La Tour (1987) by François Schuiten and Benoît Peeters is the third story in the Cités Obscures series, although it’s the fourth volume if you want to be strictly canon about things, L’achivist, a guide to places in the Obscure World, having preceded it.

Carcere Oscura by Piranesi (1750).

This is another book where Schuiten and Peeters’ interests tick a list of my own obsessions, being a tale which seems to originate in the question “What would it be like if you crossed Piranesi’s Prisons etchings with Brueghel’s Tower of Babel?” The protagonist of La Tour, Giovanni Battista, has his name borrowed from Piranesi’s forenames and his appearance taken from Orson Welles’ Falstaff in Chimes at Midnight. The story owes something to Kafka, although it lacks Kafka’s drift towards paradox, concerning a colossal building referred to throughout as The Tower, a structure we only ever see in close-up—and then mostly from the inside—but whose height must reach several thousand feet.

Battista (above) is one of the Keepers, a group of men charged with maintaining small sections of the Tower whose structure suffers continual decay and collapse. Tired of years spent in complete isolation, and concerned that other Keepers aren’t doing their job, Battista goes in search of the Tower’s feared Inspectors, only to discover that the lack of maintenance is endemic and few of the Tower’s scattered residents have any idea of the origin or purpose of the vast building where they’ve spent their lives, never mind a concern for its upkeep. There are no Inspectors, and while Battista is worried at the beginning about vines in the stonework, we later see small forests growing among the ruins. Kafka resonances come with the mention of the mysterious Base, and the equally mysterious Pioneers, those builders and engineers who went ahead years or even centuries before, climbing skyward.

It’s a surprise reading this book after the first two with their late 19th and early 20th century appearance. The world of La Tour is quite medieval, especially the small community in which Battista finds himself after a near-fatal fall from a jerry-rigged kite. The most sophisticated technology we see is in the home of a doctor, Elias, whose house contains histories of the Tower’s construction as well as astrolabes and armillary spheres. (The latter device plays a key role in a later story.) The only clue we’re in the Obscure World at all comes with a close view of a polyhedral globe which shows the Tower on one face with the cities of Xhystos and Samaris on the others. Aside from Elias, none of the inhabitants of the Tower are aware of, or curious about, anything outside their vast building.

Elias also has a collection of paintings which show the history of the Tower’s design. Several of these are Schuiten’s variations on famous pictures, including the Brueghel Tower of Babel. Less familiar is a version of the curious Historical Monument of the American Republic (1867-88) by Erastus Salisbury Field. The paintings in the Tower are distinguished by being shown in colour while everything else is black-and-white, a distinction used later in the story to striking effect.

Historical Monument of the American Republic by Erastus Salisbury Field (1867–88).

This is a far longer book than the previous ones, and its final third concerns a fascinating journey of several weeks by Battista and a young woman, Milena, up the Tower in search of the Pioneers. Once again, I don’t want to spoil the story but it rather runs out of steam at the end; as with Les Murailles de Samaris there’s a feeling that the creators weren’t sure what to do with their splendid creation once they’d invented it. But the drawing more than makes up for that, with Schuiten once again showing an apparently effortless mastery of a given style, superbly rendering walls of Piranesian vastness, Chartres-like flying buttresses and masses of cross-hatched shading. The journey to the top of the Tower—and the return down—is worth it for the view alone.

• Piranesi / Schuiten. Arquitectura, Comics y Clasicismo | A Spanish examination of Piranesi’s influence on Schuiten.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• La fièvre d’Urbicande by Schuiten & Peeters
• Les Murailles de Samaris by Schuiten & Peeters
• The art of François Schuiten
• Taxandria, or Raoul Servais meets Paul Delvaux
• Aldous Huxley on Piranesi’s Prisons

left: Serpentine pattern; right: Bouquet pattern, both 19th c.

Regular readers here will have seen a number of posts recently concerning psychedelic culture, a perennial fascination/obsession of mine. One of the notable qualities of movements such as psychedelia or Surrealism is the way they highlight what seem to be previous manifestations of themselves which, until their emergence, lacked a specific label. Borges examined the literary version of this phenomenon in his 1951 essay, Kafka and His Precursors. In art and design, the vivid and chaotic appearance of psychedelic visuals cause us to class certain products of earlier centuries as psychedelic even though they were never intended as such. The Victorian era is especially rich in this regard with its proliferation of Paisley textile designs—which saw a resurgence in the 1960s—the fractal cats of artist Louis Wain, and incredible marbled papers such as these, the samples above being from a University of Washington collection. Of particular interest is the details of their creation; the look is familiar enough but one rarely sees any mention of how paper manufacturers went about designing or even making new works. I selected a red and black marbled paper for the endpapers of The Adventures of Little Lou which we produced at Savoy Books in 2007. The sheets used for that book were handmade, not printed copies, and had to be ordered from a specialist supplier in Scotland.

Via Design Observer.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Paisley patterns
• The Adventures of Little Lou

The White Peacock (1910).

A typical piece of mysterious erotica by Austrian illustrator and pornographer Franz von Bayros (1866–1924). Like all good Decadents, Bayros used peacocks and peacock feathers as decorative motifs in his pictures but this is the first I’ve seen where the peacock itself is the result of amorous attention. If that sounds overly-perverse, you haven’t seen his Sweet Snail.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Kafka’s porn unveiled
• The art of ejaculation
• The art of Félicien Rops, 1833–1898

Nova Venus (1938).

I doubt that illustrator Mahlon Blaine featured in any of the scurrilous porn books in Franz Kafka’s collection—he would have been too young, for a start—but his erotic work isn’t so far removed from some of the artists of The Amethyst and Opals. As usual with obscure talents of this period it’s good to know that someone has already done the required legwork in assembling biographical details. The always reliable Bud Plant has a page about Mahlon Blaine’s life and work, and there’s also a website, The Outlandish Art of Mahlon Blaine. Blaine’s quality control is variable but there’s a trace of the usual suspects in many of these drawings, notably Harry Clarke and, occasionally, the etiolated shade of the Divine Aubrey. (Beardsley, to you.) Similarities too to contemporaries such as Wallace Smith and John Austen, both of whom owe a debt to Clarke and Beardsley. The drawing above comes from this gallery which is among the better sets available.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Kafka’s porn unveiled

Pages from Der Amethyst (1906).

Okay, don’t get too excited, I simply wanted to make a couple of points of order while this story is still causing a stir. I noted earlier the recent (London) Times piece about James Hawes’ new book, Excavating Kafka, described as a work which:

seeks to explode important myths surrounding the literary icon, a “quasi-saintly” image which hardly fits with the dark and shocking pictures contained in these banned journals.

Hawes claims to have been surprised, if not shocked, by the discovery—new to him but not to Kafka scholars, it seems—of Kafka’s collection of Franz Blei publications, The Amethyst and Opals. Blei published Kafka’s short stories as well as other literary works and fits the mould of many small publishers (Leonard Smithers and Maurice Girodias come to mind) who financed poorly-selling literature with erotic titles. Kafka may well have been “paid” for his writing with these books. However:

Even today, the pornography would be “on the top shelf”, Dr Hawes said, noting that his American publisher did not want him to publish it at first. “These are not naughty postcards from the beach. They are undoubtedly porn, pure and simple. Some of it is quite dark, with animals committing fellatio and girl-on-girl action… It’s quite unpleasant.”

Read the rest of the breathless saga here. The Times doesn’t show any of the pictures in that piece but the paper edition showed a drawing which looked like the usual erotica of the period, a slightly cruder version of the kind of thing done so well by artists like Franz von Bayros. So not photographs, then, but drawings. Sure enough, descriptions of Blei’s books list well-known names such as Aubrey Beardsley, Alfred Kubin, Thomas Theodore Heine, Karl Hofer, Félicien Rops, and von Bayros. Yesterday’s Guardian examined some of the reaction to Hawes’ assertions from other Kafka scholars which is generally hostile, their counter-assertion being that he’s making a mountain out of a molehill. That piece includes another description of the depraved contents:

They include images of a hedgehog-style creature performing fellatio, golem-like male creatures grasping women’s breasts with their claw-like hands and a picture of a baby emerging from a sliced-open leg.

Hmm…Beardsley, sliced-open leg? That could only be Aubrey’s illustration for Lucian’s True History. Sensitive readers may wish to avert their gaze.

Birth from the Calf of the Leg. Illustration intended for Lucian’s True History (1894). Not used, but published in An Issue of Five Drawings Illustrative of Juvenal and Lucian by Leonard Smithers, London (1906).

Shocking stuff. Allow me to veer from the point for a moment with Beardsley scholar Brian Reade’s explanation of that drawing:

This illustration (was) rejected from the 1894 and 1902 editions of Lucian’s True History. At the time when it was drawn the artist was obsessed by foetuses and irregular births; creatures derived from the foetus form occur in the Bon-Mots series, in The Kiss of Judas, in Salome and elsewhere. That he chose to illustrate this subject suggests that there may have been a latent strain of homosexuality in Beardsley. Lucian describes in his True History the way in which children are born in the kingdom of Endymion on the Moon. “They are not begotten of women, but of mankind: for they have no other marriage but of males: the name of woman is wholly unknown among them: until they accomplish the age of five and twenty years, they are given in marriage to others: from that time forwards they take others in marriage to themselves: for as soon as the infant is conceived the leg begins to swell, and afterwards when the time of birth is come, they give it a lance and take it out dead: then they lay it abroad with open mouth towards the wind, and so it takes life: and I think thereof the Grecians call it the belly of the leg, because therein they bear their children instead of a belly”. Lucian also explains that “their boys admit copulation, not like unto ours, but in their hams, a little above the calf of the leg for there they are open”.

The other drawings mentioned by the Guardian don’t sound familiar but may well be by Alfred Kubin who produced a number of curious erotic pieces, one of which is in my Art of Ejaculation post. Meanwhile Die Welt Online reproduces some of the Félicien Rops pictures in a small gallery, all of which are rather innocuous depictions of prostitutes.

Rops could be a lot weirder and wilder than this. (See his Octopus drawing of 1900.) I haven’t seen Hawes’ book yet, but going on this evidence it seems the Kafka scholars may have a point about his inflated claims. Much of this work was shocking at the time, of course, and open publication of some of it would have been an invitation to an obscenity prosecution. But I’ll let the Kafka scholars haggle over Franz’s reputation, quasi-saintly or not; the main point for me was that the works in question are very familiar to anyone who knows the art of the period. So in place of rancour, here’s a nice homoerotic painting by another of the artists published by Blei, Karl Hofer, in style and colour reminiscent of Picasso’s Rose Period pictures.

Drei Badende Jünglinge by Karl Hofer (1907).

Update: this volume finally turned up in the Savoy Books office so I was able to look through it. The Beardsley picture above is indeed among the very few examples of “Kafka’s porn”, used without any credit and Beardsley receives no mention in the index. There’s also a Félicien Rops drawing with a caption which says it “may be Victorian”, along with a couple of other pieces, all equally uncredited. Yes, that’s the level of the scholarship at work here; the author couldn’t even be bothered to research the art in question. Summary: worthless.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• A postcard from Doctor Kafka
• Alexandre Alexeieff and Claire Parker
• Hugo Steiner-Prag’s Golem
• Steven Soderbergh’s Kafka
• Kafka and Kupka
• The art of ejaculation
• The art of Félicien Rops, 1833–1898

So it arrived at last, yesterday in fact, the colossal volume that is A Lovecraft Retrospective: Artists Inspired by HP Lovecraft from Centipede Press. Calling this a book is like calling the Great Pyramid of Cheops a pile of stones, technically accurate but the words somewhat fail to convey the existential reality. This is the heaviest book I’ve ever come across, 400 pages of heavy-duty art paper at BIG size. (Amazon gives the dimensions as 16.1 x 12.6 x 2.3 inches or 409 x 320 x 580 mm.) The photo above shows the scale beside an old Mountains of Madness paperback (Ian Miller’s cover art appears in full in the new book) and my own Haunter of the Dark collection. The cover art is by Michael Whelan, a detail from his wonderful 1981 HPL panoramas.

The Virgil Finlay section showing The Colour Out of Space and his definitive Lovecraft portrait.

The range of contributors past and present includes JK Potter, HR Giger, Raymond Bayless, Ian Miller, Virgil Finlay, Lee Brown Coye, Hannes Bok, Rowena Morrill, Bob Eggleton, Allen Koszowski, Mike Mignola, Howard V. Brown, Michael Whelan, Tim White, Frank Frazetta, John Holmes, Harry O. Morris, Murray Tinkelman, Gabriel, Don Punchatz, Helmut Wenske, John Stewart, Thomas Ligotti and John Jude Palencar. The introduction is by Harlan Ellison and there’s an afterword by Thomas Ligotti. Many pages fold out to reveal spreads like the Giger ones below. Print quality is exceptional, of course, but then ladling the superlatives is pointless when it’s obvious this is a sui generis masterpiece of Lovecraftian art. Naturally I’m very happy indeed to be a part of it.

A pair of Necronoms by HR Giger.

I don’t have to photograph too much since other people have been doing the same with their copies. Matt Staggs has more pictures of the contents here and Jeff VanderMeer has made the book a feature of his latest art column for io9. Jeff talks to Centipede Press’s Jerad Walters about the book’s production and notes on his own blog what an important, landmark volume this is. Having done my fair share of book production I can imagine what an undertaking it was. Jerad should be very pleased he’s been able to put together a book which bests the productions of multinational publishers with their armies of staff. And we might even ask why it’s left to a small independent publisher to produce something of this quality at all.

Jeff asked me a few questions for his io9 piece which I’m reproducing in full here.

• Everyone knows what Lovecraft means to fantasy and horror. What do you think he meant for the idea of “cosmic SF”?

JC: The young Lovecraft was a keen astronomer who became acquainted at an early age with a sense of cosmic scale, the vastness of the universe and so on. That combined with a natural pessimism and his later atheism gave him a strong sense of human insignificance in the face of cosmic enormity. “We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity,” as he says at the opening of The Call of Cthulhu.

His problem as a writer was that most Western supernatural fiction up to that point had some kind of Christian dimension to it, even if this wasn’t directly stated. That was obviously a problem for an atheist writing a form of fiction which needed something malevolent at its core. His solution was to replace the Devil and the Christian idea of evil with vast extra-dimensional entities which disturb or threaten us either because we mean as much to them as microbes do to human beings or (in the case of Cthulhu) they’re eager to take reclaim the earth for their own destructive ends. All of Lovecraft’s best fiction tends to be sf used for horror purposes; he’s telling the same old tales about what might lurk in the dark beyond the campfire, only the campfire is now the planet Earth and the dark is the interstellar void.

• What personally resonates with you re Lovecraft?

JC: I think initially it was that skilful blend of sf and horror. When I was a kid I always enjoyed reading ghosts stories as much as science fiction. The first story of Lovecraft’s I read was The Colour Out of Space, a tale of a meteorite which crashes near a farm and whose insidious infection slowly affects the farm and the surrounding countryside. That’s an incredibly chilling story—one of his very best—and yet there’s nothing supernatural in it. In his best work he builds a sinister atmosphere to a remarkable degree, something he’d learned by studying previous writers. Other writers of the period and even more recent writers often seem lightweight in comparison. Later on I got drawn into the tangled web of the Cthulhu Mythos which is a compelling attraction for new readers.

The Call of Cthulhu (1988).

• How did you put your personal stamp on your Lovecraft-influenced art?

JC: I wanted to take Lovecraft’s fiction seriously on its own terms, something which—in the comics world especially—wasn’t happening very often. When I started illustrating his work in the 1980s there was little apart from the Lovecraft special issue of Heavy Metal from 1979 which had attempted that. I tried to match his dense writing style with an equally dense and detailed drawing style and tried to make things look solid and historically accurate. I’ve always been interested in architecture and Lovecraft’s concept of alien architecture continues to fascinate; I explored that in a small way last year in a picture commissioned for a Swiss exhibition (below).

Detail from “Mirage in time—image of long-vanish’d pre-human city” (2007).

• Lovecraft clearly tapped into something hidden or buried in readers. What was it, as far as you’re concerned?

I’ve thought for years that the invented mythology is one of the things which really hits people, even if they don’t read many of the stories. It was this which powered the Call of Cthulhu role-playing games. People don’t have to be religious to feel the draw of a mythology or invented taxonomy, you can see that in other areas whether it’s Star Trek, Star Wars or Harry Potter. That’s probably the juvenile attraction; the more sophisticated one would be the attraction for people such as Michel Houellebecq who see Lovecraft as a kind of pulp Kafka or Camus. You can be drawn into his writing by something trivial like Hello Cthulhu then journey deeper to discover a great imagination at work and even a philosophical viewpoint; anything that works on all those levels we need to label “art”.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The fantastic art archive
• The book covers archive
• The illustrators archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Horror comics
• The art of Ian Miller
• At the Mountains of Madness
• Witness my hand and official seal
• Lovecraftian horror at Maison d’Ailleurs

From the German National Library, a postcard dated 1918 from Franz Kafka to his publisher, Kurt Wolff. These are press images so the links are to big scans.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Alexandre Alexeieff and Claire Parker
• Hugo Steiner-Prag’s Golem
• Steven Soderbergh’s Kafka
• Kafka and Kupka

Previous posts about book covers or cover design.

• Nabokov book covers

• Netherlands decorated books

• March of the Penguins

• Science fiction and fantasy covers

• The art of Ed Emshwiller, 1925–1990

• The King in Yellow

• Samuel Beckett and Russell Mills

• Penguin science fiction

• Ma Petite Ville

• Groovy book covers

• Bugger Boy

• Rockwell Kent’s Moby Dick

• Alan Aldridge: The Man With Kaleidoscope Eyes

• Ronald Searle book covers

• The faces of Parsifal

• The monstrous tome

• Reynard the Fox

• The New Love Poetry

• Phallic worship

• The art of Ian Miller

• Recovering Bond

• Old book covers

• Pasticheur’s Addiction

• Arthur Machen book covers

• Repackaging Cormac

• Ballantine Adult Fantasy covers

• The World’s Greatest Detective

• Dorian Gray revisited

• Beardsley’s Salomé

• Clark Ashton Smith book covers

• James Bond postage stamps

• Stevenson and the dynamiters

• Decorated Russian book covers

• Russian book jackets, 1917–1942

• Penguin Labyrinths and the Thief’s Journal

• Kafka and Kupka

• Philip José Farmer book covers

• Crossed destinies revisted

• Jack Kerouac book covers

• Wanna see something really scary?

• The art of Bob Pepper

• Philip K Dick book covers

• Masonic fonts and the designer’s dark materials

• Boys Own Books

• Penguin designer David Pelham talks

• Fantastic art from Pan Books

• Penguin Surrealism

• Hospital by Toby Litt

• Cormac McCarthy book covers

• Crossed destinies: when the Quays met Calvino

• Revenant volumes: Bob Haberfield, New Worlds and others

• Thomas Allen’s paperback art

• Perfume: the art of scent

• City of Spades

• DIY aesthetics

• Penguin book covers

• Dorothy Parker

• War of the Worlds book covers

• JG Ballard book covers

• William Burroughs book covers

• Czech book covers

• The Absolute Elsewhere

• The Hetzel editions of Jules Verne

• Gay book covers

More archive pages:
• The archive page archive

Jeremy Brett in The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle.

A few words of praise for Jeremy Brett is his role as the world’s greatest detective, for my money the definitive screen Sherlock Holmes. I’ve spent the past few weeks working my way through the complete run of TV adaptations that Granada Television produced from 1984 to 1993, being bowled over again by Brett’s mastery of the role. It took me a while to notice these when they were first screened, British television was churning out a lot of costume drama at the time and the sight of more Hansom cabs and gas lamps paled beside the audacity and excitement of contemporary thrillers such as the BBC’s Edge of Darkness. I think I caught on during the second season that Brett’s performance was something special, and that these adaptations were treating the Holmes stories with a veracity rarely seen before.

The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle by original Holmes illustrator Sidney Paget.

Brett was a dependable but not necessarily distinguished actor prior to Sherlock Holmes. Having been passed over for James Bond in favour of Roger Moore in the Seventies, he seemed determined to make an impression with a role that’s become a challenge over the years given the weight of precedent attached to it. He pored over the books obsessively and even argued with directors over minor story points if he felt that Conan Doyle’s intentions were being lost. I remember finding his performance a bit eccentric at first but his unorthodox portrayal of a gentleman—vaulting over a couch to answer the door—helped separate him from the stock of solid Victorian types around him and acted as a visual signifier of the detective’s genius. Brett was very energetic in the first few seasons and always great in the close-ups, with a furious intensity that believably portrayed a man possessed of a brain working several orders of magnitude above the ordinary. We know now that some of that intensity was a result of his manic depression which worsened following his wife’s death in 1985.

But a great performance wouldn’t have shone without a suitable setting and it’s to Granada’s credit that they went to so much trouble over period detail. A Victorian-era Baker Street was built outdoors at the Granada studios complete with fully-stocked shop interiors. One of the pleasures for this Manchester citizen is seeing how many familiar locations our local TV company used. I recall walking past Manchester Town Hall circa 1988 when filming was taking place there, with vans along the street and a horse and carriage waiting to be called. They used the Town Hall courtyard a great deal, over-much if you recognise Alfred Waterhouse’s Venetian Gothic architecture. Splendid use is made of some of England’s country houses and there are some stunning shots later of genuine London streets which—with judicious camera placement and a few costumed extras—still looked as they did in 1900.

Eric Porter as Professor Moriarty.

Most crucially, the stories were taken seriously on their own terms, without any of the cliché that’s become a feature of so many screen representations of Holmes. Some liberties are taken now and then with the adaptations but for the most part the stories (and the audience) are treated with respect. (It’s a surprise now to see a primetime TV drama have its main character quote Flaubert in French and offer no translation.) The deerstalker hat appears occasionally but only when Holmes and Watson are in the country; in the city Holmes wears a silk topper. And the character of Watson is always portrayed sympathetically by David Burke (who left after series two) and Edward Hardwicke, both worlds away from the bumbling Nigel Bruce in the Basil Rathbone films. Guest support in each episode came from a range of great British acting talent—Charles Gray (as Mycroft), Eric Porter (as Moriarty), John Thaw, Dennis Quilley, Harry Andrews, Ronald Lacey, Rosalie Crutchley—so many of whom have died in recent years that the series now has a strangely melancholy atmosphere, like watching a procession of ghosts.

Holmes obsessives can and do quibble over the merits of these adaptations but we’re unlikely to see the (nearly) entire run of stories filmed so faithfully any time soon. The Granada films were all shot on 16mm, a relatively cheap format no longer used in television. To repeat this effort would be ruinously expensive, even if they could find actors to match Brett and company. For that reason it’s unfortunate that the company didn’t manage to fulfil its intention of filming all the stories but Jeremy Brett’s health grew increasingly worse from 1990 onwards. The really sad thing about watching the films from start to finish is seeing his deterioration in the final episodes from the energetic actor that began the series. He died of a heart attack in 1995. But it’s the energetic actor that we remember and celebrate, and the performance that remains his monument.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Steven Soderbergh’s Kafka
• Judex, from Feuillade to Franju
• Zeppelin vs. Pterodactyls
• Boys Own Books

Before the Law from The Trial (1962).

I’d wanted to write something about this pair of animators last year but at the time there was none of their work available for online viewing. This situation has now been remedied thanks to the ubiquitous YouTube.

This is Kafka-related once again since most people have seen Alexeieff/Parker’s work—if at all—in the prologue they provided in 1962 for Orson Welles’ film of The Trial. Alexandre Alexeieff was a Russian illustrator and animator who met Claire Parker, an American art student, in Paris in 1930. The pair formed a life-long partnership and together developed a new style of animation using a pinscreen, a white board containing thousands of pins whose shadows when pushed out of the board provide the grey tones required to create a picture. At the time they began working with this most animation was flat and cartoony; the pinscreen enabled them to create the kind of subtleties of shading seen in pencil and ink drawing. Many of the effects they created are stunningly lifelike.

The prologue for The Trial is a pictorial rendering of Kafka’s parable, Before the Law, which Welles narrates. This is an impressive piece (and I always loved the distinctive Piranesi-style walls) but for a real taste of their breathtaking skill you need to see Night on Bald Mountain, whose Goya-like transformations precede Disney’s Fantasia version by nearly a decade, or their adaptation of Gogol’s The Nose. It’s a shame that YouTube’s compression degrades much of the detail in these films, they really deserve to be seen on a bigger screen, but—as with many of these obscurities—it’s good to know they’re available at all.

Alexeieff and Parker on YouTube:
• Night on Bald Mountain (1933)
• En Passant (1944)
• Before the Law (1962)
• The Nose pt. 1 | The Nose pt. 2 (1963)

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Steven Soderbergh’s Kafka

Do you detect a theme this week? The recent Pragueness had me watching this favourite film again. I unfairly dismissed Soderbergh after his debut, Sex, Lies and Videotape (1989), which I found to be two hours of yuppie tedium despite its winning the Palme D’Or at Cannes. That prize did enable him to make Kafka (1991), however, so I shouldn’t complain although I didn’t get to see this until it turned up on TV years after its release. The film was a major flop and put Soderbergh in the wilderness until Out of Sight (1998), his first outing with George Clooney.

Kafka is one of a small group of works wherein well-known writers become embroiled in stories which exactly parallel their fiction. Joe Gores’ Hammett (filmed by Wim Wenders in 1982) did this with Dashiell Hammett while Mark Frost in his novel, The List of Seven, had a pre-Sherlock Holmes Arthur Conan Doyle becoming involved in a Holmesian mystery. The screenplay for Kafka by Lem Dobbs has the author falling in with anarchist revolutionaries in order to solve the death of a co-worker and a bureaucratic conspiracy. This was obviously too clever for a general audience, being littered with references to Kafka’s life and work and also to German Expressionist cinema with names like “Orlac” and “Murnau” comprising key plot elements. Dobbs wrote a couple of other noteworthy screenplays after this, Dark City, a noirish fantasy that does what The Matrix did only with greater imagination, and The Limey (1999), another Soderbergh film with a great performance by Terence Stamp as a vengeful Cockney gangster on the loose in Los Angeles.

Alan Bennett had already done something similar to Kafka in his TV film for the BBC, The Insurance Man, which concerns a dye worker becoming enmeshed in the labyrinthine bureaucracy of the Worker’s Accident Insurance Institute where Kafka worked as a clerk. Daniel Day-Lewis made a marvellous Franz Kafka in Bennett’s play and was far more suited to the role than Jeremy Irons is in Soderbergh’s film. This is a shame since everything else about Kafka is excellent, from the moody black and white photography and fabulous cymbalom-inflected score by Cliff Martinez, to the cast, which includes the wonderful Theresa Russell, Joel Grey, Ian Holm and—in one of his last performances—Sir Alec Guinness.

Kafka is also the Prague film par excellence, making great use of the city’s Old Town and landmarks such as the Charles Bridge and Prague Castle, a building which dominates the story as well as many of the outdoor scenes. In fact I find myself watching it as much for the settings than anything else. Soderbergh enjoys cinematic pastiche and Kafka owes a great deal to The Third Man (which did for post-war Vienna what Kafka does for Prague) and—inevitably—Orson Welles’ Kafka adaptation, The Trial. Theresa Russell brings Vienna with her via Nicolas Roeg’s Bad Timing, Joel Grey was in Cabaret, of course, and Alec Guinness isn’t so far removed from his role as retired spy George Smiley in the BBC’s John le Carré films. And halfway through the film there’s a great surprise which I won’t spoil here.

Kafka is available on DVD finally, although if you’re in the US you’ll have to import it. Soderbergh has talked about reworking the film in a longer version which I’d like to see if he ever gets round to it. Not an easy film to find but it’s worthy of your attention.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Kafka and Kupka
• Alexander Hammid
• How to disappear completely
• Karel Plicka’s views of Prague
• Giant mantis invades Prague
• Nosferatu
• Barta’s Golem

And speaking of Kafka, today’s book purchase was this 1979 story collection. The picture on the cover is a coloured aquatint and my favourite work by Czech artist Frantisek Kupka (1871–1957).

Resistance, or The Black Idol (1903).

Kupka is one of the more unique artists of the period, having begun his career in the Symbolist mode then abruptly changed course, post-Cubism, to become one of the earliest abstract painters. Kandinsky and Mondrian followed a similar evolution but little of their early work is valued, whereas Kupka’s Symbolist pastels and etchings are still regarded as significant. This page has several of his pictures on mystical themes.

As well as being a good match for Kafka, The Black Idol was also the model for the ruined castle in Francis Coppola’s Dracula. There aren’t any decent pictures around, unfortunately, but if you must you can go and squint at the screen grabs here.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The book covers archive

Two short films by Maya Deren’s husband are now available for viewing at Ubuweb. I’ve known about Hammid’s work for years but this is the first time I’ve seen any of it so these additions are very welcome. In a reversal of the usual state of affairs, the works of the wife overshadowed those of the husband even though they collaborated on Deren’s most famous film, Meshes of the Afternoon (which is also at Ubuweb).

Of the pair of films, Na Prazskem Hrade (At Prague Castle) (1931) is the most interesting for this Prague fetishist, a disjointed study of the architecture of the city’s castle which turns the building into an expressionist collage. Two obvious associations arise while watching this; one is Franz Kafka who lived for a time in the castle’s Hradcany district at 22 Golden Lane and whose novel, The Castle (1926), is inspired by the dominating presence of the building. The other is the Nazi invasion which took place a few years after the film was made and caused its maker and his wife to flee to America. The Nazi high command controlled the country from Prague Castle so the brief glimpse of marching soldiers in one shot can be seen as an ominous presentiment of the future. The castle has featured in bigger budget productions more recently, including one of my cult films, Steven Soderbergh’s Kafka (1991), and the underrated The Illusionist (2006) where Prague masqueraded as turn-of-the-century Vienna.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Jan Svankmajer: The Complete Short Films
• Meshes of the Afternoon by Maya Deren
• How to disappear completely
• Karel Plicka’s views of Prague
• Giant mantis invades Prague
• Barta’s Golem

From the latest Arthur email bulletin:

DON’T FREAK OUT BUT…
Something stupid happened to Arthur magazine “Do the Math” columnist/motorcyclist/writer/ “Defend Brooklyn” creator Dave Reeves late last year in Burbank and now he’s being tickled by the Burbank D.A. for fines, probation and even a jailing on some bogus-on-their-face criminal charges. Call it weird, call it harassment-by-cop, call it Kafkatime: whatever name you hang on this cruel mess, it is expensive and is requiring legal services at a level far above Dave’s means. He’s in a jam now and he needs—and deserves—our support during this nightmare. Help our brother out. Defend Dave Reeves like he’s defended you—order something off his website www.defendbrooklyn.com
Thanks.

Dave writes great columns for Arthur; give him some love if you can.

Bridge Street, from Prague in Pictures (1940).

A shame there isn’t more of Plicka’s atmospheric photography on the web, his views of Prague present the city the way we usually imagine it from the stories of Kafka and Gustav Meyrinck. This site features a very small selection from the 220 plates that comprise his Prague in Pictures book. Taschen have published a collection of Atget’s famous photographs of Paris; the “Ansel Adams of Czechoslovakia” is overdue for a similar reappraisal.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Giant mantis invades Prague
• Atget’s Paris
• Barta’s Golem

I scanned this essay years ago from a library copy of a 1949 edition of Piranesi’s Carceri d’Invenzione (Trianon Press, London). It’s worth reproducing here since it’s still one of the best analyses I’ve read of these fascinating and enigmatic drawings. Online reproduction quality of Piranesi’s work is dismayingly low for the most part. And nothing matches seeing these etchings in their original printed state, of course. But you can start here then search around for more.

AT THE TOP OF THE MAIN STAIRCASE in University College, London, there stands a box-like structure of varnished wood. Somewhat bigger than a telephone booth, somewhat smaller than an outdoor privy. When the door of this miniature house is opened, a light goes on inside, and those who stand upon the threshold find themselves confronted by a little old gentleman sitting bolt upright in a chair and smiling benevolently into space. His hair is grey and hangs almost to his shoulders; his wide-brimmed straw hat is like something out of the illustrations to an early edition of Paul et Virginie ; he wears a cutaway coat (green, if I remember rightly, with metal buttons) and pantaloons of white cotton, discreetly striped. This little old gentleman is Jeremy Bentham, or at least what remains of Jeremy Bentham after the dissection ordered in his will—a skeleton with hands and face of wax, dressed in the clothes that once belonged to the first of utilitarians.

To this odd shrine (so characteristic, in its excessive unpretentiousness, of that nook-shotten isle of Albion) I paid my visit of curiosity in company with one of the most extraordinary, one of the most admirable men of our time, Albert Schweitzer. Many years have passed since then; but I remember very clearly the expression of affectionate amusement that appeared on Schweitzer’s face, as he looked at the mummy. “Dear Bentham!” he said at last. “I like him so much better than Hegel. He was responsible for so much less harm.” And of course Schweitzer was perfectly right. The German philosopher was proud of being tief, but lacked the humility which is the necessary condition of the ultimate profundity. That was why he ended up as the idolater of the Prussian state, as the spiritual father of those Marxian dogmas of history, in terms of which it is possible to justify every atrocity on the part of true believers, and to condemn every good or reasonable act performed by infidels. Bentham, on the contrary, had no pretensions to tiefness. Shallow with the kindly, sensible shallowness of the eighteenth century, he thought of individuals as real people, not as trivial bubbles on the surface of the river of History, not as mere cells in the brawn and bone of a social organism, whose soul is the State. From Hegel’s depths have sprung tyranny, war and persecution; from the shallows of Bentham, a host of unpretentious but real benefits—the repeal of antiquated laws, the introduction of sewage systems, the reform of municipal government, almost everything sensible and humane in the civilisation of the nineteenth century. Only in one field did Bentham ever sow the teeth of dragons. He had the logician’s passion for order and consistency; and he wanted to impose his ideas of tidiness not only on thoughts and words, but also on things and institutions. Now tidiness is undeniably a good—but a good of which it is easily possible to have too much and at too high a price. The love of tidiness has often figured, along with the love of power, as a motive to tyranny. In human affairs the extreme of messiness is anarchy, the extreme of tidiness, an army or a penitentiary. Anarchy is the enemy of liberty and, at its highest pitch, so is mechanical efficiency. The good life can be lived only in a society in which tidiness is preached and practised, but not too fanatically, and where efficiency is always haloed, as it were, by a tolerated margin of mess. Bentham himself was no tyrant and no worshipper of the all-efficient, ubiquitous and providential State. But he loved tidiness and inculcated the kind of social efficiency which has been and is being made an excuse for the concentration of power in the hands of a few experts and the regimentation of the masses. And meanwhile we have to remember the strange and rather alarming fact that Bentham devoted about twenty five years of his long life to the elaboration in minutest detail of the plans for a perfectly efficient prison. The panopticon, as he called it, was to be a circular building, so constructed that every convict should pass his life in perpetual solitude, while remaining perpetually under the surveillance of a warder posted at the centre. (Significantly enough, Jeremy Bentham borrowed the idea of the panopticon from his brother, Sir Samuel, the naval architect, who, while employed by Catherine the Great to build ships for Russia, had designed, a factory along panoptical lines, for the purpose of getting more and better work out of the industrialised mujiks.) Bentham’s plan for a totalitarian housing project was never executed. To console him for his disappointment, the philosopher was granted, by Act of Parliament, twenty-three thousand pounds from the public funds.

The architecture of modern prisons lacks the logical perfection that characterised the panopticon; but its inspiration is that same passion for a more than human tidiness which moved the Bentham brothers and which, we may add, has been from time out of mind the inspiration of martinets and dictators. Before the days of Howard and Bentham and the Philadelphia Quakers, nobody, for some odd reason, seems ever to have thought of making prisons orderly and efficient. The gaols to which Elizabeth Fry brought her inexhaustible treasures of charity and common sense were like the embodiments of a criminal delirium. Passing these doors, the prisoner found himself condemned to an existence resembling that of Hobbes’s theoretical state of nature. Behind the facade of Newgate—a facade which its architect, uninhibited by the tiresome necessity of finding a place for windows, had been able to make consummately elegant there existed, not a world of men and women, not even a world of animals, but a chaos, a pandemonium.

The artist whose work most faithfully reflects the nature of this hell is Hogarth—not the Hogarth of the harmoniously coloured paintings, but he of the engravings, he of the hard insensitive line, the ruthless delineator of evil and chaotic misery, as well within the Fleet and Newgate and Bedlam as outside, in those other prisons, those other asylums, the dram-shops of Gin Alley, the brothels and gaming rooms of Covent Garden, the suburban playgrounds, where children torture their dogs and birds with scarcely imaginable refinements of cruelty and obscenity.

Within a space of thirty or forty years the Prison Discipline Society accomplished an extraordinary reformation. From being sub-humanly anarchical, prisons became sub-humanly mechanical. Ever since Sir Joshua Jebb erected his model gaol at Pentonville, the consciousness of being inside a machine, inside a realised ideal of absolute tidiness and perfect regimentation, has been a principal part of the punishment of convicts. Even in the Nazi concentration camps hell on earth was not of the old Hogarthian kind, but thoroughly neat and scientific. Seen from the air, Belsen is said to have looked like an atomic research station or a well-designed motion picture studio. The Bentham brothers have been dead these hundred years and more; but the spirit of the panopticon, the spirit of Sir Samuel’s mujik-compelling workhouse, has gone marching along to strange and horrible destinations.

Today every efficient office, every up-to-date factory is a panoptical prison, in which the worker suffers (more or less, according to the character of the warders and the degree of his native sensibility) from the consciousness of being inside a machine. It is, I think, only in literature that there has been anything like an adequate artistic rendering of this consciousness. De Vigny for example, has said fine things about the soldier’s enslavement to an ideal of absolute tidiness; and in War and Peace there is a memorable chapter on the way in which the impersonal forces of Orders from Above, of High Policy expressing itself through the workings of a System, transforms Pierre’s kindly French gaolers into insensitive and pitiless automata. But in the twentieth century an army is only one among many panopticons. There are also the regiments of Industry, the regiments of bookkeeping and administration. These have evoked a good deal of plaintive or truculent writing, but not much, and nothing very satisfactory, in the way of pictorial art. There were, it is true, certain Cubists who liked to paint machines or to represent human figures as though they were the parts of machines. But a machine, after all, is itself a work of art, much more subtle, much more interesting from a formal point of view, than any representation of a machine can be. In other words, a machine is its own highest artistic expression, and merely loses by being simplified and quintessentialized in a symbolic representation. As for the representation of human beings in mechanomorphic groups—this is effective only to a certain point. For the real horror of the situation in an industrial or administrative panopticon is not that human beings are transformed into machines (if they could be so transformed, they would be perfectly happy in their prisons); no, the horror consists precisely in the fact that they are not machines, but freedom-loving animals, far-ranging minds and God-like spirits, who find themselves subordinated to machines and constrained to live, if they can be said to live, within the issueless tunnel of an arbitrary and inhuman system.

Beyond the real, historical prisons of too much tidiness and those where anarchy engenders the hell of physical and moral chaos there lie yet other prisons, no less terrible for being fantastic and unembodied—the metaphysical prisons, whose seat is within the mind, whose walls are made of nightmare and incomprehension, whose chains are anxiety and their racks a sense of personal and even generic guilt. De Quincey’s Oxford Street and the road in which he had his vision of sudden death were prisons of this kind. So was the luxurious inferno described by Beckford in Vathek. So were the castles, the court-rooms, the penal colonies inhabited by the personages of Kafka’s novels. And, passing from the world of words to that of forms, we find these same metaphysical prisons delineated with incomparable force in the strangest and in some ways the most beautiful of Piranesi’s etchings.

Historical generalisations are delightful to make and thrilling to read. But how much, I wonder, do they contribute to our understanding of the past? The question is one which I will not venture to answer except with a series of other questions. For example, if, as we are told, the art of a period reflects the life of that period, in what way precisely do Perugino’s paintings express the age whose history is written in The Prince of Machiavelli? Again, modern historians affirm that the thirteenth century was the Age of Faith and a period of Progress. Then why should the men who actually lived during the thirteenth century have regarded it as a time of decadence and why should its liveliest chronicler, Salimbene, depict for us a society that behaves as though it had never even heard of Christian morals? Or take the fourth century in Constantinople. At this time and place, we are assured by certain historians of religion, men were wholly preoccupied with problems of theology. If this was the case, why did the professional moralists who were contemporary with those men complain that they lived only for the chariot races? And finally why should Voltaire and Hume be regarded as more typical of the eighteenth century than Bach and Wesley? Why have I myself, in an earlier paragraph, spoken of the “kindly shallowness of the eighteenth century,” when that century gave birth to Blake and Piranesi as well as to Helvétius and Bentham? The truth is, of course, that every variety of human being exists at every period. In religion, for example, every generation has its fetishists, its revivalists, its legalists, its rationaIists, and its mystics. And, whatever the prevailing fashions in art may happen to be, every age has its congenital romantics and natural classicists. True, at any period the prevailing fashions in art, in religion, in modes of thought and feeling are more or less rigid. It is therefore hard for those, whose temperaments are at odds with the fashion, to express themselves in any but an oblique and inhibited way. Any given work of art may be represented as the diagonal in a parallelogram of forces—a parallelogram, of which the base is the prevailing tradition and the socially important events of the time, and the upright is the artist’s temperament and, his private life. In some works the base is longer than the upright; in others, the upright is longer than the base.

Piranesi’s Prisons are creations of the second kind. In them the personal, private and therefore everlasting upright is notably longer than the merely historical and social base. The proof of this is to be found in the fact that these extraordinary etchings have continued, through two centuries, to seem completely relevant and modern not merely in their formal aspects, but also as expressions of obscure psychological truths. To use a once popular religious phrase, they spoke to the condition of Coleridge and De Quincey at the height of the Romantic reaction; and they speak no less eloquently to the condition of twentieth century men and women brought up on the literature, imaginative or descriptive, of deep psychology. That which Piranesi represents is not subject to historical change. He is not, like Hogarth, recording the facts of contemporary social life. Nor is he trying, like Bentham, to design a mechanism that shall change the nature of such facts. His concern is with states of the soul—states that are largely independent of external circumstances, states that recur whenever Nature, at her everlasting game of chance, combines the hereditary factors of physique and temperament in certain patterns. In the past psychology was generally treated as a branch of ethics or theology. Thus, for St. Augustine the problem of human differences was the same as the problem of Grace and the mystery of God’s good pleasure. And it is only in very recent years that men have learnt to talk about the idiosyncrasies of individual behaviour in any terms but those of sin and virtue. The metaphysical prisons delineated by Piranesi and described by so many modern poets and novelists, were well known to our ancestors but well known, not as symptoms of disease or of some temperamental peculiarity, not as states to be analysed and expressed by lyric poets, but rather as moral imperfections, as criminal rebellions against God, as obstacles in the way of enlightenment. Thus the weltschmerz of which the German Romantics were so proud, the ennui, fruit de la morne incuriosité which was the theme of so many of Baudelaire’s most splendid verses, is nothing else than that acedia, for indulging in which the temperamentally bored and melancholy were plunged by Dante head over ears in the black mud of hell’s third circle. And this is what St. Catherine of Sienna had to say about the state of mind which is the very climate and atmosphere of all Kafka’s novels. “Confusion is a leprosy that dries up body and soul and binds the arms of holy desire. It makes the soul unendurable to itself, disposing the mind to conflicts and fantasies. It robs the soul of supernatural light and darkens its natural light. Let the demons of confusion be vanquished by living faith and holy desire.” To someone like St. Catherine, whose primary concern was union with God and the salvation of souls, even to someone whose preoccupation with Christianity was, like Dante’s, rather that of a philosopher than of a theocentric saint, the idea of treating spiritual confusion or acedia or any other kind of metaphysical prison as merely a subject for scientific research or artistic manipulation would have seemed a kind of criminal imbecility. The historical base, upon which mediaeval artists erected their personal uprights, was so long and so deeply rooted in traditional theology and ethics that it proved impossible for even Boccaccio—born story-teller and passionate humanist though he was—to pay more than the most perfunctory attention to psychology. In the Decameron even the outward appearance of the personages is hardly described; and the characterisation is confined to simple adjectives, such as gentle, courtly, avaricious, amorous, and the like. It required a greater genius and a profounder scepticism than Boccaccio’s to invent a psychology independent of ethics and theology. And let us remember that Chaucer—the Chaucer of the later Canterbury Tales—remained without any rival until the time of Shakespeare. In relation to its traditional base, his personal upright is one of the tallest on record. The resulting diagonal is a work of truly astounding originality.

In their much smaller way the Prisons of Piranesi are also startlingly original. No previous painter or draughtsman had ever done anything at all like them. Fantasists, of course, there had been before Piranesi’s day—even fantasists who expressed themselves in terms of architectural design, like the Bibienas. But the Bibienas were men of the theatre and their architectural inventions were intended primarily to astonish the groundlings, to express, not the subterranean workings of a tormented soul, but those thoroughly vulgar aspirations towards grandiosity which, throughout the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, tormented the great ones of the earth, together with all who snobbishly wanted to be like them. Another more celebrated fantasist was Salvator Rosa—a man who, for reasons which are now entirely incomprehensible, was regarded by the critics of four and five generations ago as a great artist. But Salvator Rosa’s romanticism is pretty cheap and obvious. He is a melodramatist who never penetrates below the surface. If he were alive today, he would be known most probably as the indefatigable author of one of the more bloodthirsty and adventurous comic strips. Much more gifted was Magnasco, whose speciality was monks by candle-light and in a state of Grecoesque or Gothic elongation. His inventions are always pleasing, but always, one feels, without any deep or abiding significance—things created voluntarily on one of the higher levels of consciousness, somewhere near the top of a very whimsical and accomplished head. The fantasy of Piranesi’s Prisons is wholly different in quality from that displayed in the works of any of his immediate predecessors. All the plates in the series are self-evidently variations on a single symbol, whose reference is to things existing in the physical and metaphysical depths of human souls—to acedia and confusion, to nightmare and angst, to incomprehension and a panic bewilderment.

The most disquietingly obvious fact about all these dungeons is the perfect pointlessness which reigns throughout. Their architecture is colossal and magnificent. One is made to feel that the genius of great artists and the labour of innumerable slaves have gone into the creation of these monuments, every detail of which is completely without a purpose. Yes, without a purpose: for the staircases lead nowhere, the vaults support nothing but their own weight and enclose vast spaces that are never truly rooms, but only ante-rooms, lumber-rooms, vestibules, outhouses. And this magnificence of Cyclopaean stone is everywhere made squalid by wooden ladders, by flimsy gangways and cat-walks. And the squalor is for squalor’s sake, since all these rickety roads through space are manifestly without destination. Below them, on the floor, stand great machines incapable of doing anything in particular, and from the arches overhead hang ropes that carry nothing except a sickening suggestion of torture. Some of the Prisons are lighted only by narrow windows. Others are half open to the sky, with hints of yet other vaults and walls in the distance. But even where the enclosure is more or less complete, Piranesi always contrives to give the impression that this colossal pointlessness goes on indefinitely, and is co-extensive with the universe. Engaged in no recognisable activity, paying no attention to one another, a few small, faceless figures haunt the shadows. Their insignificant presence merely emphasises the fact that there is nobody at home.

Physiologically, every human being is always alone, suffering in solitude, enjoying in solitude, incapable of participating in the vital processes of his fellows. But, though self-contained, this island-organism is never self-sufficient. Each living solitude is dependent upon other living solitudes and, more completely still, upon the ocean of being from which it lifts its little reef of individuality. The realisation of this paradox of solitude in the midst of dependence, isolation accompanied by insufficiency, is one of the principal causes of confusion and acedia and anxiety. And in their turn, of course, confusion and acedia and anxiety intensify the sense of loneliness and make the human paradox seem yet more tragic. The occupants of Piranesi’s Prisons are the hopeless spectators of this pomp of worlds, this pain of birth—this magnificence without meaning, this incomprehensible misery without end and beyond the power of man to understand or to bear.

It is said that the first idea of the Prisons came to Piranesi in the delirium of fever. What is certain, however, is that this first idea was not the last; for some of the etchings exist in early states, in which many of the most characteristic and disquieting details of the Prisons we now know are lacking. From this it is to be inferred that the state of mind expressed by these etchings was, in Piranesi, chronic and in some sort normal. Fever may originally have suggested the Prisons; but in the years which elapsed between Piranesi’s first essays and the final publication of the plates, recurrent moods of confusion and acedia and angst must have been responsible for such obscure but, as we now see, indispensable symbols as the ropes, the aimless engines, the makeshift wooden stairs and bridges.

The plates of the Prisons were published while their author was still a young man, and during the remainder of his fairly long life Piranesi never returned to the theme which, in them, he had handled with such consummate mastery. Most of his work, thence-forward, was topographical and archaeological. His theme was always Rome; and this was true even when he abandoned the facts of ruins and baroque churches to undertake excursions into the world of fantasy. For what he liked to imagine was still Rome—Rome as it ought to have been, as it might have been if Augustus and his successors had possessed an inexhaustible treasury and an inexhaustible supply of manpower. It is fortunate that their resources were limited; for the hypothetical Rome of Piranesi’s fancy is a depressingly pretentious place.

In St. Catherine’s opinion, the demons of confusion are to be vanquished only by holy desire and faith in the Christian Revelation. But actually any sustained desire and any intense faith will win the battle. Piranesi, for example, seems to have been without any profound religious conviction or any mystical aspiration. Unlike his younger contemporary, Blake, he was granted no intimations of immortality, no visions, among the tempests and the lamentations, of God and transfigured souls and the Sons of the Morning. Piranesi’s faith was that of a renaissance humanist, his god was Roman antiquity and his motivating desire was a mixture of the artist’s will to beauty, the archaeologist’s will to historical truth and the poor man’s will to make a living. These, we must assume, were sufficient antidotes to acedia and spiritual confusion. At any rate he never gave a second expression to the state of mind which had inspired the Prisons.

Considered from a purely formal standpoint, the Prisons are remarkable as being the nearest eighteenth century approach to abstract art. The raw material of Piranesi’s designs consists of architectural forms; but, because the Prisons are images of confusion, because their essence is pointlessness, the combination of architectural forms never adds up to an architectural drawing, but remains a free design, untrammelled by any considerations of utility or even possibility, and limited only by the necessity of evoking the general idea of a building. In other words, Piranesi uses architectural forms to produce a series of beautifully intricate designs—designs which resemble the abstractions of the Cubists in being composed of geometrical elements, but which have the advantage of combining pure geometry with enough subject matter, enough literature, to express more forcibly than a mere pattern can do, the obscure and terrible states of spiritual confusion and acedia.

Of natural, as opposed to geometrical forms, Piranesi, in his Prisons, makes hardly any use. There is not a leaf or a blade of grass in the whole series, not a bird or an animal. Here and there, irrelevantly alive in the midst of the stony abstractions, stand a few human figures, dark, cloaked, featureless and impassive.

In the topographical etchings things are very different. Here Piranesi uses natural forms as a romantically decorative foil to the solid geometry of the monuments. The trees have an unkempt wildness; the personages in the foreground are either beggars, inconceivably ragged , or else fine ladies and gentlemen, no less inconceivably beribboned and bewigged, sometimes on foot, sometimes sitting in coaches carved into the likeness of wedding cakes or merry-go-rounds.

Everywhere the purpose is to set off the smoothness of hewn stone by juxtaposing the wavering, flame-like forms of plants and human beings. At the same time the figures serve another purpose, which is to magnify the size of the monuments. Men and women are reduced to the stature of small children; horses become little larger than mastiffs. Inside the basilicas, the pious reach up to the holy water fonts and, even on tiptoe, can hardly wet their fingers. Peopled by dwarfs, even the most modest of baroque buildings assumes heroic proportions; a little piece of classicism by Pietro da Cortona seems gravely portentous, and the delightful gimcrack of Borromini takes on the quality of something Cyclopean. This trick of increasing the apparent size of buildings by diminishing the known yardstick of the human figure was a favourite device among eighteenth-century artists. It was reduced to final absurdity in such pictures as the Belshazzar’s Feast of John Martin, where the ant-like king and his courtiers sit down to dinner in a hall about two miles long and fifteen hundred feet high.

In the Prisons there is no hint of this ingenuous and simple-minded theatricality. Such prisoners as there are exist for the purpose of emphasising, not the super-human grandeur of the buildings, but their inhuman vacancy, their sub-human pointlessness. They are, quite literally, lost souls, wandering—or not even wandering, but merely standing about—in a labyrinthine emptiness. It is interesting to compare them with the personages in Blake’s illustrations to the Inferno of Dante. These damned souls are so far from being lost that they seem to be perfectly at home among their flames and crags and morasses. In all the circles of Blake’s hell everybody is vaguely heroic in the corrupt classical manner of the late eighteenth century and everybody appears to take a lively interest in his fellows. How different is the state of affairs in the Prisons! Here there are no heroic muscles, no extroverted exhibitionism, not a trace of social life. Every man is clothed, muffled up, furtive and, even when in company, completely alone. Blake’s drawings are curious and sometimes beautiful; but never for a moment can we take them seriously as symbols of extremest suffering. Piranesi’s prisoners, on the other hand, are the inhabitants of a hell, which, though but one out of innumerable worst of all possible worlds, is completely credible and bears the stamp of an unquestionable authenticity.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The etching and engraving archive

1920: the writer sits, at night, an old city asleep outside his window, dim light upon the empty page. He sits and waits for the words. When the words arrive he sets them down, hopelessly he often feels, a pointless task he submits to with resignation. Recurrent illness has been a rebuke against expectation, lack of acknowledgement equally rebukes his ambition. When illness prematurely claims him he dies with an assurance of extinction, certain that his words will be lost along with his breath.

But the words survive. Drawn from the ether of the new century, his sensitised intelligence has crafted a mythology for the time, giving shape to forces that his contemporaries perceive dimly, if at all. A mythology of those vast, impersonal yet manipulative powers coalescing in the air of the coming age, a mythology of conspiracy elevated to the level of metaphysics, a mythology of tyranny and mutation, paranoia and holocaust.

II

The writer is Franz Kafka. When he died in 1924, HP Lovecraft was unknown outside the pages of Weird Tales and of the handful of his stories already published there, none were those that would later make him famous. (’The Call of Cthulhu’ came in 1926.) Lovecraft is unlikely to have known Kafka’s works, even in the early translations of the 1930s, yet the similarities between the pair persist, not only in their powerful representations of dread and alienation?the one crafted in a spare and affectless style, the other in the baroque vernacular of the pulps?but also for the way they define a sense of their times, and of the world, that subsequent readers have come to regard as visionary.

Jorge Luis Borges (who dedicated his story ‘There Are More Things’ to Lovecraft) identifies in his essay ‘Kafka and His Precursors’ a phenomenon common to writers who possess this kind of singular vision. The writer that forges a new way of seeing, says Borges, creates his own precursors, also forging connections between disparate themes, other writers and so on, that were previously unconnected. When the vision is powerful enough, and its influence proves to be as adaptive as a successful virus, we look for words to describe that influence and the reach of that vision. “‘Kafkaesque’ is the only word in common English use which derives from German literature” writes JP Stern. “Its meanings range from ‘weird’, ‘mysterious’, ‘tortuously bureaucratic’ to ‘nightmarish’ and ‘horrible’, yet we do not associate it with the horror machines of science fiction or Edgar Allan Poe.” Equally, we now have the word ‘Lovecraftian’ which can mean many of the same things, with possibly ’squidlike and squalid’ (to borrow a phrase from the late John Balance) replacing ‘tortuously bureaucratic’. In Lovecraft’s case we can, of course, associate the word in part with Poe, if only to see where the designation has come from, and note how it builds upon foundations laid by Poe to touch the unique dreads of a new century.

III

When Lovecraft began to hit his peaks in the late 1920s a young William Burroughs was cultivating a lifetime hatred of authority during his tenure at the Los Alamos Ranch School in New Mexico. In August 1931, teenage Bill could have gone to a news-stand in Los Alamos town and picked up the latest issue of Weird Tales, there to read about “the monstrous nuclear chaos beyond angled space which the Necronomicon had mercifully cloaked under the name of Azathoth” from Lovecraft’s ‘The Whisperer in Darkness’. ‘Tam, Son of the Tiger’ by Otis Adelbert Kline received the cover treatment that month, with a mediocre painting by CC Senf. Lovecraft’s lack of faith in the enduring popularity of his works is perhaps easier to appreciate when you realise that none of his stories were deemed worthy of a cover illustration during his lifetime. Yet Kline and his contemporaries—many with names as baroque as the characters in their stories: Nictzin Dyalhis, Pearl Norton Swet, Ronal Kayser, the egregious Seabury Quinn—have been buried by the dust of their rotting magazines, while Lovecraft’s influence proliferates in subsequent books and films and digital media.

Ten years after ‘The Whisperer in Darkness’, however, Lovecraft was dead, and—so he believed—his works forgotten. In 1941, as William Burroughs never tired of reminding people, Robert Oppenheimer and the scientists of the Manhattan Project came to the Los Alamos Ranch School to close it down, bulldoze its buildings and construct in their place a research facility where they could create a monstrous nuclear chaos of their own. The Trinity explosion in the Alamogordo desert in 1945 prompted Oppenheimer to recall some words from an ancient text, a pronouncement from the god Vishnu in the Bhagavad Gita: “I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.”

IV

“(The Necronomicon was) composed by Abdul Alhazred, a mad poet of Sanaá, in Yemen, who is said to have flourished during the period of the Ommiade caliphs, circa 700 AD. He visited the ruins of Babylon and the subterranean secrets of Memphis and spent ten years alone in the great southern desert of Arabia—the Roba el Khaliyeh or “Empty Space” of the ancients—and “Dahna” or “Crimson” desert of the modern Arabs which is held to be inhabited by protective evil spirits and monsters of death. Of this desert many strange and unbelievable marvels are told by those who pretend to have penetrated it. In his last years Alhazred dwelt in Damascus, where the Necronomicon (Al Azif) was written and of his final death or disappearance (738 AD) many terrible and conflicting things are told. He is said by Ebn Khallikan (12th cent. biographer) to have been seized by an invisible monster in broad daylight and devoured horribly before a large number of fright-frozen witnesses. Of his madness many things are told. He claimed to have seen the fabulous Irem, or City of Pillars, and to have found beneath the ruins of a certain nameless desert town the shocking annals and secrets of a race older than mankind. He was only an indifferent Moslem, worshipping unknown entities whom he called Yog-Sothoth and Cthulhu.”

HP Lovecraft, ‘The History of the Necronomicon’.

“The Cities of Red Night were six in number: Tamaghis, Ba’dan, Yass-Waddah, Waghdas, Naufana and Ghadis. These cities were located in an area roughly corresponding to the Gobi Desert, a hundred thousand years ago. At that time the desert was dotted with large oases and traversed by a river which emptied into the Caspian Sea.”

William Burroughs, The Cities of the Red Night.

Burroughs’ cities are brothers to Lovecraft’s Nameless City, and to Irem, City of Pillars, described in ‘The Call of Cthulhu’ as the rumoured home of the Cthulhu Cult. The Cities of the Red Night are invoked with a litany of Barbarous Names, a paean to the “nameless Gods of dispersal and emptiness” that includes the Sumerian dieties that Burroughs found catalogued in the ‘Urilia Text’ from the Avon Books Necronomicon, and which includes (how could it not?) “Kutulu, the Sleeping Serpent who cannot be summoned.” In Burroughs work the ‘Lovecraftian’ is transmuted, the unspeakable becomes the spoken and the nameless is named at last, beneath the pitiless gaze of Burroughs’ own “mad Arab”, Hassan I Sabbah, Hashish Eater and Master of Assassins. “Nothing is true, everything is permitted.”

V

2005: Nothing is true and everything is permitted but only in the space created by the latest architects of fear, the demagogues of the 21st century, our very own agents of the Control Virus. We see now that Irem, City of Pillars, is named in Sura 89 of the Qur’an (”Hast thou not seen how thy Lord did with Ad? With Iram of the columns? The like of which has not been created in the land?”) and that the Qur’an itself is presented to us by the architects of fear as the new Al Azif, a Necronomicon for an Age of Terror. In ‘The Dunwich Horror’, the Whateley brood, like misegenous backwoods Unabombers, pore over their ancient texts in the hope of invoking titanic forces that would “clear off the earth”. In ‘The Call of Cthulhu’ the cultists wait patiently for their god to return, when all the earth will blaze “in a holocaust of ecstasy and freedom”. So Cthulhu reveals another face as Shaitan, “the Old Dragon” and “Lord of the Abyss”, named in Sura 25:29 of the Qur’an as “the forsaker” who will lead men away from the path of righteousness: “Mankind, Shaitan is al khadhulu.”

At the dawn of a new century, “mad Arabs” in mountain retreats pore over these ancient words before unleashing a new Manhattan Project on America’s City of Pillars, raising columns of smoke and human ash over the city described in ‘He’ and ‘The Horror at Red Hook’. Hatred stalks the city streets as racist tabloid editors gibber and froth at the spectre of swarming immigrant hordes, while African witchdoctors are butchering boys and throwing their bodies into the River Thames. Nuclear chaos is but a breath away, the architects of fear assure us, it’s only a matter of time. “I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.” So we turn for respite to another story from 1931, ‘The Shadow Over Innsmouth’, and we read:

“Keener news-followers, however, wondered at the prodigious number of arrests, the abnormally large force of men used in making them, and the secrecy surrounding the disposal of the prisoners. No trials, or even definite charges were reported; nor were any of the captives seen thereafter in the regular gaols of the nation. There were vague statements about disease and concentration camps, and later about dispersal in various naval and military prisons, but nothing positive ever developed. Innsmouth itself was left almost depopulated, and it is even now only beginning to show signs of a sluggishly revived existence.”

At the dawn of a new century, those with the Innsmouth look have found themselves in the penal colony, waiting for a trial that will never come. Can you feel the heat closing in? Welcome to the Witch House; these are your dreams.

John Coulthart,
Manchester,
Summer Solstice, 2005