‘Mr Chairman, Ladies and Gentlemen, I must address you in my native tongue, and trust that the interpreters will carry my meaning to you. Will the interpreters please stop me if I go too fast?’ His mouth was slightly dry, his heart beating strongly. He was used to the effect; it gave him power and his voice resonance as he breathed deeply. In any case, it would pass as it always did when he got into his stride.
‘It’s not for me but for our hosts to say “Welcome to Ermalpa”; what I can say is welcome to a select band, the band of people who attack that great open conspiracy, critical contempt of popular culture. That band comprises not only critics but readers, viewers, and general doers. Everyone benefits from popular culture, and a reasoned critical view should be to wish to survey it, not condemn it. The pop art of one generation becomes the classic of the next; Homer was, in his day, the Bronze Age equivalent of the TV soap opera.
‘I will remind you of the simple and seminal idea of my founding of SPA, the Society for Popular Aesthetics, which has led to our present encouraging situation here, with the Faculty enjoying IUF support. As a child in the thirties and forties of this century, I was addicted to the cinema, the great popular art form of the period. I went as often as I could in the small town in which I lived. I kept lists of the films I saw, of the actors in them – not only the stars but the minor players – and of the directors and companies who made them. I could tell by the sets and the lighting whether I was watching a film made by MGM or Warner Brothers or Gainsborough.
‘All this activity was opposed by my parents. They regarded the cinema simply as a repository for trash, as too many people today regard television. In particular, they disliked the way in which I settled on two actors as my heroes. Those actors were Errol Flynn and Humphrey Bogart. Flynn was at first my particular favourite, then I shifted to Bogart. The bitter and wise-cracking character Bogart played, on whichever side of the law, spoke to me of something enduring in human nature, and personified the man who lives his life battling in obscurity, often against forces of which the rest of the world has no knowledge.
‘Although I was quite inarticulate about it, I revered Bogart. For himself and for what he symbolized. My parents came to hate him. To them, Bogart was just a gangster and, if I followed him, I should go the same way. It may sound ridiculous, but so it was; nor is that kind of unthinking opposition to living symbols defunct today. There will always be a vocal minority against whatever is vital in our culture; it prefers what is safely dead.
‘The Hollywood system as it was in its hey-day has passed away. In the hour of its downfall, critics suddenly found good things to say about it, where before they had done nothing more than sneer. As soon as Bogart had died, they did the same for him. They pretended they had always praised him. He became – as Elvis Presley did a few years ago – a great cult hero. He was dead, and safe. You recognize one of the themes of Frankenstein Among the Arts: praise only for the dead; exile, cultural exile, for the living.
‘What we hope to bring about here, and hereafter, is a much wider appreciation of what it is in popular culture which had genuine vitality, and how its roots are always based firmly in the fertile soil of the past, even when that is by no means easily apparent.
‘Which brings me to my paper. You will see from your programme that it is entitled “Since the Enlightenment”. Because of the time limit sensibly imposed on speakers, I can give only a résumé now. The full paper will be published in our proceedings, and also in the next issue of our friend Jacques’s Intergraphic Studies. Am I going slowly enough for you, interpreters?’
He caught a flash of smile in one of the boxes, and continued.
‘The subject we study is admittedly amorphous. It must often seem even to us that we are all studying different, even conflicting, subjects. I believe that not to be the case, and expect that conferences such as this one will bind more closely together not only our interests but us ourselves. To that end, I hope you will consider a proposal that we should adopt a common term for our diverse subject matter. My suggestion is, “Future Culture”. FC for short. Or perhaps you prefer “Symbols Future”. SF.
‘Under some such heading, we can consider the arts which interest us, the arts of today, the arts scorned by higher criticism in whatever field. You see them listed in your programmes: pinball machines, movies, prophecy, TV, pop art, rock’n’roll, the Top Twenty, science fiction, design, and the rest. Everything from make-up to metropolises. I have nothing against higher criticism, but its analytical tools are honed towards the objectives of its dissection. It has shown itself unable to discuss effectively our Future Culture.
‘Because Future Culture is something, according to my definition, which has sprung up since the beginning of the last century. It is either affected by, or the product of, mass-production. The machine has transformed it. A paperback novel, for instance, can be purely a product of the mass-market, designed as a unit package with its cover to sell this month at check-out point in a million supermarkets and never be seen again; or it can be a newly edited edition of Henry James’s The Ambassadors. What are the differences and similarities between a James novel and the latest catastrophe novel? It’s rich ground for investigation.
‘Some of our subjects do not claim to be art or even folk art. Car bumper-stickers. I know a man in Toronto studying them now. Are they ripe for something more than sociological study? Some subjects are simply commercial ways of doing traditional things. But are T-shirts a modern equivalent of sandwich-boards or a way of legitimizing graffiti? We have to improvise questions and answers as we go along. Virtually all arts have been touched by the change-compelling system of mass-production and mass-consumption.
‘We believe that precisely in this amorphous situation lies a hope for future acculturalization. Improvisation and spontaneity are still possible, contrary to what is sometimes argued. Older arts tend always towards formalization or even fossilization, and never more so than now, as we move towards the eighties, when global change is swift. The fluidity of non-art may become one of the staples of the future. It’s up to us to forge a methodology to help direct it constructively.
‘I see from the noticeboard in the foyer that some ingenious person on the Faculty of Iconographic Simulation has videotaped my television series, “Frankenstein Among the Arts”, and will be showing it in the adjoining small hall for the next three nights. You’ll excuse me if I stay in the bar while it’s showing – I lived with the series for so long, I almost know it by heart. Of course, it does relate closely to the subject of our discussions. But I must remind you, for all the kindness you have done me, that I am an amateur in a field where you are experts, and I took as my text for the series a tag from the philosopher Gurdjieff, which I discovered long ago in Ouspensky’s fascinating book, In Search of the Miraculous.
‘It’s a tag which many authors could use at the front of their books as a warning. Gurdjieff says, speaking of his work, “The object I had in view was to produce an interesting and beautiful spectacle. Of course there is a certain meaning hidden beneath the outward form, but I have not pursued the aim of exposing and emphasizing this meaning.”
‘Nor have I, because I am unable to. I only know that the traditions of the West, strong and honourable though they are, are insufficient to live by. We have to embrace the new and rise up to change.’
2
Flattery and Higher Foolishness
Ermalpa, September 1978
On checking into the Grand Hotel Marittimo, conference delegates had received small books with meal vouchers in them. One voucher had to be presented at every meal, the meal being understood to include a bottle of red wine and half a bottle of mineral water.
Squire entered the dining room of the Grand Hotel a little late for lunch, and found himself with no choice of table. He had been detained by one of the American delegates, Selina Ajdini.
Following the coffee break, four speakers had delivered papers on various aspects of popular culture: Enrico Pelli on ‘Psychiatry and the Popular Understanding of Prehistory’, Marianne de Suffren on ‘Horror Films in Catholic Countries’, Geo