by Greil Marcus
The most casual comparison of lettrism to the exploits of the Cabaret Voltaire or the Berlin Dada Club makes it obvious how unoriginal, academic, and precious Isou’s program was. Judged on the level to which he aspired, on the level of aesthetic purity and high art, lettrism was a screaming oxymoron, systematized dada. Judged as news, it was gossip. Judged as history, it was, absent anything better, something to do: if, as Roger Shattuck wrote from Paris in 1948, postwar French culture was a vacant lot and existentialism “a means of clearing the ground,” lettrism was merely “a temporary shack.” But these were not the only levels on which the small drama of lettrism was played out. A comparison of the first lettrists to those with whom they really shared the postwar terrain reveals an element that makes the story interesting, an element the lettrists cultivated and their true contemporaries ignored. That element was consciousness, and the terrain was still unnamed: pop culture.
POP CULTURE
Pop culture—the folk culture of the modern market, the culture of the instant, at once subsuming past and future and refusing to acknowledge the reality of either—began about 1948, in the United States and Great Britain. There, where the Nazis never arrived, the war years not only regimented society—through conscription, rationing, curfews, and vastly intensified production—they loosened it, breaking up old ties of social life. For a long moment, an entire level of patriarchal hierarchy was stripped away. Like so many soldiers in combat, on the home front some people experienced a sense of purpose, fellowship, and freedom they never knew before and would never know again. Ordinary housewives might not have come up with the words surrealist poet René Char found when, with the occupation of France ending, he confronted what it would mean to leave behind his life as a Resistance partisan—“I shall have to break with the aroma of these essential years, silently repress (not reject) my treasure”—but they would have known what he meant. Photographs of wartime American female factory workers reveal smiles unlike any to be seen in the photojournalism of the years that followed: strong, almost surprised smiles radiating shared purpose, autonomy, and self-worth.
With the war over the women who owned those smiles were returned to a subservient life. The project of the postwar West—which can be read most clearly as a project in Betty Freidan’s The Feminine Mystique, the history of a propaganda campaign far more sophisticated than the concurrent demonization of communism—was to prove that real life was back, and to restrict the definition of real life to the pleasurable consumption of material goods within a system of male supremacy and corporate hegemony. The new freedoms discovered during the war were cut off from words and cut out of pictures; the most intense and complete days many had lived, at home and away, were turned into an anomaly, and those who could neither get over them nor, according to the new rules, talk about them, were charted as deviant cases. Thus all sorts of anarchic protests against the reorganization of social life appeared out of nowhere: refusals of the affective limits placed on the unlimited material future promised by the managers and promoters of public discourse, a future whose promises were fixed in advance. “How can we live,” Char wrote in 1947, “without the unknown before us?”
IN JULY
In July 1948 a bizarre, almost silent record began playing on a black music station in Harlem; soon it spread up and down the East Coast and across the country. It seemed to come out of the ether, not so much carried by the airwaves as floating on them, and no one knew what to make of it, except that it stopped time, and stopped hearts. It was “It’s Too Soon to Know,” the first record by the Orioles, five black men from Baltimore, led by a twenty-three-year-old truck driver who called himself Sonny Til. The song was written by Deborah Chessler, a young Jewish woman who one night found herself transfixed by a black vocal group called the Vibranaires. She became their manager, had their name changed, offered them her tune, and with them made history—for if the title can be awarded with any certainty, which it probably cannot, this was the very first rock ’n’ roll record.
Earlier popular black harmony groups—the 1930s Mills Brothers, the early-1940s Inkspots, the 1947 Ravens—made their music according to the rules of well-ordered rhythms, close ensemble singing, shaped tones, recognizable lyrics. These were white, bourgeois, altogether orderly modes of communication. They suggested definition, suppressed ambiguity, presented the listener with a finished fact—and a finished fact says “all is well” or it says “there’s nothing you can do about it.” The Orioles’ sound reached the listener as the voice of another world; it demanded that you finish the sound, fill in the silences with your own wishes, fears, fantasies. With its falling sighs, its constant hesitations, the sound implied that against every accepted promise, everything was in doubt.
“The only accompaniment,” Charlie Gillett says of the Orioles’ most distinctive records, “was a guitar played so quietly its only purpose might have been to prevent the group from [coming] to a complete stop. Sonny Til seemed to try to withdraw himself from the situation, refusing to become involved.” Framed by high, drifting moans that faded almost before they could be registered, Til’s fragile tenor was so emotionally distant, so aurally crepuscular, that it did not sound like singing at all. It was a voice that seemed to treat the forming of a word as a concession, a voice less of someone singing than of someone thinking about the possibility of singing, as if to say, “What would it mean to care?”
The records were constructed, felt through, out of lacunae. Til’s always aborted desire to commit himself, his inability to believe that anyone could ever make a commitment to him, made a metaphor for the evasion of any confrontation with any sign of things-as-they-were; he wanted to care, Til’s sound said, but he didn’t. The feeling was delivered whole, with a passion so plainly repressed it implied not revolt but suicide. When Til sings, lifting every second phrase out of its syntax and almost into onomatopoeia,
Though I’ll cry
When she’s gone
I won’t die
I’ll live on
If it’s so
It’s too soon
Way too soon
To know
you don’t believe he’ll outlive the song.
The Orioles were in their time but not quite of it. The biggest black record of the late 1940s was “Open the Door, Richard,” a broken-beat novelty number, Stepin Fetchit in a tuxedo. It was a top-ten hit for no less than seven artists, both Count Basie and the Three Flames took it to number one in the same month, and one has to stop over that weird fact—impossible since the advent of rock ’n’ roll, it speaks for a world in which only a very few songs were heard, in which only a very few conversations were permissible, or comprehensible. But one has to look beyond music to see how strange the Orioles really were.
In the early 1980s, the detritus of late 1940s and early 1950s advertisements was resurrected by a host of American and British collage fanzines (all of them inspired, in one way or another, by the recoding spirit of punk), and what these magazines showed, be they the kitchen-table Tacky World or the slickly printed Stark Fist of Removal, was so clear, so single-minded, it now looks like an art project commissioned by the CIA. It’s not just that every person pictured is white, middle-class, and well-off; black people in post-1960s American TV commercials were white, middle-class, and well-off. It is the sense of confidence that is so unsettling.
The smiles on the faces of the men are easy, unconcerned; the fulfillment of every desire is taken for granted. The smiles on the faces of the women have come a long way from those of the wartime factory workers: they are pursed, determined. There is a hint of resentment beneath the surge toward gratification, unfulfilled desire puts the necessary edge into the ads, constitutes the subliminal hook, and so together the men and women make a world that is both open and closed, a world that cannot be touched. In 1958 The Family Physician published an illustrated guide titled “You Can Beat the Atomic Bomb” (note the active verb; twenty years later it would be “You Can Survive”): a couple is fleeing
radioactive fallout. They are dressed for a night on the town—in fact they seem to be out on the town, having already heard the news, covering their mouths with handkerchiefs as casually as one might open an umbrella against the rain.
It would be specious to connect the Orioles’ quiet refusals to the Bomb—but perhaps not so to connect those refusals to the monochromatic orchestration of confidence that accompanied them. That orchestration did not include the Orioles. In 1948, or for that matter in 1958, downtown hotels in Baltimore would not have admitted them, restaurants would not have served them, and had Sonny Til, with new money in his pocket and his combat medals on his sharkskin suit, persisted in a demand for entrance, the police would have been called and the nigger thrown in jail. Penned in on itself, the black ghetto produced a culture of violence, hedonism, and despair; with the Orioles, Gillett writes, “the harsh, fast life produced a slow, gentle response.” Sonny Til became an artist of the reverie, always one step removed, a mole in the ground.
Pop culture at the turn of the half-century: the Orioles, with Deborah Chessler, left, and Sonny Til, right
Sonny Til fantasized; he ran his fantasies down. As he fell back and his fantasies slipped out of his grasp, he communicated the notion that the real world could be different from the apparent—that the apparent world, the world of ordered rhythms and distinct words, was not real. There was no confidence; there was only an erotic concentration on loss, hopelessness, and failure. Til imagined what it would mean, what it would feel like, to love, to be loved, to hurt, to be hurt, to say no, to say yes. He could, he said, do none of it—but because he was imagining, he spoke with more purity than real life ever allows. His music was an affirmation, an emotive utopia, where everything could be said; it was a negation, a nowhere, where nothing could be done.
NEGATION
Negation was accompanied by nihilism—which, once glamorized in the media, was understood by young people eager for new myths as a promise of freedom. In 1947, four thousand motorcyclists invaded the quiet town of Hollister, California, and held a party; the town was partially destroyed. In 1948, four Paris teenagers, “les tragiques de Lagny,” joined in an inexplicable scheme involving sexual jealousy, a supposedly imminent Soviet invasion of France, and a nonexistent fortune; three of them held a trial to decide the fate of the one who claimed to have the money, sentenced him to death, and carried out the sentence. In 1958, Charley Starkweather, nineteen, and his girlfriend, Caril Fugate, fourteen, murdered ten people in Nebraska and Wyoming, including Fugate’s mother, stepfather, and baby half-sister; among the other victims was a couple about the same age as the killers.
These events and others like them became myths almost before they were acknowledged as events, and within the matrix of the postwar rhythm the incident most immediately and completely mythologized was one of the first to take place. In the fall of 1948, a twenty-four-year-old gunman and triple murderer named Ivanhoe “Rhyging” (Raging) Martin became a hero in Jamaican shantytowns because, advertising himself in the papers with scrawled threats and two-gun photos, trumpeting himself as Alan Ladd and Captain Midnight, he sensed the pop dimension of the nihilist role. On 9 October 1948 he was trapped by police on Lime Cay Beach and shot to death. Featuring a picture of the corpse in the sand, the Kingston Daily Gleaner devoted its entire front page to the story.
Lagnyites on trial, Combat, 8 May 1951
Caril Fugate and Charley Starkweather, January 1958
CRIME DOES NOT PAY
KINGSTON’S SIX WEEKS TERROR IS ENDED! “RHYGING” IS
DEAD!!
“I SAW HIM SHOT”
THOUSANDS AT THE MORGUE
WHO WAS THIS MAN WITH A PRICE ON HIS HEAD?
ACE COP-SWIMMER JOINS HUNT
DOWN THE CROOKED ROAD TO DOOM
And, bringing it all back home, the inevitable prosaic angle:
LIME CAY, NATURE LOVERS’ HAVEN
In time, movies would be made, songs would be written, iconographic books and sociological studies would be produced about all of these occurrences, from Laslo Benedek’s 1954 film The Wild One to Bruce Springsteen’s 1982 tune “Nebraska”; far from being merely trapped in legend, Rhyging’s event was the founding crime of postwar Jamaican popular culture, and it was always understood as such. Rhyging was the ghost guiding the hand of every rude boy, the voice of every reggae singer. When Perry Henzell told the story in his 1973 film The Harder They Come, bringing it into the present, he made Rhyging the pop star that Ivan Martin wanted to be: this “Rhyging” not only killed people, he cut records, topping the hit parade and the most-wanted list at the same time.
Today these crimes would be a version of everyday news: in their time they communicated as a violation of it. Each briefly marked a moral panic, and an inflation of the moral currency. I sometimes think that to understand why these crimes turned into myths, and why the crimes of the serial or (savor the words) “recreational” and “theme” killers of the 1970s never transcended their numbers, is to understand culture—or the day Elmer Henley Jr. was arrested in Texas for the rape-torture-murder of twenty-seven teenage boys. The TV news happened to run an interview with Juan Corona, who was appealing his conviction of the murder of twenty-five California farmworkers; “Well, Juan,” I was sure the interviewer would ask him, “how does it feel to lose the record?” It was barely a fantasy: “I’ve been reading about Gacy, and he says he killed thirty-three,” Henley told his prosecutor while awaiting trial. “If you cut me some slack on the time I can find you some more bodies and get my record back.” But then Theodore Bundy reached the forties; Henry Lee Lucas claimed 188 victims, then 600. Inflation outstripped any possibility of meaning; the only use value of a murder was its exchange value.
The violations of Rhyging, the motorcycle gangs, the Lagny trio, Starkweather and Fugate were packaged and sold, but they resisted commodification. They were a kind of noise and a kind of silence. They were still sufficiently outside the limits of the public conversation to be received as art statements: as attempts to willfully construct life, or to represent its absence. As mythical assaults they were self-justifying: art for art’s sake, which is a form of nihilism. For many, these crimes, in their very muteness—the noise they made, the silence they left behind, the refusal or the inability of the actors to explain themselves—were experienced as a common dream of the postwar period. Some people, following the news, felt they themselves dreamed these events—which, given the buried, shapeless desires for novelty, adventure, and revenge to which these events gave voice, they did. If they didn’t the media dreamed for them—after the fact, but also in advance. Just as Ivan Martin, a.k.a. Alan Ladd, saw himself in American crime movies, Starkweather saw himself in the central mythic story of his era, Nicholas Ray’s 1955 film Rebel Without a Cause, which dramatized the coming of age of one Jimbo Stark, as played by James Dean. For hours, Starkweather stood before the mirror, combing his hair, arranging his slouch, positioning his cigarette, adjusting his shirt and pants, until he and Dean, Stark and Starkweather, two ordinary midwestern boys, the first already dead, the second knowing he soon would be, were one. It is not hard to believe that, in moments, Starkweather convinced himself that what he wanted to do was no more than what Stark wanted to do—would have done, if Hollywood were more than a fixed game of chicken. Facing the electric chair, Starkweather refused to plead insanity: “but dad i’m not sorry for what i did cause for the first time me and caril had more fun.”
The escape of Ivan Martin, Kingston Daily Gleaner, 2 September 1948
THE APPEAL
The appeal of Isou’s crusade cannot be understood except as a systematic version of this scattered no: as an attempt to turn emerging negationist and nihilist energies back toward the creation of a new culture. “The great American substitute for social revolution is murder,” the political scientist Walter Dean Burnham said at the height of the serial killing fad; Europe had other traditions, among them Lefebvre’s long line of fatal spells, in which Isou had found a pl
ace. Lettrism was no less bizarre—and thus, to a few, no less seductive or exciting—than the Lagny killing or “It’s Too Soon to Know.” Like the teenage Lagny murderers, who could not explain themselves, and the Orioles, who refused to explain themselves, Isou began with rules and language; he knew, as the review La Tour de feu would put it in 1964, writing about the situationists, that “when the crisis of language and poetry is pushed beyond certain limits it ends up placing the very structure of society in question.” For both the lettrists and the situationists, that crisis was the goal; to reach it one had to say things others did not understand, and thus provoke them into doubting the ability of their own language to say anything at all.
The Lagnyites were not lettrists; Claude Panconi, who pulled the trigger, testified at his trial that he “hoped to become a writer,” but he scorned the avant-garde, rejecting Rimbaud (“frenzied”) and Baudelaire (“morbid”) in favor of Stendhal and La Rochefoucauld. Though Isou sometimes spoke of letter-song hits, he never wrote “Théorie des loriots,” which today would be fun to read. But like the Orioles and the Lagnyites, lettrism was utterly part of its time and outside of it, socially determined and the product of individual choice, a myth of a creation to be glimpsed in destruction. Unlike its contemporaries, lettrism demanded that one explain oneself, if only in riddles and runes; more than that, it required a willingness to understand just how one’s individual choice was determined, and how a tension between determinism and choice could be brought to the point of explosion. Most of all, it required both a sense of history and the faith that one could willfully transcend it.