Sweet Ottoline

by Perry Meisel

Ottoline Morrell: Life on the Grand Scale. By Miranda Seymour. Illustrated. 452 pp. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $30.

She was, said Virginia Woolf, "Helen of Troy." "She gave me a complete mental reorientation," said Aldous Huxley. She was, in a less hyperbolic assessment by Lord David Cecil, "a creative artist of the private life." With her mane of red hair, her six-foot frame and her dazzling and eccentric mode of dress, the beautiful Lady Ottoline Morrell, niece of the Fifth Duke of Portland and wife of the Liberal politician Philip Morrell, ranked among London's chief literary hostesses from 1907 until her death in 1938. Lady Ottoline has, as a rule, also been subject to "grotesque caricature," says Miranda Seymour in her new biography, and it is time to rediscover the real woman behind the myth of the vain aristocrat seeking admission to esthetic circles.

D.H. Lawrence's portrait of Ottoline as Hermione Roddice in Women in Love (1920) is just the kind of image Ms. Seymour wishes to challenge in Ottoline Morrell: Life on the Grand Scale, although it is the Bloomsbury set that she holds principally responsible for Ottoline's bad historical reputation. Virginia Woolf, her sister Vanessa Bell, Lytton Strachey - all flattered Ottoline, then joked about her behind her back. With full access to Ottoline's papers for the first time, particularly her letters to Bertrand Russell (an earlier biography by Sandra J. Darroch appeared in 1975 without benefit of them), Ms. Seymour tries to produce a fresh Ottoline beyond the haze of Bloomsbury distortion.

Born in 1873, Ottoline Violet Anne Cavendish Bentinck weathered a painful Victorian childhood. After her father's death in 1877, her mother turned her into an emotional "slave," as Ms. Seymour puts it, passing along to her daughter a penchant for both nervous suffering and religious enthusiasm. Following the death of her uncle in 1879, Ottoline's half-brother Arthur became the Sixth Duke of Portland, and the family moved to ancient Welbeck Abbey in Notthinghamshire.

Educated at home, Ottoline was free to roam in nearby Sherwood Forest after lessons. Here her awakening sense of physical beauty began to clash with her precocious religiosity, foreshadowing a series of tensions later in life between the "puritan" and the "artistic" sides of her nature, as Ms. Seymour calls them, and between her aristocratic background and her bohemian propensities. She felt, Ms. Seymour tells us, like an outsider in both of the worlds she inhabited. "I could never learn my proper part," she confessed to her diary.

The conflict between Ottoline's spirituality and her love of sensual beauty found a perfect resolution in a religion of art based on the estheticism of Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde, then still fashionable. By 1907, Ottoline had discovered her true vocation as a patroness of the arts, "the chance," as Ms. Seymour describes it, "to live a life of active benevolence outside the conventions." She and Philip Morrell had moved into 44 Bedford Square, Bloomsbury, in 1906; by the following spring she was sending off invitations for what became her famous Thursday Evenings. By 1910, she was helping Roger Fry choose the paintings for the first Post-Impressionist exhibition in London; by 1911, she was in the opening rounds of a stormy relationship with Bertrand Russell that lasted for the rest of her life.

Her marriage to Philip Morrell in 1902 was a devoted union but also an open one. "Too weak a character to dictate the form a marriage should take . . . he was putty in her hands," says Ms. Seymour. Of her serious lovers, however, only Russell was as important to her as her husband. With Russell, she could play out, openly and endlessly, the split in her nature between the spirit and the flesh, by turns enduring and enjoying Russell's vaunted sexual appetite, and always enjoying his mind.

If Bedford Square was Ottoline's court, then Garsington, the country house in Oxfordshire which the Morrells acquired in 1914, was her Forest of Arden. Like all of her houses, Garsington was, as Juliette Huxley put it, "a habitual work of art" (Ms. Seymour's book is illustrated, and the proof is manifest). Garsington was a "romantic theater," as Ottoline herself described it, renowned for its picturesque Italian garden and the "Shakespearean intrigue," as Ms. Seymour nicely phrases it, among the guests (during World War I, the house and surrounding farm also served as a refuge for conscientious objectors performing alternative service). So esthetically luxurious was Garsington that, on a good day, Ottoline could talk books with Lytton Strachey, then fetch D.H. Lawrence for a walk through the countryside.

Ottoline's sincerity and her capacity for suffering are Ms. Seymour's chief evidence in a case that is unnecessary to make. Ottoline vindicates herself, not as a journal writer (the extracts Ms. Seymour gives us are rather bland), but as a lovably infuriating character who would be far more comfortable, and far more vivid, in a crossover historical novel.

This potential Ottoline gets lost, however, amid all the documents on Ms. Seymour's desk. As estimable as Ms. Seymour's revisionary project may be, its successes and its shortcomings go, oddly enough, hand in hand. Ms. Seymour aspires to comprehensiveness rather than to shape, but the very abundance of her materials often turns her biography into an unwitting historiographical farce of the kind Ottoline's friend Lytton Strachey specialized in writing: the sardonic romance of the wide-eyed historian looking to separate fact from fiction (in her introduction, Ms. Seymour refers directly to Strachey's own words on the subject in Eminent Victorians), only to be swallowed up by a mass of evidence whose organization is beyond his powers unless he succumbs to generic melodrama.

The melodrama to which Ms. Seymour succumbs is drab hagiography. Bloomsbury's "duplicity," she argues, hurt Ottoline, making her feel the childhood dread of being the outsider all over again. Ms. Seymour wisely allowed herself novelistic liberties in her 1989 book on Henry James; here she takes advantage of the strategy only occasionally, although with superbly dramatic results when she does so. "How could it be designing," she has her hostess wonder, "to want to help people?" The indirect style is characteristic of Flaubert, and well suited to a persuasive representation of Ottoline. It also leaves the reader free to make an independent response. How indeed?

Ottoline Morrell was really a female dandy in the grand 19th-century tradition. She feminized estheticism as surely as Virginia Woolf did. She also gathered within herself the dandy's entire history by combining its aristocratic origins at the court of George III with its bohemian destiny after Baudelaire and Wilde. An aristocrat, she was languid and affected; a bohemian, she was passionate, flouting the very conventions that sustained her as Lady Ottoline. Like any good biographical subject, she eludes the hand that tries to grasp her.

Originally published in The New York Times Book Review, June 13, 1993.

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When We Were Young and Surreal

by Perry Meisel

View: Parade of the Avant-Garde. An Anthology of View Magazine (1940 - 1947). Edited by Charles Henri Ford. Compiled by Catrina Neiman and Paul Nathan. Illustrated. 287 pp. New York: Thunder's Mouth Press. $35.

After the Germans occupied Paris in 1940, much of the Parisian avant-garde relocated to New York. Charles Henri Ford, an American writer who in 1929 had founded an experimental literary magazine called Blues and who had then gone on to live in Paris, North Africa and other venues, decided to start View, a magazine designed to reflect New York's new international status. Whole issues were devoted to Max Ernst and Marcel Duchamp; André Breton became a regular contributor. View published and assessed a polymorphous assortment of writers and artists. It had competition from the magazine VVV, which Breton founded in New York in 1942, but it was View that was most manifestly the Surrealist organ in America.

Ecumenical by virtue of its sheer open-mindedness, View paraded nearly everybody; it published Wallace Stevens' "Materia Poetica," a series of apothegms and prose meditations; portions of William Carlos Williams' "Paterson"; criticism by Kenneth Burke, Harold Rosenberg, and Meyer Shapiro; and fiction by Albert Camus, Jorge Luis Borges, and Henry Miller.

View lasted until 1947 and published 36 issues, beginning as a six-page tabloid in 1940 and, by 1943, becoming an elegant commercial magazine notable for spectacular color covers by artists like Ernst, Duchamp, René Magritte, Man Ray, and Georgia O'Keeffe. Mr. Ford has now edited an anthology of its articles, generously illustrated with a selection of cover reproductions, plates of paintings, drawings and photographs, and facsimile pages and period advertisements for jazz concerts and new books. "View: Parade of the Avant-Garde" provides a vivid and dramatic history of the movement from prewar Surrealism to postwar existentialism and, more obliquely, of the electric play between estheticism and political engagement that structured the history of criticism during these transitional years.

The magazine's contributors fall into two main groups: Mr. Ford and his circle, particularly his associate editor and designer, the critic and poet Parker Tyler; and the émigré celebrities whom Mr. Ford befriended and purveyed. While these major figures are well known, the work of Mr. Ford and his followers adds a fresh chapter to the history of American bohemia in the years before the Beats established the protocol. As critics, Charles Henri Ford, Parker Tyler, and their younger contributors shared a kind of house style that ranged from woozy to astute; they tried to balance cultivation and hipness.

A muted romance with Hollywood also runs like a thread through the volume's American contributions, and it is often at conscious odds with suspicions about commercial film's integrity as a mythology. This tension can be productive, however, especially in the case of Tyler's enormously prescient essay on The Maltese Falcon, "Every Man His Own Private Detective." Tyler, who wrote a book about Hollywood in 1944, exposes the allegorical resonance of Bogart's detective-hero, Sam Spade, by reference to Dostoyevsky.

It was, however, on the European superstars that View staked its claim to fame. Among the most impressive documents in the entire volume is Breton's superb, and unlikely, essay on Duchamp, "Lighthouse of the Bride." Like Stevens' "Materia Poetica," it gives intellectual muscle to artistic states of mind normally assumed to be spontaneous and transcendent. Breton is technical, secular, and hard-nosed, explaining Duchamp as a sieve of influences, a powerful processing machine who, like Ernst, is a "meeting place" of historical forces, a "crosspoint of . . . tendencies" organized by "negation." "Originality," writes Breton, "is in no way, as many seem to believe, a matter of instinct and intuition; to find it, one must generally seek it laboriously." Even "automatic writing," one of Surrealism's most abused legacies, becomes necromantic as a result of the specific mechanisms it unlocks, rather than despite them.

Once the war ended, View's contributors, and the issues they dealt with, began to change. Surrealism gave way to existentialism. In 1946, View published Camus and Jean Genet in English for the first time. Mr. Ford also published "The Nationalization of Literature" in English, in which Jean-Paul Sartre sets out to re-imagine the nature and role of literature after the war, trying to sort out the political from the esthetic and realizing how difficult it is to do that. Now, almost 50 years later, criticism is once again caught between the presumable antinomies of formalism and advocacy. This anthology shows just how little things have changed.

Originally published in The New York Times Book Review, March 1, 1992

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How Postmodern Is It?

by Perry Meisel

The Object of Performance: The American Avant-Garde since 1970. Henry M. Sayre. Chicago and London, University of Chicago Press: 1989. 308 pp. $39.

Coming as it does at the end of two decades of fierce activity in criticism and the arts alike, Henry M. Sayre's comprehensive study of the American avant-garde since 1970 reveals both the advantages and the dangers of trying to identify a coherent postmodernism that has meaning as a stable historical achievement. Sayre's descriptive history ranges from painting, photography, and performance to poetry, dance, and earthworks. Propounding a notion of postmodernism that distinguishes it from modernism both polemically and in practice, Sayre's book also summarizes the presumable link between postmodernism and certain aspects of poststructuralist critical theory, particularly deconstruction.

Sayre puns on the word "object" in his title in order to undo Clement Greenberg's classical modernist notion of the work of art as an "immanent object" - as an autonomous, bounded whole that is "irrefutably present." For Sayre, the word "object" shifts back and forth between meaning an "object" like a canvas or a poem in the modernist sense, and an "object" that is simply the aim or direction for a performance-oriented, postmodern poetics. He argues that, since 1970, the work of art as a modernist object has given way to the work of art as postmodern performance - open, in-process, and polyvocal. Using as a symbol and proximate source Andy Warhol's calculated evacuation (and negative reconstitution) of almost every received modernist virtue, from the exaltation of authenticity to the sanctity of the frame, Sayre shows us that "by the late sixties . . . the object per se had become . . . dispensable," whether the autonomous painting or poem, and so, too, had the gallery, the studio, and even the personality of the artist or author. "By the seventies," concludes Sayre, "the site of presence in art had shifted from art's object to art's audience, from the textual or plastic to the experiential."

This is a familiar and largely durable argument; its descriptive strengths include its ability to link many kinds of art and artists through their share in the almost programmatic approach they appear to follow in common. The relation of performance to painting and photography is central to Sayre's account, which chronicles the shift over the last 20 years from the work of art regarded as finished product to the work of art regarded as "work site." In fact, the book's most impressive sequence is Sayre's reading of Site, a 1964 performance by Carolee Schneemann and Robert Morris that sharply exemplifies Sayre's view of what postmodernism is, and of how it entails a decidedly critical relation to past traditions in art. Sayre reads Site as a virtual essay on Manet's Olympia (1863), claiming that Manet's presumably "finished" painting suffers a series of transformations as Schneemann and Morris "re-present" the image of the courtesan Olympia by resituating it in a cluster of other activities. As Morris performs "work" around Schneemann's re-creation of the seemingly static Olympia, says Sayre, "painting is transformed into sculpture, sculpture into dance. And dance itself is transformed . . . into ordinary, vernacular movement." Incorporated into and mobilized by the dynamism of performance, Manet's passive portrait - a presumably autonomous image - is opened to a world beyond the frame.

Equally instructive from Sayre's point of view is the difference between the painting of Eric Fischl and David Salle. Salle's work, writes Sayre, is "assimilative" and, in the artist's own words, "'autonomous'" and "'self-sufficient'"; it functions as a "closed network of signs." Fischl's, by contrast, is "disseminative," "theatrical" and "performative," inviting the viewer to recognize the "potentialities of the work" rather than keeping the viewer enclosed within it. Whether or not this argument is convincing (and whether or not Sayre's use of poststructuralist terminology is entirely plausible), it reflects Sayre's belief in a programmatic historical movement from product to process. This change is evident in, for example, Jonathan Borofsky's work, which, according to Sayre, calls into question the integrity of the painting as an object by exceeding the modernist box of frame and gallery alike, disrupting the autonomy of the art object as well as the institution that perpetuates it and redoubles its structure of exclusion. In the author's view, the performance art of Laurie Anderson is similarly disruptive; set in an "undecidable terrain," Anderson's performances disorient her audience by the "calculated disjunction" between her "high tech trappings and her self-consciously bohemian pose." Postmodern performance, then, moves the goal or object of art from "mastery" to "process," from "transcending the temporal" to "falling into it."

A parallel transformation, according to Sayre, structures the history of dance, which moves from classical ballet, with its emphasis on symmetry, to modern dance, with its preference for asymmetry and disjunction, to postmodern dance, with its "vernacular, task-like" movements. In reflexive postmodern fashion, Sayre's narrative of dance history also intersects with the histories of other arts, each holding up a mirror to the other. Especially rich meal for Sayre's position are the collaborations of Robert Rauschenberg, John Cage, and Merce Cunningham in the 1950s, which make explicit a rejection, following Brecht, of the Gesamtkunstwerk or "integrated work of art." Cunningham's insistence on "the independence, not interdependence, of each part of the dance's presentation" is emblematic of "a consciously anti-Wagnerian" art, one that emphasizes the arbitrariness of the relations between mediums that are ordinarily combined in a presumably natural way in "integrated" work such as Wagner's own.

The political object of such transformative praxis, says Sayre, quoting Craig Owens, is not "'to transcend representation,'" but "'to expose that system of power that authorizes certain representations while blocking, prohibiting and invalidating others.'" Sayre also shows that "repetition" is the active principle of postmodernism. Postmodernism is thereby pedagogical, with repetition functioning as "a teaching tool," as Sayre puts it, for re-educating audiences in what to pay attention to in works of art. (Hence the logic of Trisha Brown's remark that "dance" is a "lecture form.") "Repetition and accumulation" - whether in Brown, Anderson or Schneemann - "become a way of creating suspense and drama, the knowledge in the spectator that any sense of the whole is contingent and must inevitably be submitted to revision."

Sayre's systematic approach draws on a series of notions from poststructuralism, chief among them the disappearance of the author, the polyvalence of meaning, and the fugitive presence of both the art object and the world it purportedly represents. The philosophical analogue to the disruption of painting as an autonomous object is the deconstruction of the phenomenological stability of the object as an empirical category.

Here, however, Sayre begins to get into trouble. While an adaptation of these notions is reasonable enough for the purposes of a description of the work he surveys, Sayre's use of such poststructuralist categories is exceedingly literal; it betokens an ultimate misunderstanding of poststructuralism's methods, a misunderstanding which becomes particularly evident in Sayre's overestimation of certain of the avant-garde practices he praises, and in his inability to see that what he claims to be a historically new stance in art - i.e., its performative aspect, its emphasis on process, its undecidability - is really little more than the normative epistemological condition of all art, albeit one that postmodernism makes exceptionally overt. The largely pedagogical cast of postmodern art does indeed suggest that its deconstructive dimension is in some measure quite real. Surely Site, for example, puts Manet's Olympia into an obvious relation to historical processes of labor and gender construction that are left unstated in the Manet painting itself. This does not, however, mean that such processes are not at work in Olympia, only that they are not made explicit there.

Surely, then, Sayre's argument is really about emphasis and overtness, not about an altogether historical occurrence in which a material, "postmodern" change in the status of the art object presages something entirely new. The object, as Stanley Fish remarks of texts, has never been there in the first place, no matter the historical moment or the state of critical opinion; objects of any kind are always the construction of an interpretative community. Sayre, however, seems to think that a text must be materially disrupted for this kind of observation to be true.

Sayre's unquestioning acceptance of the tacky authenticism of the Language poets is the surest evidence that neither Warhol nor Jacques Derrida has really sunk in. While it is in some sense a graphic counterpart to postmodern performance artistry that Sayre nicely details elsewhere in his book, Language poetry, from Charles Olson to Allen Ginsberg, Jerome Rothenberg, and David Antin, is by no means another example of the deconstructive epistemology shared by Warhol and Derrida, even though Sayre astonishingly mentions Derrida and Ginsberg in the same breath. No two figures could be more at odds; Ginsberg's is probably the consummate instance of works based on the precise kinds of myths about language (particularly the "presence" it can supposedly embody) that Derrida deconstructs.

Such bungling points to a larger and more perplexing problem: the curious misapprehension of "theory" that Sayre, like so many teachers and critics today, equates with postmodernism. Sayre's reading of Roland Barthes in a chapter at the books' close is so deeply misconceived as to render Barthes's work almost unrecognizable; among other things, it maintains critical categories such as "subjective" and "novelistic" that Barthes himself rendered obsolete. Sayre apparently needs the literal maneuvers of the Language poets to tell him that there is no such thing as a poem already in place, and the graphic absurdities of Rothenberg's or Antin's work to assure him that a poem is a porous and unstable semiotic field. He even needs the Language poets to show him (erroneously, by the way) how to open a poem "to the contingencies of history, time and place." Yet Paul de Man's fame rests precisely on his demonstration 20 years ago in "The Rhetoric of Temporality" that it was 19th-century Romanticism which opened an irreparable and actually constitutive gap between discourse and experience. Romantic poets bespeak this play of presence and absence perhaps even more eloquently than the photograph, whose epistemological dubieties do not, by contrast, mystify Sayre at all in his discussion of, say, Cindy Sherman or William Wegman.

What Sayre should have learned from the "theory" he endorses and claims to use is that the conditions he describes as postmodern are not historically new at all; rather, they are most rewardingly viewed as an amplification of the normative conditions that attend any cultural production once it is read and studied in the light of semiotic, deconstructive and reception-oriented approaches. Sayre overvalues the historical newness of what postmodern art does because his misreading of "theory" prevents him from seeing that what "theory" describes - the instability of texts, for example, or the lack of ontological ground in any semiotic system - are difficulties that assail culture throughout history. Postmodernism is, as Sayre himself says, really an extended pedagogical strategy that makes these difficulties literal, and that thereby transforms postmodern art into a form of criticism and teaching. Since postmodernism characteristically goes out of its way to vex its own integrity as a practice, and since it offers by definition no object about which to speak directly, it must be seen, after all, as a myth. Thus a particular irony - a distinctively postmodern one, if you wish - attends any critical attempt to address postmodernism. To devise an appropriate means of negotiating this encounter requires an irony greater than any Sayre himself has achieved.

Originally published in Art in America, December, 1990.

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Maternal, Erotic and Playful

By Perry Meisel

Subversive Intent: Gender, Politics, and the Avant-Garde. By Susan Rubin Suleiman. Illustrated. 276 pp. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. $27.50.

It is something of a commonplace to observe that the conjunction of three trends of thought over the last two decades - feminism, psychoanalysis and deconstruction - has produced a powerful style of American academic criticism that cannot be ignored, especially since some of its practical implications, canon-bashing and the reconstruction of liberal arts curriculums chief among them, will have real and far-reaching consequences for college education in the next century. Susan Suleiman, a professor of Romance and comparative literatures at Harvard University, is an exemplar of this kind of syncretic criticism. As its title suggests, Ms. Suleiman's new book, Subversive Intent, takes as its subject the history of the avant-garde, from Surrealism through the New Novel to post-modernism.

Well aware of the manifold ironies that attend the notion of an avant-garde tradition (how can ''subversive intent'' be a function of the continuities that foster a tradition?), Ms. Suleiman carefully deconstructs many of the paradoxes that accompany such a presumably radical enterprise. Through close examinations of the French writers Andre Breton, Alain Robbe-Grillet and Georges Bataille, she goes on to uncover a sexual-political dimension to the work of the male avant-garde that has been left unexplored.

While confined mostly to French writing, Ms. Suleiman makes forays into the contemporary American scene, using the 1960's French ''Tel Quel'' group of writers and the post-structuralism associated with it as a pivot between past and present. She concludes with an excellent bibliographical essay that details the history of the idea of post-modernism and nicely organizes the debate on that subject.

She also has a prescription in mind for a renovated avant-garde esthetic that is both feminist and post-modern: ''A double allegiance,'' Ms. Suleiman says, ''characterizes much of the best contemporary work by women: on the one hand, an allegiance to the formal experiments and some of the cultural aspirations of the historical male avant-gardes; on the other hand, an allegiance to the feminist critique of dominant sexual ideologies, including the sexual ideology of those same avant-gardes.''

Ms. Suleiman is herself a liberal or ecumenical feminist who honors both the biocentric wing of international feminist thinking, which takes the body alone as the essence of gender, and the structural wing, which views gender as a cultural construction, in order to present a united front to the outside world. While the result tends to conceal the rifts within feminism itself, it also results in a dauntingly comprehensive demonstration of the way different feminist approaches may be combined to engage a wide range of meanings from a tradition like the avant-garde.

What Ms. Suleiman is saying at any given time, however, is hard to summarize; her prose reflects the kind of fluid, feminist poetics for which she argues thematically. Feminist criticism, it appears, like feminist fiction, must be a kind of writing that refuses the straightforwardness of male writing, including its armory of values such as clarity, concision and pointedness, all of which can be interpreted as masquerades for the male lust for power, replicating the structure of male sexual pleasure.

If the male Surrealists historically suppressed the women who were allowed access to their inner circle, they also maintained a notion of woman as object in their esthetic practice, a point Ms. Suleiman makes lucid in readings of Breton's novel Nadja (1928), Max Ernst's painting The Blessed Virgin Chastising the Infant Jesus Before Three Witnesses (1926) and Marcel Duchamp's mustachioed Mona Lisa (1919). The same kind of ''ordinary sexism,'' as she calls it, also contaminates the work of avant-garde novelists such as Bataille and Mr. Robbe-Grillet.

Too great a focus on Mr. Robbe-Grillet's technique, she argues, requires readers to bypass the ''sado-erotic core'' of his novels, particularly Project for a Revolution in New York (1970). ''Formalist rationalization'' obscures this core by neutralizing the scenes of bondage and torture and the humiliation of women that crop up so often in the novel.

Mr. Robbe-Grillet does not deploy such sexist representation, Ms. Suleiman says, as a revolutionary strategy that disrupts sexism. She suggests that, like Bataille, he uses it to resist ''the female body, in its duplicity as asexual maternal and sexual feminine'' - the specter of woman as mother and lover at once. Using Roland Barthes's remark that ''the writer is someone who plays with his mother's body,'' Ms. Suleiman explains Mr. Robbe-Grillet's ''fury toward women'' as ''hatred of mothers,'' a reflection in turn of a ''desire to dominate - be it one's language or the body of one's mother.'' Ms. Suleiman takes this to be a ''fantasy of self-engenderment'' that corresponds to the art of the male avant-garde as a whole, which pretends to have no precursors.

A properly feminist avant-garde, by contrast, looks toward ''parody and the multiplication of narrative possibilities.'' Key are the strategies of ''parodic appropriation'' and ''revisionist mythmaking'' common to the contemporary work of Angela Carter in England and Cindy Sherman or Barbara Kruger in the United States. Here patriarchal ideologies like classical myth, Hollywood or advertising are reconceived rather than simply rejected.

Ms. Suleiman's favorite example of revisionary mythmaking is The Hearing Trumpet by Leonora Carrington (1976). The novel is narrated by an old woman and mother banished by her family to an old-age home. Reversing the structure of the Arthurian Grail, Carrington's parodic rewriting of myth also supplements the traditional image of Venus by adding to it her neglected historical role as ''mother.'' In Carrington's fable, Venus even turns out to own the chalice.

The figure of woman as both maternal and autonomous organizes Ms. Suleiman's entire book; it is best symbolized, she tells us, by ''the figure of the playful mother.'' Drawing on ''the maternal metaphor'' advanced by French feminism to offset the notion of ''the patriarchal mother,'' Ms. Suleiman concludes that ''a woman can be politically radical, artistically innovative, and yet a mother.''

The union of mother and play is also a solution to the Oedipus complex, whose importance Ms. Suleiman likes to underplay. While she wonders aloud whether ''the 'real' logic of Oedipus'' is ''the elimination of the mother, and a fortiori of female subjectivity,'' its logic is actually the one represented in her own positive image of the mother playing. Woman as both maternal and erotic, as Ms. Suleiman imagines her, is precisely the double image of women that the concept of the Oedipus complex requires of boys and girls alike. This is a deep and moving insight, and one that Ms. Suleiman's ecumenical approach validates despite itself. Indeed, the extent of her liberalism should not be underestimated. ''For the sake of some literal-minded readers,'' she writes in a footnote, ''I want to emphasize that I do not consider castration or sex-change operations as solutions, political or other!''

Originally published in The New York Times Book Review, August 5, 1990

Emilio's Is Dead, Long Live Emilio's!

by Walter Kendrick and Perry Meisel

They said it many different ways: "This place isn't supposed to close." "This is the worst thing that's happened to the Village since the fire at the Eighth Street Book Store." "If Emilio's closes, anything can happen." They were, of course, the usual crowd - actors, musicians, grocers, professors, black, white, old, young, gay, straight, and all the stages in between. They laughed, they cried, they loaded their plates with eggplant parmigiana, meatballs, ziti, and, for no apparent reason, fried chicken. They drank as if there were no tomorrow. And there wasn't.

Emilio's restaurant, a Sixth Avenue institution for 32 years, was shutting down for good. Sunday evening, several hundred of its regular patrons gathered to say farewell at a party that resembled a cross between an Irish wake an Italian wedding. Gil Rainero, son of the original Emilio, was retiring, and he threw a bash to say thanks. The timeless waitresses bravely served their last suppers: Maria (28 years on duty), Carol (22), Paula (16); even the new arrivals, Tricia (two years) and Mary Lou (just one), deftly hugged old friends with one arm and dished out lasagna with the other.

Manager Gus Theodoro, Gil's impromptu press secretary, waxed eloquent: "Emilio's was a true melting pot; it was what the country should be. Other places are Irish bars, Italian bars, actors' bars, sports bars, gay bars, Jersey bars - Emilio's was all of these. People are here tonight to get a last little taste and touch of that human family that used to belong to them part-time." On an average Saturday night, he said, Emilio's was home to 750 diners, 75 people who came in to use the bathroom, 40 for the phone, and 25 purse-snatchers. "A real microcosm," he said.

The bar, Gil maintained, was the center of Emilio's, but for us it was the "red room" (the one with the fireplace) in winter and the "garden" (with hardly a plant to be seen) in summer. In the garden, July 1977, we cheered with the sweaty crowd as the Village came out of the blackout; all along, Emilio's had been the only place you could get ice in your drink (they trucked it in from Jersey). For 12 years, from the time we moved to New York, we used to meet there almost every week, and we charted our development in what we ordered: In 1975, Perry favored veal parmigiana and disdained the lasagna; by 1980, he knew better. Walter, by contrast, was an early lasagna fan, but in the '80s his taste turned in favor of the veal. No one, however, went to Emilio's for the food.

It was the atmosphere (you couldn't call it ambiance) that drew us back again and again, and that made us drag our friends there, no matter how snooty they were. Yuppification never put a dent in Emilio's: It was New York as you used to see it in old Don Ameche movies. The red-and-white checkered tablecloths disappeared in the late '70s, and fake Tiffany hanging lamps moved in, but the painful benches and little fake flowers endured. Now it's being turned into an appliance store - just what the neighborhood needs. The last gloppy forkful of characterless mozzarella went down as smoothly as the first. Emilio's is gone, but the heartburn lingers on.

Originally published in The Village Voice, January 19, 1988

Company Jets

by Perry Meisel

Football is blocking and tackling. Everything else is mythology.

- Vince Lombardi

The Jets' regular home is the Weeb Ewbank training center, comfortably tucked in a (naturally) green and isolated strip of the high-rise Hofstra campus on Long Island. When I went out for a visit in the plash of a sporadic rain the Thursday before the season-ending (so far) Monday Night Football tilt with the Patriots, the military atmosphere was anything but subtle. Within 10 minutes after arriving, I was spotted squatting along the sideline watching the offensive troops drill. Eyes everywhere, the Coach greeted the new visitor with a question asked in a tone that was only half joking: "You're not from New England, are you?"

This was hardly the austere and rabbinic Joe Walton I was used to seeing on the tube; it was clear that, full metal jacket and all, Joe was enormously relaxed (this was five days before the strike and long before he was forced to coach scabs), and, well, enjoying himself, even relishing the implication (wholly unwarranted given the hardass security at the gate) that I was an enemy spy sent by the archrival Pats. Joe's question in fact detonated a whole string of images that lead into the heart of football's classic military vocab.

Squad, bombs, drills - the list of shared terms is endless. Engaged as we now are in an NFL DMZ, the tenacity of these tropes is alarming, especially if the strike principals stick to 'em. You think I'm exaggerating? The Jets' PR chief, Frank Ramos, a lean and elegant man with keen, distant eyes (not unlike field general Ken O'Brien's), spent his army hitch working for the football program at West Point.

Military structure runs through all pro football, but there's another system at work that's especially evident with the Jets. I didn't see it fully until I visited the locker room following the Monday night game at the Meadowlands, where the cold high-tech feel provides a stark contrast to Edenic Hofstra. While the Giants or the Bears will pop off to the press, the Jets are trained not only as a football squad but also as, well, a corporate sales force. (Walton's description of Freeman McNeil in the Jets media guide could just as well have fit an IBM marketing veep: "He has good leadership qualities and the team responds to him.") Face it: despite their relative eloquence (or perhaps because of it), the Jets are now one of the most faceless teams in the NFL.

The fabulation of team harmony is so brutally perfect it leaves you gasping. These guys are as man/nerly in their discourse as they are on the field. The Brooklyn-born O'Brien is the perfect Jet - cool, levelheaded, nerveless. But whether it's because he's developed Sacramento cool or because Lockheed subcontracted his cerebrum, it's hard to tell. No showboating for this team, no fat-heading, no stupidity - not as players, not (any longer) as personalities. Only Jetspeak, a fine and supple language that yields nothing and whose primary rule is that the speaker subjugate himself to the team as a whole. The corporate message behind Jetspeak is sheltered very well indeed in the military metaphor. Jetspeak is a mode of military orderliness for the players, but also a mode of corporate cool for the company.

Jetspeak is an example of the slow addition of the language of the corporation to the more classical milatarese we associate with football. But the noncoincidence of the metaphors is surprising. In fact, it's caused a football strike. Pro football has, of course, always been a business, but only lately - in these days of Super Bowl Giants who are both suburban M.B.A.'s and "lunch pailers" - have its self-describing metaphors caught up with the corporate reality that produces them. In fact, you could say that there's been a time lag in the history of football terminology. You could even say that the military lingo has, until recently, almost entirely repressed the corporate infrastructure.

The striking NFL player looks like a guy itching to be a mercenary (the natural combination of war skills and the corporate marketplace) but discovering that he's only got a single client - and a single metaphor - to stand on. After the USFL's demise, the NFL is once again a monopoly, especially when the TV money is divided equally among the clubs no matter how well they perform. Had Pittsburgh played the Jets last weekend, for instance, it wouldn't have been a fight between cities but between "organizations." Look at it this way: football, the ultimate TV sport, is a living-room war - our continuing Vietnam. But the difference is that the NFL is always the home team and the enemy. Sorta like Rollerball (itself a joke about the NFL) with Tokyo and Houston in mortal "combat" in the arena under the regime of a single international corporate government. Sorta a lot like it.

Military and corporate metaphors have suddenly collided rather than meshed - hence the strike. In fact, for the past few years they've been colliding in the current system, which is military for the players ("loyalty to the team") but coldly corporate for the owners ("loyalty to profits"). "When we call it a game," said John Matuszak in North Dallas Forty, "you call it a business. When we call it a business, you call it a game." Most NFL players not named Gastineau have finally come to understand the slipperiness of this doublespeak - and to act on it.

No matter how successful the players are in their strike and how much the structure of the NFL changes as a result (it's hard to imagine the NFL Players Association turning the league into the People's Republic of Santa Monica), the Jets' astonishing bolt out of the gate this year is likely to silence kvetches and succor the faithful once a legitimate season resumes. OneVoicehand even quipped that a strike would at least bar another late-year Jet collapse, since the schedule will be truncated. Whatever happens, who'd've figure the Jets to be 2-0 and the Giants 0-2 in 1987? Before the opener at Buffalo (a sturdy though numerically slim victory, 31-28), it seemed that the Jets would probably benefit from a suspension of play more than any other team in the league (Joe Klecko, Lance Mehl, and Reggie McElroy are expected to return no earlier than November - hang on, scabs).

The Monday night subjugation of the Patriots should've dispelled any lingering questions about Obie (his late-season slide last year turned most Jets fans into amateur shrinks) or the two rookies, Gerald Nichols and Alex Gordon, now filling in for Klecko and Mehl, respectively. With a combo of sticky D by the secondary and funky stunts by the line (from the second quarter on), supersound field-positioning by the special teams, time-bomb running by Johnny Hector and Freeman McNeil, and an obviously refreshed O'Brien, particularly in the second half, the Jets are (were) on a roll again.

Ironically, it's the Jets rather than the Giants who should be hungry to get back to work. They're (once again) the surprise team of the year, this time in a stillborn season.

Originally published in The Village Voice, October 6, 1987

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Arctic Spring

A Consumer Guide to the USFL

by Perry Meisel

Except for Herschel Walker, they all have a lean and hungry look. Somebody seems to be watching from behind - you, me, the coach, the owner, the NFL. Above all, the NFL scouts. Those prospective gazes are the secret diversion in both the players' and their mentors' eyes even in the thick of a sometimes bruising, sometimes sluggish game in the fledgling United States Football League.

Sure, the overtness of the anxiety has receded now that the season is several weeks old. And no, as Lou Grant would say to Mary, "it doesn't stink," either as spectacle or achievement. Boring maybe, but not pathetic. With only a month's camp and no exhibition games, some offensive lines actually started to click by the second week of play (Philadelphia's in particular, releasing North Carolina rookie Kelvin Bryant for big yardage), though others stayed inarticulate (Washington's); team concentration sagged in some cases (New Jersey), but in others it deepened profoundly, especially in Arizona's stunning alarm-clock comeback to beat powerhouse Chicago under the new gun of LSU rookie star Alan Risher.

But the almost palpable anxiety remains and is likely to endure, qualifying the major-league credibility of the new league. Even the Birmingham press corps - as ready (again) as any for a pro franchise - was reportedly grumbling "Triple A" after the opener there against Michigan.

By turns jaunty and tedious, exhilarating and downright dull, the USFL will in all likelihood remain Triple A in stature, a highly formalized, almost luxurious hybrid of established minor institutions like the Canadian Football League, the Central American baseball leagues, or summer pro basketball clubs. But it wouldn't stand a chance against even the impromptu NFL Players Association squads that played two games during last fall's strike (John Riggins took the red-eye to play in both). The USFL will forever be a three-quarters to seven-eighths version of the NFL, everything - and most everybody - built just a tad off-scale, especially (and in this case, happily) the exciting young quarterbacks like Risher who wouldn't - and won't - get legitimate shots at the Real Bigs.

But while the USFL is offscale aesthetically, it will probably have no financial problems in staying afloat (or adrift) for at least a few more years, certainly longer than the two-year bubble of the old World Football League in the early '70s. After all, the marketing boys at ABC said go ahead and spend a rumored $20 million last year. Meanwhile, ESPN -- which shares the league video package with ABC and whose former president, Chet Simmons, is the new league's commissioner - is rumored to have its future hanging on the new venture at a supposed cost of $11 million. But after a couple of weeks the Nielsen numbers aren't just respectable - they're terrific, both for ABC and ESPN (of the 30 million households that have cable, almost 25 million get ESPN). Stadium attendance, too, has been more than reasonable - consistently over 30,000 plus an average per game, producing a controlled but visible jubilance among league personnel and contradicting guys like Dave Anderson (the John Simon of sportswriting) who prophesy a virtual biogenetic dysfunction as the result of pro football in the spring and summer.

And add still another advantage, this one the plain (and perhaps the only) result of real football work: two extremely different kinds of high-caliber players buttressing the league at its inception - some good NFL veterans plus some genuinely dazzling rookies. Hence the re-emergence of tested rifles like Chicago's Greg Landry, and even the emergence of Tampa Bay's John Reaves; the shocking jump to the new league by ex-Lions linebacker Stan White (NFL strike spokesman, by the way) now calling signals for the Chicago Blitz defense; and the signing of Eagle linebacker John Bunting by Philadelphia.

Hence, too, not just one but two sets of college rookies, one group normally NFL-bound (North Carolina's Kelvin Bryant, SMU's Craig James, Wisconsin's David Greenwood); the other brilliant but slightly offscale (the kind of college stars you've always wanted to see more of but couldn't, performers like Risher, Birmingham quarterback Reggie Collier, and Chicago wide receiver Trumaine Johnson).

This is the one important - and historically salutary - difference that the USFL adds (or subtracts?) to pro football. Sure, James or Bryant would likely start in the NFL (at least on a noncontender). But Risher would get cut, like Yale's John Rogan last year with the Jets, as would Washington's rookie quarterback, Minnesota's Mike Hohensee.

Of course, in the middle, both figuratively and literally, come all the no-names and never-names, guys cut for years and years but who could at least beat out the hundreds who came to the earliest camps. But let's face it: like the Académie Française, the NFL has the legal standards no matter its mistakes or its politics.

Both credible and incredible, then, what's this three-quarters to seven-eighths operation like? Only real football junkies need apply (I confess to watching CFL replays at 3 a.m. in August). Most of us expected a wide-open offensive game like the old AFL at season's start. Even the commentators (and more especially the coaches) huffed about offense being prime.

The consistent ring (clunk would be too strong a word) is not so much poor execution as it is an almost uniform principle of conservative rather than reckless play - as if to offset all the prophesies (including the coaches' own hype) about mega-offense. Conventional idiom would say defense was simply ahead of offense. But defense is hardly the dominant factor. Offensively, the games have simply centered on the ground, superadded to a control passing game used either simply to mix it up or, more often, to maintain possession by zipping the ball to receivers curling under the defensive backs and behind the linebackers, or by tossing outlet passes to flaring backs.

Under the relative duress of sketchy video coverage and only a few weeks of play, then, here is a set of team-by-team impressions, containing some maybe harebrained predictions (special thanks to ABC Sports for providing whatever additional video has been available).

Atlantic Division

New Jersey Generals: Even before the signing of Walker, everyone thought this was the team to beat, based largely on coach, president, and part-owner Chuck Fairbanks's reputation, a stolid if soggy customer. Boy, were we wrong. Just thinking about how much depended on rickety old Bobby Scott after nine years on the beach in New Orleans during its "glory years" should've clued us in. The Generals' receivers do include two former Giants, Mike Friede and Mark Slawson (Friede's acrobatic catches often made highlight films when the Giants rolled).

Without Herschel (is this a scam we have to get used to, or are we really waiting for something?), the Generals' backfield has looked strangely like the Giants' did a few years ago, especially with ex-Giant Larry Coffey stroking off a few elegant yards on one play only to fall on his face in the backfield on the next.

But it's not all Coffey's fault, any more now than it was with the Giants. Plagued by a demoralizingly inept offensive line, Herschel will have to start carrying the ball 30 to 40 times a game after (so Fairbanks's rap goes) he learns all the plays, especially his blocking assignments and a better way to see holes. And even despite a line in shambles, Herschel still runs like he did at Georgia, sweeping mostly to the right and simply feeling his way along his blockers' asses till he finds a crack. He's hardly had a blast-off run yet; questions are actually cropping up about his ability to accelerate.

But if Herschel does start carrying more often, it still means he'll have to take Earl Campbell-style punishment, extremely damaging both physically and mentally. Marcus Allen, for example, will last longer (like Tony Dorsett or Walter Payton) because his narrowness doesn't give tacklers a chunky target to spear - the weighty Campbell and Herschel are sitting ducks by comparison. What this will spell for Herschel's later NFL career, we won't know for a while. But to think that Herschel will stay in the USFL very long is naive.

Philadelphia Stars: A slashing tailback from North Carolina, Kelvin Bryant was easily on his way to breaking the record for NCAA season touchdowns (29) when his knee gave out early in his junior year (despite arthroscopic surgery, he still came back to gain over 1000 yards in the 1981 season). The injury clearly hampered him in his senior season, scotching once-genuine hopes for a Heisman bid. On the first Sunday, the sleek and stocky Bryant still had 77 yards. And with a full camp behind him, Bryant at least has, like his linemen, obviously learned the system well (Herschel, Herschel). But, like Walker, look for him to jump to the NFL at the right time.

Quarterback Chuck Fusina (one of innumerable Penn Staters in the USFL, including teammate Scott Fitzkee) is indeed an NFL backup but a much younger one (three years behind Doug Williams at Tampa Bay), but in charge as much as any quarterback in the league. Exuding a quieter and more convincing confidence than Reeves or even Landry, Fusina's second game was the best exhibition yet of the control passing that will highlight the league's conservatism more consistently than the rushing game. But with Bryant in there, too, Philadelphia obviously has the most balanced attack in the East.

Washington Federals: Even though SMU tailback Craig James would've doubtless ended up a probably latish NFL pick (he played alongside Eric Dickerson, the cool, wise one who sits and waits), he'd likely have ended up on special teams ("oops, my frontal lobe"), seeing only backup duty at fullback on a contender and a faceful of defense on a lousy team. After a dismal opener, though, James went down with a jammed back the second Monday night against L.A. And along with him went Washington's other best hope, rookie quarterback Mike Hohensee, another Risher in stature but without the mobility (receiver Reggie Smith also went down in the second game, decimating an already sluggish squad).

Boston Breakers: It's been an ex-Eagle Johnnie Walton's passing that has seen Boston first lose one of the few seesaw openers to an equally aerial Tampa Bay team, and then win one the next week against Denver on a fleaflicker bomb plus a 14-yard TD strike (Walton also has ex-Eagle Charlie Johnston to throw to). Add to the passing a defense that can block field goals and run 'em back for TDs, and you've actually got one of only a few defenses to say something positive about. Boston is balanced enough to merit real scrutiny once they get fuller video exposure. Besides, they're the only threat in the division to Philadelphia's otherwise clear supremacy.

Central Division

Michigan Panthers: Probably the only team in the league with a more interesting and potent defense than offense. Already feared for some beefy backers, Michigan also features world-class rookie strong safety David Greenwood, a Ted Hendricks/Bob Baumhower look-alike, blitzing his lanky frame all over the place, very often in the quarterback's face. Michigan is lucky to have his excitement - and his punting - as well as the psychological and strategic relief he provides cornerbacks like Clarence Chapman, who can gamble with Greenwood roaming the streets.

There is also a good quarterback rivalry to watch, though coach Jim Stanley has yet to exploit it, staying with rookie Bobby Hebert and letting Vandy rookie Whit Taylor sit on the bench. This is still not one of your big play/major action teams. Like Birmingham, Michigan will be relatively interesting to see develop over a few years, but expect less and less as this season wears on - unless, of course, Taylor gets a chance to come on like Risher.

Birmingham Stallions: Quarterback Reggie Collier is exactly the kind of great college offensive threat (Southern Mississippi '83) who'd at best end up as a defensive back in the NFL (like Darrol Ray or Nolan Cromwell), but who can continue his offensive career in a USFL that allows a fair amount of quarterback running at three-quarters punishment. A blastoff sweep-runner (or up the middle) whose only other pro shot at offense would've been the Great White North, Collier resembles Oklahoma's J.C. Watts, who led the Toronto Argonauts to the Grey Cup out of nowhere in 1981 (the Generals' Lott was also a wishbone quarterback at Oklahoma, but Fairbanks is almost surely too old-fashioned to try him out under center if things get even worse in the Meadowlands).

Defensive backs have been brought into lots of action so far throughout the league and the Stallions' Billy Cesare is a prime example of how to bottle up outside routes so as to allow pressure coverage of the underneath receivers (Cesare can even do a Jerry Holmes, getting into the backfield before a running play can start).

With little else going for 'em other than a reasonably tough if no-name defense, then, the Stallions' future now depends on how much punishment Collier's body can endure and whether or not he can learn to throw more and better.

Chicago Blitz: Chicago's opener was easily the most convincing game of the lot, the kind you expect from a George Allen-coached team. Balancing Stan White on defense is vet quarterback Greg Landry - never a question to the extent Scott or L.A.'s Mike Rae have been. And unlike former backup Scott, Landry did get to play a fair amount with Baltimore (Bert Jones got hurt often) and so has not just psychological but also physical experience - the toughening will doubtless help preserve him in the USFL. Landry is also fortunate in his receivers, especially rookie Trumaine Johnson (maybe an NFL shot if looked at long enough), an instant star on day one, a Reynaldo Nehemiah or Lam Jones who already has soft hands even if he's thinking about running before catching the ball. He's also one of the few really explosive runners in the league, with more acceleration than almost any of the backs.

Tampa Bay Bandits: Landry can do it for Chicago, and veteran John Reaves (Bengals, Eagles) is doing it up big for Tampa Bay. Reaves got in a seesaw spearchucking affair with Boston's Walton the first day; like Landry's, Reaves's was no short-passing game but the bombardier antics of an old pro. Adding to the offensive push is a running game headlined by Duke rookie Greg Boone, the first back to break 100 yards in a single USFL game.

But will good old quarterbacks like Reaves and Landry make it through an 18-game season? Scott is already more than a question, but even the proven ones are vulnerable. They have experience - bench experience - but the punishment factor, even for Landry, has yet to be assessed. Will there even be any pressure late in the season? Or will people just sigh - or not even notice - when the CFL kicks off July 4th and the USFL finishes its regular season?

Pacific Division

L.A. Express: The simple fact that Hughie Campbell has come should tell everybody else to get out of town. This cool and largely unknown customer is probably the best coach in pro football today. A receiver at Washington State, he coached at little Whitworth College in Washington before going north in 1975, eventually leading the Edmonton Eskimos to five champion Grey Cupa in a row before coming to Los Angeles this year. Certainly Fairbanks's fate and even Allen's mean coaching aren't everything but, like Allen, Hughie is also blessed with talent.

With the one-two punch of veteran quarterback Mike Rae (Oakland, Tampa Bay, Washington) and UCLA rookie sensation Tom Ramsey, the cunning Hughie started with Rae in the opener, switching to Ramsey only after the flutters were gone and getting a fairly exceptional pro debut out of him. By the second game, Hugh's line system was clicking well enough to get even the substitute backs hunky hardage, and well enough too to leave Rae in there long enough (three quarters) to make him the second week's star.

Already rich and balanced in quarterbacks, then, L.A. probably surprised itself when it saw incandescence in a classic backfield combination of swift tailback rookie Tony Boddie and a Sam-the-Bam-style fullback in LaRue Harrington. Even the defense is hitting in harmony, led by linebacker Eric Scroggina. Add receivers like Ellis and a zesty backfield bench and L.A. has got it all, growing not just sounder each week but fierier too.

Oakland Invaders: Oakland's young quarterback Fred Besana (Cal) played as well as Reaves when the Invaders tackled Arizona in their opener. One of the few instances in which offense outdid defense convincingly on opening day, Oakland also produced the league's only defensive shutout the first weekend.

Former Raider, tailback Arthur Whittington gives Oakland some backfield credibility on paper, though its young fullback Ted Torosian who's actually done what rushing damage there's been so far. With only a few old vets to stabilize line play (especially 13-year veteran Cedrick Hardman at defensive end), Oakland will live or die by how well the youngsters jell in a future more secure than Washington's, but less so than Tampa Bay's or even Boston's.

Arizona Wranglers: Even though center Dave Otey wears a horseshoe belt signifying his status as a "bucking" star on the rodeo circuit ridin' bulls, the Wranglers at first didn't look at all like the "roughneck" outfit they've learned to call themselves in interviews. Apparently the dog of the league the first week out (the only shutout victim), their second week's upset of powerhouse Chicago was the biggest surprise yet, and probably the most exciting game. Maybe the Wranglers didn't realize they were really a finesse, collegiate-style team rather than a bunch of gunfighters until Risher turned it all around in the second half of the Chicago affair. Expect anything.

Denver Gold: Coach Red Miller is, of course, a local folk-hero, leading the Broncos to the Super Bowl in 1977. Bob Niziolek and Lionel Phea are Colorado rookie quarterback Jeff Knapple's most dependable targets, even though Knapple himself throws too many floaters, easily picked off on fly patterns. Ken Johnson can at least spell him, though, throwing tighter spirals and showing more pocket poise. At his best, though, Knapple features the USFL's control passing game, tossing underneath dumplings to his receivers and backs - a better way (in this league anyway) of keeping the ball than the largely damp running game it has (un)developed so far. Former Bronco Larry Canada - good for breaking off a few long gainers between stumbles and occasional short-yardage success - is the best Denver has in the backfield, and is probably better at snagging short passes than running the ball with any particular consistency. Look for catnapping fans at Mile High Stadium as the weather gets better.

Predictions

It took the NFL till the last few years to achieve Rozellian parity. It will probably take this league more time than it's got. That makes prognostication easier even if the enjoyment is subpar. And though it's absurdly early, these picks ain't coin tosses either.

Atlantic: Philadelphia will take the division with relative ease and relatively little competition.

Central: Chicago and Tampa Bay will fight for a while, but Chicago will glide in the end.

Pacific: Best race of the three by far. L.A. will eventually take it all (Hughie doesn't lose), though the endurance of Besana's arm at Oakland and Risher's fortunes at Arizona may give the Express some skirmishes before it's all over.

Pick for the championship game: Los Angeles against Chicago, with Hughie a winner all the way.

Originally published in The Village Voice, April 12, 1983

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L’Affect et l’affectation dans la culture contemporaine

by Perry Meisel

Nous évaluons d’habitude la vie et l’art d’après des coordonnées analytiques où—même quand elles empruntent le nom de Freud—il n’est plus question de ce qui est vraiment à l’œuvre dans le tissu quotidien de la culture contemporaine. C’est le prix qu’elles payent pour le fait d’y vivre, je suppose. Même Freud n’a pas pénétré suffisamment nos esprits pour rendre les choses plus claires. Vous me corrigerez si je ne parle ici que de la vie intellectuelle en Amérique. Notre aveuglement quant à ce que veut dire l’inconscient est bien sûr un symptôme due problème qui se pose à nous aujourd’hui. C’est le problème de la différence, que nous évoquons silencieusement ou non, à tout moment : la différence entre affect et affectation, authenticité et fiction, sincérité et parure.

Les registres qu’il recouvre comprennent d’autres différences significatives pour la façon dont nous organisons notre pensée entre le privé et le public, l’impulsion et l’autorité, la transgression et la loi…la liste est virtuellement infinie. C’est même une différence qui nous a fait mettre en croix nos dirigeants élus, à cette époque d’authenticité qui est en train de s’achever, et dont les chapitres portent les noms de Profumo, Nixon, Jeremy Thorpe.

Rien que ceci soit ordinairement la pâte dont est faite la psychobiographie vulgaire, son expression la plus concise et représentative est sans doute littéraire. On la trouve chez Norman Mailer, dans Un rêve américain en 1964. La myopie des suppositions contenues dans la citation qui suit, au sujet de ce que les psychologues de l’égo appellent « l’identité » sera en fait corrigée par Mailer lui-même, comme nous le verrons, dans la ligne de la critique de l’authenticité que nous entreprenons aujourd’hui. Voici ce passage exemplaire de Mailer au milieu de sa carrière, et la notion fondatrice—que nous partageons avec lui—de ce que le héros supporte afin d’arriver à être un symbole public. « Je voudrais—dit le Rojack de Mailer—m’éloigner de la politique avant d’être à jamais séparé de moi-même par la distance entre mon aspect public, qui était devenu primordial à la télévision, apparence presque robuste en fait, et mon histoire d’amour secrète et effarouchée avec les phases de la lune. »

C’est précisément l’éclatement de la différence entre l’affect et l’affectation, le privé et le public, le sentiment et la façade qui menace de détruire Rojack, en tant que politicien dans Un rêve américain.

Et cependant, ironiquement, ce n’est que l’imminent effondrement de cette différence qui permet d’en sentir la valeur ou le sens. C’est, paradoxalement, l’épreuve par laquelle nous n’espérons pas découvrir cette valeur. Essayer d’évaluer l’absence de différence entre affect et affectation, que nous appelons caractère ou intégrité, c’est rechercher une différence qui contient déjà sa propre impossibilité.

Un rêve américain

Cette façon rhétorique de priver de leurs moyens de production certaines machines idéologiques comme le moi n’est pas le seul fait du domaine de la subjectivité. Comme nous le savons bien, parmi les procédures techniques, qu’emploient également la littérature et la psychanalyse se trouve la primauté du langage, spécialement le langage de la narration et de la mémoire qui compose aussi bien les vies que les romans. Tout comme, par exemple, l’absence souhaitée d’une différence entre l’affect et l’authenticité d’un caractère à la fois en nous-mêmes et chez les autres—c’est le problème qui inquiète Rojack « l’authenticité »--de même la coupure nulle, dans le récit, entre ce que les formalistes russes appellent récit et histoire entre le temps du récit et le temps de l’histoire racontée est le moteur du désir qui nous fait lire jusqu’au bout un livre ou continuer de regarder un film. En fait la coupure du récit avec l’histoire, qui cherche à atteindre l’authenticité d’une histoire dans la forme particulière du désir narratif propre et endémique au discours réaliste est un des plus claires modèles auxquels nous puissions faire appel pour élucider les différences opérationnelles qui produisent le désir dans tous ses registres—l’un des plus clair tout spécialement parce que son éclatement est aussi compliqué dès le début par l’assurance de sa propre impossibilité. Par la nécessité du gommage de sa première activité organisatrice dans la soumission à ce qu’elle produit.

Et il y a un modèle qui est encore plus réduit pour ce que nous voulons montrer, c’est la notion spécifique à Harold Bloom du trope, qui situe cet impossible désir de l’identité entre l’affectation, désir naturel à la subjectivité comme au langage littéraire. Pour Bloom—comme pour Derrida—le trope est le trope du chiasme, une figure qui nous permet de voir que le système du désir—c’est-à-dire de la référence comme telle—n’est pas réel empiriquement, mais est une structure rhétorique qui situe l’affect et l’affectation comme fonctions l’une de l’autre. (Je passe ici sur la question maintenant traditionnelle de l’emploi de « structure » dans le contexte de la temporalité.) Le chiasme, par définition, inverse les termes d’une proposition donnée—par exemple : la littérature de science, la science de la littérature—et se propose ainsi comme modèle pour la façon dont est produit l’espace à la fois du personnage et du action. Bloom l’appelle contamination dans écart vis-à-vis de Derrida—et ses exemples incluent la tactique rhétorique du texte de Freud, par laquelle la mutuellement, en une structure de contamination ou de chiasme mutuel. Suivant Laplanche, par exemple, Bloom prétend que la conduite s’appuie rétrospectivement sur une défense qui la précède au niveau de l’histoire mais qui la suit au niveau du récit. C’est le nœud que Lacan noue au niveau du langage littéraire et aussi de la défense psychique, faisant de sa structure chiasmatique une fonction de la référentialité inventive du discours de Freud.

Mais bien que nous puissions faire appel à Bloom, à Lacan, ou à Derrida pour la boucle qui constitue les structures homologues de la subjectivité aussi bien que du récit—interrogeons plutôt une évidence sociale—comme Freud lui-même plutôt que de nous en tenir uniquement au niveau de la théorie. Interrogeons en fait, pour les symptômes, le caractère dramatique, dramatistique, au même dramaturgique de l’histoire contemporaine telle qu’elle se joue à travers l’instrumentalité patente des media. Des exemples à la fois récents et immédiats peuvent être facilement donnés : tout comme la fiction du nettoyage produit par Watergate avait sa racine dans le désir de supprimer la différence entre l’affect et l’affectation—de même un livre comme la nouvelle biographie d’Elvis Presley par Albert Goldman n’insiste pas seulement sur la différence entre le public et le privé. Il fait aussi apparaître le gain idéologique obtenu en faisant la séparation : la possibilité de rendre compte (et dans le cas de Goldman, presque de rejeter) d’un succès public ou artistique comme celui d’Elvis par les vices privés de la personnalité dont le nom y est lié. Le fait que l’on peut considérer la situation dans l’autre sens (l’antisémitisme de Pound, par exemple, coexistant avec sa réputation plutôt que la ruinant véritablement) est en fait une preuve supplémentaire de notre argumentation plutôt que sa réfutation.

Mais s’il y a un discours culturel pour lequel est central à la fois le danger et le désir, le handicap et l’inévitabilité, de l’éclatement de la différence fondatrice bien qu’impossible entre affect et affectation, c’est la pop-music, le rock en particulier. Dans l’art-rock de Manhattan—dans ce qu’on a appelé punk depuis le milieu des années 70—notre querelle théorique sur la différence entre affect et affectation est une question primordiale.

Il est assez facile d’aligner la structure de la problématique punk avec les structures de la subjectivité et du récit par lesquelles nous avons commencé. Dans la boucle de la subjectivité comme dans celle du récit, il y a le produit d’une différence impossible mais désirée entre ce que se trouvait là et ce que se trouvera là—entre le récit et l’histoire, la mémoire et le souvenir : dans le rock l’organisation même de l’espace discoursif procède directement d’une série de doubles significations presqu’avouées. Ces procédés exposent dès le départ les opérations rhétoriques—en fait, chiasmatique—par lesquelles nous plaçons nos normes au rang des dieux.

Le chiasme en action

Je prends pour texte central—texte qui a fourni à mon article son titre et ses termes essentiels—un morceau du premier groupe punk, le plus grand groupe de rock de la décades, les Ramones, morceau intitulé I’m affected dans un album récent End of the Century. Le « double entendre » du titre du morceau, qui et aussi le chœur qui retentit encore et encore dans le morceau, éclaire le paradoxe du nom de l’orchestre, et de ce fait le paradoxe du rock lui-même qui est, pour parler réthoriquement, d’exposer le chiasme en action. Ce qui bouge, ce qui est chargé « d’affect » ou d’émotion, est aussi ce qui est affecté ou simulé. Comment savoir la différence ? Pour les Ramones, la question est indécidable. Le rock est exemplaire parce qu’il est, ainsi, plein d’affectations, de maniérismes, de façon tellement connue en perdant aussi peu contenance, affectations qui nous remuent profondément alors même que nous les savons être de pure fiction, de pur rituel. (Je devrais ici prendre le temps de dire que le jeu de mots en anglais entre affect au sens freudien et affect au sens de jouer ou d’affecter un rôle ne se trouve pas dans les possibilités de son anglais. Je fonde donc le jeu de mots autour duquel s’organise notre discussion, uniquement sur la déviation poétique et séductrice qui nous est permise par l’anglais de Bloomsbury).

Le déguisement familial des Ramones est un autre exemple de la structure de leur humour, en leur faisant échanger la simple allégeance due au fait de jouer dans le même orchestre contre le sentiment (apparemment plus authentique) d’appartenir à une famille. Mais en fait, bien sur, les Ramones n’ont aucun lien de sang—le nom et la chose sont entièrement inventées—même quand ils nous tourmentent en échangeant le sang et la fiction comme des liens d’égale valeur. N’est-ce pas Joyce qui dit que la paternité peut être une fiction légale ?

La fonction qu’a le sujet parlant—ou chantant—en relation avec les modes discursifs qui déterminent son émergence est, qui plus est, le point de mire à la fois des plus récents et des meilleurs éléments de la musique punk ou New Wave. Joan Jett par exemple, chante I love rock ‘n roll, titre de son nouveau 45 tours, certainement pas comme sujet véritable, ni comme ce que nous pourrions, bizarrement, appeler une personne : mais plutôt comme canal serein entre la personnalité et le genre. Notez encore la confusion intentionnelle à l’œuvre dans les noms d’orchestres anglais comme Liquid Liquid ou Medium Medium : dans les deux cas, le même signifiant est utilisé à la fois comme adjectif et comme nom, ce qui pose les questions suivantes : quelle est la différence entre la qualité et la chose elle-même, entre la quiddité et la caractéristique, l’essence et l’attribution ? Nous évaluons nous à la mesure des choses ou des signes ? Même le nom d’un autre nouvel orchestre. A Certain Ratio, joue sur le même problème : un certain rapport est un rapport qui est à la fois précis et incertain.

Notre suprême fiction

Ainsi la raison pour laquelle nous avons l’impression que le rock est le diamant produit par la pression accumulée par l’histoire de la bohème devrait maintenant s’éclaircir. Plus que tout autre discours contemporain, il est obsédé par, et prend comme son scénario même le jeu de l’affect et de l’affectation, du sérieux et de l’imité, de l’angoisse, et de l’ironie, de l’appris et du spontané—et montre comment chacun n’est produit qu’en relation avec l’autre. Le rock ‘n roll est, pour emprunter l’expression de Wallace Stevens, nôtre suprême fiction, celle à laquelle nous croyons le plus aisément du monde, précisément parce que la bouffonnerie et la contamination qui sont secrètement à l’origine de tout ce que nous ressentons quand nous l’entendons est à présent une condition avouée de la musique, à la fois pour ceux qui la jouent et ceux qui l’écoutent.

Et le jeu chiasmatique n’est pas le seul fait de la période punk, même si ce n’est que maintenant qu’il apparaît comme le sujet du rock par excellence. Considérez, par exemple, la double signification du mot rock lui-même : ce qui remue et ce qui est inamovible. Ou considérez le vieux nom donné premier style de bohème de l’Amérique d’après guerre : Beat. Kerouac a lui-même suggéré la double signification à l’œuvre ici : être beat voulant dire à la fois être épuisé « I’m beat » et aussi se sentir en état de béatitude ou de sainteté. La transcendance vers le haut égale la transcendance vers le bas. L’affaiblissement ou la distortion sensorielles égalent la plus grande plénitude de vision—point auquel nous joignons Leary et les années soixante. On peu même mentionner Yoko Ono, son nom est-il un anagramme, qui épelle en les joignant O.K., et Oh no ? Comment évaluer même l’intention ou la distinction dans un tel cas ?

Mais revenons en à la littérature pour voir ce mode avoué de subjectivité et sa présence dans la culture « boho »comme mouvement narratif conscient. Revenons, en fait, à Norman Mailer, cette fois dans un texte très récent,The Executioner’s Song. Là il devient clair que Mailer est allé de la problématique de l’authenticité de la fiction à la fiction de l’authenticité aussi surement que l’a fait le rock lui-même. En fait, avec The Executioner’s Song, nous pouvons voir maintenant que le schéma de toute la carrière de Mailer met en récit la différence indécidable entre l’affect et l’affectation en présentant la différence, non plus comme réelle mais comme stratégique, et en fait chiasmatique. Dans le mouvement même qu’a accompli Mailer, de l’instinctualisme vulgaire due manifeste de 1952, The White Negro, à travers le moment pénible, déjà décrit, d’American Dream en 1964, jusqu'à Executioner’s Song en 1980, sa carrière est passée, consciemment ou non, peu importe, de l’essentialiste au sémiotique, du racisme latent du Beat à la poésie démocratique d’une esthétique punk. Ou, pour le dire autrement. Mailer a infléchi son point de vue, en accord avec l’époque et le tour qu’elle prenait, en lui donnant les diverses teintes que la psychanalyse elle-même a découvert progressivement à la notion qu’avait Freud du Trieb. Si le premier Mailer et aussi le Mailer de la période moyenne aimait à prendre de belles couleurs, à la Laing, l’instinctualisme gratuit du gangster nouvelle vague, The Executioner’s Song déconstruit véritablement notre notion héritée du gangster comme héro tragique en examinant la relation de l’affect et de l’affectation dans Gary Gilmore lui-même. Est-ce que la force de Gilmore vient de l’intérieur ou de l’extérieur ? Est-ce que son affect est fonction de son affectation, ou le contraire ? Ou est-ce que chaque terme n’est en fait rien de plus qu’une fonction de l’autre ?

Ce que met en récit la carrière de Mailer, le punk-rock le répète, de nuit. Ce que les deux ont en commun est, sans aucune gêne et avec une exactitude presque technique, le projet de mettre en question la différence entre l’authenticité et la fiction, et, alternativement, les moyens de la produire.