Read Where the Stress Falls Online
Authors: Susan Sontag
Where the Stress Falls (16 page)
Apart from the invention of one new character—an all-forgiving mother figure, Biberkopf’s landlady Frau Bast—most of the changes Fassbinder has made in the story simply render the action more compact visually. In the novel Biberkopf does not always live in the same one-room apartment, as he does in the film, and Fassbinder sets events there that in the novel take place elsewhere. For example, in the novel Franz kills Ida at her sister’s place; in the film, the gruesome battering—which we see in repeated, hallucinatory flashback—takes place in Biberkopf’s room, witnessed by Frau Bast. In the novel, Biberkopf doesn’t live with all the women with whom he takes up; in the film each of them, one by one, moves into his place, reinforcing the film’s visual unity, but also making the relationships that precede Biberkopf’s union with Mieze perhaps a bit too cozy. The women seem more whores-with-hearts-of-gold than they do in the book. One last invention: it is hard not to suspect that the canary in a cage Mieze gives Biberkopf (such a gift is just mentioned, once, in Döblin’s novel), which we see Biberkopf doting on, and is often in the shot in scenes that take place in Biberkopf’s room, is a reincarnation of the canary that is McTeague’s most cherished possession, the only thing he salvages from his wrecked domestic felicity, and still by his side “in its little gilt prison” when his doom is sealed in the desert.
Fassbinder’s cinema is full of Biberkopfs—victims of false consciousness.
And the material of
Berlin Alexanderplatz
is prefigured throughout his films, whose recurrent subject is damaged lives and marginal existences—petty criminals, prostitutes, transvestites, immigrant workers, depressed housewives, and overweight workers at the end of their tether. More specifically, the harrowing slaughterhouse scenes in
Berlin Alexanderplatz
are anticipated by the slaughterhouse sequence in
Jail Bait and In a Year of 13 Moons
. But
Berlin Alexanderplatz
is more than a compendium of his main themes. It was the fulfillment—and the origin.
And the material of
Berlin Alexanderplatz
is prefigured throughout his films, whose recurrent subject is damaged lives and marginal existences—petty criminals, prostitutes, transvestites, immigrant workers, depressed housewives, and overweight workers at the end of their tether. More specifically, the harrowing slaughterhouse scenes in
Berlin Alexanderplatz
are anticipated by the slaughterhouse sequence in
Jail Bait and In a Year of 13 Moons
. But
Berlin Alexanderplatz
is more than a compendium of his main themes. It was the fulfillment—and the origin.
In an article he wrote in March 1980, toward the end of the ten months it took to film
Berlin Alexanderplatz
, Fassbinder declared that he had first read Döblin’s novel when he was fourteen or fifteen, and had dreamed of making it into a film from the beginning of his career. It was the novel of his life—he described how his own fantasies had been impregnated by the novel—and its protagonist was Fassbinder’s elected alter ego. Several heroes of his films were called Franz; and he gave the name Franz Biberkopf to the protagonist of
Fox and His Friends
, a role he played himself. It is said that Fassbinder would have liked to play Biberkopf. He did not; but he did something equally appropriate. He became Döblin: his is the voice of the narrator. Döblin is omnipresent in his book, commenting and lamenting. And the film has a recurrent voiceover, the voice of the novel, so to speak—and Fassbinder’s. Thus we hear many of the parallel stories, such as the sacrifice of Isaac, related in the novel. Fassbinder preserves the novel’s extravagant ruminating energy without breaking the narrative stride. The ruminating voice is used not as an anti-narrative device, as in Godard’s films, but to intensify the narrative; not to distance us but to make us feel more. The story continues to evolve, in the most direct, affecting way.
Berlin Alexanderplatz
, Fassbinder declared that he had first read Döblin’s novel when he was fourteen or fifteen, and had dreamed of making it into a film from the beginning of his career. It was the novel of his life—he described how his own fantasies had been impregnated by the novel—and its protagonist was Fassbinder’s elected alter ego. Several heroes of his films were called Franz; and he gave the name Franz Biberkopf to the protagonist of
Fox and His Friends
, a role he played himself. It is said that Fassbinder would have liked to play Biberkopf. He did not; but he did something equally appropriate. He became Döblin: his is the voice of the narrator. Döblin is omnipresent in his book, commenting and lamenting. And the film has a recurrent voiceover, the voice of the novel, so to speak—and Fassbinder’s. Thus we hear many of the parallel stories, such as the sacrifice of Isaac, related in the novel. Fassbinder preserves the novel’s extravagant ruminating energy without breaking the narrative stride. The ruminating voice is used not as an anti-narrative device, as in Godard’s films, but to intensify the narrative; not to distance us but to make us feel more. The story continues to evolve, in the most direct, affecting way.
Berlin Alexanderplatz
is not a meta-film, like Hans Jurgen Syberberg’s
Hitler,
Fassbinder has nothing of Syberberg’s aesthetic of the grandiose, for all the length of
Berlin Alexanderplatz
, or his reverence for high culture. It is a narrative film, but one that is
that
long: a film that tells a story, in decors of the period (the late 1920s), with more than a hundred actors (many roles are taken by actors from Fassbinder’s regular troupe) and thousands of extras. A fifty-three-year-old
theatre actor who has had minor roles in a few of Fassbinder’s films, Günter Lamprecht, plays Franz Biberkopf. Splendid as are all the actors, particularly Barbara Sukowa as Mieze and Hanna Schygulla as Eva, Lamprecht’s Biberkopf overshadows the others—an intensely moving, expressive, brilliantly varied performance, as good as anything done by Emil Jannings or by Raimu.
is not a meta-film, like Hans Jurgen Syberberg’s
Hitler,
Fassbinder has nothing of Syberberg’s aesthetic of the grandiose, for all the length of
Berlin Alexanderplatz
, or his reverence for high culture. It is a narrative film, but one that is
that
long: a film that tells a story, in decors of the period (the late 1920s), with more than a hundred actors (many roles are taken by actors from Fassbinder’s regular troupe) and thousands of extras. A fifty-three-year-old
theatre actor who has had minor roles in a few of Fassbinder’s films, Günter Lamprecht, plays Franz Biberkopf. Splendid as are all the actors, particularly Barbara Sukowa as Mieze and Hanna Schygulla as Eva, Lamprecht’s Biberkopf overshadows the others—an intensely moving, expressive, brilliantly varied performance, as good as anything done by Emil Jannings or by Raimu.
Though made possible by television—it is a co-production of German and Italian TV—
Berlin Alexanderplatz
is not a TV series. A TV series is constructed in “episodes,” which are
designed
to be seen at an interval—one week being the convention, like the old Saturday afternoon movie serials (
Fantômas
,
The Perils of Pauline, Flash Gordon).
The parts of
Berlin Alexanderplatz
are not really episodes, strictly speaking, since the film is diminished when seen in this way, spaced out over fourteen weeks (as I saw it for the first time, on Italian TV). Presentation in a movie theatre—five segments of approximately three hours each, over five consecutive weeks—is certainly a better way to see it. Seeing it over three or four days would be far better. The more one can watch over the shortest time works best, exactly as one reads a long novel with maximum pleasure and intensity. In
Berlin Alexanderplatz,
cinema, that hybrid art, has at last achieved some of the dilatory, open form and accumulative power of the novel by being longer than any film has dared to be—and by being theatrical.
Berlin Alexanderplatz
is not a TV series. A TV series is constructed in “episodes,” which are
designed
to be seen at an interval—one week being the convention, like the old Saturday afternoon movie serials (
Fantômas
,
The Perils of Pauline, Flash Gordon).
The parts of
Berlin Alexanderplatz
are not really episodes, strictly speaking, since the film is diminished when seen in this way, spaced out over fourteen weeks (as I saw it for the first time, on Italian TV). Presentation in a movie theatre—five segments of approximately three hours each, over five consecutive weeks—is certainly a better way to see it. Seeing it over three or four days would be far better. The more one can watch over the shortest time works best, exactly as one reads a long novel with maximum pleasure and intensity. In
Berlin Alexanderplatz,
cinema, that hybrid art, has at last achieved some of the dilatory, open form and accumulative power of the novel by being longer than any film has dared to be—and by being theatrical.
[1983]
Art is something which lies in the slender margin between the real and the unreal … it is unreal, and yet it is not unreal; it is real, and yet it is not real.
—CHIKAMATSU MONZAEMON (1653 - 1725)
I
N BUNRAKU THE PLAY
is identified, first of all, as a physical object: a text. And the text is sacred—that is, generative. Hence, the grave ceremony that opens each performance: the chief reader holds out the text and bows to it, before setting it down on the low lectern and beginning to read. Bunraku is a theatre that transcends the actor, by multiplying and displacing the sources of dramatic pathos.
N BUNRAKU THE PLAY
is identified, first of all, as a physical object: a text. And the text is sacred—that is, generative. Hence, the grave ceremony that opens each performance: the chief reader holds out the text and bows to it, before setting it down on the low lectern and beginning to read. Bunraku is a theatre that transcends the actor, by multiplying and displacing the sources of dramatic pathos.
The play is acted; that is to say, recited; that is, read. The text (declaimed, sung, chanted, wailed) is punctuated or italicized by music produced by a string instrument, the shamisen. It is also, simultaneously, enacted by piercingly expressive large puppets, half or two-thirds life-size. The enacting of the drama occupies the stage proper, in front of the audience: the wide rectangular space where figures—the puppets and their handlers—move. But the source of the words and the music—the one or more reciters and musicians who sit to the right of the stage on a rostrum—constitutes a parallel performance. The dialogue is not “off,” as in a certain kind of narrative film, but off-center—displaced, given its own expressive and corporeal autonomy.
The drama has a double displacement of emotion, a double scale, a double physical and emotional gait. On the stage proper the leading principle is a kind of anti-hysteria. There is the muteness of the protagonists—who, instead of being living actors, are puppets; there is the impassivity and omnipresence of the humans who make them move. To the
joruri
reciter, who is not only off-center (from the audience’s point of view) but physically immobile, is given the task of maximal expressiveness. Most of the texts, which consist of narrative and commentary as well as dialogue, are floridly emotional, and the narration may modulate into a lengthy crescendo of sobs and gasps. The figure of the reciter, who acts, as it were, by proxy, on behalf of the puppets, is just one of the devices whereby Bunraku isolates—decomposes, illustrates, transcends, intensifies—what acting is.
joruri
reciter, who is not only off-center (from the audience’s point of view) but physically immobile, is given the task of maximal expressiveness. Most of the texts, which consist of narrative and commentary as well as dialogue, are floridly emotional, and the narration may modulate into a lengthy crescendo of sobs and gasps. The figure of the reciter, who acts, as it were, by proxy, on behalf of the puppets, is just one of the devices whereby Bunraku isolates—decomposes, illustrates, transcends, intensifies—what acting is.
The puppet is, in prototype, a supple doll operated by a single person. The invention, in 1734, of a puppet to be operated by three persons brought the puppet’s emotional and gestural potency to a point never equaled before or since. The Japanese puppet can roll its eyes, raise its eyebrows, smile, clench its fists; it can languish, dress itself, run, convincingly take its own life. No string puppet or hand puppet can perform such complex and detailed actions; and the Bunraku puppets have an ability to move audiences, move them to tears, unmatched in any other puppet tradition.
But apart from widening the emotional range and expressiveness of the puppet (a gain we may or may not choose to identify with “realism”), the fact of multiplying the operators—and, of necessity, putting them onstage with the puppets—decisively shapes and transforms the emotional register of puppet drama. The puppet is literally outnumbered, beleaguered, surrounded. The presence of three outsized handlers endows the puppet’s movements and efforts with a sheen of pathos. The puppets seem helpless, childlike, vulnerable. Yet they also seem sovereign, imperious, in their very smallness and precision and elegance.
Bunraku works on two scales of relatedness in space. The often elaborate decor is constructed to the puppets’ measurements. The operators are giants, interlopers. Alongside each delicate puppet head are the three large heads of the operators. The operators look at the puppet
as they manipulate it. The audience watches the operators observing the puppet, primal spectators to the drama they animate. The three operators sum up the essence of what it is to be a god. To be seen, and impassive: one has his face bared. And to be hidden: the other two wear black hoods. The puppet gestures. The operators move together, as one giant body, animating the different parts of the puppet body, in a perfected division of labor. What the audience sees is that to act is to be moved. (And, simultaneously, observed.) What is enacted is the submission to a fate. That one operator’s face is exposed and two are veiled is another device making Bunraku’s characteristic double statement: hyperbole and discretion, presence and absence of the dramatic substance.
as they manipulate it. The audience watches the operators observing the puppet, primal spectators to the drama they animate. The three operators sum up the essence of what it is to be a god. To be seen, and impassive: one has his face bared. And to be hidden: the other two wear black hoods. The puppet gestures. The operators move together, as one giant body, animating the different parts of the puppet body, in a perfected division of labor. What the audience sees is that to act is to be moved. (And, simultaneously, observed.) What is enacted is the submission to a fate. That one operator’s face is exposed and two are veiled is another device making Bunraku’s characteristic double statement: hyperbole and discretion, presence and absence of the dramatic substance.
This relation between the operators and the puppet is not simply an efficient relation; it is the cruel mystery which is at the center of the Bunraku drama. Handing the puppet a comb, rushing the puppet to its doom—some moments the operators seem like the puppet’s servants, at other moments its captors. Sometimes the puppet seems to be reposing solidly on the operators or to be borne placidly aloft by them; other times to be in perpetual, hapless flight. There are constant shifts of scale, to delight the senses and wring the emotions. Sometimes the shadowy manipulators shrink and the puppets swell into a normal scale. Then the operators loom once more and the puppets re-become fragile, persecuted Lilliputians.
The situation we call art characteristically requires us both to look very attentively and to look “beyond” (or “through”) what is understood as an impediment, distraction, irrelevance. At an opera performance, we look past or over the orchestra to concentrate on the stage. But in Bunraku we are not supposed to look past the shadowy, blackgarbed puppeteers. The presence of the operators is what gives Bunraku its elevated, mythic impersonality and heightened, purified emotionality. In order to make the art of the puppets competitive with the art of living actors, says Chikamatsu, the text must be “charged with feeling.” But, he adds, “I take pathos to be entirely a matter of restraint.” Compare Balanchine, who brought the naïvely emotive classical ballet tradition to its apex by developing the sense in which dancers are co-sharers, with ideal puppets, in the sublimity of the impersonal:
“Silence, placidity, and immobility are perhaps the most powerful forces. They are as impressive, even more so, than rage, delirium, or ecstasy.”
In the most profound Western meditation on puppet theatre (and, by extension, on the dance), Kleist wrote that the very inanimateness of the puppet was the precondition for expressing an ideal state of the spirit. Kleist’s speculative fantasy—he was writing in 1810, about string puppets—is incarnated and fulfilled in Bunraku.
[1983]
G
ARDEN HISTORY IS
an enthralling branch of art history, opening onto the history of outdoor spectacles (the masque, fireworks, pageants), of architecture, of urban planning—and of literary history as well. Once mainly a European subject (its scholars were French, English, German), it now flourishes in this country, too. One center of activity is the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library in Washington, D.C., which possesses superb materials on garden history.
ARDEN HISTORY IS
an enthralling branch of art history, opening onto the history of outdoor spectacles (the masque, fireworks, pageants), of architecture, of urban planning—and of literary history as well. Once mainly a European subject (its scholars were French, English, German), it now flourishes in this country, too. One center of activity is the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library in Washington, D.C., which possesses superb materials on garden history.
The principal tradition of Western garden art is inclusive rather than exclusionary, putting human-made constructions—of marble, brick, tufa, stucco, wood—among the trees and plants. And of the many constructions that recur in gardens (statuary, fountains, follies, bridges), none is more fascinating or complex in its history and associations than the grotto. It is a space that is, literally, profound. The human-made recess or subterranean space that is called a grotto is, usually, a space already tamed. Other, less reassuring names for the same kind of space are “cave,” “underground vault,” “crypt.” The grotto in the garden is the domesticated version of a space that is often scary, even repulsive, and yet exercises on some people, of whom I am one, a very strong attraction. I have always been fascinated by grottoes and have gone out of my way to look at them and at constructions that echo them. This curiosity is perhaps no more than dread mastered—
but then the grotto seems no more, or less, than a playfulness with morbid feelings.
but then the grotto seems no more, or less, than a playfulness with morbid feelings.
For grottoes to enter the garden, a place conceived as a haven and a site of recreation, their original functions had to be secularized or miniaturized. Grottoes, mostly real grottoes, were first of all sacred places. The sibyl’s or oracle’s lair, the hermit’s retreat, the sect’s sanctuary, the resting place of the bones of holy men and revered ancestors—we are never far, in our imaginations, from being reminded of the cell and the grave. And grottoes that were artificial had, to begin with, severely practical purposes: like the marvelous vaults the Romans built as part of hydraulic projects. Artificial caves first appear as an element in the garden program in the late Roman Republic. From the latter part of the first century B.C., artificial grottoes, and rooms fitted out to resemble grottoes, became common features of the gardens of the villas of Roman patricians. These caverns, ornamented spaces that alluded gracefully to the old sacred spaces and their mysteries, were partly practical constructions for pleasures and entertainments conducted outdoors—for example, as the backdrop of satyr plays and for banquets. Perhaps the most famous and grandiose, though hardly typical, of the villas whose ruins survive from the ancient world was Hadrian’s villa in Tivoli near Rome, which had a number of grottoes.
Christianity gave the grotto new associations and succeeded in monopolizing grotto imagery for more than a thousand years. Supposedly natural but in fact thoroughly stylized grottoes figure in paintings of the Christian narratives—the cave of the Nativity, the sepulchre of the Entombment—and in the lives of saints like Jerome and Anthony, who are often depicted as praying or being assailed at the mouth of their hermit’s grotto. The revival of the garden grotto—that is, the reconnecting of the grotto with the garden—had to wait for the Renaissance, when the grotto could be divested of its principally Christian associations and infused with new, eclectic symbolism (Neo-Platonist, humanist). Although the gardens and grottoes of the classical villas had long since been leveled, descriptions of them—for example, by Ovid and Livy—had been preserved, and were admired. The elaboration of the garden grotto, a principal feature of the new heights attained by the
garden in the Renaissance, produced such triumphs as the Grotta Grande in the Medici’s Boboli Gardens in Florence and the many grottoes and hydraulic marvels of Pratolino, so admired by Montaigne and other foreign visitors. The use of the grottoes of ancient villas as banquet sites protected from the sun was replaced in the Renaissance by their employment as backdrops for theatrical spectacles.
garden in the Renaissance, produced such triumphs as the Grotta Grande in the Medici’s Boboli Gardens in Florence and the many grottoes and hydraulic marvels of Pratolino, so admired by Montaigne and other foreign visitors. The use of the grottoes of ancient villas as banquet sites protected from the sun was replaced in the Renaissance by their employment as backdrops for theatrical spectacles.
The distinctive, complex idea of the garden as a work of art, which has been most prevalent in Western culture—the garden as an “ideal” landscape, including an anthology of architectural elements, and featuring waterworks of various spectacular contrivance—is defined in the Renaissance. Though only one element of the garden program, which in the West has mostly been heterogeneous, the grotto has a privileged place: it is an intensification, in miniature, of the whole garden-world. It is also the garden’s inversion. The essence of the garden is that it is outdoors, open, light, spacious, natural, while the grotto is the quintessence of what is indoors, hidden, dim, artificial, decorated. The grotto is characteristically a space that is adorned—with frescoes, painted stuccos, mosaics, or (the association with water remaining paramount) shells.
In the garden history that starts in the Renaissance, the grotto reflected all the turns of taste, all the ideas of the theatre. The grotto as artificial ruin. The grotto as a place for foolery and escapades. (A modern, degraded form of this survives in the fairground’s papier-mâché Tunnel of Love.) The grotto as showcase. The grotto is, as it were, the innately decadent element of the garden ensemble, the one that is most impure, and most ambiguous. It is a space that is complex and accumulative, dimly lit, thickly ornamented. (An appeal to fantasy, and a likely site for the elaboration of bad taste.) At first it was thought to be the most intensively “rustic” space—the imitation of a cave, as in some Roman villas. Eventually it became an elaborately theatrical, encrusted space. The roof and walls of the famous grotto built by Alexander Pope at Twickenham in the 1720s and 1730s were studded with shards of mirror interspersed with shells. (The grotto as
camera obscura
, in Pope’s phrase.) In the eighteenth century, many grottoes were built by shell collectors principally as a setting to display their treasures. One of the last private grottoes, the Venus Grotto built by Ludwig II of
Bavaria at Linderhof in 1876—1877, was itself a theatrical space, the setting of several scenes from Wagner’s
Tannhäuser.
Le Palais Idéal du Facteur Cheval, in a small village in central France, could be regarded as the great garden grotto of the beginning of this century—and perhaps the last of the breed. The crypt-like ground level of this astonishing building has the characteristic encrustedness of the grotto interior, the didacticism, and the reach for the sublime. Its builder’s aim is nothing less than to miniaturize, and thereby to possess, the sublime. There are inscriptions, labels, declarations, adages incised throughout on the walls—the whole structure being designed, with something like genius, by the inspired autodidactic village postman who built it single-handedly between 1879 and 1912, as an anthology of world spiritual wisdom. However different in materials and sensibility, Ferdinand Cheval’s grotto-labyrinth belongs to the same family as the grotto of Pope.
camera obscura
, in Pope’s phrase.) In the eighteenth century, many grottoes were built by shell collectors principally as a setting to display their treasures. One of the last private grottoes, the Venus Grotto built by Ludwig II of
Bavaria at Linderhof in 1876—1877, was itself a theatrical space, the setting of several scenes from Wagner’s
Tannhäuser.
Le Palais Idéal du Facteur Cheval, in a small village in central France, could be regarded as the great garden grotto of the beginning of this century—and perhaps the last of the breed. The crypt-like ground level of this astonishing building has the characteristic encrustedness of the grotto interior, the didacticism, and the reach for the sublime. Its builder’s aim is nothing less than to miniaturize, and thereby to possess, the sublime. There are inscriptions, labels, declarations, adages incised throughout on the walls—the whole structure being designed, with something like genius, by the inspired autodidactic village postman who built it single-handedly between 1879 and 1912, as an anthology of world spiritual wisdom. However different in materials and sensibility, Ferdinand Cheval’s grotto-labyrinth belongs to the same family as the grotto of Pope.
Grottoes are places of fantasy, but the greatest grotto buildings are, and always have been, functional: from the
cryptoportici
of the Roman villas (underground passageways one could take from one building to another to avoid the heat of the day), or that stupendous achievement of Roman engineering, the
emissarium
of Lake Albano (the subject of one of Piranesi’s most haunting books of engravings), to such modern fantasy lands as the limestone caves, over six hundred feet long, that house the operations of the Brunson Instrument Company in Kansas City, Missouri; or the miles of underground shopping streets in Osaka; or the vast caverns dug in the mountain behind the National Museum in Taipei that store the innumerable art treasures that Chiang Kai-shek made off with when he fled from China to Taiwan in 1949; or the Louvre Métro station in Paris, several stations of the Stockholm subway system, and, above all, the justly celebrated Moscow subway, especially the Mayakovsky and Dynamo stations. Modern technology has made it possible to build below ground on a scale never before feasible: the great subterranean installations are bound to multiply. Grottoes of art, grottoes of industry, grottoes of shopkeeping, grottoes of war—all these are functional and yet seem the epitome of the poetry of space. In grottoes the functional and the fantastic are anything but incompatible. Perhaps that is why the museum for his art collection that
Philip Johnson put underground next to his Glass House in New Canaan, Connecticut, seems like the famous house’s twin—a house with glass walls demands one that is sunk beneath the ground—but is not convincing as an example of the grotto in the garden: it is too purely functional, stripped down.
cryptoportici
of the Roman villas (underground passageways one could take from one building to another to avoid the heat of the day), or that stupendous achievement of Roman engineering, the
emissarium
of Lake Albano (the subject of one of Piranesi’s most haunting books of engravings), to such modern fantasy lands as the limestone caves, over six hundred feet long, that house the operations of the Brunson Instrument Company in Kansas City, Missouri; or the miles of underground shopping streets in Osaka; or the vast caverns dug in the mountain behind the National Museum in Taipei that store the innumerable art treasures that Chiang Kai-shek made off with when he fled from China to Taiwan in 1949; or the Louvre Métro station in Paris, several stations of the Stockholm subway system, and, above all, the justly celebrated Moscow subway, especially the Mayakovsky and Dynamo stations. Modern technology has made it possible to build below ground on a scale never before feasible: the great subterranean installations are bound to multiply. Grottoes of art, grottoes of industry, grottoes of shopkeeping, grottoes of war—all these are functional and yet seem the epitome of the poetry of space. In grottoes the functional and the fantastic are anything but incompatible. Perhaps that is why the museum for his art collection that
Philip Johnson put underground next to his Glass House in New Canaan, Connecticut, seems like the famous house’s twin—a house with glass walls demands one that is sunk beneath the ground—but is not convincing as an example of the grotto in the garden: it is too purely functional, stripped down.
Many tourist-worn sites can supply the grotto experience. The Carlsbad Caverns in New Mexico, the Postojna Caves in Slovenia (near Ljubljana), the Grotte d’Arcy near Vézelay, south of Paris, the Grotte di Nettuno near Alghero on the western coast of Sardinia—such natural caves admired by grotto-buffs like myself serve as well the function of artificial grottoes. For there is no natural cave open to tourists that (if only because of the requirements of safety) has not been turned into a stage set, or museum, with guides pointing out zoomorphic forms and organ pipes in stalagmites and stalactites with their flashlights to the visitors lined up on the stairs and walkways. (In Postojna, one traverses part of the caves by miniature railroad.) The cemetery is a garden with—generally inaccessible—grottoes. But some cemeteries, particularly in Latin countries, have mausoleums and aboveground crypts with grilles instead of doors, into which one can peer. Visits to the Etruscan tombs excavated at Cerveteri, near Rome—such as the Tomba Bella, with its relief-encrusted walls—resemble visits to grottoes, as do visits to the catacombs of Palermo and of Guanajuato, whose walls are decorated with upright mummies or artful piles of bones instead of shells.
The garden grotto is not extinct, but it is not to be found in gardens anymore. And it is above ground more than below. While the dominant architectural tradition for half a century was the machine phase of the Bauhaus style, much of the building that contradicted, dissented from, or simply ignored the hyperrational Bauhaus aesthetic precisely tended to have a “grotto” look: the curving line, the encrusted wall surface, the underground mood, in buildings as different as Antoni Gaudí’s Casa Milá and Parque Güell (indeed most of Gaudí’s work), Kurt Schwitters’s
Merzbau
(with its Nibelungen and Goethe grottoes), Frederick Kiesler’s “Endless louse” (he designed a “Grotto for Meditation”), the Rudolf Steiner Goetheanum in Switzerland, and Eero Saarinen’s TWA terminal at Kennedy Airport. One of the more flamboyant
recent versions is the design developed by John Portman for the Hyatt Hotels. In the first of the hotels, in Atlanta, one goes through an oddly small, unprepossessing entrance to receive the full shock of unexpected height in an enclosed space. The Portman atrium—overdecorated, cluttered, and centered on water, usually a waterfall—is a deliberately coarse transposition of some garden-grotto motifs.
Merzbau
(with its Nibelungen and Goethe grottoes), Frederick Kiesler’s “Endless louse” (he designed a “Grotto for Meditation”), the Rudolf Steiner Goetheanum in Switzerland, and Eero Saarinen’s TWA terminal at Kennedy Airport. One of the more flamboyant
recent versions is the design developed by John Portman for the Hyatt Hotels. In the first of the hotels, in Atlanta, one goes through an oddly small, unprepossessing entrance to receive the full shock of unexpected height in an enclosed space. The Portman atrium—overdecorated, cluttered, and centered on water, usually a waterfall—is a deliberately coarse transposition of some garden-grotto motifs.
Grottoes affirm the element of fantasy of frivolity, of excess in architecture and feeling. Garden grottoes may be, in the sense projected in garden history writing, obsolete. But one can predict an interminable future for this kind of space, for it is a permanent part of our imagination.
A grotto is both a hiding place and a kind of ruin; it is on the border between the scary and the safe, the sublime and the decrepit. It is also a permanent part of our reality. And added to the archaic fears and apprehensions embodied in the grotto is a specific modern scariness. In the 1950s there was considerable pressure on all American house owners to build grottoes in their gardens. They were called bomb shelters.
[1983]
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