Dynamic Form by Cara L. Lewis

Author:Cara L. Lewis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Published: 2020-03-26T00:00:00+00:00

In her view, watching a film is a process of watching for the moments when shapes emerge from a sea of “fragments,” from the roiling, bubbling “swarm and chaos.” This opening leads Laura Marcus to conclude that “Woolf at times appeared to be suggesting that cinema is a lesser art than literature, and certainly more ‘primitive’”—exactly the value system that orients Waugh’s work.63 I want to highlight, too, the extent to which Woolf’s rhetoric here positions the savagery of the filmgoer in relation to the history of the arts; despite—or because of—their appeal to the “primitive” within the viewer, the movies can say new things and be ambitious. Somehow, the savagery of the movie watcher suggests that we moderns are not quite yet “at the fag end of civilisation,” even if the new medium causes us to regress behaviorally.

Waugh’s own view of cinematic savagery lacks any such positive valence. For him, savagery is not just a matter of misguided menu choices or primitive picture viewing. Savagery and vulgarity manifest themselves in precisely the place where we might expect to find the locus of European civilization—in the library. Waugh is careful to note that Adam has “rather a remarkable library for a man of his age and means. Most of the books have a certain rarity and many are elaborately bound; there are also old books of considerable value given him from time to time by his father” (21). Disrespecting these individual works of civilization, Adam “makes a heap on the floor of the best of them” and takes his books off to sell them (21).64 This characterization of Adam’s library suggests, quietly, that literature has never really been an autonomous site of aesthetic value for Waugh: like all other art forms, it is class bound and subject to economic pressures. Adam’s destination is Mr. Macassor’s bookshop, a den of dissipated reading, with books “everywhere, on walls, floor and furniture, as though laid down at some interruption and straightaway forgotten”: here the wisdom of reasoned intellect has been converted into the “treasures” of acquisitive appetite (21). Mr. Macassor, whose name evokes both the antiquated Victorian antimacassar and the savagery of a massacre, combines fustiness and ferocity in his attitude toward Adam’s books, lecturing Adam about the sadness of having to sell books before he “adjusts his spectacles and examines [the books], caressingly, but like some morbid lover fastening ghoulishly upon every imperfection” (22). His greed and his lust for decay are, in their own way, just as vulgar as Imogen’s steak tartare, and Mr. Macassor makes two crucial things clear.

First, savagery is also, for Waugh, a kind of decadence—a vision of what follows from a philosophy that upholds art for art’s sake and strives for the conversion of life into art. For Waugh, any type of overindulgence is an aesthetic immoderation that signals the threat that all appetites—even cultural appetites—pose to the civilized world.65 In their ability to register this threat, moments of savagery in his work carry with them the

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