Wally Cardona and Jane Austen

I have been busy writing and teaching, but I did go to three cultural events this past weekend: My Lang colleague Wally Cardona's dance piece 'Really Real' at BAM, the Jane Austen exhibit at the Morgan Library, and a reading by Justin Taylor and one of the Wu Ming collective at P. S. 122. Wu Ming and Taylor--though very interesting--does not really go with the other two, but I found odd commonalities between the Cardona and the Austen.

The Cardona is divided into two parts, "He Lived A Somewhat Uneventful Life" and "Repetition". For the first (shorter) part, the lights are turned on, so that the audience can see themselves see the performers (I don't know whether the lights helped or hindered the performers seeing the audience). As a series of small, unobtrusive actions took place on stage by a series of dancers, a overvoice--deliberately halting and unassured--recited details which, without the name (I believe) ever being explicitly mentioned, clearly demoted the life of Søren Kierkegaard.

The first time we heard the snippets about Kierkegaard, we paid rapt attention to them, the second time, we began to drift away, notice the movements of the dancers on stage, hear the sound as only sound but not sense. By the time the words--spoken with an awareness of both how difficult the concepts evoked in them could be and for their potential as cliché--were said a third time they became meaningless; only the action mattered. Then "Repetition" began--with no words other than songs, the stage darkened, and a series of lyrical, sinuous dances, peopled by both adult and child performers, took over as a kind of rhapsodic counterpoint and complement to the more talky and cerebral part that had gone before.
It is interesting to think of the juxtaposition of Kierkegaard with the emphasis on youth and the presence of the Brooklyn Youth Chorus as a large part of the action--Kierkegaard is usually thought of not as a philosopher for young people, if indeed there is such a thing, but part of the show's theme is openness to experience.
The articulation of a lived intellectuality is very different form actually living it, and the difference between the first and second sections was just that: the first was the rationale for a concrete mental life, the second the actually living it. But the second could not possibly occur without the manifestation of the first, just as, for Kierkegaard, the 'aesthetic' mentality was the necessary prelude to the ethical. Kierkegaard was very unlike many of his contemporaries who objected to e.g. haggle for not being political or practicable enough--Kierkegaard wanted to turn Hegel in the direction not just of concreteness but of irony and polyether title, “Really Real” suggests three states, the Unreal, the Real. and the Really Real. In this scheme, the Unreal could be philosophical abstraction as such, the Real could be an understanding of the need for lived. understood intellectual experience. the Really Real would be that experience, itself. of course, for some people, like Kant and Lacan, the Really Real would be the most ultimately unknowable, and in a sense there is a kinship between the most knowable and the most unknowable, conveyed by the moody lyricism, the playing of the song "I Feel Free' , which has exuberance, joy, a sense of the unfettered, but also especially in the version used by Cardona, an underlying melancholy. The uniformity of the second half has less to do with collectivism in my mind than the connection necessitated by the dichotomy of repetition and a more active recollection, which, as all readers of Kierkegaard know, has to be lived forward. In order for this to happen, the unites that are repeated or recollected have to be standardized, but the black to me signified the inevitable sadness that attends on this project as also a sense of the night, the unknown, a kind of dark, mystical ecstasy. I did not feel any sense of ;conformity from the dancers, the differences in ages and features in any event made that impossible.

Part of the liberation was having the lights turned on the audience for the first twenty minutes or so...we felt relaxed, freed, we no longer needed to pretend we were an audience, pretend we weren't there (though I wished the woman in front of me whose cell phone went off with the telltale Cingular/At&T ring tone had not been there)


I did not see the dynamic mentioned by Gia Kourlas in her, to my mind, generally, albeit unsurprisingly, uncomprehending Times review about the individual and the collective--to me, the dynamic was between thought and experience, the mental and the physical, the conceptual and the authentic. Really Real achieved what its title spoke of, a release into the freedom of the lived, the actual, but it also showed that this has to be a complicated and earned and actually performed process, that it cannot be done with a snap of the fingers. it was an extraordinarily uplifting and stimulating evening and I am most grateful for it.
A day later, I had a strangely analogous experience, going to the Jane Austen exhibit at the Morgan. Austen, like Kierkegaard, was someone not really taken seriously in her own day: compared to her peers, like Lord Byron and Sir Walter Scott, she, like the Danish thinker, seemed unusually personal, narrow, 'living a somewhat uneventful life' --the observations made about Kierkegaard in Cardona's play, that he only traveled outside Denmark five times, that he rarely left home, could also be made of Austen--and they both, sadly, lived only 42 years. Austen also raises the issue of concrete experience--she has been underrated until the past two generations of critics because people thought she did not give vent to the Big Ideas, but what she really did is, like Kierkegaard, embed them in a lived, actualized context. As W H. Auden said about her in 'Letter to Lord Byron".

Beside her Joyce seems innocent as grass.
It makes me most uncomfortable to see
An English spinster of the middle class
Describe the amorous effects of ‘brass’,
Reveal so frankly and with such sobriety,
The economic basis of society.


And this was not just an unmasking but an unmasking done in order to affirm life and affirm the real ties of regard and affection that could exist even after society's economic basis was granted. Austen and Cardona combined ot underscore the rich braid that is possible between conceptualized and lived experience, if thought of in , very generally, the right proportion.

The exhibition had Austen’s personal copies of several of the major books that influenced her (a number of which I am teaching in my eighteenth century fiction course at Lang this semester) as well as some of the few manuscripts of hers that have survived (all of her unpublished, unfinished work; the publishers threw away the manuscripts of PRIDE AND PREJUDICE and EMMA, etc., not feeling anybody needed them any more). there also was a set of instructions on courtly dancing--which attracted a group of attendees from the Westchester Courtly Dancing society, (or some such name), an organization devoted to dance in the Georgian and Regency era. The woman I talked to at the exhibit said that some dancers liked Jane Austen, and some Austen fans liked dance, but that the groups did not have an overwhelming overlap. Still, it did provide yet another interesting link between Austen and Cardona.

Aside from the Richard Foreman play, “Idiot Savant” , in December, this is it for 2009 in terms of cultural events—writing, the holidays, the end of the semester, and the MLA call! And, unless in case of emergency, my last post here for 2009—see you all in 2010!

Trip to New England

A quick weekend trip to the symposium on Australian literature at Harvard provided a joyful diversion from the rigors of the semester; not only was the academic companionship congenial and the intellectual atmosphere stimulating, but my ride up and back on Amtrak was enjoyable and in a way revelatory because I had never before travelled on this route this late in the fall--it was striking going past the Connecticut and Rhode Island shore with leaves turning, burning, churning, vibrant...seeing the bare birch trees standing alert in the unexpectedly balmy October air, the estuarine majesty of the Charles in Boston and the Thames in New London. Even an hour delay coming back at Old Saybrook was made tolerable by the company of my fellow passengers and the clarity of the blue-gray water surrounded by taut, brown reeds, the delight of intermingling yellow, green, and brown even in unromantic clusters of brush, the spray of afternoon sunlight amid trees steadily dispensing leaf after leaf...

More Marches

it would be very funny, in terms of 'diversity', if in the gay rights march today there were some who were in the anti-Obama march I encountered last month......

Back from Klagenfurt

I am back, so once again have little time to blog, but the last two days in Klagenfurt were filled with fun, heroic and poignant folk singing, continuing sumptuous food, boat rides, and wonderful collegiality. Back to New York and once-a-month blogging!

Klagenfurt 3

Okay, I gave my talk--which went well depsite an extraordinary initial foul-up in which i was told by the convenor that I was to speak in a room different from those of the other keynotes, went to that room, was told we had to wait fifteen minutes for people to drift in, went to the bathroom, then was told the paper was in fact in the original room, makng me rush back to the alternate room, get my paper, get lost in the cavernous 'Hauptgebaudt' of the university, then finally rush to the podium, despite all this, the delivery was great, the adrenaline if anything really helped. Because the paper got off to such a late start, there was no time for discussion, but I heard appreciative comments afterward. Then the convenor took us to his house in the hills above Klagenfurt for a salad and lasagna lunch accompanied by champagne and red wine with a delicious cake prepared by the convenor's wife for dessert. There is yet another banquet tonight, and I wonder if I am up for it...but at least my own work here is over and I can sit back and listen to the other papers.

The convenor's wife by the way said the local Slovenian dialect (as opposed to the official Slovenian propagated from Lljubljana), was laced with French admixtures..I wondered if from the Napoleonic occupation, but apparently not, it was just French as lingua franca....javascript:void(0)

More Klagenfurt

Back before buffet dinner, impressed but also daunted by the excellence of the two plenaries (out of five, including mine) so far, I will have to be at my best. The jacket and tie definitely helped. Another detail; as those in the know know, Ljubljana, the capital of Slovenia, is traditionally referred to by German speakers by its German name, Laibach, which people may know from the band of that name if nothing else. But I have noticed that not only is Llujbjana called that here but they pronounce it with exaggerated formality, as if an English speaking person was saying it--this is also a gesture in the direction of respecting cultural difference. or maybe Laibach is now just the name of the band.

As long as we are on the topic of music--my hotel's soundtrack plays the complete oeuvre of Lionel Richie, including hits I forgot he had.

Klagenfurt

I am currently in Klagenfurt, Austria, where tomorrow I am giving a plenary speech to Anglistentag 2009, a gathering of German-speaking professors of English. I am writing this as I had to return to my sumptuous hotel, the Lindner Seepark, in order to get a jacket and tie; I usually reserve these accoutrements for the days I am actually giving my talk, but, unlike on my last international conference trip to Brazil, the Teutonic formality of the occasion (even though all the peopel afre friendly, engaging, and unpretentious) clearly dictates a more stringent dress code.

Klagenfurt is, as one of the Forum speakers in the morning said (in German, therefore so far as I understood it) the southernmost city in the German-speaking world, near the Slovenian border (the university makes a deliberate attmept to be trilingual, with signs in Slovenian and Italian as well as German, and therefore a place of liminality that can meaningfully position itself in the context of diaspora and globalization in the Englsish-speaking world. In practice, the only language one hears on the street is German, and this region, as the bastion of the late Jörg Haider, is more 'conservative' than 'multicultural' in inclination, more Tea Party than Spivak or Bhabha in mien, though the people on the street and in the hotel are, again, friendly and charming. The ciy feels like a small city in the hillier regions of the Northeast or mid-Atlantic, sedate yet vigorous, with many new buildings. It is also the beach volleyball capital of Austria. The large lake, the Wörthersee, is now near to all that Austria has for a seacoast, Trieste and Pola of course having been long denied it.