VV(12): Avant-Garde

[Dave Monroe]

Seeing as the ol' Weimar Republic has come up here, a little something I 
reread over coffee this morning.  From Maria Tatar, Lustmord: Sexual Murder 
in Weimar Germany (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1995), Chapter One, "Morbid 
Curiosity: Why Lustmord?," pp. 3-19 ...

"I don't particularly want to chop up women but it seems to work."  Brian 
DePalma (3)

The sheer number of canvases from the 1920s with the title Lustmord (Sexual 
Murder) ought to have been a source of wonder for Weimar's cultural 
historians long before now. (4)

... a strange bond between murder and art, one to which Thomas De Quincey 
referred to in his meditations "On Murder Considered as One of the Fine 
Arts" (1827).  (6)

... a modernist project that aestheticizes violence and turns the mutilated 
female body into an object of fascination and dread, riveting in its display 
of disfiguring violence yet also repugnant in the detail of its morbid 
carnality. (6)

... it becomes evident that the representation of murdered women must 
function as an aesthetic strategy for managing certain kinds of sexual, 
social, and political anxieties and for constituting an artistic and social 
identity. (6)

Our fascination with sexual murder stems in part from its mystification as a 
deed that, in its perversion of love into hate, could be committed only by a 
savage beast or deranged monster rather than a human being.  Yet time and 
again, these murderers are constructed as sons seeking revenge against 
women--against mothers as agents of sexual prohibition or against women in 
general as icons of licentious sexuality.  Similarly, those who commit 
murder on canvases, pages, or screens are ... competing with the 
reproductive powers of women or aiming to transcend the laws of biological 
procreation affiliated with women's bodies. (7)

Elisabeth Bronfen has stressed the degree to which overkill has also 
desensitized us to the image of female corpses in books, on the screen, or 
on canvases: "Because they are so familiar, so evident, we are culturally 
blind to the ubiquity of representations of feminine death." (8)

[citing here Elisabeth Bronfen, Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity, and 
the Aesthetic (NY: Routledge, 1992), p. 3]

That cultural blindness often takes the symptomatic form of naturalizing 
rape and murder directed at women.... What makes woman's position as victim, 
either in cinema or in real life, "natural"? (8)

Yet even once we agree to problematize images of sexual violence, our 
interpretive habits can prevent us from facing the full implications of what 
is represented.  As twentieth-century [!] readers and spectators, we have 
been trained to view violence as an aesthetic strategy funded by a powerful 
transgressive energy that is the mark of the avant-garde.  It is seen as 
nothing more than a pretext for practicing the modernist art of 
fragmentation and disfigurement.  The referential matter of modernist art is 
relentlessly subordinated to and effaced by its spiritualizing manner....  
Focusing exclusively on formal features and insisting on disfigurement as a 
purely aesthetic principle can distract from facing the full consequences of 
what is at stake in the pictures we see and the words we read. (9)

Hm ...

"'From Munich, and never heard of Hitler,' said Weissmann, as if Hitler' 
were the name of an avant-garde play.  'What the hell's wrong with young 
people.'" (V., Ch. 9, Sec. ii, p. 242)

To continue ...

Exposure to violence breeds numerous defense mechanisms, one of the most 
common of which may be avoidance.  It is endlessly reassuring to deny many 
of the unpleasant personal and cultural truths underlying the artistic 
construction of violent images.... yet we also feel irresistibly drawn to 
gape, ogle, and stare--to take a good, hard look or to make sure that we do 
not miss a word.  When ... Robert Musil gave an account of press reports 
about the killing of a prostitute by a sexual murderer ... in The Man 
without Qualities, he captured the double movement from fascination to 
revulsion in all of us:

[and here follows several sentences from Musil's meisterwerk, which I'll 
sketch as follows]

The reporters had described in detail a throat wound ... as well as two stab 
wounds ... and two others ....  They had expressed their abhorrence of it, 
but they did not leave off until they had counted thirty-five stabs in the 
abdomen and ...

"Something interesting, for once." (9)

Cf. ...

"This is only 1 per cent of six million, but still pretty good." (V., Ch. 9, 
Sec. ii, p. 245)

Continuing in Tatar ...

Deaths represented as having a spiritually or socially redeeming purpose 
have not met with the powerful resistance to analysis at work in images of 
Lustmord.  The nineteenth-century Liebestod (love-death), marked assertionof 
transcendent desire and the spiritualization of eros, found its most 
celebrated incarnation in the musical drama of Richard Wagner's Tristan and 
Isolde.... Similarly, the Expressionist Vatermord (patricide) ... an attack 
on authority, power, and moribund traditions.  To murder the father is to 
liquidate the past and to clear the way for the social renewal and 
regeneration championed by a generation of disaffected writers. (9-10)

While it may be tempting to identify hidden symmetries in the construction 
of Vatermord and of Lustmord ... the psycho-sexual dynamics are so different 
as to demand separate treatment.... there is almost always more than a trace 
of either helpless infantile rage or the nervous womb envy ... (10)

Lustmord seems, in many ways, less the female counterpart to Vatermord than 
a response to the "bloodlust" of male representations of sexually predatory 
women, the turn-of-the-century femmes fatales.  The profusion of images of 
Eve, Circe, Medusa, Judith, and Salome in art and literature around 1900 
gives vivid testimony to an unprecedented dread of female sexuality and its 
homicidal power.... (10)

Frank Wedekind's Earth Spirit and Pandora's Box ... (11)

... the psychic fall-out of the war years: the sense of resentment directed 
against victors, noncombatants,a nd military chiefs alike; the crisis of 
male subjectivity occasioned by a sense of military defeat; and a painful 
acute sense of the body's vulnerability to fragmentation, mutilation, and 
dismemberment. (12)

... the gesture of aversion is often coupled with its kindred opposite.  Few 
of us can deny a voyeuristic fascination with the sight of what is our 
common lot.  In looking at murder victims, it is easy enough to become 
transfixed by the sight of a body in the state of biological 
disintegration--to experience a secret sense of pleasure at having escaped 
that destiny ....  What is particularly frightening about this fascination 
is the way in which it bonds us, if only for a moment, with the perpetrators 
of violence, drawing us into a kind of complicitous gaze at the victim. (13)

... Otto Dix's harrowing Sexual Murder (Lustmord, 1922) ... (13_

As Elisabeth Bronfen has pointed out, the feminine body has come to be 
affiliated with "the polluting world of biology, with the time-bound 
individual, with corrupting flesh, with the putrescence of the corpse, with 
'bad' death." (17; citing Bronfen, p. 199)

Artistic representations of sexual murder usually fix on the victim ... (17)

In fictional and cinematic accounts of sexual murder, by contrast, it is 
usually the killer and his psychosis that occupy center stage. (17)

artistic identity and masculine identity come to be founded on and 
constituted through acts of disfiguring, murderous violence. (18)

"identification with the innocent victim is frequently substituted for 
mourning" (18)

[citing Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich, The Inability to Mourn, trans. 
Beverly R. Placzek (NY: Grove, 1975), p. 25]

To what degree is the disfiguring violence presented in a sympathetic light, 
drawing attention to the perpetrator's entitlement to discharge his "evil" 
urges and effacing the suffering on the victim?  To what extent do these 
works legitimize murderous violence, providing for it a socially acceptable 
outlet?  Do the "aesthetically pleasing" images of fictive victims 
contaminate our perception of the real-life victims, leading us to look at 
their corpses as works of art? (18)

And see also ...

http://www.harvardmagazine.com/issues/ma97/right.lust.html

As well as ...

   "'I loved the man,' he'd said.  'He taught us not to fear.  It's 
impossible to describe the sudden release; the comfort, the luxury; when you 
knew you could safely forget all the rote-lessons you'd had to learn about 
the value and dignity of human life. [...]
   "Till we've done it, we're taught that it's evil.  Having done it, then's 
the struggle: to admit to yourself that it's not really evil at all.  That 
like forbidden sex it's enjoyable." (V., Ch. 9, Sec. ii, p. 253)

"You weren't ashamed. [...]  Before you disemboweled or whatever you did 
with her to be able to take a Herero girl before the eyes of your superior 
officer, and stay potent."  (V., Ch. 9, Sec. iii, p. 257)

"... a Herero child named Sarah." (V., Ch. 9, Sec. iii, pp. 271-3)

And so forth.  There are a number of aesthetics (Romanticism, Decadence, 
Symbolism, Expressionism, Modernism), not to mention politics (Imperialism, 
Colonialism, Fascism), and the articulations amongst them in play, not to 
mention under critique, in V., and, esp., in Chapter 9 here.  Cf. Ch. 14 
("V. in love") and the "Epilogue."  And see as well, as well as Bronfen ...

Black, Joel.  The Aesthetics of Murder: A Study
   in Romantic Literature And Contemporary Culture.
   Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 1991.

Kramer, Lawrence.  After the Lovedeath:
   Sexual Violence and the Making of Culture.
   Berkeley: U of Cal P, 1997.

And, now that I think of it, or, rather, now that Judy has mentioned it, 
Alain Robbe-Grillet, le nouveau roman, might not be irrelevant here as well. 
  Mirrors, "objectivity" (chosisme, cf. that Weimar Neue Sachlichkeit?), 
murder.  The Voyeur, that first tableau in Snapshots, at least.  Will report 
back ...





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