Realistic Cynicism, Part II

BY PER GIOTTO

 

 

In the January 18^th issue of the New York Times Magazine, photographer Nadav Kander provides two photographic contributions: one is a photo essay of Obama’s incoming cabinet while the other, documenting Washington landmarks, supplements an article by Matt Bai on the predictable and rapid diminishment of a president’s approval ratings soon after his inauguration.  The former is a bit odd: Kander works with a variety of styles, many of which mimic somewhat standardized ones, and here he strives for an Avedon-like documentation of celebrity.  Many of his other photographs have the eerie composure and tones of Hollywood horror and sci-fi films, and these, too, have a somewhat nauseous cyan sheen.  While there are several excellent results – the utterly creepy portrait of Larry Summers and the wholly endearing one of David Axelrod are perhaps foremost among them –, they for the most part feel as though Nadav was capable only of approximating Avedone in style; any substance is absent.  The figures look beyond the frame almost chronically – artificially, as if pretending to be caught unawares –, and a great many of them look like they were photographed in Madame Tussaud’s for convenience’s sake.

But the Washington landmark photos are phenomenal.  They are far fewer in number than those within the cabinet portfolio but infinitely more intelligent and incisive.  More than that, they are adorable.  Nadav manages to capture the particular and peculiar willingness with which so many of us are, with some difficulty, allowing ourselves to feel hopeful about Obama’s presidency. 

And thus these old haunts of Washington – having become largely imbued with a sinister tinge, an aftertaste of the Bush Administration – appear sheepishly behind branches and trees, as if staring out at us for approval, hoping to impress us anew. They are marvelous, seeming to ask us, as we too may now be asking them, to be accepting.

It is difficult to not be tritely cynical about Obama’s presidency and the possibility of his accomplishing all that he has claimed; the seemingly naive trust so many have placed in him and his administration makes it all the more difficult to resist the temptations of disillusionment.  But beneath these familiar twinges of cynicism, I am immensely hopeful.  These photographs invest the city – and thus the Obama Administration and the entirety of the American government – with this hopefulness.  It is too early to definitively praise or condemn the administration – the charming hangdog expressions of the Capital; the Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln Memorials, the last of which is unfortunately not available online; and the White House reflect the tendency to make such prognostications –, but it does feel nice to be hopeful.

The Articulation of Mental Illness, Part I

BY FREEMAN BRANDYWINE

 

Several years ago, in an interview with the New York Times or the New Yorker or some other journalistic institution based out of New York, Tony Kushner said something to the effect of “The body betrays; the mind does not.”  He was reflecting upon his mother’s cancer specifically but related it to his own work and its commitment to exploring the degradations that physical illness inflict upon the body.  Surely this is a misquote, but the general thrust seems similar to the intent of his remark: that while one can rely upon the health of one’s mind, one is always subject to the often cruel vacillations of the body within which it is caged.

His plays never directly address mental illness; the characters within them often suffer horrific mental corruptions as a result of their physical ailments, but neurological disorders or diseases seem largely absent from his realm of artistic inquiry.  And what the earlier misquote most clearly betrays is Kushner’s myopia regarding the reality of the betrayal of the mind.  Indeed, even while his characters undergo the most ferocious and terrifying symptoms of their corporal diseases, they largely remain intact enough to describe their states – even their incapacity to describe their states – with great articulacy.  The intention here is not to condemn Kushner for overlooking the true terror of mental disease – although his characters’ persistent ability to articulate whatever immensely confusing states they are in with witty, sound-byte ready calculations is somewhat annoying, and feels disruptive and disloyal to the emotional morass in which they proclaim to find themselves –, but to question the capacity of any artistic medium in appropriately conveying this terror.  Kushner’s articulations provide his audience with a means by which to digest the incomprehensible; he formulates dialogue that is often very intelligent, acutely observed, and understandable.  The audience leaves the theatre not in the thick of the emotional fog through which those whom his plays portray describe themselves as suffering, but with a seemingly lucid comprehension of their suffering.  And herein lies Kushner’s greatest achievement and most unfortunate failure: he makes the unfathomable seem comprehensible, and in pithy, charming, oft-quoted phrases no less.

Certainly there is no harm in this.  On the contrary, there is much good to be found in it: we often turn to the articulacy of art – whatever be its tongue – to express what we feel ourselves incapable of more accurately communicating.  These articulations are a solvent of sorts: it seems quite likely, for example, that William Styron, in seeking to express the inconceivable and incredible depths of his depression, found great solace upon coming across Milton’s description of the “darkness visible” in his Pandemonium.  If clarity is to be gained in such references, if what is otherwise untouchable by language – as the entire human experience is, as the particular assumption goes – can at the very least be pointed to, if the signifier is weak but signifies well enough, then what, ultimately, is the problem?  Dialogue, and the ability to express one’s condition, is necessary for empathic relations, even for maintaining sanity.  Why denigrate attempts at doing such, no matter how impoverished these attempts may be?

I do not hold that denigration is at all appropriate or necessary.  But it is upsetting to imagine what is lost in translation, what can never be understood.  If Kushner provides his audiences with the belief that they have begun to comprehend a condition, when in fact they have merely been pointed more precisely in its proper direction, isn’t this gap problematic, or at the very least upsetting?  Should what is unfathomable be left unfathomed?  The answer clearly seems to be that they should not.  But the alternatives are so often filled with trite assumptions and consolations, with tame approximations and pat articulations, that it is reasonable to yearn for the less expository: for the inchoate or untranslatable, for the amputated sources of the howls in Francis Bacon’s work, or the cavernous transliterations of dreams and death-bound ruminations of Finnegans Wake.  And even these – made static, at some near-infinite horizon line, by the very fact of their earthly, physical existences – may seem too much, too expository.  The breadth of the mind, and of its diseases and disorders, is inherently averse to any form of complete representation, as Joyce may have attempted to produce, or pithy evocation, as Beckett may have; any artistically isomorphic recreation would seem impossible and, more importantly, pointless: it would be too boring, too tedious.

Perhaps we need a certain amount of pith in addressing the pithless spread of life and thought.  At the very least – as in Kushner’s work – it provides words where little present themselves; in Joyce’s grand attempts to encapsulate aspects of human experience – his works build, in Finnegans Wake, to perhaps the greatest attempt thus far at such an artistically isomorphic recreation of life – it is often specific moments, phrases, or words that strike most resonantly.

As any obsequious and self-respecting Post-Structuralist or Deconstructionist would have it, nothing more is possible.  Literature and life are largely irreconcilable as existing forms; perhaps we should just celebrate whenever they do overlap, however grossly, coarsely, or fittingly they can.