The 1970s librarians who revolutionised the challenge of search | Aeon Essays

Aeon Magazine · by essay

Throughout an unusually sunny Fall in 1970, hundreds of students and faculty at Syracuse University sat one at a time before a printing computer terminal (similar to an electric typewriter) connected to an IBM 360 mainframe located across campus in New York state. Almost none of them had ever used a computer before, let alone a computer-based information retrieval system. Their hands trembled as they touched the keyboard; several later reported that they had been afraid of breaking the entire system as they typed.

The participants were performing their first online searches, entering carefully chosen words to find relevant psychology abstracts in a brand-new database. They typed one key term or instruction per line, like ‘Motivation’ in line 1, ‘Esteem’ in line 2, and ‘L1 and L2’ in line 3 in order to search for papers that included both terms. After running the query, the terminal produced a printout indicating how many documents matched each search; users could then narrow down or expand that search before generating a list of article citations. Many users burst into laughter upon seeing the response from a computer so far away.

The IBM 360 mainframe computing system with printing terminal. Courtesy IBM

As part of a telephone survey afterwards, participants were asked to provide two or three words describing the experience. Of the 78 total words provided, 21 were the same adjective: ‘frustrating’. Participants had trouble signing on to the system and experienced unpredictable failures, ‘irrelevant output’ and, most of all, not knowing ‘what words to use in a search’. Yet they also found the system intriguing and exciting (‘fun’, ‘thorough’, ‘I dig computers’), and 94 per cent said they would use SUPARS (the Syracuse University Psychological Abstracts Retrieval Service) again if it were available. Several offered to keep the experiment running past its deadline by asking their departments to contribute funding to the project.

This group of academic guinea pigs, mostly graduate students in education, psychology and librarianship, were part of a radical online search experiment run by the Syracuse University School of Library Science. SUPARS was one of many ambitious information-retrieval studies that took place between the late 1960s and mid-1970s on US university campuses. A number of factors led to the surge in this research. Developments in computer-processing capability for speed and storage had allowed academic databases and catalogues to be digitised and moved online. Computer terminals were newly modular and could be placed around campuses for decentralised access to mainframes. And military and industry funding for computer-based research was more abundant than it had ever been. Given the opportunity, academic librarians took advantage of the chance to explore this expensive new technology. In turn, universities offered unclassified environments for collaborations with corporate technology firms and military groups; SUPARS was sponsored by the Rome Air Development Center, the laboratory arm of the US Air Force.

It’s easy to see why librarians of the 1970s set out to revolutionise search. Work across the academy was expanding to such a degree that, soon, there would not be enough human librarians to support all of it. Yet, to get the information they needed, researchers would face a time-consuming, physically involved process that required librarian intervention. While academic researchers could browse new issues of journals in their field, for a focused search of all that had come before they still had to consult with a reference librarian to look up the correct Library of Congress subject headings within a multivolume manual. Armed with a set of subject headings, the researcher would then search across the library catalogue for books and in citation indexes for journal articles, including subscription databases such as the Science Citation Index as well as hand-built bibliographies created by their university’s subject librarians. Finally, they would physically track down the correct books and bound periodicals that included articles they thought might be relevant – if the volumes happened to be on the library shelves.

It’s no wonder that SUPARS participants found the system compelling, despite its limitations. And given how familiar university librarians were with the challenges of search, it makes sense that the system they designed bypassed subject headings and citation indexes. What’s more surprising is that, of all the online search experiments that took place during this period – including commercially focused search systems like Lockheed’s Dialog, which has since become an enterprise product – SUPARS mimicked contemporary web search more closely than any other, prefiguring several primary features of web-search protocols we rely on more than 50 years later.

SUPARS and other largely forgotten systems were the forerunners of the contemporary search engines we have today. While the popular history of the internet valorises Silicon Valley coders – or, sometimes, the former US vice president Al Gore – many of the original concepts for search emerged from library scientists focused on the accessibility of documents in time and space. Working with research and development funding from the military and industry, their advances can be seen everywhere in the current online information landscape – from general approaches to ingesting and indexing full-text documents, to free-text searching and a sophisticated algorithm utilising previous saved searches of others, a foundational building block for contemporary query expansion and autocomplete. Indeed, these and many other approaches developed by campus pioneers are still used by the multibillion-dollar businesses of web search and commercial library databases from Google to WorldCat today.

Pauline Atherton Cochrane (centre) with colleagues working in the Syracuse University Libraries on SUPARS. Photo courtesy Syracuse Libraries Special Collections

SUPARS was designed by a librarian named Pauline Atherton (who goes by the name of Pauline Atherton Cochrane today). In 1960, aged 30 and early in her library career, she had been the cross-reference editor of that year’s revision of the World Book Encyclopedia, ensuring thorough and accurate cross-linking between different articles. By 1966, she was working at the Syracuse University libraries and in the library school, where in 1968 she demonstrated the first use of an online decimal classification file to aid in search (AUDACIOUS). That same year, she established the first computer-based teaching lab that integrated online search into regular classroom teaching at the library school (LEEP). (In the context of the world before the internet, ‘online’ meant establishing a networked, real-time connection between a mainframe computer and some other remote device, such as a terminal.)

The following year, in 1969, Atherton designed SUPARS with her co-investigator, Jeffrey Katzer, another library science professor at Syracuse. The main goal of the SUPARS project was to provide online searching at a massive scale in order to learn as much as possible about how users searched online, how they felt about it, and what they needed to search better. To do so, the team set up a searchable corpus of scholarly content made available to the entire campus; more than 35,000 recent entries from the American Psychological Association’s Psychological Abstracts. Used for indexing and retrieval in the SUPARS system, this comprised the first database of significant size available online in an unclassified environment. While obviously nowhere near the size and scope of today’s web search, both the user group and the searchable content were enormous for the time.

Two decisions from Atherton and her team made SUPARS truly novel. First, they stripped away all subject headings from the entries in Psychological Abstracts and made all the words directly searchable, except for connectors such as ‘and’ and articles like ‘a’ or ‘the’. This made SUPARS the first system where extensive free text was available online for both searching and output. (They titled their final report ‘Free Text Retrieval Evaluation’.) Second, they saved every SUPARS search in a parallel database that could be queried alongside the abstracts themselves, making SUPARS the first experiment that allowed users to access and use previous searches to find alternative terms or approaches.

SUPARS prefigured web search by giving users the ability to search free text directly in the documents themselves

Each of these features would have been novel on their own but, to contextualise how ahead of its time the combination was, it’s worth looking at how web-search services operate today. Google, Bing and other search engines index web pages using two major components: crawlers search for new pages, and regularly recrawl already found pages; parsers analyse the content of pages, storing the resulting information, including all free text, in an internal database. When a user enters a search query, Google tries to match the words and phrases in the query to pages in its database and serve the most relevant results to the user.

In addition to the words that searchers enter themselves, contemporary web-search algorithms also take into account other terms closely related to those in the search query, including synonyms (such as a search for ‘bike’ returning results for ‘bicycle’ and ‘cycle’) and other directly related words.

Most search engines will also include words that were part of similar queries performed by others, which become part of the internal thesauri used to add search terms to a user’s query. This process of including related words, known as query expansion, significantly improves the relevance of records returned. Similarly, Google and other search engines also suggest additional search terms to users via autocomplete, creating predictions based on previous searches to help users quickly complete their queries.

SUPARS thus prefigured web search by giving users the ability to search free text directly in the documents themselves, and by allowing searchers to piggyback on search strategies used by others who came before. Meanwhile, SUPARS determined the utility of all these individual searches through analysis of its transaction log. After an initial pilot project, two sessions of SUPARS testing were run between October to December 1970 (SUPARS I) and November to December 1971 (SUPARS II). Atherton’s team concluded that free-text search was an efficient way to improve relevance (known as ‘recall’ in the scientists’ parlance) of search results – and might be just as effective as a search led by a research librarian of the human sort. What’s more, the ever-evolving vocabulary of a system continually adapting to human input and behaviour presented an upgrade over a system based on a fixed, ‘one-shot’ controlled vocabulary of search systems thus far. The SUPARS team had no way of knowing that AI-powered web-search algorithms would be doing this precise work a few decades later, but they clearly had a sense that this would be a new and effective way of continually updating search results.

In a 1972 letter to the editor of the Journal of the American Society for Information Science, Katzer described the reasoning behind providing a database of all previous search queries:

The purpose of this Search Data Base is to aid the user as he tries to formulate queries to the data base of documents (Psychological Abstracts.) Since SUPARS is currently using an unrestricted vocabulary, the output from the search data base could help the user discover other ways to attack his topic in the document data base: It will provide keywords used by other topic experts, along with a representation of their thought processes … [W]e think that this is a beginning in an area which has not been sufficiently explored: the use of user intelligence to augment all of the effort which has gone into machine intelligence.

It is tempting to depict Atherton’s team as utopian futurists, but the SUPARS experiment was not designed with a guiding vision like the open web in mind. It was specifically created for a future in which fewer librarians would be available to help researchers in person. Extending the collective intelligence of others was a practical solution, not an idealistic one.

Atherton’s group observed that, because the new computer terminal locations at Syracuse were ‘remote from a reference librarian or any other human specialists in the user’s interest area’, they would need an additional source of help, which could be found in ‘the human intelligence of all other users of the system’. The aggregate decisions of other researchers was only a substitute for a library expert, they wrote:

Ideally, a user would be able to talk with someone familiar with his interest area and be provided with a variety of words and other cues. The user could then develop or formulate a search inquiry to the system that had the specificity or exhaustiveness needed to maximise retrieval.

As they worked with the modular terminal on campus, the SUPARS team saw the future that was coming and what a world based on distributed, networked computing would lose: an ever-larger number of researchers were increasingly going to be working outside of the library, on their own, in need of support that librarians wouldn’t be able to provide. Atherton’s team wasn’t predicting a world where expert librarians wouldn’t be needed; they were preparing for a world where research would take place in many disparate locations, too far from a reference desk for them to be able to help.

The people credited as visionaries imagined a world where technology would improve human communication

The SUPARS experimenters also concluded that, while utilising the search terms of others was a promising alternative to subject-based search, it had real limitations. One of the final SUPARS recommendations was to continue developing controlled vocabulary, explaining that ‘a need continues to exist in interactive free-text searching for some form of user vocabulary or synonym control’. They came to this conclusion after seeing how frequently SUPARS participants stumbled into search vocabulary problems such as, in one of their examples, searching for ‘people’ instead of ‘humans’ and returning no results. The participants themselves missed the comprehensiveness of subject headings. In fact, as part of the SUPARS survey, they were asked if they preferred a free-text system or one in which the vocabulary was more controlled: 42 per cent preferred the free-text system, 36 per cent preferred the controlled vocabulary, and 12 per cent wanted both.

In this way, SUPARS is meaningful as both a design far ahead of its time and as a counterexample to established techno-utopian histories of the internet and the world wide web. The people credited as visionaries in this history almost always imagined a world where technology would improve human communication, intelligence and effectiveness absolutely.

For example, one of the most celebrated figures in this history is Joseph Carl Robnett ‘Lick’ Licklider, whose idea of a universal network directly inspired the invention of ARPANET, often described as ‘the first internet’. (Licklider was also deeply involved with similar 1960s and ’70s campus experiments for online search; he both funded and advised on several studies at MIT libraries that ran during the same period as SUPARS.)

In 1968, the year before SUPARS was designed, Licklider’s paper ‘The Computer as a Communication Device’ declared that: ‘In a few years, men will be able to communicate more effectively through a machine than face to face’ and described a rewarding, blissful society mediated by human computer interactions. Licklider predicted that ‘life will be happier for the on-line individual’ and that ‘communication will be more effective and productive, and therefore more enjoyable’. Licklider’s essay is typically both predictive and rosy for this futuristic genre about the potential of information technology.

Culture celebrates people like Licklider for being visionary in a positive vein. But, similarly, Atherton and the SUPARS research team should be celebrated for having seen and then designed for what the future would lose. Expanding our group of established internet visionaries to include people like Atherton, we see a more complex portrait of how different kinds of researchers envisioned the world to come. Where Licklider saw what we would gain from being able to communicate online with anyone in the world, Atherton’s group saw that we would lose expert intermediaries; they designed for this cost.

In 2022 and 2023, as the first generative AI search engines, including academic search engines such as Elicit and Consensus, were introduced to a wide set of users to both great excitement and scepticism, it is similarly useful to analyse what will be lost when researchers come to rely on these tools. When we can simply enter research questions to create instantaneous literature reviews, for example, there will not be merely a great positive leap forward. This new technology will create a lack of grounding and context, even as incredible new discoveries are made – a different loss than what Atherton saw, but similarly both intangible and deeply consequential. Being able to predict these consequences in advance, not mourning them as Luddites but actively considering how to help researchers overcome them, is a lesson we can learn from the SUPARS team.

 

The Art of Compression

hedgehogreview.com · May 30, 2023

At that moment, he splashed into the pond. The thin man, who had been holding his right hand, had suddenly let go.
“Oh!”
“He fell!”
“He fell!”
The onlookers were all clamoring for a better view when they were suddenly pushed from behind and plunged into the pond, too. The thin man’s clear, high laughter could be heard above the uproar.
The thin man scampered across the bridge like a black dog and ran off into the dark town.
“He ran away!”
“Damn it!”
“Was he a pickpocket?”
“A madman?”
“A detective?”
“He’s the tengu of Ueno Mountain!”
“He’s the kappa of Shinobazu Pond!”

“The Hat Incident” (1926) by Yasunari Kawabata (trans. J. Martin Holman)

for summer she needs
pretty dress cotton

cotton nottoc
coontt
tcoont
toonct
tocnot tocont
tocton
contot

“Notes During Long Phone Conversation with Mother” (2014) by Lydia Davis

What exactly separates the short story from the novel? As the contemporary Scottish writer William Boyd has observed, the issue is more complicated than it might at first appear. Novelists and short story writers, Boyd points out, rely on the same “literary tools,” including character, plot, setting, title, and dialogue, and their outputs—sentences and paragraphs—look the same on the page. The tempting answer is to fall back on the obvious difference: short stories are just shorter than novels.

Already in the late nineteenth century, critics argued that that answer wasn’t good enough. In one of the earliest attempts to define the genre, “The Philosophy of the Short-Story” (1885), Brander Matthews made the case that the short story’s distinctive trait is not length per se. (“The story which is short can be written by anybody who can write at all.”) In Matthews’s view, the short story is defined by its originality, ingenuity, and, above all, “vigorous compression.” On the last point, Matthews stressed that every word matters in the short story in contrast to the novelist’s freedom to digress; the short story form required a degree of discipline—in both planning and execution—that he doubted many successful novelists possessed (and he explicitly names Anthony Trollope here). Although his name is now rarely mentioned, Matthews’s argument about “compression” has been echoed in anthologies, how-to books, and works of criticism for more than a century. Boyd, for instance, traces Matthews’s line (without naming him), pitting the short story’s “compression” against the novel’s “expansion.”

Writers, editors, and critics have long acknowledged that the audience exerts pressure, too. The short story has, from the beginning, been a thoroughly modern form: Originally published in newspapers and magazines and consumed on railroads and omnibuses, short stories have been ideal material for people who do not have the time or patience for a novel. A mentor memorably distilled this point to the writer Olivia Clare Friedman: With the short story, “the timer starts as soon as you read the first sentence.”

How long, though, should the timer run? Twenty pages? Thirty? Forty? Fifty? But for more than a century, writers have also gone in the other direction, exploring the short end of the genre. A crafty Cosmopolitan editor in the twenties, for example, experimented with stories that could be printed on a few pages, even on opposite pages, in acknowledgement of the fact that, as W. Somerset Maugham (himself a contributor) observed, “Magazine readers do not like starting a story, and, after reading for a while, being told to turn to page a hundred and something” in the back.

In the last forty odd years, writers have shown increasing fascination with brevity, producing a new taxonomy of very short forms, including “microfiction,” “sudden fiction,” “nanofiction,” “hint fiction” (twenty-five words), “dribble” (fifty), “drabble” (one hundred), “trabble” (three hundred), and, of course, the staple of creative writing workshops, “flash fiction” (a category that may include all of the previously named species, depending on whom you consult). The appeal of the flash set for creative writing instructors is plain: Students can reasonably be required both to produce such minute stories and critique others’ flashes/dribbles/nanos in the space of a week or two. And, as critics have pointed out ad nauseam, flash fiction suits the age of the tweet and “tl;dr” in which writers can’t count on readers to hang in for long.

But very short fictions need not be concessions to workshop practicalities, the Internet, or shallow attention spans. They can also be—as my extracts show us—serious explorations of the formal possibilities of extreme compression. In the first passage, we catch the ending of one of Nobel laureate Yasunari Kawabata’s famous “palm-of-the-hand” stories, a phrase he coined in 1925. That timing is important. As in Matthews’s United States context a generation earlier, the Japanese literary scene of the early twenties was thick with magazines seeking slim submissions. Kawabata saw his miniscule outputs as a way to mediate between past and present. Though written in prose, often about modern life, very short fiction seemed to him a natural extension of the Japanese taste in literary minimalism evident in poetic forms such as haiku.

“The Hat Incident” shows immediate signs of the art of compression: The action consumes only three-and-a-half pages in English translation, lasts only a few minutes in the storyworld, and occurs in a single place, the moon-viewing bridge at Shinobazu Pond in Tokyo’s Ueno district. The titular incident concerns an unnamed young man who drops his hat in the pond and is goaded into retrieving it by a “thin man” with a “stern voice.” “Grasping the thin man’s hand with his right hand,” Kawabata writes, “and putting his left hand on the edge of the bridge, the man slid down the bridge pylon” in order to snag the hat with his toes. As the young man attempts to clamber back onto the bridge, the thin man releases his hand sending our hero and his hat into the pond. Onlookers “clamoring for a better view” are, in turn, shoved into the pond by the thin man, who disappears into the night.

In the closing lines, the crowd ventures several theories about the thin man’s identity. Notice that the first three suggestions are personality types known in the modern city: pickpocket, madman, and detective. The last two, meanwhile, are trickster figures from Japanese folklore: a tengu being a land spirit and a kappa a water sprite. Because the story cuts off here, readers are also at a loss to account for these curious events.

Should we favor a naturalistic explanation? (He’s crazy!) Or should we entertain a supernatural one? (He’s a demon!) This problem of interpretation sends us back with fresh eyes to the initial description of the setting. The moon-viewing bridge is a classic element of Japanese landscape architecture; the structure and the moon it reflects belong to the world of traditional symbols, along with the lotuses that dot the pond. Kawabata juxtaposes those attractions, however, with the intrusions of the modern city, most prominently “advertising lights” spilling brand names— such as “LION TOOTHPASTE”—on the water and distracting visitors from the moon’s gorgeous reflection (the ripples created by an evening breeze the make it appear “a fish with golden scales”).

As critics have long observed, the compression of the “palm-of-the-hand” stories often creates sticky ambiguities; readers are not shown quite enough data to be sure about the motives of character or whether what we think happened actually happened. The basic rules of many stories’ realities are murky—a problem often exacerbated, as seen here, by Kawabata’s love of the fantastic and folkloric. In the palms of his reader’s hands, Kawabata presents a miniature portrait—as vivid and mysterious as haiku—of modernizing Japan.

My second selection, meanwhile, makes Kawabata’s palm-of-the-hand stories seem lavish. American writer and translator Lydia Davis is often named among the masters of flash fiction, but the title is anachronistic because the author was already writing very short fictions before the term (or other recent coinages) had any currency. Many of Davis’s stories are one or two paragraphs long, some only a sentence or two. Take “Companion”: “We are sitting here together, my digestion and I. I am reading a book and it is working away at the lunch I ate a little while ago.”

However, with my chosen text Davis outdoes herself in practicing the art of compression. Here the reader is given only the rudiments of a sentence (“for summer she needs / pretty dress cotton) followed by a series of rearrangement of the letters of “cotton.” One could legitimately ask—as you may be asking right now—whether these crumbs really amount to a story.

The question is fair, as Davis is overtly testing the minimal deposit required by the art of fiction. She has said so herself, writing of her first experiments with extreme austerity, “I wanted to see just how brief I could make a piece of writing and still have it mean something.” It is instructive to recall (as Davis notes) the legendary six-word short story—“For sale. Baby shoes. Never worn.”—attributed by the literary agent Peter Miller to Ernest Hemingway. Miller claimed that Hemingway won a bet from his fellow writers on the strength of the tale. Arthur C. Clarke wrote to a friend that he could not “think of it without crying.”

Why? The story’s success relies heavily on the reader’s contribution. First, the reader needs to recognize that “For sale” is a formula from the classifieds section of the newspaper (the part where ordinary people posted their wants and wares). Then the reader must account for why the baby shoes were never worn. Here Hemingway’s taste for the tragic influences our judgment: The baby must have died! (In fact, there are lots of other plausible scenarios such as the possibility that the baby has large feet.)

Some assembly is required by Davis’s story too. The title provides an interpretive key—call with Mom—with which to decipher what follows. At the same time, the interest of the story comes from the way in which the title breaks down. After the first two lines, the jottings are not aides-mémoire but meaningless anagrams. On my reading, they are failed attempts to stave off boredom (it is a long conversation after all). Here, then, we are not so much reading a story as using the artifact—a page torn out of the “narrator’s” notebook—to create a plot. The art of compression is the triumph of inference.

For the short story writer, Matthews argued in 1885, “more than anyone else, the half is more than the whole.” That was a good early estimate. But our examples suggest that sometimes an eighth will do, or a sixteenth, or still less. Indeed, the virtuoso of the very short story can conjure a fiction out of almost nothing.

 

Seeing Beyond the Beauty of a Vermeer

The New York Times · by Teju Cole · May 26, 2023

“Mistress and Maid” at the Rijksmuseum exhibit in Amsterdam, the largest number of paintings by Vermeer ever assembled.Credit...Christopher Anderson/Magnum, for The New York Times

The violence of his era can be found in his serene masterpieces — if you know where to look.

“Mistress and Maid” at the Rijksmuseum exhibit in Amsterdam, the largest number of paintings by Vermeer ever assembled.Credit...Christopher Anderson/Magnum, for The New York Times

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• Published May 25, 2023Updated May 26, 2023

The afternoon I discovered Vermeer, I was passing time by browsing the books and publications piled up on the shelves at home in Lagos. I was 14 or 15. Amid the relics of my parents’ college studies (Nigerian plays, French histories, business-management textbooks), I found something unfamiliar: the annual report for a multinational company. I don’t remember which company it was, but it must have had something to do with food or drink, because on the front cover was a painting of peasants in a rolling field and on the back was a painting of a woman pouring milk.

I remember the quietness of that afternoon and my fascination with the images on the report, which seemed to transfigure the space around me. I learned from the printed captions that the paintings were “The Harvesters,” by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, and “The Milkmaid,” by Johannes Vermeer. These names were new to me at the time, but I was already an avid student of art and knew enough to know when something moved me. The Vermeer, especially, had a plain and impressive mystery. Never had I seen a wall so well painted or a human figure so convincingly situated in pictorial space. And all of it was suffused with a light that made it seem more like life itself than like other paintings. I would not have thought to call it “Northern light” back then, but I did know that I was looking at something foreign and alluring, something set in a world radically unlike the tropical one in which I was living.

Detail of “The Milkmaid.”Credit...Christopher Anderson/Magnum, for The New York Times

I am still moved by the quiet miracle of that boyhood afternoon. But my relationship with art has changed. I look for trouble now. No longer is a Vermeer painting simply “foreign and alluring.” It is an artifact inescapably involved in the world’s messiness — the world when the painting was made and the world now. Looking at paintings this way doesn’t spoil them. On the contrary, it opens them up, and what used to be mere surface becomes a portal, divulging all kinds of other things I need to know.

This spring, at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, I stood again in front of “The Milkmaid,” returning 33 years after that day in Lagos to her humility, her solidity and the ongoingness of her domestic work. I love it — I love her — no less than I ever did. It was she who inspired Wisława Szymborska’s epigrammatic poem “Vermeer” (translated by Clare Cavanagh and Stanisław Barańczak from the Polish):

So long as that woman from the Rijksmuseum
in painted quiet and concentration
keeps pouring milk day after day
from the pitcher to the bowl
the World hasn’t earned
the world’s end.

The curators of the Rijksmuseum have brought together, in a much-praised exhibition, the largest number of paintings by Vermeer ever assembled, 28 of the surviving 35 or so generally agreed to be by him. It is a feat of coordination by the organizers and of generosity by the lenders, a gathering unlikely to be repeated in this generation at such a scale.

But I had not been keen on seeing the exhibition, and the reasons why not began to accumulate. The entire run of tickets, some 450,000 of them, sold out within a few weeks of the opening, and even if I did manage to get one, the galleries were sure to be crowded. I was also skeptical of the bluntly narrow focus of the exhibition: a painting by Vermeer, followed by another, followed by another; most successful exhibitions need more context than this. But what was really beginning to grate on me was the breathless critical acclaim. The name Vermeer is, by now, a shorthand for artistic excellence and so much of the praise for the exhibition sounded like emotional shorthand too. Greatness, perfection, sublimity: the appropriate vocabulary for a certain kind of cultural experience. Those who had seen the show were envied by those who hadn’t. That it represented a “once in a lifetime” experience was taken as gospel. (And yet, how many of our best encounters with art have happened in a minor museum on a quiet day? What moment, fully inhabited, isn’t “once in a lifetime”?) The idea that the images were wonderful had somehow gotten mixed up with the dogma that the images were nothing but wonderful. Amid all this rapturous consensus, critical dissent was hard to come by.

But some Dutch friends arranged entry for me, weakening my resolve. Then, Martine Gosselink, director of the Mauritshuis (home of “Girl With a Pearl Earring” and one of the major museum lenders to the exhibition), invited me to walk through the exhibition with her after hours. Well, refusal at that point would have been absurd. Late in the afternoon on March 13, joined by a friend, we entered the exhibition. The last wave of regular visitors was ushered out, and there we were, three lucky viewers, with 28 Vermeers.

He was not prolific: He is thought to have made as few as 42 paintings in all. It’s reasonable to assume, as art historians did for a long time, that this slow rate of production was a consequence of a particularly meticulous technique. But X-rays and infrared imaging show that he made swift underpaintings and very few preparatory drawings. So what was he doing with all that extra time? For one thing, he had a day job as an art dealer, the profession he inherited from his father. For another, he was himself father to as many as 15 children (11 of whom outlived him). The household must have been noisy. Against the implied backdrop of that noise, the astonishing and self-possessed pictures arrive, two or three of them a year. These are pictures that seem to be doing things with light that no pictures had ever done before. The art historian Lawrence Gowing describes it as a certain heedlessness of subject, a certain faithfulness to pure appearance: “Vermeer seems almost not to care, or not even to know, what it is that he is painting. What do men call this wedge of light? A nose? A finger? What do we know of its shape? To Vermeer none of this matters, the conceptual world of names and knowledge is forgotten, nothing concerns him but what is visible, the tone, the wedge of light.”

Our little group paused in front of “Woman in Blue Reading a Letter,” and it was so beautiful that my heart almost stopped. The paint keeps to a narrow range of hues: The wall is off-white with blue undertones; the large map of the regions of Holland and West Friesland is light brown with a hint of green; the two chairs on either side of the woman have glimmering brass tacks that hold their deep blue upholstery in place. One chair is larger than the other, closer to us while the other is farther away, and between them is the space in which the woman stands. She is clad in a top of blue and a skirt of dark olive. All the colors are so muted, it is as though they are remembered rather than painted. The woman, in profile, in a deep reverie, her eyes dreamily downcast, holds the letter with both hands. There are ribbons in her hair. The blue top is a beddejak, a bell-shaped house jacket. She is pregnant. Scholars doubt that she’s pregnant, or they say that we can’t know. But we rely on scholars to tell us what we cannot see, not what we plainly can.

Detail of “Woman in Blue Reading a Letter.”Credit...Christopher Anderson/Magnum, for The New York Times

What has he written to her — for surely it’s a he and surely he’s the father of her child? Her lips are parted. Vermeer tightens his cord of suggestion around us. The map, the early morning, the letter that has traveled through the night to be delivered: A narrative heaves underneath the silence of the scene. There’s drama here, if not melodrama. We imagine someone far away whose awayness is being imagined by this other he has left behind. Perhaps the faraway one is a soldier or a sailor. The back of the chair on the left casts soft, bluish shadows on the wall. The window from which the light comes is only implied, not depicted, and the light falls on the woman’s forehead and on the gently swelling marine expanse of her beddejak. All of this is done in brushwork that is precise but not fussy, a wedge of light here, a wedge of light there. Our breath as viewers is collectively held because we don’t want to interrupt whatever this is. The woman is waiting for her lover to return, she is waiting for her child to be born and the painter is waiting, after working at his easel each morning, for the next morning to arrive, and the next, waiting for those favorable hours, until the work is complete. Lawrence Gowing is right that Vermeer is a painter of light. He is also, exquisitely, a painter of time.

But let us find the trouble now. All through Vermeer’s oeuvre are objects like those in “Woman in Blue Reading a Letter” that remind us the world is large. This was the world that was emerging after the protracted struggle by the Netherlands for independence from Spanish rule. During the 80-Years war and in its immediate aftermath, the Dutch established trading posts in Asia, Africa and in the Americas. An efflorescence of capitalism at home and overseas followed, and with it the beginnings of a colonial empire. Their own experience of subjugation did nothing to temper their desire to subjugate others. The Dutch East India Company dominated maritime routes and its shareholders raked in profits. The Dutch West India Company, meanwhile, was a significant force in the trade in enslaved people. Ordinary Dutch citizens grew wealthy from these criminal enterprises. With a renewed sense of who they were in the world, they filled their homes with rare objects and far-fetched finery. You could have luxurious things, and you could also have them depicted in paintings. The paintings were helpful reminders that you were mortal, yes, but also that you were rich.

In his perceptive book “Vermeer’s Hat” (2008), the historian Timothy Brook draws out some of the global provenances of the things we see in Vermeer’s paintings. He suggests, for instance, that the silver on the table in the “Woman Holding a Balance” could have had its origin in the notorious Potosí silver mine, a hellish place run on the labor of enslaved people in what was then Peru and is now Bolivia. The felt lining the hat of the soldier in “Officer and Laughing Girl” almost certainly came from beaver pelts sourced by French adventurers from the violent trade networks of 17th-century Canada. Brook traces a connection between this lighthearted genre scene and the bitter history of the “starvation winter of 1649-50,” when European greed for pelts led to expulsions, wars and the mass deaths of Huron Indian children.

The beddejak in “Woman in Blue Reading a Letter,” Martine tells me, is painted with ultramarine, the rarest and most expensive of the blue pigments that would have been available to a 17th-century Dutch painter. Ultramarine was made from lapis lazuli, which was imported into Western Europe from Afghan mines; it came from beyond the sea (Latin “ultra marinus”). Possibly the use of such an expensive pigment allowed Vermeer to attach greater prestige and a higher price to his paintings. Possibly he liked its association with paintings from earlier eras in which it was used to paint the blue of the Virgin Mary’s robe. The effect of ultramarine is dazzling, emotional. But who was mining the lapis lazuli in Afghanistan and under what conditions?

Detail of “The Glass of Wine.”Credit...Christopher Anderson/Magnum, for The New York Times

Any work of art is evidence of the material circumstances in which it was produced. The very best works of art are more than evidence. Inside a single frame, within a single great painting, complicity and transcendence coexist. This is what I thought as I went through “Vermeer.” The exhibition did not broach those subjects, and I did not read the catalog, which was scholarly and insightful, until later, but earlier that afternoon I had lunch with Valika Smeulders, the head of the history department at the Rijksmuseum. Smeulders co-curated “Slavery,” an epochal show held at the museum in 2021. It made use of artifacts from the Rijksmuseum’s own collections and a wide range of other sources. There were paintings, prints, drawings and documents, as well as plantation bells, foot stocks, a brass collar, a branding iron bearing a logo (probably of the Dutch West India company) and a ceremonial glass made for the raising of toasts by successful enslavers. Visitors to the Rijksmuseum, used to more vainglorious accounts of their national history, were confronted by visions of the brutality of life on plantations in Batavia, South Africa and the Banda Islands and by the stories of a select few of the hundreds of thousands of people enslaved by the Dutch.

One painting featured in that exhibition was by Pieter de Wit, who was possibly a student of Rembrandt’s. De Wit’s painting depicts the director general of the Gold Coast, one Dirk Wilre, in an ornate interior in Elmina Castle, in present-day Ghana. De Wit, as a painter, is not at all in Vermeer’s league, but I’m struck by the details his painting shares with Vermeer’s “The Geographer,” painted in the same year, 1669: the single open window to the left, the leaded glass, the terrestrial globe, the richly patterned rug on the table. But unlike “The Geographer,” De Wit’s painting has two other figures in it. One of them is a woman: Black, naked to the waist, down on one knee, clearly in a condition of servitude. If the slippers on the floor are hers, her servitude might be sexual as well. The kneeling woman offers Wilre a landscape painting showing Elmina Castle. Her body, and her land. The brutality is explicit.

Detail of “Woman With a Pearl Necklace.”Credit...Christopher Anderson/Magnum, for The New York Times

The exhibition at the Rijksmuseum, which runs through June 4, is full of arresting pictures, many of them from the mid-1660s when Vermeer’s career was at its peak of focus and invention. In those years he made a number of immortal pictures, several of them variations on the theme of a woman in a hushed interior, solitary, wearing a fur-trimmed beddejak. In “Woman Holding a Balance,” she is pregnant and the room is darker than usual, lit primarily by the daylight that has sneaked around the lemon-yellow curtain. The scales the woman holds up are empty — she’s balancing, not weighing. On the table in front of her are coins of gold and silver as well as pearls, and behind her is a painting of the Last Judgment. In another painting, the “Woman With a Pearl Necklace” stands in profile looking left. It’s the same yellow curtain, now drawn aside to admit gentle light. On the left side, in shadow, is a dark blue porcelain jar, its hard gleam contrasting with, on the right, the softness and yellowness — a yellow slightly cooler than that of the curtain — of her beddejak. “A Lady Writing” is another arrangement in yellows and blues. We don’t know who she is, this long-ago woman; we don’t know who any of them are and probably never will. She, too, wears the yellow jacket. (Vermeer’s few props recur like a playwright’s favorite actors.) She is seated at her writing table and looks at us directly with what seems to be real human understanding. It is a stunning picture, in the collection of the National Gallery in Washington. I had seen it before but never properly looked at it. This is why, finally, one goes to museums: for the chance to learn to see again, to see beauty, to see trouble. And, yes, there is the “Girl With a Pearl Earring,” a startling and immediate vision. In the context of its studio mates it is just another mountain peak in the range. But what a range, and what a peak.

As we were heading out of the exhibition, I dashed back and went to stand again in front of the painting that had surprised me most: “A Lady Writing.” Her gaze has a shadowy complexity to it, a soft smile; on her irises are white points. (She feels far more real to me than the “Mona Lisa” ever has.) There are white highlights, too, on the enormous pearl earrings she wears. If real, the pearls would have been harvested by pearl divers in the Gulf of Mannar, between present day Sri Lanka and India. In her right hand is a quill pen, paused. Underneath it, a streak of white paint perfectly denotes a sheaf of white paper. The ornate writing box, of different kinds of wood and with round metal studs, is most likely from Goa under Portuguese rule. Made by whom? I found myself asking again. Under what conditions? Behind her is a painting in dark umber of a viola da gamba, a stilled music that suggests or confirms the love theme of the picture. But if her lover is absent, who has interrupted her? At whom is she smiling with such gentle familiarity?

Detail of “A Lady Writing.”Credit...Christopher Anderson/Magnum, for The New York Times

At you. This gaze has held yours for centuries, suspending time on your behalf. There’s not a single hard line of drawing anywhere in the painting, just layers of paint set beside one another, patches of color blurring into one another as though seen through an old camera lens that refuses to focus. The softness of “A Lady Writing” is so pervasive, it’s as though the picture were on the verge of dissolving. Morning after morning Vermeer sits at his easel, as the world rages out there, the world where people are kneeling in subjection, where people are being branded with a hot iron. Even right outside his own door, there’s the violent brother-in-law who threatens to beat up the women in the household. But the pictures are permeable to these outside troubles, are in fact continuous with them. Those amorous soldiers aren’t playing dress-up. They fight, they kill. We scan Vermeer’s oeuvre in vain for an image of a simple happy family, of mother, father, child in domestic peace. No, the world of the pictures is poetic and lyrical, but it is also fractured, vulnerable, isolated and anxious. His paintings (and those by others; the implications of this argument are not limited to Vermeer) cannot be taken as mere decorations or technical achievements. They contain the knowledge of their own sorrow and can tolerate more honest context than we often allow them. To reduce them to ads for beauty, free-floating signifiers of culture and elegance, does them a disservice. On their long journey across the ages, the paintings of Vermeer bring with them both consolation and terror. And so long as this is the case, this world has not yet earned its end.

Teju Cole is a novelist, an essayist and a photographer. He wrote the magazine’s National Magazine Award-nominated On Photography column from 2015 to 2019. He teaches writing at Harvard. Christopher Anderson is the author of eight photographic books, including “Odyssey,” out in November.

A version of this article appears in print on , Page 20 of the Sunday Magazine with the headline: Reframing Vermeer

吴其尧评《弥尔顿传》︱病眼虽枯心未碎

 学界一般把英国诗人约翰·弥尔顿（1608-1674）的生平和创作分为三个阶段：第一个阶段（1608-1639），自十七岁进入剑桥大学基督学院，毕业后没有参加工作，而是随家人搬迁至位于伯克郡的霍顿村，弥尔顿在此居住了五年，把他的大部分时间花在阅读上，并且“继续显然已经着手的学术研究”（《弥尔顿传》，95页，以下引用此书仅标注页码）。1638年春，弥尔顿像当时的英国年轻贵族子弟一样前往意大利游历，1639年8月回到英国，这样也就结束了弥尔顿第一阶段的生活。这一阶段弥尔顿创作了一些较短的诗歌和戏剧作品，如《快乐的人》《沉思的人》《科玛斯》《利西达斯》。第二个阶段（1640-1660），这是弥尔顿从事政治活动的时期，1649年即国王查理一世被处死的这年，弥尔顿被任命为国务会议的外语部拉丁文秘书，负责处理外交文书。1652年，弥尔顿双目失明，于是他作为拉丁文秘书的公务职能缩小到了有限的范围，比较繁重的任务交给了别人，但他仍为清教主义的革命政权四处奔走。这一阶段弥尔顿的主要作品是论战性质的政治小册子和十四行诗，政治小册子一共有二十五本，其中二十一本是用英语写的，四本是用拉丁文写的。十四行诗的数量不多，一共是二十四首，其中十九首是用英语写的，五首用意大利文写成。第三个阶段（1660-1674），查理二世复辟后，弥尔顿受到迫害，曾遭囹圄之灾，经人多方说情方被释放，此后幽居家中闭门不出，通过口授由人笔录从事著作，三大史诗作品《失乐园》《复乐园》《力士参孙》完成于这一阶段（参见王佐良《英国诗史》）。马克·帕蒂森的《弥尔顿传略》（金发燊、颜俊华译，生活·读书·新知三联书店，1992年版）里差不多也是如此划分的：弥尔顿的一生是个三幕的戏剧。第一幕显示出他潜居霍顿平静安宁的生活，《快乐的人》《幽思的人》和《黎西达斯》便是这一幕的表演。第二幕中他呼吸着党派激情与宗教仇恨的猛烈炽热的空气，产生了那闪耀在他散文小册子战斗号角中令人惊骇的火焰。那三部伟大的诗作，《失乐园》《复乐园》和《力士参孙》，是他孤身只影又普罗米修斯般伟大的最后时期的产物，那时他双目失明，贫病交迫，又没有依靠，他独自在堕落的世界面前，证实公道、节制和审判即将来临（《弥尔顿传略》，16页）。

《弥尔顿传》一共分为六个部分，完全遵循上述三个阶段的划分，每两个部分为一个阶段。两位作者在“引言”里讲了撰写这部传记的原因。人们普遍认为，弥尔顿的生平资料比起莎士比亚来要多得多，为他立传应该是轻而易举的事。十七世纪晚期就有五部弥尔顿的传记，“这些作者或是与弥尔顿相识，或是从认识弥尔顿的人那里获得素材”（第1页）。这些人里包括弥尔顿的外甥爱德华·菲利普斯、文物研究者约翰·奥布里和安东尼·伍德、弥尔顿的挚友西里亚克·斯金纳、自由思想家及哲学家约翰·托兰等，早期的这些传记作家在不同时期与弥尔顿有过接触，因而他们的著作具有一定的权威性。但是，正因为这些人或者是弥尔顿的亲属或者是他的挚友，所以他们有关弥尔顿生活和言论的记录“在盲目地为一位好友和一位有培育之恩的舅舅辩解，旨在回应各种针对弥尔顿生平和名誉的抨击”（第2页）。这样的传记就会失去客观性，而最需要客观看待的，“就是弥尔顿讲述自己的生活（如在《再为英国人民声辩》中）或在诗里以第一人称语气发言（如在《失乐园》的多个开篇祷告中）的部分”（同上）。弥尔顿习惯根据不同作品的需要来塑造自己的经历和个人形象，比如他在《再为英国人民声辩》中称，在霍顿的时期是一段自我教育和闲暇的时间，展现了西塞罗式“高贵的闲暇”，但是他对霍顿的描述是出于论战的需要，不应被理解为对霍顿那些年生活的可信记录（97-98页）。其实，弥尔顿在霍顿的生活一点也不“闲暇”：1637年是他在霍顿时期最为重要的一年，这一年年初他的父亲老弥尔顿收到法庭传票，一位叫托马斯·科顿的对他提起诉讼，指控他与人合谋诈骗，试图窃取科顿家族的财产。1637年4月3日，弥尔顿的母亲萨拉在霍顿去世。1637年8月10日，弥尔顿的好友、基督学院年轻的研究员爱德华·金在前往爱尔兰探望亲人的途中，在安格尔西岛海岸溺水身亡，弥尔顿为他写了悼诗《利西达斯》，这是弥尔顿最伟大的悼亡诗，也可以说是最优秀的英语短诗（99-106页）。鉴于此，两位传记作家认为有必要在研读这些带有自传色彩的篇章段落基础上重新写一部传记。可以说，这部传记的一个显著特点是，首次对事实的记录建立在查阅了所有可用文献的基础之上。还有一个显著特点是，作者对史料编撰的研究，几个世纪以来学者对十七世纪早中期宗教、社会尤其是政治生活的理解处于变化之中，对其作品的研究也处于变化之中，最明显的例子是著名诗人T. S. 艾略特在写于不同时期的两篇评论弥尔顿的文章里，对弥尔顿的评价可谓大相径庭。不妨举一个例子来说明有必要重写这部传记的原因，《弥尔顿传》的两位作者在第五章中写道：几个世纪以来，人们一直认为，弥尔顿于1632年举家搬迁至霍顿村，直到1638年前往意大利之前，他一直居住在此。但是，两项最新的发现却颠覆了这个说法。1949年，在英国国家档案馆发现的大法官法院的四项结案清楚地表明，从1632年9月14日（也许更早）到1635年1月8日（也许更晚），弥尔顿一家不住在霍顿，而是住在哈默史密斯。1996年，在哈默史密斯和富勒姆档案馆发现的一些文件表明，弥尔顿一家在1631年4月30日前就住在哈默史密斯，而弥尔顿的父亲可能一直在劳德派小礼拜堂担任堂区俗人执事（71页）。所以事实是，1632年7月3日，弥尔顿获得文科硕士学位后，从剑桥搬到位于哈默史密斯的一座房子里，确切位置不得而知。

这部《弥尔顿传》不仅仅是对弥尔顿生平和作品的介绍，对弥尔顿不同时期的思想的研究也是其重中之重，所以传记的标题是John Milton: Life, Work, and Thought。弥尔顿的思想既激进又复杂：“他青年时期对文化的态度遥遥领先世人，但思想上却克制压抑，后来为教会改革而抗争、为弑君和共和制辩护，最终在王政复辟的凶险中保持了政治操守和精神独立。”（第3页）他的思想虽激进复杂，但从长远看来都是占据主流和上风的。比如，他认为政府无权干涉公民的宗教信仰，人民如何做礼拜以及做不做礼拜不应由国家法律机构规定。关于出版自由，他认为统治者无权决定哪些书籍应该被出版哪些书籍不该被出版。他还主张“婚姻以相互喜爱、思想契合为基础，一旦失去这些基础，应当以离婚来结束这种痛苦，让双方可以尝试新的婚姻关系”（同上）。这种婚姻观在十七世纪还是非常超前的，为后来的人们所普遍接受。弥尔顿自己一生有过三次婚姻，婚姻生活并没有给他带来多大的幸福，这也许可以解释他为什么一再写关于离婚的小册子。关于政治体制，他认为最好的政体应该是共和制，他自己的祖国迄今还不是共和制政体，但他的这一思想对法国和美国都产生了巨大影响，“法国革命者借用了弥尔顿的观点为他们的革命事业服务”。美国的开国元勋如本杰明·富兰克林和托马斯·杰斐逊都研读过弥尔顿的作品，“并以此来设计他们的共和制、解决一些具体问题”（同上）。

读完这部传记，我们可以对弥尔顿的生平、著作和思想有一个较为全面的了解。有三个读者比较感兴趣的问题值得一讲：一、他为什么会被称为“基督学院的淑女”（The Lady of Christ’s），他对这个绰号的态度是什么？二、他1638年开始游历欧洲意大利，其间中断旅行回国的原因究竟是什么？这次游历给了他什么影响？三、他是怎么失明的，失明对他一生有着怎样的影响？

1631年7月8日，弥尔顿在剑桥大学基督学院举行的一次活动中发表演说：《第六篇演说试讲稿》。在这篇演说稿中，弥尔顿首次提到了他的绰号“淑女”：“有人最近给我取了一个绰号‘淑女’。为什么我在他们眼里缺少男人气概呢？……我猜想是因为我从无勇气像职业拳击手那样对着瓶口喝酒，或是因为我的手掌没有由于把犁而长老茧；或是因为我没有在七岁时就去农家做雇工，以致从未在阳光下睡午觉——最后也许是因为我从未像那些嫖客一样展示我的威猛阳刚。我希望他们不再丑态毕露，就像我不经意间会显得像女人一般。”（Some people have lately nicknamed me the Lady. But why do I seem to them too little of a man? … I suppose because I have never had the strength to drink off a bottle like a prize fighter, or because my hand has never grown horny with holding a plough-share; or because I was not a farm-hand at seven, and so never took a midday nap in the sun-- last because I never showed my virility in the way these brothellers do. But I wish they leave playing the ass as easily as I the woman.）

这是弥尔顿本人的“夫子自道”，从语气上判断他似乎对这个绰号有些不满。据《弥尔顿传》的作者说：这个名称的英文词最早由弥尔顿的遗孀提出“他太俊美了，大家都叫他‘基督学院的淑女’”。两位作者推测：弥尔顿获得这个绰号，可能是因为他的肤色白皙，或是因为他的举止或外表青涩、柔弱（65页）。马克·帕蒂森在《弥尔顿传略》里说：“他的同学们开玩笑给他取的‘基督学院淑女’的外号是他举止温文尔雅的证明。”（《弥尔顿传略》，第8页）虽然，弥尔顿对大家给他取的绰号有些不满，但他很珍惜这个绰号，因为这是维吉尔的绰号。据生活于四世纪的文法学家多纳图斯关于维吉尔的传记《传略》记载，维吉尔在那不勒斯求学时的道德行为堪称楷模，当时人们给他的绰号是“童贞女”，所暗示的少女气质与“基督学院的淑女”是一致的（65页）。

弥尔顿像当时的英国贵族子弟一样对欧洲文艺复兴的策源地意大利始终怀有向往之情，早在1629年年底于剑桥大学就学期间，他就开始学习意大利语，还有证据表明他可以用意大利语阅读和写作，他大量阅读了但丁、彼特拉克、塔索、阿利奥斯托等意大利作家的作品，他创作的十四行诗中有五首是意大利语写就的。弥尔顿为什么要去意大利游历？据《弥尔顿传》的作者推测：这段旅行可能代表了他对上层社会的向往，或是要逃离家庭（他没有工作，与寡居的父亲住在霍顿），或是逃避某些丑闻，又或是摆脱父亲的期许——父亲希望他对当时发生的一些事情不要反应过度从而引起当局的注意，对他不利（111页）。这些推测都不无道理，但更深层的原因是：弥尔顿遗传了父亲在音乐方面的天赋，对意大利的音乐文化有浓厚的兴趣；意大利有一批学识渊博的名人，他想利用自己业已掌握的意大利语结识这批名人。总之，无论出于什么原因，他决定要去探索这片“清新的树林和新鲜的草地”（《利西达斯》最后一行“fresh woods and pastures new”）。（111页）

弥尔顿在拿到护照、几封介绍信和一大笔钱后即开始了欧洲之行。第一站是法国巴黎，然后到了位于现在法国南部独立的萨伏伊公国。萨伏伊公国包括现在法国萨瓦和上萨瓦地区，以及意大利的奥斯塔山谷和皮埃蒙特地区。萨伏伊的领土向南延伸，沿着一条狭窄的走廊通向地中海，港口就是尼斯（115页）。弥尔顿在这里没有停留多久，到达尼斯后，他找到了一条前往热那亚的通道，热那亚当时是一个独立的共和国，弥尔顿在此首次领略了一个富庶的共和国，但他在热那亚的时间也不长，乘坐轮船经里窝那、比萨、美第奇港最终抵达托斯卡纳。

弥尔顿似乎只是途径比萨，然后沿着阿诺河走了四十五英里到达佛罗伦萨。据他在《再为英国人民声辩》里说，他在佛罗伦萨逗留了大约两个月，他特别喜欢这座城市，因为它不仅有着优雅的语言，还拥有高雅的才子。他在此结交了许多门第显赫、学识渊博的绅士朋友（118页）。这也说明了他来意大利游历的目的所在。弥尔顿在佛罗伦萨最重要的活动是拜访了意大利物理及天文学家伽利略。他在《论出版自由》里提到了这次会面：“就在那里，我找到并拜访了著名的伽利略，他已年迈，由于对天文学的思考与方济各会和多明我会的审查员想法不一致，遭到了宗教裁判所的软禁。”（121页）为什么说与伽利略的这次会面对弥尔顿来说很重要呢？弥尔顿拜访伽利略时，这位天文学家已经失明，而且因为自己的著作几乎丧命。我们在伽利略身上或许可以看到弥尔顿晚年的形象，而在弥尔顿身上显然存在着对失明主人想入非非的倾心爱慕，我们在读《失乐园》时可以看到伽利略的名字和对他所取得的成就的赞颂。

从佛罗伦萨出发，弥尔顿越过亚平宁山脉经博洛尼亚和费拉拉到达威尼斯，他在威尼斯将自己在一路上搜集到的大批书籍运往英国，据他的外甥说这些书都是稀有的珍本，其中有两箱他精心挑选的乐谱。他的目的地是罗马，在罗马逗留了一段时间，主要也是跟一些才华横溢的绅士见面畅谈，然后离开罗马前往那不勒斯。那不勒斯当时是西班牙的一个总督行省，他在那里经人引荐结识了詹巴蒂斯塔·曼索侯爵，侯爵是一位艺术资助人和诗人，弥尔顿跟他交往颇为投契，两人有诗作往还，表达了相互之间的倾慕之情。

弥尔顿在《再为英国人民声辩》中声称，他本来打算去西西里岛，然后去希腊，但是“英格兰内战的坏消息把我召回来了”（133页）。他自己说“当我的公民同胞们在国内为自由而战的时候，我为了获取知识却在外国优游自在是卑鄙无耻的”。这一庄严的说法后被广泛引用，以此来说明他中断意大利游历匆忙回国的原因。不过，据马克·帕蒂森在《弥尔顿传略》里说，弥尔顿回国的步伐并非匆匆忙忙，而是十分从容不迫的。他在罗马停留了两个月，又在佛罗伦萨待了两个月（《弥尔顿传略》，44页）。值得注意的是，弥尔顿回国的理由很是令人费解，《弥尔顿传》的作者分析了其中令人费解的原因：第一，英格兰当时还没有爆发内战，1639年1月26日查理一世要向苏格兰人宣战，但弥尔顿在消息传到那不勒斯时已经启程返回，而且英格兰内战始于1642年。第二，对一个匆匆而归的人来说，弥尔顿花的时间太长了，他由陆路缓慢地经过威尼斯和日内瓦，六个月后才回到家。第三，弥尔顿有可能想效仿威廉·利斯高和乔治·桑迪斯（都是英国作家、翻译家和旅行家），前往西西里岛，但他并不想去希腊，希腊似乎不太可能是他憧憬的地方，除非是缅怀其过去的历史。总之，弥尔顿无意前往希腊，而且他所给出的理由，是根据后来发生的事件以及他在1654年出于论战目的而构建的，并不是依据他在那不勒斯的回忆（134页）。

意大利之行对于弥尔顿一生而言是极为重要的，他对自己的未来充满了信心，也找到了未来的方向。他知道自己可以成为——也许只能成为——一名诗人，这是他的责任和使命。尽管当时教会和国家日益显露的危机很快把他引向了其他方向，但他已经明确了自己最终发展的方向，用他自己的话来说，他已经取得了文化上的胜利（140页）。马克·帕蒂森也认为，弥尔顿的意大利之行出现了两种相互冲突的感情旋律：诗人天生强烈的感受力和自由人对教权统治的愤懑。在接下来的人生的第二阶段，弥尔顿卷入政治斗争，为自由而战，写了大量的小册子，这是与他的意志相抵触的，是违背他的天赋才能的，但这一阶段是他诗人生涯的一个插曲，是他一生真心诚意生活的一个片断（《弥尔顿传略》，73页）。由于政治愿望的最终破灭，他将回到当诗人的本能上来，始终还是诗占据了他的真情实感，还是诗人的荣誉构成了他的雄心壮志（同上，103页）。

1649年3月15日，弥尔顿被任命为外语部拉丁文秘书，最初任期是一年，但实际上他在这个岗位上干了四年半之久。《弥尔顿传》花了较多的篇幅叙述了外语部的内部组织结构以及它与被清洗的议会之间的复杂关系，这有助于我们理解弥尔顿所做的工作和他在处理公务时面对的各种压力和困难。弥尔顿为什么要接受这份工作？据《弥尔顿传》的作者分析：公职确乎有些魅力是其他工作所没有的，外交团以及与它相关联的活动具有明显的吸引力，有时它还会任用那些满腹经纶的博学者和近期欧洲大陆最顶尖的人文主义学者。当然，这个职务也确实提高了弥尔顿的经济收入（229-230页）。弥尔顿在《为英国人民声辩》中自己记述了接受这项职务的动机：“始终没有人看到我为升迁而奔走，也没有任何人看到我为个人目的而出入于议会大厅，或出现于下议院，或企图通过朋友提出什么要求。”接着他说出了在国内政局动荡时期自己大部分财产被扣押，同时又要缴付一份不合理的税款，过着俭朴生活的窘境。弥尔顿接受这份公职还有一个重要原因是他对自己能力的自信，他可以极其娴熟地翻译拉丁语口语和书面语，他可以在极短的时间内写出一封外交书信来（233页）。

弥尔顿在这个岗位上恪尽职守，他精力旺盛、能力过人、辩才无碍，他还能流利地运用拉丁语向欧洲各国发出英国的声音，很显然，国务会议任命弥尔顿担任这一职务是明智之举也是成功之举（233页）。然而，这份工作也给他带来了身体上的伤害。从1649年3月开始，他便感觉到因为用眼过度，视力严重受损，视力变弱似乎是在他三十六岁时，先是左眼，然后是右眼，症状逐渐加重，到1652年上半年终于完全失明，这时他才四十三岁。弥尔顿的父亲直到八十四岁，视力依旧完好无损，他的母亲则因弱视从三十岁开始就戴眼镜，他有可能遗传了母亲的“弱视”。另据眼科医生告知，弥尔顿罹患的很有可能是间歇性闭角型青光眼，这种病在现代是很容易治愈的，但在十七世纪，几乎可以肯定会导致失明（235页）。

弥尔顿在1654年9月28日写给朋友的一封信中详细写明了视力变弱最终失明的经过：“我想或多或少有十年了。在这十年里，我注意到我的视力变得越来越弱，越来越模糊。……甚至在早上，如果我像往常一样开始阅读，我的双眼内部便会立即感到剧痛，使我无法继续读下去……视力一天天地衰退，色彩也随之变暗，眼睛内部似乎破裂了；而现在，纯黑一片，好似带着熄灭或灰白色的光，好似与它交织在一起，汹涌而出。不过日夜在我眼前漂浮的雾似乎更接近白色，而不是黑色；当我转动眼球，就会有一点微弱的光仿佛穿过一条裂缝般透进来。”（234页）

失明是人所可能遭受的最残酷的痛楚之一，比起其他人来，弥尔顿的痛苦则尤甚，因为他是一个整天只同书本、文字打交道的人，没有人比他的损失更大了。肉体的痛苦尚在其次，他还要经受政敌带给他的精神的痛苦。有一位名叫萨尔马修斯在与弥尔顿的论战中竟然这样嘲笑弥尔顿的失明：“小犬，一度是我可爱的小乖乖，如今目光迟钝，或者不如说是个瞎子，他从来不曾有过心灵上的洞察力，如今丧失了肉体上的视力；一个愚蠢的花花公子，异想天开竟自以为是个美人；一头肮脏不堪的畜牲，全身没有比烂眼皮更带人气的东西；于他最合适不过的判决便是把他绞死在最高的绞刑架上，枭首示众，悬挂在伦敦塔上。”（《弥尔顿传略》，120-121页）这番话无异于恶毒的人身攻击。

弥尔顿自己也在其中的两首十四行诗中谈到了失明的痛苦，一首写于1652年他刚刚失明后不久，那时的心情是这样的：

我这样考虑到：我未及半生，就已然

在黑暗广大的世界里失去了光明，

同时那不运用就等于死亡的才能

对我已无用，纵然我灵婚更愿

用它来侍奉造我的上帝，并奉献

我的真心，否则他回首斥训——

于是我呆问：“上帝不给光，却要人

在白天工作？”——忍耐来阻拦

这怨言，答道：“上帝不强迫人作工，

也不收回赐予：谁最能接受

他温和的约束，谁就侍奉得最好：

他威灵显赫，命千万天使奔跑，

越过陆地和海洋，不稍停留：——

只站着待命的人，也是在侍奉。”（屠岸译）

看得出弥尔顿的内心是非常痛苦的，他甚至对上帝也抱有怨言，但他没有绝望。三年后的1655年他又写了一首十四行诗，谈及失明，心情似乎有了变化：

西里克，三年来我这眼睛全失了神，

它尽管外表上没有斑点，没有污垢，

被剥夺了光，已忘掉了看。一年到头

这废眼珠里再也没出现过日月星辰，

再没有出现过一个男人或一个女人。

可我只坚定、忍耐、向前行。没有抗议，

没有反对上帝的手或苍天的旨意，

也绝对没有让我的希望减少半分，

心，退缩一寸。什么在支持我，你要问？

良心！朋友，意识到：是为了捍卫自由

我才用力过度而永远失去了它们！

我这神圣的使命现已传遍了全欧。

这认识会带我——若无更好的带路人——

走过人世的舞台，瞎，但知足而优游。（陈维杭译）

痛苦依然深切，但他宽慰自己：为了捍卫自由的神圣使命而失明，而且这一使命已经传遍欧洲，他不再有任何怨言了。我们看到了一个开朗自信的弥尔顿，我们期待着他的人生第三个阶段的到来，那时更加辉煌的三部史诗将横空出世。

最后要说一说《弥尔顿传》这部书的翻译，这部长达五百多页的巨著移译之难自不待言，语言层面的艰难尚在其次，原著作者查阅了大量的档案材料，牵涉到众多的人物和事件，对弥尔顿生活时期的英国乃至欧洲的历史必须熟稔于心。总体而言，两位译者的译笔流畅可读，中文表达精准地道。《弥尔顿传略》一书的译文较之《弥尔顿传》则要逊色得多了，有不少地方佶屈聱牙，几乎难以卒读。两相比较，更显得《弥尔顿传》翻译的难能可贵，感谢两位译者的辛勤付出，为中文读者奉献了一部关于传主生平、作品和思想的传记。

 

Cruelty and Luxury: The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie at Fifty - Dissent Magazine

dissentmagazine.org · by Sam Russek

Cruelty and Luxury: The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie at Fifty

Luis Buñuel’s most famous film is a furious, if restrained, critique of the wealthy and a scathing look inside their collective unconscious.

▪ Spring 2023

Still from The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (Flickr)

Last fall marked the fifty-year anniversary of Luis Buñuel’s The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, a surreal, plot-light comedy about the waking anxieties of the upper classes in France. Filmed three years after the May 1968 protests, following President Charles de Gaulle’s shaky triumph over the largest student-led general strike ever attempted in the country, Discreet Charm sees its wealthy sextet drift from soiree to soiree, dreaming of their own embarrassment and demise. The anniversary couldn’t have come at a better time.

The U.S. film industry seemed to have all but forgotten the concept of class until Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite was a surprise hit in 2019. Since then, film and TV studios have inundated us with class comedies, thrillers, dramas, whodunits, and gnarled combinations of all of the above. Last year, there was Triangle of Sadness, which satirizes gender roles and exploitation aboard a luxury yacht; The Menu, a horror revenge fantasy about service-worker exploitation at a gourmet restaurant; Glass Onion, about, among other things, Elon Musk; and the second season of The White Lotus, which, like the first, takes a knock at the high-end resort crowd, but this time with lighter punches.

We don’t need to squint for these pictures to blend together. But what of their satire? Do they offer any fresh insights? Not really. Instead, for the most part, it’s the mere fact of luxury—the idea that an expensive lifestyle could be afforded by someone at all—that we’re supposed to find absurd. It is absurd; but this point either dulls through repeated use or flattens into a kind of wish-fulfillment fantasy. Wouldn’t it be nice to vacation in Sicily?

Although the central characters in Discreet Charm are practically ancestors of our contemporary resort dwellers, Buñuel takes an entirely different tack, intertwining a furious, if restrained, critique of power with a scathing look inside the wealthy’s collective unconscious. He does so not merely to poke fun, but to destabilize our vision of class domination altogether. Paraphrasing Friedrich Engels, Buñuel once said his view of the artist’s purpose was “to shatter the optimism of the bourgeois world” and force the viewer “to question the permanency of the prevailing order.” For all its surrealist pivots and tangled dream sequences, his film is compulsively lucid.

Today’s class-conscious comedies wouldn’t presume to go so far. Instead, they settle for evoking schadenfreude—a clumsy substitute for actual politics. The result is an overarching sterility in tone, an absence of concerted interest or intent, and a rich topic reduced to window dressing. Buñuel was often didactic and prone to sadism, and he was never much of an optimist. Yet in retrospect, there’s a confidence under all that insolence. His films are still surprising, not just in their visual novelty, but because he believed, through actions big and small, symbolic and literal, our social order could be flipped on its head. He’d seen it happen before.

When Buñuel was born in 1900, the first of seven children, Spain was reeling from its loss of colonies in the Spanish−American War. In response, the ruling classes were turning with nostalgia toward monarchism, as if reifying tradition might restore what had been lost, if not materially then spiritually. Buñuel wrote that his childhood in Calanda, a small agrarian village in the northeast, had an “almost medieval atmosphere.” He was a rich Jesuit school student surrounded by poverty and death. His father Leonardo had accrued a fortune in colonial Cuba before returning to his homeland after the war. Like many bourgeois schoolboys before and after him, Buñuel not only rejected the principles of his upbringing but made a career out of his scorn for them.

Enrolling at the University of Madrid, Buñuel studied entomology for a year before falling in with the artists. He formed close friendships in the students’ residence with Federico García Lorca, José Moreno Villa, and Salvador Dalí. With Dalí, Buñuel encountered the surrealist movement in Paris. He was mostly interested in theatrical plays before co-directing Un Chien Andalou (1929), his first film, with Dalí, and L’Age d’Or (1930)—two phantasmagoric avant-garde works that challenged middle-class sexual mores. Audiences found these films shocking, punkish, and more than a little misanthropic. By 1932, Buñuel had dissociated himself from the surrealist movement altogether—later calling it “bourgeois revolting against the bourgeoisie”—and joined the Spanish Communist Party. His next film, Land Without Bread (1933), was more overtly political, a faux-documentary with surreal elements depicting poverty in rural Spain. When the Spanish Civil War broke out three years later, Buñuel coordinated the Spanish Republicans’ film propaganda effort from Paris. In 1938, he was in Hollywood consulting on a film project when it seemed all but inevitable that Franco’s nationalists would win. With returning to Spain now impossible, he bounced around Los Angeles and New York looking for steady work before settling in Mexico City in 1946, where he supported his family by directing pulp films.

These low-budget, populist features were “uneven,” by Buñuel’s own admission; his shooting schedules were rarely longer than twenty-four days. (Still, there are some gems, like Los Olvidados, a coming-of-age story set in Mexico City’s slums, and El Bruto, about a slaughterhouse worker who is hired to break up a rent strike.) His 1961 film Viridiana, about a would-be nun in Spain who attempts to “reform” the homeless people in town by paying them to live on her inherited estate, marked his return to European audiences. The beggars behave themselves while Viridiana is around, but when she goes into town they rebel, breaking into her home and throwing a feast resembling Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper. The film is a scathing rebuke of charity, which despite the best intentions can’t change the unequal distribution of wealth. In 1962, Buñuel released The Exterminating Angel, about a supernatural force that traps a group of wealthy guests at a dinner party after compelling the help to leave their posts. Without the servants, the film supposes, their employers couldn’t even leave the house.

Discreet Charm builds off Viridiana and The Exterminating Angel by again desecrating the dinner banquet. Each time the band of Parisian socialites sits down to eat, they’re interrupted by incidents escalating in severity. A café runs out of tea, milk, and coffee; the army drops in unannounced; a firing squad lines them up against a fireplace. While these gatherings are symbols of an in-group’s power, in Buñuel’s film they become signs of impotence—of an elite in love with its ceremonies but unable to consummate them. What are the rich without their dinner parties?

Early in the film, one of the six, François Thévenot, proposes an “experiment.” He prepares a martini and calls a chauffeur into the manor to drink it. The chauffeur obliges, downing the whole glass in one gulp, and Thévenot smirks. “See that?” he asks his friends. The chauffeur had stumbled directly into Thévenot’s point: as a servant, he wouldn’t know that a dry martini is a sipping drink. Thévenot’s friend Don Rafael concurs. “No system will ever enable the masses to acquire refinement.” Refinement, signified by luxury, requires an opposite to preserve its value.

The poor treatment of service workers by wealthy consumers is also of central interest to the contemporary class comedy. But the bad behavior of the rich seems to stem from obliviousness rather than deliberate cruelty, suggesting there is still hope for the clueless customer—that she could restore workers’ dignity simply by adjusting her perspective. When the wife of a Russian oligarch in Triangle of Sadness insists that the yacht workers pause their daily tasks to go down the water slide, she says she wants them to experience the privileges they can’t afford, essentially ordering them to have fun. Her actions are well-meaning but blinkered; she doesn’t see that the workers can’t refuse her. Interspersed between these scenes of naïveté are reminders that the wealthy characters are only human, caught up in their own family dramas, lovers’ quarrels, and the like: They know not what they’ve done; we can only hope they might change. “WEALTHY PEOPLE OF PRIVILEGE, THIS FILM IS ABOUT YOU,” exclaimed a promotional poster, which advertised the movie like an instructional tape.

This framing suggests such mistreatment is incidental to the class structure rather than foundational to it. Buñuel knew better. His films reveal how the little rituals that differentiate the lifestyles of the rich from the common lot act as everyday reminders of the prevailing social hierarchy and serve to bolster it. In his work, there’s no expectation that we might shame the wealthy into respectful conduct. Instead, the entire hierarchy is challenged from below. No matter the victor, Buñuel saw the classes in persistent conflict with each other, acting and reacting to repeated grabs for power. When given orders, it’s possible his characters might simply say no. And even when they don’t, through surreal intervention, the action plays out as if they did.

What happens in the years following a successful defense of a hierarchy? Discreet Charm is an attempt to play out that question. Insulated as the main characters are, protected by the police and plainclothes agents of some unspoken regime, they can’t help but torment themselves with dreams of what might disrupt their peace.

The nightmares begin innocuously enough. Around halfway through the film, after a colonel in the French military invites the group to a private dinner party, Henri Sénéchal dreams that when they show up it isn’t a house at all, but a theater stage, with fake decorations and plastic food, and he’s forgotten his lines—a classic anxiety dream. Immediately after Sénéchal wakes, another dream begins, depicting the same dinner party, this time in the colonel’s actual home, but focused on Don Rafael, an ambassador for the fictional Latin American country of Miranda, who defends his homeland against an onslaught of insults. “I’m told it’s common practice in your country to bribe a judge or a policeman,” one guest says. Not making eye contact, Don Rafael denies all charges. “Today we are a true democracy,” he says. “Corruption no longer exists.” This from a man who smuggled cocaine into France to distribute with the help of his colleagues.

As the film unfolds, the dreams escalate, propelling the narrative forward even though not much has occurred. Don Rafael is hounded by a group of student-aged Mirandan guerrillas whom he labels as terrorists. Etiquette, in his hands, is a kind of shield. When one of the guerrillas confronts him in his home, he retrieves his gun from an ornate soup tureen and pushes it against her back before offering champagne and asking about her family. When she protests, he chides her: “Violence leads nowhere. I keep saying so.”

Don Rafael is the antithesis of depictions of the rich in many contemporary class comedies; they are almost invariably stupid or childlike. We’re more likely to find these would-be villains as embarrassing refractions of The Office’s Michael Scott: oafish in a charming way, unable to fend for themselves, and largely unaware of how their power affects others. Among the French socialites—some of whom are stupid and childlike—Don Rafael is an outlier. But his presence makes explicit the link between their cushy lifestyle and the violence safeguarding it just off-screen.

On more than one occasion, Buñuel’s focus roves from his six main characters to plunge into the subconscious of a cop or soldier; their fates, like their psyches, are linked to our dinner guests by their vested interest in the social order. While the lives of the cops and soldiers are calm, boring even, in the recent past they used brutality and torture and now they are haunted by blood-soaked ghosts. In light of the revolutions of the 1960s, the film presents a thesis: even failures have consequences, and while rebellions can be quelled, the bourgeoisie might still crumble under its own psychic weight.

A half-century later, it can be hard to know what to make of that contention. For decades, most rebellions seemed ineffective amid an overarching sense of stasis—the purported end of history. We might say that Buñuel foresaw this state of affairs. Punctuating the film at random intervals are scenes where the central cast abruptly disappears from Paris and turns up on a quiet country road. There are no sounds other than their footsteps. It’s an eerie quiet, tense with possibilities, and yet nothing happens. These segments, reminiscent of purgatory, are the film’s most abstract flourish.

Discreet Charm has been called Buñuel’s most accessible work, and it won a slew of mainstream awards, including the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. If bourgeois optimism had been shattered, the establishment had a funny way of showing it. He didn’t show up to accept the award, but when the Academy called, asking him to submit a picture of himself with his new trophy, he obliged, donning a wig and oversized glasses for the photo in a weak act of protest. At around this point in his career, Buñuel told Max Aub, “I’m a revolutionary, but revolution horrifies me. I’m an anarchist, but I’m totally against the anarchists.” Perhaps the reason Discreet Charm has been so popular is that it can’t or won’t do more than name the problem—though it names the problem better than most. Vague anti-capitalism is an easier sell. Its argument is largely unspoken, which allows directors to shirk the duty of paving new ground and permits audiences to take what they like and ignore the rest.

A show like The White Lotus is soaked in inevitability: by the end of the very first scene of each season, the viewer knows someone will die, but they can safely assume the rest of the wealthy will live on, practically unperturbed, from resort to resort. On its face, the premise that the rich can get away with murder is realistic, but the events that propel the plot to that conclusion are facile. There’s no real sense of possibility. The lower classes may grit their teeth and curse, but they could never hope to materially change their situation. Meanwhile, if anyone took the show’s critique to heart, they are hard to find. After the second season aired, the Four Seasons hotel in Sicily where The White Lotus was filmed saw a rush of fans booking rooms—which cost upward of $4,200 per night—to mimic their favorite characters’ vacation. Clearly, for some, these satires were viewed as a form of flattery.

If Discreet Charm was responding to the fallout of the May ’68 protests, when countries around the world were funneling millions into policing dissent, today’s class comedies are reckoning with the state of affairs after decades of such investment. The fact that it feels like so much more is possible in Discreet Charm is by design, but it’s also a byproduct of the time. Despite or because of this enclosure of our collective imagination, we deserve the sort of aesthetic openness Discreet Charm invites us into. I often think of those pastoral scenes where Buñuel’s socialites are pacing toward nothing, unsettled, almost frantic in the accentuated quiet. Those moments were charged with potential. If the class comedy can return with such cultural force, that sense of chance can too. But it will require more than conciliatory TV shows to bring it back.

Sam Russek is a reporter-researcher at the New Republic.