Constellations of a Contemporary Romanticism by Khalip Jacques; Pyle Forest;

Author:Khalip, Jacques; Pyle, Forest;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Fordham University Press
Published: 2016-06-03T18:52:35+00:00

31. For example, Lisa Robertson, Debbie: An Epic (Vancouver: New Star Books, 1997); Stephen Rodefer, Answer to Dr. Agathon (Cambridge: Equipage, 1996); idem, Call It Thought: Selected Poems (Manchester: Carcanet, 2008); and especially Stephen Rodefer and Benjamin Friedlander, Oriflamme Day (San Francisco: Phraseology, 1987).

Dancing in the Dark with Shelley

Joel Faflak

But still. Still.

Bless me anyway.

I want more life. I can’t help myself. I do.

—Angels in America: Perestroika1

1

This chapter entertains film musicals as what Jacques Khalip calls “the romantic remains of a modernity that defines itself in the claims it cannot reflect, and which it cannot also bury.”2 John Ridpath wonders, “If films were once likened to the theatre, perhaps the modern movie is closer to the musical.” Video and digital media have turned cinema’s “immobile, attentive, disciplined, receptive” public into a “distracted audience” engaged in “boundless activity.” This shift transforms cinema’s private catharsis into democratic exchange at the same time that it broadcasts desire as pleasure’s same dull round. For J. Hoberman, this “‘cyborg cinema’” turns “Bazin’s dream” into the “nightmare . . . of a virtual cyber existence: Total Cinema as a total dissociation from reality.”3 By making a spectacle of their manufactured technology, musicals celebrate both film’s simulative potential and its promise of liberated subjectivity. They put film to work to produce a line of musical commodities that give their happy consumers more bang for the film’s buck.4 Yet musicals’ late logic of capitalism’s ceaseless promise also reflects an earlier nervous reaction to the visual’s “suspension of perception.”5 As Bell Calvert says in James Hogg’s 1823 The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, a novel in which reason confronts faith to produce a post-Humean crisis of testimony, “We have nothing on earth but our senses to depend upon: if these deceive us, what are we to do?”6 The traumatic delay between vision and reality feeds our ineluctable capacity to confuse belief with deception.7 But if Coleridge’s poetic faith suspends disbelief in the autonomous cognition of the mind’s vision-ary powers, the “triumph” of Percy Shelley’s final, unfinished poem stages the visual’s more problematic transformation of the public sphere. In a post-Lockean context, sight commandeers the other senses, as if to make visible the common sense and sensibility of enlightenment itself. On the eve of a Second Empire, however, David Brewster calls the visual “supernatural,”8 an overweening creative power in need of discipline. Written after the empire’s first tryout gets bad reviews, as Regency culture renegotiates post-1790s politics, The Triumph of Life reflects a society of the spectacle still in visual flux. But it predicts a history fascinated by the production of images that body forth life, then compromise any return to life itself.

No wonder, then, that the poem is vitally cinematic. As Shelley sets the scene, the “Sun” didn’t just rise; it “sprang forth,” “Swift as a spirit hastening to its task”: “before me fled / The night; behind me rose the day; the Deep / Was at my feet, and Heaven above my head.”9 The Apennines

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