File spoon-archives/marxism-international.archive/marxism-international_1997/97-02-08.012, message 3


Date: Wed, 05 Feb 1997 14:46:04 +1000 (EST)
From: Gary MacLennan <g.maclennan-AT-qut.edu.au>
Subject: M-I: Response to Hugh and Chris


Hugh's almost-gracious response to my post on The Pride of the Marines (POM)
raised an issue that is occupying me - the matter of aesthetic judgement.
Let us take specifically the political scenes in Land & Freedom (L&F) and
POM.  On *one* viewing of both sequences I formed the judgement that Maltz
did this better than Loach/Allen.

Hugh's writes that his first response here was to call me a "Stalinist".  On
reflection even he would admit I suspect that this was premature.  I am as
ever anxious to break from the sterile politics of Stalin versus Trotsky and
this has been interpreted that I am "soft on Stalinism" or some kind of
closeted Stalinist but surely there can be little doubt that I prefer the
politics of Jim Allen to those of Albert Maltz?

Chris B. responded to Hugh's post pointing out that he enjoyed the political
scene in L&F even though he came to a different political position from
Hugh's.  And I will come back to Chris's position later.

But I want to insist that we leave such political considerations aside when
we come to judge the films.  As far as L&F is concerned I absolutely support
the position that the peasants should have seized the land and done what was
necessary with the former owners to ensure that they were not a present or
future threat. But in aesthetic terms I felt that I was at a branch meeting.
The kind we used to have in the Communist League when we in Brisbane debated
the Portuguese revolution to decide whether we should join up with the SWP.  

Our debates then were abstract ad absurdissimum.  We should have been
debating Australia, of course.  Similarly in L&F I felt that the central
concern was not the actual peasants but the rehashing of the united versus
the popular front debate. Now again my trotskyist training was very thorough
and I have just succeeded in thinking that such matters are not the life and
death of the revolution.  But more importantly in aesthetic terms I was
hurled out of the drama and I form the judgement that in aesthetic terms
this was a mistake.

Now Chris' reaction is intriguing for my position.  Implicit in what he says
is an aesthetic criterion.  Relevant here is the Bakhtinian distinction
between polyphonic and monologic texts.  The polyphonic text is superior
because it contains many voices - roughly points of view.  So for Chris L&F
was polyphonic and he read it as he felt he should.

I agree with Chris that the L&F provided enough for one to form one's own
political conclusions.  I also support the notion that this is an important
aesthetic criterion.  But I still prefer Maltz's scene - why?

Well the number of positions within Maltz's set piece were very complex.  I
especially liked the tension between what I felt was populism and class
based radicalism.  The text does close this all off with patriotic hymn but
for a moment class anger does take the stage.  It is only until the end of
the sequence that I get the feeling that I am at a branch meeting and the
Browderites have won the vote and the debate's over.

So here I am forming my judgement of the aesthetic superiority of the Maltz
text based on the complexity of the drama mirroring the complexity of life.
Art must simplify reality of course but there is a balance there and I think
Maltz comes closer to achieving it.

There's a wonderful poem "The Cool Web" by Robert Graves which says what I
am trying to articulate here and with comrades indulgence I will quote it in
full, because I do not know how to abbreviate it to make my point and do it
justice at the same time.

Children are dumb to say how hot the day is,
How hot the scent is of the summer rose,
How dreadful the black wastes of evening sky,
How dreadful the tall soldiers drumming by.

But we have speech, to chill the angry day,
And speech, to dull the rose's cruel scent.
We spell away the overhanging night,
We spell away the soldiers and the fright.

There's a cool web of language winds us in,
Retreat from too much joy or too much fear:
We grow sea-green at last and coldly die
In brininess and volubility.

But if we let our tongues lose self-possession,
Throwing off language and its watery clasp
Before our death, instead of when death comes,
Facing the wide glare of the children's day,
Facing the rose, the dark sky and the drums,
We shall go mad no doubt and die that way.

So to sum up I preferred i.e. judged as aesthetically superior POM because
it was much closer to the "roses's cruel scent" while L&F smacked too much
of the watery grasp of language, had too much of the "cool web" about it.


So I have broached two aesthetic criteria here - the Bakhtinian polyphonic
one and another which I will call the reality criterion.  I also implied
that I felt that the latter was more important.  Why?  Well, to be frank at
this stage of my reading in aesthetics I cannot say.

There is another problem here which is bothering me, and which I may return
to.  Namely how does one separate out the ethical/political from the
aesthetic?  After all isn't the notion of Polyphony an ethical as well as an
aesthetic criterion?  Again I have no answer here.  

I have been contemplating trying to use Bhaskar's notion of
constellationality where when we have two terms where one over reaches the
other.  So of the ethical and the aesthetic which is the over reaching term?
For me always the ethical but does this not lead us back to Hugh's position?
However I will leave this here unless there is an expression of specific
interest.


Now having said all that a caveat.  Both films would need to be studied in
much more detail than I could give them.  I specially regret that POM does
not seem to be readily available.  But nevertheless I think we broached a
very important topic namely the autonomy of the aesthetic and the necessity
of aesthetic judgements.
y



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