Páginas
Páginas vistas en total
Suscribirse por correo electrónico
jueves, 19 de julio de 2018
lunes, 16 de julio de 2018
On Hide and Seek
By
Eva Feld
Overexposure kills poetry. Metaphors
are in danger, especially in erotica. By diminishing the power of secrecy, all
mysteries become narrow shadows of what they were meant to be in literature. It
was common knowledge that meanings meander between the lines as well as in the
choice of words and silences picked by a writer to narrate, describe, tell or
show.
It seems as if today the empire of the
images and of entertainment considers the art of subtlety a menace to its
domain. Sex, for example, is sex, only sex, nothing but sex. Maybe Gertrude
Stein would feel a cold tremor go down her back if she came to suspect that her
arch famous phrase, “A rose is a rose is a rose” could be at the root of such
simplicity.
No more hiding the female genitalia
under a protecting veil of poetic detours such as the Shakespearean expression velvet
leaves or attributing the power of arms to the penis by calling it dart.
No more complex and iconic characters, such as Gustave von Aschembach a male
protagonist who painfully falls in love with a beautiful young boy through
plural chapters of restraint in Death in Venice.
Death in Venice was not Thomas Mann’s most important
novel, nor the reason for his Nobel Prize in 1929, but it is probably his most
popular one. So popular that Luchino Visconti, one of Italian Cine Cita’s best
directors of all times, turned it into a movie version, with Marcello
Mastroianni playing the leading role in 1971.
Roger Ebert, the American film critic
from Chicago, didn’t wait long to write about it in these terms:
I
think the thing that disappoints me most about Luchino Visconti's "Death
in Venice" is its lack of ambiguity. Visconti has chosen to abandon the
subtleties of the Thomas Mann novel and present us with a straightforward story
of homosexual love, and although that's his privilege, I think he has missed
the greatness of Mann's work somewhere along the way. In the novel, Count
Aschenbach goes to Venice at a certain season in his life, driven by a
compulsion he does not fully understand and confronted by strange presences who
somehow seem to be mocking or tempting him. Once settled in his grand hotel on
the Lido, he becomes aware of a beautiful boy who is also visiting there with
his family from Poland. His feelings toward this boy are terribly complicated,
and to interpret them as a simple homosexual attraction is vulgar and
simplistic. The boy represents, above all, an ideal of perfect physical beauty
apart from sexuality; the irony is that this beauty stirs emotions in a man who
(in the novel) has insisted on occupying the world of the intellect. The boy's
youth and naturalness become a reproach to the older man's vanity and creative
sterility.
Almost a half century ago, Ebert
already grasps the lack of subtleness that would prevail in the twenty-first
Century, when as a conquest by feminists, gays, lesbians, transgenders, and
main streamers, sex and desire are being overexposed and banalized.
A few years ago, I was lucky to assist
to some of the Gay Pride week events at the University of Cincinnati, one of
which was an open lecture about gay poetry where mostly all participants were
homosexuals.
Many students had prepared
visual backups to their readings. One of them, probably the most talented in
the room, showed a succession of black and white slides of cactuses from
several angles, evidently poetic references to erect virility. The words that
accompanied the images were, on the contrary, direct coitus descriptions,
straight accounts of rigid penises and orgasms.
The conductor of the lecture was a
literature professor. He praised each and every student for their freedom to
express themselves and was visibly touched. He then told about his own youth
experiences, decades ago, in a small village of South America, where, in order
to survive, he cruelly hid his tendencies as well as his emotions.
I stood up and addressed him: “I
understand that since then there has been important progress in tolerance and
acceptance, but don’t you feel that from a strictly literary perspective there
is more poetry in suggesting?”
“All I feel is pure envy, I wish I had
been born to be as free as my students are,” exclaimed the professor passionately.
I did not stay until the end of the
lecture, which seemed to me as an escalating repetition, a blunt recurrence of
adjectives and adverbs. For sure a victory for homosexuals, maybe not so much
for poetry. I have also left early from many other recitals (heterosexual,
feminist, political, and even title less) for the same reason. I generally have
little patience for void grandiloquence and for filibusters of déjà vus and déjà entendues.
How much should be said or silenced,
how much should be disguised in metaphors or embellish in allegories? How much
should remain veiled or revealed? How much should be told or showed? Of the
answers to these interrogations lay the best prompts for poets and
philosophers. In the replies to these questions resides the depth of human
nature and the sparkle for creativity.
miércoles, 4 de julio de 2018
Concursos literarios julio
|
||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||
|
Suscribirse a:
Entradas (Atom)