There
are two things I won’t do. I won’t publish another episode of “Suwa” because I
don’t think I will use any of it. And I won’t write another blog on “Hannibal”.
At least not right now. I just reached a new level of “reading” watching season
two and season three, episode 1-7 in a row. And it still makes me happy,
especially because Halloween won’t be over until after Christmas – or at least
not until the new season of “House of Cards” will be available on dvd. I had a
particularly satisfying Halloween with the whole family on Lago Maggiore where
we “retrieved” a local tale about the devil that led to a devil-drawing
contest. Afterwards the children got a genuinely scary make-up by their elder
cousin and chased one another around the church. When I asked the five-year-old
what they were playing he explained enthusiastically that he just had half his
brain removed by his elder siblings. So much about horror and children. It must
be in our genes …
Anyway,
“Hannibal” remains fascinating as the “landscape” keeps shifting. This time it
was definitely shifting towards Will Graham, and I think it was high time that
it did. And not only because it is where things happen. I still don’t really
like Hugh Dancy as an actor but I slowly came to appreciate the hard work. Most
of what Will Graham is about is virtually impossible to act. And because of
this there are these parts attached to his character which I think are the
least satisfying – to play and to watch, namely his weird dreams and fantasies.
But we have to read them nonetheless because we want to find out what is going
on inside his head.
And
following Will Graham closely took me off Hannibal. At least I realized how
little I actually like about him. Not even any of his many impressive
achievements really impressed me. The first thing I noticed was that he could
never have lured me with his elaborate meals because I know that I don’t
appreciate five-star cuisine. Seeing something on a plate that looks like a
sculpture or a painting immediately makes my appetite go away. I literally
don’t taste it. I suppose that, because my main concern about food is its taste
and if it is good for me – not one of the many ethical and aesthetical
categories attached to it by our culture – and you can’t SEE what it tastes
like, a lot of the chunky bits the series prepares for us were easy to swallow.
I mean, I probably could imagine circumstances where I might eat whale meat, or
snails, or even human organs, but none where I would enjoy food that looks like
anything but food. And in the same way I have no real respect for the culture
of cooking I probably have very little respect for art as such. I mean, for art
BECAUSE it is art. I already noticed that I was amused and thrilled by the
Blake painting being eaten – not scandalized. And, thinking about this, I
learned why I have never been impressed or attracted by this type of a
“Renaissance man” – who appropriates every bit of culture and skills he can. Maybe
because I was never impressed by people who fetishize culture and art in that
way I was able to see why they are actually doing this. Usually they are wearing
it as a suit – or armour – to impress other people, and to be impressed with
themselves, of course, thinking that they are somehow “better” than the “mob”. So,
maybe more often than we are aware of, it is actually ABOUT POWER. In fact, not
only sex is about power, or certainly can be. (There is very little of this kind
of violence in the series, and where there was in the book they even took it
out. Which I think was a good intuition.) Even what is going on in the kitchen
may be about power. At least it is for Hannibal. Exercising power is ALWAYS the
end product of what he does. It might be hard to prove where playing the
harpsichord is concerned but maybe I am just missing something. At least
playing the theramon falls into this category because he is obviously fascinated
with making it play his tune without even touching the thing. It is certainly
his ideal of exercising power! And even when I liked him, briefly, for example
when he is absorbed drawing the faces of his “loved ones”, I was always on my
toes. Maybe I just don’t understand what this REALLY is about. So I probably
always disliked him already FOR WHO HE IS – not for what he does. I probably
even like him best when he is killing because these are, in a way, his most
honest moments. And even when he is saying things I approve of – which happens
a lot – regarding the context it always sounds like he is bullshitting me. I
just was so smitten with what Mads Mikkelsen does with this character that it
took me a while to achieve this conclusion. And, in fact, that is only the end-product
of my reading JUST NOW. As a reading-process the shifting was confusing and
unsettling. And, initially, following Will Graham was even worse. That was
probably the reason why I actively had to take my mind off it, without having
to deal with something new, and went backwards in my blog for reassurance.
Which
didn’t work at all. I hadn’t done it for a long time, being absorbed with other
things. But every time I did it I had liked what I read. At least I had never
been bored going back to my past “adventures”. Now, suddenly, there was so much
that was actually boring. And there was so much that appeared pointless where I
so clearly had a point when I wrote it and that I didn’t understand anymore. Basically
there were just the parts about Shakespeare that still appeared to make sense.
I had to remind myself of the fact that my blogs are NOT essays but that I
adopted this literary form so that I would be tempted to write. In fact they
have always been protocols of what happens when I am reading, and are supposed
to be “over” when the reading is finished. But that only partly reassured me
because there had never been any need to remind me of that before.
But I
could live with that because I know that the writing isn’t important AS SUCH
but because it is taking my reading one step further … or many steps, probably,
towards new horizons. So, though I have to admit that it was disagreeable,
being bored wasn’t the worst. The worst was when I suddenly noticed that I
didn’t really like the person who had written this. I resented her eagerness to
be pleased, to adopt a naïve point of view and to show off at the same time.
And, most unsettling, I didn’t even like her humour. I suddenly became aware of
me, sitting there doggedly, consciously not pressing the “like-button”. I just
sat right beside “this” – as if I had actually moved out of my own orbit and
didn’t care. I had always thought I at least KNEW the person who wrote this …
I think
it was really disagreeable when it happened – like being genuinely disappointed
ABOUT MYSELF watching a Woody Allen film. But, as usual, there was a benefit
because I began to understand what I had already set down as my current
favourite quote about a literary experience I retrieved from another person.
This time it was my sister – the elder one who never reads. (Which is literally
untrue, but there must be a reason why we were living in different worlds from
the beginning, and I think it is this one.) On the surface it sounds a lot like
other things I have written, but in this case the context is important. She
recently reminded me how much she resented it that her friends and I “made” her
study literature in college. She would have wanted to study music, but ours was
a very small college and there was no chance there would be a music class
anyway. So we persuaded her to join our literature class so that we wouldn’t
have to study biochemistry – which everybody did who was neither really good in
mathematics nor particularly fond of economics or history. We both liked French
and were good at it, so we chose that as a first subject. But this already
included a lot of reading. I didn’t remember she resented her choice that much
because I could never imagine it to be an ordeal to read books. It was, for
her, but she said as well that she distinctly remembered this experience: lying
on a beach reading Kafka and suddenly becoming THIS OTHER PERSON.
She
actually SAID that! And what I love and hate about these amazing synopses other
people give me about their reading experience is that I could throw out
everything I have written and just take that instead – in this case all my
efforts to explain fictional worlds. Of course fictional worlds are special,
and different, because of this different experience we have when we live in
them. As soon as we chose to “participate” we get changed into THIS OTHER
PERSON. And in some cases, like Kafka or probably Woody Allen, we don’t even
have a choice as to who this person will be. Either we are bored with it and don’t
really read it – so we just finish it because we have to – or we become THIS
person. I probably don’t really like it when I have no choice …
Of
course it is this different experience which is at the bottom of my obsession
with fictional worlds. But I don’t remember noticing that it actually happened
– unlike my sister who never saw the point of reading books, even as a child! –
because I have been “literate” longer than I remember. Probably from the age of
two when my father read “Max und Moritz” by Wilhelm Busch to me. I think I even
hated the stories from the beginning, but they were stories. And, not being
able to read myself, I had memorized the whole thing in no time at all –
whereas nowadays I am unable to learn a complete scene from “Macbeth”, notwithstanding
how much I like it, which is pathetic. And I think I still remember this first
reading-experience, like I still remember the person I was when I read Karl May
or Camus, whereas I have forgotten everything about Kafka, and even about who I
was when I read Sartre’s “La Nausée” – the only book I actually remember to
have changed me because I definitely left a naïve state of thinking and feeling
and moved on towards something more “grown-up”. It was great as well as
unsettling but I cannot remember this person now. I probably kind of “absorbed”
her. Whereas the person who enjoyed Karl May wasn’t dead – though I wouldn’t
see the point of reading it anymore. She came back when I saw “The Fellowship
of the Ring” for the first time, but she came back changed. And there were a
few people in between Sartre and Tolkien. Especially the one who avidly read
every Icelandic saga she could get hold of and very little else for years. At
least it appears so. And this person is currently fading, though part of her “faded”
into the person who is now reading Cornwell’s war stories. Whereas I am
obviously getting bored with the person who read “The Hobbit” for years. I
really don’t like it, but it is probably high time to move on. And of course I
already did.
There is
nothing surprising about these changes though it is sometimes disagreeable. But
there are some of these people who never left me. I even think that the person
who lives in “Shakespeare” was already there twenty-five years ago. She just
wasn’t ready for it yet. And, at least for now, I don’t think that she will
ever be gone. And there is another person I know inside out even though she
changed a lot over the years. It is the person who was fascinated and horrified
reading “Madame Bovary” when she was about twenty and who was swallowed up by
“The Crucible” in the cinema ten years later. The person who, in the meantime,
went through “The Scarlet Letter” and Fontane’s “L’Adultera”, and who probably
rejected “North and South”. Who ended up with “Women in Love” as her favourite
book for years. After that, or maybe rather after “The White Peacock”, which
might have taken it a bit too far, she disappeared. But she came back after
what seemed like decades of Icelandic sagas seeing the BBC adaptations of “Lady
Chatterley’s Lover”, “North and South”, and “Women in Love”, and “The Crucible”
by the Old Vic. I recognized her though she was very much changed. And I am
actually confused – as much as I am confused by the person who is currently
devouring “Hannibal” because I still don’t know her: Was this the same person
who weathered whatever had happened to her then in “Austen”? I rather think so.
“Austen” probably was her sanctuary – but why she hid out there, and who she
was while she lived there, I have quite forgotten.
And this
is still almost a random choice. I would never be able to keep track of all
these people. What is probably already half the point about fictional world is
that we already ARE all these people. Or at least we could be. Because the
other half – more difficult to understand, but necessary and maybe even more
stunning – is that all these people are only here because THESE fictional
worlds exist. It is commonly known, and, I think, even understood that we are
different people in real life as well. But we could never be so many of them,
nor so different, because our own imagination and experience is too limited for
more than a few worlds of our own. There is certainly an embryonic form of one
or more fictional worlds in anyone – even people with literally no imagination
because even they have daydreams, nightmares, and sexual fantasies. They just
never become aware that they are stories. And I suppose everybody has a world
in which he is his favourite person. Though they might not realize that, in real
life, they are not. Where all this begins … interesting, but I will never know.
It would be impossible anyway. Where IT really begins is the first sentence we
read, becoming intrigued, or the first sentence we write, becoming aware that
we wrote something that is not a hundred percent “covered” by “real life” …
Maybe
the REAL reason why I dislike Hannibal is not because of who he is or what he does
but because he is so bloody “literal”. (I just reached the “peak”, having now
arrived in the third season again, watching from the beginning, when Hannibal
literally does what we all want to do all the time: open up Will Grahams head!)
I think we are right to consider it to be an achievement that we don’t take
Jesus literally. He didn’t intend us to. But people who basically care about
power have to be. It is doubtless a great attraction as well, and it is what
makes Hannibal so successful. And it makes for a lot of great irony – which
might be the most attractive part of it for me. Whereas Will Graham is a reader
– he reads and understands what is going on in other people’s heads. And maybe
his story is one of becoming “literal” himself – becoming HIMSELF by making a
place for himself in a world which is already mapped by others, namely Jack
Crawford and Hannibal. And to find his place, and make his own, genuine
contribution, it is necessary for him to understand HIMSELF. At the moment it
appears to make sense to read his story in this way, but I don’t know yet. What
I know is that another chapter about “Hannibal” was in the making even before I
finished this one. There is probably nothing more to say, anyway, about
fictional worlds.
Keine Kommentare:
Kommentar veröffentlichen