Being Human

The question of miseria et dignitatis hominis encompassed a variety of moral, political, and religious issues, and was approached from a range of perspectives. In arguments espousing his misery, man was characterised as a base, weak and fragile creature, who is born and dies in filth and sorrow, is ruled by animalistic passions (greed, drunkenness, lasciviousness) and subject to the vicissitudes of nature, the elements, and fortune. In contrasting depictions of his dignity, man is believed to have been made in the image of God, is situated at the centre or outside of the cosmos, and is gifted with dominance over the natural world, language, reason, intellect and free will. As María José Vega observed (2011: 5–6), however, the parameters of the debate were not fixed; at different times they focused on different aspects of the issue, made use of different motifs, and were described by terms that evolved as the discourse about humanity also evolved and as new texts become part of the dialogue.

As an example of how ideas about man's nature and condition could change, we need only look at the meanings attributed to the term ‘humano’. A search of the Corpus Diacrónico del Español (CORDE) shows that classical and early medieval interpretations contrasted ‘human’ with ‘animal’ and placed the term in relation with the divine, the body, and knowledge. In contrast, by the sixteenth century it had acquired connotations of ‘courtesy’ and ‘politeness’ as well as mercy and good conversation, and was being used with additional moral and social connotations that focused far more upon the individual's relationship with others and wider social structures – a change that is reflected in the definition of ‘humano’ in early seventeenth century dictionaries, which rely on earlier sources. The 1612 Vocabolario della Crusca not only descibes ‘huomo’ as a reasonable animal – ‘Animal ragionevole’ – it defines mankind thus: ‘Per affabile, benigno, mansueto, trattabile’. Likewise, in Sebastián de Covarrubias's 1611 Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española, to be ‘humano’ not only signified ‘Aquello que puede pertenecer al hombre’ or ‘los descendientes de Adán’, but ‘el que es apacible, compasible, acariciador, benigno y manso’ (2006: 1078).

BEYOND OUR PRIMARY FOCUS on the five cello sonatas, two other ‘sonatas’ entered Beethoven's catalogue, but indirectly, as arrangements for cello and piano of two chamber works: the Sonata in F major for horn and piano Op. 17 (1800) and the String Trio in E-flat major Op. 3 (1795). Both appeared in print as cello sonatas during the composer's lifetime, in 1801 and 1807 respectively, but are often relegated in the literature to the status of the composer's step-children, and neglected. Though Beethoven's direct involvement with the transcriptions is unclear, and in the case of Op. 3 was perhaps undertaken without his consent, the publications no doubt reflected the composer's new-found celebrity, which significantly increased after the turn to the new century.

Alternate versions of Beethoven's music frequently appeared during his lifetime, most of them not from his own hand. Making popular works available to a wider audience or group of performers mutually benefited the composer and his publishers - a Beethoven symphony transcribed for piano or, in the case of the Second Symphony, for piano trio, could be comfortably enjoyed within intimate drawing rooms, where the composer's music reached domestic audiences, and the sale of such transcriptions could enhance publishers’ profits. We should also remember, however, that much of the recast Beethoven crept into print against his wishes, and that even successful arrangements could mask whether Beethoven or someone else actually undertook the task.

Typically, the busy work of rescoring compositions for alternate settings did not interest Beethoven, even if he regarded the endeavor as necessary, to satisfy either his publishers or his public, or both. Clearly, however, Beethoven did not object to artfully executed arrangements, especially if he was able to oversee the work personally. Ferdinand Ries, among those entrusted with such tasks, wrote that ‘many … pieces were arranged by me, revised by Beethoven, and then sold as Beethoven by his brother Caspar’. And in a letter to the Leipzig publisher Hoffmeister & Kühnel concerning Franz Kleinheinz's arrangements of Beethoven's Serenades Opp. 8 and 25, the composer summed up his attitude about the entire enterprise: ‘The arrangements were not done by me, but I have gone through them and in some passages made drastic corrections. So do not dare to state in writing that I have done the arranging …

Bristol was a city of spires and masts. Alexander Pope was struck by the hundreds of ships at Broad Quay and the Backs, ‘their masts as thick as they stand by one another, which is the oddest and most surprising sight imaginable’. ‘The streets are as crowded as London’, he remarked, ‘but the best image I can give of it is, Tis as if Wapping and Southwark were ten-times as big, or all their people run into London.’

It was the ‘swarming vessels’, to echo Richard Savage, that particularly attracted the Admiralty. Swarming vessels meant seamen, and seamen, especially experienced topmen, were what the navy needed to man its ships in wartime. Between 1738 and 1815 Britain was at war roughly two in every three years, and as fleets grew in size, her demand for men was insatiable. At the beginning of the war of Jenkins’ Ear in 1738, 23,000 men were borne by the navy; that is, registered on the ships’ books. That number rose dramatically in subsequent wars peaking at 85,000 in the Seven Years’ War, over 100,000 in the American, and at an amazing 140,000 towards the end of the Napoleonic wars. This was a six-fold increase in the space of roughly seventyfive years, and it could only be sustained by appropriating seamen from the merchant marine, whose own numbers could only be sustained by relaxing the official requirements of the Navigation Acts, which insisted on British and colonial ships managed by a high proportion of home-grown mariners. Because wages in the merchant marine were always higher than those of the royal navy, and appreciably higher in wartime, men had to be coerced into joining His Majesty's fleets. Precisely how many men were pressed into service is impossible to say. The figures are fragmented and fraught with problems. The best we currently have, derived from the Shelburne papers for the American war, suggests that 37.5 per cent of all seamen enlisted on land were impressed, and probably 34 per cent of the 235,000 men recruited ashore and afloat. As the historian who compiled these figures admitted, some of those who technically ‘volunteered’ for the navy did so under duress. It was either a case of come quietly and accept the bounty for a volunteer; or be pressed and be damn'd.

The string quartet was increasingly set apart – literally and figuratively – as a special genre. Writing in 1810, Petiscus took care to locate it, aesthetically speaking, between orchestral and solo music. His choice of metaphor also relates to the genre's physical location at that time. Using the metaphor of the Cabinetstück he described the string quartet as an exemplary artwork. Cabinet paintings were objets d'art of a small scale, typically with intricate detail that could be appreciated only on close inspection. They were originally viewed by invitation only, in the chambers of princes or noblemen; they belonged in a choice, secluded collection, the Kunstkammer, removed from the public's gaze.

Writers from Hanslick onwards have observed that the string quartet was becoming less at home in courtly chambers, and was to be found more and more in public settings. Petiscus was writing from Leipzig, where, as in Vienna, the string quartet had already partly moved out of the Kunstkammer. Leipzig was home to the Gewandhaus-Quartett, a professional ensemble formed in 1808 after the model of Schuppanzigh's quartet in Vienna, who gave semi-public concerts from 1804 onwards. But the string quartet's move from ‘private’ to ‘public’ was a gradual process, which has been somewhat exaggerated in histories of the genre. If the courtly chamber was no longer its true home by 1810, the bourgeois drawing room and salon, rather than a public hall, were its most typical venues, in Vienna, Leipzig, and elsewhere.

The genre's departure from its courtly origins is complex. This complexity is especially apparent when one takes into account the various people who were involved in writing, selecting, programming, and performing these works in early nineteenth-century Vienna. Where, exactly were quartets performed, and by whom? How well were they played, and what other repertoire was available? Who preferred the easier, more modern works? Who started to construct a canon of chamber music ‘classics’? And how did all these circumstances begin to change during the era?

WHEREAS THE FIRST THREE CHAPTERS tackled the intermedial nature of montage before large-scale theories of montage took hold, in this chapter I turn to the adaptation of Berlin Alexanderplatz that appeared not only after Theodor Adorno's and Peter Bürger's work already started exercising significant influence but also after the postwar scholarship on Döblin's novel identified montage in a range of devices other than the perceptually disruptive use of ready-mades. This does not mean that here I undertake no analysis of the contemporary reception of Fassbinder's Berlin Alexanderplatz, but only that this type of analysis can no longer serve as an as powerful a tool for identifying montage segments as it was in the case of the novel and Piel Jutzi's adaptation. Specifically, contemporary reviews now point mostly to the soundtrack as the privileged site for montage in Fassbinder, but understand it primarily in terms of simultaneity of different sounds rather than in terms of the relationship the sounds have to the image. In other words, the discussion of the perceptual experience of disruption as the key trait of montage across the arts has taken a backseat to the celebration of superimposition and cacophony under the sway of broadly conceived theories of montage.

This, however, does not mean that we are left without tools for pinpointing instances of montage understood narrowly in Fassbinder's adaptation. Chapter 3 has provided us with a robust account of film montage as norm-breaking spatiotemporal dislocation. Put differently, I have explained the perceptual experience of disruption of montage in film in terms of spatiotemporal organization. Formal analysis, therefore, allows us to spell out the intersubjectively verifiable basis for subjective perceptual experiences. Although formal analysis cannot vouch that a particular cut will be experienced as a “hacking of impressions painful for the eyes” by all audiences, it can explain what the basis for such an effect is when the impression does occur. Crucially, its results are easily verifiable by looking at the film in question.

At the end of September 1729, the corporation filed into the Mayor's Chapel on College Green to hear the customary sermon from the Bishop's chaplain, Carew Reynell, at the swearing in of the new mayor. Reynell's themes were equally customary. In January, he had reminded them that ‘little jealousies bred discontents, that discontents occasioned murmurings, and murmurings ripened into faction’, and in November he would remind them of ‘the just sense (they) must have, as a Rich and Trading City, of the Benefits of Government’. Yet as the corporation listened to Carew's sage advice that day, events were unfolding in another part of the city and in its hinterland to the east to ensure the poignancy of his message for several weeks to come. At seven o'clock that morning the weaving community beyond Lawford's Gate had mobilised en masse and set off in a crowd to the house of a Bristol drugget maker, Stephen Fechem in Castle Ditch. Within a day or two, eight would be dead and Fechem in hiding. This chapter considers the often complex relationship between corporate governance, economic hubris and a series of threats to Bristol's stability emanating, or so it was presumed, from ‘without the Gate’ – not only from marauding weavers and colliers but from criminal extortionists and ‘gangs’ of sodomites. The self-confident reputation of the merchant elite would be severely tested by challenges of this kind over the next five years, culminating in the unexpected defeat of one of the oligarchy's sitting MPs, the Walpolean minister and the city's Recorder, Sir John Scrope.

Bristol's continued pre-eminence as the nation's second city, it was frequently said, required constant vigilance against factional discord and weak local government. Nourished by two decades of peace, Bristol's economy thrived in the 1730s, as the city finally outgrew Norwich as Britain's second-largest urban centre, and came to dominate the tobacco, sugar and slaving trades.3 Suggestions from detractors that its culture was materialistic and unrefined were countered by a self-confident corporation, who fondly ordered the publication of sermons like Carew's that elevated merchants to the status of local and national heroes. By 1744, Bristol had become the modern Tyre, counselled A. S. Catcott, rector of St Stephens, ‘the crowning city whose merchants are princes and whose traffickers are the honourable of the Earth’.

IN THE PREVIOUS CHAPTER I set the discussion of the ready-made aspect of literary montage aside in order to focus on the perceptual dimension of film editing and photomontage/collage understood in the narrow sense. Tracking the historical application of the term “montage” in Weimar film and literary criticism in the second half of 1920s allowed me to specify the perceptual common ground on which literary montage, Dadaist photomontage/ collage, and a specific type of editing—“Russian montage”— were brought together: the experience of disruption. Although spectator/ reader-dependent, the perceptual experience of disruption saves the concept of “montage” from becoming overinflated. More specifically, the specification of this common ground bestows both necessary conceptual precision and empirical foundation to the claim that the perceptual effect of montage and the experience of modernity are alike. From the perspectives of literary criticism and theory, the perceptual experience of disruption provides one of the two necessary conditions for the identification of literary montage. Unlike in film and photomontage/collage, however, where recourse to the technological aspect (e.g., the fact of cutting) of the formal technique is sufficient to attribute the perceptual experience of disruption to a particular montage device, in the case of literary montage it is necessary to engage with the material used.

Having established the perceptual trait common to all montage, this chapter examines in detail the other key feature that the contemporary critics saw as constitutive of literary montage—its ready-made nature. I open the chapter with a theoretical discussion of the ready-made in an attempt to improve on existing accounts, particularly those by Viktor Žmegač (1987) and Hanno Möbius (2000). I argue that a truly intermedial account of ready-made cannot rest on either the notion of “nonfictionality” or that of “physical tangibility,” as commonly used phrases such as the “document” or “reality fragment” would imply. In the former case, ready-mades can be engaged fictionally as much as nonfictionally. In the latter, not all arts—literature, most important—employ physically tangible materials. And even in those arts that, like pictorial arts, do employ physically tangible material, the ready-made status hinges on a different matter. Instead, ready-mades need to be construed in functional terms as forms that are or appear to derive from a separate and preexisting source.

Introduction

This chapter explores the cinema made during the years of dictatorship. As anticipated in the previous chapter, many institutions such as the University Film Institute (ICUR) and the Third World Cinematheque (C3M) were closed down, and several filmmakers associated with political documentaries, such as Mario Handler, Mario Jacob and Walter Tournier, went into exile. However, the activity did not stop. On the contrary, filmmaking practices were more frequent – and even more diverse – than before. Films continued to be made both in institutions and independently. This chapter explores how opposing political tensions are present in cinema by analysing three specific contexts. First, it focuses on how independent filmmakers, gathered in Film Cooperative (CINECO), used Super 8mm film stock to subvert not only the original purpose of this technology but also the social function of children's animations through the analysis of El honguito feliz (The Happy Mushroom; 1976). Second, it approaches the cinema commissioned and supported by the state through the film Gurí (Eduardo Darino, 1980) to examine the versatility of the image of the gaucho, which serves both as an exotic character to the American education market and as a nation-building figure to the military trying to forge the new nation. Finally, it concentrates on Cinemateca Uruguaya and it analyses its production Mataron a Venancio Flores (Venancio Flores was Killed; Juan Carlos Rodríguez Castro, 1982) through an allegorical reading that emphasises the violence of the period, and the differences between official historical narratives and people's experiences of the past. Whereas the productions supported by the regime were filmed on 35mm film stock – or blown up to this film gauge – some independent filmmakers continued working with 16mm, others incorporated Super 8mm, and yet others, by the end of the period, had already started to use video. The characteristics associated with these materialities and the consequence of their current obsolescence will be analysed in depth. Films produced outside state institutions were the result of huge efforts made by filmmakers passionate about cinema. The majority of them believed that cinema was a good tool for resistance.

Twelve Years of Dictatorship

The beginning of the Uruguayan dictatorship brought a series of changes which affected society as a whole. The socio-political and economic situation of the previous years had already indicated that Uruguay could not be called the Switzerland of America any more.

The interest of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert in the late medieval past offers an insight into their exercise of authority in the early years of the queen's reign. Victoria ascended to the throne, young and unready, at a time when the monarchy's reputation had been tarnished by George iv. Early in the reign, the ‘Flora Hastings’ affair made the queen very unpopular. Albert himself also had a deeply ambiguous status. Here, it became clearly relevant to the monarchy and to the married couple to associate themselves with virtuous rule as represented in the reign of Edward III and Queen Philippa of Hainault and in the figure of the Black Prince. At the same time, they saw in these fourteenth-century royal figures the height of chivalry and the source of honour and they used the emblems of this period to make specific claims about their royal power.

Victoria and Albert, known for their interest in the Middle Ages, drew on a number of earlier historical periods and myths to assert different aspects of their monarchical power; they turned to the Anglo-Saxon period, for example, for ideas about race and a unified English nation. However, very early in Victoria's reign, they focused on the age of Edward III as a time of romantic chivalry, which they thought offered an ideal expression of the monarch's role as the fountain of honour. This distinct focus on chivalry and honour for its political uses contributed an entirely new dimension to fascination with the fourteenth century. The first part of this chapter shows how, in the early Victorian era, such an ideal dovetailed nicely with other aristocratic and conservative visions, but did not go uncontested, especially by the Whigs. Prince Albert, in particular, provided the catalyst for many of the royal reimaginings of this period, showing his fascination by dressing as Edward III at the medieval-themed bal costumé in 1842.

The second part of the chapter explores how, during the 1840s, Prince Albert, in his role as the president of the Royal Fine Arts Commission oversaw the decoration of the new Houses of Parliament. Here, he highlighted a monarchical symbol of medieval power, the Order of the Garter, in a fresco which emphasised the sovereign as the source of honour and which celebrated the Black Prince and Edward III.

LONDON'S role as a centre of Christian worship can be traced back to the foundation of the diocese in 604, if not to the late Roman period. In addition to the cathedral and the monastery dedicated to St Peter to the west, a number of other religious institutions were founded which enhanced the religious importance of a political and economic capital that benefited significantly from the demographic and economic expansion which characterised the development of western Europe between the tenth and thirteenth centuries, allowing William FitzStephen to mention thirteen major convent churches in the City and its suburbs in the late twelfth century. The mendicant houses which were established in the city from 1221 onwards were the last great contribution to this rich heritage in the middle ages. They contributed to the change of the city's topography, and the bigger convents, the Dominicans, Franciscans, Carmelites and Austin Friars, which were part of London's religious landscape for about three centuries, became important cultural centres.

Spiritual life

Although the mendicants introduced important differences to the traditional orders, notably the absence of stabilitas loci, the duty to remain in the convent after profession, they did retain core elements of older monasticism. In addition to the vows of chastity and poverty these included a regular performance of the liturgy. The Dominicans came to London before they had established their Constitutions (1228) and it may be assumed that they were following the liturgy of the Augustinians because technically they were Augustinian canons. This consisted of prayers and the recitation of psalms and hymns at fixed times horis et temporibus constitutes – Psalms 62, 5 and 89 for matins, a psalm with two antiphones, a reading and complet at terce, sext and at noon, a psalm with four antiphones, another psalm, a reading and complet in the evening and further services at night. In November, December, January and February these consisted of twelve antiphones, six psalms and three readings; in March, April, September and October ten antiphones, five psalms and three readings, and in the remaining months when the night hours were still shorter a reduced load of eight antiphones, four psalms and two readings. This will have been the pattern for the Austin Friars as well. From 1228 the Dominican service began with matins which consisted of a service of the Virgin.

KINDHEITSMUSTER REPRESENTS A MILESTONE in the memory politics of both Germanies. Pioneering historian Claudia Koonz commends the novel as one of the first works, literary or otherwise, “which challenged canonical accounts of the Third Reich as a ‘man's world.’” Implicating her female protagonists in the ideological and moral corruption of the Third Reich, Christa Wolf subverted the model of history sanctioned by the Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands (SED, Socialist Unity Party), which upheld the definition of fascism adduced at the seventh congress of the Communist International in 1935 and viewed National Socialism as an expression of “der reaktionärsten, am meisten chauvinistischen, am meisten imperialistischen Elemente des Finanzkapitals” (the most reactionary, most chauvinist, most imperialist elements of finance capital). This focus on politico-economic structures overshadowed questions of individual responsibility. Accordingly, the few GDR histories of women in the Third Reich centered not on their complicity but on the regime's misogynist policies. The preeminent historian Jürgen Kuczynski set the tone, declaring that the discrimination and degradation of women “erreichte unter kapitalistischen Bedingungen ihren Höhepunkt in den Jahren der faschistischen Monopoldiktatur” (reached its peak under capitalist conditions during the years of the fascist dictatorship). In Kindheitsmuster, Christa Wolf complicates this view, showing how the Third Reich provided welcome opportunities for female advancement.

Wolf's intention to challenge the state-sanctioned version of history sounds in the incipit of Kindheitsmuster: “Das Vergangene ist nicht tot. Es ist nicht einmal vergangen” (The past is not dead. It is not even past). This translated quotation from William Faulkner's Requiem for a Nun (1951) had previously been cited by Wolfgang Joho in Das Klassentreffen (The School Reunion, 1968) as a means to assert the continuity between the Third Reich and West German society. By contrast, in an interview with Hans Kaufmann, Wolf explains that it is erroneous to purport that fascism was effaced “nachdem man seine Machtzentren und Organisationsformen zerschlagen hatte” (after its centers of power and structures of organization had been destroyed). Rather than depicting National Socialism as bygone history, the narrative of Kindheitsmuster shifts associatively between the Third Reich and the global upheaval of the 1970s.

FEW MUSICIANS - and fewer critics - appear to have confronted the enigmatic final cello sonata in the last decade of Beethoven's life, but within thirty years of his death at least one devotee rose to the challenge. In 1854, Wilhelm von Lenz, a Russian official and author of German descent who wrote in French, released a biography of the composer, Beethoven et ses trois styles, an early attempt to divide his music into three ‘manières’ - the familiar early, middle, and late styles that, despite some challenges, are still widely accepted today. There Lenz assigned Op. 102 No. 2 to Beethoven's ‘third manner’, and readily conceded that it had garnered little sympathy from audiences. ‘Nonetheless’, he continued, ‘the Adagio exhibits a remarkable if somber beauty. Behold, there is the forest of Norma, the Druids’ sacrifice, and the confections [caramelles] of Bellini.’ But then, in an abrupt pivot: ‘The final fugue of the sonata is unplayable - it is a perfect scarecrow. No one has succeeded less in [the art of] fugue than him.’ If we set aside Lenz's purple prose and his unequivocal rejection of the finale, he was still able to grasp Beethoven's intent in Op. 102 to create true ensemble music: ‘No instrumental duet [has] gone so far in transmitting the musical idea in abstraction from the medium. The form is raised above itself.’

Though prescient, Lenz's description was, for most if not all of the remainder of his century, well removed from reality: decades would elapse before Op. 102 secured its rightful place within the slowly developing canon of works for the instrument. If, as Ernest Newman claimed in 1927, Lenz's agendum in writing his biography was ‘to discover the personal secrets of a man's art’, Op. 102 No. 2 left him, like many others at mid-century, nonplussed and unable to come to terms with his hero's liberal vision of the art of counterpoint. Remarkably, such attitudes persisted even well into the twentieth century, as is evident in this assessment by Robert Schauffler, among Beethoven's numerous biographers: ‘Thirty years’ study of this rough-hewn movement, as violoncellist and critic, has never altered the writer's conviction that its brutality, inflexibility and lack of poetic relief make the first fugue of the nine [late fugues] the worst of them.’