The Story of Black

by John Harvey

  And then there is that odd rider to black evil, which can come sometimes in the ‘black joke’. Black jokes can be loathsome, but they can also be extraordinary in the juxtapositions they make. The most extreme item of black humour I know occurred when Mel Brooks, director of the brilliantly successful movie The Producers (1968), which turns on the spoof-musical ‘Springtime for Hitler’, said wryly in an interview, ‘Hitler was bad for lots of Jews – but he’s been good to me.’ Of course only a Jewish film-maker could say that, but everyone can see the outrageous excess of it. It is almost sublime in its unmentionability. Actually it does not devalue the hideousness of systematized genocide, but it does perform a mental-linguistic somersault in which an incongruous surprise of vivacity joins with the utterly terrible.

  What human beings do with worst things over time may be both astonishing and oddly playful – even soothing. The Black Death itself became a nursery rhyme:

  Ring-a-ring o’roses

  A pocketful o’posies

  A-tishoo a-tishoo

  We all fall down.

  The ring of roses was the small, circular rash of sores which was one plague-symptom; the posies were the sweet-smelling herbs used in the hope they could disinfect. So countless numbers died in a horror of gangrene and suppurating buboes; and the children join hands to dance in a ring, and laugh as they tumble over.

  IN THE BROADER literary field a black emphasis is again apparent. It is beyond the scope of this book to give a fair whole account of black writing in the sense of African, African American or Afro-European fiction, poetry, drama, song; also the time of an insistence on pure Négritude has passed. In both the critical and the fictional prose of Chinua Achebe, Toni Morrison and many others, an injustice – a blindness – has been redressed so that it is no longer true to say, as Achebe did of Conrad’s work, that ‘the very humanity of black people is called in question’.20

  In fiction at large, the fashion for black things (unrelated to race) is represented surreally in the ‘Midnite-Confidential Club’ in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children. The Club exists in pitch darkness, the floor is covered with ‘a lush black carpet – midnight-black, black as lies, crow-black, anger-black’ and the girl-attendants are blind because the whole purpose of the Club is for the well-to-do of Bombay to manage sexual encounters which society would forbid. In another passage in the novel, the colour contrast in the hair of India’s President Indira Gandhi – who had a pronounced ‘skunk stripe’ – is extended with a Halloween surrealism of black and green. In the novel she is known only as ‘the Widow’, but the reference is clear: ‘the walls are green the sky is black . . . the Widow is green but her hair is black . . . it is green on the left and on the right black . . . the Widow’s arm is long as death its skin is green . . . the fingernails are black . . . see the children run . . . children green their blood is black’.21

  In the theatre an all-black visual field is nearly all one sees in Samuel Beckett’s Not I, except for one spotlit jabbering mouth. To achieve this effect, the actress – Jessica Tandy in New York in 1972, Billie Whitelaw in London in 1973 – had to be clamped in place dressed in black, with a black hood which left only the mouth uncovered. The mouth is lit for the duration of her hectic, almost Pentecostal gabble, which seems to be an outburst of protest following a life of sterile isolation. Her speech can hardly be a release, since she repeatedly denies that she is speaking of herself. In an earlier play by Jean Genet, The Screens (Les Paravents) of 1961, there is a character called The Mouth who has been represented in production as a figure swathed and hooded in black so that only his mouth could be seen.

  And in poetry there is Ted Hughes’s Crow (1972). In the first poem, ‘Two Legends’, the word ‘black’ begins over half of the poem’s 24 lines. Heart, liver, lungs and blood, bowels and nerves are black. They make ‘an egg of blackness’ which hatches a crow, ‘a black rainbow Bent in emptiness . . . But flying’. Crow, the protagonist, is a carrion crow, eating the dead, ‘grinning into the black’; also a malicious-humorous trickster-spirit; and also a man ‘in the silent room . . . smoking . . . between the dusk windows and the fire’s embers’. The poems were produced following the suicides of Hughes’s wife Sylvia Plath in 1963 and of his lover Assia Wevill in 1969 and, however these matters may be connected, the poems clearly have a burden of painful, dark experience. They have violence and pain, and reiterated blackness, but the blackness of Crow himself is alive, not dead. Crow may be ‘blacker / Than any blindness’ (‘Crowcolour’), but the black beauty in nature is his companion (‘black is the wet otter’s head, lifted’). Crow is also a tragic-heroic fool: he was once white and decided the sun was too white, so he flew up and attacked it. The sun, however, brightened steadily, and he returned burned black. Still he proclaimed, ‘Up there . . . Where white is black and black is white, I won’ (‘Crow’s Fall’). Crow is described as ‘flying the black flag of himself’ (‘Crow Blacker than Ever’), but he is also a father who loses his children: when he enters the ‘stupor’ of Nature an oak tree grows out of his ear, and his ‘black children’ sit in a row in its upper boughs, until

  They flew off.

  Crow

  Never again moved.

  (‘Magical Dangers’)

  The blackness of Crow is made of pain, but is also hot, beating, the black inside of being – an irreducible principle of continuation, with a steadiness in facing the inescapable. Crow was criticized for its extremes when it first appeared – extremes from which Hughes retreated in his later, more pastoral writings – but in retrospect it may seem one of poetry’s closest encounters with what is blackest in life (and in death too) but which still, though black, is life.22

  BEYOND THE BLACKS of our culture is the black of the cosmos – the black of space. Our sky, it is true, is filled with stars; but if we could travel to the edge of our galaxy, we would see what we don’t see in the night sky above us: true emptiness, starlessness, the ultimate black – made deeper by the odd dot, here and there, of other galaxies. I don’t know if such emptiness could freeze the soul. It may be too that the universe will end in freezing black emptiness everywhere. But that is not our problem – nor is it a certainty. Nor do we understand how anything – let alone a universe – should have come into being out of nothing, whether in a big bang like a giant firework, or in some other way. We are surrounded by uncertainty, which includes the uncertainty as to whether the emptiness is truly empty – or whether it harbours invisible matter, what has been called ‘dark matter’, which may exist in unimaginably huge quantities. It seems too that there are – within our galaxy – those places where the stuff of many stars has collapsed inwards, imploding into a ‘singularity’ whose gravity is so colossal that not even light can escape. ‘Black holes’, we say, though they are the opposite of empty.

  Around us is such vast emptiness – but perhaps also such vast black energy – of almost unimaginable scale. Whether that knowledge affects our fashions is doubtful, though our taste for black may in some way connect with the finality of death and with the absence – from all of space – of benign powers to help us.

  Whether black will have in the future the stature it has now, and has had in the past, we do not know. For the present we live in a polychrome world – a world of bright pinks, lime greens, sharp blues – a world of more colours than the human race has seen before, in which, nonetheless, the colour in greatest use is black.

  I shall close by noting that the day of black paintings is far from over. Recent postmodernist painting has often been polychromatic, to the extent that one could think art had turned its back on black. But in 2006 in Paris the Foundation Maeght held an exhibition, ‘Le Noir est une couleur’, which was followed in 2007 by the exhibition ‘Black Paintings’ at the Haus der Kunst in Munich. Also in 2007 was the exhibition ‘Dark Matter’ at the White Cube Gallery in London. And in 2008 the Kestner Gesellschaft in Hanover, Germany, had its ‘Back to Black’ exhibition. There have been other black exhibitions since. B
etween them these exhibitions have represented works by Matisse, Bonnard, Braque, Rouault; also by Reinhardt, Rothko, Rauschenberg, Stella; and by an international generation of younger artists, keen to work in black.

  104 Peter Peri, Modernity will not seduce me, 2009, spray paint and marker pen on canvas.

  Of the latter, Ned Vena is closest to Stella in his liking for parallel pinstripes, though he works in sprayed rubber over vinyl stencils. Rafał Bujnowski has broken with the rectangular canvas, and makes paintings with five, six or seven sides. From the front they look like black three-dimensional solids. Emanuel Seitz paints abstracts in which, set in deep jet-black, there are shapes of deep lilac, deep turquoise, sea-deep blue. The language in which he speaks is dynamic, like his colours:

  Already the dark sky dazzles above the black horizon . . . [eyes] lose themselves in deep blackness . . . The imagination dashes through the darkness.23

  Among the new black-on-black paintings I find a special intrigue in the work of Peter Peri (illus. 104). His blacks are crossed by fine hairlines of silver, in which traces of colour may show (pink, yellow, green, blue), and there is also a play of contrasting textures between the black spaces which the fine lines delimit, so that one may be unsure whether thin lines cross black space or whether black solids hover before us. His Modernity will not seduce me makes pattern a paradox, like an Escher drawing in the flat, where the shapes which are squared but on the slant seem also to overlap impossibly. The eye may be enticed inside its black maze. In the book that accompanied the ‘Back to Black’ exhibition in Hanover he quotes from Edmund Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757),

  Black bodies . . . are but as so many vacant spaces . . . When the eye lights on one of these vacuities . . . it suddenly falls into a relaxation; out of which it suddenly recovers by a convulsive spring.24

  For darkness is fecund. Out of darkness something springs.

  The story of black is far from ended. But I must stop, and having reached contemporary practice, I shall make not one but two ends. Dark as all blacks is a painting by Victor Man, in greys deepening down to black (illus. 105). It is much like a monochrome photo viewed through smoked glass, in which we just make out what may be a family gathered in a waiting room. It looks to be a dysfunctional family, its members set apart though their postures cross. They are gathered round a box not unlike a coffin which rests on a pram, and an obscure serpentine shape is coiled in the shadows over the box. Victor Man quotes Paul Celan, ‘Black milk of daybreak we drink you at night’, though the words this picture brought to my own mind were those of the prince, late in Henry James’s Golden Bowl, ‘Everything is terrible, cara, in the heart of man.’ Not that the painting covers ‘everything’, but a sense of death and the terrible hangs upon it while its title, Deposition, implies that its darkness may be religious also.25

  105 Victor Man, The Deposition, 2008, oil on linen.

  106 Zbigniew Rogalski, ‘Untitled 2004’, from the series Together, 2004, oil on canvas.

  And for my best approach to an end which, though black, is happy, I call to mind a painting by Zbigniew Rogalski (illus. 106). His words are a little cryptic: he says ‘black paint is the most specific means of describing the essence. It’s like print in a book – best when it comes in black.’26 In his Together series there is a painting, ‘Untitled 2004’, much of which is solid black. Against the dark we make out – bright-lit in places – a young couple riding from us on a moped. The girl’s outstretched hand clasps a large white cut-out paper shape, which represents the moped’s exhaust, and curls round and down to the exhaust pipe. A caprice, then, with comedy in the cartoonish bubble shapes of the cut-out cloud. And a nice representation of a young couple heading on together through the solid midnight black of world, space, the universe.

  A Note on Chessboards, Death and Whiteness

  Perhaps the reason that the combination of black with white works so well visually – in the appearance of clothes, tiles, books, the pieces on a chessboard – is because the contrast is between a high strength and an extremely low strength of the same, broad band of light. When bright we call it white, since that is how we name the combined colours of the spectrum, and when dim we call it grey, or charcoal – or black. This combination of kinship with contrast may also explain the ease with which darks and lights, and blacks and whites, may change places.

  Take death. It is sometimes said that the colour of death is black in the West, while in the East it is white. And it is true that for centuries in the West, mourning clothes were black, even jet-black, while from India eastwards, mourning clothes have very often been white – in both cases having a stronger association with mourning when the colour is worn by women. A young woman in London would have had the same hesitation in wearing an all-black dress to a wedding that, in Delhi, she would have if she wore a white sari (before, that is, the interaction of Bollywood with Hollywood gave Western-white a romantic association). In Africa also, the colour white has the odour of death. An Africanist friend, Professor Patrick Chabal, has told me that when he asked his African students to describe how they would feel if they woke up one morning and found they were white, they mostly said this would be a catastrophe, because the colour white belongs to death.

  Colour values are not so simple, however, as instances like these suggest, and actually, in West, South and East, death is black and also white. Mourners in Africa may be marked both with white and black, and also with black ashes. Historically, in China or Japan, if an attacking warrior flew a black flag, it meant that battle must be to the death. And in the West, though mourning dress has generally been black, both bereaved children and bereaved young unmarried women have often worn white in mourning – as have the queens of France.

  In the West, black death has many whites. The shroud or winding sheet was white (often of cotton), and perhaps this is why the risen ghost was imagined as white. And while the mourners at a funeral wore black, the officiating priest would wear a white surplice. Death especially, as a figure, was thought of as white, because he was imagined as a skeleton. In Bruegel’s Triumph of Death, which has a strong black centre, there are many stark whites: white corpses, white shrouds, a horde of white skeletons, while one Death rides an emaciated, ‘pale’ horse, which here is white (see illus. 31).

  In fact the picture of Death we make today, when we imagine Death as a towering, sometimes empty, black, hooded cloak, is – like the Black Witch – a figure most popular in the twentieth century. There were hooded Deaths in the past, and when Scrooge meets Death in Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol (1843), he takes the form of a ‘solemn Phantom, draped and hooded . . . shrouded in a deep black garment’.1 But though black, hooded Deaths can be found in earlier periods, the predominant visualization – in, for instance, the innumerable ‘Dance of Death’ engravings – is of a naked, vivacious skeleton. If not fully a skeleton, Death is still aged, pale and emaciated, as in the engravings of Dürer. Or, Death’s cloak may be light, not dark. In the Dance of Death series (1848) by the German artist Alfred Rethel, Death – a skeleton – wears a hooded cloak, or alternatively the robes of a pilgrim, but his cloak is light in tone and certainly not jet-black. In a Goya etching of 1808–14, in the series Disasters of War, Death may be seen draped and hooded in white, looming over cowering soldiers.

  If practice changed in the twentieth century, giving the black-hooded phantom pride of place, this may be partly because, when making a film, it is easier to drape an actor in black than to animate white bones convincingly. This black Death often appears as one of the cast in films by Woody Allen. But the great representation of a black-hooded Death had been in Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal (1957) where, within his black cloak, Death had a dead-white face and was bald as a skull, though also grimly playful, as Death should be when leading his Dance. Such Death’s clothing is perhaps the final, demonized form of the cappa negra worn by Christian priests, which then became sinister in Protestant ar
t and literature. This ‘mortified’ form of Church dress has become iconic in fantasy literature and film, so that Tolkien’s Black Riders, whether on horses or on giant pterodactyls, look at once like Death and like black monks, while the evil emperor of the Star Wars film series is not grand at all, but again looks like a black monk, or like Death, his damaged skin white in arrested putrescence. His associate, Darth Vader, is also a Death, as his name half hints: he is a more original concept however, exploiting the combined sinister effect of gas masks, skull-masks, Prussian helmets, black capes, hi-tech control panels and old, black-lacquered armour.

  A corollary of these contrasts is that, within a single culture, a different colour may predominate in different arts. In literature, one may find white deaths. In D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love Gerald Crich dies a snow-death between white peaks and glaciers, while in Moby-Dick Herman Melville has a wonderful chapter on the nightmare deathliness which the colour white can have (chapter 42). He speaks of ‘the white gliding ghostliness’ not of white whales but of the white shark. Even so, and though I cannot quantify, I am certain that in literary usage death is associated with blackness much more than with whiteness. The frequent use of ‘black’ in eighteenth-century graveyard poetry, mentioned earlier, illustrates this. The black waters of Edgar Alan Poe are death in liquid form, and as the Fay dies lingeringly in ‘The Island of the Fay’ we are repeatedly told that her shadow ‘fell from her, and was swallowed up in the dark water, making its blackness more black’. In Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain (1924) Hans Castorp, admiring the military, speaks of death existentially: