Virtue and openness in "The Life of Others"

Saw Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's Das Leben der Anderen the other evening.

Das Leben der Anderen ("The Life of Others") is too secure, too polished a movie for me to criticise on the aesthetic level. It shows you, like a good play (perhaps one by its playwright hero), how a powerful storyline makes pretty much everything else subordinate to it - acting, images, words, music, and the rest. So for once I have to climb off my aesthetic hobbyhorse - it may not be the last time - and talk about the ethical content that in this film simply cannot be ignored. (I'll leave it to my German friends to answer the tricky question of whether that content was historically realistic.)

The plot turns on the points of intersection between politics and human morality, in particular the questions - how far should one go in supporting one's political beliefs, and when is it right to betray one's own side? One could merely say that immediate human or moral decisions end up dictating the answer to both questions, first for the characters and then for the nation as whole, when belief in the total political project of the GDR collapses and the joy and hopes of millions of individuals have free rein once more. The message of the film's last scene (Dreyman's personal dedication "in gratitude") does seem to be that such decisions and feelings are what count - not what you believe in or which side you are on. But to leave it at that would be too simple. It is a true, but relatively easy, point to make, to say that ideologues often lack a human side, that abstract political ideals are dangerous when they are followed with disregard for one's sympathetic instincts. And it is easy to make it in order to justify a lack of interest in politics.

This is not what "The Life of Others" does. Indeed its central characters, the Stasi agent Gerd Wiesler and the playwright Georg Dreyman on whom he spys, both have high political ideals, and distinguish themselves from the real villains of the piece - Wiesler's superior Grubitz and the Kulturminister Hempf - precisely because they have them. They are not supporting the system hypocritically for personal gain, whether sexual or careerist - they believe in what it ultimately stands for, while at the same time they desire to lead a human and morally good life. (This is signalled clearly by their common enjoyment of Brecht; a deeply humane poet but also a deeply political one, who himself returned out of American exile to the GDR after the Second World War out of loyalty to his communist ideals.) If the choice between altruism and selfishness on a personal level was the only basic one here, it would be impossible to understand the (political) motive behind the plot's nouement, Dreyman's conspiracy to publish an article on the East German suicide rate in the West German magazine Der Spiegel. The answer to the question, when is it right to betray one's own side? does not have to be - when politics matters less than people. It could just as easily be - when the people on one's "own side" are betraying their own political responsibilities. The scene between Dreyman and Hempf in the wings of the theatre (after the Wende) shows this: Dreyman despises Hempf because he has sacrificed the dignity of his political calling for mere lust. (His parting shot is, "Dass Leute wie Sie unser Land wirklich gefuehrt haben" - "[to think] that people like you actually governed our country".)

The courage that the characters need for the film's moral turning-points (Dreyman's volunteering to write the article; Wiesler's stealing of the typewriter to protect him) is partly reliant on political belief, on the belief that something more than oneself and one's immediate circle of friends might matter (that "the life of others" matters). This courage is a part of moral virtue - a part one needs in order to be able to make the ethically right choice. (Courage was indeed at the centre of virtue back in Homeric times, before the philosophical concept of "ethics" was even invented.) Yet it is not, I would argue, the only part. Many reviewers have commented on Dreyman's moral stature, compared to Wiesler, of which the spy steadily becomes conscious in a kind of slow redemption as he observes the former's everyday life. Dreyman really is the "good man", to whom the title of the piano sonata he is given by the theatre director Jerske refers. Why is he so obviously good?

Our and Wiesler's sensation of this (and perhaps it is worth stressing that word "sensation", to emphasise that ethics exists for us through feelings and not merely through reasoned judgements) cannot be because of the courage to act, which he will only manifest later. Early on, as it happens, Dreyman is upbraided by a more actively dissident friend at his party for fence-sitting; but although we feel his helplessness, this does not destroy our confidence in his virtue. What whispers to us the hints of this confidence, when we compare his life to Wiesler's, is its spontaneous quality, its openness. The first we see of him is a spontaneous kickabout in the street with a group of children as he returns home. Wiesler, by contrast, has an iron routine: even sex happens by appointment. It is paradoxically his surveillance of Dreyman, the central piece of malevolence in his politically-motivated career, that produces in him an openness to the extra-political dimension of life, above all to moral beauty. His courage to act is founded on that newly discovered openness, and is admirable, I think, chiefly because of it. Dreyman's own courage to act, to argue analogously, derives from his openness to the criticisms of his dissident friends, and even more from the emotional openness - the openness to pain - of his grief for one of them, Albert Jerske.

"Openness" here means a lot of things. It is much more than the colloquial meaning of being "frank" or "free and easy" with one's views, one's emotions, one's social or even sexual intercourse (as in an "open" relationship). One can be that, and be quite without the sensitivity and responsiveness which are closer to what I mean by openness. It could be called sympathy - but that only captures one side of it; sympathy implies a human bond, and would not include the moments of freedom - of release from bonds - in Dreyman's behaviour and demeanour. One could also call it innocence: Dreyman has this quality throughout the film.

I'm tempted in fact to expand it altogether beyond the realm of ethics, conceived as the study of right action (what in analytic philosophy is called "deontology", the study of duty), and see it as a fundamentally desirable relationship to the world in many spheres at once. The sphere of knowledge and reason, for instance: intellectually we should strive to be open, which means to doubt, to criticise (oneself above all), and to question (but in the sense of quest-ing or searching towards something even more than the polemic sense of a challenge to authority). Aesthetically, in terms of experience, openness is just as important; here it is a fascinated, self-renewing attention to the world, like that of the poet, that does not limit itself through pre-given concepts and priorities. And morally too, such prejudices (above all relating to definitions of identity or status) are habitually set aside by the genuinely open person in his or her dealings with others.

On a national note, I would like to think fondly that the English distrust of "causes" and ideology (I recall the astonishment of a Greek communist friend when I told him that in English "ideology" had for most people a negative meaning) is proof that the English are after all more open than our famous insularity and xenophobia suggest. The lack of party-feeling in the great English essayists, Browne, Addison, and Lamb, or the skeptical, empirical slant of our philosophical tradition (Hume), the universal sympathy of Shakespeare, and the innocent wonder at experience of Wordsworth - all of these (selective examples, of course) are in some fashion testament to a native understanding of the virtue of "openness". Keats even provided a definition of it in his famous idea of "negative capability". - At the same time, openness is of course by its very essence not something to be en-closed in national boundaries.

To return to the specific theme of morality, the inevitable concluding question for the arguments I have been pursuing must be: How can one reconcile the resolute courage to act morally (which I connected with beliefs, ideals, and active political engagement) with this strangely passive and doubtful quality of openness, which feels like a suspension and not a resolution? I've suggested that openness forms the basis for truly moral action, as otherwise one's acts have from the beginning only a limited and partisan significance. But for those acts to be decisive, won't some of the free potentiality of openness be renounced?

Given the difficulty of the question and the length of this entry, the most appropriate thing I can do is leave that question open; and hope that the courage to answer it will come to me at some later date.

Richard Linklater

Richard Linklater is one of my favourite filmmakers. I was reminded recently by a TV screening of his animated feature Waking Life of how original his subjects and style are, just as I was frustrated that the development of these has been interrupted again by a “mainstream” feature (Fast Food Nation, released a few weeks ago). So this piece is in praise of his genuinely independent films (or those of them I’ve seen).

The films of Richard Linklater fascinate me. In them I find peculiar tensions I have not found elsewhere. Between their obvious artfulness and what they lack in conventional craft (sutured narratives, purposeful dialogue, climax). More than this, the tension of subject with generic ambition: tragedies and epiphanies play out among students, drifters, the unemployed, people moreover who Linklater has taken no trouble to idealize or round out, but whose banalities and eccentricities are taken straight from the everyday. It would be interesting to compare him to Jim Jarmusch, on the face of it a similar director, whose self-conscious, indirect playfulness (watch Coffee and Cigarettes) conceals a very direct empathetic interest in his characters. (I’m thinking of Night on Earth especially.) Both elements are lacking in Linklater, whose indirectness is contemplative and not playful, and who is interested in human situations (the last day of school, the chance romantic encounter abroad), and ideas and possibilities, rather than characters as such. The camera waits for these to show themselves – in this Linklater remains the classic documentary director, the interviewer; but he knows how to nuance his presentation in the most subtle ways, and to give it forms resonant with historical meaning. Because of his politically activist, anti-establishment “agenda” (which comprises a philosophical justification of "slacking" quite in the tradition of Bertrand Russell's superb and cogent In Praise of Idleness) it wouldn’t naturally occur to one to look for such nuances, yet they are what I am most of all interested in here. (In this I'm taking a different tack from Ben Lewis, whose Channel 4 film a few years ago, "St. Richard of Austin", set out to unravel the messages and meanings he thought must underly Linklater's work. He more or less failed, which didn't stop the resulting documentary being very interesting - but does show the limits of that kind of interpretation.)

A potent set of meanings emerges from the unity of time which repeatedly characterises these films. Slacker, Dazed and Confused, Before Sunrise, Tape, and Before Sunset all take place within 24 hours (or considerably less in the case of the last two). In the case of Tape, in some ways the most atypical of Linklater’s films, the other classical “unities” are obeyed too, and the effect is positively Greek in its concentration. It remains confined to a motel room and two characters arguing, with a third (the girl they are arguing about) arriving half-way through. The tension is carefully increased, the dialogue is guarded, the use of the single, eponymous prop a stroke of pure theatre. But the intention is not, as in classical theatre, to impress the weight of fateful reality on the audience, but to make them doubt what they are being shown and told. The perspectivist paradox of Kurosawa’s Rashomon (did a rape take place? whose account can be trusted?) is heightened by the realist implications of recorded media. Not only the audio tape of the crime, but the video on which the film itself is shot (using clumsy but “true” panning shots at numerous points in preference to untrustworthy edits) imply presence, objectivity, truth. Yet the whole, true story is withheld from us, leaving only the claims of the characters themselves.

Before Sunrise is also a classical, temporally unified tale about sex (and love), although otherwise utterly different from Tape. A fleeting student romance is given the pathos and dignity of Dido and Aeneas’ – not my reference but Linklater’s, signalled during the credit sequence by the overture to Purcell’s opera. (Linklater’s musical editing is superb. He opens from a black screen during the slow introduction onto a shot of the track speeding away underneath the train that carries the to-be-lovers to Vienna, coinciding with the fugal Allegro: the cut is utterly compelling.) Other eighteenth-century musical excerpts give the drama an antique gravity that its sequel lacked: the lovers dance on the street at dawn to a harpsichordist playing the twenty-fifth – the bleakest, the most grief-stricken – of Bach’s Goldberg Variations, and another Bach slow movement arches over the intensely moving final montage sequence, showing the places in Vienna the two have wandered through, talked in, made love in, in the cold light of morning (an old woman shuffling past the empty bottle and discarded wineglasses on the park lawn…).

Otherwise, unity of time is not interpreted as unity of story, but in a more open-ended, quasi-Romantic fashion. The time of the film is a frame, flung down arbitrarily over an area of life rather like one of those wire squares I remember throwing around on school biology field trips, to capture a finite segment of the local flora. Linklater’s flora is typically the oddball population of his home town, Austin, Texas, as in Slacker and Waking Life. The camera bounces pinball-style (pinball being another favourite Linklater image) from one conversation to another, neatly propelled (in Slacker) from dawn to dusk through the town by the serial encounters of its denizens, drinking, driving, (conspiracy-)theorizing. Conversations, especially speculative ones, are of central importance (as in the “philosophical” novels of Thomas Love Peacock). Linklater’s characters are extremely loquacious, and he loves to show the joy that springs from perpetuating interminable dialogues, free of all purpose and power. Talk is fascinating because it can take one anywhere, it is a continuous dérive or drift (the watchword of the Situationists, and the spirit of Godard, Rohmer, Eustache, Linklater’s French forebears), just like the movement of these characters or the camera that follows them. It is extravagant, pretentious, it fails to establish anything or “move the discussion on” (like a police officer!); but it is never mindless filling of empty space either, it knows very well the meaning of silence. It is after all, always referring to moments of silence and stillness – to dreams (Waking Life), to love (Before Sunset), to nature (the final scenes of Slacker and Dazed and Confused) – relating them with unconcealed excitement. (I find that very American, somehow! the excited refusal to concede ineffability to anything.) Sometimes, briefly, in the pauses between scenes of dialogue, those moments of stillness are echoed in the present tense – the camera lingers, refuses to cut, and makes one aware for just a second of the dumb mystery of the place we find ourselves in. In such moments too, the souls of the characters seem retrospectively to find their true weight, as Maeterlinck said in his great essay on silence (in Le trésor des humbles) “like gold and silver are weighed in water, and the words we utter have only their sense by grace of the silence in which they are bathed”. The achievement of Linklater’s style is that (as Maeterlinck also demanded) it bears this weight so lightly, in free, gentle, intimate rhythms, without resort to crushing dramatics or the apparatus of convention. I’m looking forward to the next film in which he will push this style on.

American novels

These were my reactions to four quite different American novels read as I travelled across the States in May of last year.

Tom Wolfe's The Bonfire of the Vanities is a fine work of literature. I feel quite confident in this opinion, despite having come across many derogatory references to it or its author, and few that claim any serious classic status for it. Although the descriptions are journalistically detailed, and utterly specific to a certain (now historical) time and place - I'm glad at least to have made the acquaintance of New York before starting in on it - the satire is not dated at all. On the contrary, it is on a universal level, quite worthy of the Roman satirists or of Schiller's definitions of the genre. This is a function of the essential simplicity of the book's plot: for whatever subplots Wolfe is spinning through the sultry Manhattan streets, we remain planted in the expensive patent leather shoes of his anti-hero Sherman McCoy, facing his inexorable downfall. There are no twists and no buffoonery: we are made to share his perspective and his horrible, pit-of-the-stomach sensation (over hundreds of pages) - "no, no, this is all a terrible mistake". In this sense the novel possesses more of a kinship to tragedy than to to the crime thriller - we are not being thrilled, we are being sickened. And yet even while looking through Sherman's eyes and feeling his self-pity, we know that the situation is not tragic (it is simply not serious enough: Sherman is not going to lose his life, and by the end of the book he seems to have gained more of a genuine purpose in it than he had to begin with). It is blackly comic; and Sherman is a dupe and a self-deluding fool, by the time of his final abasement a figure of pure slapstick mockery. The chasm between these two perspectives is the true measure of the book's understanding of human nature.

To take only one of the subtler examples: Wolfe depicts his hero at two high-society cocktail parties hosted by friends of his wife. At the first he is virtually ignored, made to feel small and dull: he cannot understand the treatment he receives, and why the other guests do not recognise him as a man of power, a financial "Master of the Universe". At the second, however, which occurs after news of Sherman's involvement in a hit-and-run incident in the Bronx has hit the papers, he is feted, the hostess and assembled dignitaries hang on his lips, their eyes gleaming with wonder and curiosity. Sherman finds it even harder to figure out what is going on here than he did at the first party. In the taxi home his puzzlement spills over, he tries to get some kind of explanation out of his wife - and receives nothing but a pitying shake of the head in reply, with the answer "Sherman, you're too easily pleased". Pleased with what, then? With the attention he has been given, the apparent social "success". But he can only take pleasure in that because he is so blinded by vanity as to think that the other guests are actually responding to him as a person, an individual with his own profound worth - which they recognise. Doubt plagues him because he cannot understand why they should be according him this recognition now, with all the scandal surrounding his name, and not when his achievement was still untarnished. Yet this doubt does not disturb in the least the innocence of his vanity, his assumption that his self-worth is what is at stake in such a scenario. (That is the awful, snakelike truth of this scene, that vanity and innocence pair perfectly with one another, in adulthood just as once in early childhood.)

The natural corollary of his wife's rebuke - that he can be "easily pleased" because he is shallow - is thus in one important sense untrue. Sherman is far more concerned to understand and to be understood at a deep level than anyone else at the soiree: the problem is that the other guests are shallow. They don't see anything of Sherman's character at all, either as he wishfully imagines it or as it really is (a mass of petty vanities: Wolfe demonstrates with clinical precision, the scalpel of prose slitting and probing a repulsively decayed yet still familiar psychology, how a man's life can be spent in almost every minute worrying about his self-respect). All that attracts them to him is the wish to hear the latest gossip from the horse's mouth, and to indulge a little vicarious nostalgie de la boue. The sadness of his wife's shake of the head finally symbolises, for me, this truth: what good would it even do Sherman if he saw what was happening? Why renounce the comforting illusions of vanity, if it merely permits one to fraternize with superficial and cynical people in the full knowledge of how superficial and cynical they are? Would the shock of that knowledge not make Sherman himself so cynical that any chance of redeeming such a situation, such a life, would be lost?

While Wolfe shows how minute observation of the details of a particular time and place can enhance writing's universal import as well as its satiric punch, the beginning of Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence made me wonder if Wharton was not too close to the society she describes. She lavishes impressive powers of recall some thirty years after the fact (one is reminded of Proust!) on the fashions, turns of phrase and social customs of people one cannot to begin with feel any sympathy towards, so taken up are they by the strangely dutiful (and titularly "innocent") vanities of late-nineteenth-century New York. Characters who say things like "Oh my dear, how can you possibly countenance someone who wore black at their coming-out?" make you roll your eyes in disbelief. Yet the overall tone is not satirical, or at least ceases to be after one of the most effective "flash-forwards" probably ever written in a novel. The hero Archer has married, decided to renounce his great love the Countess Olenska, and raised children happily with his dignified but blinkered wife. The age in which her views and values seemed so firm, so self-evident has slipped quietly into the past, even before she herself dies as one of its last representatives - and Archer, who never represented it, but who has nonetheless defined the course of his life by an act thoroughly typical of its buttoned-up moral code, is invited by his son to accompany him to Paris. There, of course, Ellen Olenska still lives, the Count now dead, nothing standing in the way of a meeting and re-awakening of their love - and how does Wharton end the book? With a masterstroke, one of the most shattering endings I can remember reading; one unexpected but at the same time (as soon as one reflects on it) inevitable. For after all how could the lovers' meeting be played in a fashion that would do justice to the expectations, longings and frustration of two lifetimes?

One solution would have been to cut the novel short with Archer waiting, poised on the threshold. This I am sure Wharton could have managed well and movingly, but there is still something dissatisfying about it, not only because it's a "trick" that's often been used, but because it would end on a note of prospection, when the mood of the final section and of the novel as a whole is one of retrospection. So instead Archer lets his son go in ahead to meet Ellen and the assembled party, promising he will follow - and he never does. Seated on a bench on the other side of the street, he looks up to the brightly-lit windows of Ellen's apartment in the deepening dusk, and when the shutters are finally drawn down by the servants he returns alone to his hotel. Wharton shares little or nothing of what is going through his head, but she does not need to: the poignancy and dignity of the act are enough. With such a final image one can easily forgive Wharton that her style is not as "refined" as Henry James', or that the earlier part of the book had its longueurs and lapses into romantic cliche.

Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 and Don DeLillo's Underworld portrayed the same America, I concluded after finishing them; even if Underworld is seven times the length of the Pynchon and in quite a different style. Bigger doesn't mean better: Pynchon's novel is the more successful for me, and more convincing in its imaginative delineation of the modern American "frontier", California. I forget the book's date, but it startled me: I had expected it to be twenty years later. All the themes of the American collective unconscious are there: motels, TV, freeways, shrinks, shootings, garbage, kitsch, paranoid hermeneutics, underground networks of conspirators, and the sense that in a completely interconnected universe "every little trifle, for some reason, does seem incalculably important" (that's E. M. Forster, quoted by Zadie Smith in an epigraph to White Teeth, but it's a very American-flavoured idea). In this last symptom of modernity lies a particularly crucial difference from the bourgeois world of experience of nineteenth-century Europe, essentially not much changed in 50s America. If you read Balzac or Flaubert's minute descriptions of bourgeois interiors you couldn't exactly maintain they thought trifles unimportant; but those details contain no promise of redemption, they merely confirm the deadlocked pattern of a "respectable" existence which can only be broken by a major catastrophe or by crime (adultery, suicide). In the networked world, freed from respectable isolation by automobiles and the media, one can find genuine meaning in the smallest observed thing, such as the logo on a postage stamp, and experience epiphanies at the most unpromising of moments, such as driving down a freeway (both of these prompt illuminations for Pynchon's heroine Oedipa Maas).

The excellence of Pynchon's book lies in spotting this era-defining change in consciousness without overplaying it: The Crying of Lot 49 remains short, light, disorientingly inventive, and comic to the core. Underworld, however, falls into the trap inherent in any attempt to conjure with "epiphanies". DeLillo's style portentously expects an epiphany at every juncture, and given how many junctures (not to mention disjunctures) there are in the jigsaw-puzzle plot, this makes for a superfluity of irritatingly "significant" moments. Not only the disconnections in the narrative, jumping back and forth from coast to coast and decade to decade, but the disconnections of DeLillo's sentences seem to want to enforce a plenitude of sensation and significance at every point. He writes very beautifully, there's no doubt of that. Often the prose is as densely worked, the words as carefully chosen as poetry, and sustaining that level of attention to the world and words over 800 pages is pretty miraculous. But also close to monotonous - because the intensity never slips, even as the tone and syntax are subjected to constant variation.

DeLillo's ambition in terms of theme causes similar problems. His "Great Post-War American Novel" must include: baseball (check) - B52s (check) - the Cuban missile crisis (check) - immigrants (check) - AIDS (check) - civil rights marchers (check) - teenagers, graffiti, urban deprivation, casual sex, Frank Sinatra, Vietnam protests, housewives making Jell-O, Sputnik, serial killers, waste disposal, TV replays, condoms, heroin, Arizona deserts, Russian nuclear tests, road trips, conceptual art and the assassination of John F. Kennedy (check, check, check, check...!). This is not quite as indiscriminate a list as it sounds: there's a reason why Korea and Vietnam don't really feature, for instance, which is that DeLillo clearly wants to keep the Cold War cold, stressing the dark potential of the symbolic (Sputnik or the first Soviet bomb tests) rather than the messy, blazing, meaningless realities of actual combat or its traumatic aftermath. But despite some degree of selection the list of themes touched on sounds suspiciously like the contents page from a twentieth-century history textbook (Eric Hobsbawm's Age of Extremes, for example). In the weakest section of the novel, subtitled "Selected fragments public and private in the 1950s and 1960s", DeLillo abandons his plot(s) to fill in 150 pages with a kind of free empathetic chronicle of all the "big stories" he hasn't managed to cover so far. It's almost as if he has deliberately covered all the historical bases so as to give himself the best possible shot at the title "Best American Novel of the 20th Century" - which he only narrowly missed in a New York Times Book Review critics' poll a year ago (Underworld came second to Toni Morrison's Beloved). Martin Amis in fact took DeLillo to task for the novel's looseness and "disparate" quality; yet it could only sound like a weak caveat beside its manifest skill, ambition, and sheer size.

I feel odd making these criticisms, because (as will unavoidably emerge in any future postings to this blog on critical topics) I don't find unity, especially narrative unity, an important aesthetic criterion; I like fragmentary forms, and enjoy skilled poetic craftsmanship on a local level more than anything. Moreover, much of my experience has been guided by the search for epiphanies of one sort or another (not that there's anything special in that). In these respects, Underworld ought to be a favourite book of mine. But - dazzling, multi-layered work though it is - it doesn't have the sustaining warmth that I need from a writer of fiction, and remains in the end strangely loveless and lustless, as if the desire for vision, stretched taught over the frame of every line, had finally shrivelled and gone slack. The central character, Nick Shay, looks back from the mod-con, cleaned-up, west-coast lifestyle he now leads to his gritty, driven, improvised existence as a teenager on the streets of New York, and feels a kind of regret. So cool and unemotional has he been, though - less a character than a perceiving machine to drive the aesthetic energy of DeLillo's sentences - that by this stage we find it hard to sympathise with the feelings DeLillo wants to claim for him. For a real literary epiphany, one might conclude, insight alone is not enough: it must occur in a human context, one that is after all built largely by the conventional apparatus of character and dramatic movement that modernism wished to escape from.