I also met a local man who said that Malaparte had been a big boss of the Communist Party.
‘Can’t you see it?’ he said, looking down the cliff at the rectangular roof and its curving concrete windbreak. ‘He built the house in the shape of a hammer and sickle.’
1984
THE MORALITY OF THINGS
This morning we have assembled to bow before the graven image. But an Old Testament prophet, were he present, would have thundered, ‘Fingers Off! Thou shalt not lust after things.’ The patriarchs of Ancient Israel lived in black tents. Their wealth was in herds; they moved up and down their tribal lands on seasonal migrations; and they were famous for their resistance to art objects. They would have stormed into art galleries as they stormed into the shrines of Baal, and slashed every image in sight. And this, not because they couldn’t pack them in their saddlebags, but on moral grounds. For they believed that pictures separated man from God. The adoration of images was a sin of settlement; the worship of the Golden Calf had satisfied the emotional weaklings who sighed for the fleshpots of Egypt. And prophets like Isaiah and Jeremiah recalled the time when their people were a race of hardy individualists, who did not need to comfort themselves with images. For this reason they denounced the Temple which God’s Children had turned into a sculpture gallery, and recommended a policy of vandalism and a return to the tents.
And do we not all long to throw down our altars and rid ourselves of our possessions? Do we not gaze coldly at our clutter and say, ‘If these objects express my personality, then I hate my personality.’ For what, on the face of it, enhances life less than a work of art? One tires of it. One cannot eat it. It makes an uncomfortable bedfellow. One guards it, and feels obliged to enjoy it long after it has ceased to amuse. We sacrifice our freedom of action to become its privileged guardian, and we end its imprisoned slave. All civilisations are by their very nature ‘thing-oriented’ and the main problem of their stability has been to devise new equations between the urge to amass things and the urge to be rid of them.
But things have a way of insinuating themselves into all human lives. Some people attract more things than others, but no people, however mobile, is thingless. A chimpanzee uses sticks and stones as tools, but he does not keep possessions. Man does. And the things to which he becomes most attached do not serve any useful function. Instead they are symbols or emotional anchors. The question I should like to ask (without necessarily being able to answer it) is, ‘Why are man’s real treasures useless?’ For if we understood this, we might also understand the convoluted rituals of the art market.
People who know and really love things – people, we say, who have taste—commonly rant against the philistine who buys a work of art with as much emotion as he would eat an egg. They accuse him of collecting in order to buy an intellectual respectability without having to suffer for it, or of making people admire him through the refracted mirror of his things. But Freud and the psychoanalysts have had far nastier innuendoes to make about the compulsive art collector. The true collector, they imply, is a voyeur in life, protected by a stuffing of possessions from those he would like to love, possessed of the tenderest emotions for things and glacial emotions for people. He is the classic cold fish. He taps the vitality of former ages to compensate for the impotence of the present. And he protects his things with defensive fury from the human wolves who threaten them. (We shall recall Karl Marx’s insight that the destruction of brick and mortar causes more dismay to the bourgeois than the widespread spilling of human blood.) In other words, the collector evolves a moral system from which he squeezes out people. We can call it the morality of things.
The acquisition of an object in itself becomes a Grail Quest—the chase, the recognition of the quarry, the decision to purchase, the sacrifice and fear of financial ruin, the Dark Cloud of Unknowing (‘Is it a fake?’), the wrapping, the journey home, the ecstasy of undressing the package, the object of the quest unveiled, the night one didn’t go to bed with anyone, but kept vigil, gazing, stroking, adoring the new fetish – the companion, the lover, but very shortly the bore, to be kicked out or sold off while another more desirable thing supplants itself in our affections. I have often noticed that in the really great collections the best objects congregate like a host of guardian angels around the bed, and the bed itself is pitifully narrow. The true collector houses a corps of inanimate lovers to shore up the wreckage of life. In a self-analysis of surgical precision, Signor Mario Praz, in his House of Life, explains that people are never reliable. Instead one should surround oneself with things, for they never let you down.
The art collection, then, is a desperate stratagem against a failure, a personal ritual to cure loneliness. The art market is the public aspect of this private religion, and, with its apparent irrationality, seems to defy any known rule of commerce. It reduces businessmen into credulous believers, and makes the peasant with his pot of gold at the end of the rainbow seem positively hard-headed. Consider an important international art auction. Is it not some seasonal, liturgical drama? An uninitiated observer might imagine he was attending an arcane ceremony of mystic love. He would find an altar and a pulpit, the missals of service, the executant priest, his acolytes, the sacrament proffered, the slippery path along which many tread but few are chosen, the complex relationship between the priest-lover and his suitors, or between the seducer and seduced, the nervous anticipation, the esoteric numerology, the ascensionalism of the price, the crescendo, the moment of breathlessness, and (BANG) the climax!
We are told to the point of exhaustion that art collecting is a phenomenon of the decadent. And in moments of puritan reaction people give it up. In any case there comes a moment when the sacrifices reach the point of diminishing returns. Moreover, the aesthete is often fatally attracted to the violent; and, on the principle that rapists are usually invited, positively wants the wrecker to shatter his private universe, hoping, once he is free of things, to be free himself.
Something of this kind seems to be happening in America where we watch the discomfort of the President and the discomfort of the Museum for the same set of reasons. Ever since the priest bureaucracies of Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, the upper classes have put precious objects into depositaries. The extent of the treasure proves symbolically the power of the Tribe, City or State. For power is always manifested by the capacity of authority to hold wealth. The American Museum became a paraphrase of the State itself, with its ceremonial unveilings, presentations of wealth heavily guarded, its technical experts and providers of cash, its court of privileged visitors and the not-so privileged public for whose education the Museum ostensibly exists. But education, as defined by a former director of the Metropolitan in New York, is the ‘art of casting false pearls before real swine’. It frequently aims to teach people the full extent of their ignorance.
For many years the American Museum publicly demonstrated the power of money; it became more splendid as the cities became more squalid. To some eyes the recent embellishment of the Metropolitan appeared to defy the poverty programme of the City’s administration, but the old cry, ‘We can’t eat stones,’ was deflected and ignored. The new wing of the Cleveland Museum, designed by Marcel Breuer, is not so much an exhibition space as a fortified bunker. It is of some psychological interest that the more exquisite the Oriental objects it houses, the further they are buried underground in black stone crypts, while in the park outside, trees and children gasp for air, and streams and ponds are oily black and perhaps inflammable.
Such observable disparities turned people against art, particularly valuable art. The artists started it by creating unsaleable nothings. Now they have been joined by a chorus of critics, who once jumped on the art wagon and find it convenient to jump off. A famous New York critic declared the other day that, in his experience, people who are attracted to art are—it goes without saying—psychopaths, unable to tell the difference between right and wrong.
Why psychopath? Because, in some opinions, the wor
k of art is a source of pleasure and power, the object of fetishistic adoration, which serves in a traumatised individual as a substitute for skin-toskin contact with the mother, once denied, like the kisses of Proust’s mother, in early childhood. Art objects, leather gear, rubber goods, boots, frillies, or the vibrating saddle, all compensate for having lost ‘mama en chemise toute nue’.
The word ‘fetish’ derives from a Portuguese expression, fetiçio; it carries implications of being a thing magical or enchanted, with an additional meaning of something embellished or false, like maquillage. The term ‘fetishism’ was first employed by a very acute Frenchman called the President de Brosses in 1760, who described ‘the cult, perhaps not less ancient than the cult of stars, of certain earthly material objects called fetishes by Black Africans. I shall call this cult fetishism. Even if in its original context it pertains to the beliefs of Blacks, I intend to use it for any nation whose sacred objects are animals or inanimate things endowed with some divine virtue.’ He added that the things varied from a statue to a tree, a cow, a lion’s tail, a stone, a shell, or the sea itself. Each was less than God, but possessed of some spirit that made it worthy of adoration.
The President de Brosses was a figure of the Enlightenment. He frowned on this childish adoration of fetishes. And he failed, of course, to notice in his own colonial civilisation a mania for profits that carried fetishism one step further in infantility. Other writers on fetishism included Auguste Comte, for whom it was a religious phase through which all races had to pass; for Hegel it was a condition in which the poor Blacks were stuck; for Karl Marx ‘the fetishism of the commodity’ was inseparable from bourgeois capitalism but would evaporate into communistic harmony once the working masses had possessed themselves of the things of the rich. And finally we come to Freud who said that the fetishistic attachment to things was rooted in the psychopathology of the individual, was, in effect, a perversion, and as a perversion could be cured.
Freud said something very original and very profound about fetishism. If we could fathom the depths of its profundity, we might either discover it to be meaningless or to answer all our economic woes and moral dilemmas. He said, ‘The fetish is a substitute for the phallus of the mother which the child does not want to relinquish.’ And he also said, ‘These substitutes can meaningfully be compared to the fetiches in which the savage incarnates his god.’ Thus he implied that the savage’s adoration of sticks, stones, cows or the sea follows exactly the same psychological process as attachment to Meissen figures, kelims or motor bikes. Even if I understood it better, I cannot hope to expound the convolutions of Freud’s complexes and his contention that all fetishism has at root a horror of the sexual organs of the opposite sex. But we should note in passing that he does raise a fascinating insight into why, from the ancient Siberian shaman to the modem artist, the creator is likely to have sex problems; and why men, who notoriously have greater difficulties in their relations with their mothers, have produced more and greater artists than women. And when he remarks on the fetishist’s heightened sensitivity to touch, we are forcibly reminded of Mr Berenson’s ‘tactile values’.
Instead of immersing ourselves in Freud, I suggest we accept as fact that a human infant requires the immediate and constant presence of its mother and her breast for at least the first fifteen months of its life. If this presence is withdrawn and the child pawned off with substitutes for the mother, the results will not necessarily be fatal, but will produce a different sort of character. The Harlows, a team of animal behaviourists, studied rhesus monkeys and found that if their clinging reflexes were directed solely towards inanimate objects, such as a mechanical mother, they grew up drastically disturbed in their sociability – withdrawn, morose, perverted, and hopelessly selfish. And Dr John Bowlby of the Tavistock Clinic found a similar pattern in children left by their mothers. If a very young child, whose bonds of attachment to its mother were firmly cemented, was taken from her, it would cry inconsolably at first and pass into sullen despair, but then, quite suddenly, it would brighten up and take an intelligent interest in its surroundings – and in particular in things, teddy bears, rattles, sweets, or any sort of amusement. This lively upsurge of interest always causes relief to the guardians of the child, because it has apparently recovered from the absence of the mother. In fact Bowlby maintains that irreparable damage has been done, for when the mother returns, although the child greets her cheerfully, it does so with a glazed aloofness, as the provider of more things to keep it amused. If this is so, the child that plays happily with its toys is meat for fetishistic activity later, and the prototype of the thing-fixed citizen of today. The playpen will be civilisation’s cage in microcosm.
But why the intensity of the bond? Why must all small children stick close by their mothers? Why must they rapidly come unstuck from them if they are to mature? If one examines this question in terms of living in a city or even a mud hut, one does not arrive at the answer. Instead I would ask you to accept that all our emotions have a function in nature, but before they begin to make sense, we must first cross-reference them with the original habitat of early man. I also ask you to take it that our species evolved in a temperate climate (which is why we are hairless); that we were hunters of game animals and gatherers of vegetable food; that seasonal challenge forced on us annual migrations (which is why we have the long striding walk unknown to our primate cousins and why we symbolise life as a long journey); that our hands developed to make our essential equipment—the slings and spears, axes and baskets without which we should be lost; that ideally a man should own no possessions but those he can conveniently carry; that the basic unit of human sociability was not the hunting band, but the group united in defence against the zoological monstrosities with which we shared the bush (for this alone will explain why children are expert palaeozoologists in their nightmares, and why the prime object of our hate is always a beast or a bestialised man); and finally that this archaic life, for all its danger was the Golden Age for which we preserve an instinctive nostalgia and to which we would mentally return. Today Serengeti is innocuous compared to the dangers it contained in the Early Pleistocene, but if a mother left her child alone there, I doubt if she would find it alive twenty minutes later. In the context of the African savannahs we shall understand the function of the child’s clinging: that the mother’s breast is not simply the source of food, but something to hang on to; that when a squalling infant has to be walked back to happiness it demands to be on its mother’s left side as she herself walked on her daily migration; that the desperate screams for help are protests against abandonment (for when a mother leaves her child she murders it); and that when it gives her a cool reception later, it is simply exacting revenge. We will also understand why, in the light of future dangers facing him, a boy must learn to break away from the mother and stand, to use a cliché, on his own two feet.
But why the attachment to things? Is the work of art really a compensation against abandonment? The Freudian notion of fetishism is fine if you favour a Nothing But philosophy. But it doesn’t really get us very far. It may help fathom some of the more obsessive collecting manias. But the acquisition of symbolic things cannot really be a perversion, because everybody does it, deprivation trauma or no. And if the behaviour of their so-called ‘primitive’ descendants is anything to go by, the earliest men spent much of their time bargaining, bartering, giving and receiving things which were formally useless with the same enthusiasm and irrationality as the modem art collector.
Art, like language, is a communication system. But unlike language it overrides linguistic and cultural barriers. Show an Eskimo a Velazquez and he will ignore it at first. But he can also learn to master its finer points far quicker than he can the sonnets of Gongora. ‘Art’, as Chesterton once said, ‘is the signature of man.’ Moreover, an art style is the signature of a particular man and a window on to the age in which he made it.
When I studied prehistoric archaeology we were encouraged to examine
the objects of the past, to measure them, compare them to others, and date them. But when one speculated on the character and the beliefs of their makers, such inferences were frowned on as speculative, emotional and unscientific. Unhappily for the prehistorian, prehistoric religion is irrecoverable. It is for him a non-problem, not meriting his attention. But the position is not so desperate. Thanks to Rorschach and other tests we are beginning to be able to determine the character, or psychic life, of a man by the things he makes or even likes. The art object is what psychologists call a cognitive map, which reveals more about the artist than he would ever care to reveal.
I have harped on the connection between art and sex. And the first thing to remember is that the sexes have very different ways of seeing things. Societies simpler than our own have always made the distinction between male and female property, between his and her things; the Married Women’s Property Act would have been a non sequitur. Certainly in other periods it is usually possible to decide which sex made what. Alone the twentieth century would reveal a pattern of total mixed-upness.
At this point let us also recall that early man did not know the existence of a neuter, inert thing. For him everything in the universe was mysteriously alive and sending messages. Stones and trees have often spoken to mystics like Mohammed or to depressives like Gérard de Nerval. And if the universe was alive it was also sexed. The subconscious appears to contain a mechanism for dividing the world of our experience into sexed opposites, male and female, corresponding to the Chinese Yin and Yang. Mountains, rocks and promontories are likely to be male; caves, crevasses and bays female. The sky raining thunderbolts and covering the earth is always male. The Earth is always the Mother. One cannot with certainty predict the sex of, say, the sun. For Louis XIV the Sun was male and symbolised potency, light over darkness, order over chaos, power and glory. For the Rwala Bedouin of Arabia the sun is a mean and destructive old hag, who forces the handsome moon to sleep with her once a month, and so exhausts him that he needs another month to recover. The point to notice is that everything is sexed one way or the other; and the archaic languages preserve this. Hebrew contains no neuter, and the French have preserved ‘la chose’.