The Bond of the Furthest Apart: Essays on Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Bresson, and Kafka
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The Bond of the Furthest Apart: Essays on Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Bresson, and Kafka
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Overview
Whether exploring Bresson’s efforts to reassess the limits of human reason and will, Dostoevsky’s subversions of Christian conventions, Tolstoy’s incompatible beliefs about death, or Kafka’s focus on creatures neither human nor animal, Cameron illuminates how the repeated juxtaposition of disparate, even antithetical, phenomena carves out new approaches to defining the essence of being, one where the very nature of fixed categories is brought into question. An innovative look at a classic French auteur and three giants of European literature, The Bond of the Furthest Apart will interest scholars of literature, film, ethics, aesthetics, and anyone drawn to an experimental venture in critical thought.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780226414232 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Chicago Press |
| Publication date: | 04/10/2017 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 280 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
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The Bond of the Furthest Apart
Essays on Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Bresson, and Kafka
By Sharon Cameron
The University of Chicago Press
Copyright © 2017 The University of ChicagoAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-41406-5
CHAPTER 1
Animal Sentience: Robert Bresson'sAu hasard Balthazar
In Robert Bresson's Au hasard Balthazar a young girl, who we discover is dying, looks on without expression, one might almost say without interest, or with interest dulled by her invalidism, from a supine position on a couch as the camera shifts to two still younger children, the objects of her attention: Marie and Jacques taking a pinch of salt to feed Balthazar, a baby donkey. In a second scene — while Marie and Jacques, on a swing, gaze infatuatedly at each other — again on the sidelines, the young girl sits upright on a stretcher and herself feeds the donkey salt. But the carefree mood of the beautiful summer day suddenly darkens when the girl, given a spoon of medicine by an attendant, puts her head in her hand and cries at its bitter taste (fig. 1.1). In a third scene the girl's father bids farewell to her as she lies fully dressed, as if laid out for burial. As the attendant props up the body so that a rimmed hat can be removed, we see she isn't dead, but has only fallen asleep in Sunday clothes (fig. 1.2). Although the girl is a minor character (whose actual death is reported later), what she models isn't minor. She is the image of mourning at the taste of the bitter medicine. She is an image of death, which is the bitter medicine. She is at once a spectator looking on from the sidelines and the spectacle being regarded. Death is what the girl cries at when she takes the bitter medicine. Death is what she mimics when she falls asleep in her clothes. The scene in which the girl sleeps prefigures her death and recalls the tears she sheds at its anticipation. Yet the fate that is the dying girl's is not in fact unique. Rather, its manifestations — the deaths of Arnold (the film's vagabond), Marie's father, and Balthazar — are those of the fate that is anyone's, even as the versatility of these representations (death from illness, death from grief, death from drink, death from a bullet) resists universalizing. Moreover, the space of death occupied by the girl in her Sunday clothes is also occupied by Marie at the film's end, kneeling and naked, with her back to the camera, after Grard's gang has stripped and beaten her (fig. 1.3). These inverse images (dressed up and naked) are drawn together and linked to death by the objectification of the body in the lifelessness of the countenance immobilized by sleep and in the blankness of the naked back, which registers Marie's effacement.
I have begun by looking at images of sentience and its extinction (the dying girl, and Marie, in her nakedness, another dying girl), because they immediately indicate how Balthazar fastens images into a relation that subtends the film's donkey story. Such representations of embodiment reveal Bresson's film to be incongruously elemented of a reductive, yet enhanced, hence mysterious, materialism. To anticipate the strands my argument will draw together: in Bresson's film, materialism radiates from all embodied forms — the human and the animal — revealing a similitude so unthinkable (so appalling to think) that resistance to the identification of human and animal bodies provokes cruelty to the animal, even as its beauty at other moments fascinates with an allure apparently devoid of human counterpart.
"Images will release their phosphorus only in aggregating," Bresson wrote, capturing his belief that in cinematography, "an image must be transformed by contact with other images. A blue is not the same blue beside a green, a yellow, a red." The aesthetic of juxtaposition and recomposition is of particular interest in Au hasard Balthazar, in which a donkey is acquired by different owners at whose hands he suffers and ultimately dies, because through the filmic congruence of animal and human bodies that are brought into relation rhythmically rather than narratively, we are made to rethink the meaningfulness of distinctions that separate animal and human forms of embodiment — specifically, we are asked to rethink the roles of reason and will in making us who we are. One aspect of Bresson's genius involves the decoupling and reassociation of images to form novel relations. It could be said of film in general that, in Steven Shaviro's words, its "dematerialized images ... are the raw contents of sensation, without the forms, horizons, and contexts that usually orient them. And this is how film crosses the threshold of a new kind of perception ... non-intentional and asubjective." But Bresson's films italicize this fracturing and relinkage of images. Such "parcelling," writes Gilles Deleuze of montage in the films of Bresson, Alain Resnais, Benoît Jacquot, and Andr Tchin, produces "a whole new system of rhythm. ... Instead of one image after the other, there is one image plus another" — a strategy Bresson identified with unforeseen manifestations of extremity: "Dismantle and put together till one gets intensity" (N 55).
What has not been remarked upon, however, is that this technique in which independent images are linked in a fragmented virtual space, visible in all Bresson's films, has a specific effect in Au hasard Balthazar, where it becomes a resource for an exploration of the kinship between human and animal forms of embodiment. In the film's transplanted images and in the radical ellipses between narrative sequences (which cross and become entangled without being integrated), characteristics that separate the animal from the human are at once scrupulously italicized and paradoxically weakened, or rather, notwithstanding such distinctions, the animal and the human are brought right up against each other for the spectator to examine the meaningfulness of such distinctions. In visually and aurally associating animal and human beings, Bresson participates in a debate about what kind of alterity animal and human beings reflectively constitute for one another. Bresson does not take up the question of the animal in relation to Martin Heidegger's famous disparagement: "The stone ... is worldless; ... the animal is poor in world; ... man is world-forming." Nor does he engage in an effort like Jacques Derrida's to reclaim an honor for the animal in which the latter's difference is not "privation." And, unlike Giorgio Agamben, Humberto Maturana, and Francisco Varela, he does not explore the traces that affiliate the animal with the human or that bind discrete species in an alliance outside of filiation. (Needless to say, these characterizations of complex philosophical positions ought ideally to be elaborated.) Rather, as I explain, Bresson visually holds the animal up to the human in a series of rhythmic gestures without discursive argument. Or, if the film explores a common ground shared by the animal and the human, such a foundation could be specified in relation to the involuntary and to the "matter [men and women] are made of" (N 47) that compels it, to which Bresson inimitably discovers a corollary — even an essence — in the materiality of the animal.
But I also want to suggest that in Balthazar the filmic proximity of animal and human forms of embodiment has a frictive relation to the film's frame narrative. What is stunning about the contesting of the film's narrative is that it is not any story that is challenged in Bresson's Balthazar. Rather, insofar as the film begins with a mock baptism of the donkey and concludes with his brutal killing on a hillside surrounded by herds of sheep, the narrative puts into question the archetypal story of the crucifixion. The film's Old Testament narrative of law and debt (there is a miser; the film's two fathers quarrel over money; there is an accusation of larceny, a sudden inheritance, and, throughout, courts and police, who officiate over charges of murder and changes in monetary fortune) and its New Testament framework of crucifixion and salvation, alluded to at the film's beginning and end, are, respectively, punctured and displaced by an investigation of the congruence between animal and human manifestations of embodiment and sentience that the filmconducts rhythmically. While it is possible to describe the narrative as absorbing into a content the rhythmic elements I shall discuss — the donkey treated cruelly by its different owners ultimately dies a death so pitiless it could be regarded as a crucifixion — the film creates an aphony between these rhythmic congruences and the Christian frame so that they are unable to speak to each other. Let me press on why they cannot do so.
A death that can be redeemed suggested by the sacrificial frame (He died for all) is juxtaposed to and subsumed by the film's multiple representations of a death that is nontransferable. In Balthazar "the non-relational character of death individualizes" being "down to itself" (as Heidegger formulates it). Yet, in a counterphilosophical claim, the film also curiously suggests that if no other can redeem or experience one's death, death also lies beyond the bounds of one's own experience. Death renders one passive to a fate that can't be universalized, that can't be transferred, and that also can't be owned. It could even be said that Bresson's attempt to recover the involuntary dictates that render the body will-less, discussed in the following pages, continually prefigures death as that state that only ultimately punctures the illusion of a body that is one's own. In Balthazar the dying body is rendered as a singularity that belongs to no one. This anonymous state of dispossession is also the animal's, is the donkey's at the film's end (where the mass of sheep overwhelms and visually negates the unique fate of a single lamb in their midst, contesting the Christian story at its most unambiguous). Starkly figured against the mass of moving sheep, Balthazar, a non-lamb, remains, like the girl on the sidelines, a solitary figure of unredeemed materiality. Such juxtapositions — which are, in Bresson's special sense, rhythmic — lock animal and human forms of embodiment and sentience into relationship, penetrating the enigma of each outside of a common understanding of either.
By rhythm, Bresson understood the recurrence of sounds and images (and the camera's movement between them) as they repeat and vary. Bresson elaborated: "Nothing is durable but what is caught up in rhythms. Bend content to form and sense to rhythm" (N 68). The rhythms are all-powerful. "The meaning arrives last." Rhythm, and even the special case of rhyme, is perceptible in the film's title, hasard/Balthazar — in French a perfect syllabic homophone, putting the accident or hazard back in all characterization. It is perceptible in the constant cries "Marie, Marie" (whom Jean-Luc Godard called "another donkey"), at once a summons and a cry at the fact that the one who is summoned can't be made to come and stay, and can't be saved by the care that underscores the call's urgency, as well as in Marie's reiterated "Balthazar"— variously a greeting, a designation, an expression of love, and a powerless importuning. And the film rhymes objects in space; as has been much discussed, the camera is as interested in the expressiveness of legs, feet, arms, and torsos — which are disarticulated from the image of the whole body and juxtaposed to each other — as in the human countenance (fig. 1.4). Animal bodies are similarly fragmented and juxtaposed: thus, in the circus scenes the hind portions of donkey and horse are set against trailer cars in back of them (whose rear we also see) — constructions of matter, in their piecemeal appearance without compositional integrity (fig. 1.5). In Balthazar one point of this filmic disarticulation is to shatter and even demolish an illusory image of embodiment, one constructed by thought rather than one perceived as inhabited. In the reduction of human and animal bodies to isolated parts — to a crude materiality that is partialized — Bresson is reimagining forms of embodiment so that they appear as strange as they really are (and as they sometimes feel): unthinkable as wholes and unthinkable apart from each other (fig. 1.6).
In section I of the following pages I examine the congruence of animal eye and human eyes, and the eerie consonance between the involuntary movement of Bresson's untrained actors, whom he called models, and the instinctive movement of animals. In section II, I turn to an allusive juxtaposition of Bresson's donkey with his precursors in Dostoevsky's fiction, and to the rhyme established by the film's intercutting of the donkey's braying and a Schubert andantino. The versatility of the film's representations of cruelty constitutes its most pervasive rhythm. Yet one of the most unaccountable features of Balthazar is its ecstatic conjoining of beauty and cruelty. An identification with the animal body incites cruelty, even as its beauty (with which identification is impossible) unmistakably compels rapture. I conclude by pressing on the relation between rhythm and representation across Bresson's films.
I
The donkey's liquid eye haunts the film (figs. 1.7 – 1.9). That eye is passive, beautiful, seemingly omnipresent in its witnessing of events, and in the camera's dwelling on it, repeatedly discoverable as an opacity, an eye that could be profound, but that is in fact unfathomable. Sometimes Balthazar's vision (what he might see as he gazes in a certain direction) indicates what we will see, as when Balthazar, decked in flowers, gazes at Marie who sits across from him on a bench in the middle of the night, while Grard, coming into view, creeps up behind her. In other scenes, the donkey is treated as if he were inanimate, a stone or a ledge (Marie and Grard chase each other around him and use his body to steady themselves), while the camera, framing his eye, rather records him as an experiencing presence.
The camera moves away from the donkey's eyes when, as in illness, sentience flows out of him. Distance from the eye is also perceptible in the camera's record of his death. But Balthazar's eye in health and viewed close-up epitomizes sentience, in contrast to Arnold's drunken stupor when he rides away from the bar slumped over the donkey's neck. And when Arnold falls off the donkey — dying from an immediate blow to the head — the camera juxtaposes the side of Arnold's lifeless head and face to Balthazar's leg and hoof, which it has landed beside, as if the sentience registered moments earlier in the animal's eye has now suffused his whole body and is most palpable in his leg, which sways as the animal stands, and visibly pulses with life (fig. 1.10).
The camera's relentless close-ups of that liquid eye, its recurring to the eye in relation to the human interchanges it reveals the donkey witnessing, as well as in its recording of his reaction to the elements, presses us to seek meaning in the donkey's gaze — a seeking that would confer agency — even as the seeking is consistently rebuked by being thwarted. Pertinent to this allure is Maurice Merleau-Ponty's idea of "tacit ... expression" in relation to what he calls "style"— the contrary of formulas that can be translated into statements and conventions — in that it privileges mute forms of expression. Such muteness "dwells and makes us dwell in a world we do not have the key to ... [within] matrices of ideas ... symbols whose meaning we never stop developing." In Balthazar what we most lack a key to is the liquid eye that, in its suggestiveness, is a depth, a plenitude, hence a condensation of attributes we ascribe to it — judgment, neutral witness, innocence, beauty (notwithstanding the incompatibility of these traits with one another) — and, at the same time, a placeholder, an absence, because the eye repels these attributions. The pull toward attribution and the pull away from it catch the spectator up into a mobility, an inconsistency, an improvisation, a repetition with a difference that is itself a rhythm. This being compelled and being refused by the camera's vigilance — being compelled despite being refused — invests the eye with depth (though depth that is impenetrable), as if what the eye holds to be revealed is not just vitality (indistinguishable from sentience), but responsiveness itself, a responsiveness eerily mirrored in the eyes of the animals in the circus. Moreover, in an apparent reflection of our own absorptive interest in that eye when we behold the animals in the circus seeing, their glassy eyes take Balthazar as their object.
This is the narrative: Balthazar, pulling a cart of hay, is led by a handler past animals in their cages. As the latter goes about a task, he leaves the donkey standing — we don't know standing where until we see Balthazar stare, and then we see a caged tiger stare. Although we never see the tiger and the donkey in the same frame, the shot/reverse shot suggests they are looking at each other. The stripes made by the vertical bars of the tiger's cage throw into relief the stripes of the tiger's pelt. And the visual echo of iron and flesh precipitates a half-implicit sense that something internal to the animal's flesh has been extracted and deformed into the very mechanism of his prison. Though we see the tiger's body fully — he is lying in his cage — a bar crosses in front of and obstructs one of his eyes (fig. 1.11). Or rather, it is unclear whether the bar that blocks our vision also blocks the tiger's eye, a singularity mirrored with a difference in the camera's shot of Balthazar's single eye.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Bond of the Furthest Apart by Sharon Cameron. Copyright © 2017 The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission of The University of Chicago Press.
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Table of Contents
List of AbbreviationsIntroduction
1 Animal Sentience: Robert Bresson’s Au hasard Balthazar
2 “Outside Christ”: Dostoevsky’s Joy
3 The Sight of Death in Tolstoy
4 Robert Bresson’s Pathos
5 Kafka’s No-Hope Spaces
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index