entering the manifesto: pursuits of dada and such: Week 7, Madness and the Margins the Erotic: Sex and Death

As I mentioned in class this past week, I am struck most by what seem to be influences of mise-en-scène in Unica Zürn's Dark Spring, specifically those moments in the text where bodies are framed as actors and staged as signifiers, or as the translator Caroline Rupprecht emphasizes in the preface: "Instead of words, it is the body that comes to act as a site of signification" (4). The influence of cultural images and the power of filmic bodies seem paramount in Dark Spring to the extent that that they serve as agents of psychological centering and totems to draw power from. The narrator describes the exoticized maid Frieda Splitter as "a movie star" whom the young protagonist watches and is "enraptured by her every move" (Zürn 44-45). The spectacle-like nature of Frieda's body and all the props that stage her body as uber feminine (the costuming of lingerie, perfume, powders, garters, and such) become a locus for the young girl to the extent that "Frieda [had] become the center of all things marvelous" (45).

Frieda's physical body and the extensions of her corporeality become a site of fantasy, a channel and means for the child protagonist to envision a separate reality. The protagonist "she" seems to use bodies as visual referants of mise-en-scène to not only understand the world around her, but to also create alternate storylines (selves) and to then become lost in such cinematic spaces (perhaps a protective mechanism). She wishes that "Frieda had a handsome young prince for a husband" (45), but the fantasy is shattered by the appearance of a new maid, a "successor [who] is an ugly hunchback" (46). Even Frieda's last name (Splitter) suggests doubling and a splitting of the self: beautiful vs. ugly, reality vs. fantasy, idealized vs. realized. It is further interesting that after both Frieda and her father have left, the then described ten-year-old alludes to Jules Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea where "Captain Nemo is another one of her heroes" (49). The scene suggests a libidinal desire: "octopus tentacles that force their entry into the submarine, the "Nautilus" (49)...

Hokusai Katsushika's The Dream of the Fisherman's Wife
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Tako_to_ama_retouched.jpg

...and it also sets up a movie screen-like influence of male bodies, specifically that of Douglas Fairbanks in Thief of Baghdad.

Douglas Fairbanks in Thief of Bagdad (1924)
http://www.fandor.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/Thief-of-Bagdad.jpg

Actor James Mason as Captain Nemo in
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954)
http://media.comicvine.com/uploads/6/64422/1543537-disneynemo.jpg

Just as there is an appreciation for an exoticized female body, one framed and understood in relation to a staged body, so too is there a desire for an exoticized male body: "She is sorry she has to be a girl. She wants to be a man, in his prime, with a black beard and flaming eyes" (51).
Both Douglas Fairbanks and Captain Nemo (at least a filmic version of Prince Dakkar) bear a strong resemblance to the characterization of the young girl's father and ground her sexual musings of racialized others who simultaneously protect and pleasure her. More is to be said of the other "actors" who make appearances (the school teacher and the foreign-looking swimmer, love interest), but at this point I would offer that the visual impact of these allusions and mise-en-scène-like stagings in Dark Spring suggest not only the power of cultural references to shape social constructions of gender but also how visuality influences the artist, the viewer, and all points of signification in between.

The uncanniness of Verne's Nautilus and one of Zürn's drawings: