Total Eclipse

“Dogs are all liberals” – Rimbaud

“He [Rimbaud] was my great and radiant sin” – Verlaine

“I’m faithful to all my loves, because once I love them, I will always love them” – Verlaine

“The only unbearable thing is that nothing is unbearable” – Rimbaud

A favorite topic among bibliophiles is what one literary figure might have said to another (see above) had they ever met.  Writers and philosophers living far apart on our history’s spectrum are particularly popular themes, with one writer even gaining eternal renown for a work composed of conversations between famous writers and philosophers that reads more like opposing editorials.  Other students of literature like to spend an inordinate amount of time imagining the private lives of the writers they admire.  For them, the being of a famous writer cannot emerge solely from his works as a rosebush may not live without its thorns, topsoil, or weeds.  It is not enough that we must subject great works upon their copyright’s expiration to editorial whims, we must also find new and silly ways to enter the lives of people whom we could not know and whose legacy is a pile of books that we often cannot bring ourselves to read attentively.  We must understand them as people first and writers later.  If how they talked, how they ate, and how they showed each other affection are more important than their literary production, so be it.  Their legacies will be forever tainted and we share only part of the blame.  Which brings us to this fine film about two legendary French poets, Paul Verlaine (David Thewlis) and Arthur Rimbaud (Leonardo DiCaprio).

The year, we are told, is 1871.  Germany unites into the most powerful state Continental Europe has seen since the Romans; Verlaine is twenty-seven but already fading in poetic authority (poets then were like tennis stars now, washed up at thirty); Rimbaud is ten years his junior and the most phenomenal of Wunderkinder.  This is not a love story, or at least not one in which there is any tenderness or caring.  A poet of genius in his own right if more a product of his era, Verlaine cannot do much more than get viciously intoxicated, vent on his ugly but very rich wife, and gaze at the beautiful lad who keeps asking him for small favor after small favor.  He loves Rimbaud as a younger, more gifted version of himself, one unafraid to challenge society’s mores.  Nevertheless, it is remarkable how humdrum Rimbaud’s notions of novelty seem, and how consistently a man of such talent is portrayed as a boor and a bully.  The two while away their time in absinthe bars (roughly a barrel gets consumed during the film), smoking, flirting, and obviously planning something that will ruin both of their lives.  They shift and totter between hatred and symbiotic need, and finally separate once Verlaine, in his umpteenth booze-ridden fit, decides to play William Tell with dear Arthur, who of course has too little respect for Verlaine’s promises to pay his threats any attention.  Verlaine is arrested, charged with being a sodomite, and jailed for two years.  He is released having served his full sentence and become a devout Catholic.  And at this point, Rimbaud is far away in both body and spirit.

One might suppose that the whole endeavor would sink into melodrama in a gooey, nauseating way.  Yet a certain dignity obtains throughout.  And whatever our knowledge of the times and, more importantly, of the poetic oeuvres of the two men, we are compelled to watch even if nothing really happens.  Did what is depicted really take place?  Should we alter our impressions of the oeuvres of the two artists accordingly?  A more celebrated film employs the same technique of portraying a young ingénue as a sort of rock star, the difference being that Rimbaud’s upstart irreverence curiously resembles the ignorant kitsch of Soviet and hippie manifestos.  Amadeus was a rock star, insofar as he was worshiped as a celebrity who could do no wrong upon the stage.  Methinks the problem lies with the fiction, not the reality.  I am duly aware that the intent of the film was to be authentic and that the happenings portrayed have their basis in the correspondence between the poets.  Even so, the characters, especially Rimbaud, are too one-sided, evincing modern cinema’s endemic aversion to subtlety.  The deep and recurrent problem with such recreations, as in so many historical novels, is that the literary revivalist has no inkling of the inner lives of the artistic creatures he re-imagines because he has little relationship to their work, where their true biography is found.  The result is that extraordinary persons are obliged to be understood in our terms, not theirs, and live out the plainest of soap opera ditherings. 

That being said, Thewlis and DiCaprio are marvelously cast in terms of looks and gestures.  Yet time and again they are superceded by Rimbaud's bohemian vulgarities which, as could be expected, devolve into ridiculous showmanship.  By many indications, Rimbaud was mild-mannered (some sources do portray him as the prototypical enfant terrible), if impetuous and all too ready to enthrall people with his genius.  The Rimbaud of Total Eclipse is only obnoxious, only self-absorbed, only prone to immediate gratification like all of the young and the guileful.  Verlaine, on the other hand, is without exception a sniveling, pathetic meatball of middle-age insecurities battling issues of sexual identity and creative choices.  But you cannot be a great poet if you are completely and utterly immoral.  The on-screen Rimbaud hasn’t a redeeming quality about him and temporizes awkwardly whenever asked to express any of his verse.  Such does not a poet make.  In the end, Rimbaud comes off acting his age – although his compositions are of an artist of much broader experience – with the manipulative properties of a pretty woman rather than a man of letters (most evident in his lament that he has never seen the sea).  Come to think of it, perhaps that might not be terribly distant from the truth.

The Count of Monte Cristo

The moral law within us is certain — as we are as well in our stronger moments — that there exist no benefits to revenge.  What do we learn from harboring resentment and spite?  What good does it serve to inflict upon others what we or our loved ones have suffered?  We may lead decent, unfettered lives with nary an affront, and yet this old debate continues to burn as our petty justification of redemption.  Now redemption is a great thing.  Justice for all is what we all seek in one way or another, and its fairness not only makes being moral worthwhile, it also removes all other approaches to reality.  For all the cruelty and evil perpetrated in the world, there will always be hope for those who want justice for others as much as they want it (most naturally) for themselves.  We know that a true artist’s sincerest wish is the chance to fulfill his potential, a magnanimity that he extends to every downtrodden and miserable wretch in his vicinity.  This is why the artist, perhaps the most pacific of all souls, enacts in his mind a violent revenge upon the responsible, searing them with his thoughts and banishing them to eternal cognition of their wickedness.  And if you know anything about the literature of revenge, you know the name of Edmond Dantès.

The story is one of the classics, remade into plays, films, and rewritten as the thinly−veiled plot of more recent books.  And like all such tales, its longevity can be attributed to its fundamental moral: the meek shall triumph over the blasphemous and inherit the earth.  Or in this case, a large trove of loot buried in the earth.  As it would do us little good to review the original book, a melodramatic farrago at times both charming and schmaltzy (the sure sign of a serial), we should instead turn to the most recent film adaptation.  Dantès (James Caviezel) is an illiterate French sailor in the year eighteen−fourteen, as is his chum Fernand Mondego (Guy Pearce).  Students of language will immediately note that Mondego contains the French word for “world,” while Dantès reminds us of some lesser realm.  More perspicacious readers will see a bizarre homogeneity in the fact that the first syllable of each surname contains the last syllable of the other’s first name.  To be sure, the men are mirror images, but they are also two parts of the same soul, a device mentioned earlier with regard to this book.  Mondego is so irrevocably evil and unscrupulous that no God or gremlin could hope to rescue him from speeding doom.  And Dantès, who will rise from lowliest pauper to holiest prince, has much of the avenging angel in him, vigilantism which we are supposed to cheer on like the triumphant Jacobin trains.  In this world there is no grey, no off−white, no mauve, no lilac, no azure.  Only black, white, and the red of Dantès’s flesh as he is whipped every year on the anniversary of his incarceration.

There is more to this, of course.  We have the requisite female (Dagmara Dominczyk) who loves one man but marries the other; the dying priest who cannot understand how to burrow out of a prison but knows the secret of El Dorado itself; the maniacal jailer who enjoys thrashing his wards and cackling; the disappointed father who does something particularly desperate when Edmond is convicted; the corrupt official who barefacedly ignores one man’s innocence in favor of his career; and the ingenuous teenage son who seems to remind us of someone else.  I vaguely recollect some ridiculous attempt at symbolism involving a chess piece and a quip about all of us being either kings or pawns, but that’s for those viewers who think historical figures become historical by uttering such rot.  Yet, despite its predictability (you will guess each intrigue one scene before it occurs), the film is a rousing, swashbuckling pleasure.  Dantès’s redemption is as pure as the wanton betrayal of his friend Mondego, played with sadistic relish by Pearce in what must be considered the performance of his career.  We also remember that the motto of the film, conveniently painted in bold on the wall of Dantès’s cell, is God will give me justice.  And if He doesn’t, snarls Dantès, I might just take it myself.

Vampires and Vampirism

Rarely do I peruse customer reviews because, as a rule, they are overly positive, overly negative, or so general as to add no stickiness to the paste.  But I had to smile at some proffered insight into another of this author’s books which I will do the critic the dishonor of paraphrasing.  According to this most disappointed reader, Monsignor Summers (if he were indeed ever ordained, a matter of biographical debate) is, like “most religious writers … horribly tainted” by his beliefs; he "cannot seem to write a line without referring to Our Holy Father" (which the critic, to underscore his consistency, does not capitalize); he “picks his flavor” according to his religious beliefs, not according to “proof”; with the result being a “narrow−minded” book with “strong marks of fundamentalism.”  Whatever the dyes Summers uses to color his quilt, quoting hundreds of texts in six languages from the last twenty−five centuries is probably not the most appropriate example of “narrow−minded.”  Nor does “fundamentalism” have anything at all to do with his beliefs, which are heretical in a harmless way and as far from standard doctrine as they could possibly be with good intentions.  But the real howler here is the idea that proof and belief have anything to do with one another, and that only “religious writers” (somewhat of a redundancy, for all first−rate writers have some religion) cherry−pick what they need for their arguments while the great objective empiricists include all the facts, pro and contra, before drawing their conclusions.  I cannot imagine what our good reviewer was seeking to find in a book written by a priest on the occult, but his lack of appreciation is exceeded only by my pity.  Which brings us to an authoritative take on what is presumably a fictional subject.

I say “presumably” because as fantastic and preposterous as vampires may sound, you may never find another text that could more convince you of their reality.  This has much to do with the way in which Summers, an eccentric man of awesome learning, chooses to present his information.  He is not looking at teethmarks, scrutinizing autopsy reports, or investigating missing persons; rather, he is suggesting what spiritual penury could result in a state of living death and the traditional beliefs that reflect this possibility.  He begins exactly where one should begin in such argumentation: with some of the countless occurrences of persons buried alive.  These are not, mind you, intentional happenings, but weird stoppages of vital signs that persisted long enough to persuade the local medical authorities that nothing more could be done.  We are introduced to examples from Hellenic and Slavic culture — the countries of the Balkan Sprachbund being the wellspring of vampiric lore — as well as other instances from European, African and Asian lands.  Summers then proceeds with ecclesiastical justifications for casting someone out of the church, as well as the mania of suicide that has become such an accepted component of modern society that we think little of its spiritual consequences.  As it were, features commonly associated with a vampire have their roots in basic beliefs about suicide, burial, excommunication and human psychology, although there exist less tantalizing explanations for all these phenomena (usually, that they are the products of ignorant superstition).  Yet we are never told that we must think it so; we only understand that this is his belief laid out before us like a shroud upon an oaken bier.

The instances he localizes and enumerates are impressive enough, but our respect as scholars is overtaken by our pleasure as readers.  Most renowned as the first English translator of this evil book, Summers has a lush, somewhat archaic style of perfectly weighed phrases and endless libraries to feed his metaphors and sidelights.  Take, for one, his opinion on suicide:

The belief that a man has not complete dominion over his own life and that it is unlawful for him to take it is certainly a feeling naturally implanted in the human breast, and it was only when nations were entirely barbarian or had become decadent and corrupt that the notion of suicide was held up as noble and even heroic.  Whatever certain among the later Greeks may have practiced and taught, in earlier days, as we have seen, the act of suicide was regarded as a dark and presumptuous deed.  They truly felt that there was something of ἀσέβεια, something of that  ὕβρις which so surely stirred the wrath of heaven and inevitably called down righteous vengeance.

In one way or another, we are all familiar with the pitfalls of hubris.  “Impiety” (ἀσέβεια) was the charge leveled at Socrates and later at Aristotle for crimes that they could not possibly have committed.  The obvious idea here is that life is a gift: those who choose death as some form of refuge from daily ills (Summers does not fault the poor and miserable among the suicides whose existence is but a litany of suffering) should be condemned to it eternally.  Thence is derived the mentality, to use a modern term, of the vampire, of living death, of sleeping through every manifestation of the sun, and of preying upon those who have chosen to carry on regardless of the odds.

The book culminates in two learned chapters on the vampire in literature, old and new.  We saunter through the twilights of Assyria, Polynesia, pre−Colombian Mexico, China, and, most of all, India, which has a longer and more pronounced tradition than perhaps any region on earth save the aforementioned Balkans.  Here we find curious correlations in legend, and a rather unpleasant collation of detail.  So when the final chapter on modern literature begins with a consideration of this horrific tale from the coldest reaches of Sweden, we are already sufficiently gorged on bloodthirsty subjects to discern the subtleties of storytelling that inform our images.  And our images are not only tainted with our beliefs, they seem to shadow them like soundless serpents wandering near our ankles in the dark.  Non timebis a timore nocturne.

Continuidad de los parques

A translation of a very short story ("Continuity of the parks") by this author.  You can read the original here.

He had started reading the novel a few days before.  Urgent business made him abandon it for a time; but he returned to its pages while on his way back to the farmland estate.  He gradually let himself become interested in the plot, in the characters.  That evening, after writing a letter to his representative and discussing a matter of sharecropping, he took up the book again in the tranquility of his study which gazed out upon the park of oak trees.  As he lounged in his favorite chair with his back to the door that would have bothered him with the irritating potential for intrusions, he let his left hand stroke the green velvet once then again, and he began to read the final chapters.

His memory retained with no effort the names and appearances of the main characters, and so the novelistic illusion came upon him almost immediately.  He took an almost perverse pleasure in letting himself tear through line after line of what surrounded him.  All at once he felt his head relaxing comfortably in the velvet of the old recliner, cigarettes persisting within reach of his hands, and, beyond the large windows, the evening air dancing below the oaks.  Word for word, absorbed by the heroes’ sordid dilemma, he cast himself adrift towards the images which concerted and acquired color and movement, evidence of the last meeting in the mountain cabin.  First the woman came in, mistrustful.  Then her lover arrived, his face hurt from the whiplash of a branch.  Admirably she clotted the blood with her kisses, but her caresses were rejected: he had not come to repeat the rituals of a secret passion protected by a world of dry leaves and furtive paths.  The dagger grew warm against his chest, and below beat cowering liberty.  A breathy dialog ran through the pages like a stream of serpents, which felt as if it had always been so.  Even as these caresses swirled around the lover’s body as if trying to hold him and dissuade him, they drew at the same time the abominable shape of another body which had to be destroyed.  Nothing had been forgotten: alibis, mishaps, possible mistakes.  From this hour forth, each moment would have its use, minutely detailed.  The merciless re−inspection was hardly interrupted for a hand to caress a cheek.  It began to get dark.

No longer looking, bound rigidly to the task which was awaiting them, they separated at the door of the cabin.  She had to follow the trail that led north.  From the opposite trail, he turned for a moment to watch her run with her hair flowing loosely.  He then ran in turn, taking shelter beneath the trees and hedges until, in the mallow mist of twilight, he was able to make out the avenue that led to the house.  The dogs were not supposed to bark; and they didn’t.  The majordomo would not be in at this hour; and he wasn’t.  He climbed the three stairs of the porch and went in.  In the blood swishing between his ears rang the words of the woman: first a blue room, then a gallery, then a carpeted staircase.  Upstairs, two doors.  No one would be in the first room, no one in the second.  The door of the living room, and then the dagger in his hand, the light of those large windows, the old recliner with green velvet seat, the head of a man reading a novel.

The Sacrifice

Apart from being the beloved country of this recently deceased director whose heyday coincided with Europe’s postwar rebirth, Sweden is undoubtedly one of the least plausible locations you might imagine involved in a cataclysm of the type only possible the last sixty-odd years.  Bergman’s untouchability has been questioned the last two decades or so, but such impertinence is common to every wave of clammy-handed critics who seek to deify their contemporaries and cast out the old masters.  When you consider that the ghosts of Milton, Bach, and Melville all labored at one point or another in obscurity in favor of talentless hacks whose names are long forgotten, Bergman’s waning authority is not surprising.  Soon enough, however, he will be restored to power because he is a genius of this newest art of ours, the moving picture.  And this film, shot with some of Bergman’s habitual actors and crew and on the Swedish island he so adored, is a monumental tribute to Bergman by the greatest cinematic artist the world has ever seen.

We begin the film in Gotland, land of God or good, an island away from the Swedish mainland, a small sanctuary amidst the torrents of chaos, war, and materialism.  There Alexander (Erland Josephson), a family patriarch and man of no faith, lives with his family, including his English wife Adelaide and their mute six-year-old son.  Alexander’s days are quiet ones, very distant from the storm of his younger years in which he was an actor, psychologist, and something of a philosopher.  The postman comes with a telegram that allows Alexander to digress into the usual existential poppycock about the fate of man (no one is supposed to be impressed with the casual mention of profound topics except perhaps Alexander himself).  Civilization, he muses, has no real meaning, and it is fruitless even to discuss that some higher power has given us the privilege of life.  It is in this context, at a family dinner to which the postman is invited, that the unthinkable occurs: a short, earthquake-like scene is followed by an emergency announcement from the television. This is the worst kind of announcement; the announcement no one ever, ever hopes to hear or consider; the announcement that for a while during the height of the Cold War seemed less of a fantasy than at any other time; the announcement that makes Alexander do something he has never done or wanted to do.  And at the end of this strange session which he seals with a promise, Alexander wakes up, cold and wretched.  But the world he sees does not reflect his misery in the way he thought it might.

There are myriad interpretations as to why Alexander makes such a choice, why his house erupts in flames (in one of the greatest scenes in all of cinema), and why his son, in the end, finally speaks.  Perhaps the most satisfying approach would be to ask oneself what Bergman and Tarkovsky have in common.  Both are Northern Europeans, aesthetes of the finest caliber, untraditional if devout in their spirituality, and committed to demolishing the falsehoods of trend, movement, and theory that throughout the course of human history have tried and failed to reduce us to amœbæ.  Man is first and foremost a spiritual being, a soul caged in a brittle box.  What else he makes of himself is often dictated by vanity, hedonism, or cruel circumstance.  The aging Alexander, who has always been vain and hedonistic, cannot fathom for the longest time why anyone should care about what we can’t see, or those billions of people we cannot meet, or the ecumenical and moral responsibility we have to preserve ourselves in the face of extinction and lesser plagues.  Hopeless man does not even deserve my pity, he assures himself.  Then he grasps at a thread – a large, branched thread that he plants on his birthday – tries to follow its path against the almighty sun, and comes across something else.  His beginning is his end, so to speak.  Or something greater than both.