Dante — The Journey Up

The progress of Dante’s Pilgrim from Inferno to Paradiso, may be read, among other things, but perhaps above all, as a process of anagnorisis. The Commedia narrates an anagoge, a movement upwards, detailing Dante’s journey from the hubris of material knowledge and merely profound poetry to the greater, almost ineffable, humbling spiritual understanding. This motif of anagnorisis, bearing resonant Aristotelian undertones, is general in the Commedia as Dante, through the narrative engine, meets and realises the identities of various historical and mythological characters—or as he is recognised by them. Following Piero Boitani’s essay on the subject as it manifests in Dante, contained in his Auerbachian Anagnorisis: Scenes and Themes of Recognition and Revelation in Western Literature (2021),I will examine two major recognition scenes: the encounter with Virgilio in Inferno I and with Beatrice in Purgatorio XXX.

These scenes link explicitly the characters of Virgilio and Beatrice and place them in a trinity with Dante. While Virgilio symbolises the earthly perfection of reason and the search for knowledge, Beatrice symbolises pure, divine understanding, the preparation for which comes through thepurgatorial process of witnessing and experiencing that Dante undergoes under Virgilio. This divine understanding, really a kind of knowledge beyond human understanding, is realised in the closing passages of the Commedia as Dante witnesses the Mystic Rose—the culmination of his pilgrimage and the poem’s final instance of anagnorisis.

Recognition, anagnorisis—the shock of recognition—is simply put by Aristotle in his Poetics as ‘a change from ignorance to knowledge, producing love or hate between the persons destined by the poet for a good or bad future. The best form of recognition is coincident with a Reversal of the Situation, as in the Oedipus’ (Aristotle,1965, p.46). It is difficult to put this in plainer terms than the alleged ‘maestro di color che sanno’ (Inf. 4:131), but to apply it to the Commedia, it is evident that such a concept would adhere to Dante’s polysemous allegorical method. The Commedia is a change within the Pilgrim from ignorance of the divine to knowledge and understanding of it. This is of course driven by an Aristotelian thirst for knowledge: in the preface to the Convivio, Dante recounts Aristotle’s Metaphysics:

1. Sì come dice lo Filosofo nel principio della Prima Filosofia, tutti li uomini naturalmente desiderano di sapere. La ragione di che puote essere [ed] è che ciascuna cosa, da providenza di prima natura impinta, è inclinabile alla sua propia perfezione; onde, acciò che la scienza è ultima perfezione della nostra anima, nella quale sta la nostra ultima felicitade, tutti naturalmente al suo desiderio semo subietti.

2. Veramente da questa nobilissima perfezione molti sono privati per diverse cagioni, che dentro all'uomo e di fuori da esso lui rimovono dall'abito di scienza. (Convivio I:1-2)

That is, man naturally strives for knowledge, to new recognitions. Moreover there is much to admirein this striving, in this perfection of spirit. Before the perfection can be achieved, however, there are flaws which must be purged.

It is more or less by these Aristotelian terms that Piero Boitani builds his theory of recognition in Dante in the comprehensive essay “I Know The Signs Of The Ancient Flame”(2021, pp. 318-359). He summarises the various functions of recognition in the Commedia; I will briefly summarise him.

Essentially, Dante’s encounters with various characters uniquely allow him, by mirroring himself with these characters, to define himself through and against others, whether they be poets or fellow citizens, religious and mythological figures or dead relatives and friends. With this he is able to understand and signpost his spiritual growth and sense of purpose, with the heightened senses of the afterlife journey. Boitani says: “the anagnorisis scenes of the Comedy are not only narrative devices. They are the technical means by which Dante stresses the central process of the poem, the acquisition of knowledge in the flesh [and, I would add, the supersession of this], and its dramatic quality” (ibid, p.325). Boitani is extensive in cataloguing of the various recognition scenes in the Commedia. Within the scope of this essay, however, I would like now to emphasise one aspect of his insights, and what I believe is his ultimate thesis: “...Dante overcomes the initial ‘faintness’ of Virgil,transcends the recognition of Beatrice on the top of Purgatory, and at the same time points to the final cognitive stage of the poem: the recognition of God” (ibid, p.359).

Virgilio’s initial appearance comes in a moment of crisis. The narrator, yet unnamed, finds himself, as we know, in a dark wood and in his attempt to escape the wilderness finds himself hounded severally by a leopard, a lion and a she-wolf. (One must not lose the opportunity to note the allegory of these beasts, especially in so much as they prevent the pilgrim from gaining the summit of the hill he is trying to climb.) With much suspense, the Pilgrim is stalked by the she-wolf ‘a poco a poco’(Inf.I: 59), so that he takes to his heels, ‘rovinava in basso loco’. Suddenly, he spies a lone figure. The dramatic shift, the appearance of a figure out of nowhere in this crisis heightens the stakes of the narrative. Anagnorisis leads to friendship or enmity, Aristotle says. We are unsure whether this spooky figure is friend or foe. Desperate, the Pilgrim cries out: "Miserere di me’’ gridai a lui,/qual che tu sii, od ombra od omo certo!” (Inf. I: 65-66).

Incidentally, the figure is something like shade made flesh. But it is all the more interesting to note that Virgilio, is especially the shade of a great man, by virtue of his poetry; it is fitting that he is resurrected in poetry. In his response to Dante’s cry, he sketches his biography briefly, the effect of which is something like a spotlight illuminating a character out of the darkness of a stage (a characteristically Dantescan legerdemain):

“ Rispuosemi: «Non omo, omo già fui,

e li parenti miei furon lombardi,

mantoani per patria ambedui.

Nacqui sub Iulio, ancor che fosse tardi,

e vissi a Roma sotto ’l buono Augusto

nel tempo de li dèi falsi e bugiardi.

Poeta fui, e cantai di quel giusto

figliuol d’Anchise che venne di Troia,

poi che ’l superbo Ilión fu combusto. (Inf. I:67-75)

Auerbach spoke of the so-called ‘retarding element’, quoting Goethe and Schiller, in his “Odysseus’ Scar”. His claim is that in Homer the moment of revelation and the consolidation of revelation are often interrupted by narratively extraneous flashbacks and descriptions which serve to slacken tension, as opposed to the modern assumption that such digressions heighten suspense. It is not so easy here to codify possible readings in this way. True, the confirmation of identity that is symbolised in the naming, “or se tu quel Virgilio’’ (Inf.1:79) comes several lines after the figure appears. For a reader ignorant of the allusions in Virgilio’s introduction, this is a kind of suspense. However, presumably, the cultured reader, (and especially in Dante’s time, the cultured reader who could stand the ‘vulgarity’ of Dante’s Italian), would potentially be able to recognise the clues as to the identity of this dramatic figure, who is self-presented, in (naturally) fine verse with a calm assuredness that comes as an antidote to the torpid anxiety of the preceding passages. Anyway, Dante instantly recognises him, and the identification is entirely dramatic, dramatised by dialogue.

As such, any reader can recognise, with the sense of place in Virgilio’s autobiography, the sense of time, of vocation and of moral responsibility, that this is an important character. His importance as a mentor-poet (emphasised as a function of his humanity, with “poeta fui” echoing “non omo, omo gia fui”), is made apparent with the Pilgrim’s gushing reverence:

O de li altri poeti onore e lume

vagliami ’l lungo studio e ’l grande amore

che m’ha fatto cercar lo tuo volume.

Tu se’ lo mio maestro e ’l mio autore;

tu se’ solo colui da cu’ io tolsi

lo bello stilo che m’ha fatto onore. (Inf. I:82-89)

Evidently, Dante, being a poet, takes Virgilio as a guide; this is made evident in that Virgilio immediately after his introduction provides Dante with consolation and advice. Virgilio, who until the closing passages of Purgatorio, is a physical guide and a symbol of knowledge and reason, saves Dante from the physical, mortal danger of the beasts and the dark wood, as well as from the allegorical spiritual peril which comes as an obstruction to Dante’s spiritual perfection. Or perhaps it is better to say he steers him away, for Virgilio is not sufficient to constitute Dante’s salvation.

In this meeting, there is a sense of self-recognition, even as Dante places the Latin poet on a higher level than himself, to begin with. This is comparable to the self-recognition and incidental comparison with a character like Arnaut Daniel, for example, whose reputation also precedes him.

Otherwise, figures like Statius and Guinizelli. But in each of these cases, and in others, the characters are ranked on a much lower position than the pedestal on which Dante places Virgilio, even as helauds their poetry.. It is clear that there is much more to be desired, more to be refined in their morality. Virgilio, however, is one that Dante aspires to; in this self-recognition there is a level of projection or aspiration. Virgilio is a rare example of one who perfected life and art, to borrow from Yeats. All that damned him was the mere but immutable fact of his paganism. In this aspect, Dante supercedes him, as he embraces his path towards becoming a fully Christian poet-prophet. All the same, Virgilio provides the base model for Dante’s eventual fulfilment of his divine anagnorisis, which I would argue is perfected not in his apprehension of the Divine Rose, but in his subsequentdivinely mandated testimony, his so-called “Summa in Verse”, the Commedia. Thus, I would suggest that this is the reason Virgilio is the exemplary candidate, above St. Augustine, Thomas Aquinas or Aristotle for Dante’s rational, aesthetic and moral guide through hell and purgatory.

Unfortunately, however, Virgilio is not qualified to accompany Dante to Paradise. The next stage of Dante’s awakening to the Divine requires a change of the guard. I wish to prefigure Virgilio’s disappearance by briefly considering the meeting with Sordello in Purgatorio VII. Therein, upon being asked to confirm his identity by Sordello, Virgilio answers, naming himself, and stating with a hint of self pity: “Io son Virgilio, e per null’altro rio lo ciel perdei che per non aver fe.” (7-8). This fact however, does not keep Sordello from offering a show of reverence to Virgilio, and the glory of his poetry, a comforting re-confirmation of the moral authority which has been threatened somewhat by Virgilio’s lack of sovereignty in Paradise (symbolised most of all by the figure of Cato). Virgilio goes on to describe their journey : “per tutti’ i cerchi del dolente regno’, rispose lui, son io di qua venuto”.

Here is more emphasis on the moral authority that direct experience lends, even if it is not sufficient to save Virgilio. We skip now to Purgatorio XXX. After all said and done, Dante is about to gain Paradise proper. With

‘la parte oriental tutta rosata e l’altro ciel di bel sereno addorno’, we are provided with an echo of the opening scene of Purgatorio, and Dante performs a similar panoramic sweep, emphasising the socalled ineluctable modality of the visible, with a sense of visual movement, of colour, with the ‘nuvola di fiori’ (Pur. XXX:28), and the sudden apparition of a mysterious lady clad in green and the colour of flame. This is Beatrice, whom Dante recognises immediately, although she renames unnamed for now. Dante’s reaction to this sight is visceral, and he feels something greater than what his mere eyes can perceive:

“Sanza de li occhi aver piu conoscenza,

Per occulta virtu che da lei mosse

D’antico amor senti la gran potenza” (Pur. XXX:37-39)

This triggers in Dante something anachronistically Proustian, he is transported psychologically to the boyhood love he felt for Beatrice, his first inkling of the power of divine love; it renders him childlike; the significance of this will soon be made evident. Dante turns ‘a la sinistra’, again calling attention to the physical, to express his astonishment to Virgilio, with the lines that Boitani takes his essay title from: “conosco i segni de l’antica fiamma” (Pur. XXX:48) Virgilio is gone, however, vanished as dramatically as his apparition in Inferno I. In this disappearance, the replacement of him by Beatrice is brought into high relief, underscoring the difference in the two characters, and the difference in Dante’s own spiritual maturity. Virgilio has already prophesied the necessity of this replacement:‘Quanto ragion qui vede,/dirti poss’io; da indi in là t’aspetta/pur a Beatrice, ch’è opradi fede’ (Pur. XVIII: 46-48). The drama of this scene, among the most touching in the Commedia, and the weight of Virgilio’s absence is impressed with the repetition of his name.

The gender play and the idea of maturity are interesting here, even in terms of modern psychological understanding. Dante says that he turns to Virgilio “col respitto col quale il fantolin corre a la amma quando ha paura o quando elli e afflito” (Pur. XXX:44-45). He identifies Virgilio, hitherto known to us as a father-figure, really a ‘dolcissimo padre’, with motherhood, and implicitly with the Virgin Mary: “perdeo l’antica matre”(Pur. XXX: 50-52). At the same time, Beatrice, who some have argued can be read as a Christ figura (Rodheffer, 2019), declines to offer much parental consolation, beyond the ironic “non pianger anco, non piangere ancora, che’ pianger ti conven per altra spada’, a stark contrast to Virgilio’s consoling response in Inferno 1. Rather she chastises and goads Dante, questioning his right to ascend the mountain, such that angels sing on his behalf: “Donna, perche si lo stempere?”. After a measured silence, she presses on, detailing the difficult task at hand and her role in it: Dante’s salvation, which is impossible until his spirit is totally purified, immature as it obviously still is. Imperiously, she emphasises her no-nonsense pragmatism, and leaves no false impressions as to the difficulty of the Purgatorial task at hand. That is to say, the difficulty of anagnorisis.

Dante is an entirely intentional poet; he worked every description and narrative turn into an articulation of his theology. For this reason, it is not untoward to suggest that Dante directly intimates a comparison between Virgilio’s manifestation and that of Beatrice’s, with all three protagonists being mentioned by name here (indeed with Dante’s name being hapax legomenon).Indeed this juxtaposition has been a subcurrent throughout the poem up to this point, even as Beatrice speaks through Virgilio in Inferno II. Virgilio is certainly emblematic of a kind of reason; of a kind of empiricism, that of the sensual altruistic, expansive world of poetry and philosophy. It would have been crass to deny this truth. Beatrice, however, symbolises an epistemology which is superior to that of Virgilio’s, and certainly that of Dante’s. This is because hers is divine knowledge. Soon after meeting Beatrice, who in fact is something somewhat transformed--exulted--from the Beatrice that he knew in the world (compare to how much Virgilio’s supernatural reputation is staked on his earthly achievements), Dante must wash himself by Lethe--a physical ritual which underscores his movement towards spiritual maturity.

Chastised by Beatrice, Dante hangs his head, but spying his reflection in the brook: li occhi mi cadder giu nel chiaro fonte”, is ashamed and forced to look away. To play further with this idea of mirrors; perhaps Beatrice is a kind of mirror. Maybe there is an aspect of self-recognition and the same aspirational process as in Canto 1 that must begin anew upon Virgilio’s exit. Furthermore, perhaps Lethe itself can be read as a kind of mirror through which Dante is forced to reconstruct his ego. I shall steer away from teasing out the Lacanian undertones of this imagery within the scope of this essay— it is imperative not to follow theories too rigidly— but it is certainly interesting to consider the instances of idealisation and self-recognition from this perspective.

More important to consider, perhaps, is how Dante’s spiritual maturity is brought into relief in the very closing scenes of the Commedia. Brought through Paradise by the stern, imperious Beatrice, who eventually leaves him to take her place in the Mystic Rose, Dante is at last able to get an inkling of God. It has taken this long and his realisation, this summative anagnorisis is all-encompassing. He recognises the divine

Nel suo profondo vidi che s’interna,

Legato con amore in un volume

Cio’ che per l’universo si quaderna (Par. XXXIII:85-87)

It is interesting to compare this Borgesian understanding of the Divine as an encyclopaedia within the encyclopaedia which is the Commedia and with Virgilio’s ‘volume’ that Dante speaks of in Inferno I:84. Indeed, while he speaks of ‘il grande amore che m’ha fatto cercar lo tuo volume’, presumably the love of knowledge—philosophia—, this pales in comparison to ‘l’amor che move il sole e l’altre stelle’.

Such that, at the very last, however instigated by his initial thirst for knowledge and inspired by the example of Virgilio, Dante’s attainment of true knowledge and his ability to express his perception of it comes only by Divine grace. At the very last, after a process begun by Virgilio and consolidated by Beatrice, Dante is able to cast the scales off his eyes and complete the overarching process of anagnorisis. All this is achieved with Dante’s conscious narrative pacing and sense of the dramatic, with his mastery of suspense and surprise. By tracing Dante’s journey through his meeting with Virgilio, and then with Beatrice and then finally his apprehension of the Mystic Rose, we are able to track Dante’s edification and refinement, as it occurs through the three cantiche, a journey in which, by virtue of the poet’s sophisticated dramatic and narrative sensibility, the reader is able to empathise and grow in kind.

Works Cited

Alighieri, Dante. Inferno, trans. Robin Kirkpatrick. London: Penguin Books, 2010.

Alighieri, Dante. Purgatorio, trans. Robin Kirkpatrick. London: Penguin Classics [Imprint],

2008.

Alighieri, Dante. Paradiso, trans. Allen Mandelbaum. Quality Paperback Book Club, 1984.\

Edizione Nazionale (Florence: Le Lettere, 1995). Edited by Franca Brambilla Ageno.

Alighieri, Dante. Dante's Il Convivio: (the Banquet), trans. Richard H. Lansing. New York:

Garland, 1990.

Aristotle. On the Art of Poetry, in Classical Literary Criticism. trans. T.S. Dorsh. Reading: Penguin

Books: 1965.

Auerbach, Erich. “Odysseus’ Scar’. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature,

trans. Willard R. Trask. Princeton: 1953, repr. 1974,

Boitani, Piero. Anagnorisis: Scenes And Themes Of Recognition And Revelation In Western

Literature. Brill Rodopi, 2021.

Rodeheffer, Jane Kelley. “‘And Lo, As Luke Sets Down for Us’: Dante’s Re-Imagining of the

Emmaus Story in Purgatorio XXIX–XXXIII.” Religions 10.5 (2019): 320. Available:

http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/rel10050320.

Soyinka and Pasolini—Beyond Negritude

1.

Fanon, in the vein of his critical stance towards Negritude (and its concomitant Orphism, even as it paradoxically denies any non-African influence) famously criticised the adaptation of Greek mythology and its ‘Mediterranean values’ to (post)colonial contexts. He says in The Wretched of the Earth (1965):

Now it so happens that during the struggle for liberation[…]all the Mediterranean values—the triumph of the human individual, of clarity, and of beauty—become lifeless, colorless knickknacks. …those values which seemed to uplift the soul are revealed as worthless, simply because they have nothing to do with the concrete conflict in which the people are engaged. (37-38)

His negativity is understandable. The usage of ‘Greco-Latin’ myth seems to come out a sense of insecurity on the part of the colonised intellectual (like Soyinka), and a sense of superiority on the part of the colonialist bourgeoisie (like Pasolini), which lauds the perceived purity and universality of the so-called classics above all else. The assumption that the essence of these classics can be so easily transposed does disservice to the classics themselves, which are profound in their original context, but which become ‘lifeless, colourless knickknacks’ when they are forced to speak to third world experience with which they do not have necessarily anything to do.

While Fanon’s arguments are provoking, he betrays a lack of faith in the transcendent capacity of mythology (of all cultures) to speak to all mankind and to bear timelessly resonant implications; Wole Soyinka and Pier Paolo Pasolini on the other hand evince a belief in this. Soyinka’s Bacchae of Euripides (1973), and Pasolini’s Appunti per un’Orestiade africana (‘Notes for an African Orestaia’) (1970) are hybrid dramatic adaptations which may be interpreted in light of their ambition of making Greek drama relevant to a modern African context. Their hybridity comes out of a reconciliatory impulse which recognises natural parallels between the Hellenic and the African, and a politically informed ambition of illuminating modern African societies in flux by drawing comparisons between them and points in Greek history, especially as they pertain to the false dichotomy between reason and unreason.

I argue that in Pasolini there is a confused romanticism and nostalgic tendency which makes him unable to see Africa as it really is; perennially complex, multivalent. This unwitting reductionism ultimately dooms his project to a certain primitivist superficiality and lends credence to Fanon’s grouse. Conversely, Soyinka’s adaptation, illuminated by his lifelong critique of the essentialist myths of negritude (even while accepting to some degree the necessity thereof), as well as his frank understanding of African society and his usage of a specific and profound point of reference in his comparison of the Ogun myth to that of Dionysus, provides a more authentic and more serious, universally relevant syncretic vision.

2.

To refresh on Negritude momentarily. The term is notoriously ambivalent, but it broadly describes a mainly Francophone response to colonialism and how it affected Africa and Africans, especially as espoused by Leopold Senghor, as Irele (1990:67) summarises. Negritude constituted a reactionary valorisation of blackness and of Africa: ‘a passionate exaltation of the black race, associated ‘with a romantic myth of Africa’, whose essential project was the ‘rehabilitation of Africa’(ibid:69). The ideology ultimately relies upon the idea that there is something exclusively essential to blackness and to Africa. Senghor held that this essentiality comes down to the relative corporal, rhythmic sensuousness of Africans, as opposed to the rationality of the Occidental. Soyinka’s relevant satirical summary of this idea was: ‘Reason is Greek; emotion African’(1993:176).

Needless to say, this reductive essentialism is problematic (and false), but perhaps we can understand the historical necessity of reactionarily rescuing the tarnished image of Africa and doing some salutary work to the black ego, as well as fostering the recognition of commonalities between black people globally. Above all, despite its foundational claims, Negritude is a synthesist vision, which at ts best encourages the black person to reconcile with the realities of the modern, post-slavery, post-colonial world, while never losing view of their ancestral history, and thus achieving a kind of authentic subjectivity.

It is clear what Pasolini’s affinity with Negritude would have been: he says in his African travel diaries ‘Negritude…will be the way’(Siciliano, 1982:265). But, besides his genuine concern for the ‘Third World’ his ‘panmeridional’ (i.e the Global South) consciousness (see Trento, 2010) and a desire to see Africa progress past the morass of colonialism and post-colonial wars, he is in many ways the prime candidate for the pitfalls of reductionism. He is unable to see past the myth of Africa and actually realise the progressive potential of Negritude, which is the self-actualisation of Africans through debunking myths of African inferiority and the artistic and political deployment of African ideas in the face of postcolonial modernism. Trento (2012), for instance, has argued that despite his affinity for the global proletariat, Pasolini’s descriptions of Italian-colonised Africa were not different from the likes of the exoticist, imperialist Marinetti and the ‘colonial construction of ‘Mediterranean Africa’ (ibid:292). The cloying odour of romanticism and primitivism degrades Pasolini’s revolutionary vision, even as he tries to move past an aestheticization of poverty and atavism. Let us see how this manifests in his attempt to create an African Orestaia.

We see Pasolini’s translucent reflection in a shop window in Africa. The impression is that behind every shot in this film, there is the implied individual gaze of the European auteur, with all the neocolonial implications of this. His aim:

I have come to film. But to film what? Not a documentary or a film. I have come to film notes for a film. This film would be the Orestaia of Aeschylus, filmed in the Africa of today, in modern Africa. [1:00-2:00]

Pasolini finds parallels between this hybrid, transitional modern Africa and the Argos in which Aeschylus’s Orestaia begins. His voice speaks over moving-portraits of autochthonous Africans, reminiscent of the apotheotic ethnographic portraits of Pierre Verger, as he chooses potential cast members and settings, as he suggests an American jazz singing scene (he is silent, though, when he uses real war footage): we imagine the film without really seeing it. He recounts: following his matricide of Clytemnestra to avenge his father, Orestes is hounded by the Erinyes, ‘the goddesses of ancestral terror”. He is protected from them by Apollo, who brings him to Athena, “goddess of democracy and reason” and patron of Athens. She establishes the first human law court to absolve Orestes (here Pasolini shows images of African students at the university of Rome – evidently the new, rational arbiters). The conclusion is that “the Furies (i.e Africans) are transformed by the goddess Athena (i.e. Europe) from goddesses of ancestral terror into goddesses of the irrational – which endure alongside the rational democracy of the new state (i.e ‘Modern African)’”--parenthetical inserts mine.

Interestingly self-critical, Pasolini interviews the African students at the University of Rome whom he considers to be fulfilling the role of Orestes, bringing civilization to their homelands, and suggests to them that this period of democratic transformation is the basis of his identification of Africa with Ancient Greece. Their response takes the form of collective bemusement, if not outright scorn. Pasolini is first of all reminded that “Africa is not one thing” – it is vast continent with diverse realities and histories (including, as we must be reminded, diverse political systems historically, from imperialism to democracy). This is the general form the criticism takes, which I would largely agree with. Pasolini is chastised rightly for indulging in essentialist myths about African and its perceived homogeneity and archaism, and for the idea of democracy as being brought through colonialism as an ideal model for Africa (if it indeed exists), even though a few profess to some tenuous belief that his adaptation could work. One tells him bluntly, however, that despite fulfilling the role of an Orestes who travels for education, “We haven’t come to discover a better world. We are discovering a new world.”[56:01]

In the end, Pasolini speaks to the political relevance of his film:

it must refer to the African ideology of those [independence] years, which probably had its symbol in Senghor, the president of Senegal. This is the idea that the new Africa.. must be a synthesis of modern, independent, free Africa, and of ancient Africa. [1:01:53]

This is revealingly ambivalent: Pasolini intuits the need for a syncretic vision of Africa, which reconciles its past with its present; but in saying this he also affirms the view of Africa as a primitive monolith, which has in all areas a consistent past, and one consistent present and fails to understand that the continent, with its historically complex and diverse nationalities and politics, like every other entity, is constantly in flux. Additionally, by his phrasing, he implies that ancient Africa, whatever he means by that, was not ‘free’ or ‘independent’. His valorisation of Senghor is telling. While he may believe that he is truly on the side of the lumpenproletariat, and paradoxically at the same time thinking that he is moving past his attraction to primitivism, he fails to realise that he is actually supporting a privileged, western-university-educated mode of being, which is of little relevance to actual lived experience of the proletariat; much like Fanon warns against. Soyinka relevantly has this to say about the Negritude’s bourgeois trappings:

even in a country like Senegal where Negritude is the official ideology the regime, it remains a curiosity for the bulk of the population and an increasingly shopworn and dissociated expression even among the younger intellectuals and literateurs. (1976:135)

Pasolini is unable to make positive use of the flawed Negritude vision of an ideal ancient Africa; instead denigrating it as irrational, and using the Occidental as a paradigm instead; his amounts to a kind of whitewashed Negritude; Negritude without Africa.. Siciliano rightly criticizes the development of this viewpoint: ‘One might say that in him an old cultural dream—exoticism—donned progressive clothes’(1982:265).

Shockingly, these problems have not struck a critic like Usher (2014:114) who insists ‘None of this, however, is sentimental; nor does it romanticise African “primitivism.’, while making no mention of the criticism of the African students’ criticisms. Indicatively, he approves of Pasolini’s usage of real footage from the Biafran war to illustrate the Trojan War. I personally find Pasolini’s appropriation of these images of people’s real suffering as illustrations for his adaptation repulsive, regardless of whatever arguments about parallels he claims to be making. This, to me, shockingly insensitive attitude encapsulates the problem of the primitivist impulse, again a confirmation of Fanon’s argument. Despite all good intentions, it results in an absolute inability to view the so-called primitive directly; they are merely illustrations and not people with real lives and destinies; their past is a fiction of the appropriator’s imagination. What is the alternative?

3.

Soyinka has criticized Negritude as: ‘infantile regression’, the work of ‘Neo-tarzanists’ (1993:p.175), who delight in Senghor’s insipid Uncle-Tomist dictum of valorised black emotivity which encourage such extrapolations as Pasolini’s Athenian reason versus African unreason. But this is the same Soyinka who has delimited an ‘African world-view’, which he holds as distinct from the European. The necessity of this African world-view is for the self-actualisation of the African on African terms to protect from neocolonialist impulses both well- and ill-intentioned:

We black Africans have been blandly invited to submit ourselves to a second epoch of colonization – this time by a universal-humanoid abstraction defined and conducted by individuals whose theories and prescriptions are derived from the apprehension of their world and their history, their social neuroses and their value systems. It is time, clearly, to respond to this new threat, each in his own field. (1976:135)

So with this neo-colonialism, comes the need for a neo-, refined Negritude, with fewer of the essentialist pitfalls of the first epoch, while recognising the primary potentialities. Jeyifo (2004) has described Soyinka as going from out-and-out anti-Negritude to a ‘complex neo-Negritudinist temper’. How does Soyinka evince this nuanced Negritude in his Bacchae of Euripides?

To summarise: It concerns Dionysus’s revenge upon the people of Thebes, especially King Pentheus and his mother Agave, who have denied his divine legitimacy and slandered his mother Sebele. Disguised as a mortal, he causes havoc, inducing the women of Thebes to run mad in the hills and engage in orgiastic bacchanals in his honour; Pentheus intrudes on this ritual and is dismembered, his head mounted on a pike by his wine-maddened mother. Ultimately, Dionysus is feared in all his glory as a vengeful god. Composed by Euripides in his years of exile (and there are clear parallels here with Soyinka, who also endured exile from his homeland at various points), it is interpretable under various schema, but Soyinka has chosen to emphasise its revolutionary significance, which is borne through its ritual, metaphysical centre and carried through by the artist-avatar, arguing that:

Dionysos [forms]a universal paradigm for the artist – the dramatic artist that is, as illusionist, conjurer, agent of release and control, a medium of primordial chaos, yet midwife of beginnings (1993:.45-46)

(Notably, and similarly to Pasolini, Soyinka likens Euripedes transitional Greek context to postcolonial Africa in flux (Jeyifo, 2004: 162).

Soyinka’s translation is broadly similar to his reference texts (as Sotto, 1985:32-36) has detailed,) but there are instances in which one can sense the post-colonial implications simmering beneath the surface. For instance, in his opening lines, Soyinka goes directly to Dionysus’ rage, saying:

Thebes taints me with bastardy. I am turned into an alien, some foreign outgrowth of her habitual tyranny. (1974:1)

This introduction has shades of that infamous righteous fury of Caliban, surely not by accident. It is perhaps possible to suggest here that Soyinka is willfully invoking a postcolonial cadence to show the anger of the hybrid who is reduced to ‘bastardy’, ‘an alien’, some ‘foreign outgrowth’; the ‘habitual tyranny’ being that of course of the colonial centers. The narrative arc of the play, the revelation of the outcast as the superior and his divine retribution against bigotry, achieved through para-theatrical means, offer possible identifications with Caliban. And yet, it would seem that Soyinka is too nuanced of a thinker, to limit the play to this kind of reactionary interpretation. It serves to look at Soyinka’s other main points of departure from the original.

For example, where in the original Euripides has homogeneously Asian Bacchante chorus, Soyinka has them as being of mixed origin. This is relevant for a creolized, diasporic view of the world, certainly, but with any mention slavery, of specific historical resonance. There is also the opportunity to meld different performance techniques (reminiscent of Pasolini’s proposed use of jazz). He calls for a compelling inclusion of ‘Negroid’ lead slave, the result being particularly Fanon-esque. “In the play, the “hollering” of the mostly male slaves blends well and effectively with the women’s keening, ululuating cries of anguish and faith. The suggestion is that the terrifying powers of the god Dionysus—which derive from, and express elemental forces of nature—can merge with the cause of all oppressed people-- women, slaves, workers.”(Jeyifo, idem: 163). In short, the wretched of the earth. This is truly Panmeridiomal consciousness.

Perhaps more significantly, Soyinka blends praise-songs of Dionysus with Yoruba oriki praise poems to the Yoruba god of transition, Ogun ( uncannily similar in fact to Dionysus, both simultaneously embodying rationality and irrationality, as well as the ideas of transition and hybridity). This is a way to introduce the compelling final scene in which Soyinka’s Dionysus turns the blood from the head of decapitated Pentheus into wine, an act of expiatory mercy as opposed to Euripedes’ all-out punishment. This is appropriated from Ogun rituals. That is, Soyinka’s syncretised version is a more creative, less destructively vengeful Dionysus, in fact a fusion of the Apollonian and Dionysian impulses. Jeyifo:

“The effect of this is to give the ritual sacrifice at the heart of the play, as extremely gruesome as it is, a more credible necessitation than its dim, symbolic outlines in the text of the Euripides original. This is perhaps why this play marks the most convincing dramatisation of Soyinka’s theorization of ritual as a performative matrix for change and renewal.”

The syncretism (which also has unmistakable Christian reference points) detailed in Soyinka’s famously elliptical metaphysical essay the fourth stage as well as in his preface to the Bacche,mimics the resistance syncretism of African slave religions in the Caribbean and Latin America and underscores the revolutionary (in every sense) achievement of the play.

Soyinka’s subtly complex adaptation of the Bacchae, I would argue, is fundamental to an understanding of his vision as an artist, especially as one who may be considered a socially engaged mythopoet and conscious, consistent syncretist. The achievement is such that ironically, despite his critique of negritude; ‘it can be said that there is no better fulfilment of the idea of negritude in modern literature than in the work of Soyinka himself’. (Irele,idem: 112)

4.

It would be fruitful to compare deeper both of these authors’ works as pertaining to mythopoesis, panmeridionalism and the politics of creative adaptation (including into different artistic media); as well as to bring them in dialogue with other artists who have contravened Fanon and used Greco-Latin myth for postcolonial ends. However it must suffice here to summarise. While Pasolini’s attempt may ultimately be a dialectical basis for further thought (and thus not entirely flawed; in fact amounting to productive self-mockery, as Syrimis (2013) suggests), Soyinka provides an excellent model for the postcolonial who must overcome double-consciousness. For Soyinka the arena for the dialogue between reason and unreason; for the affinities between Africa and the Greek world, is not Africa as symbol or set; rather it is within the reified image of the gods Ogun and Dionysus. Through them he draws out similarities and builds his mature neo-Negritudinist synthesis which is dialectically and aesthetically revolutionary. This is opposed to Pasolini’s superficially hybrid, conflicted idealisation, which while well-intentioned looks like lightweight tokenistic allegory in comparison, even as it is inspiringly self-critical.

Peppiat and Theroux

1. Strange Bedfellows

There is an enthralling painting by Francis Bacon from 1975 which Michael Peppiat describes in Francis Bacon in Your Blood (p.266) . It depicts two commingled bodies, a blur of bruised flesh, falling through space, so interfused that they seem to form a single swirling entity, recalling Nabokov’s Double Monster, with the feeblest gestures towards individual, vestigial body parts; something like a head, something like a foot. They freefall headlong but are somehow also trapped in a diaphanous box. It could be an allegory of Catholic lapse, or of the delimitations of sadomasochistic queer love (it may present Bacon and his doomed lover and muse, the part-time criminal and eventual suicide George Dyer). In the painting Peppiat describes, there is also a malevolent dwarf sitting on a stool, apart from the doomed duet, supposedly an allusion to the act of voyeurism, perhaps referring to the gallery-goer who dresses up and heads out to consume such visceral grotesquerie.

But—if this is not too melodramatic—might this not also stand as the perfect illustration for the strange, prodigious, unequally codependent relationship between the protégé biographer and the maestro biographee, in which one is consumed by the other and is in turn consumed? In the version of the painting version I have reproduced above, Bacon has removed the stooled manikin, but there is still the ghostly implication of the reader of biographies, as well as the biographer himself who makes a living observing other people’s lives. What are the strange forces that pull all three parties into such compromising positions?

My aim in this essay is to explore this question through two quasi-Boswellian memoirs, Paul Theroux’s Sir Vidia’s Shadow and Michael Peppiatt’s Francis Bacon in Your Blood, which respectively narrate thirty-year friendships to great, complicated artists, V.S. Naipaul and Francis Bacon. I call them quasi-Boswellian because even though they follow the tradition of Boswell in presenting warts and all portraits of their subjects, whom they have the benefit of observing over a long time at close quarters, their aims are somewhat different. Boswell’s aim was to present a portrait of an intriguingly human great man; Theroux and Peppiatt go one further by being just as concerned with the influence that their subjects have over their own lives. As such, they present hybrid works (as all biographies are), which dialogue with the forms of Bildungsroman, personal diary, Roman-a-clef, as well as Boswellian biography with all its concomitant techniques. My argument is that the two narratives present the charismatic allure of ‘illustrious’ men as the strange binding force that provides the initial attraction; they then chart the gradual disillusionment that comes with the maturity and burgeoning independence of the once-impressionable biographers.

To this effect, I will provide a brief sketch of the Boswellian biography, before analysing Theroux’s and Peppiatt’s presentation of a warts and all portrait of their subjects, and suggesting, with reference to Freud’s ideas on idealisation of the biographical subject and C. Stephen Jaeger’s elaboration of the concept of charisma, that while the narratives both map out disillusionment. Peppiatt remains somewhat enthralled by Bacon, while Theroux is left totally disenchanted in a way that more or less amounts to a resolution of what may be called his anxiety of influence.

2. Taking Down

Boswell is of course not the first or only writer who has embarked upon the task of creating a portrait of a great man whom he knew, as Hermione Lee, for example, has pointed out: “the literary disciple following the great man around and taking down everything he says has stayed with us as an almost parodic image of biography (58)”. The reason, nonetheless that Boswell should become the posterboy for this often thankless task, is that he assiduously labours to provide a thorough, “authentick”, portrait of his subject, warts and all — which even though the veracity of which can be challenged and has been, remains an enduringly charismatic creation in its own right. This portrait came out of heroic diligence in dredging up and presenting documents pertaining to Johnson’s life and off course undergoing the famous role of being his incessant interviewer and listener, writing up his notes and storing up information in his exceptional memory.

In dialogue with the tradition of realism in vogue at the time, the narrative is also set within a context of a complex social landscape: “it keeps opening out into the surrounding texture of urban society, politics, manners and domestic scenes, and provides a running commentary on the literary, theatrical, legal, artistic, and journalistic professions”. Against this background, he gives us a vivid, grotesque, spitting image of Johnson with his immense size, and his tics and quirks; we can imagine the voice that comes out of this presence. This charismatic presence, (and it is pertinent to note as Lee does, that Boswell becomes, “Better at ‘taking down’ Johnson as he grew less in awe of him”) has endured and we understand Boswell’s attraction to the character because we are attracted to this larger than life persona.

Jaeger’s suggestion is that charisma be understood as pertaining to works of art and the characters they depict. This is an intriguing proposition for books about Bacon and Naipaul who make art out of their own lives as much as Theroux and Peppiatt do. The argument is that charisma functions through a process of enchantment, which comes on like an epiphany, similar to a spell cast on the reciever and results in a surrender of will and idealisation of the charismatic figure. Pertinently Jaeger says: “Charisms affirms whatever is experienced and inspired in its spell. That includes enterprises that reveal themselves as demonic once the spell fades”. (P.14)

The spell takes hold on our biographers through a confluence of aura, the reputation of the artist, and their art, their personalities, even their distinctive physical appearances; small men with big personalities, their penetrating intellects, as well as the glamour of the circles they move around in; at first Peppiatt and Theroux simply plod about dutifully like Watsons to their Holmeses, but as we will see, even though Johnson is not revealed to be demonic, they are like Boswell in being better in their taking down (in the sense of capturing as well as of taking down a notch, and especially in Theroux of ridiculing) of their subjects.

Besides this, Boswell’s motivations are notable. As much as he wished to represent epically the subject whom he respected and was obviously awestruck by, there was surely of course a certain artistic ego at play: ‘he was also trying to make his mark in a self-advertising literary world”(60).

These central concepts, of intimate authenticity, motivation, artistic ambition, and the charisma of the subject as we will see, are highly relevant to how we read Theroux and Peppiatt, and above there is the central idea of this kind of writing as a ‘co-partnership’, which dynamic I believe is fleshed out more in the memoirs. Lee evocatively sums up the effect, in words that slightly recall Bacon’s painting :” in the dance and copartnership between the two, the figures seem to move about, talk and think in front of us, embodied and immediate…”(63).

3. Ecce Puer

Having established the main parameters of Boswellian life-writing, let us now turn to Francis Bacon in your blood. Somewhere in the middle of the narrative, Peppiatt describes an opportunity which has arisen for him to write a book about Bacon. It seems a natural and welcome development; although he has nursed ambitions of being a serious writer and has published occasional creative work alongside his art journalism, he has frustrating life hitherto been been unable to create work of ambition: “I haven’t yet been able to do much of what’s called uninspiringly, ‘writing for myself’. Put two and two together and you’ll have me writing a book about Francis Bacon’(277). It is rather telling that he seems to equate writing for himself with writing about Bacon, but his reasoning is that this is the perfect subject, which will reveal something about Bacon as much as himself, so closely identified is he with this subject whom he has become an expert on by virtue of his close and privileged association since his foundational years. He says: “I don’t have a better subject and , though I say it myself, I have become something of an expert on the man, the work and the whole Bacon universe” (278). There is also the allure of prestige, with the book being solicited by none other than the revered Nouvelle Revue Francaise; so that there is the promise of clout as well as personally fulfilling work.

In a way, Peppiatt has been training for this opportunity his whole life, since he first found his way into Bacon’s orbit as a student reporter seeking an interview, which is where he begins his narrative. The first contact, which is enabled by the photographer John Deakin, in a bar in bohemian Soho has Bacon taking an inexplicable liking to him. Peppiatt not too humbly suggests this may be initially homosexual attraction, strengthened by the fact that Peppiatt is straight and thus unattainable; the objet petit a, (which describes, after all, a different form of charisma).There is also the respect that Bacon has for Peppiatt’s intellect, tact, linguistic aptitude and affinity for his work. Whatever the root of the attraction is, it leads Bacon to be unusually forthcoming to Peppiatt about his life and art. Deakin privately instructs Peppiatt to take advantage of this:

“I hope you’re getting it all down my dear. One day it will be of such value…it’s incredible, but you’re becoming a sort of Boswell to Francis. It’s simply marvellous. He talks to you about everything. Even I didn’t foresee that. Don’t screw it all up now, kiddo. Remember, get it down.” (Pp. 53-54)

This becomes a kind of guiding principle for Peppiatt and reveals much of what he figures of his responsibility to Bacon, paying Boswellian attention to his tumultuous idiosyncrasies, his alcoholism, his speech, his repetitive catchphrases, his Francophilia; topics he returns to frequently (childhood, his former shyness, his masochistic sexuality), as well as his private rhythms, his studio space and working methods,, his haunts, his associates—the man and his world. At some point, at this point ten years after the initial meeting, Peppiatt remarks, “for a long a long time I didn’t even question the fact that I jotted down what happened and what I said when I was with Francis…Francis could hardly be relaying all the information he passes on to me for no reason”.(277)

As it stands the book is promising; the problem however comes when Bacon, who is at first open, rejects the idea bluntly, for the sake of discretion, advising him to publish it only when he is dead. The publishing deal is scrapped and Peppiatt is plunged into emotional turmoil. It is heavily implied that what we read in Bacon in Your Blood is the very book that was scrapped. It is not the first Peppiatt is hurt or disillusioned by his Johnson in this copartnerhsip, nor will it be the last; the question that is left begging is why he puts up with it so dutifully regardless?

NEED TO SKETCH OUT BACON’S SEDUCTION OF HIM AND ITS LINK TO CHARISMA, AND HOW THIS CHARISMA FADES AS PEPPIATT GROWS OLDER AND THE SPELL WEAKENS. EVEN THOUGH PEPPIATT IS NOT HOMOSEXUAL IT IS VERY MUCH LIKE FALLING IN LOVE, AND IT IS ENABLED BY BACON’S CHARISMATIC ART, WHICH HAS A STRONG EFFECT ON PEPPIATT, AS HE EQUATES BACON WITH HIS PAINTINGS.

3. Nor Hell a Fury

Theroux has written explicitly about consciously undertaking the role of Boswell in his Railway to Patagonia, his travel narrative (of course a mode of biographical writing) set in Latin America. In the course of his journey he reads Boswell’s Life of Johnson and is thus inspired to delay his trip and perform the biographer’s role when he meets Borges. It is such that Theroux, the lifelong jotter and professional observer, who has made both fiction and non fiction out of his own life, is perfectly positioned to deconstruct the Boswellian role in his relationship to Naipaul.

After describing his first meeting with Naipaul in Uganda, where Theroux is a young lecturer and upstart writer trying to escape the provinciality of his middle America upbringing, he is introduced to Naipaul, who impresses him by his sense of self-worth and his reputation as a writer and no-nonsense and who repels him by his casual racism and snobbery and demanding, curmudgeonly behaviour. The fascination is stronger however, and a friendship is struck up when he takes a liking to Theroux for his candour, intelligence and promise (as well as the fact that Theroux has read his books); the initial dynamic is very similar to Bacon and Peppiatt. Theroux drives him around and helps him settle in while Naipaul offers him writing mentorship, until the irritable Naipaul decides to abandon his residency, fed up as he is with the backwardness of the ‘bitches’, ‘bow-and-arrow men’ and ‘infies’ (his word for his supposed ‘inferiors’). Paul is left to deal with ostracisation for his close association with the generally repulsed Naipaul. They nevertheless maintain a friendship and Naipaul invites him for the first time to London, where he later moves and establishes his literary career. He speaks of the significance of meeting Naipaul: “I certainly had no idea that my meeting with Vidia’s would look so large in my life, or his” (104).

It is such that his literary career cannot escape his association to Naipaul, even as Naipaul shows no real interest in Theroux’s personal life: “almost everywhere I went I was asked about Vidia”(286). This impression is not helped by the fact that he, like Peppiatt, writes a book about Naipaul and his work, interpreting the work through the context of Naipaul’s complex postcolonial, diasporic identity, which Naipaul, smugly in the role of Johnson encourages and writes approvingly of in a letter to Paul:

You must give me the pleasure of seeing what I look like…I have changed; lost and gained and sometimes strayed, as I have grown older. Show me!(5)

Theroux is so thorough and so dutiful in the comprehensively sympathetic account of his monograph— baffling given his constant reference to Naipaul’s foibles (his adultery, his hypocritical grousing, his racism, his misogyny, his fussiness over food and contamination, his anger— in Sir Vidia’s Shadow, that even Naipaul’s wife Pat remarks on the elective affinity: “Pat said she saw the love and understanding in my book…and the depths of these feelings that had given me insights into Vidia’s work” (202). The work of course, is not just a matter of piety, as Theroux notes, much like what Lee says if the self-promoting Boswell,, ‘it was done out of friendship, but like many gifts it was also self-serving’, for it was intended to bolster both their reputations in America (195).

Perhaps Naipaul should have been careful what he wished for. In a sense, Sir Vidia’s Shadow, with its description of Vidia’s various flaws and absurdities, and can be seen as a revision of this original glowing study, which gives a picture under the harsh light of hindsight, so that Theroux can say:

I had admired his talent. After a while I admired nothing else. Finally I began to wonder about his talent, seriously to wonder, and doubted it when I found myself skipping pages in his more recent books. In the past I would have said the fault was mine. Now I knew that he could be the monomaniac in print that he was in person. (363)

The eventual disillusionment comes at the end of the friendship, after Pat Naipaul, who is endeared to Theroux and who has been neglected and abused by Naipaul dies of cancer. Vidia gets married to a new wife not long after, who encourages him to cut Paul off abruptly. Theroux is left reeling; similar to the question we ask of Peppiatt, why did he put up with it all for so long?

IN THEROUX IT SEEMS TO BE MORE OF PROJECTION, WANTING TO BE AS GOOD A WRITER AS NAIPAUL, FROM VERY EARLY HE CONSIDERS HIMSELF SOMETHING LIKE NAIPAUL’S EQUAL, AND ONLY STICKS AROUND BECAUSE NAIPAUL DOES NOT DO MUCH TO HURT HIM DIRECTLY…THE LOST OF ENCHANTMENT COMES WHEN NAIPAUL CUTS HIM OFF AND HE BECOMES LIKE A LOVER SCORNED, REALISING THAT NAIPAUL DIDNT LOVE HIM AS MUCH. IT IS INTERESTING THAT THEY BECOME FRIENDS AGAIN 8 YEARS AFTER

4. Special Affections

Let us consider this somewhat lengthy passage from Freud:

biographers are fixated on their heroes in a quite special way. In many cases they have chosen their hero as the subject of their studies because--for reasons of their personal emotional life--they have felt a special affection for him from the very first. They then devote their energies to the task of idealization, aimed at enrolling the great man among the class of their infantile models…To gratify this wish they obliteratre the individual features of their subject’s physiognomy; they smooth over the traces of his life’s struggles with internal and external resistances, and they tolerate in him no vestige of human weakness or imperfection…That they should do this is regrettable, for they thereby sacrifice truth to an illusion, and for the sake of their infantile phantasises abandon the opportunity of penetrating the most fascinating secrets of human nature. (Italics mine.)(130) by

In the first instance, it may be said that both Peppiatt and Theroux are working within Freud’s pathographic method, even if it sometimes reads like Pop-Freud, discussing the character flaws and monstrosities of their subjects, and trying to understand from whence they come. There are suggestions that Bacon’s sadomasochism may come from his inherent loneliness and from his relationship with his abusive father; Peppiatt rationalises away his volatile jealous my by trying to relate them to the pressures of life and work and to Bacon’s senile jealousy. Theroux is unsparing in his detailing of Naipaul’s dependence on uxorial, maternal attention, and refers to his fractured relationship with his domineering mother (Theroux has written about his own domineering mother in the semi-autobiographical Motherland). Peppiatt seems to pity Bacon; there’s a sense of humourism in his description of Bacon’s foibles; with Paul it is more scathing mocking that seldom passes over to sentiment. Peppiatt pities Bacon, the victim of sadomasochists. Theroux on the other hand vilifies Naipaul for what he sees as intimations of his masochism in his novel. In any case, there is always a focus on trying to get the mind of the subject. And of course what is relevant about these books is that there is more than one subject; there is also a fair amount of the writers trying to understand themselves, their insecurities, their attractions to the older men. They acknowledge indeed that they developed ‘special affection’ for their subject, and as I have describe take efforts to unpack this. It can be said that their books stand as a sort of rejoinder to Freud’s complaint, an implicit call for the biographer to examine themselves; to understand their own psychic impulses so that they may better understand that of their subjects, and ultimately so that they may understand their relationships to them, and the other way round too; an analytical ouroboros. This evolution of the Boswellian form seems to be an excellent one for this threefold analysis, which in the end does amount rather to ‘penetrating the most fascinating secrets of human nature’.

The special affection; tested though it is in Peppiatt comes fully realised in the end, Theroux seems to lose it; though they later reconcile (and the context may have something to do with it; Bacon is dead and Naipaul is still alive) paul wrote his obituary and still mentions him in his occasional writing.

The special affection, anyway, is what we may understand as charisma, how it relates to this kind of biography is that it depends on a subject and an object; the book may be seen as a talking cure, Peppiat solidifies his identification and Theroux loses the glamour, describing this clearly when the roles reverse and from being Vidia’s shadow, his boswell, living in his shadow, he steps into the light and sees Vidia as the shadow, the shade, the ghost of himself of Paul’s first impression of him.

5. Real Life

Who can say in all certainty what force compels one to read or write a life? I cannot remember now how I first came across Sir Vidia’s Shadow. My aim, disrobing as it is to reveal it in this supposedly cold, analytical context, was to learn something about the practicalities of starting out as a writer; to try to see how my own life might turn out if I made similar decisions to the young Theroux. At the same time I was reading JM Coetzee’s account of his own faltering early days in London; but Coetzee did not have a mentor. Theroux’s description of Naipaul did not put me off; it had the effect of making more interested in Naipaul’s work. What kind of work, created by so complex and controversial, beguiling a character, would warrant a Nobel Prize? I was repulsed by Naipaul and also drawn to him, and I was captivated by this fascinating relationship in the same way one is captivated by the story of Saul and David or Lolita or The Comfort of Strangers. It also had the effect of making Peppiat’s memoir stand out to me from the stacks in a charity bookshop. It was a serendipitously signed copy, and despite the gruesome descriptions of Bacon’s occasionally dinghy world, there was a captivating warm familiarity spurred on by Theroux’s precedent. There is no way to ascertain if Peppiatt read Theroux’s work; perhaps lightning merely struck twice. Both books inspired me to read the official biographies, to compare notes, but I confess that I soon grew bored with the ‘objective’ accounts. The truth held me less than the art and the charisma of all parties, experienced directly in their accounts or recreated. So that, here I am, hunched over homunculus, reveling in these strange Lives enough to write about them.

Tartarus

'Towards a New World: Sculpture in Post-War Britain'

Malborough Fine Art, London

16 March – 22 April 2023

‘Poi s’asose nel foco che gli affina.’ – Dante, Purgatorio XXVI

Take first of all the petrified, silently screaming terror in Bacon’s visceral visions. The ominous fleshy masses rise and twist and turn, shuffling off the mortal coil, against the flat sanguine vacuum of a background-- a curve here, an angle here, something like an amputated limb,something like a neck, the semblance of a mouth, with unmistakable teeth gnashing cannibalistically. Take this first, and imagine it made tangible, then you see how the sculpture could be described as the physical realization of Bacon’s hellscape.

Truly the exhibition is starkly infernal. Complementing Bacon are the distorted metallic figures of the likes of Elizabeth Frink, Reg Butler, Lynn Chadwick (members of the generation whose tortured style Herbert Read infamously branded ‘the geometry of fear’), like samples from hell, presented on their pedestals like prisoners in the austere, white, bare Tartarus of the gallery.

Butler’s ‘Study for Third Watcher’, with its tensed, outstretched neck and bare clavicles, and arms clamped to sides, face turned completely skyward, could be Tantalus, the martyr of desire, ever yearning, never reaching.

No music now from the female Marysas, arms tied above the non-extant head by invisible fetters, there is not even screaming from the torment of being flayed, the textured bronze giving the painful impression of degloved flesh (and of course we remember that bronze must be fired and burnished’). Is that Prometheus, protean sculptor, bound in coarse, flaking metal? IsArmitage’s ‘Seated Woman with Square Head’ an idol of Eris, goddess of strife? Are the many inert and static the Giacomettian angsty souls of Asphodel?

Out of what vale of tears are these bodied forth? Most directly, the wreckage of the Second World War. But of course, regardless, there is always human capacity for belligerence and cruelty. This is what we get for our hubris; this is also our salvation. This is what has been salvaged, these are the fragments shored against our ruin. This is what we must confront if we are to survive the fire that refines us, il foco che ci affina.

Madmen and Specialists

Soyinka’s immediate audience, the urban Nigerian audience, have often complained about his seemingly obscurantist aesthetic even while acclaiming his genius. The feeling is that he is made too much good use of his syncretic education and multilingual lexicon to craft texts which are so inscrutable and elliptical as to be rendered practically useless. Critics like Abiola Irele and Biodun Jeyifo and Henry Louis Gates (one his fellow-traveller and the others his former students) have argued his right to ‘opaqueness’ (to borrow Eduoard Glissant’s concept), comparing his complexity to the complexity of the Yoruba mythopoetic art traditions, for example, as well as to the vaunted complexity of global (especially European) modernists. With Soyinka we have a Serious Writer. But we also have with him a committed, occasionally agitprop, writer, who--despite having paid the price of activism by facing threats to his life and freedom, in solitary confinement and exile—who is criticized, especially by those of a more hardline Marxian bent, for not being more baldly didactic, for betraying his vision and message by not making his art more accessible to the ‘masses’. A critic like Lindfors has put it like this:

‘He has got what it takes to move men and set them thinking…Soyinka, in attempting to brave the harsher elements of his society, may have blow his own fuse, for there is increasing evidence of a tragic misapplication of power, a near total blackout of illumination. More and more frequently the artist simply fails to communicate his message to the world.’

Is this not a criticism of the whole avant-garde trend of the 20th century, as well as the drama that concerns us specifically. What does it matter if Beckett and Soyinka and Jarry and Brecht did their thing? What has it actually changed for people outside of the privileged few who have access to their plays? And yet…

Reporting about a young first-time voter who was disillusioned by the delay in the opening of the polling units and left without casting his vote, Al Jazeera quotes him saying:

“I’ve been here since 9am (8:00 GMT) and there’s still no sign of them. I can’t keep waiting for Godot,” he said in reference to a play by Samuel Beckett about a man who never arrives.”

Most Nigerians have not read or watched Madmen and Specialists, but the author and the title are so popular that the words often for newspaper headlines. Apt because it describes a country which has not diminished in chaos since the years of the civil war, and sometimes it’s so apt it is almost absurd. Take for example, words from a campaign speech in which the unlikely ‘Third Force’ Labour Party candidate and ex Anambra governor Peter Obi, businessman and Philosophy BA, very seriously says about how he managed to stop crime in an area of Anambra State: ‘I got the advice from a madman’. And the audience responds with pensive collective nods and ‘Hmmm’…which is not unlike what we do when we try to understand Beckett and his ilk, after all.

In a way, despite claims of obscurantism, Soyinka is depicting more clearly than anyone else the absurdity of his postcolonial milieu. The characters are stock characters, which you can take a stroll down the streets of Lagos or Ibadan and still encounter. In Ibadan, for example, there is still the colony of mendicants located on Jemibewon Road (Je mi be won=‘help me beg them’). And there are stories about the various ‘specialists’, technocrats, doctors, lawyers, data analysts, computer programmers and so on… the postcolonial bourgeois elite who have not hesitated to use their skills and education to assist in the oppression of their own people. What we are left with is a dismal dog eat dog or man eat man situation.

Anyway, Soyinka’s play is not about the particular postbellum social circumstances so much as it is about the problem of evil in general and the ever-lurking possibility of human perversion. It is pessimism reified; what Abiola Irele calls ‘a global Manicheism underscored by a profound cynicism’, a warning of what could happen if the evil encouraged by the civil war is not kept at bay; it demands to be experienced as an allegory.

Much like Beckett and Brecht, whose Vladmir and Estragon and Pirate Jenny could very well fit in with these characters, Soyinka frustrates our need for escapism by perplexing us, forcing us to think, much like he had to brood during his time in solitary confinement in which the aim after all was to warp his mind, to drive him mad.

Duro Ladipo and Ritual Theatre

It is Wole Soyinka, significantly, who has most articulately grasped Duro Ladipo’s achievement in his fashioning of a new Yoruba operatic tradition. This is significant because although Soyinka and Ladipo were contemporaries, it is the former who has been more globally recognised as the postcolonial modernist hybrid, taking advantage of disparate traditions to form an avant-garde practice. This, one would imagine, is largely due to the fact that Soyinka has worked mostly in English; his work travels well; his themes seem to be familiar to Western audiences. Relatedly, because of his education and the trajectory of his career, Soyinka can be interpreted in dialogue with the tradition of European Modernism, regardless of whether he would entirely agree with this assessment or not. (Incidentally, Biodun Jeyifo in Wole Soyinka: Politics, Poetics and Postcolonialism (2004) has suggested that Soyinka’s reading of Duro Ladipo amounts to a meta-commentary on Soyinka’s own work.)

Soyinka establishes a difference between the ‘African world-view’ and the implied European world-view (similar to what Eliot calls ‘the temper of the age’ in ‘The Possibility of a Poetic Drama’). Roughly speaking, God in the West is dead, and so is the sense of the sublime and of ritual; thus the death of tragedy and the need to create new forms out of the fragments of civilisation. Here is the cycle of Occidental intellectual history:

You must picture a steam-engine which shunts itself between rather closely-spaced suburban stations. At the first station it picks up a ballast of allegory, puffs into the next emitting a smokescreen on the eternal landscape of nature truths. At the next it loads up with a different species of logs which we shall call naturalist timber, puffs into a half-way stop where it fills up with the synthetic fuel of surrealism, from which point yet another holistic world-view is glimpsed and asserted through psychedelic smoke. A new consignment of absurdist coke lures it into the next station from which it departs giving off no smoke at all, and no fire, until it derails briefly along constructivist tracks and is towed back to the starting-point by a neo-classic engine.

This is not quite so in for example, Duro Ladipo’s Yoruba milieu, which is far from secular, and in which a communal and spiritual phenomenology is still general (as much now, arguably, as in the ‘60s and ‘70s). Soyinka’s contention is that ritual theatre, which Europe sporadically return to with its modernism (‘the search, even by modern European dramatists for ritualist roots from which to draw out visions of modern experience, is a clue to the deepseated need of creative man to recover this archetypal consciousness in the origins of the dramatic medium’), constitutes a kind of psychomachia, in which the tragic personages in the drama exist within a microcosm of the communities matrix of concerns and anxieties; in an almost expiatory role that constitutes ego death in the actor.

In Oba Koso, the tragedy of Oba Sango, gestured, danced and drummed out in a ‘poor theatre’ style that harkens back to the travelling theatre influence, is ‘not merely an interesting episode in the annals of a people’s history but the spiritual consolidation of the race through immersion in the poetry of origin.’ The plot: Sango is encouraged by his wives and vassals who stoke his ego, to manipulate two potential rivals, Timi and Gbonka to eliminate each other. Twice he tries and fails; the rivals unite and turn on him and he if forced into exile. In exile, his last remaining wife deserts him and he decides to hang himself. So the history goes; the mythology has it that he did not hang, and instead ascends to the heavens, disgusted with human fickleness, and in divine rage, punishes his enemies with fire and thunder from the skies. Thus, in his apotheosis, he comes to constitute a ritual cleansing of the pettiness of humanity; the actor in assuming the role of this god-king who is very much a Real Presence in the lives of the Yoruba (or Brazilian Candomble, or Cuban Santeria acolyte) risks divine possession. The lines between religious rite and performance are naturally blurred; the coherence of medium, idea and action constitute a kind of poetry with an objective correlative.

From the aforementioned Eliot essay:

The essential is to get upon the stage this precise statement of life which is at the same time a point of view, a world—a world which the author’s mind has subjected to a complete process of simplification. I do not find that any drama which “embodies a philosophy” of the author’s (like Faust) or which illustrates any social theory (like Shaw’s) can possibly fulfil the requirements—though a place might be left for Shaw if not for Goethe. And the world of Ibsen and the world of Chekhov are not enough simplified, universal.

If only Eliot, speaking in 1921, had waited for Duro Ladipo. Here was one who wrote his plays based on traditional oral sources, his natural absorption of the mytho-history of his people, blending his experience of church revues and moral plays, as well as Alarinjo Yoruba travelling theatre and masquerade; who wrote, directed, cast, produced and acted the part of the protagonist (who is both mythologically and dramatically the lifeblood of the play).

Artaud

1. Julie Kristeva on the abject:

“A wound with blood and pus, or the sickly, acrid smell of sweat, of decay, does not signify death. In the presence of signified death—a flat encephalograph, for instance—I would understand, react, or accept. No, as in true theater, without makeup or masks, refuse and corpses show me what I permanently thrust aside in order to live. These body fluids, this defilement, this shit are what life withstands, hardly and with difficulty, on the part of death. There, I am at the border of my condition as a living being.”

2. Artaud’s theater constitutes a movement towards a truly corporal theater; one that is almost perversely concerned with the body and its various functions; additionally to mine these functions (which are always a kind of utterance) and turn them into signifiers which can evoke unconscious feelings in the spectator; the emphasis is on spectacle, naturally. The reversion to the abject is a means of forcing a confrontation with the Real (the surreal).

3. From Andrew Marvell’s ‘Dialogue Between the Soul and the Body’:

SOUL

O who shall, from this dungeon, raise

A soul enslav’d so many ways?

With bolts of bones, that fetter’d stands

In feet, and manacled in hands;

Here blinded with an eye, and there

Deaf with the drumming of an ear;

A soul hung up, as ’twere, in chains

Of nerves, and arteries, and veins;

Tortur’d, besides each other part,

In a vain head, and double heart.

BODY

O who shall me deliver whole

From bonds of this tyrannic soul?

Which, stretch’d upright, impales me so

That mine own precipice I go;

And warms and moves this needless frame,

(A fever could but do the same)

And, wanting where its spite to try,

Has made me live to let me die.

A body that could never rest,

Since this ill spirit it possest.

4. The unconscious is structured like a language, says Lacan. Artaud’s aim was to create a theater which is structured like the unconscious, in which every element is a part of a language; to expand the vocabulary of theater; to take full advantage of its sensory resources (sight, sound, sympathy), to do away with the superficial vision of the theater that centers on narrative, and actors performing the words; a kind of abstraction or distillation to the pure elements of the art.

5. Sontag:

“Thus, Artaud does not so much free writing as place it under permanent suspicion by treating it as the mirror of consciousness-so that the range of what can be written is made coextensive with consciousness itself, and the truth of any statement is made to depend on the vitality and wholeness of the consciousness in which it originates.”

6. If surrealism sought to expand the consciousness of the mind in order to expand the potential of physical and sensual pleasure, Artaud with his ‘contempt’ for life, sought to expand the perception of life as being rife with pain and turmoil.

7. Writing with the body; poetry in space; sculpting in time.

Rockaby

Beckett is not always entirely scrutable but after a certain point, his ‘aim’ is so evident that each successive work becomes almost like self-parody. We know that with a Beckett text (how else can we categorise these works, why must we categorise?) we deal with a certain amount of chiaroscuro, with an interrogation of the Cartesian fallacy, with the voice ex nihilo, valorisation of austerity, unexplained confinement—physical, psychological, and existential; ante-natalism, morbid humour; the odd well-timed profanity, echolalia/semantic satiation, itemisation…but even with this, we still manage to avoid cliché; there is a sense synoptic of each repetition of themes being a colouring-in, each time we are a shade closer to the truth of things.

The particulars are important. Particulars of language certainly. No word is accidental; no-one has been as much a martyr of the instance of the word since Gertrude Stein. Each word and each instance of the word (the thing we call repetition) is charged with meaning, and each word is in vain; every utterance is futile, all bears down to the realm of silence. It is Munch’s conceit in ‘The Scream’; Klee’s ‘Angelus Novus’; Bacon’s screaming popes. If Joyce was trying to fill the vacuum of existence with words, Beckett widens the vacuum by speaking; his texts peter out, but because by virtue of their mere existence (because expression can never be silence) they cannot expire, they fold in on themselves eternally, thus creating the ellipse, the failure.

There is an austere tyranny to the directorial instructions. This is because this theatre, much like Artaud's, is structured like a language. The communication is not merely verbal. To adjust one material element would be to modify the text.

I have mostly put language ‘at the centre of my enquiry’, as Elizabeth Barry has it. But is it really possibly to read gainfully through neurology or psychology? Is Beckett’s drama really legible as a dramatisation of psychological processes? (as Barry suggests, “Beckett explores and dramatises these psychological processes, the positing of a self-observer being a frequent trope in the fiction and theatre.) We know that Beckett underwent psychoanalysis and that he otherwise well-informed about this and other related subjects; that he had personal experience of aphasia, that he was interested in pathology, etc. But is it necessarily true that ‘any study of language and the mind, she argues, must pay attention to both neuroscience and psychoanalysis, as Beckett himself paid close attention to both the biology and the psychology of the mind in his reading, experience and practice.’

Thus we can read Rockaby perhaps as a dramatization of senility or schizophrenia; of morbid aphasia. The old woman on the chair, all done up in her black attire -- is to some extent ‘off her rocker’, we are to pay no real attention to the words she says; they are only illustrations of her condition. Perhaps I am exaggeration the tone of this kind of reason, but its merely to say that while such ‘informed’ analysis can throw light, ultimately they are besides the point. Beckett’s staging is so bare precisely because he does want us to latch on to errant symbols and then spin interpretations.

Beckett’s art of impoverishment resists ‘the availability of art to a cultural usefulness or domestication’. But much as he couldn’t help but write, we can’t help but read.