English
4650: Metafiction, Abstract Expressionism &
Film Noir—Brian Kiteley
Winter 2007
Email: bkiteley@du.edu
TEXTS:
Guy Davenport, The
Hunter Gracchus; Counterpoint, 1887178554
Donald Barthelme, Sixty Stories;
Penguin Classics, 0142437395
Donald Barthelme,
Forty Stories; Penguin Classics, 0142437816
William H. Gass, In
the Heart of the Heart of the Country; Godine,
0879233745
William H. Gass, On
Being Blue; Godine, 0879232374
Grace Paley, Collected
Stories; Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 0374530289
Robert Coover, Pricksongs and
Descants; Grove Press, 0802136672
Mary Ann Caws, Robert
Motherwell: with pen and brush; Reaktion Books, 1861891415
Arthur Danto, Philosophizing Art: Selected Essays; University of California, 0520229061
The Introduction to the Film Noir Reader, by
Alain Silver
“The Simple Art of
Murder,” by Raymond Chandler
An essay on pulp fiction
We will also look at these films: “Double
Indemnity,” “The Big Heat,” and “The Big Sleep.”
COURSE SCHEDULE:
ABOUT THE COURSE:
The title should say a great deal. The three parts of the course are not
equal. The fiction will predominate, and
Donald Barthelme’s short stories will dominate the fiction we’ll
read. We will also look at film, slides,
and some art and film criticism. This
will be a course of associative collage.
We will make attempts to connect the dots between the three parts, but I
don’t expect the connections will be all that binding. Guy Davenport’s essay
“Civilization and Its Opposite in the 1940s” is the egg or packet
of chromosomes of the course.
At the very end of the movie “Double
Indemnity,” Walter Neff (played by Fred MacMurray)
says, “You know why you couldn’t figure this one, Keyes? I'll tell ya. ’Cause the guy you were looking for was
too close, right across the desk from you.” His friend and colleague in the insurance
company Keyes (played by Edward G. Robinson) says: “Closer than that,
Walter.” Neff replies, “I
love you, too.” Neff tries to
light a crumpled, bloody cigarette he has pulled from his jacket. Throughout the film, before this moment,
Keyes has always been the one who did not have a match, and Neff would light
one by flicking his thumbnail against the match head. At this moment, Keyes produces a match, and
he lights it for his dying friend.
This was the third movie Billy Wilder directed, and it is
often spoken of as the first Film Noir.
It was co-written by Wilder and the great American noir writer, Raymond
Chandler, from a novel by James M. Cain.
This was
Stanley Crouch, in Slate, talks about the influence of
the Third Reich and Hitler on the form:
A number of its most influential
directors were European Jews like Fritz Lang, Otto Preminger,
and Billy Wilder, all of whom had escaped the Nazis. The enthusiastic support of the Third Reich
by the German people had convinced such artists that conformity always had
to be questioned, ridiculed, and perhaps resisted. Another assumption was that
corruption hid behind images of a gilded civilization, high-class refinement,
uplift, and thorough social improvement.
So, in one sense, Adolf Hitler was a major player in forming the
sensibility of film noir. That Austrian
boy whom Chaplin accused of having made off with his mustache had done it again
but, as usual, not in the way the paperhanger intended.
Like Film Noir, Abstract Expressionism is supposed to be
the first great homegrown American art movement, although it too was heavily
influenced by the arrival, during the Second World War, of dozens of great
European painters, particularly the Dutch abstract painter Piet
Mondrian, who was not well-known in the US before he
arrived in New York in 1940. Abstract
Expressionism did signal that
Metafiction is the American approach to
narrative that grew out of the same impulses that created Dadaism, surrealism,
the theater of the absurd, and magic realism, and yet it feels peculiarly
native to our soil, with fascinations for high and low culture that few
European or Latin American practitioners of similar fiction had and very little
interest in magic or fantasy. This
American postmodernism shares with Film Noir a cynicism, a hard-boiled prose
style, and a very dark humor. Only
Donald Barthelme of these writers had any sustained contact with the Abstract
Expressionists (particularly when he was
curator of a museum of contemporary art in Houston, during the year he edited the art
and literary journal Location in New
York with Clement Greenberg, and at the
Cedar Tavern a few blocks from his apartment, where many of these artists held
court). All of these movements are considered the
first purely American approaches to their arts and yet each grew quite
naturally out of European aesthetics and the close contact between exiled
European and American artists during and after the Second World War. Two began in the 1940s. Metafiction reached
its heights in the 1960s, and we might more comfortably pair it with Pop Art
and the New Wave of French cinema.
We’ll explore these tenuous relationships and see what we find on
the dark alleys and rain-soaked streets of our sunny American cities.
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Technic is the result of a need—
new needs demand new technics—
total control—denial of the accident—
States of order—
organic intensity—
energy and motion made visible—
memories arrested in space,
human needs and motives—
acceptance—
—Jackson
Pollock, Jackson Pollock: A Catalogue Raisonné of
Paintings, Drawings and Other Works
In Watt (1953)
the protagonist totally replaces the world with his verbal constructs when he realizes
the impossibility of transcribing it. In
attempting to grasp the meaning of phenomena, he enumerates every possible
combination and permutation he can think of for each set of circumstances, in
an attempt to construct a system which will offer him a stable identity. However, as Mr Nixon tells Mr Hackett,
“I tell you nothing is known. Nothing” (p. 20). The human mind is a fallible instrument of
measurement and the external world a chaos.
Knowledge derived from human calculation or generalization can only
demonstrate the epistemological distance between consciousness and objective
reality, however exhaustive the account.
—Patricia Waugh, Metafiction: The Theory & Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction
David
Amfam, in a review of Michael Leja’s
Reframing Abstract Expressionism in Art in
America in 1994 (here is a link to the whole
review), notes the relationship between Abstract Expressionism and Film Noir:
Leja discusses Rothko’s Slow Swirl by the Edge of the Sea and its noir-like combination of the tragic and the comic but does not note its similarity to the cinematic representation of dreams through slow motion and out-of-focus effects. The connections between Willem de Kooning’s work and film noir go beyond noir-ish gender stereotypes of that artist’s imagery, which Leja mentions, to the more subtle manner in which film noir made ways of seeing its actual subject. De Kooning’s repertoire of dislocated presences and slipping glimpses, beginning in his work of the 1940s, corresponds with themes in film and roman noir where an “I” is also an “eye” that either sees, fails to see, or is itself being seen. Leja asserts that the excess of subjectivity in Abstract Expressionism is an attempt to support the category of “self.” But he does not consider the possibility that it may instead be a critique of the limits of the self.
This
is link to a wonderful essay, “Exorcising Beckett,” by
Lawrence Shainberg.
A Timeline
of Abstract Expressionism, by Stella Paul at the
The new abstract painting,
an Art News piece.
Here is Jessamyn West’s wonderful page on Donald Barthelme—a
quick reference. And here is a link to
Helen Moore Barthelme’s memoir of her
marriage to Donald Barthelme (this is available only to DU students and
faculty). And here are David
Gates’ explanatory notes
for Sixty Stories.
Here is the complete screenplay
of “Double Indemnity.”
Take a look at these
self-portraits William Utermohlen painted as he
descended into Alzheimer’s (from The
New York Times Oct 24, 2006): Image 1, Image 2, Image 3, Image 4. I don’t mean to imply that Abstract
Impressionism and brain dysfunction are comparable, but it’s interesting
to see the movement from orderly self-portraits to these darker, more stripped
down images of the face, even as the self begins to dwindle and disintegrate. William Utermohlen
said he painted the way he painted, as the disease progressed, because he could
see no other way of representing himself.
Here’s a link to a Norman
Rockwell painting
of a man looking at a Jackson Pollock painting.
David Usborne, in The Independent:
One day in 1950 [Hans Namuth]
arrived at Springs after arranging with the painter to
take pictures of [Jackson Pollock] in the barn.
On his arrival, he was put out to find Pollock standing over a canvas in
the barn that apparently was already done.
"A dripping wet canvas covered the entire
floor," he later recalled.
"There was complete silence ... Pollock looked at the
painting. Then, unexpectedly, he picked
up can and paint brush and started to move around the canvas. It was as if he suddenly realized the
painting was not finished. His
movements, slow at first, gradually became faster and more dance-like as he
flung black, white, and rust-colored paint onto the canvas. He completely forgot that Lee and I were
there; he did not seem to hear the click of the camera shutter ... My photography session lasted as long as he
kept painting, perhaps half an hour. In
all that time, Pollock did not stop. How
could one keep up this level of activity? Finally, he said 'This is it'."
From The Museum of Modern Art, MoMA Highlights,
True to an alternate name for Abstract
Expressionism, “action painting,” Franz Kline’s pictures often
suggest broad, confident, quickly executed gestures reflecting the artist’s spontaneous
impulses. Yet Kline seldom worked that way. In the late 1940s, chancing to project some of
his many drawings on the wall, he found that their lines, when magnified,
gained abstraction and sweeping force. This discovery
inspired all of his subsequent painting; in fact many canvases reproduce a
drawing on a much larger scale, fusing the improvised and the deliberate, the
miniature and the monumental.
“Chief” was the name of a locomotive Kline remembered from his
childhood, when he had loved the railway. Many viewers see
machinery in Kline’s images, and
there are lines in Chief that imply speed and power as they rush off the
edge of the canvas, swelling tautly as they go. But Kline
claimed to paint “not what I see
but the feelings aroused in me by that looking,” and Chief is abstract, an uneven
framework of horizontals and verticals broken by loops and curves. The cipherlike
quality of Kline’s
con-figurations, and his use of black and white, have provoked comparisons with
Japanese calligraphy, but Kline did not see himself as painting black signs on
a white ground; “I paint the white
as well as the black,” he said, “and the white is
just as important.”
And
here’s a link to this
painting, at MoMA.
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