On Happiness: Notes from Pamuk

Orhan Pamuk’s The Museum of Innocence is an interesting piece of work that creatively uses the novel as a museum of stories. The novel itself which is scant on narrative but rich with life and insightful musings, spans across several years, sometimes a lifetime and even a generation. The story of Kemal who falls in love with a poor distant relation when he is already engaged to Sibel, follows one man’s obsession with love, loss and a lifetime of longing and yearning which finally result in his undoing. Yet, what in the eyes of society is a life wasted and ruined, is triumphantly countered in the end by Kemal’s assertion ‘Let everyone know I lived a very happy life.’

Through this novel, Pamuk delves upon the notion of happiness and in a strange way this happiness is so closely associated with innocence that the novel might as well have been called ‘The Museum of Happiness’ and it might not change the spirit in which the story has been told. Happiness for Pamuk is a retrospective feeling. One always realizes one was happy only when one looks back. Happiness in this sense, can never be lived in the present. And yet, when one looks back it is always through the prism of memory. Happiness and memory seem to be interlinked for Pamuk. The idea of the museum, is then a way of preserving memories through objects and their stories. These objects become portkeys (using a term from Rowling) to the past and one can re-live the emotions associated with them. The reason Kemal steals objects from the Keskin household is that he wants to preserve the time he has spent with Fusun and her family. A museum, Pamuk remarks, is the place where Time becomes Space. The objects are not only a way of preserving the past but of preserving a world into which one can escape. The museum of innocence that Kemal founds with his collection of objects through more than half a decade, create a world in which ‘the living can live with the dead.’

Pamuk interestingly uses the museum as a symbol of difference between the cultures of the East and the West. In the West, the concept of the museum is often associated with a collector’s pride in displaying his collection. In Istanbul, Kemal and other collectors like him are seen with disdain as their passions are regarded as an eccentricity that can only serve as negative examples to deter others. But Kemal decides to build a museum with the hope that he will be able to cope with the shame of collecting these objects throughout the years. It becomes a way of turning shame to a collector’s pride. It becomes an empowering act as he can finally put his story before the world.

Pamuk seems to be more of a feminist than has ever been acknowledged. In recounting the whole story from Kemal’s point of view, he reveals all the misogyny, chauvinism and hypocrisies of a privileged Istanbul male with a Western education. Through the specific male and highly biased perspective he also seems to reveal a lot more about the women characters than he would have been able to as an impersonal third person narrator. Pamuk’s women characters, both the modern Sibel and the traditional rebel Fusun are both stronger than Kemal who follows in the footsteps of his father in his obsessive love for a younger girl. While Kemal’s father wilts away his days in the memory of this girl, looking at her black and white photograph and drinking, Kemal’s story is also similar. The only thing different, as Vecihe, Kemal’s mother remarks, is that while Kemal’s father ‘did it’ quietly, Kemal’s story was fodder for gossip to everyone. One wonders how Vecihe, aware of her husband’s adultery, accepts it for the sake of keeping the family together in the eyes of the society and also still loves her husband. This is also seen in the way Kemal frequents the Keskin household in spite of Fusun being married to Feridun. Everyone knows of Kemal’s true intentions but everyone turns a blind eye and the situation becomes one in which a rich man comes to inquire about his beautiful, poor distant relation.

Fusun remains mysteriously unresolved as a character. We see her mostly through Kemal’s mind through the major part of the novel. In the beginning when Kemal has an affair with her, she is nothing more than ‘a girl who is taken advantage of.’ Kemal is perfectly happy having both, a mistress and a fiancée, at the same time. He even invites Fusun to the engagement party. His selfishness in wanting her to be close to him even as he cannot leave Sibel is likely to irk every female reader. He does not think of Fusun’s reputation or future. But in her resolute will to keep distance from Kemal and not encourage him when she is married, she becomes very much a woman of her own mind. She also punishes him by withholding from him that she found the earring he had left for her on his first visit to the Keskins after her marriage.

She never passionately proclaims her love for him, the way he always does. Her desire to become a film star and make something of her life is more important for her than a life of love. And in this desire we see her need for independence, a need that is thwarted by both Feridun and Kemal who prevent her from interacting with the ‘wretch’ of the film industry even though Fusun is clearly able to handle her share of anything in life. But it is perhaps this desperation, of not being able to achieve anything that she had wanted, of being ‘used’ by Kemal that ‘she could kill him’ and finally of not being able to hate him completely either that she deliberately rams the car to her death in an impulsive moment. Even in the moment of the crash, Kemal romanticizes the death of two lovers dying together. One wonders whether he has really ever understood Fusun. In spite of her tantrums and her moodiness, Fusun remains a character we empathize with, while Kemal although his suffering is strikingly poignant at times, remains in general ‘a sloshed lover’ who needs to be shaken out of his obsession and megalomaniac self-pity. Sibel as a character also commands admiration in the way she stays with Kemal in the hope of helping him out of his desperation. When she realizes her efforts are in vain, she has the courage to break off the engagement even as Kemal cannot. In the end, this monumental story about love, loss, innocence and happiness transcends its superficial love story of a jilted lover and comes alive in the details, in its nuances which contain the world and the human condition in its most vulnerable rawness.

The Left Hand of Darkness

The Left Hand of Darkness is a science fiction novel by Ursula K. Le Guin (1929-2018) that is breathtaking in terms of its world-building and deceptively simple given its slimness. Le Guin is a well-known name in the world of fantasy writing and children’s literature. Writing primarily in the 60s and 70s, she was one of the few women who wrote in a field largely dominated by mostly white men. Le Guin’s writings, especially The Left Hand of Darkness, which came out in the year of the Stonewall Riots, added a different perspective to existing literature. Most of all, it tackled larger human, social and philosophical questions through science, calling attention to an ideal of humanism, understood in its best sense, and of the need to rally beyond barriers of race, ethnicity and culture.

In The Left Hand of Darkness, an Envoy named Genly Ai from an advanced humanoid race is sent to the land of Karhide on a planet called Gethen to propose an intergalactic alliance with the Ekumen, a coalition that seeks to forge unity between the far flung planets of the universe and to unite them. In a land of political intrigue and vendetta, the astute and exiled Prime Minister of Karhide, Estraven is the only one who believes in Genly Ai’s cause and eventually dies for it after saving him and making an incredible journey across snow, mountain, forest and ice.

Each state in Gethen has evolved into its own society, politics, language and custom which the Envoy observes and analyses in an anthropological manner typical of Le Guin’s writing. Among these, one of the most striking aspects of Gethenian society, is the notion of gender understood by the term ‘kemmer.’

Gethenians are androgynous and ambisexual and become female across a cycle of 28 days at the end of which they go into ‘kemmer’, a few days in which they are sexually active while any partner in kemmer can conceive. This idea about cyclic gender was incredible for its time and had important implications. It envisaged a society in which continuous sexuality was no longer a norm which meant that a person could be on any point of a gender spectrum at any time. It also put forth the idea of ‘men’ sharing the reproductive labour of child-bearing and rearing so that gender was no longer one of the most prominent organising principles of a society. This reproductive serendipity is novel even for today’s times.

The study of the polis between Karhide and its rival state of Orgeryn run by a Commensal instead of a king, is another scintillating piece of writing. It traverses the gulf between a monarchy and communal governance touching upon notions such as Shifgrethor or personal prestige in Karhide to Orgeryn’s group conditioning and the boundaries between love for one’s motherland and nationalism as a political tool for power.

Amidst all this, Le Guin throws in mystical narratives about spiritual cults (inspired by her interest in Taoism), stories of origins about places, people and names from the points of views of different characters. There is also a breathless nightmarish account of the Envoy himself, describing his experiences to the Farm which eerily echo the treatment of Jews in concentration camps.

What is especially stunning is the journey that Estraven and Genly Ai take together, a journey that is both metaphorical and spiritual in order to meet halfway across their cultural differences and to forge a friendship and loyalty for a greater cause. The ecological descriptions of snow, forest, mountain and the terrain they traverse are vivid and detailed as is the empathy with which societies and polities are described.

While the novel is majestic in its sweep, it does have a few setbacks. The most striking of which is the representations of gender itself. Although we are reminded that Estraven is both a man and a woman, even in his/her mysterious elusiveness s/he appears largely ‘male’ both because of the travesty of language and of a template of femininity that has itself come into question in recent years. But The Left Hand of Darkness is a world by itself like most of Le Guin’s novels and seen in the context of its own time, it certainly spoke to a different age.

Kieslowski’s ‘Decalogue’: An Existential Reading

Krzysztof Kieslowski and Krzysztof Piesiewicz’s Decalogue, a set of ten short films, is an exploration of the subtleties, contradictions and ambiguities of the Ten Commandments and their significance in a contemporary world. Each episode takes up one commandment and explores the grey areas beyond the realm of right and wrong. By merely enumerating the different episodes without titles, viewers make sense of each commandment in their own way as the director deliberately chooses to leave interpretations open-ended. Much of the ambiguity associated with the films’ subtext has to do with an age of censorship that posed serious limitations. Limitations that Kieslowski saw as a new climate for creativity in order to establish that no law can ever wholly grasp or deal with the complexity of being human. In this write-up, I touch upon some of the short films that moved me in order see the Decalogue not only as a re-examination of the Ten Commandments in a modern context, but also as a text which draws heavily from Sartrian existentialism in the way that “individuals alone are real.”

All the films of the Decalogue share the same setting of a tall housing project in which the characters are confined, almost in the claustrophobic anxiety of Sartre’s ‘No Exit’ or ‘Nausea’. The apartment complex is an ideal set for Kieslowski because his camera is fond of windows, mirrors, reflections of any kind and through any window of the housing project, there are people behind them. But in the films, characters remain masked, unknown to each other, neighbours and strangers at the same time. They meet each other unexpectedly, they drop in briefly from other episodes, run into the key characters into the elevator, leave a message on the phone informing of their absences and asking neighbourly favours. These devices to “inscribe people in the spectator’s memory” as Lucas notes, remind the viewer that human beings after all cannot live independently of each other and any external divinity is merely observatory.

This is portrayed through the character of the mysterious ‘silent observer’ who comes in all the episodes except 7 and 10 of the Decalogue. The use of the silent figure/ God, as Kieslowski remarked was that it has no influence on the action but “leads the characters to reflect on what they are in the process of doing. His intense look at the characters leads them to ask themselves questions” (Abrahamson, np). In many episodes, the silent observer merely gazes upon the characters in critical moments but does not intervene. His passive presence is superfluous within the context of human struggle and anxiety as only human actions and decisions shape events. This we see in the Decalogue 5, A Short Film about Killing, where the silent observer, cognizant of the murder that is to happen doesn’t not avert it or intervene while the lawyer of the murderous youth expresses regret over not exercising his human agency in preventing it.

In Decalogue 1, Kieslowski explores the relationship between scientific rationality and religious faith through an atheist scientist Krzysztof, a man for whom “reality alone is reliable” (Sartre, 42). When his son, who sees a dead dog in the snow, is deeply moved and asks him what death is, he merely gives a biological definition. Death is the cessation of the heart’s pumping of blood to the brain. The boy, Pavel however is not convinced. Kieslowski himself has to say: “In believing too much in rationality, our contemporaries have lost something” (Lucas, np). Could it be that we have bartered our humanness, even with all our fallible instincts and flaws, for the cold perfection of measured and evaluated decisions taken by machines?

When the scientist loses his own son, it is the same devastating loss that unites him with his Catholic sister in spite of their different beliefs. Kieslowski makes a more fundamental point that while reason and religion, like so many other things, divide us, it is only the endeavour of being human that unites us and binds us together. While the first commandment says “Thou shalt have no god before me”, Krzysztof’s suffering might apparently be justified as a punishment for his ‘worship’ of rationality, but we nevertheless ask ourselves whether he hasn’t paid too dearly for this disobedience. Nor does Kieslowski offer any explicit openings to grace. “Man”, as Sartre says, and Krzysztof of Decalogue 1 seems to agree, “is left alone, without excuse” (34).

Decalogue 2 settles more comfortably into the existential domain. The opening shot is, in an Angelopoulosian manner, an extreme wide shot and reveals the towering buildings of a housing complex in the early hours of the morning contrasted against the frail figure of a sweeper. And in the silence as he continues to sweep the ground, there arises a gentle sense of irony. Though the sweeper sweeps the ground, there is no ‘outside’ in which the dust can be got rid of. The dust will settle again and the sweeper will sweep again much in the futile repetition of Sisyphus’ toils. There is no exit.

The true nature and condition of one of the main characters in this film, a doctor, is revealed through an array of rich and expressive visual cues. He is a man of science and the first shot shows him testing a cactus plant with his hands, a symbol of death, barrenness and futility. As in the case of the father of Decalogue 1, the rational man desperately tries to make peace with his surrounding and unravel himself through whatever little his arid world can provide him with. His despair and reason’s indispensable need to imprison things for analysis can be clearly seen in his room much in the way that Tarkovsky reveals the scientist in ‘Solaris’.

Dorota Geller, a lady who lives right above the doctor finds herself forced to speak to him as her terminally ill husband is under his care. When she asks him if he knows who she is, the doctor curtly replies: “Yes, you’re the one who ran over my dog two years ago.” But it is this sense of loss, as in Decalogue 1, that unites them. Dorota has never had children and now the only time that she is pregnant, it is by somebody other than her husband. She wrings herself to agony in trying to decide whose life is more precious to her. After trying in vain to obtain an appointment with the doctor, she cruelly breaks one by one the new shoots of a young plant on her windowsill as she helplessly watches the doctor walking away. The act of destroying a young plant that is the first sign of life in the coldness of concrete reeking with death and decay seems gruesome but portrayed with stunning cinematic beauty.

In a silent scene, Dorota reaches the threshold of her sanity and her despair is portrayed in silence as she slowly pushes inch by inch a glass of wine to the edge of the table. There is no violence in her touch, but the spectacular shot of the glass as it falls and shatters to the floor into a million specks of light and the wine as it spills out of it gloriously, is reminiscent of Bergman. Even in that moment of dire agony, like in the earlier films of Bergman, Kieslowski gives us an image whose exquisite beauty and splendour transcend that agony.

In yet another example of this beauty, when Dorota learns from the doctor that he cannot know what the future holds, in her frustration she unwitting tries to snuff her cigarette in the matchbox. The matchbox catches fire and there is a bigger flame than the one she tries to extinguish. The doctor’s uncertain reply sets fire to her already burning self and plunges her into greater agony. If her husband dies she wants to keep the child, but if there is a possibility that he will get better then she will abort it, and with it the only chance of being a mother. But the doctor provides no final judgement to help her make a decision and Dorota is left to trust her own instincts.

If a man has committed a crime, however cruel and meaningless, how far should the law draw the line between holding the criminal responsible for his actions and granting him clemency? Decalogue 5, A Short Film about Killing, is an unsettling film about the justice of capital punishment. The protagonist is a young man, Jacek, who is shown throughout the film as a sadist and finally as a murderer. He is callous and impassive; he sees a street fight in which a young man is cornered and beaten up by several others but Jacek merely looks on and coolly walks away.

An old woman asks him to clear off because he is unknowingly frightening her pigeons. But he deliberately runs towards pigeons and scatters them all away while the woman watches on in helpless anger. In an instance of meaningless violence, Jacek looks down from the square onto the traffic that is circulating below and finding a large stone nearby, drops it on a car below. The car honks and goes awry and Jacek doesn’t even stop to look at the disaster he has initiated.

The film is strewn with such incidents of senseless violence and cruelty until Kieslowski makes sure that he has secured the disgust of the viewer towards this character. Eventually Jacek commits a brutal murder of a cab driver for no apparent reason. And yet, however deserving of capital punishment Jacek seems to be because of his crime, the last few scenes of execution leave the viewer in a state of deep malaise. And instead of the moral and ethical satisfaction that justice ought to provide, there is an ever increasing sense of inner discomfort. What we see of Jacek is not the cruel brutal murderer towards whom we harbour hate, but the poor helpless human being who is afraid to die and as helpless as the cab driver whom he has murdered. There is something in that terrible condition of vulnerability that makes us go beyond moral or ethical satisfaction and cry out in despair like the lawyer in the end: “I abhor it, I abhor it.”

Kieslowski’s characters are lonely, inarticulate yet proud people who are capable of reflection. There are long meditative moments of silence where the image is let to speak for itself. In each moment of reflection the character finds itself in the liminal spaces of being and lives constantly in a kind of mental smog. Like Bergman’s Pastor in Winter Light and Jonas who are both filled with different types of anguish and find different ways to deal with it, the Decalogue’s characters meander their way through their despair and finally reach an authentic action emerging through a debate with the self.

This action is nevertheless based on a freedom that is individual and is as the lawyer in Decalogue 2 says, “restricted only by the freedom of others”. And yet, they are cruelly faced with the realisation that they need and depend on others. There is no escape from the nemesis of culture except in the recognition that, although they can never be other than free beings they can also never be self-sufficient; they are free to open their lives-but in anguish-to the influence of the living God, or in pride to deny and repel Him. It is in this condition that both Bergman’s and Kieslowski’s characters find themselves in and proceed to resolve it in their individual ways.

Bergman explores these individual ways of dealing with anguish. Resolutions emerge through conflicts and tumults in the soul, anxieties, agonies, perilous adventures of faith into unknown territories. The reality of their existence proceeds thus from their ‘inwardness’, and not from anything that the mind can codify. Eventually, there is no legislator but man himself; that he himself, thus abandoned, must decide for himself; nothing can save him from himself, not even a valid proof of the existence of god.

Kieslowski deals with this anguish by touching upon subject matters and situations that link people: “There are too many things in the world which divide people, such as religion, politics, history, and nationalism. If culture is capable of anything, then it is finding that which unites us all. It doesn’t matter who you are or who I am, if your tooth aches or mine, it’s still the same pain.” (Abrahamson, np) And it is finally this pain, like all other feelings that link us together. We all fear the same way and the same things. And we all love in the same way. Sartre’s Inez also seems to agree: “What’s the point of playacting, trying to throw dust in each other’s eyes? We’re all tarred with the same brush” (No Exit, 7).

Works Cited

Abrahamson, Patrick. “Kieslowski’s Many Colours.” Oxford University Student Newspaper, June 2, 1995.

Corliss, Richard. “The Dazzling Decalogues.” The Arts/Show Business July 27, 1998 Vol. 152 No. 4 Time.com.

Corliss, Richard: The Dazzling Decalogues, The Arts/Show Business, Time Magazine, Vol. 152 No. 4, July 27, 1998.

Cunneen, Joseph: “Kieslowski On The Mountaintop: Ten Commandments from the latePolish director”, Commonweal, Vol. 124, No. 14, August 15, 1997.

Kieslowski, Krzysztof. “A Masterclass for Young Directors 1994.” Documentart, Filmmaking, Cinephilia & Beyond. Transcript. https://cinephiliabeyond.org/krzysztof-kieslowski-masterclass-young-directors/

Lucas, Tim, “‘How Death Will Judge Us’: A Krzysztof Kieślowski Videolog,” in Video Watchdog (Cincinnati, Ohio), no. 30, 1995.

Sartre, Jean-Paul. No Exit and Three Other Plays. (tr.) L. Abel. Vintage Books Edition, September 1955.

–. Existentialism and Humanism. (tr.) Philip Mairet. Methuen & Co. Ltd: London, 1970.

Tristram Shandy

Laurence Sterne’s ‘novel’ Tristram Shandy, born in the latter part of the eighteenth century, found itself in a waning tradition of biting satire of the kind earlier propagated by Pope and Swift. Although it is itself clearly a satire, through its meandering in and out of “scintillating wit and whimsical baffoonery” (Stedmond, 53), Tristram Shandy is nevertheless much more good-humoured than its predecessors. Even its profuse bawdy humour that presents itself almost naively throughout the novel, prompted Samuel Johnson to respond with “Nothing odd will do too long.”

And yet, two and a half centuries later, Tristram Shandy came to be widely regarded as the godfather of modernist literature. Sterne’s wild experimentation with form and voice was a radical departure from the orderly, structurally unified novels of the day, such as Fielding’s Tom Jones, and considerably ahead of its time. Sterne’s childhood was spent following his father’s army regiment around England and Ireland. This early experience of military life was to inspire some of his most memorable comic characters, including the war-game obsessed Uncle Toby and Corporal Trim. The satirical and stylistic influence of Rabelais and Cervantes can also be felt throughout Tristram Shandy, whilst the philosophy of John Locke informs one of the book’s key themes: the association of ideas.

The protagonist’s constant straying away from the story, if it could be called a story at all, switching back and forth in time, the smallest of trivialities or comical accidents triggering off the most outrageous fabrications, all contribute to render Tristram Shandy, a novel of digressions rather than of narrative. “Digressions, incontestably, are the sunshine; – they are the life, the soul of reading! – take them out of this book, for instance,- you might as well take the book along with them” (50). And it is in this digression that the novel retains its uniqueness, a uniqueness upon which the author had long deliberated rather than stumbled upon. Thus although the author constantly laments having so much yet to write about, he still cannot check himself from straying into apparently irrelevant incidents. There is an implicit sense then, of the futility of recounting in the first place. This futility of communication seems to occur, not because of a lack of means but because the author takes on the impossible task of writing about his life while living it.

The central irony of the book is that the novel is being written more slowly than the life that is being lived, that while Tristram sits down to pen an incident, he nevertheless lives in a continuum of space and time and his experience keeps accumulating thus always adding to what he has to write.

Through this sort of hermeneutics, Sterne also seems to throw light on the complexity of human beings which are, like Tristram, brought into society by accident, or even through a process so mechanized and regulated that there is almost nothing human about it as suggested in the opening scenes with the winding of the clock. After being thus ejected into the world, human beings have to further undergo the trauma of baptism in order to exist and own an identity. It is Walter Shandy’s “magic bias” that will decide the character of his son through a name. But, Tristram is in fact a victim of several accidents, the biggest of which is probably his birth as not only is he mis-named and de-sexed in the novel, he appears, rather than the protagonist, more as a minor character or narrator whose voice is subordinated to the description of the other characters.

Tristram in the novel is in fact nothing more than a voice and yet it is Yorick that the author speaks through, deserting Tristram almost as cruelly as he does the other characters. The narration of the story is futile not because of the narrator’s continuous existence, but because of the characters in his world who are immune to him even in moments of severe crisis. This was the case when the maid and Dr Slop are trying to attend to Tristram after the window sash incident but fall to quarreling among themselves, leaving Tristram by the wayside. Everyone rides his hobby-horse and thus, not only is there no one to be part of the Tristam’s story, there is no one to listen to him as well. He is himself, like the rest of his characters, riding his own hobby horse of trying to recount a story that is never going to end.

This is where Sterne seems to equalize all his characters and allay a little bit of Tristram’s victimhood in a world in which everyone spins in his respective orbit but nevertheless in the gravitational field of the other. In a tower of Babel-like situation, everyone simultaneously talks about his own life and opinions in a desperate need to be understood and in the end, the confused hodgepodge of voices that is heard is not very different from the narrative chaos that undermines every attempt of Tristram to begin at the beginning. “Tristram Shandy is quintessentially a book about man’s attempt to give a reasonable and definitive form to his experience of the world-and about the inevitable tendency of experience to run counter to man’s formulations” (Briggs, 195).

Upon closer inspection, the narrator’s statements about narrating what he is doing and when he is doing it are seen as somehow “above or beyond the plot, as if these were outside the domain of the narrative proper- as if they existed as critical comments on narrative rather than as part of the narrative itself” (Williams, 1032). The narrator always freely shifts positions. He is self-reflexive in the way that he is aware that he is recounting his life ‘story’ and at the same time keep reminds us about it too. Unlike the self-effacing omniscient narrator, the self-conscious narrator of Tristram Shandy flaunts his whims and narrative agency to the reader. He can have a marbled page in the middle of the novel if he likes, he can have absurd patterns of asterisks or of any other typing symbol that he likes, he can even pretend the novel was suddenly a play and give stage directions to Garrick.

If he chooses, he can refrain from description altogether, then the reader might be at sea when it comes to certain events like the window sash circumcision: “It is in vain to leave this to the reader’s imagination” (377). This kind of narrator is then enormously powerful. Not only does he provide the narrative, but admits that he is as fallible as us, as ignorant. The reader’s interpretation is as biased as the narrator’s. There is no pretension of objectivity or reality. As the title itself spells out, the novel is not just about the life of Tristram Shandy, it is also about his opinions. Any act of narration is necessarily also interlinked with the act of sentience. To ‘be’ is necessarily tangled with the activity of explaining being.

In as much as Tristram may be considered as rhetor, the whole book consists of his “oration.” But this is the rhetoric of a “fool.” And it carries some interesting implications about Sterne’s conception of the nature of his audience. Like Swift in The Modest Proposal, he shocks the more squeamish members by reflecting upon their own underlying preconceptions. One kind of empty verbalism against which both Swift and Pope inveighed was the fulsome praise of the prospective patron. Sterne’s dedication of his first volume to Pitt is, significantly, not fulsome. Sterne was of course seeking a patron of a different kind-the reading public at large. He implicitly dedicates his book to them by titillating their tastes, while at the same time managing to satirize the human foibles involved in that taste. Thus, though dedicating his book to the “Lord Public,” he attempts to unseat that Lord from some of his “Hobby-Horses,” or at least to make him more aware of his “ruling passions.”

“With an ass,” Tristram says in his account of his travels in Volume VII, “I can commune forever.” Not so with jackdaws or apes, for they speak and act by rote. But with an ass, “surely never is my imagination so busy as in framing his responses from the etchings of his countenance-and where those carry me not deep enough-in flying from my own heart into his, and seeing what is natural for an ass to think-as well as a man, upon the occasion” (VII. xxxii.). The reader whose responses Tristram can gauge as accurately as he can those of an ass is one who will laugh at certain words in the bedchamber, but abuse them in the parlor. For his sake, Tristram must seek devices whereby he can “satisfy that ear which the reader chuses to lend me,” while not dissatisfying “the other which he keeps to himself” (VII. xx.).

Works Cited–

Briggs, Peter M. “Locke’s ‘Essay’ and the Tentativeness of ‘Tristram Shandy’.”
Studies in Philology, Vol. 82, No. 4 (Autumn, 1985), pp. 493-520.

Stedmond, J. M. “Satire and Tristram Shandy.”Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, Vol. 1, No. 3, Restoration and Eighteenth Century,(Summer, 1961), Rice University, pp. 53-63.

Williams, Jeffery. “Narrative of Narrative (Tristram Shandy).”MLN, Vol. 105, No. 5, Comparative Literature (Dec., 1990), The Johns Hopkins University Press, pp. 1032-1045.

Reflections on the Formative and Realist traditions of Film Theory

The cinematic aesthetic for the Formalists was that film is a making. Eisenstein considered the artistic activity to be, more precisely, of “building”. To attain reality one had to destroy realism, break up the appearances of a phenomenon and reconstruct them according to a ‘reality principle’. In contrast, the Realist tradition emphasized looking at life the way it was and to let nature speak for itself. The Formalists were always interested in the question of film as an art and what characterized art in the first place. Art belonged to the aesthetic sphere as an object, which does nothing but exists for our intense perception and contemplation. The Formalists prescribed to art the role of ‘recovering the sensation of life’ and revealing the defining qualities of objects. Thus the technique of art became a means to defamiliarize objects, to make forms difficult and to subordinate objects to the experience of their ‘objectness’. It ‘wrenched objects’ from their normal surroundings and distorted them in a way that called for attention. Technique thus became synonymous with art and deviation was required to stimulate the process of contemplation. With the second wave of Formalism, however, foregrounding required that the technique of art make objects necessarily challenging so that finally, the degree of deviation in an object served as a criterion for art.

Even though both the traditions believed in the process of perception or contemplation of the world, while the Formalist took upon himself to make objects strange in order to force extended attention, the Realist merely offered the viewer the chance for greater contemplation through devices like the long take and multiple plains of action using the depth of field. And it is precisely this continuity of vision that the Formalists, especially Eisenstein strove to break with his theory of montage and shock of attractions. While contrast was important to Eisenstein, Bazin rejected montage, though without discarding editing, in favour of images with depth that offered a fuller image for contemplation.

Although the formalists differ in their ideas of the raw material of film, (Eisenstein with his attractions, Pudovkin with the shot itself, Arnheim with the technical deficiencies that prevent cinema from replicating the visibly real perfectly) the realists more or less agreed that the raw material for film was the visible world around us. It is however interesting to notice the complementary points of views of Arnheim and Kracauer which would amount to saying that while Arnheim sees the glass half empty, Kracauer sees it half full. For Arnheim cinema attains its peculiarities through its technical deficiencies in replicating reality exactly; for Kracauer however, it is precisely the capacity of the medium to record or to photograph reality, although inaccurately, that is its strength and peculiarity. The Formalist theory noted a difference in the visible reality and the capacity to grasp it in various ways, but the Realist theory held that the photographed image was ontologically bound to its object.

Kracauer sees the function of the filmmaker to read reality and his medium justly and employ the proper techniques to find a balance between the two. With the Realists, there is a tendency that not all things in the visible reality are photographable; some things lend themselves to the camera more readily than others. Nature is allowed precedence and it is a pattern in nature that dictates the filmmaker, not his own impulses or desires for self-expression. The fundamental difference between the two traditions also arises from the fact that the Formalists saw film as a tool to convey a particular message. Though Realism was closely tied with social function, film was more a way of seeing the world, a window rather than a frame. The other difference lies in the way both traditions treated their audiences. Eisenstein conceives film as a machine which has predictable results and which is used after a particular end has been envisaged. The Formalist filmmaker designs, constructs, and destroys his elements with his audience in mind. But for the Realist, there is no specific audience, no specific end to achieve except that of showing reality. The Realist’s focus is not on the audience but on the perceived object that is mediated through the medium. Cinema, as Kracauer says, is about the curiosity about reality, not a medium for self expression. Thus, while Formalism uses the medium as a frame to neutralize the world, Realism uses it as a window to see the world.

The limitations with the Formalist tradition as Balazs remarks in the case of Eisenstein, is that it lacked naturalness. Eisenstein and Pudovkin were both engineers and they saw art as a machine with a specific purpose and a precise end. Even though they saw human beings as evolving and devoid of any essences, their notion of constructing meaning by consciously creating, against the naturalism of the mind, an environment for a psychological result supposed that they could control every aspect of the audience’s mind. They defined a specific manner in which they expected the audience to watch the film and interpret the juxtaposition. In his example of the Japanese ideogram, (a picture of a bird and a mouth means to sing, which a picture of a child and a mouth means to cry) Eisenstein knows how to interpret the juxtaposition. But in the case of montage pieces, the viewer is constantly confronted with new and ever-increasing number of alphabets, as it were, in addition to which unlike the static bird and child, the visual content is constantly in motion. In trying to assign a precise role to art, as if it were a work like any other, and in their obsessive fervour to deny realism in a strain similar to surrealists of the same age, the Formalists forgot to leave room for spontaneity.

The usefulness of the Realists on the other hand, lay in the fact that they did not try to manipulate their audience’s reactions. In their belief of naturalism, they hoped to provide a renewed perspective, which aligned the viewer with nature and thus laid the foundation for change. Yet, while Kracauer talks of a balance between Formalist and Realist tendencies, the film could not be the director’s self –expression, he could not exert his imagination. In their belief to see the world as it is, they seem to think of it as given and easily accessible. But the visible reality is not as objective or as obvious a phenomenon as it might seem, as Kracauer realises, because it attains meaning only in a human context as it is finally intercepted and grasped by a human mind. Thus as Balazs finally says, although the two traditions seem opposed to one another, they are ultimately different in emphasis rather than in choice: while the Realists began with reality and the photographic ability of the camera, the Formalists began with cinema’s own language ability, the principle of editing.

Reference:

Andrew, J. Dudley. The Major Film Theories: An Introduction. London: Oxford University Press, 1976