Re: THE CONTRADICTIONS OF ENFORCED SOCIALITY

[Dennis R Redmond <dredmond@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Sat, 12 Jun 1999, Ralph Dumain wrote:

> The universe of Krapp's last tape is not that of John Coltrane.

Try expanding your universe a bit. Beckett and Genet are the indispensable
playwrights of late modernism, and Coltrane is the indispensable musician
of late modernism; they inaugurated strikingly similar aesthetic
revolutions, only in a very different set of materials.  Modernism is
literary-critical-speak for "international aesthetics"; in Beckett's case,
a gorgeous Irish lyric tradition, handed down by Yeats and Joyce and so
many others, comes into contact with the culture-industrial categories of
Fifties Hollywood. With Genet, we're talking about the gay urban
subculture of Paris, clashing with postwar French Gaullism amidst
decolonization and the great anti-imperialist struggles of Algeria and
Vietnam. With Coltrane, it's the vertical extension of jazz forms (the
music of the African American liberation struggle) into new types of
atonality, and the horizontal extension of the jazz musical palette via a
variety of African, Asian etc. instruments and musicians.

-- Dennis