From such chaotic, mish-mash potpourri
what are we to expect but poetry.
T. S. ELIOT
There is in the most compelling collage-works a restless energy that is torqued to undermine any neat containment that form might imply or impose. The kinetic force of the collage-work is pitched toward an idea of motion that resists linearity and formal closure and maintains a desire to go beyond its own boundaries. In this way, the collage pushes beyond itself in the force of its accretion of materials and its nonlinear syntactical strategies. The collage-work is intrinsically driven by its failure to rest in closure and resolution; it’s always bigger than the sum of its parts, but its parts are energized by their relationship to the other parts of the work, and so the work generates an energy and dynamism that draws the reader into a swirl or vortex of motion. In the most compelling collages, the parts accrue meanings from the relation they bear to one another.
The collage isn’t interested in resolution or closure, and there is something organic in this, and something similar to the kind of thing that Emerson once articulated about organic form in poetry: that “meter making argument,” in which form and meaning are snaked into each other and grow out of each other. Although collage is often highly conceptual, it is also driven by open-endedness and incompleteness that articulate an organic dimension to the larger whole, which allows us to see the parts and the whole differently. In its resistance to closure and resolution, collage appeals to an epistemological orientation that asks us to be self-aware about how we know what we know, about the process of making meaning.
The rich tradition of collage, montage, and assemblage in folk art and popular culture that precedes modernism is vestigially alive in modernist and postmodernist collage art. The genealogical registers of late medieval Europe made with cut-out paper and parchment and silk; seventeenth-century Dutch silhouettes; Russian icon collages; eighteenth-century devotional paper collages of German prayer books; nineteenth-century English valentines; Victorian “memory chests”; German kladderadatsh (kit and caboodle) assemblages; and nineteenth-century photo montage in the early evolution of photography all remind us how rich and multifarious the collage tradition is and how richly it’s been appropriated.
In the twentieth century, the collage has been central to modernism and postmodernism. The drive to bring disconcerting entities together, to make a form out of seemingly disparate materials has been essential to literary and visual forms across genres. In part, collage has been defined by the construction of intersecting materials, forms, and discourses, and in this way the collage is always defining new and myriad relationships between fragments and an idea of a larger concept, or something that alludes to a whole. Collage-works challenge genre boundaries, traditional parameters, and, as Brandon Taylor has put it, they embrace “indecency, paradox, and perplexity.”1 A subversive potential is always emanating from the strange combinations of collage inventions that have the potential to usurp the idea of traditional genre, linearity, and the determinedly rational.
The evolution of collage from early cubist modernism through late surrealist adaptations defined the collage as aspiring to surpass its antecedents, to making claims to the perpetually new. The range in that era is expansive: Braque and Picasso’s early papier colle and cubist collages; Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carra, and Giacomo Balla’s three-dimensional constructions and “free word pictures”; Hans Arp’s decontextualized paper fragments; the media mixing of Swiss and German Dadaism; Kurt Schwitters’s use of metal and wood on board; Max Ernst’s superimposing multiple images in pursuit of the surrealist unconscious; Russian constructivism’s photomontage, political realism, and commercial design; Dada’s love of fusing high and low culture in its bricolage inventions; and the conceptual collage ideas in Magritte and Tanguy’s juxtapositions of incongruous metonymic signs.
Picasso and Braque and Gris found in their inaugural modern collages of 1912–1915 a way of rejecting not only traditional painting but a whole notion of perception and ordered experience. Among other things, their collages came to embody uncertainty, just as later postmodern collages would embody a collation of fragmentary forms and layered explorations of disunity. And, for both modernists and postmodernists, the collage was also about either analytic or nonrational perception, or the kinetic shocks and dramas of the modern metropolis. The impulses behind both modern and postmodern collage are driven by an immersion in the kinetic and turbulent modern urban landscape—which is, as Walter Benjamin noted, defined by excess, overstimulation, and shock; the unexpected, the disparate, and constant boundary crossing; bombardments of materials and alterations of time and space—and a constant heterogeneity of fields in motion.2
For the Italian futurists, collage was made on canvas or board, or perceived as occurring right then and there—in the world. The futurists were so engrossed in collage as motion that they extolled the work of art as a manifestation of modern life—as moving parts, as speed, light, heat; so obsessed were they with modernity that they celebrated war (misguidedly, I would say) as a grand expression of modern action.
In creating emblems of kinetic energy, the collage creates objects in motion in visual, symbolic, and metonymic ways, and the viewer is compelled to engage in what Whitman once called “a gymnast’s struggle,” as he or she moves with the jumps, leaps, and juggles that the materials and perspectives generate. Motion, then, is intrinsic to the subject of collage, and if the conversion of the energy of motion is not always completely efficient, the heat it gives off is eponymous to its form and its aspirations. Because the collage spurns being a well-wrought urn, part of the drama of its articulation resides in the intersecting arcs and the motion that define its parts.
I want to suggest that whether collage-works are conceptualized by radical social visions or vanguard aesthetic impulses (Dada’s subversive and antibourgeois visions or surrealism’s engagement with the nonrational and the unconscious), I find the form is most energized and rich when it finds a dialectical balance (and dialectical is everything in the collage kinetics) between the inventiveness of its disparate yokings of materials and an inner coherence that generates depth through layering. In more quixotic and whimsical collage forms, the work can be sapped by a lack of cohesion, a random floating of forms, or a mechanical arrangement of fields. As successive generations of twentieth-century writers and artists see themselves as wrestling with unfolding zones of modern chaos, the collage has been a form to engage disorder while embodying a kind of order as it makes a form for an aesthetics of open-ended dynamism and epistemological challenges.
I want to look at three collage-works in different genres and at their achievements in their different forms at different moments in twentieth-century upheaval. T. S. Eliot, Robert Rauschenberg, and Joan Didion created collages that have expanded the canvas, the poem, and the nonfiction essay. Eliot’s The Waste Land and Didion’s essay “The White Album,” in her book of the same title, continue to open possibilities for literary form, and Rauschenberg’s combines of the 1950s and early 1960s created inventive pathways for the shape of the text and the text’s relationship to the reader and the world. I also want to suggest how aspects of their collage forms created new notions of consciousness, self-directed ways of reading and seeing, and surprising visions of the social and political world.
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From its epigrammatic opening, The Waste Land is defined by mixed idioms, shifting planes, intersecting textual notations, and linguistic textures. The epigram from Petronius’s “Satyricon” is in Latin and the words of the Sybil at Cumae are in Greek, and there are no text citations given. The reader is, as Whitman once put it, “to do something for himself”—in this case, to find the sources. One is drawn in by two classical languages and then quickly to the dedication that follows directly under the epigraph: “For Ezra Pound / il miglior fabbro” so that one is forced to both bring Pound into the poem and to negotiate another language, modern Italian.
In an era that was defined by traditional Anglo-American forms of the kind practiced by Thomas Hardy, A. E. Housman, and John Masefield in England, and E. A. Robinson and Robert Frost in America—the concept of The Waste Land was redefining and beguiling. Eliot, a conservative in religion and politics and a traditionalist in intellectual taste, had been shaped by Pound’s new idea of the lyric poem as intellectual collage and repository of cultural texts and sources.
The opening section, “The Burial of the Dead,” can be seen as a series of intersecting cubist-like planes that move without ligatures or narrative rationales. In five scenes and five voices, we move seamlessly from the elegiac opening of April as the cruelest month (a riff on Chaucer) to the spoken voice of the young girl, Marie, who recalls the privileged life of her Central European childhood in the Starnbergersee Mountains of Bavaria. Her nostalgic, prewar memory of staying at the archduke’s and sledding in the carefree mountains is deepened by lines of German that inscribe her cultural identity. The poem shifts with no set-up or rationale to a mythic voice situated in a biblical landscape that is inflected with allusions to Ezekiel 2:1 (“What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow / Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man”) and Ecclesiastes 12:5. But the poem pivots on a dime to the voice of the drowned lover of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, and again a bit of German inflects the poem, creating another texture and intertextual kinesis:
Frisch weht der Wind
Der Heimat zu
Mein Irisch Kind,
Wo weilest du?
“You gave me hyacinths first a year ago;
They called me the hyacinth girl.”
—Yet when we came back, late, from the Hyacinth garden,
Yours arms full, and your hair wet, I could not
Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither
Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,
Looking into the heart of light, the silence
Oed’ und leer das Meer.
As section 1 continues, Eliot keeps cutting and splicing, this time to the fortune-telling, Tarot card–reading Madame Sosostris, through whom we get a biting perspective of the “famous clairvoyante,” before Eliot cuts abruptly montage-like to another urban scene in which the allusion to Baudelaire (“Unreal City, / Under the brown fog of a winter dawn”) morphs quickly into a voice that speaks from the thronging crowds of the London streets with postwar trauma:
There I saw one I knew, and stopped him, crying: “Stetson!
You who were with me in the ships at Mylae!
That corpse you planted last year in your garden,
Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?”
While Eliot’s scenes move without syntactical set-ups or rational contexts, they are not without nuanced linkings of meaning and their sometimes mythic threads. In its kinetic organization by titled sections (“The Burial of the Dead,” “A Game of Chess,” “The Fire Sermon,” “Death by Water,” “What the Thunder Said”), the poem moves in large pieces that embody metaphoric meanings and tones, keeping the poem in constant flux and generating a collage force that allows Eliot to generate zones of surprise and disorientation.
Not unlike like a shift in a surrealist montage, in Section 2, “A Game of Chess,” Eliot splices two disparate scenes in the lives of women in London. In scene one, with its baroque, Jamesian interior in which a pampered woman is cloistered in her neurotic world as she sits in her “Chair . . . like a burnished throne,” he sets up one of several moments of sexual sterility. The spiraling literary allusions—to Shakespeare’s Cleopatra, the “laquearia” from Book 1 of The Aeneid, “the Sylvan scene” from Book 6 of Milton’s Paradise Lost, and the Philomel myth from Ovid’s Metamorphosis—make the layering of myth essential to the kinetic movement that is then strategically interrupted with the woman’s voice: “‘My nerves are bad tonight. Yes, bad. Stay with me. / Speak to me. Why do you never speak. Speak. / What are you thinking of? What thinking? What?’”
In the other half of the montage, Eliot takes us to a pub in working-class London where a woman is recounting her conversation with her friend Lil amid the theatrical interruptions of the pub keeper’s last call: “HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME” (with its double entendre on time passing). Eliot splices the scene at intervals as his dramatic dialogue pushes the montage. Lil looks “antique” because, she claims, the effects of the pills she took to have an abortion (she already has five children, the last of which almost killed her) have taken their toll. Eliot’s version of working-class dialogue isn’t cockney, but he makes clipped phrases that bring us into his vision of still another variation of sexual sterility: “He’s been in the army four years, he wants a good time, / And if you don’t give it him, there’s others will, I said.” And then the scene ends abruptly, with its mocking playful riff on Ophelia’s departure in Act 4 of Hamlet: “Goonight Bill. Goonight Lou. Goonight May. Goonight. / Ta ta. Goonight. Goonight. / Good night, ladies, good night, sweet ladies, good night, good night.” Eliot gives us a social texture, closing time at the pub, as well as a metaphysical hint about time passing and passing time, all twined together in the kinetics of Eliot’s lyric theater.
In Section 3, “The Fire Sermon,” he pushes the shifting movement into an even more layered, kaleidoscopic poetics that is closer to that “chaotic mishmash, potpourri.” Had there ever been a poem or section of a poem with such cutting and splicing, such frenetic movement that, formally at least, it seemed closer to Italian futurism’s love of mixing and combining the unexpected. In a section held together by the image of the Thames River, the movement of the mythic omniscient Tiresias voice moves around like a shaky handheld camera. The opening lines press hard on the idea of desolation in language and seem stilted and overdrawn, even with the sweet lines from Spenser’s Prothalamion:
The river’s tent is broken: the last fingers of leaf
Clutch and sink into the wet bank. The wind
Crosses the brown land, unheard. The nymphs are departed.
Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song.
The following stanzas make another cinematic-like montage of scenes along the river in which past and present London are jostled together in a mode that Eliot, Joyce, and Pound all believed the mythic method could accomplish. We go from “empty bottles, sandwich papers / Silk handkerchiefs, cardboard boxes, cigarette ends” to a big dramatic voice: “By the waters of Leman I sat down and wept . . . / Sweet Thames, run softly till I end my song,” which echoes the elegiac exile of Psalm 13, “By the rivers of Babylon, yea, there we sat down, we wept,” and the Prothalamion again. Back and forth between myth and contemporaneity, the sterility of sex and sexuality obsess Eliot: “The sound of horns and motors, which shall bring / Sweeney to Mrs. Porter in the spring.” With his witty play, things move from an allusion to Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress” to a scene closer in a line from Verlaine: “Et O ces voix d’enfants, chantant dans la coupole! ” before the stanza spills into an onomatopoetic interlude in which allusions to bird sounds evoke rape as well:
Twit twit twit
Jug jug jug jug jug jug
So rudely forc’d
Tereu
And then we’re spun once more into a kinesis of montage with another Baudelairian allusion of an “Unreal City” that introduces us to “Mr. Eugenides, the Smyrna merchant / Unshaven, with a pocket full of currants,” whose homosexual assignation defines another part of the Eliotic sexual landscape. And when Eliot shifts again to the “violet hour,” Tiresias finally appears by name, witnessing the tawdry modern urban work world. The long scene of the office secretary having her indifferent sexual encounter with the “carbuncular . . . clerk” continues Eliot’s meditation on failed sex, and as Tiresias keeps watching the world turn, we move to a scene in a kind of Rauschenberg combine-like way made of playful one- and two-beat lines. In those staccato lines, we continue to see the Thames through Eliot’s Thames nymph—his riff on the Rhine daughters in Wagner’s Gotterdämmerung. Once again, the mythic past propels the scene—this time with its evocation of Queen Elizabeth and her supposed lover the Earl of Leicester as they float down the river to “the peal of bells,” and “White towers,” and the nymphs echo the Rhine daughters in a further indented stanza, “Weialala leia / Wallala leialala.” The ensuing stanzas take us back to tawdry, working-class London and repellent sex (in real life, as we know, Eliot was struggling with his sexuality and his marriage to his soon-to-be ex-wife), and then to another one of those abrupt shifts as the poem’s mythic voice assumes Saint Augustine’s Christian confession about lust: “To Carthage then I came / Burning burning burning burning / O Lord Thou pluckest me out / O Lord Thou pluckest / burning,” as those incantatory lyric lines move the whole wild spliced section to a close.
Section 4, “Death by Water,” is like a small inset photo in a larger collage of big forms; a quiet, haunting lyric poem, it abuts two wild, mythy sections and gives the poem the kind of asymmetry an interesting collage structure does, as it catches us off guard and comes as thematic continuation of the focus on death that has haunted the poem from the opening lines of “The Burial of the Dead.” It’s like a small insert in, say, a Hans Arp collage.
The final section, “What the Thunder Said,” is a big swath of landscape that, like the earlier sections, is made of spliced pieces; but here the predominance of the spiritual topography dominates. Eliot’s ability to imagine a desert landscape of the final days of Christ is an evocative myth-history moment that sets up the spiritual drive of the final section. From the evocation of Jesus being betrayed in the garden at Gethsemane, Eliot’s successive stanzas are defined by that parched landscape that embodies the spiritual hunger of the poem. The repetition of rock and water becomes almost hypnotic in the short one- and two-beat lines of the fourth stanza: “And no rock / If there were rock / And also water / And water / A spring,” before the section slides into another desert landscape that evokes Christ’s return at Emmaus, “Gliding wrapped in a brown mantle, hooded.” As dry sterile thunder hovers over the section, Eliot’s image of “hooded hordes swarming / Over endless plains” brings us the dislocation of upheaval in the wake of war and the fall of empires and decline of civilization:
Falling towers
Jerusalem Athens Alexandria
Vienna London
Unreal
With the evocation of Baudelaire again, Eliot cuts the scene, cinematic-like once more, to a surreal sexuality as a woman lets her hair out as bats are flying and hanging in a church bell tower. Then more dry bones, empty chapels, desert rocks of Eliot’s Levantine desert, until he shifts the scene in the middle of a stanza, startlingly, to India. Eliot’s spiritual hunt now drives him to the holy water of the Ganges. In this inset segment, Eliot shifts landscape as if a camera were panning scenes, as we now leave the Levant’s biblical topography for the holy water of India: “Ganga was sunken, and the limp leaves / Waited for rain, while the black clouds / Gathered far distant, over Himavant. / The jungle crouched, humped in silence. / Then spoke the thunder / DA.”
When the poem opens into a penultimate piece of its final part—a prayer meditation demarcated, as if flashcards were inserted, by the instructions in virtue from the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad: “Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata.”—meaning Give. Sympathize. Control. With Sanskrit wisdom enmeshed with biblical scenes from the life of Christ, the poem spills into a frenetic, futuristic whirling of small pieces—a montaging of fast scenes, as the section closes with an allusion to Jesse Weston’s book From Ritual to Romance, which then spills into a line from Dante’s Purgatorio, and then moves to a phrase from the fourth-century Latin poem Pervigilum Veneris, which enjambs to a line from a sonnet by Gérard de Nerval and then to a line from Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy and back to the Upanishad commands of virtue, and then—can it be?—to a formal closing from the Upanishad “Shantih shantih shantih”—the word for peace that passeth all understanding. Notwithstanding those words of peace, the splicing and piecing of this chaotic closing has some futuristic collage-like swirling or Rauschenberg combine motion to it. As Eliot closes, are we closer to order or entropy?
I sat upon the shore
Fishing, with the arid plain behind me
Shall I at least set my lands in order?
London Bridge is falling down falling down falling down
Poi s’ascose nel foco che gli affina
Quando fiam uti chelidon—O swallow swallow
Le Prince d’ Aquitaine à la tour abolie
These fragments I have shored against my ruins
Why the Ile fit you. Hieronymo’s mad againe.
Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata.
Shantih shantih shantih
If the reader thinks the last collage piece has been set in motion, she will have one more segment to navigate: the Notes. The Notes, which Eliot added at the urging of his editor, comprise, really, another section of intersecting sources, and so the reader is forced to engage and presumably consult Eliot’s sources such as Ezekiel II, i, Tristan and Isolde, verses 1, 5–8, The Tempest, I, ii, Verlaine, Parsifal, and so on, for several pages. The Notes create another kind of mishmash that is designed to push the poem into a self-reflexive modern-ness and send the reader both out into the world of literature and history and back into the poem with myriad ways of making meaning while bringing the poem to a new kind of multiplicity.
The Waste Land has given scholars fits of joy for decades, and its built-in scholarly appeal and its impact on the English department curriculum bears that out. The poem’s intellectual lures are many, and it is the kind of poem scholars feed on because it engages an intellectual sleuthing process that can be fun and rewarding, even if at times necessarily incomplete. Sometimes there seems something comic about the degrees to which scholars have treated The Waste Land as if it were a continuous narrative, an almost seamless continuity of symbols and images and poetic telling that isn’t all that different from Tennyson’s “In Memoriam” or Wordsworth’s Prelude.
In his controlled, well-conceived (with the great aid of Pound) “mish-mash potpourri,” Eliot created a modernist collage as no other poet before him had. In its continual cuts and shifts, pivots and leaps, informed, as well, by the end notes that lead the reader into the poem’s forest of intertextuality—providing both coherence and some desired obscurity. Without surrendering to the collage-like movements that embody fragments and fragmentation, disconnects, wild and shaky jumps, the reader misses the meaning of the poem that is generated by its formal and coherent disunity and its collage dynamism. The poem embodied a new age in which Pound’s poetics, Picasso’s and Braque’s collage rebellion against the canvas, and Dada’s and futurism’s immersion in the dynamism and fragmentation of the new urban-technological world were all part of a context and moment. It is Eliot’s appropriation of these idioms combined with his intellectual classicism that continue to give the poem its appeal to both experimentalists and traditionalists, so that perhaps he did succeed, in some way, in shoring those fragments against his ruin.
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Joan’s Didion’s opening essay, bearing the same title as her book The White Album, suggests collage in its title. If album derives from the Latin word for list, it has come to be subsumed by the LP or CD album as a collection of songs, or the photo album or scrapbook that suggests a collection of artifacts of disparate layers, hybrid, of a polyglot nature. Didion’s chapter is an album of a time of turmoil, both inner and outer for her, in the late 1960s—a time of bewildering change, chaos, violence, uncertainty. She articulates her ars poetica early in the chapter: “We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the ‘ideas’ with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.” Narrative as imposition on disparate images is one way of seeing how a nonfiction writer might take on the prismatic intersections of the real—as they collide and intersect in ways that give off something about the state of reality she’s compelled to engage. So radical was Didion’s sense of a break with her previous notions of the real that she refers to the time “when I began to doubt the premises of all the stories I had ever told myself.” It seems fair to assert that the years between 1966 and 1971 in the United States were years of turmoil and change of an unprecedented kind. The antiwar movement, the civil rights movement, a new pop culture that included psychedelic drugs, a more subversive rock ’n’ roll, and a new sexual liberation, which intersected at times with cult violence, group movements, and political assassinations, were defining a new American landscape. As Didion put it, “certain of these images did not fit into any narrative I knew.”
Confronted with these realities, Didion’s appropriation of collage techniques in “The White Album” enables her to get hold of a sense of “the shifting phantasmagoria” of “our actual experience.” And her choice of phantasmagoria captures the collage nature of her seeing. In using the trope of the phantasmagoric, that late-nineteenth-century form of theater in which a magic lantern was used to project frightening and nightmarish images in kaleidoscopic forms on a screen, she encodes another trope for collage-seeing, as colliding, kinetic, nonlinear perception becomes the central way of taking in the real.
“The White Album” opens its meditation on confusion with an autobiographical accounting of family life, personal events, political occurrences, and her confessions of bewilderment and uncertainty. Didion continues to address her sense of the rupture in the narrative: “I was meant to know the plot, but all I knew was what I saw: flash pictures in variable sequence, images with no ‘meaning’ beyond their temporary arrangement, not a movie, but a cutting-room experience.” She tells us that she “wanted still to believe in the narrative and in the narrative’s intelligibility,” but there has been a break in the narrative, and so experience seemed like a flash cut—abruptly shifting images “with no ‘meaning’ beyond their temporary arrangement.” The abrupt shifts in reality that hit Didion in the year 1968 needed another kind of form to absorb it. “The White Album” offers a form and an approach to capture the phantasmagoria of violence, political chaos, jolting new social arrangements, and relations that bring us into the realm of the American grotesque. Her essay is made up of textual flash-cut layers, and, not surprisingly, many of them are texts of testimony. I’m reminded here of Shoshana Felman’s claim that we live in the age of testimony, which has supplied us with a new sense of crisis.3
In “The White Album,” we enter into a more intimate kind of testimony in which we open with a text Didion pulls from her confidential file; it’s a psychiatric report about her near collapse in June 1968, when she was an outpatient at Santa Monica hospital:
A thorough medical evaluation elicited no positive findings and she was placed on Elavil, Mg. 20, tid. . . . The Rorschach record is interpreted as describing a personality in process of deterioration with abundant signs of ailing defenses and increasing inability of the ego to mediate the world of reality and to cope with normal stress. . . . Emotionally, patient has alienated herself almost entirely from the world of other human beings. Her fantasy life appears to have been virtually completely preempted by primitive, regressive libidinal preoccupations many of which are distorted or bizarre. . . . Patient’s thematic productions on the Thematic Apperception Test emphasize her fundamentally pessimistic, fatalistic, and depressive view of the world around her.
Rendered in italics, and as a longer report in her essay, the narrative hinges on a flash cut in which we—as readers of Didion’s report on her medical trauma—enter into her intimate sense of struggle. In this way, the impact of cultural chaos on the life of the self becomes part of Didion’s personal voice, one in which self and world are enmeshed. As the chapter turns on flash cuts and fragments, overheard voices, song lyrics, street slogans, and more testimony from various sensational trials, we are pushed into the chaos of American culture, California style. We move in and out of narrative as we intersect with planes of jarring texts that push us both in and out of chaos and the self’s struggle with chaos. The text of a sentimental framed “house blessing” on the wall of Didion’s mother-in-law’s house in Connecticut is pure irony in the opening, “God bless the corners of this house,” and its closing, “And bless each door that opens wide, to stranger as to kin.” This kitsch is followed by the transcript of a murder trial of two boys convicted of killing a sixty-year-old man who had read their fortunes at his house (not far from Didion’s house in Hollywood) and who turned out to have been a former silent film actor:
Q: Did you talk after you ate?
A: While we were eating, after we ate. Mr. Novarro told our fortunes with some cards and he read our palms.
Q. Did he tell you you were going to have a lot of good luck or bad luck or what happened?
A. He wasn’t a good palm reader.
Between murder trial transcripts, encounters with cult murders (Linda Kasabian of the Manson cult) and taking sedatives for vertigo or migraines (25 mg. Compazine), from which Didion suffered, pop songs on the radio float through her consciousness: “Midnight Confessions,” “Visions of Johanna,” “Do You Wanna Dance.” There are conversations with women private detectives and prophets of Scientology, and then she is at a recording session of the new rock Dadaists, The Doors, with their charismatic leader Jim Morrison. She captures the sound bites of dialogue between Manzarek and Morrison with a Raymond Carver–like minimalism, and then a block of lyrics by rock’s new prophets of “apocalyptic sex”:
Come on baby, gonna take a little ride
Goin’ down by the ocean side
Gonna get real close
Gonna get real tight
Baby gonna drown tonight—
Goin’ down, down, down.
As the essay swings back and forth from rock music to trial transcripts, the scene cuts to the Black Panthers trial of Huey Newton up north in Alameda County in the East Bay region, where Newton was charged with killing police officer John Frey. Didion’s flash edit of the scene captures the street chants of fellow Panthers outside the Alameda County Jail:
Get your M-
31.
’Cause baby we gonna
Have some fun.
BOOM BOOM. BOOM BOOM
. . .
Bullshit bullshit
Can’t stand the game
White man’s playing.
One way out, one way out.
BOOM BOOM. BOOM BOOM.
Testimony—“that crucial mode or our relation to events of our time,”4 as Shoshana Felman puts it—continues to be Didion’s approach to crisis, and again we get a Huey Newton transcript from a journalist:
Q. Tell us something about yourself, Huey, I mean your life before the Panthers.
A. Before the Black Panther Party my life was very similar to that of most black people in this country.
Q. Well, your family, some incidents you remember, the influences that shaped you—
A. Living in America shaped me.
As Didion investigates the trial, she gives us another testimony, this time of Corrine Leonard, the nurse at the emergency room of the hospital (Kaiser) where Newton was brought after being shot in the stomach during the gunfire with officer John Frey:
I heard a moaning and a groaning, and I went over and it was—this Negro fellow was there. He had been shot in the stomach and at the same time he didn’t appear in any acute distress and so I said I’d see, and so I asked him if he was a Kaiser, if he belonged to Kaiser, and he said “Yes, yes, get a doctor, can’t you see I’m bleeding? I’ve been shot.”
With confessional snippets set into parts of the narrative, Didion grafts the intimacy of the testimony of others into a larger portrait of a cultural moment and her own journey through it. No detail of intimacy is too private or irrelevant, and so we move from a moment at Eldridge Cleaver’s apartment with his parole officer on the day of the publication of Cleaver’s sensational book Soul on Ice to a list of things taped on the inside of her closet door that gives us a view of her life as a traveling journalist:
To Pack and Wear:
2 skirts
2 jerseys or leotards
1 pullover sweater
stockings
bra
nightgown, robe, slippers
cigarettes
bourbon
bag with:
shampoo
toothbrush and paste
Basis soap
razor, deodorant
aspirin, prescriptions, Tampax
face cream, powder, baby oil*
The narrative continues to scissor between the swirling events of Didion’s personal life and the phantasmagoria out there. She finds herself on the San Francisco State campus, where the Black Panther revolution is playing out as police and mace mix with camera crews, militant black students and bourgeois white students trying to be revolutionary. Then we cut to the shallow end of her sister-in-law’s Beverley Hills swimming pool, as news comes over the radio about the murders of eight people by the Charles Manson cult at Sharon Tate Polanski’s house on Cielo Drive. As this phantasmagoric piece of the collage emerges, Didion takes us from the social real as she interviews Linda Kassabian—one of the Mason cult who was a witness to the murders on Cielo Drive—to the state of her nervous system:
Certain organic disorders of the central nervous system are characterized by periodic remissions, the apparent complete recovery of the afflicted nerves. What happens appears to be this: as the lining of a nerve becomes inflamed and hardens into scar tissue, thereby blocking the passage of neural impulses, the nervous system gradually changes its circuitry, finds other, unaffected nerves to carry the same messages. During the years when I found it necessary to revise the circuitry of my mind I discovered that I was no long interested in whether the woman on the ledge outside the window on the sixteenth floor jumped or did not jump, or in why. I was interested only in the picture of her in my mind: her hair incandescent in the floodlights, her bare toes curled inward on the stone ledge.
We then catapult from being with Didion at the fashionable I. Magnin in Beverly Hills, where she is picking out a dress for Linda Kasabian to what I would call a small insert like something out of a 1970s Rauschenberg collage, in which she recalls being in a motel near Pendleton, Oregon, doing a piece for Life about the storage of nerve gas at an army arsenal. She recalls the motel manager, a Mormon, abruptly saying to her: If you can’t believe you’re going to heaven in your own body and on a first-name basis with all the members of your family, then what’s the point of dying? From this “koan of the period”—a startling non sequitur that functions like a counterintuitive aphorism of the cultural moment—she moves us back to her neurology report and her vision disorder and the doctor’s conjectures about her having multiple sclerosis. In her closing, she takes us back to her departure from her house in Los Angeles to a house on the ocean, where she ruminates on the chaos swirling around her.
If she comes to a place where she acknowledges the limits of writing—“Quite often I reflect on the big house in Hollywood, on ‘Midnight Confessions’ and on Ramon Novarro and on the fact that Roman Polanski and I are godparents to the same child, but writing this has not yet helped me to see what it means”—the essay affirms the power of collage. The mosaic pieces, fragments, and splicings that she orchestrates bring us into a deeper sense of the reality of unfolding historical forces. Her assemblage of sensations and encounters and disruptive images (violent events, pop-song fragments, court testimonies, street chants, personal medical reports) intersect with her desire to get at something about 1968 in California. The collage-album becomes a record of witness and an idiosyncratic confession about writing and living in personal and cultural chaos. If they are “fragments shored against ruins,” it is not a ruined Didion we encounter, but a writer who wants to collect and render the fragments so cultural confusion can come into whatever focus it might—the way shards, rapid cuts, and edits bombard consciousness.
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I want to close by reflecting on the combines of Robert Rauschenberg—in particular, his combines of the 1950s and 1960s, which took the idea of collage to a new place, and perhaps a place that is unique in its range and goal and expansiveness. During the early 1950s, Rauschenberg was obsessed with the idea of remaking the barriers between life and art: “Painting relates to both art and life. Neither can be made. I try to act in the gap between the two,”5 that similar impulse which also drove both the Beat and confessional poets of the same 1950s moment.
Rauschenberg’s technique of combining objects—scraps of metal, street signs, license plates, photographs, diverse materials (paper, cloth, plastic, wood, metal), taxidermied birds and animals, pieces of furniture, industrial scraps—within and on the surface and perimeters of a canvas created an idea of collage that, as the word combine suggests, brings wild and radical combinations of forms, textures, concepts, and materials together. What marks Rauschenberg’s combines of the 1950s is their explosive fullness, their baroque excess, their entanglements, fusions, and combustions. Rauschenberg’s breakthrough into what he named his combines is inseparable from post–World War II American culture and the aesthetic energies of the 1950s. The combines embody a kind of bebop spontaneity and freedom and a sense of motion that evokes the Beat idea of the American road (a mid-twentieth-century extrapolation of Whitman’s “Open Road”). This sense of freedom—both metonymic and literal—defined the Kerouac-Ginsberg highway of On the Road and Howl of the 1950s as well as the Rauschenberg combine with its kinetics of possibility and surprise.
Whether Rauschenberg’s combines are autobiographical, as some are, or less personal, they embody a field in motion where things merge, converge, and intersect as they give off explosive energies. As collage, they challenge notions of formal containment and aesthetic assumptions about the beautiful, the elegant, the decorative, and they hold in balance something of Jackson Pollock’s idea of action painting—the fluidity of abstract expressionism—earlier modernist notions of collage, and a new notion of space and materiality.
Whether one is interested in finding iconographic meaning in the combines or seeing abstract formalisms, Rauschenberg’s collages allow us another perspective on the collage as a mode of remaking and extending form beyond linear expectations and closed or contained parameters. His passion for the bric-a-brac layers of American material culture (was there a more plentiful culture of materialism and commerce than the postwar United States at the time?) enabled him to create collages of singular hybridity and intertextuality, often inflected by his neo-Dadaist (as Rauschenberg termed his own sensibility at the time) mixing of postwar jazz and abstract expressionism. His omnivorous eclecticism and his brilliant sense of design (he was a set designer for Merce Cunningham for years) were also essential to his inventions.
In his 1955 combine, Monk, which evokes and plays with the work of the jazz innovator Thelonius Monk, we’re overwhelmed with colliding images, textures, and materials (Plate 1). A newspaper fragment, a comic strip, a reproduction of a serene Hudson River School water landscape, a piece of a record with the half-legible title “’Round Midnight,” a filmstrip of sequential images of Charlie Chaplin, a postage stamp, a piece of an airmail envelope, wood, fabric, swaths of paint, and some gooey drippings in red and yellow. The materials are quintessential Rauschenberg, but it is the motion created by their intersections—the animated fury of their coming together—that creates a challenging and compelling aesthetic with its signifying layers of objects. We are pulled into looking at images, materials, textures, gestures, and a multiplicity of interpretations.
Not unlike Ginsberg’s wild image juxtaposings in part 1 of Howl (which was written the same year that Monk was made), Rauschenberg asks us to look freshly at things with a new visual syntax. What are we to make of the seven sequential film frames of Charlie Chaplin in relation to a photocopy of a Hudson River School image and a scrap of Monk’s classic 1944 record “’Round Midnight”? Is the traditional Hudson River School image undercut by the Monk record label? Do the pop-culture images (the cartoon frame, the frames of Chaplin) intersect with the more genteel image of the Hudson River School landscape in order to ask us to consider the nature of American art and imagination? Rauschenberg’s perspectival openings are also inflected by the values of the paint—red and yellow that are dripped and dashed across the canvas and over the Hudson River School image. In the hot and excitable tensions created by the gestural brushstrokes, Rauschenberg also asks us to look at relationships between textures and color as they overlay the images within his compositional form.
One of the arresting images in the combine is a hunk of polka-dot fabric that pops near the center of the canvas; it brings you through the clotted images of newspaper and comic strip to the filmstrip of Chaplin. To get there, you have to travel through layers of transparency and opacity as you view the comic strip and the newspaper fragment through washes of white paint. The dynamism of the design is as compelling as the syntax of the images and materials. The action-spilled red paint over the staid Hudson River School image, and the swirling red, blue, and orange impastos of paint over cloth at the top, from which a postage stamp emerges, force us out of any easy metonymy into oblique relationships between color and form, image and idea.
If you take Monk’s famous jazz piece “’Round Midnight” as a trope for the combine, then Rauschenberg’s mode of collage play has a more self-aware sense of riffing about its movements and strange mixes. From one perspective, it’s a riff on American forms of art and compels us to ask: What is American culture? What strange elements make up the landscape of the American imagination? What do we make of the relationship between the Chaplin film, the Hudson River School image, and the Monk jazz piece? How do they intersect with one another, and how do they exist in relation to textures, colors, and other materials: a fragment of a map of West Virginia, a comic strip, a newspaper fragment, a piece of cloth, the translucent white wash?
In the yoking of such images, genres, color, and materials, Monk also leads us by composition, by the juxtaposing of images, by strange intersections, by an idea of motion that resists linearity and goes beyond its own boundaries. In this way, Rauschenberg’s combine is open-ended, bigger than the sum of its parts, as it generates motion. Hybridity and intertextuality drive its fabulous fusions but also keep it working with its disparate parts so that the collage doesn’t lapse into arbitrariness or slackness but stays torqued to its own inner workings, to the parts speaking to one another as they animate the whole.
Monk forces the viewer to participate in the kinetics of collage, to negotiate meaning from image to image, from texture to texture, from color to color. In doing so, the viewer engages in a jumping and leaping and in negotiating meaning across image representations of genres of music, painting, and film. The intensity of visual movement is part of the intellectual drama that activates our signifying process and is also congruent with the compositional structure, which is—in its spontaneity—also formal. Rauschenberg creates, in this way, interpretative perspective out of a visual language of hyperexcitation. In his visual dynamism, we’re led lyrically into a vision of culture and aesthetics that can also resist iconographic interpretation while it leads us to contemplate an idea of potentiality and of meaning making as a process that is incomplete and open-ended. This kind of collage kinetic opens us to an idea of dialogical thinking that Matthew Leone has called an epistemology of potentiality—in which the relationship between the parts generate “an interconnectedness” and an “interanimation” that keep the dialogue between the viewer and, in this case, collage in constant motion.6
In his 1961 combine Black Market, Rauschenberg takes the collage to an even more expansive place (Plate 2). Working in New York at the time, Rauschenberg was immersed in the culture of industrial America, or junk culture, in another sense. The collage owes something to his living in Lower Manhattan for over a decade during a time of urban transition and change.7 Mounted on a framed canvas, Rauschenberg’s assemblage of industrial junk includes an Ohio license plate, Plexiglas clipboards affixed and hanging from the canvas, a piece of found metal, a magazine photo of the U.S. capitol over a gray wash, crumbly poster fragments, finger-applied impasto paints, a bright white stamp-pressed lettering, a news photograph, a rusted panel, billboard posters, a thick silver X over a clean canvas piece, metal file card dividers, and other mass-produced objects. And then there is a large wooden “ONE WAY” sign.
The collage starts in a flat plane and morphs into something else as the affixed clipboards hang like translucent windows through which vague shapes of color show. The clipboards pop the canvas and push it into a three-dimensional space. They are the white windows that break up the dark industrial materials. But Rauschenberg pushes the spatial play further, as the wooden “ONE WAY” sign disrupts the flat surface as well as the idea of containment. The sign is a formal gesture as it sends the collage into another dimension, out of its perimeter and conceptual containment; but it’s also a signifying image that marks a moment in Manhattan urban planning, which had just been redefined by the creation of one-way avenues on the East Side, transforming the traffic flow of the city, which is also the flow of space, the kinetics of machines in the confines of an urban grid, the way consciousness now experiences the formation of human-techno movement, and the desire to remake the city as a systematized place of order and flow.
The “ONE WAY” sign also disrupts the already intersecting chaos of materials; nailed on wood that is affixed to the canvas, the sign’s black-and-white boldness is not only three-dimensional but it then breaks out of the frame, undermining the idea of containment and closed form. But Rauschenberg takes it even further: From the arrow point of the “ONE WAY” sign, he drops rope down the length of the canvas to a wooden suitcase on the floor. As the combine pushes toward what will come to be more popularly known as installation by the 1980s—the suitcase, still attached to the canvas through the tip of the extruding “ONE WAY” sign—extends the idea of space and object play. The rope casts a shadow line on the wall as it drops to the valise, and it is through the valise (an old wooden suitcase) that Rauschenberg invites the viewer’s participation.
Here the viewer is invited to put items of his or her own in the suitcase in exchange for objects already in the valise. It is not only a black market of gift exchange but a way for the viewer to give meaning to ordinary objects, meaning that could only be ascribed by the viewer. Through this process of participation, Rauschenberg pushes the collage to engage the viewer both physically and intellectually and through a sense of materiality—as the viewer contributes a material object to the collage and takes one away with her. The implications of Black Market are, in part, about open-endedness, expansiveness, continuousness. Dialectical tensions between meaning and materiality keep the idea of conceptual and formal dimensions energized in Black Market; stasis and motion keep pushing each other into new planes or spaces of meaning. As the image is allowed its own formal presentation, it’s also enveloped by shifting contexts that are set in motion by planes of color, texture, materiality, by stasis and motion—free and attached. As the materials break out of the perimeter of the canvas, Black Market resists closure, and in this way Rauschenberg’s kinesis recalls Whitman’s notion of open-endedness at the closing of “Song of Myself,” when the poet reminds us that the meaning of the poem supersedes any conventional idea of form and that the poet is outside of the parameters of the text, as text diffuses in a wider world: “If you want me again look for me under your boot soles. . . . Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged, / Missing me one place search another.”
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The Waste Land ’s collage configuration inscribes T. S. Eliot’s sense of social change from sexual mores and spiritual decline to post–World War I human dislocation and historical trauma. Robert Rauschenberg’s combines raise issues embedded in social meanings and material forces that are part of an emerging post–World War II American culture of explosive power, rapid motion, and material and cultural capital that are coming to shape some of the new empire’s modes of cultural production and signification. Joan Didion’s phantasmagoric collage vision of California in 1968 embodies both her personal crisis and something of the psycho-social-sexual pop-cultural revolution and political upheaval that defined U.S. culture at a time of explosion. Collage thrives on the continual potentiality of its elements, which are redefined as they are seen in relation to the other fragments of the whole. In this way, collage not only eschews traditional formalisms of the autotelic text, it also allows us to see the imagination taking on historical moments of shifting meanings that define the dynamics of social change and historical disruption.