by Jon Lackman | 3 November 2010 | Americas, Books
In his new book Acting in the Night: Macbeth and the Places of the Civil War, art historian Alexander Nemerov “takes a performance of Macbeth in Washington, DC on October 17, 1863—with Abraham Lincoln in attendance—to … illuminate American art, politics, technology, and life as it was being lived.” Rather than marshal history to explain an event, he uses an event to explain history, to put it somewhat crudely. You might say, rather, that he does both, blurring the line between the two modes. He writes:
The idea came from Wallace Stevens’s poem “Anecdote of the Jar,” with its famous account of the centrifugal power of aesthetic acts, the power of even a modest local aesthetic event–the placing of a jar on a hill in Tennessee–to shape the surrounding slovenly wilderness … I have aimed to treat that night’s performance of Macbeth as a place, even as a Thing in Martin Heidegger’s sense … because it would hold a whole world–a social world as well as a natural one … a vivid picture of “the Nothing which we scarcely know.”
This is, needless to say, an unusual and provocative interdisciplinary book. Literature comes into play: “In Hawthorne’s Marble Faun (1860), set in Rome, the characters, visiting the Roman catacombs, notice that “while their collected torches illuminated this one, small, consecrated spot, the great darkness spread all around” … Likewise, Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851) tells of small lights and faceless immensities.”
And art:
When actual monuments appeared in [the Virginia] landscape, they had the effect of an exorcism. [Northern writer J.T.] Trowbridge described the postwar memorial a few miles from Bristoe Station, a “pyramidal monument of rough red sand-stone … a silent preacher, with its breast of stone, and its austere face of stone, preaching inaudible stern lessons” … Virginia during the war–the land Macbeth flowed into, had no such monuments … Blasted into perfect nothingness, it made a nice clear ground only for antimonuments reasserting and even memorably articulating a choked, hollow lack of meaning. An anonymous photograph taken after the war at the Wilderness Battlefield depicts such a ground. The photograph was exposed to sunlight, probably inadvertently … giving it a strange night-for-day glow befitting its grim subject. The solarized photograph shows three skulls on the ground … The photograph says nothing at all. As devoted to a lack of commentary as the patch of wilderness it shows, it implies that this lack of utterance, this bubbling up of an incoherent space into only a silent sign here and there, is the only thing that can fix a place or mark a spot … It understand that a representation, to be meaningful about the war, must approach the wild emptiness and let it work, contour by contour, upon the image’s will to clarity–let the wildness reduce the art, slowly but surely, to an inscrutable sign. That sign would be neither meaningless babble nor mysterious incantation but some wise combination of the two, a profound incoherence.
