Holism

Duration is one characteristic of the film avant-garde of the 1960s that is not shared with the historical avant-garde of the 1920s. Of course, there were long films during the silent era – Griffith's Intolerance (1916), Abel Gance's Napoleon (1927) – but these were narrative, naturalistic and epic; the classics of the historical avant-garde are either short (the Dada and surrealist films) or feature length (the Soviet films) and, as David Campany (2008: 36) has noted, tend to be preoccupied with motion rather than stillness, speed rather than stasis. Properly durational films, by which I mean films that radically subtract dramatic incident and interest, offer an unprecedented challenge to expectations of running time, and foreground time as a formal element of cinema, are not seen until the era of Andy Warhol's Sleep (1963) and Empire (1964), Ken Jacobs's Star Spangled to Death (1956–60, 2002–4), and Michael Snow's Wavelength (1967) and La Region Centrale (1971).

Warhol and Jacobs are the founding figures of this first durational cinema, and so I shall look in some depth and detail at one film by each, Sleep and Star Spangled to Death. These two films establish a dialogue between a subtractive or minimalist aesthetic which has been clearly dominant in durational film-making, and connects most plainly with the idea of slow cinema, and a more encompassing, encyclopedic kind of durational film, less familiar but nonetheless historically insistent. Some of the important figures from the beginning of durational cinema in fact made both kinds of film.

Let us return to the two epigraphs of the Introduction. What about ‘the words, the serious words, [that] have been used up’ and which ‘don't seem to fit the thoughts nowadays’? Have we been able to use them without abusing them or using them up? Have they regained the poetic power to speak to us ‘as if we were hearing [them] for the first time’? To capture the nature of the unique word of a poet or a thinker – or of Paul, the poet-thinker – Heidegger uses the expression die Erstlinge des Wortes, the firstfruits of the word. This expression is a Pauline heirloom. ‘Firstfruits’ renders the Greek aparchē, which names the first fruit of the revivifying power of the spirit: ‘we have the firstfruits of the spirit [tēn aparchēn tou pneumatos]’ (Rom. 8:23). With this heirloom, Heidegger articulates the power of the word to quicken thought, to open up new ways for thinking and hearing, and to speak to us as for the first time, as on the first day. Freshness, newness and fruitfulness are returned to the word as on the first day of its creation or inception. The words that are part of our culture, presupposed by this culture as words belonging to its inception, belonging to our culture's ‘in the beginning’, in principio, regain their power to speak, become initium, words that speak here and now as for the first time and as on the first day. Looking back to the previous chapters, we may now ask to which extent the used-up words of the apostle can be said to have regained their poetic power. Have the explorations of ontology, ethics and politi¬cal philosophy revivified another Pauline legacy for thinking? In which sense are the very stakes of the Pauline discovery of the outcast and the spirit found in this revivification?

This section of the Reading Guide provides a selection of suggestions and starting points for teaching In Memoriam. It includes strategies for reading the poem, sample seminar and module outlines and ideas for assessment activities that aim to enable students to engage with those formal elements and thematic concerns addressed in earlier chapters.

Reading the Text

One of the most signifi cant challenges of teaching In Memoriam is getting students to read it. Its length and repetitiveness – two characteristics that are key to understanding the poem – also pose problems for students, who will often have one week to ‘get through it’ in preparation for class. A couple of straightforward solutions to this initial problem are: to spend more than one week teaching the poem (see the outline for an In Memoriam module, below) or to ask students to read selected sections (you could take one of the chapters of the reading guide as the basis for this kind of selective approach). However, regardless of whether students are being asked to read the whole poem or just parts of it, in one week or over several, it is important to get students to think about the reading experience: to refl ect on how they are reading as well as what they are reading. Students might be provided with a list of questions that encourage this kind of refl ection, for example:

• • What did you fi nd most diffi cult about reading the poem?

• • Do you think the poem traces a narrative?

• • Would you describe the development of the poem as linear or cyclical, or would you say that it failed to develop at all?

A portrait of the artist as a young woman?

[A]s far as the arts go, it is a bad sign of poet, painter, or musician, who is arrogant enough to call his work his own. It never was his, and never will be. It is planned by a higher intelligence than his, only he happens to be the hired labourer chosen to carry out the conception […]. And when a work, any work, is completed, it passes out of the labourer's hands; it belongs to the age and the people for whom it was accomplished, and […] goes on belonging to future ages. (Corelli, Romance I: 93)

Given that A Romance of Two Worlds (1886) explores such an eye-catching array of aesthetic and civic concerns – such as the form and function of a revitalised Christianity in an age where ‘we take Deity for an ape’ (Corelli 1890: 367) – this extract may appear unexceptional on cursory inspection. But it reveals a vital facet of Marie Corelli's (née Mary [Minnie] Mackay, 1855–1924) energetically eccentric narrative: not only its surprising readiness to ponder its own status as a unique ‘work’ of art, but whether it can be described as a ‘novel’ at all. A Romance of Two Worlds concerns an unnamed narrator–protagonist, a financially independent but neurasthenic professional pianist, who seems to deliver an autobiography – a ‘plain history of strange occurrences happening to one's self ‘. Yet this very same speaker, a few paragraphs later, declares that she will not ‘hold myself answerable for the opinions expressed by any of my characters’. Is Corelli commenting on, and distancing herself from, her fictional creations (Romance I: 1–2)?

THE next day, punctually at noon, according to my promise, I entered the studio. I was alone, for Amy after some qualms of conscience respecting chaperonage, propriety, and Mrs. Grundy, had yielded to my entreaties and gone for a drive with some friends. In spite of the fears she began to entertain concerning the Mephistophelian character of Raffaello Cellini, there was one thing of which both she and I felt morally certain: namely, that no truer or more honourable gentleman than he ever walked on the earth. Under his protection the loveliest and loneliest woman that ever lived would have been perfectly safe – as safe as though she were shut up, like the princess in the fairy-tale, in a brazen tower, of which only an undiscoverable serpent possessed the key. When I arrived, the rooms were deserted save for the presence of a magnificent Newfoundland dog, who, as I entered, rose, and shaking his shaggy body, sat down before me and offered me his huge paw, wagging his tail in the most friendly manner all the while. I at once responded to his cordial greeting, and as I stroked his noble head, I wondered where the animal had come from; for though we had visited Signor Cellini's studio every day, there had been no sign or mention of this stately, brown-eyed, four-footed companion. I seated myself, and the dog immediately lay down at my feet, every now and then looking up at me with an affectionate glance and a renewed wagging of his tail.

In this first chapter, I explore how Cicely Saunders herself used ‘total pain’, focusing on her publications in medical, nursing and other journals. Starting with early ideas that might seem suggestive of ‘total pain’, I chart the various accounts of the term in Saunders's output from its first mention in 1964. Far from the static concept often assumed, Saunders's own approach to the definition of ‘total pain’ across forty years is flexible, changing emphasis and content depending on her audience. This pragmatism makes it unclear whether ‘total pain’ is an experience, an approach or something else, and I end by considering the seemingly endless permutations and interpretations of the term that now exist.

INTRODUCING ‘TOTAL PAIN’

Precursors: 1958–1963

Saunders's first article was published in 1958 and already draws the reader's attention to the complex nature of pain at the end of life. Among four detailed case studies from her time at St Luke's and St Joseph’s, she describes Mrs W. who responded to pain relief but ‘needed help and understanding in her mental and spiritual worries’, which Saunders suggests were the cause of ‘her greatest distress’ on admission (1958, pp. 12–13). Saunders goes on to use the phrase ‘total pain experience’ to articulate how most people's experience of pain is predominantly ‘comprised of our mental reaction’ (1958, p. 15), although in this early paper she uncharacteristically suggests a sedative best manages such a reaction. ‘Total pain experience’ is a natural combination of words in a medical context akin to ‘total experienced pain’, not unheard of in the 1950s (see, e.g., Haugen, 1956; Ramzy and Wallerstein, 1958). The phrase often simply quantifies pain experienced by a person over time.

In this chapter, I address how Saunders is less interested in narrative to communicate ‘total pain’ than in the evocative nature of quotations and fragments, including Mrs Hinson's ‘all of me is wrong’. Notions that Saunders collected patient narratives are undermined by archival evidence of conversations in which she prioritises how patients express their pain in language over any sense of narrative unity or coherence. Using ideas from Romanticism, I examine how these shorter narrative fragments might counterintuitively evoke complex experiences of ‘total pain’ in a manner that becomes more affective as less context is given. Saunders's interest in less-storied forms has implications for how professionals engage with their patients’ pain and for the open-ended forms of knowledge and care advocated by the holism of ‘total pain’.

SAUNDERS AND QUOTATION

Not Patient Narratives?

I have shown how Saunders uses narratives and anecdotes to communicate ‘total pain’. Yet, it is disingenuous to claim Saunders's references to Mrs Hinson and other patients always constitute narrative retellings of her patients’ situations. As I have argued, her articles which most heavily foreground narratives are often published in nursing rather than medical journals. In a paper targeted at surgeons rather than nurses, Saunders seems less willing to use anecdotes of specific patients. Like the earlier doctor-writers criticised by David Clark (2016, p. 67), Saunders instead speaks generally from her own experience, using stand-alone quotations, among them Mrs Hinson's ‘all of me is wrong’, to emphasise the emotional content of her anecdotal evidence.

Recently, as this volume amply demonstrates both in its essays and the scholarship with which they engage, film studies has been gripped by a fascination with ‘slow cinema’. A substantial body of theoretical writing has defined and expanded, both geographically and historically, the corpus of films admitted to the pantheon which now encompasses a diverse range of films from early cinema through to myriad contemporary works from the mainstream to the experimental. It is not the intention of this chapter to rehearse these debates or redefine the cannon. Instead the aim is simply to look at one film, in its time paradigmatic for an entirely different kind of cinema, Brechtian materialism, as an essay in the political potential of slowness, or at least the attention to detail that it may attempt to encourage.

Bertolt Brecht's ‘attitude of smoking and observing’

Brecht is not a playwright, poet, essayist, or film-maker whom one would generally associate with slowness though many of the film-makers purported to be influenced by him clearly are, among them Jean-Marie-Straub and Danièle Huillet, and Jean-Luc Godard (at least in his most experimental works for large and small screen from 1967 to 1978). In defining the ideal mode of spectatorship to encourage intellectual reflection alongside emotional engagement, however – it is a persistent misconception that he disapproved of the latter – Brecht coined a neat phrase: ‘the attitude of smoking and observing’.

Lost for Words: Prologue, II, V, VI, VIII, XIII, XVI, XX, XXI, XXXII, XL, LII, LIV, LVI, LX, XCV, XCVII, CXXIV, CXXXI, Epilogue

In Memoriam is centrally concerned with the limits of linguistic expression. As we have seen, in section V, Tennyson's mourner bleakly refl ects that poetic composition is useful because the rhythm that it generates numbs his grief. The implication of this line is clear: measured language is good for little else; it is no use as an accurate or adequate description of the mourner's own feelings, or of the friend that he has lost. This failure of language in the face of grief is a familiar convention of mourning. Faced with the grief of a bereaved friend, we might well resort to phrases such as ‘I am more sorry than I can say’ or ‘I know there is nothing I can say’ or ‘nothing I can say will bring them back.’ These kinds of non-utterance both fulfi l the social need for speech and also acknowledge that death is an event that defeats speech. Of course, to say that one is lost for words is a way of indicating the extremity of one's response to almost any situation. I might be rendered speechless with rage, or love someone more than words can say. Again, these expressions are linguistic conventions. They are ways of saying ‘I am very angry’ or ‘I love you very much.’ They are therefore less interesting for the quality of emotion that they (fail to) express than for what they, like Tennyson's stanza about measured language, say about words. These phrases, embedded in our social discourse, defi ne the limits of language and accept that words are an imperfect way of communicating.