What Would Lynne Tillman Do?

by Lynne Tillman

  Their antic dinners and wild proclamations are meant to be taken with a dollop of the zany, the movement itself sometimes appearing to be what Oscar Wilde may have had in mind when he conjured up “zanies of style.” Though where there’s style there’s content, and Marinetti isn’t content with jokes. He defines Italian Futurism of the 30s as “the renewal of Italian pride, a formula for original art-life. the religion of speed . . . spiritual hygiene . . . the aesthetics of the machine. . . . Convinced that in the probable future conflagration those who are most agile, most ready for action, will win. . . .”

  At the Holy Palate restaurant, sometimes known as the Aluminum restaurant, site of Futurist dinners, one might be served “sculpted meat,” which is “symbolic of Italian regions.” Marinetti demands: “The word Italy must rule over the word Liberty! The word Italy must rule over the word genius. The word Italy must rule over the word intelligence. The word Italy must rule over the words culture and statistic. The word Italy must rule over truth.” It’s an odd position from the man who called for words in liberty, words freed from syntax. But not an odd position for a fascist. Words in liberty become fixed, their meaning subsumed by a new syntax, one created by the State. Marinetti was, after all, one of the first members of the Fascist Party. And his own words, not freed from history, resonate with it, tasting the bitter aftermath of the Great War and Italy’s sense of betrayal at the hands of the Allies. A past that also, in 1932, included the deaths of many of the leading Futurists, like Boccioni and Sant Elia, a startlingly innovative architect, both of whom, like so many other, had enthusiastically rushed to do battle in that war. In fact it was the Great War that effectively put an end to the most productive moment of Futurism. In this respect, it’s not surprising that Marinetti calls for the murder of nostalgia. The Futurist door to modernity, once pried open and walked through, must be shut forever on the past—past failures and past losses.

  If Marinetti hadn’t written it himself of The Futurist Cookbook, it would have been necessary to comment: “It is not by chance this work is published during a world economic crisis.” Marinetti’s “antidote” is “a Futurist way of cooking: optimism at the table.” Significantly the cookbook begins with a parable against despair. In “The Dinner That Stopped a Suicide,” Giulio is obsessed with killing himself, as “She” has died in New York—at that time a place of many capitalist suicides—and is “calling” to him to join her. So Marinetti, Prampolini and Fillia, the “Aeropainters,” rush to rescue their friend. But another “She” has sent Giulio a message, he tells them, another “who resembles her.” Giulio “must not betray death” and says he must “kill himself tonight.” “Unless?” the Aeropainters ask. “Unless?” Marinetti asks. “Unless you take us instantly to your splendid, well-stocked kitchens.” A hilarious retort to a singular cul de sac or a worldwide depression, and an absurd way out of the devastating effects of the War that ushered in Hitler and Mussolini, as well as killed the earlier Futurism, which was once synonymous with avant-garde.

  It’s not without consequence, either, that death in the suicide story is represented by She, for women, who are always other in Futurism (though sometimes [m]other), sit uneasily at its table, occasionally having to eat food shaped like their own bodies. The first Futurist Manifesto proclaimed: “We will glorify war, the world’s only hygiene—militarism, patriotism, the destructive genius of freedom-bringers, beautiful ideas worth dying for, and scorn for women. We will destroy. . . feminism.” And it’s not just coincidence that the call against death also comes from a She, “one who resembles her.” This may be reference to capitalism under a Fascist state. But in any case, it’s the female body that signifies death as well as renewal. “The fugitive eternal feminine is imprisoned in the stomach. . . . At dawn he devoured the mammellary (sic) spheres of all mother’s milk.” In the “Geographic Dinner,” she’s a waitress, “a shapely young women dressed in a long white tunic on which a complete geographical map of Africa has been drawn in color; it enfolds her entire body.” This is a neat conflation, woman as Africa, especially Africa, the site then of some Italian colonies. She is colonized and that part of the world is turned into something to be devoured, the waitress, the provider, greedily eaten up like a woman might be by a hungry lover desirous of conquering and overwhelming her. Women here, like food, are figures of speech.

  While the first wave Futurists embraced both internationalism and war, but not feminism, the second wave are Italian firsters. They call for an end to Xenomania, defined in the cookbook as “the international cuisine of grand hotels, which in Italy is “submit[ted] to only because it comes from abroad,” Xenomanes are anti-Italians, like Arturo Toscanini, who “disown[ed] his own national hymns . . . opportunistically playing foreign anthems,” those who don’t “promote Italian influence in the world,” and who are “infatuated with foreign customs and snobbisms.” While the second wave Futurists trounce some traditions, including the earlier Futurists’ internationalism but not their patriotism and antifeminism, there remains the traditional belief in an overpowering principle that centers existence. For Marinetti, it not a belief in God but the state, Italy under Mussolini. As Hannah Arendt put it: “The Fascist movement, a ‘party above parties,’ because it claimed to represent the nation as a whole, seized the state machine, identified itself with the highest national authority and tried to make the whole people ‘part of the state.’”

  To make Italians into, and part of, a healthy state, Marinetti wants to put the nation on a diet that is not just concerned with food. No more “Xenomania.” “No more after dinner speeches.” “Elementary patriotism demands that at least half the music on, programme should be by modern or Futurist Italian composers.” Like most diet books and cookbooks, The Futurist Cookbook is sometimes repetitive, hammering away at its prescriptions for right living, its short announcements like press releases or ads that are trying to sell a product. In this case, the nation. Eating ought to imbue that patriotic feeling. As in, the way to the heart is through the stomach.

  And speaking of the heart, the recipe—in fact the cookbook—is a prescription for the regulation of pleasure. While everything in The Futurist Cookbook seems to be full of imagination and is funny and clever, not that much is really left to the imagination. We’re told not only what to eat but how to and with what feelings, in what kind of restaurant, listening to what type of music and sniffing what kind of scents. The Futurist “New Year’s Eve Dinner,” for instance, is meant to overturn crusty bourgeois conventions, when “the same elements have conspired to produce a happiness which has been enjoyed too often.” So, “everyone eats in compulsory silence; the desire for noise and jollity is suppressed.” One may sympathize with the urge to throw away customary and obligatory forms of feeling that seem hollow and perfunctory. But to replace those with others is problematic, to use words like “supress” and “compulsory” means one kind of order is being supplanted by another. In this light it’s interesting to consider the Marquis de Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom, his regulation of pleasure written during the French Revolution while he was in jail. A pessimist, de Sade presents a dystopia which took to the extreme the problem of imagining what complete liberty would mean and look like under the law. He translated the furthest reaches of liberte, egalite and fraternite, where laws insist upon pleasure and turn pleasure inside out, into pain, at least for some. In the midst of a revolution, de Sade questions the ability of any state to provide pleasure or happiness. Marinetti, a man at liberty, whose words are supposedly also “in liberty,” sets down a regimen—tongue in cheek—for the right libertinage. The optimistic Marinetti exuberantly ordains a future of aluminum and steel, of controlled anarchy and virility, of art that scoffs at some traditions in search of a genuinely contemporary existence. He doesn’t question a pursuit of happiness that looked to the nation for its greatest rewards.

  Coming to the end of this century, some of these refrains may not seem unfamiliar. There’s the furtive glance back to the beginning,
performed like a cat first contemplating its quixotic tail then chasing it. Though since we’re at the end of it, and that’s supposed to mean something in itself, the way death means something, we’re supposed to be at the end of it, the end of the Twentieth Century. Which reminds me again of that movie of the same name, as good a metaphor as any. By now some of the cars have become derailed or separated from each other. In the time after modernism, otherwise known as postmodernism, certain beliefs, especially faith in the new, in progress, in self-referentiality, have come under scrutiny and are in the train station, with a bad wheel or engine. But can anything be left behind and what’s in front and what’s in back? Does coming to the end of a century have anything to do with an end anyway? Will a postmodern menu offer us something different, other metaphors, like one from column A, column B and column C? Will recipes with generous amounts of asymmetries and hardy dashes of anti-closure not be recipes? My view is necessarily one-sided, seeing the past through the present, my version of the present, seeing The Futurist Cookbook darkly, when I might have concentrated on nature versus culture, formal art issues, Futurism’s influence on art practices generally, the sheer fun of it. My reading is no doubt compelled by forces from within and without. A recipe may be inscribed in me that I’m unaware of and whose powerful tastes simply, unconsciously, overcome me. Though really, I think to myself, I ought to be at the end of at least this trope.

  G is for Goldin

  The Devil’s Playground

  Nan Goldin is a photographer whose work is a record of her life. If this were the 19th century, she might be called a diarist. Her formal compositions have depicted her friends in candid moments—in bars and clubs, funky bedrooms and bathrooms, hanging out, having sex, doing drugs, looking warily at each other, themselves or the camera. Often these characters were estranged from society, but not necessarily from each other, and especially not from the photographer. Anything and anyone Goldin shot were intimate to her. In exhibitions and in books, she has included some self-portraits, a few of which presented devastating views of her own self-destructiveness. But, she suggests, no portrait of her could be complete without the people she loves and what’s around her. “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency,” the work in which she first documented her friends and herself, her scene, forged a genre, with photography as influential as any in the last 20 years.

  Her sprawling new book, The Devil’s Playground (Phaidon), jars loose memories of her early photographs. As before, she presents what she has and likes in front of her—breakfast on a tray, friends having sex, and young, nude men and women. But now her stage is broader, set in a more expansive world, maybe it’s global, and the characters and scenes have changed.

  The book opens with large-scale vistas of the natural world and friends dwarfed in it: men in blurred landscapes; fiery red and somber blue apocalyptic skies; single characters floating in placid seas; and the base, or face, of a gnarled, grotesquely green redwood tree. Goldin tells her most recent life story in pictures of places she’s been—now, instead of the old bars and clubs, they are romantic countrysides or beaches, elegant hotel suites, balconies and terraces.

  Goldin also turns her eye to biological families, a grouping that was absent or infrequent in her previous work, and even includes a series with her own parents and a photograph of her brother. Handsome parents frolic with their lovely children. The pristine portraits of her friends’ children nestle against shots of the parents serenely touching and kissing. Goldin hopes to expose unguarded instances of sexual and familial love, maternal and paternal affection.

  In one series, a couple and their son roll around on the bed, the parents alternating between attention to the child and each other. In another, Goldin shoots a woman on one bed, a man on another; he’s tenderly touching their child’s head. A sequence of the couple making love follows, with their child out of the picture. Goldin’s mothers are sexual beings, never just maternal. A nursing mother’s breast will also be an object in her husband’s mouth.

  All children wonder about their parents’ devotion to each other and to themselves, and compete for their love. Freud said that it was the primal scene children longed to see, that sexual curiosity was the source for the desire to know. Everyone’s Garden of Eden. Any photographer is outside the scene, watching. But wanting to get inside the familial embrace, or, like a child, into its parents’ bed, Goldin is necessarily pitched outside the family’s frame, and as a result the collection carries a startling melancholy.

  The many formal, austere portraits of Goldin’s friends add to that feeling. Often they are standing or sitting, darkness surrounding them. Like the photographer, they are solitary, and, looking at her solemnly, they could reflect her singular position. Set in the dark or against a blurry background, Goldin’s subjects feel as if they are cut from time, disconnected, not anywhere or in any place. Oddly, place seems unimportant here. Even the book’s numerous landscapes seem to represent just an outside to an inside, an impersonal, exterior world to an elusive interior one. Or maybe the pictures document a huge, gorgeous, alienating world.

  A section titled “Empty Rooms,” which lies at the center of the book, insists on what’s lost or gone. Goldin is traveling, staying in hotel rooms, visiting friends, returning home and leaving. There’s a portrait of a plumped pillow on a bed, rumpled sheets and two pillows that stand in for bodies that once lay there, a mirror that reflects light only on an ordinary bureau, golden paintings above a bed’s backboard, and all are stage sets for memory. Juxtaposed with those images are a photograph of Christian Schad’s painting of a masturbating woman, taken in Zurich, and a fire in Napoleon’s Elba fireplace. In a way, the two photographs disrupt the narrative flow, but then remind the viewer of other ways to be on your own, by having sex alone or by being an outcast or prisoner.

  Hotel rooms usually mark transitoriness and freedom from daily life, but they’re haunted by the many bodies that have passed through. The photographs are also haunted by her absent friends, some of whom have died and some of whom are far away. Temporary stations themselves, the empty rooms emphasize the inadequate hold anyone has on life, how it all just goes, finally. So the collection ends with religion and death, which makes sense, since Goldin’s work is about how a life spans and spins, sometimes out of control. Fire, skulls and crossbones, skeletons in monks’ robes, votive candles blazing. The last image is a tombstone for a 14-year-old: “You Never Did Anything Wrong.”

  An earlier artist’s work comes to mind: Michelangelo Antonioni’s movie Blow-Up. In it, the photographer becomes a private detective. That transformation—and metaphor—influenced a generation of artmakers. Like Mr. Antonioni’s photographer, they wanted to enlarge the event, to get closer to the scene. Goldin investigates intimacy, her large-scale photographs even blow it up. Her work asks if an ineffable feeling or experience can be visualized, and, when it’s photographed, if it is available to others. Do we feel it, too? What do we see?

  In these photographs, the artist/detective Goldin searches for secret, buried meanings, to find what is beneath the surface of a look that a photograph acknowledges but can’t explain. Here, mystery, enigma and sadness shadow the beauty of individuals, couples, children, rooms. Something’s missing, something’s wrong. Remember: the collection is called The Devil’s Playground. St. Augustine contended that evil was the absence of good, since God wouldn’t create or make evil. The Devil was absence, pure nothing. Maybe what’s not here, what’s left out or lost, is as significant as what is.

  H is for Harry

  A Conversation with Harry Mathews

  “Everything that happens in these books—the least details of their vicissitudes, their erudite digressions, their langoureux vertiges—are nothing more than the ghostly, frail delineations of the legendary wrestling match in which from the beginning of time we have been engaged with the world of words, signs, meanings, and dreams, in which we call fiction.”

  — Avez-Vous Lu Harry Mathews by Georges Perec

 
Lynne Tillman: I’m intrigued by your idea that “reading is an act of creation for which the writer provides the means.” I wonder how this directly affects your writing.

  Harry Mathews: I don’t really know that it does affect it, except in some mysterious way that comes out of my experience as a reader. I know, as a reader, that language really doesn’t work representationally. And that it’s very hard to get away from the idea that it is some kind of representation. I think that probably I only can make use of ideas like that once I’m in the rewriting stage.

  LT: An active reader allows a writer . . .

  HM: It gets a writer off the hook of subject matter. Many writers think they’re not being significant or important unless they’re writing about things which are that week or year supposed to be significant. One decade it’ll be politics, the next, something else. We have a tendency to feel that the subject matter ought to be big, and often a “big” subject may not be appropriate for a particular writer. The point is that you can write wonderfully about anything. It’s very hard, unless one takes a lot of time as I did in that essay, to show how that works. But, for instance, right now we’re talking about a particular subject, and I seem to be communicating to you about that subject. By the end of this conversation you may notice that something has happened that has nothing to do with the subject. Probably what really will have happened is some kind of alteration or transformation in the relation between us. We seem to have been having this discussion where I’ve been talking about my writing or whatever you choose to ask me about, but in fact something else has been going on. I think it’s the same in books. Writers should go with what subject matter appeals to them, with what tickles them because that probably will be the kind of subject matter that will give them most access to the process of discovery; of what they are, or the world is, or language is. You must have had that experience as a writer yourself. As you rewrite something, nothing in substance is changed and yet it’s not just that you’re making it neater or more elegant. It’s become something totally different in the third draft. And, in fact, that’s what you wanted to say. Even though all the material was there in the first draft, and you got it all down, it wasn’t doing what you wanted it to do. Rewriting is so extraordinary, it’s where writing, not always, but very often, takes place. That’s when the writer becomes the first reader. Becomes a creator. If the reader is the only creator, the writer gets to share and in fact participates in that act of creation in the stage of rewriting. That’s when the writer can play creator, too. The old idea is hard to get rid of, that the writers have something to say and the readers are there to get it. I don’t think things work that way at all.