Der var engang en fest

An essay ("There was once a celebration") about this famous Danish film.  You can read the original here.

Is The Celebration based on a true story?  What follows is the unusual tale of one of Danish cinema’s greatest successes.

“I’ve written two speeches, father.  One is green, and one is yellow.  And you can choose which one it will be.”

“I pick green,” the father answers.

“Green is an interesting choice.  It’s a sort of truth speech.  And I have chosen to call it ‘When father took a bath.’”

So begins the drama in Thomas Vinterberg’s The Celebration.

Christian (Ulrich Thomsen) taps his glasses, stands up, and gives a speech on the occasion of his father’s sixtieth birthday.  After so many years of concealment and lies, the truth about his father’s sex abuse will now be disclosed; Christian’s twin sister just committed suicide, and the guests will now know why.  A celebration dripping with scandal which pulls the rug out from under the festivities – such is the brilliant concept behind The Celebration.  The comfort of home comes face-to-face with discomfort, and the invitees become tongue-tied spectators to a showdown in which the prodigal son, like a latter-day Hamlet, challenges his almighty father.

A celebration, a speech, incest – from where then was this idea taken?   Why did it assume this particular form?  What is the truth about the story behind the film?

For many years there were rumors that The Celebration was based on a real event, even if Vinterberg was always tight-lipped about it when asked.  Now, five years after The Celebration’s world premiere and prize at the 1998 Cannes Film Festival, the unusual story can be told, a story which offers some insight into the creative process and the fragile relationship between fantasy and reality.  At the same time it raises questions about art and a journalist’s responsibility with regard to the truth.

Jekyll and Hide

We recur to March 28, 1996.  Radio host Kjeld Koplev had settled himself down in the Danish Broadcasting Corporation’s studio.  Koplev’s Switchboard, a weekly talk show on channel 1, was about to go on the air.  A thirty-four-year-old man was sitting across from Koplev.  He was the anonymous guest of the day, and he was noticeably nervous.

Koplev’s first question: “Allan, on your father’s sixtieth birthday, you got up and gave a speech.  What did you say in your speech?”

Allan: “I told him a little about my childhood, what he had done to me during my childhood, and what he had taken from me.  Because now everyone else had given speeches for him, so I wanted to give one, too.  You see, he hadn’t always been a perfect angel.”

Koplev uses a particular dramatic model, the “testimonial,” as the guiding force in his conversations.  “A successful episode of the Switchboard,” the radio journalist said recently, “begins with an opening that gets listeners to hang around; this establishes, so to speak, the theatrical space.  Over the course of the next two hours the pieces are laid in place, and dramatic progress is initiated.” 

That day Koplev struck upon a particularly alluring opening: birthday speeches.  In the two hours that ensued, he got Allan to narrate the speech’s horrific back story: at two, in the early 1960s, Allan and his twin sister Pernille moved with their mother from Copenhagen to a small, provincial town in Southern Jutland.  Their mother’s new husband worked as a chef in a hotel which the couple would subsequently take over and manage with great success.  Allan’s stepfather was very well-respected, indeed.  He moved in the town’s finest circles and spoiled the twins with material goods.  The eyes of their schoolmates lingered especially on the twins’ expensive clothes.

Yet the idyllic surface cloaked neglect, abuse, and unbelievable psychopathic behavior.  Just like Jekyll and Hyde, his stepfather would transform himself from a charming hotel owner who would see to the comfort of his guests, to a ruthless sex criminal who would abuse the twins on the sofa in the hotel office.  During these attacks, Allan would see his stepfather as “the silent dark man from the forest”; he had “empty, stinging eyes,” and during the very act would say, “hush, hush, hush – what you would normally say when you turn down a radio.”  The stepfather would only regain his normal facial expression after the matter had been concluded; it was then that he would slip back effortlessly into the role of smiling hotelier.

On numerous occasions his mother would literally catch her husband with his pants down, but do nothing.  The attacks began when Allan and Pernille were about five years old and would go on for years.  As adults Alan and Pernille would both move back to Copenhagen and study to become nurses, but Pernille retreated more and more into herself.  She would become psychotic and end up taking her own life.  But when the family attempted to play down her suicide, something took a hold of Allan.  On his father’s sixtieth birthday in front of seventy-eight guests, he would get his revenge.

Unsound alarm

A touching and fascinating radio program – and one you wouldn’t soon forget.  Thomas Vinterberg heard about the program and was taken with Allan’s courage and righteous wrath.  Vinterberg turned to his friend and manuscript guru Mogens Rukov while the latter was the midst of a peaceful midday meal in his kitchen.  “I’m tired of stories of homosexuals, incest, and pedophilia,” was Rukov’s blunt response.  But then he added: “I can remember family reunions from my own childhood.  I can remember the family.  Let’s do a story on a family business.  Then we can work incest into the family and the business.”

They agreed that the film should adhere to a normal course of events at a Danish family celebration: from the guests arriving, to lunch, to the guests’ departure the next morning.  This was a natural story, and the scandal which threw a spanner in the works was Christian’s speech and the series of speeches in its wake.  Rukov drew inspiration from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, yet Vinterberg’s most importance reference was Coppola’s Godfather.  Allan’s account, however, supplied the film’s basic elements: the hotel, the speech, the twin sister’s suicide, the patriarch (Henning Moritzen), the wild, unruly sister (Paprika Steen), the afterthought (Thomas Bo Larsen), as well as many telling details such as the black sofa in the office.

Yet there was one significant difference between the actual event and the film: Allan’s speech closed and demolished the party; Christian’s speech, however, was merely the opening volley in a harrowing and grotesque drama.  Where Allan’s speech ended was where Vinterberg’s film truly began. 

One part of the dramatization made the film studio’s attorneys sound the alarm.  The connection between The Celebration and Allan’s story was so obvious that Allan’s stepfather could press charges and, in a worst case scenario, even halt the filming itself.  The stepfather’s alleged crimes had never been brought before a judge, and out of fear of a lawsuit the film studio opted to cast the film as pure fiction.

“The events, people, and companies depicted in this film are fictitious.  Any similarity to people, alive or dead, or factual events, is purely coincidental,” began the film’s end credits, with not a word about Koplev’s Switchboard.

And whenever curious journalists persisted, Vinterberg’s answer remained: “My lawyers have placed limits on what I can say.”

Chilly feet 

Even I’m involved.  In 1999 I gave a talk on The Celebration and played part of a recording of Kjeld Koplev’s interview with Allan.  A media sources teacher stood up.  He found it amazing that there were seventy-eight guests, as well as all the cooking and service staff, and even a musician; that all of them experienced the worst party of their lives; that this party became the most talked-about Danish film of all time; and that not one of them had ever made a public pronouncement on the incident.  The teacher then put forth the theory that Vinterberg had trained and planted “Allan” in Koplev’s Switchboard as a type of media stunt, or simply one facet of the film’s robust mise-en-scène.

The theory sounded farfetched; nevertheless, after the talk I sat down and listened carefully to the radio program once more through.  I stopped the recording and noted the chronology of events in Allan’s life, and slowly his story began to crumble.  The number of deaths in Allan’s family were suspiciously high: in less than one year, his girlfriend, twin sister, and mother had all died.  He also confused the ages of his stepsiblings, had to make something up to explain an eleventh year at a boarding school, and was completely wrong about the date of the birthday speech.  I contacted Koplev, who said that, at the time, no one had verified Allan’s background or identity.  He admitted that he himself harbored some doubts about the story.  “At the beginning of the broadcast, Allan said that he and his sister were identical twins.  Yet as a trained nurse, he ought to have known that identical twins are always of the same gender,” emphasized Koplev, who learned that Allan died shortly after the radio program.         

We agreed to investigate the case, but after several weeks Koplev got cold feet.  He was afraid of discrediting his program or weakening the credibility of other journalistic programs DBC had in the works about incest.  Nor did Tulle Koefoed – head of the Copenhagen Support Center against Incest, and the person who allegedly placed Koplev in contact with Allan – wish to help.

Allan unearthed

I began a robust, but ultimately fruitless investigation, obliging me in an article in the Weekendavisen of May 5-11, 2000, to concede that all clues had led to a dead end.  The article yielded several inquiries.  An elderly woman from Southern Jutland was fully persuaded that she had read Allan’s story in a novel or other literary work, but, despite a devoted search, the book could not be found.  Only two years later, when P1’s Lisbeth Jessen was in the midst of creating a radio montage of the puzzling tale, did something finally happen.    

Jessen managed to track down Allan in a provincial town in Southern Jutland to which he had moved after his appearance on Koplev’s Switchboard.  Allan had AIDS and had been sick for many years.  He had never seen The Celebration, nor had the thought ever crossed his mind that the film could have anything to do with his own personal history.  Jessen arranged a meeting with Vinterberg.  “It is strange that such a tragedy can give another man wings.  But this is precisely what happened,” said Vinterberg.  He claimed to have told Allan of the great significance of his story to so many people.  “Your story made people ponder the secrets in their own families – secrets which, of course, are not necessarily of the same character.  Your tapping of your glass and standing up has had repercussions that have yet to fade.”

“Now the circle is closed,” said Allan, relieved.

Allan unburdened

But the story did not end here.  As it were, Jessen could not find a gravestone for Pernille; she was also amazed that Allan did not have a single picture of his beloved sister.  Jessen then spoke with Allan’s uncle, who could not at all recognize Allan’s story.  Finally Allan made a confession:  his twin sister had never existed, the hotel had never existed, the birthday speech had never been given, and Allan had never been a victim of incest.

I met with Allan a few days after Jessen’s radio montage.  He preferred to remain anonymous.  He was proud to have contributed to The Celebration, but embarrassed about having fooled so many people with his lies.  “This is where people need to learn that you can’t simply take everything for the gospel truth,” he said.  “Maybe the sluices to the media are too open.  After all, I have actually seen that you can go all the way to the end and just say, ‘ha-ha.’  So then how many stories are merely cut out of whole cloth?”

But Allan’s story is not cut out of whole cloth.  He really did have a very hard childhood.  He and his three stepsiblings lived in an old, decrepit house situated alongside a hotel; his parents worked on “booze cruises” and often came home drunk; he had a very bad relationship with his now-deceased stepfather; and, later in life, he was afflicted by great personal woe.  His male partner died from AIDS in 1995, and shortly after Koplev’s Switchboard, Allan was hospitalized in a psychiatric clinic for, as he termed it, “shrieking bats in the belfry.” 

“I don’t know whether the fantasy in my head grew in power because I had been feeling so sick,” said Allan.  “I truly believe that this was simply the expression of all the negatives, all the worries, all the bad things in my life.  I was also inspired by my experiences in the health care field, but a lot of the story – the speech, for example – was cut out of whole cloth.  I can remember thinking at the end of the radio show: ‘Let me get out of this.  The time can’t go fast enough.’  I thought they would strip all the microphones from me and thump me in the head.”  Despite his obvious talent for storytelling, Allan never felt tempted to become a screenwriter.  “You can produce a hit only once in life,” he grinned. 

We’re not in the truth industry

The mystery surrounding The Celebration has been solved.

This was no media stunt; this was no conspiracy or wily attempt at self-promotion; this was simply a long series of coincidences which led, in the end, to the greatest film in the history of Danish cinema.  And many persons participated in the film’s fantastic story.  Allan delivered the substance; Koplev, with his style of interviewing and sense for the dramatic, got Allan to step into character as a storyteller; meanwhile, Rukov and Vinterberg shifted, on the one hand, the focus from incest to the family get-together and the suppression of secrets, and, on the other hand, created a nerve-wracking dramatic plot.    

That The Celebration is based on a fabrication does not lessen it in any way.  An artist may enjoy lying; indeed, the fantastic can be necessary to relate a general or more profound truth.  “We are not in the truth industry,” said Rukov.  “We are in the storytelling industry.  Every so often we come across something that is truer than the truth.  Every so often we see something in the world which follows the rules of storytelling.”

The journalistic world, however, has a different behavioral code.  Here we expect a truth based on facts.  We expect that the stories presented to us correspond to reality.  A program like Koplev’s Switchboard hinges upon whether we can put our trust in the people appearing on the program.  Of course, you can’t always guard against hucksters.  But if Koplev had done his research, Allan would have never come to the studio.  

On the other hand, there would also never have been The Celebration.

On Two Feathers

To a wonderful critic on what would have been his seventy-first birthday.

A long-standing tenet of the unimaginative has been their aversion to fiction.  Their explanation is rooted in the proclaimed need for truth, for "things that actually happened" as if thoughts and emotions, the flour and yeast of fiction, never "happen" (I think we have all heard such arguments); fiction is regarded as a patchwork of lies, which in one way of course it very much is.  Yet the best fiction on both paper and reel is derived from a sense on the part of the reader or viewer that this event, these words, this gesture actually happened, if in a slightly different context.  Even science fiction, that bastion of the escapist, which often declares itself to be the greatest exponent of the human imagination, scours the most basic plots of melodrama and intrigue for the clotheslines on which to hang its fantastic details.  But let us not begrudge the science-fictionists their pleasures.  What does need elaboration, however, is fiction itself.  To that end, let us use the debate between two observers of fiction, Critic A and Critic B.

Critic A has been trained to study fiction.  What this means, for those of us who have not enjoyed such a privilege, is that he has read the canonical works in his language and translations of foreign classics, and has been given the tools and vocabulary to analyze fiction from a technical perspective.  While his credentials in this regard are impeccable, they are eclipsed by his passion.  He loves his work, he loves reading books and thinking about them during and after his readings, and he loves writing up his thoughts with enough flashy words to assure his audience that he knows of what he speaks.  Among his favorite works are the following: those with a political or social agenda that appeals to his own beliefs, those that exhibit devastating skill, and those that some other critics don't like very much because they seem constructed out of bromides, when in fact, according to Critic A, they are merely subversive.  He falls in particular for those cliché-ridden tales that feature a political or social element that some people – for all intents and purposes, everyone except him – do not fully understand.  These stories are dismissed by the vast majority of other critics and ridiculed years later as examples of the imbecile.  Not all such tales gain admiration on his pages, but enough to lead one to think that he, too, has a particular agenda.

Something else about Critic A: while his reputation is that of a contrarian, he is reviled for another trait – pedantry.  Why is Critic A pedantic?  Because he bandies about trendy terms as if he invented such jargon?  Because when one reads some if not most of his reviews, we learn much more about him than the works in question?  Or maybe because there is a red thread of liberal ranting that infiltrates everything he writes, with the result being that we often get factual mistakes about the works that better fit his paradigms?  In this last way, Critic A is a fiction writer, albeit a poor one.  We can forgive him his credos and slogans as well as the causes he alone appears to support like Atlas.  But what we cannot disregard is his presumably willful distortion of events and characters.  If he really has read the book he describes, why does he get some of the details wrong?  Why does he say "sister-in-law" when the character was really a "mother-in-law," if so young in comparison to her husband as to seem apt for the former title?  Why does he look upon a repulsive protagonist, one who is so unabashedly drawn as evil and self-serving and is digested by all readers in this selfsame fashion, as a "hero" and worthy of the author's admiration, when the author shows clearly from the first page how a horrible man can destroy himself and others?   Does he not get it or do we not get it?  Before we attempt an answer, let us turn to Critic B.

To the best of our knowledge, Critic B has never received any formal education in criticism.  He has become a critic by virtue of his voracious readings and his keen eye for human psychology.  His reviews (with a few notable exceptions) are wry and straightforward but rarely abusive, and while it is uncommon to encounter technical terminology in them, Critic B will use a learned word only if it is more accurate than any alternative.  Critic B has become very popular with his audience because, in his own phrasing, he has liberated criticism from jargon (jargon, after all, is but an unnecessary code for an allegedly exclusive club that no intelligent person would ever want to join).  Unfettered by nonce words and mumbo-jumbo theories, Critic B's reviews shine with the purity of gleaming truth.  Occasionally, one admits, they are a little too indulgent; they will opine that the quality of a work depends not on what it is about, but how it is about it.  Nevertheless the vast majority of Critic B's writings stand the true test of time in that they are read not for trends or his personal and political agenda, but for whether a work has any value as art.  Readers are duly forewarned about the contents of the work (some kind of plot summary or thread is invariably provided) and can always choose not to bother, like the ingredients of a dish often dictate whether or not you would even think of tasting it.  Every so often Critic B will lambaste a social crime or inequality and such howls resonate because we do not have to hear them every week.  To read Critic B's reviews is to enjoy someone who enjoys books and, more importantly, enjoys a life that is devoted to books.  To read Critic B is to read about a life consecrated to an undying love for the endless mysteries of fiction, which is nothing less than the history of the human soul.

We understand in short order that both Critic A and Critic B are moralists, but not of the same type.  Indeed, while Critic A does everything his dictionary allows him to insert bold strokes of his feelings and ideas, Critic B's mores rise slowly to the surface.  It is perhaps true that even when someone just tells you good morning, he is betraying some element of his personality.  With Critic B, however, one needs to read a handful of his reviews, preferably on rather disparate works, to acquire a notion of his world view, which embraces the open sea from the whitest cliffs of Dover.  And what does Critic A look out upon?  He, like Critic B, has a huge number of shelves; but while Critic B gazes upon them with admiration in the hope of matching the emotion and satisfaction in his measly words that he felt upon reading his favorite books, Critic A sees only the bars that the bindings seem to form.  His shelves are eclectic, consciously eclectic in the way that some people have of designing their home first and foremost to impress unexpected guests.  They have always entrapped him because he has clung to the duty of the trained literary critic, that of ancestor worship.  This worship is somewhat akin to assuming pedigree trumps talent, which it never has, even if pedigree and talent tend to be sensational allies.

But we said they were moralists, and they both are.  Critic A knows that things are wrong in society.  They are in fact terribly wrong and he might be the best person to fix them if he were not simply a critic.  In this way he simultaneously revels in and resents his profession, which cannot under any circumstances make for good reading.  Critic B, on the other hand, knows wrong from right in the way that we all know it, I suppose, although many of us try to contemn it with sham superiority.  Critic B knows that a book that doesn't know wrong from right is worthless.  He also knows that a book that glorifies money, relativism, violence, ignorance, or drugs might as well be converted into toilet paper.  He knows that spirituality is sadly perhaps not for everyone, but he does not dislike people who are spiritual; he dislikes people who insist that others adopt their particular spirituality.  Critic B lauds people who speak their conscience, people who work hard and do not blame others, and people who know history and yet strive to think for themselves.  He is always quick to point out moral contradictions and comment as to whether they have been resolved in a fashion consistent with the rest of the work.  He writes with love, tenderness, and very little acrimony, because acrimony should be reserved for those few people who hate you for what you are.  Inevitably some people must hate Critic B, but he does not hint at who they might be.

One of them could be Critic A.  Critic A also knows the things that Critic B knows, but he is very concerned that we might think he doesn't.  That is why, one supposes, we are proffered constant reminders of his learning often phrased in the most tortuous and self-congratulatory shape possible.  Critic A does have a remarkable passel of clever thoughts but he clubs us with them as if expecting them to enter our skin.  He takes stands against dumb and outrageous ideas, especially those that smack of white, middle-class apologetics – in short, bourgeois guilt and insincerity – but then turns around and defends the most unoriginal projects.  Without an ad hominem attack, which he often employs but doesn't himself deserve, one can simply gather his reviews and ask one plain question: are these about joy or about being right?  When you read Critic A, you have the distinct impression that he is disappointed that everyone does not agree with him.  Between his multisyllabics come sighs and groans as if he were an urban stage star in a hopelessly rural production.  He labors as any good critic should; alas, we see not only his review but all the work behind it as if we were looking at a skyscraper with those good, old-fashioned X-ray glasses made famous many decades ago when cinema was starting to catch up to literature.  We do not see much happiness in Critic A even though he is often right and more often observant, never mind his periodic botching of minutia.  As a fiction writer then, he has a lot to say but it all comes off as a diatribe against everything that came before him (there is even a theory about that, which I am sure he would like to forget).  Critic B, on the other hand, critiques fiction the only way it should be critiqued: with joy, wisdom, and a deep understanding of human motivation.  And that cannot be said for all those fact-laden histories.

Wagner, "Über die Benennung 'Musikdrama'"

An essay ("About the name 'music drama'") by this German composer, on the occasion of his 200th birthday.  You can read the original here. 

We often read nowadays about something called a "music drama" – whereby we may also learn that, for example, this or that music drama is gaining favor thanks to a society in Berlin – without quite being able to imagine what is meant by such terminology.  As it were, I have reason to assume that this designation is in honor of my recent dramatic works; yet the less I have felt myself inclined to claim this term as my own, the more I have detected a predisposition to define with the name "music drama" a new genre of art that – very likely without my own doing, as something simply in accordance with the mood and demands of the epoch and its tendencies – needed to come into being, and which now, akin in some respect to a comfortable nest to hatch one's musical eggs, is available to everyone. 

I cannot yield, however, to the flattering aspect of such a pleasant situation, all the more so because I do not know what is meant by the term "music drama."  When we with sense and reason, and in accordance with the spirit of our language, join two words into a compound noun, we designate each time with the first component the aim of the second.  For example, "future music," although a term invented in my derision, nonetheless means "music for the future," and makes sense.  Explained in this same fashion, "music drama" would then mean drama with the aim of music, which would make no sense at all unless one were indirectly alluding to a good old opera libretto, which in any case would actually imply a drama designed for the music.  But this is surely not what is meant: it is only through constant reading of the elaborations of our newspaper scribes and other such aesthetic literati that our awareness of correct language usage comes undone.  So undone, in fact, that we feel we may attribute any meaning we choose to their senseless verbal bricolage, just as with "music drama" we may designate precisely the opposite of the word's implied meaning.               

Examining the case even more closely, we see that the adulteration of the language in this case involves the transformation of a predicate adjective into an affixed noun: the initial name was "musical drama."  Perhaps it was not as baleful a linguistic turn of mind as hitherto mentioned which undertook the abbreviation of musical drama into "music drama," but merely the very dim thought that a drama could not possibly be as "musical" as, say, an instrument, or even (which occurs rarely enough) a singer may be "musical."  Strictly speaking, a "musical drama" would be a drama that either itself creates music, that is suitable for music making, or that has no notion of music, not unlike our "musical" reviewers.  Since this was not the intention, its unclear meaning was better hidden behind some completely senseless word, because the term "music drama" said something that no person had ever heard before.  One seemed assured against any misinterpretation through the assumption that a word so solemnly produced would never lead anyone to think of an analogy with "music boxes" or things of that sort. 

What is seriously meant by this designation is quite the opposite: a real drama set to music.  We would mentally place the tonal stress on "drama," with the intention of reminding ourselves of its distinction from the hitherto well-known opera libretto.  The difference lies namely in the fact that the dramatic plot does not solely exist for the needs of traditional opera music; on the contrary, the musical construction should be determined by the needs characteristic of a real drama.  Now if the "drama" component were the main thing here, it should have been placed before the word "music," and the former would be determined by the latter, in the vein of "dance music" or "table music" [Tafelmusik], and we would have to say "drama music."  One would think that this might absolve us of the same lapse into nonsense because, however one might twist or turn the matter, the "music" component of the name will always seem disruptive.  Nevertheless, one would again have the dim feeling that, despite all appearance, music was the main thing.  All the more so if, within its drama, the music is accorded the very richest development and demonstration of its potential.      

Thus the awkward thing about establishing a name for the work in question would surely be the necessity of indicating two disparate elements, music and drama, and the assumption that we would perceive in their fusion the creation of something brand new.  The hardest part of this is surely bringing "music" into its proper relation to "drama," since music, as we mentioned before, cannot be combined in even measure, and for us must count either much more or much less than drama.  The reason for this must be that when we mention music, we mean thereby a certain art – originally even, I would say, the very embodiment of all art; while by drama, we actually mean a specific act of art.  When we combine and assemble words, our ease of understanding the newly constructed word will be clearly shown in whether we would still correctly understand the individual parts were they still separate, or whether we would employ them only according to some conventional assumption.  Drama in its Greek origin means deed or plot; as such, when performed on stage, it initially composed a part of a tragedy, that is, the choir's song offerings, whose entire breadth drama would come to encompass, and, eventually, become the main thing.  With this name one has now eternalized a plot, whereby the most important feature is that this performance may be shown to an audience.  For this reason is the room in which the audience is assembled, the θέᾱτρον, is called the "show-place" [Schauraum].  Our Schauspiel ("play," literally "show play") is hence a very understandable name for what the Greeks more naively designated as "drama," for the characteristic form of an initial part of the ultimate and main object is more definitively expressed.  In such a "show play" music occupies but a deficient position, if indeed it is to be thought of as part of the whole; as such a part, it is thoroughly superfluous and disruptive, which is why in more disciplined theater pieces it would finally be removed in its entirety.  That said, it is indeed "the part where everything began," and its value as the womb of drama should be taken into consideration since it seems destined to such a fate.  In its value music should place itself neither before nor after drama: it is not drama's rival, but its mother.  Music tinges; and what it tinges you may witness on the stage; this is why you gather.  For what it is you may only suspect; and for that reason do you open your gaze, by means of the stage allegory, like a mother introduces her children to the mysteries of religion through the narration of legend.

Athenians did not call the formidable works of their Aeschylus dramas, but bestowed upon them the holy names of their origin: "tragedies," song offerings to celebrate their inspirational God.  How lucky they were not to have to devise any name!  They had the most unprecedented work of art and – left it nameless.  But then came the great critics, the powerful reviewers; now terms and concepts were found; and when these were finally exhausted, it was the turn of absolute words.  In Hamlet, Polonius provides us with a handsome list of these words for our edification.  The Italians devised dramma per musica, which roughly expresses our notion of "music drama," if with a more understandable word combination.  The expression was apparently deemed unsatisfactory, and so this wondrous thing, which thrived under the care of virtuoso singers, was forced to assume the most inexpressive of names, as if it were the very genre itself.  "Opera," plural of "opus," was the name of this new form of work, which Italians made female and the French male, and through which the new form seemed to emerge in both genders.  I believe we will find no more pertinent criticism of opera than if the origin of this name were assigned the same legitimacy as the name of tragedy was once assigned: reason prevailed in neither case; instead came a deep instinct, which would designate here something namelessly meaningless, and there something unnameably profound.

Now I advise my professional competitors to retain, after careful deliberation, the name "opera" for their musical works dedicated to the stage of today's theater.  Opera leaves these works where they are, grants them no false respect or dignity, and excuses them from any competition with poets and poetic texts.  And if they should have any good ideas for an aria, a duet, or even a drinking-choir, then they will be able to supply work worthy of recognition and acclaim, without worrying about overtaxing themselves and spoiling those same lovely whims.  In every era there have been pantomimes, cither players, flutists, and cantors, all of whom also sang.  If now and then they were summoned to do anything outside their natural abilities and customs, such exceptions took place in individual, solitary units to whose incomparable rarity the finger of history has pointed through centuries and millennia.  But never hence has a genre emerged in which, once properly named, the extraordinary lay ready for the common use of every bumbler.  In the case just mentioned, I for the life of me do not know what name to give the child who smiles in some astonishment from my works at a good part of my contemporaries.  At my operas Mr. W.H. Riehl, as he assured us somewhere, loses both sight and hearing, whereby he only hears at some of them, and only sees at others.  What should one call such an inaudible and invisible thing?  I would almost have tended to emphasize merely the visible and abide by the term "show-play," since I would have gladly designated my dramas as visualized acts of music.  But that would have been an art philosopher's title, something fit to grace the catalogues of future Poloniuses amidst our more aesthetically-minded courts, from which we may assume that, after the successes of their soldiers, these courts will now let the theater progress in a specific German way.  Yet despite all the “show plays” I may offer – "show plays" which many claim broach the monstrous – there would still be far too little to see in the end.   Such as, for example, when I was reproached in the second act of Tristan und Isolde for missing an opportunity to include a dazzling rout, during which time the star-crossed lovers could have opportunistically gotten lost in a grove, where then their discovery would have caused an appropriate scandal with all its concomitant details.  Instead, almost nothing happens now in this act except music, which unfortunately again seems so very much to be music, that people in Mr. W.H. Riehl's organization lose their hearing, an all the more unfortunate occurrence since there I offer almost nothing at all to see. 

So I begrudgingly resigned myself to hand over my poor works to the theaters without any name for their genre, since they were not allowed, primarily owing to their great dissimilarity to Don Juan, to pass for "operas."  I mean to remain thus for just as long as I am involved with our theaters, which rightly recognize nothing other than "opera," and if one were to give them a still quite correct "music drama," let them make out of it an "opera."  To emerge from the ensuing confusion powerfully for a change, I struck upon, as is known, the idea of a Bühnenfestspiel, which I hope to bring about at Bayreuth with the help of my friends.  The character of my enterprise suggested the name, literally a "stage-festival-play," since I knew of singing festivals, gymnastics festivals, and so forth, and could well imagine a theater festival in which the stage and its happenings, which we quite sensibly collect under the term "play," would become the main and most visible event.  Anyone who will have visited this Bühnenfestspiel, however, will perhaps also preserve a memento of this performance, and will also come up with a name for what I intend to propose to my friends as a nameless artistic act.

Discours d'ouverture du Congrès littéraire international

A speech ("On the occasion of the opening of the International Literary Congress"), delivered on June 7, 1878, by this man of letters.  You can read the original here.

Gentlemen, what imbues our memorable year with such lofty greatness, above all rumor and clamor, in a majestic interruption of all surprised hostilities, is how it allows civilization to speak.  We may call it a year heeded.  It is doing what it wants to do.  It is replacing the old agenda, war, with the agenda of a new day, progress.  It has triumphed over its doubters.  Threats persist, but the union of peoples smiles upon them.  The work of the year 1878 is complete and indestructible.  Nothing is pending.  In everything we do, we sense a certain something, something definitive.  With the Expo in Paris, this glorious year proclaims the alliance of industries; with Voltaire’s centenary, the alliance of philosophers; with the congress assembled here, the alliance of literatures; a vast federation of works in every possible form; an august edifice to human brotherhood, whose base is composed of farmers and workers and whose crowning achievement, our minds.

Industry seeks the useful; philosophy, the true; literature, the beautiful.  The useful, the true, and the beautiful – here are the three ends of all human efforts.  And the triumph of this sublime effort, gentlemen, is civilization between peoples and peace between men.

It is to observe this triumph that you have come from all points on our civilized globe and assembled here.  You are the brilliant minds which nations love and venerate; you are the celebrated talents, the generous, well-received voices, the souls whose work is in progress.  You are the peaceful combatants.  You have brought here the most radiant reputations.  You are the ambassadors of the human spirit in this great Paris of ours.  Welcome, writers, orators, poets, philosophers, thinkers, fights – France salutes you!

You and we, we are fellow citizens in a universal city.  Hand in hand, all of us affirm our unity and our alliance.  Let us all go now into this great and serene homeland, into the absolute, which is justice, into the ideal, which is truth.

It is not out of personal interest or restraint that you are gathered here.  It is out of universal interest.  What is literature?  The setting into motion of the human spirit.  What is civilization?  The perpetual discovery made at every step by that same human spirit.  Hence comes the word progress.  One may say that literature and civilization are identical.

A people is measured by its literature.  An army of two million men passes through and an Iliad remains.  Xerxes has an army, but he lacks an epic.  Xerxes vanishes.  Greece is small according to its territory and large according to Aeschylus.  Rome is merely a city; but according to Tacitus, Lucretius, Vergil, Horace, and Juvenal, this city fills the world.  If you refer to Spain, Cervantes emerges; if you speak of Italy, Dante appears; if you say England, then Shakespeare is there.   At certain times France has been summarized in a genius, and the splendor of Paris has been confused with the clarity of Voltaire.

Gentlemen, your mission is a steep one.  You are a kind of constituent assembly of literature.  You have the function, if not of voting for laws, then at least of dictating them.  Say just and fair things, promulgate true ideas, and if, by the impossible, you are not heard, well then, you may fault the legislation.

You are going to make a foundation – literary property.  It is already in our legislation and you will introduce it into our codes.  For, as I have stated, it will be composed of your solutions and advice.

You will enlighten those legislators who would like to reduce literature to nothing more than a local phenomenon, that literature is a universal phenomenon.  Literature is the government of the human race by the human spirit.

Literary property is of general utility.  All the old monarchic legislations have denied and continue to deny literary property.  To what end?  To the end of enslavement.  The writer who is an owner is the writer who is free.  To deprive him of property is to deprive him of independence.  We would hope at least.  Hence comes that singular sophism, which would be puerile if it were not so perfidious: thought belongs to everyone, so it cannot be property, and thus literary property does not exist.  Strange confusion, first of all, of the faculty of thinking, which is general, with thought, which is individual.  I am thought.  Thus a confusion of thought, an abstract thing, with a book, something material.  The thought of a writer, as thought, escapes every hand wishing to catch it, it flies from soul to soul; it possesses this gift and this force (virum volitare per ora).  But a book is distinct from thought; as a book, it is catchable, so cat-chable in fact that it is sometimes impounded.  A book, product of a printing press, belongs to that industry and determines in all its forms a vast commercial movement.  It is bought and sold.  It is a property, one of created and not acquired value, a wealth added by the writer to the national wealth, and certainly, from all points of view, the most incontestable of properties.  This inviolable property is violated by despotic government: they confiscate a book with the hope of thus confiscating a writer.  Hence comes the system of royal pensions.  Take everything and give back a little.  Despoliation and subjection of the writer.  He is sold and then he is bought.  A useless effort, in any case.  The writer escapes.  They make him poor, and he remains free.  Who could purchase the superb consciences of Rabelais, of Moliere, of Pascal?  But attempts are nevertheless made, and the result is depressing.  The monarchy is a terrible suction on the vital forces of a nation.  Historiographers bestow upon kings the titles of “fathers of the nation,” and “fathers of literature.”  All of this is contained in the gloomy monarchic ensemble.  Dangeau, that toady, declares this on the one hand; Vauban, that severe critic, declares this on the other.  And for what we call “The Great Century,” for example the way in which kings are fathers of the nation and of literature, abuts against these two sinister facts: people without food to eat, and Corneille without shoes.

What somber elimination of a great kingdom!

Hither is where leads the confiscation of property born from work, be this confiscation a burden on the people or on the writer.

Gentlemen, let us return to our principle: respect for property.  Let us announce literary property but, at the same time, let us create the public domain.  Let us go even further.  Let us make it larger.  May the law give all publishers the right to publish all books following the death of an author, with the only condition being that they pay his direct heirs some meager compensation, something not to exceed five to ten percent of net profit.  This extremely simple system, which reconciles the writer’s incontestable property with the no less incontestable right of the public domain, has already been indicated in the commission of 1836 by the person speaking to you right now.  You may find this solution, with all its details and discussions, in the minutes of the commission, published at that time by the Ministry of the Interior.

Let us not forget, however, that this is a double principle.  The book as a book belongs to the author, but as thought it belongs – the word is not too vast – to the human race.  All minds have a right to it.  If one of these two laws, the right of the author and the right of the human mind, were to be sacrificed, it would most certainly be the right of the author, because the public interest is our sole preoccupation and everyone, I tell you, everyone must come before us.

But, as I have just said, such a sacrifice is not necessary.

O, light, light always, light everywhere!  Everything needs light.  A book contains light.  Open a book wide.  Let it radiate, let it do this.  Whoever wishes to cultivate, vivify, edify, soften, mollify, put books everywhere; teach, show, demonstrate; multiply the number of schools; schools are the luminous points of civilization.          

You are concerned about your cities.  You would like to be secure in your homes.  You are preoccupied with such perils.  You abandon a darkened road.  You think even more about such perils, and you allow the human spirit likewise to become darkened.  Minds are open roads; they are comings and goings; they have visitors, well or badly intentioned; they may have some gloomy passers-by.  A bad thought is identical to a robber in the night; a bad soul identical to a band of criminals.  Make it day everywhere.  Do not leave a human mind in these dark corners where it may fall prey to superstition, where error may lurk, where it may be ambushed by lies.  Ignorance is a twilight; evil is roaming about.  Dream of the lighting of paths, for sure; but also dream, dream most of all of the lighting of minds.

For this, doubtless, we will need a prodigious amount of light.  It is this amount of light that France has been using for the past three centuries.  Gentlemen, permit me a filial word, which in any case is in your hearts just as it is in mine.  Over France nothing will prevail.  France is of public interest.  France rises upon the horizon of all peoples.  Ah, they say, it is daylight, France is there!

We are surprised that there are those who might have objections to France; nevertheless, there are such people: France has enemies.  They are the same enemies of civilization, the enemies of books, the enemies of free thought, the enemies of emancipation, of examination, of deliverance.  Those who see in their dogma an eternal master and in the human race an eternal minor.  But they waste their efforts, the past is past, nations will not return to their vomiting, the blindness has an end, the dimensions of ignorance and of error are limited.

Take your part, men of the past, we do not fear you!  Go, do what you do as we look at you with curiosity!  Try your efforts, insult 1789, dethrone Paris, speak anathemas to the freedom of conscience, to the freedom of the press, to the freedom of opinion, an anathema to progress!  Do not relent!  Dream up, while you are still there, a syllabus big enough for France and a candle extinguisher large enough for the sun!

I do not wish to conclude on a bitter note.  Let us climb and rest upon the unmovable serenity of thought.  We have begun the affirmation of concord and peace; let us continue this haughty and tranquil affirmation. 

I have said it elsewhere, and I repeat: all human wisdom is contained in two words, conciliation and reconciliation.  The conciliation of ideas, and the reconciliation of men.

Gentlemen, we are among philosophers here, so let us take advantage of such an occasion.  Let us not bother ourselves, let us speak the truth.  And so here is one, terrible truth: the human race has a sickness – hatred.  Hatred is the mother of war; the mother may be despicable, but the daughter is horrific.

Let us return the blows!  Hate against hate!  War against war!

Do you what these words of Christ, “Love thy neighbor as thyself,” really are?  They are universal disarmament.  They are the cure for the human race.  They are true redemption.  Love one another.  We disarm our enemy far better by offering him our hand than by showing him our fist.  This advice from Jesus is an order from God.  It is good.  We accept it.  We are with Christ, the rest of us!  The writer is with the apostle: those who think are with those who love.

Ah, we scream for civilization!  No, no, no, we do not want warring barbarians or murderous assassins!  We do not want war of people against people, or of man against man.  All murder is not only ferocious and savage, it is also senseless.  The sword is absurd and the dagger is imbecile.  We are the combatants of the spirit, and our task is to prevent material combat.  Our function is always to throw ourselves between the two armies.  The right to life is inviolable.  We do not see crowns, and if there are any, we only see heads.  Showing mercy is what makes peace.  When the gloomy hours sound, we ask kings to spare the lives of peoples, and we ask republics to spare the lives of emperors.    

It is a fine day for the outcast when he begs a nation for a prince and when he tries to use, in the favor of an emperor, this right to mercy which is the right of an exile.

Yes, conciliation and reconciliation.  Such is our mission, the mission for us philosophers.  O, my brothers of science, of poetry, and of art, let us declare the civilizing omnipotence of thought.  For every step that the human race takes towards peace, let us feel the profound joy of truth increase within us.  Let us proudly consent to useful work.  Truth is one and has no divergent rays.  It only has a synonym: justice.  There are no two lights, there is only one: reason.  There are no two ways of being honest, sensible, and true.  The ray that is in the Iliad is identical to the clarity found in the Dictionnaire philosophique.  This incorruptible ray traverses centuries with the straightness of an arrow and the purity of dawn.  This ray will triumph over night, that is to say, over antagonism and hatred.  Here we find the great literary wonder.  There is nothing more beautiful.  Disconcerted and stupefied force before the law, the stopping of war by the mind, this is, O, Voltaire, violence tamed by wisdom!  This is, O, Homer, Achilles taken by the hair by Minerva!

And now as I am going to end, allow me a promise, a promise addressed at the heart of everyone and at no one in particular.

Gentlemen, there is a Roman who is celebrated because of an obsession: Let us destroy Carthage!  I, too, have a thought that obsesses me, and here it is: Let us destroy hate.  If humanities have an aim, it is that: humaniores litterae.  Gentlemen, the best destruction of hatred is done by forgiving.  O, may this great year not end without sustainable peace!  May it end in wisdom and in cordiality, and after it has put out the foreign war, may it have the same effect on our civil conflict.  This is the profound desire of our souls!  France is now showing the world its hospitality; but may it also demonstrate its clemency.  Clemency!  Let us place this crown upon France’s head!  Every celebration is fraternal; a celebration which does not pardon someone is not a celebration.  The logic of public joy is amnesty.  May here be the closure of this admirable solemnity, the universal Expo!  Reconciliation!  Reconciliation!  Certainly, this gathering of all common efforts for the human race, this meeting of marvels of industry and work, this salutation to the masterpieces among them, seeing them and comparing is an august spectacle.  But an even more august spectacle is the exile standing against the horizon and his homeland opening its arms!      

Borges, "Sobre los clásicos"

A short essay ("On the classics") by this Argentine.  You can read the original here.

Few disciplines could be of greater interest than etymology; this is owing to the unforeseeable transformation, over the long course of time, of a word's original meaning.  Given such transformations, which may border on the paradoxical, a word's origin is of little or no value in the clarification of a concept.  Knowing that, in Latin, "calculus" means a small stone, and that the Pythagoreans used such stones before the invention of numbers, does not allow us to master the mysteries of algebra.  To learn that a "hypocrite" is an actor and a "person" a mask is hardly a valuable tool for the study of ethics.  Similarly, to understand our current designation of a "classic," it is of no utility that this adjective comes from the Latin classis, a fleet, which later would assume the meaning of order.  (Let us recall in passing the analogous information contained in the term "ship-shape.")  

So what is now a "classic" book?  Within arm's reach I have the definitions furnished by Eliot, Arnold, and Sainte-Beuve, undoubtedly reasonable and luminous, and I would be grateful to concur with these illustrious authors, but I did not consult them.  I am now sixty-odd years old; at my age, coincidences or novelties matter less than what one believes to be true.  Therefore I will limit myself to my own thoughts on the subject.

My first stimulus was A History of Chinese Literature (1901) by Herbert Allen Giles.  In his second chapter I read that one of the five canonical texts which Confucius edited was The Book of Changes or I Ching, composed of sixty-four hexagrams which exhaust possible combinations of six whole or partial lines.  One of the schemes, for example, consists of two whole lines, one partial line, and three whole lines, laid out vertically.  A prehistoric emperor had discovered them in the carapace of one of the sacred turtles.  Leibniz thought he detected a binary system of numeration in the hexagrams; others saw an enigmatic philosophy; still others, like Wilhelm, a tool for the divination of the future since the sixty-four figures correspond to the sixty-four phases of any undertaking or process; and while others espied the vocabulary of a particular tribe, some gazed upon a calendar.  I remember now that Xul Solar used to reconstruct this text with matches and toothpicks.  For foreigners The Book of Changes risks seeming like a mere chinoiserie; yet thousands of generations of very educated men have read it and referred to it with devotion, and will continue to read it.  Confucius told his disciples that if destiny granted him a hundred more years of life, he would consecrate half of it to its study and its commentaries or outgrowths.  

Quite deliberately I chose a simple example, a reading which requires an act of faith.  I arrive now at my thesis.  A classic book is that which a nation or a group of nations – or time itself in its length – has decided to read as if everything in its pages were deliberate, fatidic, as profound as the cosmos, and capable of endless interpretations.  Predictably, these decisions vary.  For Germans and Austrians Faust is a work of genius; for others, one of the most famous forms of tedium, such as Milton's second Paradise, or the work of Rabelais.  Works like The Book of Job, The Divine Comedy, and Macbeth (and, for me, some of the sagas of the North) promise long immortality.  Yet we do not know the future, apart from knowing that it will be different from the present.  A preference may well be a superstition.

I do not have the vocation of an iconoclast.  Until the age of thirty I believed, under the influence of Macedonio Fernández, that beauty was the privilege of very few authors; now I know that it is common, lurking even in the casual pages of the mediocre or the conversations of the street.  In this way, my ignorance of Malaysian and Hungarian literature is perfect; yet I am sure that if time were to grant me the chance to study these traditions, I would find in them everything the mind requires to nourish itself.  Linguistic barriers do not intervene as much as political and geographic ones.  Burns is a classic in Scotland; South of the River Tweed, however, he is of less interest than Dunbar or Stevenson.  In short, the glory of a poet depends on the excitement or apathy of the generations of anonymous men who put him to the test in the solitude of their libraries.    

Literature may evoke eternal emotions, yet how it does so, even without intention, must constantly vary for it not to lose its virtue.  These means persist to the extent that they are recognized by the reader.  Hence it is dangerous to confirm the existence of classic works, or their eternity as such.

Each of us loses faith in his art and his artifices.  I, who have resigned myself to doubting the indefinite persistence of Voltaire or Shakespeare, believe (this evening, on one of the last days of 1965) in that of Schopenhauer and Berkeley.

A classic book is not a book (I repeat) which necessarily possesses these or some other qualities; it is a book which generations of men, driven by various reasons, read with that same initial fervor and that same mysterious loyalty.