The Aesthetics of Movement by Paul Souriau Review
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March 25, 1984
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FICTION
THE Man IN THE Grayness FLANNEL Conform II. By Sloan Wilson. (Arbor House, $sixteen.95.) Back in the 1950's Sloan Wilson wrote a novel, ''The Homo in the Grayness Flannel Suit,'' that caught the essence of what was then becoming known as the rat race. It was the story of a chronic worrier, Tom Rath, whose desire to be himself could not be reconciled with his ghostwriter's merchandise. A paratrooper in World War Two, Tom hoped for peace every bit a Westport, Conn., commuter. But there were the usual coin demands of a growing family, the need for a bigger house and the strain of a wedlock to a adult female who had grown up in a wealthy family expecting everything. In that location was also the lurking secret of the illegitimate son Tom had fathered in Rome in the war. The novel had a happy decision. Tom inherited grandma'due south large house, and his wife, Betsy, forgave his wartime infidelity. But now, a quarter-century afterwards, we learn in a sequel that the Raths' delectation was momentary. Tom Rath, every bit the new novel picks him upward in his centre age, is just the same onetime worrier. He still loathes writing for other people, he still frets because his paycheck can't meet occasional extravagances. Moreover, his teen-age children present a whole new set of exasperations. His relationship with his married woman is outwardly calm, simply he is fix for a fling. The fling, with a good-humored woman who is non a worrier, makes the story.
Sloan Wilson writes of dalliance with a certain impact. Merely, in pursuit of another happy catastrophe, he contrives an unreal conclusion. It so happens that Tom and Betsy are each ready for divorce and each relieved to learn the other has been two-timing. The common rush to forgive and separate is difficult for the reader to swallow. Could whatsoever divorce ever have gone so smoothly, shedding contentment on everyone involved? But if the novel every bit a whole is unconvincing, it has its idyllic moments. Readers volition respond to the grapheme of the woman who teaches Tom Rath not to worry. John Chamberlain
* ABENG. By Michelle Cliff. (The Crossing Press, Cloth, $xvi.95. Paper, $6.95.) This novel explores Jamaican society through the eyes of a 12-year-sometime girl. Light-skinned Clare Fell is torn between the rural civilization of her mother, Kitty, and that of her father, ''Boy-Boy,'' descendant of a once wealthy line of British plantation owners. The book depicts Clare's rite of passage, her physical maturation paralleling her growing awareness of the gulf created by color and degree. Though this is basically a mixed-breed world, social status is jealously guarded by a light-skinned aristocracy eager to deny its origins. Clare, an idealist who has been influenced by Anne Frank's ''Diary of a Young Girl,'' attempts to resist these prejudices by emphasizing her connections to her mother's globe. Forgotten history is the real subject of ''Abeng.'' Its way - a series of short vignettes that often digress from the linear narrative - is an almost polemical exhuming of Jamaican mythology (''abeng'' refers to the conch shell the insubordinate maroons of Jamaica used ''to laissez passer their letters and accomplish one some other''). At times this complimentary-ranging technique distracts from the characters and setting. Dramatic situations are eschewed for sometimes grandiose historical generalizations (''the liberty which followed on abolition turned into veiled slavery, the model of the rest of the western world''). But Michelle Cliff has a keen eye for detail - the congregation whose singing drowns out its British minister's anomalous harpsichord, the deranged white adult female who atones for her mixed child by refusing to wash herself for 35 years. The novel'due south narrative inconsistencies are made upward for past the author'southward gift for pithy anecdotal descriptions that bring Jamaica's present and by to life. - Francis Levy
* DAU: A Novel of Vietnam. By Ed Contrivance. (Macmillan, $xiii.95.) Morgan Preston, the protagonist of ''Dau,'' is a relentlessly average eye-American youth who joins the Air Forcefulness at 17 and goes to Vietnam. Early on he is injured during a minor skirmish. Recovered and returned to duty, Morgan finds his Vietnamese girlfriend missing; she afterward turns out to exist a casualty of My Lai. He requests a transfer to a remote northern outpost and when it is overrun he makes his way south alone through hostile territory. In this section, the book'due south strongest, he begins to hear voices, and by the fourth dimension he's rescued he's completely psychotic, though able to hide his symptoms. His friends dice horribly all around him, the terminal a suicide. Morgan survives and returns to the The states where his worsening psychosis leads to a soul-destroying stay in a Veterans Administration hospital. Technically cured, he escapes to the anonymity of Los Angeles, where he finds work and a married woman, Rhonda, who nurses him through more paranoia and a bout with alcoholism. Finally Morgan finds a therapist who breaks downwardly his defenses, assuasive him to acknowledge his losses and exorcise the ghosts of friends who plague his dreams. Unfortunately, the numb detachment that characterizes Morgan'south response to Vietnam also afflicts Ed Dodge'southward prose style; Morgan becomes almost individual when he's crazy. ''Dau'' has much force of truth but little of fine art; it's all-time touch is its title, the Vietnamese discussion for ''pain.'' - Madison Bong
* LA REGENTA. Past Leopoldo Alas Translated and introduced past John Rutherford (Academy of Georgia, $20.) This 733-folio novel - published in 1885 and translated now for the first time into another linguistic communication - was largely scorned when it initially appeared in Spain. The apparent reasons were its set on on the church and its recognition of the importance of the sexual drive to the agreement of human behavior. Some 15 years ago information technology was rediscovered, and we are told in the introduction that it is now considered a classic by most critics in Spain. It is a rich, complex study of life amongst the aristocrats in a small northern Spanish town. But the story - a love triangle that leads to an amateurish duel - emerges slowly. The many and varied characterizations are detailed and convincing, and the descriptions of the boondocks and its mores are persuasive. On the negative side, ''La Regenta'' may well tell rather more than the average reader will want to know. The three main characters are the lovely, madonna-like Ana (the judge'south wife and La Regenta of the championship), the rather fusty guess Don Victor and the elegant Don Alvaro, Ana's lover. Also important on the scene is the canon Don Fermin, who is idea of ''as a wise theologian, philosopher and lawyer'' and nigh whom we learn much that is not consistent with his public epitome. The novel's rather formal mode is leavened by a sardonic outlook that gives information technology life. A reader with eccentric imagination might speculate that if Evelyn Waugh past some unlikely take chances had been a 32-year-old professor of Roman police force at the University of Oviedo in 1885, he might have written ''La Regenta.'' No such frivolous conceit, still, will exist put frontwards here. - Robert P. Mills
* CROSSOVER. Past Wayne Karlin. (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, $13.95.) One time more beyond the bridge of suspension of disblief; this time, the international hanky-panky gives united states of america an idealistic immature Israeli hole-and-corner agent, Josef Ascher. He is assigned, as he believes, to assure the safe inflow in Israel of an aged, renowned Russian Jewish dissident scientist, a crystallographer named Yitzhak Abramov, who is almost to be deported along with other Russian Jews on a sealed train to Austria and the West. Abramov has become a symbolic figure whom the P.L.O. wants destroyed, Josef's bosses at Mossad, the Israeli intelligence bureau, tell him. Josef must infiltrate Belgrade to get a line on Nasir Razak, principal of the P.L.O.'due south European operation. He is accompanied by Hanita Kahan, a female amanuensis. The plot is never as neatly ordered every bit Abramov'due south crystals; information technology's more similar the layers of an onion that must be peeled abroad. It may exist that a Nazi butcher who knew Josef'due south male parent and is thought dead is really alive and after Abramov. And maybe Mossad's motives aren't all equally idealistic as Josef thought at first. In fact, Josef is finally driven to accepting ''the knowledge of expose . . . the whoring we did to stay alive.'' Still, I, for 1, resent having claret-and-thunder thrillers told in the starting time person - so that I'm always sure of at least i character who's going to survive. But ''Crossover'' does take one not bad thing going for information technology - a ripsnorting, whistle-blowing train hijacking. In books or movies, whether it'due south Buster Keaton'due south ''General'' or Donald Westlake's ''Kahawa,'' yous can hardly go wrong with a train hijacking. - Sherwin D. Smith NONFICTION
* THE Author AND Homo RIGHTS. Edited past the Toronto Arts Group for Homo Rights. (Anchor/Doubleday, Cloth, $17.95. Newspaper, $ten.95.) It is no clandestine that among the many people in the world imprisoned, abducted or interned in psychiatric wards by tyrannical governments are hundreds of writers and journalists. ''The Writer and Human Rights'' is an anthology of statements made at a 1981 conference in Toronto held ''in the proper name of those victims of political brutality who no longer have voices.'' The volume starts out to exist an test of the plight of those writers and what can be washed for them. But many participants in the conference seemed concerned less about the bludgeons of dictators than nearly persecutions within what was referred to, pejoratively, equally ''bourgeois democracy,'' a phrase that, to cite one speaker, masks the ''brutal things, the truly monstrous things that are happening in our society.'' Thus we find Rick Salutin maxim, ''I'm just horribly embarrassed to exist a function of all this.'' Mr. Salutin is talking almost his ain country, Canada, a place he seems to discover self-patently repugnant. Plenty of this sort of whining was to be heard in Toronto, which is what may have led one participant, the German writer Hans Magnus Enzensberger, to mutter of writers who insist not merely on freedom but on special treatment in their own countries, ''as if they were the pets of society and should be given some kind of especially delicious dog nutrient.'' Mr. Enzensberger is one of the writers who redeem this volume from its mediocre posturings. Among the others is Susan Sontag, who makes a rigorous effort to define political standards. The book is worth its price for the remarks of the exiled Czechoslovak writer Josef Skvorecky, whose tempered wisdom points to the worst threat posed to the liberty of writers in free societies. Information technology comes from the confusion and ignorance of those who would fail to defend ''bourgeois democracy'' because they entertain the illusion that some cathartic upheaval, commonly called a revolution, will supervene upon information technology with a more than just society. - Richard Bernstein
* THE AESTHETICS OF MOVEMENT. By Paul Souriau Edited and translated by Manon Souriau (Academy of Massachusettes $22.50.) When Marcel Duchamp'due south nude descended the staircase in 1912, she was following the atomic number 82 of Eadweard Muybridge, whose stop-action photographs a generation earlier pioneered the scientific study of motion. Similar Duchamp, the French philosopher Paul Souriau (1852-1926) was inspired by Muybridge, whose photographs of human and animal locomotion illustrate this first and splendid translation of ''The Aesthetics of Movement'' (1889). In the volume'south text and photographs, movement is dissected - birds in flight, water cascading over rocks, a gymnast on a balance beam, fireworks, ice-skating. Soriau believed in the sovereignty of science as those of an earlier historic period believed in the infinite wisdom of God. ''Ideally,'' he wrote ''artful judgement would exist entirely based on reason.'' Just first the study of dazzler must be removed from philosophy and relocated in the realm of physics, physiology and psychology. That is the plan of this study, as Souriau attempts to divorce judgments of taste from the subjective chaos of feelings by developing a scientific esthetic based on principles derived from mechanical laws. Informed by this fin de si ecle industrial consciousness, Souriau's standard of beauty, unsurprisingly, turns out to be functional efficiency - ''the intelligent adaptation of things to their cease.'' Souriau's eloquent prose conveys both a scholar'southward dispassion and a preacher's righteousness, but his rational estheticism is not simply a testament to a bygone era. Like the Cubists' decompositions and the Futurists' dynamism, Souriau's systematic approach to movement adds dimension to our perception of the world. - Sue M. Halpern
* FURTHER UP THE ORGANIZATION. By Robert Townsend, (Knopf, $15.95.) In 1970 Robert Townsend, the sometime head of the Avis Hire A Car Arrangement, wrote ''Upwardly the Organisation,'' a compilation of his irreverent ideas nearly running a business concern that was packaged as a manual for main executives. Now he has reisssued his best seller with a new title, xxx new chapters and a number of updates. This time there is more than emphasis on corporate democracy, or what he calls ''participative management.'' The formula, notwithstanding, is unchanged. In 1970 Mr. Townsend - whose success at Avis is credited partly to the ingenious ''We try harder'' advert entrada - urged corporate bosses to burn their advertising departments and supersede their advertisiing agencies; he suggested the aforementioned fate for public relations departments. In this edition, he extends the recommendation to industrial relations departments, which, he contends, only create antagonism between workers and management; he likewise inveighs against consultants and newly minted M.B.A.'s. This being the 1980'due south, he throws in some unprofound guidance on computers and on pocket-size business. (''Work out of your abode as long as you can. Then your garage.'') Mr. Townsend has the same informal, no-nonsense tone that made the beginning edition of his book then readable, and much of his advice has merit for sure kinds of companies. (At others it would be disastrous.) But the shock value of the original piece of work has worn off, and following hard on the publication of several more than serious books nigh management, ''Further Upward the Organization'' does not accept much to add. - Sandra Salmans
* SUPERSTARS: How Stellar Explosions Shape the Destiny of Our Universe. By David H. Clark. (McGraw-Hill, $17.95.) ''Superstars'' is really 2 books shuffled together into one. The offset reads like a lecture in freshman astronomy, all nearly stars and why they smooth and what they're made of and how far away they are. The 2d could be a worried professor's attempt to Carl Sagan-ize his subject, lest by midterm the hall be empty. Readers who want the science will not be disappointed, only a bit frustrated past David H. Clark's breathlessness about ''our ultimate roots among the stars.'' Readers who like science served with a dollop of cultural history will get some satisfaction also. But whether Mr. Clark can keep everyone'south attention is debatable. His thesis is that exploding stars, known as supernovas, take had a profound effect on the concrete universe and humankind. There is no doubtfulness almost the showtime part - stars are the powerhouses of creation, and whatever happens to them is of fundamental, if somewhat afar, importance. Merely how important supernovas have been for human history, however, should perchance exist decided past nonastronomers. Mr. Clark discusses theories of the stars' effect on human history from the aboriginal Chinese obsession with angelic portents to Aristotelian philosophy. The appearance of new stars in 1572 and 1604 certainly did occur during a crucial epoch, when the Roman Cosmic Church was getting nervous about heaven's perfect immutability. But how all this fits into what Mr. Clark calls our ''continuing cosmic chance'' may not be amenable to scientific enquiry. His inclusion of a wonderful quotation from Mark Twain alludes to the problem: ''There is something fascinating almost scientific discipline. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.'' - Wayne Biddle
* THE Adept High SCHOOL: Portraits of Grapheme and Culture. By Sara Lawrence Lightfoot. (Basic Books, $xix.95.) In that location aren't many social scientists brave enough to requite an esthetic dimension to their work, merely Sara Lawrence Lightfoot has tried to ascertain what'due south good in our high schools by bringing the ''compassionate regard'' and ''discerning gaze'' of the portraitist to half-dozen of them. As she says, adjusting her metaphor somewhat, she has tried to create a tapestry, ''a textured piece with shapes and colors that create moments of involvement and accent,'' conveying ''the tone, mode and tempo of the school environment as well as its more static structures and behaviorial processes.'' Mrs. Lightfoot's good schools fall into urban, suburban and private categories. They were chosen for her ''by school people throughout the state who were knowledgeable nearly the educational landscape.'' Mrs. Lightfoot explains the choices simply does not comment on her decision to omit parochial schools - a curious one when in that location is considerable involvement in them. Good schools, she concludes, tend to have inspired principals, superior teachers given the respect they deserve, sensible attitudes toward adolescents, institutional integrity and coherent objectives. These characteristics may not ever exist axiomatic in her portraits, but then goodness turns out to be relative, ''a holistic dimension whose interpretation requires an embeddedness in context.'' If Mrs. Lightfoot ways that each school tin can only be judged with reference to its detail circumstances, she hasn't helped us very much. Withal, her portraits are remarkably successful. - Judith K. Davison
* THE Barbarian COUNTER-REVOLUTION: Cause and Cure. By W.West. Rostow (University of Texas, $13.95.) Seekers of untried paths will get encouragement from W. W. Rostow's ''Barbaric Counter-Revolution,'' which offers a program to dispel the ''virtual intellectual and policy bankruptcy in the two major political parties.'' Mr. Rostow, the Rex Thousand. Baker Professor of Political Economy at the University of Texas, did a stint as a special banana to President Johnson. He thinks ''the fatal flaw'' in Ronald Reagan'due south supply-side strategy was trying to mix economic expansion - through tax cuts and other concessions to the individual sector - with tight monetary controls. The incompatible measures, he says, brought united states of america high interest rates and a hard-to-milk shake recession. Mr. Rostow's prose is relentlessly polysyllabic. He seems reluctant, moreover, to explain what he means by ''barbaric,'' a term that suggests the sacking of Rome more than than it does the slicing of budgets. The closest he comes is to signal out that our failure to achieve total employment without aggrandizement constitutes ''a truly barbarian performance for a rich, well-educated, technologically resourceful, democratic nation.'' In place of barbarism, Mr. Rostow holds out promise for a ''civilized synthesis,'' the principal feature of which would be annual wage-policy agreements among business, labor and Government. Only ''a sense of communal purpose transcending special interests,'' he concludes, can redeem our fortunes. - Richard J. Margolis
How the Camera Became Candid Unposed pictures were a virtual impossibility for many decades subsequently the invention of photography. Cameras were simply too bulky and the necessary exposure times too long to allow for such informality. It wasn't until faster movie and meaty cameras with faster lenses were introduced in the early on 1900's that the starch was finally taken out of the photograph. For a young German language painter and printmaker, Felix H. Man, 1 such camera, the Belong-Pocket Kodak, was a significant artistic and journalistic tool. In 1915, while serving in the trenches, he took the candid photographs of soldiers that would afterward inspire him to help develop a new visual form - photojournalism.
* MAN WITH CAMERA: Photographs from 7 Decades (Schocken, $29.95) is a retrospective of his photographs culled from the seminal picture show magazines for which he worked. Through informative commentaries, Mr. Man not only traces his professional person life but too offers a firsthand history of the photograph essay, a uniquely German approach to narrative picture journalism that he and the editor Stefan Lorant fine-tuned. Mr. Human being likewise chronicles many of the special assignments that introduced him to important political and religious leaders, artists and writers. And for more than 70 years he unmasked them with the glass eye. - Steven Heller
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/1984/03/25/books/in-short-064189.html
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