Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City
“If there’s no pleasure for me in it, I feel no obligation to a work of art. I cherish certain paintings, books, and films for the pleasure of their company. When I get no pleasure from an author, I feel no duty to consult him. My interests are pretty wide; and I do keep trying to stretch them wider. But no strain.”
Orson Welles (quoted in Orson Welles and Peter Bogdanovich, This Is Orson Welles)
I’m in The Wall Street Journal today–a special unscheduled appearance on the Leisure & Arts page.
Last week, the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, which is in charge of rebuilding the World Trade Center site, announced the names of the four cultural organizations it has offered space at Ground Zero: the Joyce Theater, the Signature Theater Company, the Drawing Center, and an as-yet-nonexistent “Freedom Center” that will present “exhibitions centered on humankind’s enduring quest for freedom.”
I wasn’t exactly impressed, least of all with the Freedom Center:
The Freedom Center is one of those self-evidently silly ideas that only an underemployed committee could have conceived, a portentous-sounding Museum of Nothing in Particular destined to present blandly institutional, scrupulously noncontroversial exhibitions. No doubt the center will draw plenty of squirming grade-school kids sentenced to compulsory field trips, but I’d bet next month’s rent that tourists will steer clear.
The three other groups to be offered space are serious and respectable, but they simply don’t add up to anything remotely approaching a world-class center for the arts. “The vibrant mixture of dance, theatre and fine arts in one cultural complex will serve as a powerful cultural and economic engine for Lower Manhattan,” Gov. George Pataki proclaimed last week. Who’s he kidding? Like the Freedom Center, this particular choice of institutions stinks of committeethink. It’s modest and safe–the inverse of the magnificent cultural opportunity afforded by the coming reconstruction of Ground Zero….
I was especially disappointed in the fact that New York City Opera, which had proposed to build a three-theater complex at Ground Zero, got the brush-off. I wrote in the Journal last year wholeheartedly endorsing City Opera’s proposal as the kind of large-scale project worthy of the site and the occasion. Alas, the LMDC apparently thought it too major–and, I’m disturbed to say, too highbrow:
“By building a New York City Opera House on the ashes of the World Trade Center,” I wrote, “New Yorkers would be making the boldest possible declaration of faith in the power and glory of Western culture. A year and a half ago, 3,000 innocent men, women and children were murdered by sworn enemies of that culture. I can’t imagine a more inspiring way to honor their memory.” Instead, the Lower Manhattan Development Corp. chose to think small–very, very small….
Read the whole thing here.
I was gratified to see that Terry has revised and downgraded his opinion of the clownish mob film Sexy Beast. I caught this on dvd a year or so after everybody else swooned over it at the theater. Neither I nor my friend could understand what the fuss was about, or even stay awake, really. Sexy Beast is notable, though, for containing perhaps the most precipitous drop from brilliance to banality in recent cinema history. This thanks to its opening scene, a monster of a set-up and a visual joke for the ages. All by itself this scene is almost worth the long slog that follows. The rest of the first half of the movie is then diverting enough, but only thanks to an outstanding Ben Kingsley, as Terry notes. The second half, following his character’s departure, I just can’t recall. Sexy Beast ranks up there with Memento as one of the movies whose enthusiastic following among the apparently like-minded most baffles me.
More recently I watched the haunted house flick and Nicole Kidman vehicle The Others on cable. (If you don’t want to know how it ends, now is the time for you to stop reading and turn back.) I liked this movie much better when it was called The Sixth Sense. Also when it was a book called “The Turn of the Screw.” And that pretty much covers its sources. My disappointment at the derivative ending was closely followed by the even more deflating realization that this movie will probably be only the first of many inferior permutations/rip-offs of M. Night Shyamalan’s movie, which will then be blamed for what it spawned, like Mies van der Rohe. Sigh.
Speaking of The Sixth Sense, it’s still amazing to remember what a great year for U.S. films 1999 was. I can rattle off a top ten that shames any year since:
Three Kings
Topsy-Turvy
The Insider
Election
The Limey
Magnolia
The Sixth Sense
The Winslow Boy
Being John Malkovich
Guinevere
Okay, so maybe a couple of these haven’t worn so spectacularly well. I’m thinking mainly of Being John Malkovich, but even that I’d still watch for Catherine Keener’s acute angles and cutting edges.
As you may have gleaned if you’ve been reading us for a while, I may be in Chicago but I’m from Detroit, which is where my heart and, most important, my sports loyalties remain. So you might well guess that today I am fairly excited about an imminent event.
You’d be right: I am moderately excited. But it must be added that the somebody-or-other trophy ain’t no Stanley Cup.
Two new articles, one in the Independent and one in the New York Times, puzzle over the coming swarm of Henry James-based fiction, beginning with Colm Toibin’s The Master and soon to continue with forthcoming novels by Alan Hollinghurst and David Lodge. I feel about this trend the ambivalence you might expect of someone greatly invested in James: plenty intrigued, a little possessive, and a little bit wary of the media’s easy conversion of interest into fad.
Mel Gussow’s piece in today’s Times is reportorial and unadventurous. It’s more or less a melange of quotations plucked from interviews with the authors in question and some James biographers, framed with little anecdotes about everyone tripping over each other while doing their research at James’s Lamb House. But one item in this article stopped me in my tracks:
Each novelist approaches James from a different vantage. Mr. Toibin’s initial response was to the book “Epistemology of the Closet” in which Eva Kosofsky Sedgwick suggested that James’s entire work was written in code. Mr. Toibin took the opposite view. As he said: “You can’t make a blanket assumption about James’s sexuality or his fiction or his life. This was not a game between concealment and disclosure.”
Huh? I’m still scratching my head over this. First, it’s not Eva but Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. More important, charging her with the crazy-sounding proposition that “James’s entire work was written in code” is just plain strange. It sent me back to Sedgwick’s book, in case I was massively misremembering it. But no. She suggests nothing remotely of the sort.
Eve Sedgwick is that rare thing, a contemporary literary theorist whose theory is firmly grounded in aesthetically sensitive close reading. James makes his appearance in Epistemology of the Closet in “The Beast in the Closet,” a long chapter on “The Beast in the Jungle” and male homosexual panic in the age of the Oscar Wilde trials. Even if you don’t want to buy Sedgwick’s overall argument about the making of the closet in nineteenth-century culture, her chapter offers many shrewd and illuminating local readings of James. She may marshal James’s works to help her fry some bigger fish, but she never reduces them to mere theory fodder. She’s a wonderful reader who on more than one occasion has made me shake my head in appreciation. Elsewhere Sedgwick has written perceptively about James and shame.
Meanwhile, Jonathan Heawood’s think piece on the same James trend in the Independent gives a hint that the New York Times reporter may have scrambled Toibin’s meaning in referring to Sedgwick. What Toibin says about James’s sexuality here is not opposite Sedgwick but a reasonable, if necessarily shorthand, approximation of her thinking:
But as Toibin acknowledges, James’s own life was largely lived, “before the Wilde case consolidated a certain kind of identity.” In other words, the fact that James was attracted to men and found women sexually confusing doesn’t necessarily mean he defined himself as gay, nor that he lived his life with a constant eye on the closet door. There are other reasons for fear than repression, and it is not only closet homosexuals who are afraid. James always cautioned against putting a definitive label on anyone: “Never say you know the last word about any human heart.”
Heawood’s piece, in which he asks why James is appearing in multiple new novels at this particular moment, is deeply informed, provocative, and well written. It’s especially good at sketching James’s historical contexts. Everyone should read it. That said, his James is not precisely mine. In Heawood’s version, James’s major unifying theme and emotional keynote is fear. He argues the point eloquently:
Fear stalks James’s pages like grotesquerie in Dickens, like testosterone in Hemingway, like magic in Angela Carter. Most of his characters are afraid, most of the time, and most of their actions are motivated by fear. They spend much of their time avoiding blows which are slow in coming, which make a noiseless impact, yet which are potentially lethal. Fear is the unspoken force which knits his books together. Without fear, there would be no Henry James.
This talks a good game, for sure. But it’s just not how James’s writing feels to me, except perhaps in some cases–usually in shorter works–like “In the Cage” or “The Pupil.” If I were to replace “fear” in the last sentence of this passage (a sentence that slyly blurs what seemed, at the beginning of the paragraph, a clear line between James’s characters and the author himself), I would be inclined toward something in the neighborhood of “desire” or “wonder.” I agree with Heawood that James’s characters tend fear their very desires. In my reading, though, desire is the dominant animating force. For every fearful character there is another with a frightening will to power. To chalk up the latter to a deeper-seated fear seems overly pop-psych and overly flattening.
Heawood concludes that something about James speaks to something in our present cultural moment:
Just as the Nineties fascination with Victorian Sensation literature indicated a hunger for blood-and-guts storytelling, so this new vogue for Henry James indicates a move beyond sensation, and a heightened interest in the processes of information. In a period where the media is consumed by stories about newsgathering, James’s convoluted narratives–grounded in speculation, half-truths and distorted perceptions–make for surprisingly familiar reading.
Readers in the 21st century are used to debating every last flick of Rachel’s hair on Friends, familiar with Carrie Bradshaw’s hermeneutic labours in Sex and the City, accustomed to spending each summer discussing in minute detail the movements of a group of individuals closeted in a house where all they can do is talk, whose least misdemeanour makes front-page news. Who said anything about short attention spans? We, the psychobabble society with the tabloid morality and infinite patience for the minutiae of celebrity gossip–we are more than ready for Henry James.
It’s awfully ingenious to connect the dots of James and reality shows, I have to say. Instead of the now-dead rituals and codes of propriety that used to structure social interactions from above (and that both appalled James and impressed him), you have the interventions of television producers in the form of challenges or artificial plot twists. In both cases, the interest (such as it is!) comes from observing characters as they negotiate given situations, or what James might call donn