Barbara Tuchman's August 1914 contains the reproduction of a cartoon from a contemporary French newspaper: it shows a skeleton lying upon (what I can best recall as) the churned, bomb-ravaged earth, with the kaiser, in pickelheuber and greatcoat, standing over him. The skeleton extends its hand up to the kaiser languidly, despairingly; the line beneath the picture is "Remplace-moi, je suis fatigue."
Why did this image make such a great impression on you at the time, and why has it stayed with you since? Certain reasons are obvious: your excessive fear, as a child, of all physical manifestations of death, and of skulls and skeletons especially. The terror of the living death, of the dead invading the lives of the living, haunted your childhood. Then there was the child's indignance at the notion that an actual physical person might be something more monstrous or destructive than a metaphysical force, for childhood is a time when fundamental and ultimate powers appear exclusively to be the property of supernatural powers; it stands to a child's reason that this should be so. Finally, though, there was - to you at the time at least - what seemed the utterly perverse notion that death might be capable of being tired. It was this perhaps that scandalised and horrified you most, and in your memory it is bound up with various symbolic and semantic confusions that the figure of death evoked for you: how could the individual skeleton stand for all the dead? Perhaps more specifically, how could the force that reduced people to skeletons be a skeleton itself: how could death itself be dead?
None of this, though, answers your question: why has the image stayed with you? Perhaps the answer is in part that the relation between the death and the kaiser in the cartoon is that between a parent and a child: at one point - and yours are reaching that point now - the parent will ask the child to replace him, because he is tired. In other words, the cartoon also enacts the symbolic death of the parent. The parent here being death, the child is here being called upon to assume that role: you must now die (read: kill) in my place, for I have grown weary of it.
The death in question here needs no elucidating (or at least, you're not going to elucidate it) ; but isn't it precisely this that you've spent your entire life determined to escape; wasn't this, in some fundamental sense, its 'meaning'? And isn't it precisely this that you have failed to do? So that now in the economy of killing and dying you must take your appointed place.
Related to this is of course another memory, not quite as early, but also concerning images, this time filmic ones (someone needs to write a monograph on the cultural significance of the late night art film on TV - a phenomenon that is now disappearing with the rise of pay per view television and the relative ubiquity of DVDs. The fact that scheduling always put these films out late at night - that is, when any potential viewer would be near sleep, his subconscious perhaps more alert and impressionable - seems of considerable importance here. This was how you were introduced to Bergman and Eastern European filmmakers. And Borremans' works, which rely so much on filmic images, seem to have been shaped by this experience. It seems to be one that is specific to your generation).
The film in question was Papillon, one that you may conceivably have seen once since (but also a long time ago), but which you have never, so far as you can remember, seen through from beginning to end. In fact the only sequence you can remember from it is the dream one, and of that only the last scene clearly, when the prisoner stands before a panel of strange judges who find him guilty. He asks them why, since he knows (this being a dream) they know he is innocent of the crime he has been imprisoned for - "you know I didn't kill that pimp" - they reply; "guilty of leading a wasted life".
Again there are several reasons why this scene from what, to you at the time, seemed an otherwise unremarkable and even rather boring film, should have stayed with you. But the fundamental reasons seem the same as, or at least related to, the cartoon: the notion of the real crime not being any socially recognised one (such as murder), nor even the one that 'society' thinks you are guilty of, but the secret truth of a wasted life. This of course was also K.'s crime in The Trial, or so you now believe, and it was for this reason too presumably that his work made such an impression upon you when you came across it. The question is, how could you have been so prescient? How could you have seen your future in this film aged eleven, or whatever it was? This isn't merely the effect of a retroactively selective memory; something in you sensed this possible danger even then. And then, in desperately trying to avoid it, ensured all the more carefully that it would come true
No comments:
Post a Comment