The Business of Coincidence

Coincidentally, in the recent past I've run across a number of references to the subject of coincidence in fact and fiction. But perhaps it's no coincidence. I'm probably extra-sensitive to the issue because of my own use of the device in a novel I'm currently writing. Here are some of the comments I've seen:

The narrator in Raul Ruiz's film Mysteries of Lisbon observes that "in life, there are events and coincidences of such extravagance that no novelist would ever dare to invent them." Ruiz (or, one should say, the novelist who wrote the book on which Ruiz's movie is based) does of course dare to invent precisely such extravagant coincidences.

W.G Sebald, in an interview at Queens College in 2001, wondered about the function of coincidence-- how he/we use it to make sense out of nonsense:

"I think it's this whole business of coincidence, which is very prominent in my writing. I hope it's not obtrusive. But, you know, it does come up in the first book, in "Vertigo," a good deal. I don't particularly hold with parapsychological explanations of one kind or another, or Jungian theories about the subject. I find those rather tedious. But it seemed to me an instance that illustrates that we somehow need to make sense of our nonsensical existence. You meet somebody who has the same birthday as you—the odds are one in three hundred and sixty-five, not actually all that amazing. But if you like the person then immediately this takes on more . . . and so we build on it, and I think all our philosophical systems, all our systems of our creed, all constructions, even the technological worlds, are built in that way, in order to make some sort of sense, when there isn't, as we all know." (from The New Yorker, August 30, 2001)

Julian Barnes is not averse to using coincidence in his fiction. Or to wryly commenting on it. Geoffrey Braithwaite, the narrator of Flaubert's Parrot may or may not speak for Barnes. Braithwaite, who is full of snap opinions about life and literature, "doesn't much care for coincidences" in either. "There's something spooky about them; you sense momentarily what it must be like to live in an ordered, God-run universe, with Himself looking over your shoulder and helpfully dropping coarse hints about a cosmic plan... I prefer to feel that things are chaotic..." But what snappish Braithwaite finds particularly annoying is that "in the more bookish areas of English middle-class society, whenever a coincidence occurs there is usually someone at hand to comment, 'It's just like Anthony Powell.'"

As for coincidences in books, Braithwaite calls them a lazy stratagem. "There's something cheap and sentimental about the device; it can't help always seeming aesthetically gimcrack." Examples he cites: the troubador who passes by just in time to rescue the girl from a hedgerow scuffle; the sudden but convenient Dickensian benefactors; the neat shipwreck on a foreign shore which reunites siblings and lovers-- in other words, all the staples of old romance fiction.

But, as Braithwaite does not mention, coincidence is also central to the even older traditional kinship reunion plot-- what some critics have called the most powerful use of coincidence, as in the Oedipus story.

For modernists, and post-modernists, Braithwaite does have a way of making coincidences acceptable: call them ironies, he says. The modern mode. In that form, who could be against it? "And yet," he continues, "I wonder if the wittiest, most resonant irony isn't just a well-brushed, well-educated coincidence." Which is presumably Barnes's own ironic opinion on the subject.

China Mieville: Evading the Boundaries of Genre

The genre of China Miéville's The City and the City is not easy to pin down. Though the novel can be read as a dark, quasi-realist police procedural, it can also be viewed as a dystopic urban fantasy. I prefer to see it as both simultaneously. Or, better yet, as a terrific instance of the Genre sans Frontières movement. Miéville himself has said that he considers his book to be, above all, a "crime novel," yet he does not abjure the sci-fi side of his fiction, nor will the reader be likely to ignore the fantastical elements of the narrative.

The novel's hero, Tyador Borlu, is a not unfamiliar noir figure-- a downbeat detective, burdened by moral issues, personal failings and the frustrations of trying to operate effectively under the oppressive tyranny of an amoral and dangerous bureaucracy. Borlu's homicide case presents unusual difficulties-- primarily that the detective works in a strangely divided world. The setting is an urban area split into two overlapping yet distinctly separate cities-- Beszel and Ui Qoma. At one level, this separateness can be seen as an analogue of the familiar income and/or ethnic-based divisions common to urban existence. And Breach, the Big Brother-like institution that enforces the geographic and psychological separation of the two cities, could be interpreted as the over-arching police power of a totalitarian state. But the city divisions are uncanny and Breach's powers seem to operate in a fantastical milieu rather than a neo-realist world. The overlapping area between the two cities-- Breach's home base, as it were-- is an opaque region of the magical. And when Borlu, late in the story, is absorbed into that region, the novel turns echt-sci-fi.

The City and the City's ambiguous genre and its multiple uses of doubling have inspired some to refer to the book's "interstitiality." Miéville seems a bit uncomfortable with that fashionable characterization. "Interstitiality is a tremendous buzzword," he says. It's a theme that is "simultaneously genuinely interesting and potentially quite useful, and also a terrible cliché, so if you're going to use it, it helps to be at least respectfully skeptical about the wilder claims of some of its theoretical partisans..." Rather, he likes the idea of a "shared terrain" between the fantastic and the realistic noir.

Which may simply be another way of saying that his fiction thrives within the non-category of the Genre sans Frontières....

Opera Starved: The Berlusconi Effect

I've just read Alex Ross's downbeat report on the "lean season" of opera performances this summer in Berlusconi's Italy (The New Yorker, July 25, 2011). Ross laments the Italian government's "indifference, if not outright contempt, toward opera and other traditional genres." Apparently the sharp slash in government funding is having a visibly depressing effect on productions throughout the country and creating a widespread sense of insecurity in the Italian opera world. Sad, sad news, ameliorated only by Ross's nice account of Ricardo Muti's protest at La Scala, a modest success story that should be widely read.

Of all the performances Ross attended, only Monteverdi's L'Incoronazione di Poppea at Florence's Maggio Musicale seemed to impress him. The production had a "well-fed look" and "a degree of international glamour missing from other events." This he attributes to the participation of Susan Graham and "a lustrous cast," but also to the members of Alan Curtis's ensemble Il Complesso Barocco. What especially delighted me was the parenthetical aside in which Ross gives a tip of the hat to Donna Leon, the best-selling writer of Guido Brunetti mysteries. For years, she has been the generous patron of what Ross calls "Curtis's high-class Baroque ventures." Thus, in a season of starvation, a crime writer's royalties came to the rescue. Brava for Leon!

Ross's comments on the Monteverdi opera reminded me of the memorable Jonathan Miller production of Poppea that I saw at Glimmerglass in the summer of 1994. Though Glimmerglass provides none of the "historical resonances" Ross experienced while seeing the opera in Florence, the Cooperstown setting and country opera house had their own unique, if ahistorical, pleasures for me. As for the production itself, the counter-tenors David Daniels (as Nero) and Brian Asawa (as Ottone) both gave stunning performances, as did the brilliant original instrument orchestra, led by the energetic Jane Glover.

Partenope Redux?

This spring, Handel's extraordinary Partenope will once again be performed at the New York City Opera. My question is: which version? I know that Francisco Negrin, the talented director, has staged at least two different versions of the opera. The first, which debuted at Glimmerglass in July 1998, was an impressive and revelatory production that subsequently traveled to the NYCO in September of that year. But in the fall of 2008, Negrin directed another rather different version for the Royal Danish Opera in Copenhagen. Exegette was fortunate enough to see (and enjoy) both the Glimmerglass and the Danish productions (and was impelled to write a few enthusiastic words about the marvelous Copenhagen staging in a blog entry that year). So one wonders whether this year's NYCO production will be Partenope I or Partenope II. Or has the imaginative Negrin prepared yet another version for NYCO's audience this time around-- a Partenope III?

What's Doubly Wrong With Pinchuk's Prize?

I can't resist including in my own blog a link to the following excellent post by Judith H. Dobrzynski in her ArtsJournal blog Real Clear Arts:
What's Wrong With This New Prize? A Lot. - Real Clear Arts

I, too, am dismayed that no women seem to be included in the advisory panel that will help Victor Pinchuk select winners for his extravagant new prize for young artists. But I'm perhaps even more depressed by the sorry group of "older generation" male artists selected as "mentors" for the younger generation. (For details, see Carol Vogel's column in the Dec. 7th issue of the NY Times.)

From Gansevoort to Istanbul: Architecture on View

I've just had two great architecture experiences! First, a marvelous walk on New York's own Promenade Plantée-- the new High Line. Ambling along the recently opened section from Gansevoort Street, in the Meatpacking district, to West 20th Street in Chelsea, I kept an eye on my copy of Justin Davidson's handy illustrated tour of the architectural surroundings (it appeared in the June 15-22 issue of New York magazine). I already knew, of course, that the formerly bleak, far-west section of Manhattan was rapidly being developed, but I was nevertheless surprised by how many sleek new towers have recently come up and/or are still in the process of being built.

From the excellent vantage point of the High Line, the city seems fresh and flourishing. Yet New York's history hasn't completely vanished. The elevated view offers exciting contrasts between the new buildings, with their glittering panes of glass and steel, and rusty remnants of the industrial past. The latter consist of atmospheric, desolate shells of deserted structures and the remains of the old elevated track. The worn railroad ties have been made newly elegant with wonderful plantings based on those that had actually sprung up there over years of desuetude. As for the bright new buildings, naturally they vary in quality. To me, the most innovative and exciting so far are Frank Gehry's IAC Building and two in-the-works structures, Jean Nouvel's 100 Eleventh Avenue and Neil Denari's HL23.

The second experience was virtual-- its source the striking settings of Tom Tykwer's movie The International. In a feature included with the DVD version, Tykwer makes an unusual claim: he conceived of architecture as a character in his film. And, in fact, after the intensity of Clive Owens's performance and the dizzying switches in geographic locations, the film's array of architectural backgrounds may be its most interesting aspect. Here are some of them:

1) Gunter Henn's Volkswagen Customer Center at the Autostadt in Wolfsburg, Germany. As the headquarters of ICCB, the villainous bank that is the central subject of the film, Tykwer and his production manager Uli Hanisch wanted a huge ultramodern structure-- a building that in its size would seem to reduce to insignificance the Interpol agent (played by Owens) who tries unsuccessfully to bring the bank down. They convinced the VW corporation to allow them to shoot the movie in the giant rectangular building that sits on a hill and dominates the Autostadt. Tykwer liked the building's "fake transparency"-- all that glass, with its suggestion of openness, but sinister stuff going on inside that nobody knows about!

2) Frank Lloyd Wright's Guggenheim Museum in Manhattan. The museum is the amazing setting for a murderous, let-all-hell-break-loose chase and shoot-out. Obviously Tykwer and crew couldn't decimate the real Guggenheim, so they created a convincing replica in an unused factory site in Babelsburg. They even "installed" a video exhibition (by the artist Julian Rosefeldt) to add to the lifelike quality of the museum's interior.

3) Gio Ponti's Pirelli Tower in Milan. The classic modern building is juxtaposed against the Neo-Classicism of the city's monstrous Mussolini-period Main Station. A political rally unfolds in the open square between the two buildings. The campaigner, who is also head of "Calvini Defense," is assassinated by a sharp-shooter positioned in the Tower.

4) Zaha Hadid's Phaeno Science Center. This curved concrete building, raised above the ground on a series of cone-like stilts, is actually another structure from the Wolfsburg Autostadt. It was magically transposed by the filmmakers to a lovely lakeside site in the Lago Iseo, Italy. There it functions as the headquarters for the above-mentioned Calvini Defense corporation, and becomes the site for a cat-and-mouse chase.

5) Berlin architecture provides a host of new versus old oppositions, a theme the director likes. The film's first scene and first murder take place in front of the city's sparkling new Hauptbahnhof. Not long thereafter, the Central Station's modernity is contrasted with Berlin's venerable Alte Nationalgalerie. Inside the museum, in one of its placid galleries, ICCB's assassin is quietly given his next business-like assignment in murder.

6) Istanbul's ancient Grand Bazaar is The International's final locale, and the site of its nihilistic conclusion. First, though, there is another chase-- this one through the crowded and colorful marketplace. Then, up on the roof of the Bazaar, a tense mano a mano between Louis Salinger, our Interpol hero, and Jonas Skarssen, the elusive head of the evil bank. It's in this dramatic setting that Skarssen is finally trapped and murdered. But, alas-- as we and Salinger know-- that death, though cinematically inevitable, is futile. Any number of other equally pragmatic bankers are eagerly waiting in the wings, ready to take Skarssen's place. The ICCB goes on...

Parricide and the Flapper from Hell: Part 2

After writing about Claude Chabrol's ambiguous portrayal of Violette Noziere (see Part 1, my previous post), I found it revelatory to compare the filmmaker's treatment with the Surrealist group's ardent defense of the real-life parricide. It was Peter Read's interesting review of Jonathan Eburne's Surrealism and the Art of Crime (TLS, July 3, 2009) that drew my attention to the Surrealists' view of Noziere, and all quotes below are from Read's article.

Chabrol's film, appearing 45 years after the crime, satirized the self-righteous moralism of the press and the blatant sensationalizing of the case, but also coolly depicted French reactions to Noziere as divided and diverse. The Surrealists, on the other hand, reacting in the heat of the event, perceived the venomous public reaction as a unified assault on a pathetic victim of a corrupt social order. The press and commentators of every political position had seemingly all joined together in their hostility to Noziere. The entire French public regarded her as a threat to family, society and church; they attacked her as "the woman who had killed her father and then sullied his memory." Her act of poisoning was thus "a double parricide, committed by a heartless hedonist seeking a premature inheritance, a 'flapper from hell' who had destroyed a unionized railway worker."

For their part, the Surrealists were outraged by French society's condemnation of Violette. They saw her crime as hypocritically juxtaposed against some idealized bourgeois notion of family life, whereas the young woman had actually come from a dysfunctional family, one within which she had been oppressed, abused and raped. The Surrealists presented their defense in a collective publication containing work by eight writers (Breton, Peret, Char and Eluard among them) and nine artists (Arp, Bellmer, Dali, Ernst, Giacometti, Magritte, Man Ray and Tanguy). They cited suppressed evidence in the case (a sperm-soaked rag and the father's pornographic drawings) and denounced the legal judgement against Violette as "a patriarchal conspiracy masquerading as justice." The pamphlet was published in 1933 in Belgium and promptly thereafter banned in France, where it was considered almost as scandalous as the parricide itself.

The Surrealists exploited the subjects of crime and criminals, and their representation in the media, as a means of addressing social and aesthetic problems. Noziere was only one of a group of murderers who elicited their interest and sympathy. Others were Henri Desire Landru, the notorious serial killer who displayed a "witty insolence" in court (and was, incidentally, the subject of another Chabrol film); Germaine Berton, the militant anarchist who murdered the anti-Semitic royalist Marius Plateau of the reactionary Action francaise (though she'd planned to assassinate either Charles Maurras or Leon Daudet); the Papin sisters, oppressed domestic servants who blinded and murdered their employer and her daughter (and inspired Jean Genet's play The Maids).

In mock-serious defense of the killer Landru, Surrealist Benjamin Peret solemnly asserted that criminals should be judged according to the degree of their creativity, the amount of imagination they deployed, the "artfulness" of their crimes. Those displaying sufficient subtlety and sophistication, as opposed to "everyday barbarity," were the kind that deserved approval. Read characterizes Peret's argument as "ostensibly irresponsible" but "perversely subversive in its opposition to the predominant journalistic modes of voyeuristic sensationalism and moralism."

Less ironically, the Surrealists defended certain crimes as powerful psychological reactions against a corrupt social order and bourgeois hypocrisy. Noziere's poisoning of a father who had molested her since she was twelve years old was an explicable outburst of rage against abuse-- and a legitimate form of self-defense. But cases like Noziere's also revealed "a deeply oppressive social malady," dark underground fissures in society's fabric; Noziere's crime, along with others, thus had political as well as psychological ramifications. Such anti-social acts were already (in the late 1920s and early 1930s) seen by the Surrealists as critiques of the mores of fascism. The underlying social conditions they revealed were predictive of events to come, incipient symptoms of disease that would later fully mature "when the Vichy regime enacted its own vicious version of normative, anti-Semitic and patriarchal values."

Enlarging on this idea, Read suggests a broader political context for the Surrealist attitude towards criminals and crime. His essay begins and ends with seemingly inapposite but in fact relevant references to an important event in turn-of-the-century French history-- the Dreyfus Affair. He finds that harrowing case relevant here because of its long-lasting aftereffect. The wrongly condemned Dreyfus was, of course, finally freed and "justice was served, but the affair left the reputation of the French judiciary and other institutions seriously damaged." French society after Dreyfus remained "split down the middle." On one side, the patriotic, conservative anti-Dreyfusards, who represented rigid, anti-Semitic, patriarchal standards. On the other side were those disaffected members of society, among them French intellectuals and the Surrealists, who had a growing sympathy for "anarchists, renegades and outlaws" and who were inclined to systematically reverse society's judgements. "It would then be more apparent," concludes Read, "that the Vichy regime, whose values the Surrealists were already contesting in the 1920s and 30s, constituted a return to power of the anti-Dreyfusards, who during the Occupation achieved a late and effective revenge over their historic adversaries."

Chabrol does not make that political leap between Violette's case and the Vichy regime's morality, but he does make explicit reference to perverted Petainist values in a subsequent film, the 1988 Une Affaire des Femmes, in which Isabelle Huppert is again his heroine-- this time not as a parricide, but as an illegal abortionist who is guillotined for her "crimes" against family, church and state.