Critical Survey

When a woman appears on stage, her body too often speaks for itself. It becomes the object of the gaze, an object of desire. Feminist performance artists attempt to disrupt the cultural associations with the female body. They extend their bodily capabilities through cybernetic technology; they practice body modification; and they enact the abjection of the female body. This article will explore whether or not it is possible for these artists to control the way their bodies are perceived on stage.

The question posed by Francis Coppola’s film Apocalypse Now is a very Conradian one: what does this experience mean? Apart of Conrad’s achievement as a writer was to introduce epistemological and existential questions into narratives of adventure. In this way Conrad transformed the nineteenth-century masculine romance of exploration, conquest, war and heroism into a modernist form capable of raising profound philosophical and political issues. While Coppola’s film is not a version of Heart of Darkness so much as a radical reworking of Conrad’s novella in the context of the Vietnam War, Conrad’s text played a crucial part both in the initial idea of the film and in the problematic final stages of its production when the director, tormented by the inability to find a satisfactory ending, returned again and again to Conrad’s text. In this paper we want to suggest that the concern with the problem of meaning which Coppola derives from Conrad initially led the director astray, in a search for existential meaning in a situation where only a politicised account could be ethically responsive. Eventually, however, Conrad’s sense of meaning as above all problematic and elusive helped Coppola to introduce into his film a questioning of its own processes which rescued it from some of the simplistic or ideologically blind features of many Vietnam war films. In particular, it led the film to engage fruitfully if uncertainly with the issues raised by the very project of the representation of war: the complicity of the spectator, the problem of the aestheticisation of violence, the problem of communicability itself. In making this argument we draw on the miasma of inter-texts which surrounds Apocalypse Now like a Conradian ‘misty halo’: these include, not only Heart of Darkness itself, but Eleanor Coppola’s film Hearts of Darkness and her book Notes on the Making of Apocalypse Now, as well as Dispatches, the documentary narrative about Vietnam by Michael Herr, who wrote the voice-over narrative for Coppola’s film.

William Golding’s Fire Down Below (1989) is the last in his ‘Sea Trilogy’, a sequence of novels which began in 1980 with Rites of Passage and continued in 1987 with Close Quarters. Edmund Talbot, Golding’s young, aristocratic protagonist, finally arrives in Australia shortly after the end of the Napoleonic Wars and this sea-borne bildungsroman is brought to an end. The response to Fire Down Below was extremely enthusiastic, and markedly different from the cautious and even mildly hostile response which greeted Close Quarters. The great majority of reviewers agreed that the happy ending of Fire Down Below made it Golding’s most optimistic novel. John Bayley wrote: ‘Fire Down Below brings the whole magical enterprise to a prosperous and happy conclusion’, while John Fowles wrote: ‘In this black-besotted age some may be unsettled by the happy ending, indeed by the generally jaunty (a word that kept perversely returning to me as I read) spirit of this closing leg.’ However, the last of Golding’s books published in his life-time can be read as a deeply conservative political allegory and, overall, as one of his most deeply pessimistic novels.

The back cover of Glyn Maxwell’s first collection of poems, Tale of the Mayor’s Son (1990), has situated the writing in terms that subsequent reviewers have taken up: ‘Home is an English New Town, a Garden City, the strangest of ordinary places, providing a backdrop for much of Maxwell’s work as well as the images that govern it.’The ‘New Town’ is given specificity in ‘Garden City Quatrains’, from his third collection, Rest for the Wicked (1995), as Welwyn Garden

‘Poetry is impossible after Auschwitz.’ This (supposed) statement by Theodor Adorno has become one of the most famous in twentiethcentury philosophy. It has been popularised in verbal academic discourse, which has lead to its inclusion in, for example, numerous module outlines on post-war literature. However, such appropriations have ignored the fact that the phrase is a misquotation of the standard translation by the Webers in Prisms. Moreover, within the passage from which the misquotation originates, there are linguistic ambiguities embedded in the original German which make the essay ‘Cultural Criticism and Society’ difficult to interpret. In turn, this initiates a struggle to formulate a coherent English translation. These problems are elided by critics who, even if they quote the Webers’ translation accurately, do not consider the ramifications of the original German prose. In this essay, I engage with these elisions, and contend that Adorno’s text does not argue that ‘poetry is impossible after Auschwitz.’ In fact, the passage predicates its existence, a contention which has serious repercussions for discussions of post-war writing conducted in the context of the philosopher’s work.

Although very few electronic editions with any scholarly pretensions exist today, there is already a dominant idea of what an electronic edition ought to be. The idea is that an electronic edition ought to be an archive. It should offer diplomatic transcriptions of documents, and facsimiles of those documents. And it should avoid many of the things that scholarly editions have traditionally done, particularly the creation of critically-edited texts by means of editorial emendation. On this view, what readers need is access to original sources – to as many of them as possible, and avoiding as much as possible the shaping and selection that editors have traditionally engaged in. Although a lot of archives in the world were created and shaped to make specific points, this kind of archive-edition is not conceived of as doing that: it is instead imagined as a neutral witness.

‘And how should I begin?’ Naturally, or post-naturally enough, at the end. We have been hearing for some time recently of the end of things and this paradoxically, is where we must start. Book titles have warned us of the End of the Nation and Nation State, the End of Print, the End of Architecture, The End of Work, the End of Man, the End of Economic Man, the End of Time, the End of the Future, the End of History and yes, the End of the World. It doesn’t take a salaried cultural critic to see here the symptom of an encroaching mood, the expression on the part of marooned journalists and intellectuals of what Raymond Williams termed a ‘structure of feeling’. It expresses not so much conviction – though these scenarios of the end could not in one way be more final – as the waning of common beliefs and values. Hence the appearance world-wide of millennial sects, outcrops of New Age mysticism, the thrill of out of body experiences and the paranormal; even if, thanks to postmodernism, these tend to be more normal than para, and to come at you via the X Files or the Virgin multiplex than anywhere more distant. New media combine oddly with the new mysticism, advanced technologies with advancing teleologies. This is the way then that we are seeing in the fin de siècle, the beckoning end of century when Bakhtinian carnival will at last take to the streets, fleeing its confinement in works of cultural theory, and we shall all go belly up and dance our heads off. Or when half the world will fall into poverty, disease, and starvation and the other half wear itself out in vainglorious in-fighting, leaving a sybaritic residue to enter upon a computer-aided decadence of virtual existence. Or when we shall go up in smoke in a bang and whimper all at once.

Whenever I am faced with a film adaptation of a novel I know well, I play an impossible game which involves trying to imagine what someone would make of the film who knows nothing at all of the novel – nor, for good measure, of the author either. So: what would ‘someone’ have been thinking as they left the cinema after watching Michael Winterbottom’s 1996 version of Jude the Obscure – the film Jude, starring Christopher Ecclestone, Kate Winslet and Rachel Griffiths?

Something We Never Meant

Hickory Dickory

Pensioners’ Day

Walter Benjamin’s Library Enclosures Act

Notes on contributors