In Memory of Memory

by Maria Stepanova

  The catastrophe is displaced, the hole is resealed, things find their places once again, everyone is alive, there are no omissions, no silences. It is, in its own way, Paradise before the Fall (there are far too many people now who think that Europe in 1929 or Russia in 1913 were such paradises). We long to have our pictures taken before such a backdrop: I was there. But “there” does not exist. The oath of fidelity to family history becomes its destruction, a parody of the resurrection of the dead: another is replaced by oneself, the known world is squeezed out by the invented world, hell is other people becomes the family album where everyone is in their rightful place, pretending to be alive. Ideally they would also talk — but in your voice, like an answering machine gone rogue.

  *

  In the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington there’s a whole type of exhibit that is displayed so it can’t be seen unless the visitor makes a conscious choice to view it: usually this constitutes video materials or photographic sequences, which are just terrifying — how might one describe such things more exactly? These images are even less reconcilable with life than the rest of the exhibits. The viewer is kept apart from them by a low barrier, so to see the actual images you have to stand up close. The intention here seems to be that viewers can then half-close their eyes and deliberately protect themselves — not from knowledge of what happened, because that is always there inside, descending lump-like from the throat to the stomach; not from the actual details, after all you don’t have to look at the layers of slowly rotting bodies, one on top of another, or the murderers being washed with hoses to cool them down, or a bulky old woman trying to hide a naked little girl behind her. No, you don’t need to get too close to those screens.

  Sometimes it rather seems to me that the pictures need protecting from us: so that the nakedness of the dying and dead remains their business and illustrates nothing, invokes nothing, serves neither as a basis for conclusions nor identifications after the event. It isn’t about the fact that this turning of a life inside out, in as little time as it takes to show a film clip, to show its seams and fibrous lining, is a type of the deformed experience described by Varlam Shalamov: it has no meaning, no use, it cannot be applied, nor can it be unseen. All it can do is destroy you from the inside out. And this isn’t simply because all one’s systems of self-defense strive to neutralize the images into mere “pictures,” screens that are estranged from real life for the purpose of terrifying and titillating us.

  The further the contemporary world wades into the past (up to the knees, the waist, the chest, by stages transformed to marble, like the character in Carlo Gozzi’s The Raven) the louder the conversation about who owns it: the right to this or that scrap of the old world — and who has no such right to the past. Usually the inheritors and defenders are those who are closer by dint of knowledge or birth, scholars, family, associates. After them come all those who consider the dead to be their own property. It’s fascinating to watch when a stranger is drawn to this fenced-off property: someone from outside, someone who has not worked off their debt to this common ground. Events mostly unfold with the logic of a fight over an inheritance — and the first accusation flung at the outsider is his or her I. Someone like him or her has no business to be sniffing round such things, and so must be driven by self-interest, or worse, unfounded interest — overwrought, chance, without roots. Here the metaphors of agriculture and vegetable growth work best: blood-and-soil hums under our feet. So, even posthumously (which gives an especially morbid quality to the affair), the fair-haired Sylvia Plath was accused of the appropriation of images of Jews and ovens in the poems she wrote in the last months of her life. Accusations of exploitation hang in the air above the fields of memory, over the bent spines of her workers, her households, her underground streams, and the tips of her arrows.

  *

  There are those who manage to work in the past’s territories (to use the poet Dmitri Prigov’s expression: “to bide there, and yet to emerge dry”), as if without noticing where they are. In the (very short) history of Francesca Woodman there is nothing that speaks of the past’s vulnerability, or even shows particular interest in the old world. The daughter and the sister of an artist, she began photography at thirteen. When she died at twenty-two she left behind a body of prints, a few videos, and a large number of negatives, all connected by a rare sense of unity, not of method, but of approach. What preoccupies her — that is, the subject of her compulsively perfectionist art — is hard to formulate, not least for her. Her typed letters (written in a rush, so the words are often begun, then left unfinished, then a space, then she starts the word again, very much in the manner of the piping voice we heard on her videos) hardly try to explain the tasks she has set herself. The letters might be described as the bubbling surface of a river, flexing itself over rocks.

  There are two types of writing about Francesca Woodman, and they might be characterized as biographical and formal. Interest in her work grows in both camps: the character of her work and her early death combine to give her a special sort of fame, she very quickly became an icon for the unhappy young; another divinity in the post-Romantic pantheon; a highly prized incompatibility with life. In Woodman’s case, because her favored material was the female body, it is easy to read her subject as the impossibility of living in a male world, under the male gaze, or the hopeless attempt to avoid this gaze by hiding or pretending to be someone else. Rosalind E. Krauss interprets Woodman’s message this way in one of the first articles about the photographer, written at the beginning of the 1980s. Krauss’s article lays the foundations for the perception of the work as the chronicle of a disappearance, a commentary on Woodman’s own future death. As this version gained popularity, the most frequently used word in any discussion about Woodman became “haunted,” spoken with the kind of comfortable horror we reserve for ghost stories. If we adhere to this interpretation of Woodman’s output then our role is to witness the fair-haired girl disappearing underwater, or lost in the roots of a tree, or flickering behind tattered wallpaper, extenuated, finally fading out, and yet ceaselessly documenting all this for our entertainment and edification, in the best traditions of confessional lyric.

  The photographs certainly allow this interpretation, alongside many others. Their natural environment is the smoky light of metamorphosis, of various kinds of transformation and distortion, which do not permit a perception of the self as a thing of wonder, or even an anomaly: in Woodman’s world this is just the natural order of things. Seen from the outside Woodman’s subjects fit in a tradition of homemade Victorian shadow theaters: fluttering ghosts strolling with lost maidens.

  Seventeen-, eighteen- and twenty-year-old Francesca enjoyed dressing up. She loved and wore old clothing, what we’d now call vintage, flowery dresses, woolly tights, Mary Jane shoes. At school she told the girl who shared her room that she hated contemporary music and had never watched television in her life. It seems she was telling the truth. The documentary The Woodmans gives at least some insight into her upbringing, the right art school, the uncompromising exclusion of anything her parents thought unworthy. At some point Francesca’s father notes in passing that if his daughter had been interested in her girlfriends rather than in photographic angles and the specifics of lighting, then he would have had nothing to say to her. This seems to have been the truth, and I can only pity the child. The “fabricated” quality of Woodman’s person and her work resembles an integrated and successful project — the clarity of the handwriting and decision-making, the consistency and the ambition of every move — and this is yet another reason to think of her as a victim: of the times, of circumstances, of parental ambition. The expectation of success, the drive to success (and the inability to adapt to the inevitable delays and obstacles) is familiar to all children of professionals, the young musicians and ballerinas, in whom far too much effort and faith is placed, and it adds something to our understanding of her life and death. What it doesn’t explain is the
more than eight hundred photographs taken by Woodman in her hope of creating something of her own.

  “No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream.” This is the opening of Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, written in 1958, the year of Francesca Woodman’s birth and one of the best books on the relationship between the human and the uncanny, when the uncanny itself takes a sudden interest in the human. The book’s heroine is forced to convince herself of her own materiality by carefully noting each action: drinking a cup of coffee, buying a red sweater against her family’s better judgment, a victory, a beginning to life; but as the book progresses she blends more and more into the cursed house.

  A few quotes, taken at random, from writing about how Francesca is disembodied in her own photographs: “her own body becomes transparent, strangely weightless, almost fleshless, blurring the boundaries between the human body and its surroundings,” “her body, caught in movement by the camera like a dark haze, as if she were as unbodied and unhuman as the air surrounding her,” “a ghost in the house of the woman artist.” Francesca Woodman took her own life, the result of a long depression, and as is so often the case, a fatal concurrence of the absurd and the hurtful: her bicycle was stolen; she didn’t get a grant; she had relationship troubles.

  Suicide shines on any fate like the most powerful spotlight: it conspires to make the shadows deeper and the failures sharper. But Woodman’s family and friends collectively and convincingly refute the biographical interpretation of her work, drawing attention to another formal side of her work, the planned brilliance of these little shots, their particular humor, the language of coincidence and chance, the visual rhythms, the shadows of André Breton and Man Ray, the lifted hands metamorphosing into birch branches, branches voting with a lifted hand. They are irritated by the critics’ insistence on the theme of disappearance, but when you look at these pictures it is hard not to feel an answering desire to dissolve, to allow oneself to flow into the frame, the interior or the landscape. Or flow together with the author to the point where you become indistinguishable: The cliche of Woodman as a genius at self-portraiture nearly obscures the fact that many of the bodies, and even the faces we interpret as the confessional self belong to other women.

  These women were friends, models, people she knew. Sometimes we see their faces, sometimes they resemble each other to a strange degree, sometimes they are shielded from view by mute objects: plates, black lace, even photographs of Francesca herself. Sometimes they are completely faceless, unpossessed to the point of dereliction, severed from us by the edge of a print, or parts of the body: someone’s legs in stockings, breasts and collarbones (in another picture), a hand emerging from a wall, the body of a woman in flight, a leap, blurred. None of this belongs to anyone — it is quite literally nobody’s: like a black umbrella or a crumpled stocking, it is simply part of the location, the interior of whatever abandoned house Woodman had chosen (for she only used such interiors). If we ask ourselves who all these orphaned arms, legs, shoulder blades belong to, what sort of a creature it could be (what species of being), then we might guess that all these constituent parts make up a single entity, something like a collective body — the body of death, or more precisely, the body of the past.

  Woodman titled one of her photographs a portrait of “legs — and time” in her journal. She wrote of the objects featured in a late series of works, which went into her artist book before her death (the photographs are pasted on the pages of an old geometry primer, be fire with fire, I suppose, the new order prevailing over the old): “These things arrived from my grandmother’s they make me think about where I fit in the odd geometry of time.” The geometry of time is indivisible from its texture, which is constantly transforming itself, crumbling, breaking apart, evaporating, and then reforming in the vapor, ruled by the laws of the organic world. The phrase “body of work” takes on a living, almost medical sense: these photographs register the body of the world as a physical entity, with its pile, its skin, the dirt that eats into the pores, its twitching extremities, its ceaselessly shifting surfaces.

  The eroticism of the images takes us a long way from the straight and narrow of human desire; it’s the crushed white fabric, barely touched by the sun, that seeks a meeting/illumination, far more than the bare shoulder of a woman does. Woodman’s interiors and landscapes are filled with naked bodies, bride-white Wilis trembling like water reeds. Never sated, they stare wolfishly into the forest of further possibilities. Their zone of interest passes along the boundary of their own skin and no external touch can compare with the drive for adventure already set in motion within them. In this sense the ghosts are harmless: they are entirely focused on themselves and what has happened to them. The fact that Woodman called her photographs “ghost pictures” is telling. All her ghostly images — a cloud of human form condensed around a tombstone or someone’s face peering out of the wardrobe, legs hanging out of another wardrobe, doors taken off their hinges and hung at a strange angle — are stages in a process, and the meaning of this process lies beyond the photograph, somewhere in time. The long exposure, the incredibly slow shutter speed and darkroom techniques reveal particular qualities in the person, an ability to be anything at all — a movement, an erosion, a whirlpool. Although she is more vulnerable and less lasting than, say, a floral-patterned tile, a person suddenly discovers she can walk through walls, cover objects with a fine layer of dust, rise out of nowhere, be air and fire. “And then I flew,” as the woman in Tarkovsky’s Mirror says.

  The body, one’s own or another’s, is the essential material, the modeling clay, must be tested simultaneously for strength and fragility. In one of her self-portraits, a transparent telephone cord stretches from Woodman’s mouth as if she were vomiting a chain of soap bubbles. In other pictures shards of mirror press into the flesh of the stomach or thighs; breasts and sides are covered in pegs, hanging from the skin like beaks. Here is time passing, the human is washed away but objects keep their outlines; there is no difference between oneself and others, just an unending impersonal tender love. This is the pure matter of oblivion — an ocean without a window, as Mandelstam wrote — forever scattering, drawing itself together, then shrinking away; saving face, then suddenly removing it, ripping it off. Sometimes, not always, very seldom in fact, a ripple appears on the surface of the watery flow, something that presses from inside comes into focus, swelling, rising up, crystallizing, almost against its will. This is how the past rises up into the contemporary world, like a drowned man from the murky waters. This is how Francesca’s body rises from the floral patterns and chipped whitewash, not disappearing or fading into the background, but coming into focus, sharpening, print after print. In one of the videos she is folded into paper, writing her name on it, letter by letter — and then she rips the paper from inside and emerges into the light.

  4. Mandelstam Rejects and Sebald Collects

  “I’ve never seen Moscow look so calm, so rich, so peaceful and cheerful. Even I’ve felt its calming effect . . .”

  In December 1935 Nadezhda Mandelstam traveled to Moscow from Voronezh to manage the affairs of her exiled husband. Being in Moscow was good for her: the mood of celebration in the city, the brightness and certainty of its own righteousness and its place at the center of the world, all had a calming effect — the word “calm” appears twice in two sentences, as if she needed to stress it.

  The spirit of the Soviet thirties is immediately recognizable in her letters to her husband, just as it is in the cheerily urban paintings of Yury Pimenov, or Bulgakov’s late prose: a funny and terrifying world that never tires of insisting on its overwhelming sense of cheerful completeness. The daytime city (dresses, factories, parks) is all the harder and smoother for the existence of a nighttime city that is better left unmentioned. The presence of terror even seems to invigorate. It forces its way into the reality of the
scurrying ant’s nest, imparting a very particular jittery sensation, bubbling like seltzer, a fresh breeze over the river, the morning lightness of those who survived the night:

  It smells of postal glue over the Moscow River

  Schubert sounds from the loudspeakers’ cones

  Thin trickles of water, and the air is more tender

  Than the frog-pocked skin of silken balloons

  Impossible for me to forget that we are the direct offspring of this ant heap of the celebratory and the disappearing; flower sellers, cab drivers’ backsides, people clinging on to the hand rails on the outside of busy streetcars — or that my own twenty-year-old grandmother was among them on the Moscow “A” streetcar, fondly called “Annushka”; part of the crowd, part of this movement, part of this language.

  The wide arc of the thirties is so colored by its time, its canvases and texts mingle together in the air over their authors’ heads. Dates and places of birth are more important than direct relationships. These works have their own elusive common denominator: the sudden return of cozy domesticity, life’s comforting thickness giving people, with their spindly civic rights and short memories, a false sense of being rooted in the present. This new coziness knew what to promise (as Pasternak wrote: “In the Spring we’ll add to our living space, / I’ll take on my brother’s room”). Life was becoming more enjoyable, in 1935 citizens were given permission to celebrate New Year and a “pact on general work and collective celebration” was sealed with Christmas tree resin.