The notion of angels, those alluring and yet so unsettling creatures that once inhabited the space between the human world and the divine, is explored by Woodman in another series of photographs pursuing physical kinship: In one, she lies on top of a table covered with paper, legs protruding, bare, and blurred as if in motion. Next to her lies a dead black bird. The bringing together of the human body and the body of the bird is as simple as that of the human body and the tree. But since in art the angel has always appeared in body, rather than being rendered more vaguely, the way trees and forests for instance have stood for human longing, the gap between reality as represented by the two biological, material creatures, the human and the bird, and the dream of reality, which is the notion of the angel, is in this photograph far more brutal and acute. In another picture in the same series, she lies flopped over the table, naked, we see her back and the ridge of her spine beneath the skin, her neck, part of her hair, an outstretched arm with a black cord leading from it, presumably the shutter release. Following the cord across the table we see a sheet of paper with bird feathers stuck to it. It is as if the will to transcend the material world that this physical setup expresses, in other words our belief in art, runs through this very cord.
Yet the immaterial aspect of this, the human gaze, which belongs to our inner selves, exists not only in the existential and aesthetic tensions that are apparent, for the same division occurs in the relationship between the body, the way it is in itself, material and biological, and the expectations of the beholder toward it, visible in the roles it assumes, the poses Francesca Woodman adopts, and the contexts into which she inserts herself in her photographs – for example the moment she leans forward and presses a plate of glass against her stomach and crotch.
Why did I feel disgust when I first looked at them? It was a forceful reaction. Where did it come from? It seemed clear to me that the feeling embraced its opposite, a wish for something exquisite and restrained, and since I do not expect such things of art it cannot have been the hideousness of Woodman’s art from which I recoiled, but the specifically female hideousness. Male hideousness doesn’t faze me, it’s not threatening, for it belongs to me too. Female hideousness fazes me, I recoil from it. Why? Seemingly, it’s threatening to me. Why? Where does the threat lie? And what does it threaten?
As I write, I sense that the word “hideous” protects me, filtering out what a word such as “repulsive” would have brought into the light. The repulsive is the antithesis of the holy, for our reaction to what is repulsive is physical and belongs to the body, the earth, and all that is earthly. Excrement (another euphemism), which is to say shit, is repulsive, vomit is repulsive, bodily secretions are repulsive, rotten food is repulsive. We recoil from all these things, expelling them from the body, as well as being reluctant to talk about them or share images of them. We are averse to them. The opposite of aversion is lust, and when we fuck, our bodies transform, secretions and the channels through which they pass are seen in the light of desire and become profoundly attractive to us. A similar kind of duality is found in the case of death, which on the one hand is abstract, dark, and sometimes alluring, gilded with romanticism through those who die young, on the other hand the most repellent and repulsive of all, for what is a corpse but the stench of rotting, liquefying, infested flesh? It is within this duality, in the space that exists between our gaze, with its beautified sky of images, and our bodies, that we live our lives.
In other words, I was expecting to see a woman, not a body. That expectation clashes in these pictures with the physical reality of the body in much the same way as expectations about the angel or the tree, something the biological body may be drawn to or remove itself from. It is drawn to the image of the female body resting on a sofa, wearing only stockings and garters, her back to the beholder, wholly exposed to our gaze, bathed in soft light, bringing to mind an erotic photograph from the beginning of the last century or a work by Man Ray. It is also drawn to the image of a blurred female body seated with arms behind her head, head turned aside, chest thrust forward, reminiscent of the pose in which Munch depicted his Madonna. And it removes itself in the many images in which the female body, often faceless, assumes twisted, occasionally grotesque poses, or in those presenting the body more neutrally, neither obviously aestheticized nor as an element of any particular setup, simply lying or sitting or standing, a body inside a space, nature inside culture, a young girl with long hair, leaning forward and pressing a plate of glass to her crotch.
In the most fantastic and disturbing of all of Francesca Woodman’s pictures, these themes and progressions converge in a single point: a blurred female body lying on a floor, cropped so as to appear without head and feet, a bowl placed at the curve of her hip, her bottom arching upward. In the bowl is a coiled eel. The power of this juxtaposition is indescribable since it resides so wholly in the image, that unlike language, which must filter through thought, directly strikes the beholder. And it is certainly threatening, for it is impossible to look at the very clearly defined eel next to the blurred female body without thinking of penetration, a grotesque association insofar as the eel belongs to a completely different order to humans. And it upends all other objects next to which this body has metonymically positioned itself previously, where the direction of movement, which is to say human longing, is from the body outward – to the tree, the forest, the bird, the angel, darkness, death – whereas here it is reversed, going from the object, the eel, inward to the body. This is a coming together of a different kind, and quite unprecedented. Yet it belongs not to the picture, but to me: I am the one who thinks of penetration, who sees the body of the eel as biology, the human body as biology, two bodies, and I am the one who finds it outrageous, monstrous, grotesque.
Woodman’s photographs clearly find inspiration in surrealism, and what surrealism did was create instability in the space between our human categories by juxtaposing objects belonging to different spheres, as when Dalí replaces a telephone receiver with a lobster, or when Meret Oppenheim dresses cups and plates in fur. But these are funny, playful examples, quite unlike Woodman’s pictures, which open out not only toward the biological abyss of our sexuality, but also that of death, when the body is indeed penetrated by worms, maggots, and other such creatures. This she achieves with no small measure of innocence in her imagery, the simplicity of youth, where the boundaries to which the body is drawn are not obscured or shrouded in semidarkness like those of the forest or the supernatural, but are bathed in a sharp and realistic light: an eel, a bottom.
Most of these photographs were taken by Woodman while she was still a teenager. When I was a teenager I was blind to the contexts in which I existed, blind to what steered me, filled with feelings and longings I failed to appreciate, keeping them apart from the urge to understand, which drove me toward the most banal and general truths. That an eighteen-year-old girl could present herself and her body in ways so sophisticated and so upending that her photographs still feel perceptive, significant, and irrefutable thirty years after they were taken, is from that perspective almost unfathomable. The idea that at the age of eighteen I could have taken off my clothes, sat down on a chair, pressed a plate of glass against my crotch, taken a picture of it, and exhibited the photograph to all my friends and others who knew me, is not only unthinkable but wholly impossible, as impossible as me managing to write a poem to match Rimbaud, only in a different way, for the brick wall of conventions that prevented me from exposing my body, and which made me so embarrassed about it, is largely social in nature, regulated by shame, whereas what prevented me from writing a poem to match Rimbaud, and what still does, is embarrassment at the intellectual level. Francesca Woodman’s pictures broke free of both social and intellectual constraints, and in the ensuing freedom the constraints of our culture and what they do to our identity are made visible and may be identified, at the same time as our longing to exceed them, our yearning for transcendence, is accorded form, and that
space, between freedom and art, between life’s compulsions and the longing to transcend what ultimately is death, is the space her photographs inhabit. The freedom that made them possible was freedom from the gaze of others, and that freedom, which is the freedom of art, is dependent on solitude. This was the insight that suddenly allowed me to see her pictures. She is the beheld, as she is the beholder. She contains our gaze within her. That the rooms in which this drama of eye and body, body and identity takes place are so derelict and apparently uninhabited reinforces the sense of homelessness. Yet on the wall under one of the photographs at the Guggenheim exhibition I read that she actually lived in that house. Francesca Woodman occupied her art and dwelled within it. She alone, with all of us looking at her. It feels as if she cast herself before our gaze in the expectation that someone there would receive her. Someone there, which is us, we who see.
America of the Soul
Two men came trudging northward from the neighboring village. They were dark skinned and had lank grizzled beards. One of them carried a barrel organ on his back.
Nobody in the locality had expected that particular day to bring anything special: then up turned these two strangers. They made for a conspicuous position among the houses, set the barrel organ up on a pole, and began to play. Everybody in the place came flocking round, women and children, the adolescent and the lame; a ring of people formed around the music. There was so little to get excited about, now that it was winter; all the men were away in the Lofotens; nobody danced and nobody sang; the whole village was poor and miserable. These strange minstrels were therefore a great event, something fabulous. An event which it is doubtful if anybody in later life forgot.
One of them turned the handle. There was something wrong with one of his eyes; he seemed blind in it. The other carried a pack, but otherwise did nothing. He was merely the partner. He stood looking down at his shabby boots. Suddenly he snatched off his hat and held it out. How could he possibly expect money in this godforsaken place where everybody was simply hanging on till the spring, when the men got back from the fishing! He got nothing and put his hat on again. He stood for a moment; then he began talking to his companion in a foreign tongue, gradually louder and more insistent. Seemingly he wanted to stop the music and get his companion to come away. But the musician went on playing; he switched to a new piece and he ground out a soft sad melody which moved the audience. One young woman who was a little better off than the rest turned quickly, meaning perhaps to go in and fetch a coin. This the partner must have misunderstood and thought she was leaving altogether. He shouted after her and made a face.
“Ssh!” said the musician to him. “Ssh!” The partner was not the kind of man to be hushed like that. He became furious. He leaped at his companion and struck him. That might not have been so bad, but the half-blind musician could not defend himself. He had to cope with the barrel organ, which stood swaying on its pole. His hands were occupied; he merely ducked his head. A gasp went through the crowd at this unexpected assault. The circle at once spread out; children became frightened and screamed.
It was then that Edevart ran forward, a young lad of thirteen, blond and freckled, wild eyed with excitement. He was quite reckless, and prepared indeed to face death. He tried to get a trip hold on the assailant. The first time he failed; a second time he was lucky and threw the man to the ground. The lad gasped like a bellows. His mother screamed at him to come away, but Edevart stood there. He seemed beside himself; he grimaced, baring his teeth.
“You come home this minute!” cried his mother, in despair. She was thin and sickly, a poor mite, who all her days had been quiet and religious. She had no authority.
The stranger picked himself up from the ground. He scowled at the boy but did not attempt to do anything to him. On the contrary, he looked embarrassed and brushed the snow off himself with exaggerated care. Then he spoke again to his companion, shook both fists threateningly at him, then slunk away and disappeared.
The musician remained behind. He sniveled a little, and wept. A red streak ran across one of his cheeks – a color strangely bluish to be blood, but that was doubtless because he was from a foreign land and was so dark skinned.
So begins Knut Hamsun’s 1927 novel Wayfarers. The bloodied musician goes on to make a load of money from the poor villagers. Young Edevart follows him when he departs into the forest, where to his astonishment he finds the assailant waiting for his companion. The two men laugh. The musician wipes away the bloodstain from his cheek. They nod to Edevart and continue on their way to the next town. The episode reverberates through the rest of the novel, similar incidents occurring everywhere, variations on the same theme: constant trickery. Everything is a scheme. Nothing is what it seems. When Edevart sells watches for Papst, a Jewish merchant, we read, “Edevart made his way back to his lodging and did not go out again. Again he’d had a glimpse over a fence. No great mirror to see this time, no gilded objects. It was a world where everybody pulled the wool over everybody else’s eyes.” The metaphor of glimpsing over a fence is a recurring one. Edevart becomes acquainted with the businessman Knoff and the same thing happens, over a fence he glimpses the same thing there.
Hamsun was close to seventy years old when he wrote Wayfarers. It was a novel that might have trundled out the life-weary insights of an old man had it not been for two circumstances, the first being that the hollowness of this human scheme is rolled out in a work that is vibrantly descriptive of life and everything living, even the smallest life and that which is least alive in it, and with such power, such intensity and delight, that this sad and shallow fairground – in which we are constantly directed inward to the void of our meaningless existence – in a way shines for us too. There is worth in the worthless, meaning in the meaningless, in the mere fact of its existence, of it being a part of life itself. The second circumstance is that this is by no means a new theme for the aging Hamsun, but one he pursued throughout his work, perhaps most acutely in only his second novel, Mysteries, published in 1892, thirty-five years before Wayfarers, when Hamsun was still a relatively young man of thirty-three. It is by no means incidental that the German philosopher Martin Heidegger, who was not known for bandying about the work of other authors or scholars, cites Hamsun in his deliberations on “nothing” in his Introduction to Metaphysics, plucking a passage from The Road Leads On, the final book in what became known as the August Trilogy of which Wayfarers is the first. Besides Edevart, the other main character in these books is August. Much can be said of him, though in other circumstances than the present. For now, I shall make do with stating the bare bones: August is a traveled man, he has done many things, he is a seaman even when ashore, and in this scene, which takes place as he approaches the end of his life, he has sat down on a mountainside from where he surveys the landscape and ponders. What thoughts does he have? These:
Actually, he was out of his element up there. Looking about, he found himself in the midst of an utterly foreign world, a world of riotous peaks and rocky crags, a static confusion of monstrous gray mountains. What use did he have for such a world? He was a man of action, a trader. Up here, as there was nothing which moved – neither bush nor straw – there were no sounds to be heard, only dead silence which crushed him with its weight. Here he sits between his ears and all he hears is emptiness. An amusing conception, indeed!
On the sea there were both motion and sound, something for the ear to feed upon, a chorus of waters. Here nothingness meets nothingness, and the result is zero, not even a hole. Enough to make one shake one’s head, utterly at a loss.
Here Heidegger ends his quote, having found it sufficient for the purpose of his discussion, which concerns the relationship between “nothing” and “being.” In that dialogue Heidegger accords Hamsun a privileged position. To talk about nothing will forever remain a horror and an absurdity for science, he writes; we cannot speak of nothing as if it were a thing like the rain or a mountain or
any other object: in principle, “nothing” is inaccessible to science. To speak about nothing we must depart from science and assume the perspective of the philosopher or the poet. In the poetry of the poet and the thinking of the philosopher there is “always so much world space to spare that in it each thing – a tree, a mountain, a house, the cry of a bird – loses all indifference and commonplaceness. Authentic speaking about nothing always remains extraordinary. It cannot be vulgarized. It dissolves,” Heidegger writes, “if it is placed in the cheap acid of a merely logical intelligence.” It is to demonstrate that such a dialogue about nothing is indeed possible that Heidegger cites Hamsun.
In Dostoevsky’s novels, which should never be far away in any discussion of Hamsun, though the two stand at opposite ends of a vast stretch of land, the concept of nothing, nihil, the void, meaninglessness, is explicit, discussed, reflected upon, and brought into play, the single notion that brings everything else in Dostoevsky’s universe into jeopardy. Dostoevsky’s characters are propelled by questions of meaning and lack of meaning, God and the divine, love and benevolence, grace and salvation. His universe is a religious universe. This is quite unlike Hamsun. Hamsun has no god, nor does any character in Hamsun’s work inquire even casually into the meaning of life, and this is so because for Hamsun there is nothing else but life, nothing beyond or greater than life as it is lived by human beings. Dostoevsky’s characters are noblemen, students, priests, bureaucrats – people who work with ideas, thoughts, abstractions, systems. Hamsun’s characters are fishermen, peasants, salesmen, traders, and their work, which is physical and concrete, is often described at length and in detail, as when Edevart mows the meadow at Doppen during the course of a night, when Ezra digs the bog or builds the barn, when Joakim brings in one of his great herring catches. There may be an element of romanticism about this, a glorification of manual work as opposed to industrialized labor, certainly, but that is beside the point, for it is in work that these lives are led, work is their horizon, and all questions, even the biggest, even those concerning the meaning of all things, something no one in Polden would ever wonder about, emerge only within that horizon. There is simply nothing beyond. Hamsun’s characters do not ponder morals, they possess them. Good or bad, meaningful or meaningless, is never at issue. The people in Hamsun’s books act, and what determines their actions is partly the social world that prevails in their here and now – in Wayfarers the zeitgeist is such a powerful presence it could almost be considered a character in its own right as capitalism, progress, industry come muscling in on the tiny locality – and partly individual character traits, urges, and desire. In a sense, they are trapped by life. This is no denigration of Hamsun’s characters by comparison with Dostoevsky’s – he who pens a sentence is quite as worthy as he who strikes a sail, and emptiness is emptiness whether articulated or not. The big difference between Dostoevsky and Hamsun is the lack of transcendence in Hamsun’s world, the absence of the divine, and the foremost expression of this difference is perhaps that Hamsun’s books contain humor, Hamsun’s reader laughs, whereas Dostoevsky’s does not, humor being barely conceivable in Dostoevsky’s work. In order to laugh one must take a step back; for Dostoevsky no such step exists, everything is so intense. Clearly there is a religious dimension in Hamsun’s work, approaching pantheism, nature worship, but it is decidedly not transcendental, merely the world as it is – and between the mountains laughter reverberates. That transcendence is so absent in this religious dimension, and that all existential questions remain unarticulated, makes August’s reflections on the mountainside all the more significant and, by virtue of them being an exception, laden with meaning. That he should fall into such thoughts while resting on the mountainside is of course by no means coincidental. The mountain rises above the world, the privileged place of Zarathustra and Moses, a site of divine revelation.
In the Land of the Cyclops Page 10