Blog 94: Surrealisms

94.  Surrealisms:  N.Y.C. Ballerinas, Corbet’s Brutalist, Schulz’s Street, Bonomini’s Novices and Pynchon’s Lot 49, reviewed by Sandy

         Wildfires devastate California, ice and snow blanket our Southlands, and New York City and New Jersey are visited by what the F.A.A. euphemistically claims to be “drones” -- no wonder our local leader, Louise Ebersdorf, keeps to her safe room until what she terms “the crazies” abate.  Our childless cat-lady permits only Pippa and Master Raro to enter her steel redoubt, while Cheryl, Belle, Madame Sesostris, and I submit sympathetic bulletins.  Louise’s prize collection of felines downstairs could not be more bereft than we.  In the meantime, I took myself and Cheryl to a performance of Balanchine’s The Nutcracker at Lincoln Center, an entertainment which allows E.T.A. Hoffmann’s vision of Christmas Past to mirror our Xmas Present.

         While ballerinas are required to dance a full range of material, it is rare, indeed, for a dancer to be equally at home in the allegro and adagio roles.  While an allegro ballerina can offer a version of legato dancing, there will often be a clipped phrasing or a less than generous expanse of movement in adagio pas.  At the same time, one often notes the not quite etched rhythms and softened accents of a legato ballerina in allegro enchaînements.

         Tiler Peck has been the premier allegro ballerina at NYCB — the breeding ground of allegro virtuosity — for most of her career.  However, in the role of Sugar Plum this season she accomplished something very rare among ballerinas generally and unique in her career thus far; she conquered a realm not naturally her own, rounding the edges of her phrasing and delivering a soft, pliant and magisterial essay of the role.  A calm permeated her dancing, and by foregrounding not a rhythmic continuity (which was certainly still present), but a continuity of plastique, her dancing gained a sense of scale well beyond her modest frame.  Peck's placidity made me recognize for the first time that Sugar Plum is the breath of normalcy at the center of the zanily surreal realm she rules.  Roman Mejia, her partner, was a remarkable collaborator in this feat, becoming for all intents and purposes invisible when the focus is on the ballerina and complementing the design with ease and clarity when required.  Perhaps the fact that they’re a couple offstage aided them in this sympathetic collaboration.  Oh, to have my own Roman, or Greek for that matter, but I digress.

          Peck has long fascinated me as a dancer, and with an evolving legato technique now emerging, I returned to the Koch Theater two weeks after her Sugar Plum to see if this might inform her performance of Allegro Brillante, a role she has already shown to great and well-earned acclaim. Because her command of the allegro passages of this virtuoso ballet is now so assured, she is able to complete a supported pirouette quickly enough to then unfurl her leg with a luxuriant quality and a radiant calm.  New, too, is her more broadly theatrical use of port de bras and épaulement.  Peck has always had a very fine theatrical sensibility, but she allowed it freer reign in this performance which lent the role a rare dramatic dimension.

         That same afternoon, Emily Gerrity and, especially, Unity Phelan, in the central role, gave Concerto Barocco a lucidly poetic performance, aided by a well-rehearsed and sprung corps de ballet.  What became apparent in this performance is that Barocco contains almost no transitional or even preparatory steps.  Balanchine allows pliés and chassés to arabesques to show weight and, as such, they read as part of the actual choreography with a specific relationship to the musical rhythm and a visceral sensation, at least to an empathic viewer.  Elsewhere Balanchine has the dancers drop from a piqué arabesque with a surprising percussiveness which is contrasted to sharply accented échappé to arabesque.  And I’m aware of no other ballet which exploits the differences in rhythm and movement quality between relevé and piqué as richly as this one does.  This is all to say that despite its complexity (Master Raro claims that after many years of watching it, he still finds new things in this ballet every time), the right performers weave an unbroken rhythmic and visual tapestry through the most fundamental aspects of ballet technique.   

           The Morgan Library has an exhibit on my favorite author, Franz Kafka, and I am not only reading and rereading his works but his literary descendants as well.  (Perhaps Hoffmann would see Kafka as a descendant?)   I asked Master Raro if I could borrow his copy of the extraordinary Diaries, but he regards them as Holy Writ and holds the book close.  As a result, I am starting the first volume of the Kafka biography by Reiner Stach: The Early Years.  What a portrait of a society, in addition to what a life of a writer!  I suppose I could always turn to the stories of the great Argentine fantasist, Jorge Luis Borges.  Borges was another expert at turning reality inside-out.  Like Kafka, Borges allows quietly accumulating detail to undermine our most complacent mental orientations.  Instead, I have been reading the works of the master’s contemporary, Ángel Bonomini (The Novices of Lerna, translated by Jordan Landsman, Transit Books, 2024).

          Bonomini mines some of the literary metaphysics to be found in Borges’ work, but his range of subject matter is wider and his tone alters with setting and social topic.  For example, there is a story, “The Martyr”, about the end of a lengthy love affair, told from the point of view of an obsessed male who so intensely laments the absence of his mistress that the reader begins to see why she had to leave him, while the details of the man’s obsession outline the dubious side of any human “intimacy”, of whatever degree.  (T. S. Eliot would have understood.)  There is another tale, “The CCC”, featuring the theme of bi-locality, in which one of two friends is always arriving ahead of his chum when they go shopping in chain stores.  The story reminded me of David Lynch’s treatment of the doubling motif in his movie Lost Highway.

         The centerpiece of the Bonomini volume is a longer narrative, “The Novices of Lerna” in which a university student from Buenos Aires is given a fellowship to a Swiss university for six months to study law.  When he arrives at the campus, he discovers that all the other recipients are eerie duplicates of himself in outward appearance.  Across the months that follow, the two dozen duplicate fellows are steadily reduced in number by a mysterious disease which is so deadly that no one is allowed to leave the campus in order to prevent spreading.  The “metaphysics” of this situation are reminiscent of the university-as-world allegory in the John Barth novel Giles Goat-Boy.  My favorite Bonomini story is only two pages long:  “Index Card”.  In it, a poet who fails to find an audience stages his own death and then returns on the literary scene as a critic under another name to praise his poetry “posthumously” and to become famous and well-to-do in that role.  I will not give away the ending, but here is a very brief tale worthy of Borges.  Like that master, Bonomini describes an entrapment that reveals the unconscious parameters which we use to navigate our conception of “reality”.  “Paranoid hysteria” is only one term (Dali-blessed) to describe the literary effect of such fictions. 

         Bruno Schulz, the Polish writer killed by a Gestapo officer in 1942 for venturing into an Aryan district of Drobobych (now in Ukraine), left behind tales and drawings with a Kafkaesque influence:   The Street of Crocodiles and Other Stories, translated by Celina Wieniewska, introduction by David A. Goldfarb, Penguin Books, 2008).  Even in translation, Schulz’s language has a strong metaphorical charge as he gives us a child’s view of a Polish family prior to World War Two centered around a department store where the son’s father struggles as its manager and dreamer of life beyond provincial city culture.  (Schulz himself translated Kafka’s The Trial into Polish.).  The author returns repeatedly to the archetypal aspects of the patriarchal role.  At one point the boy’s father is reduced metaphorically to a cockroach – who flies away.  The father’s presence embarrasses, and his absence taunts.  When an official inspector visits the department store, he and the father wrestle like Jacob with his angel.  And from his office aerie overlooking the aisles of the emporium, the father becomes god-like, not only to its staff but to the boy and the other members of his family.  The father eventually grows old and enters a sanatorium, where he is visited by his son, now a young man who sees in himself the mythical image of his parent.  The archetype which the author leaves us with is a future that eternally repeats the patriarch’s life-gestures.  As in Kafka, the cumulative effect of such portraiture is deeply discomfiting.    

         When I was quite young, I tried reading Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, but all I can remember from that early exposure is a succession of very funny one-liners.  (Pynchon’s 1960s anti-authoritarianism can be hilarious.)  Then, at a later age, I read Gravity’s Rainbow and was converted to admiration of the polymath.  Now, I have returned to Crying (a short, early work that I am told Pynchon has all but disowned), and I find it very much to my current taste for the rawly surreal.  (My copy is the Harper Perennial paperback, 2006).  It contains in miniature many of the favorite themes of the author across his career.  Perhaps the sophomore aspect of his novel is the reason for the author’s subsequent dislike.  Crying is revealing in its rawness.    

         The novel’s protagonist is a woman, Oedipa Maas, who is made executrix of the will of a former lover, one Pierce Inverarity.  In uncovering the sources of his vast wealth, Oedipa comes to suspect she has stumbled upon evidence of an underground society, the Tristero, which functions – and has functioned over centuries -- as a secret postal service toward possibly nefarious ends.  Here is one of Pynchon’s favorite themes:  communication -- its necessity and its dangers.  This time around, perhaps because I had subsequently read Gravity’s Rainbow, I had to suspect that the Inverarity character had accumulated his wealth as a modern warlord, profiteering from within the intersection of the U.S. military and industry.  (Pynchon briefly worked for Boeing in his youth.)  Inverarity’s Yoyodyne Corporation celebrates itself with a song whose lyrics are quoted:

                  Bendix guides the warheads in,

                  Avco builds them nice.

                  Douglas, North American,

                  Grumman get their slice.

                  Martin launches off a pad,

                  Lockheed from a sub;

                  We can’t get the R&D

                  From a Piper Cub.

                  Convair boosts the satellite

                  Into orbits round.

                  Boeing builds the Minuteman,

                  We stay on the ground.

Grounded readers who finished Gravity’s Rainbow will know how this litany prefigures the description in the later novel of an international industrial conspiracy that led to Pynchon’s version of World War Two.  What I could not help but wonder is whether “R&D” in the song stands not for “research and development” but for “retrieval and development”, thus revealing Pynchon’s prophetic ability to anticipate today’s UFO/UAP news.  (In his later novel Vineland, he deals with the subject of UFOs.)  For all we know, the military-industrial complex may have its eye on those New Jersey “drones” at this very minute.

         I recently read for the first time Kafka’s short story “Josephine the Singer” which describes the career of a singing mouse, a female rodent who develops a large following in her mice-kingdom and turns out to be quite a diva.  The story is about co-dependency between artist and audience, and Kafka manages in a brief space to reveal the dynamics that underlie a performer-and-public relation.  A law is uncovered that I found touching and troubling.  The discovered law beneath The Crying of Lot 49 is more diffuse in dealing with the private citizen and the Deeper State.  Perhaps it has to do with the necessity for violent combat on an international scale to jump-start national economies and to inspire technological innovation.  But Kafka takes only a few pages to reveal his truth, and in Crying Pynchon takes 152 to leave us hanging.

         Speaking of the artist and audience relationship, Brady Corbet’s new film, The Brutalist, is about an emigrant European architect, László Tóth, his wealthy American patron, Harrison Lee Van Buren, Sr., and their community center project outside Philadelphia which takes years and much personal conflict to design and build.  Tóth is a Hungarian-born Jewish refugee who has survived the Holocaust, and Van Buren commissions the new building as one more gesture in memory of his departed mother.  The film’s structure creates a surreal contrast between the architect’s vivid dream of a project (Part One – The Enigma of Arrival) and the many obstructions to realizing it (Part Two – The Hard Core of Beauty).  Part One is leisurely in its rhythms.  Part Two is fast-paced in the delivery of one disappointment after another as the project lumbers toward finish.  I took this structure to be a realistic comment on the difficulties of a career in architecture, or in any art form that involves vast expense, many collaborators, and one mind behind the design.  It also reminded me of Lincoln Kirstein’s tendency to provide safe harbors here in Manhattan for young architects:  he sometimes housed them at his Manhattan residence.

         As you undoubtedly guessed, The Brutalist has its alternative relation to King Vidor’s brilliant movie of Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead.  Corbet’s two other films – The Childhood of a Leader and Vox Lux – analyze leadership (authoritarian political personalities like Lenin and pop singers like Lady Gaga) from their roots in social milieux.  The Brutalist is the most “gentle” film Corbet has directed so far.  (Global convulsion – WW2 – takes place before the film begins and there is no initial act of school terrorism as in Vox Lux.)  The emphasis falls on an act of artistic creation, an agon that reveals character in the contestants.  The parallel with the creation of a film, like the one we are watching, is unstated but obvious.  The acting by Adrian Brody and Guy Pearce is excellent.

         One irony that goes unstressed in The Brutalist is that “real world” contingencies and the unexpected can seem just as surreal as those many dramatic events in the second half of Corbet’s movie.  Life can throw us some very curved balls.  Who would have predicted that in 2025 the leaders of our U.S. government often resemble the grotesques in a satiric novel by Gore Vidal?

         Our house cat-wrangler Paco says that his wife Albertine continues to spend much time with Dr. Wonkoff in Bayonne.  We asked him if the Wonkoff clinic had been visited by “drones”, but he had no private intel.  Paco stressed how lonely he is, although surrounded by twenty-one kitties, and his mood may have been communicated to the pets:  various veterinarians have recently been in attendance.  And now our Lulu is once again insisting on a sign on top of our Ebersdorf Tower welcoming all interplanetary or interdimensional Aliens, perhaps as an anti-Trump gesture?  Madame Sesostris insists that the current drone swarms are indeed UAP/UFOs in disguise.  And now the arch-surrealist of modern movies, David Lynch, has passed.  He would certainly have had an opinion on the subject and perhaps have turned it into a film.

S

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