Dear Gentle Reader,
So I’m a mystic now.
I have been eagerly awaiting the right moment to tell you about a pair of brilliant artists who make me think of the novelist’s vocation. In the work of Richard Selesnick and Nicholas Kahn I find a playful but also deep and ritualistic sense of magic—something that attracts me—in work that nevertheless avoids Dark Ages thinking like pseudoscience, superstition, pseudo-empowerment, law of attraction, manifesting, nature fallacies—all of which I find repellent to different degrees. Ok what am I talking about? This:
Selesnick and Kahn, two American artists, have worked together since meeting in art school in the 80s. They create fictional histories—of past or future—mixing installation art, photography, illustration and design, as in this deck of tarot cards (Sarah Falkner wrote the accompanying interpretations book). These tarot cards include the usual types of cards found in any old tarot deck, along with a few new ones, including the fortune teller Madame Lulu, one of the fictional characters who populate these multidimensional, non-narrative “stories”.
To write the poetic, metaphorical interpretations book, Falkner, we are told, “channelled” the oracular Madame Lulu. This fortuneteller is “the oracle of painful, inconvenient, unvarnished truth”, who “is expert at discerning the lesser of Evils on offer”, who “smells of the whiff of diesel just before the last flight out of the city under siege lifts off the runway”. She is “vaccination, pasteurization, and salt on an icy road” and, as Falkner as Madame Lulu writes about Lulu herself, “enemy to the pure & Puritanical & an artist of the provisionally pragmatic, provided there’s some pleasure to be had at some point—which there always is.”).
Madame Lulu and other characters portrayed in this cards and in other works by the artist pair are members of Truppe Fledermaus—an invented 1930s itinerant theatre troupe who wander through an apocalyptic landscape. Kahn and Selesnick have created 1930s style posters purporting to advertise the troupe’s performances (you can see them here; I think they are just extraordinary).
The artists, and Falkner as writer, clearly share my preoccupation with ecological catastrophe and the fin de siècle feeling that haunts many of us, including scientists watching Antarctic ice falling rapidly into the rising seas and artists attuned to the general mood, and other observant and clear-eyed souls. But these clever artists must also share—at least, their characters seem to share—my unfounded optimism-of-sorts. It’s an optimism that is an emotion, not an analysis, and which sits comfortably alongside my intellectual realistic pessimism; it’s an absurdist intention to struggle or laugh all the way to Hell (or wherever we’re going), to whistle past the graveyard1. I infer all this about these artists in part because their fantasy worlds—striking, metaphorical and poetic as they are—hew close to known scientific facts, which suggests a faith in reality.
The artists embrace two archetypes that have always fascinated me. One is the Trickster—a figure found in mythologies and stories across cultures and eras, subtly different in each. Trickster crosses boundaries, subverts hierarchies, possesses secret knowledge (though they can be foolish or wise), mocks authority and introduces playfulness and ambiguity into sacred rituals or regular life.
The other is the carnival—a term referring broadly to popular rituals, festivals, carnivals and pageants. My interest dates back at least to a 2001 article I wrote for Canadian art magazine Fuse called Theatre as a Political Tool (the article starts on page 21 of this PDF, with Death on stilts), and probably long before, when I was attracted to the carnivalesque in novels I read as a child.
Russian literary critic and theorist Mikhail Bakhtin2 identified a type of literature he called the carnivalesque, the result, of course, of the process of carnivalization, in which writers incorporate into literature the ethos of carnivals of all cultures and times—that is, the subversion of the dominant mode, and the inciting of chaos, ambiguity and humour to trouble or upend ‘official’ style or atmosphere.
I look at Kahn and Selesnick’s work and imagine—reversing Bakhtin's process of the carnivalization of carnival into literature, that The Carnival at the End of the World tarot and the Truppe Fledermaus photographs, installations, interpretations and drawings are like a novel that has burst from its pages to become an immersive experience in ‘real life’. Still fantasy, but now closer to performance than paperback. I’d very much like to follow some of Bakhtin’s exemplars and put that wonder back into my own fiction writing. And, if I had the visual and dramatic arts talent, I’d love to create multidimensional art like Truppe Fledermaus as well—or at least write the words to someone else’s fantasy world.
Before kids, marriage, nuclear family living and chronic illness, and through those and beyond some of them, I have taken part annually in Clay & Paper Theatre’s just-before-Hallowe’en neighbourhood festival, Night of Dread, which is almost like Truppe Fledermaus come to life3.
What Kahn & Selesnick do throughout their work, and most recently with the Truppe Fledermaus, is to create a complete world that reflects real preoccupations, both timely and timeless, and to populate it with believable characters. Even though the characters are archetypal (meaning they represent recurrent or symbolic motifs or types), there’s a lot of individuality there too, enough to imagine full narratives and specific memories and experiences and histories for these people. It’s like a novelization in visual format, but because they use multiple methods, styles and materials to ‘tell’ their story (including the written or literary format), it approaches the visual novels of, say Nick Bantock, or even the work of W. G. Sebald (using mysterious photographs), André Bréton (Nadja incorporates line drawings and photography), or Virginia Woolf (her Orlando incorporates both reproductions of paintings and photographs—see page 3 in this interesting essay on the book). These latter writers’ work falls on the opposite end (from Kahn and Selesnick’s) of the literary-to-visual spectrum of immersing readers/watchers into an experience that has a static dimension, a narrative dimension, and an intellectual dimension.
I hope to develop some skills at completely idiosyncratic and creative readings of this gorgeous tarot for reader and writer querent (a word I just learned, meaning the person who consults a divination process). Once I am ready, perhaps some of you would be interested in joining me for imaginative, literary readings of these already imaginative, literary cards? I look forward to telling your fortunes…
Although I have never celebrated it (except perhaps, a friend reminds me, in the house we used to share), I’m writing this just after Purim, the Jewish festival that celebrates, as usual, being persecuted or marked for death and surviving, but which does so in a true spirit of the carnival, the Trickster archetype, and the desire to overturn hierarchies and outwit oppressive forces.
This year, though, in a ghastly echo of a massacre on Purim 29 years before, hundreds of right-wing Israeli settlers ‘celebrated’ this holiday by stoning Palestinian townspeople on the occupied West Bank (in revenge for the shooting of two Israeli settler brothers by a Palestinian man), killing their livestock and pets, breaking windows, and setting fire to hundreds of vehicles and several homes, injuring hundreds while the army did nothing to intervene (they later claimed to have been shocked, apparently into inaction, by the settlers’ violence). In this article from +972 magazine about what is correctly described as a pogrom, Lexie Botzum writes:
Instead of upholding the Purim story as an ideal, or even as an inevitable paradigm of how Jews must always exist under constant threat of annihilation from our neighbors, we can take the holiday’s spirit of nehafochu — “radical overturning” — to heart.
On Purim, we celebrate the sudden reversal of the Jews’ fortunes by creating a topsy-turvy day full of costume and revelry, where all one’s normal expectations are upended. This Purim, we can celebrate by envisioning a world in which the very premise of the holiday is overturned, where our mahapecha (“revolution”) generates structures of support and thriving interdependence, not war and occupation. A world in which safety stems from justice and solidarity, not destruction.
Wishing you a good weekend till we meet again on Sunday, friends. If you have not yet read “Axolotl”, here it is. There will surely be spoilers.
This is getting too long, and my note about Purim, which started as a light-hearted connection, turned abruptly painful and sobering when I realized I couldn’t just skim over what happened this year (and also what happened twenty-nine years ago).
So I will hold off till Sunday or maybe later on my plan to talk about the sense of smell, returning to Madame Lulu, who smells like the whiff of diesel.
-Carlyn
First definition of that phrase—the one where you stay cheerful in a dire situation and proceed with tasks, including, in my intention, the tasks required to prevent the worst potential or probable outcomes and protect those most at risk and who will suffer most from them. As opposed to Wikipedia’s other definition of it, in which you ignore an upcoming hazard, avoiding knowledge and living on Thoughts & Prayers or in hope—or what covid and climate realists have taken to calling ‘hopium’, the current opium of the people.
The link from Bahktin’s name is just to a Wikipedia entry that neatly describes his work on the subject; here is his book on the carnivalesque in Rabelais, with an introduction that explains a bit more.
Night of Dread and the community theatre group that created and enacts it gets a mention in the above newsletter from a few weeks ago, too, and surely many more I’ll write.