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Cinematic Thinking
Cinematic Thinking
Philosophical Approaches to the New Cinema

EDITED BY james Phillips

Stanford University Press

Stanford, California
Stanford University Press
Stanford, California

© 2008 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University.

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any

means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in
any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission
of Stanford University Press.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Cinematic thinking : philosophical approaches to the new cinema I edited by
James Phillips.
p.cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-o-8o47-58oo-o (cloth : alk. paper)--ISBN 978-o-8047-5801-7 (pbk. :
alk. paper)
r. Motion pictures--Philosophy. I. Phillips, James, 1970-
PN1995·C5352 2oo8
791.4301--dc22

Designed by Bruce Lundquist

Typeset at Stanford University Press in uii3.5 Adobe Garamond
 Contents

Contributors VII

Introduction: What Can Cinema Do?

James Phillips

Alfred Hitchcock: Fowl Play and the

Domestication of Horror
Kelly Oliver 11

2 Luchino Visconti: Insights into Flesh and Blood

Alexander Garda Duttmann 27

3 Michelangelo Antonioni: The Aestheticization of

Time and Experience in The Passenger
Alison Ross 40

4 Robert Altman: The West as Countermemory

MichaeiJ. Shapiro 52

5 Carlos Saura: Cinematic Poiesis

Krzysztof Ziarek 68

6 Glauber Rocha: Hunger and Garbage

james Phillips 90
vi Contents

7 Margarethe von Trotta: Leviathan in Germany

Cecilia Sjoholm 109

8 Rainer Werner Fassbinder: The Subject of Film

Andrew j. Mitchell 128

9 Wim Wenders: The Role of Memory

JeffMalpas 146

10 Claire Denis: Icon of Ferocity

Jean-Luc Nancy 160

Notes 171
Index 189
 Contributors

ALEXANDER GARCIA DUTTMANN is professor of philosophy and visual

culture at Goldsmiths College, University of London. Recent publications
include Philosophy ofExaggeration (London: Continuum, 2007); Visconti:
Einsichten in Fleisch und Blut (Berlin: Kadmos, 2006); and So ist es: Ein
philosophischer Kommentar zu Adornos "Minima Moralia" (Frankfurt am
Main: Suhrkamp, 2004).
JEFF MALPAS is professor of philosophy at the University ofTasmania, in
Hobart, Tasmania. He is the author of many books and essays on a wide
range of philosophical topics ranging from the history of philosophy to
applied ethics. He is perhaps best known for his work on the philosophy of
Donald Davidson and Martin Heidegger and on the philosophy of space
and place. His most recent book is Heidegger's Topology (Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 2006).
ANDREW J. MITCHELL is assistant professor of philosophy at Emory Uni-
versity. His research interests include materiality, mediation, and the phi-
losophy of literature. He is the author of a number of essays on Heidegger,
Nietzsche, Derrida, and James Joyce. Andrew Mitchell is the cotransla-
tor of Heidegger's Four Seminars (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
2003); and coeditor of Community, Communication, Communism: The
Thought of Georges Bataille (Albany: State University of New York Press,
forthcoming). He is currently completing revisions to a book-length study
entitled The Fourfold: Thing and World in Late Heidegger.

vii
viii Contributors

JEAN-LUC NANCY is professor of philosophy at the Universite Marc Bloch,

Strasbourg. Among his many books, he is the author of the following
tides published by Stanford University Press: Multiple Arts (2oo6); A Fi-
nite Thinking (2003); The Speculative Remark (2001); Being Singular Plural
(2ooo); The Muses (1996); The Birth to Presence (1993); and The Experience
ofFreedom (1993).

KELLY OLIVER is W. Alton Jones Chair and professor of philosophy at

Vanderbilt University. She is the author of more than fifty articles and
fifteen books, including The Colonization ofPsychic Space: A Psychoanalytic
Theory of Oppression (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004);
Noir Anxiety: Race, Sex, and Maternity in Film Noir (Minneapolis: Uni-
versity of Minnesota Press, 2002); Witnessing: Beyond Recognition (Minne-
apolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001); Subjectivity Without Subjects:
From Abject Fathers to Desiring Mothers (Lanham, MD: Rowman and
Littlefield, 1998); Family Values: Subjects Between Nature and Culture (New
York: Routledge, 1997); Womanizing Nietzsche: Philosophy's Relation to "the
Feminine" (New York: Routledge, 1995); and Reading Kristeva: Unraveling
the Double-Bind (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993).

JAMES PHILLIPS is an ARC Australian research fellow in the School of

Philosophy and History at the University of New South Wales. He is the
author of The Equivocation of Reason: Kleist Reading Kant (Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press, 2007); and Heidegger's Volk: Between National
Socialism and Poetry (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005).

ALISON ROSS teaches in the Centre for Comparative Literature and

Cultural Studies at Monash University, Melbourne. She is the author of
The Aesthetic Paths ofPhilosophy: Presentation in Kant, Heidegger, Lacoue-
Labarthe, and Nancy (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007).

MICHAEL J. SHAPIRO is professor of political science at the University

of Hawaii. Among his recent publications are Methods and Nations: Cul-
tural Governance and the Indigenous Subject (New York: Routledge, 2004);
and Deforming American Political Thought: Ethnicity, Facticity, and Genre
(Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2006). He is currently complet-
ing a manuscript entitled Cinematic Geopolitics.

CECILIA SJOHOLM is associate professor in the Program of Aesthetics at

South Stockholm University College and the author of The Antigone Com-
plex (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004).
 Contributors ix

KRZYSZTOF ZIAREK is professor of comparative literature at the State

University of New York at Buffalo. He is the author of Inflected Language:
Toward a Hermeneutics ofNearness (Albany: State University ofNew York
Press, 1994); The Historicity ofExperience: Modernity, the Avant-Garde, and
the Event (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2001); and The
Force ofArt (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004). He has also
published numerous essays on Coolidge, Stein, Stevens, Heidegger, Benja-
min, lrigaray, and Levinas, and he has coedited two collections of essays:
Future Crossings: Literature Between Philosophy and Cultural Studies (Evan-
ston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2000); and Adorno and Heidegger
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007). He is the author of two
books of poetry in Polish, Zaimejlowane z Polski and Sqd dostateczny.
Cinematic Thinking
 Introduction
What Can Cinema Do?

JAMES PH ILll PS

ONE WAY A BOOK of philosophical essays on film might begin

is with an attempt to justify bringing philosophy and cinema together.
Something could be made of the fact that the two share a constitutive and
ambiguous relation to the past. The reality now projected on the screen,
before which the present of its technological projection effaces itself, is
no longer real. And by arriving after the event, as Hegel intimates in the
preface to the Philosophy ofRight, thinking opens up the difference from
actuality in which it can lay claim to being the truth of what is. 1 Notwith-
standing the physical exertions, managerial vigilance, and, for want of a
nicer if not better term, power politics that are seemingly prerequisites of
the cinematic profession, the filmmaker is the contemplative among the
artists. The specificity of the cinematic art is the passivity of the techno-
logical apparatus of reproduction before a given scene: to put it a little too
pompously but not, for that matter, inaccurately, cinema is the contempla-
tive eye of the storm of the technological manipulation ofbeings. The myth
common to philosophy and cinema is that they acquiesce in front of the
spectacle of what is. This myth does not so much inform philosophy's tide
to truth as ground the very understanding of truth. Cinema, which to be-
gin with could not be acknowledged as art by the terms oflate nineteenth-
century aesthetics because a realistic art is an oxymoron, perhaps should
not have found a place so quickly among the traditional arts. 1his is not to
suggest that cinema should have been assimilated to philosophy; an anal-
ogy, and nothing further, exists between the disingenuousness with which
Hegel writes of philosophy's resignation with respect to actuality and the
2 James Phillips

alleged passivity of the cinematic reproduction of phenomena. But it is to

suggest that there is something peculiar about cinema. It is more realistic
than the arts, but because it lacks their comparative self-subsistence, be-
cause its realism consists in pointing to what is no longer, in even being
what is no longer, it is also less real, less actual.
Another way a book of philosophical essays on film might begin is
with a statement of the irreconcilability of cinema and metaphysics. In the
brute positivity of its reproductions of what is, cinema remains immersed
in the singularity of phenomena and forgoes a claim to the universality in
which metaphysical knowledge has its element. Even when cinema falters
before the singular, it aligns itself with the cliche rather than the concept.
If Hitchcock is a great director, if his recognition as an artist of genius
was long resisted, it is arguably because his domain is the specifically cin-
ematic space of nonideal, animistic, and conspiratorial singular objects.
Cinema's gift for horror lies in its passivity and its attendant, paradoxically
technological, invention of the experience of the pretechnological expo-
sure to the tyranny of things. But the singularities with which cinema is
populated can also be the occasion for a declaration of faith in the world:
this is something that unites Cavell's and Deleuze's texts on film, just as
it is something that could only properly be borne out by a profusion of at
once exacting and eccentric observations (another shared feature of their
texts). Cinema, whose passivity before what is slips all too easily over into
a cynical complacency in the face of cliches, can by its receptiveness to the
unassimilable recall metaphysics to its foundation in wonder.
Each of the essays in this collection addresses a single director from
what, very broadly understood, may be called the New Cinema. Defined
in purely historical terms, the New Cinema names the resurgence of vari-
ous national film industries after the devastation wrought by World War
II and the commercial dominance of the American sound film. But the
Italian neorealism of the 1940s and 1950s, the French nouvelle vague (new
wave) of the 1960s, the Neuer Deutscher Film (new German cinema) of
the 1970s, along with other national and international styles and move-
ments, resemble one another in more than their historical conditions. As
the newness of the New Cinema is inextricable from a renewal of the very
question of cinema, from a search for ways to open up the medium, it is
one-sided to define the movement by its works rather than by its principle
of an interrogation and rejection of the habits of cinema. If a case can be
made for including Psycho and The Birds, it is because these films take
 Introduction 3

advantage of the cracks in the crumbling studio system against which the
New Cinema was a reaction. The big-budget B-grade movies that in the
1970s restored Hollywood's fortunes were not committed to Hitchcock's
insight into the horror of the everyday but sought in the supernatural
and the extraterrestrial new resources for illusionist cinema. And the re-
cent work of Claire Denis, the last director covered here, inasmuch as it
eschews the marketable conventions of Hollywood and its foreign aspi-
rants, as well as the hermetism of so-called experimental film, participates
in the New Cinema's desire to extricate a medium of mass appeal from
the clutches of cliche.
The philosophical interest of the New Cinema is its simultaneously
material and political interest. Siegfried Kracauer clarifies this conjunc-
tion of the material and the political when he sets out the dilemma by
whose refusal the New Cinema might be defined: "Average theatrical
films and certain high-level avant-garde films must be lumped together in
spite of all that separates them. Films of this kind exploit, not explore, the
material phenomena they insert; they insert them not in their own interest
but for the purpose of establishing a significant whole; and in pointing up
some such whole, they refer us from the material dimension back to that
of ideology." 2 Kracauer regrets these two paths of cinema because they be-
tray cinema's specific innovation of a passivity before phenomena. 3 What
the New Cinema advances against ideology, in the wake of fascism and
Stalinism, in the context of Algeria, Vietnam, and military dictatorships
in Latin America and elsewhere, is the longueur. To the extent that bore-
dom breaks open the ideological whole, it is an avatar of the wonder of the
Greeks (the decadence with which Heidegger, Duchamp, and Beckett, for
instance, espouse boredom is also their originarity). What is at stake is the
proximity of the New Cinema to philosophy and the redefinition of art,
politics, and their relationship that is the corollary of this proximity. The
generality of such a statement, offered as it is in the introduction to an
anthology, is not so much the articulation of the program of the collection
as its problem: the point of indifference that an introduction might extract
from the individual contributions is either so general as to be indifferent in
the bad sense or at risk of being taken for true on no better grounds than
consensus. It is not an issue of posing the question of cinema but of search-
ing for new ways to pursue the debate around the phenomenon.
As each essay in this collection revolves around the work of a single
director, it might appear that a decision on the nature of the phenomenon
4 James Phillips

of cinema has been presupposed. Is it not the case that even if one bears
in mind that the proper name of a director denotes a constellation of col-
laborators, rather than a lone individual given over to the expression of his
or her personal artistic vision, the specificity that Kracauer ascribes to cin-
ema on the basis of its engagement with the material dimension has been
exchanged for the understanding of the arts in general as the stamping of
material with an overarching message (the message of the collaborators)?
This question, however, is a little unfair. The cinematic proper name in-
variably escapes the interiority of an individual or a collective to invoke
the historical and perceptual thickness of a given place: it becomes a path
into that very concreteness of the cinematic image that remains unattain-
able for a general discussion of cinema.
In another sense, however, as Walter Benjamin contends in his essay
"The Work of Art in the Age oflts Technical Reproducibility" (Das Kunst-
werk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit), cinema amounts
to a break with the concrete: the here and now of the work of art, as con-
stitutive of its "aura," yield to the nondeterminant locality and temporality
of the multiple copies of a film. Whatever pretensions Kracauer may put
forward in the name of the superior material engagement of cinema have
to be set against the dissolution of the material singularity of the cinematic
work itself. Reproductions of a work of the visual arts testify, as copies,
to the privileged here and now of the original, whereas the performances
of a theatrical text or a musical score, inasmuch as they first endow their
sources with the singularity of a here and now, are their realization more
than their reproduction. In cinema there is no such relation between origi-
nal and copy. Benjamin, who wishes to ascribe a revolutionary potential to
simulacra, writes off the here and now of the work of art as vestiges of the
cult object. But in this regard Benjamin's Marxism remains too metaphysi-
cal. Political activism, which is by necessity a confrontation with, as well
as enactment of, the here and now, cannot be given its due in an account
that defines authenticity (aura) by the here and now and undertakes its
liquidation.
The political hopes that Benjamin was not alone in placing in the
"democratic" medium of cinema appear ill-founded so far as the disavow-
al of the here and now of the public at a given screening is concerned. By
virtue of the possibility I threat I prohibition of participation, the one-off
aesthetic space of a theatrical performance is much closer in nature to the
volatile political space of a party meeting or mass rally than the lighdess,
 Introduction 5

abstract realm where individuals gather for the private consumption of the
interchangeable commodity of a film. The cinema presents its audience
with a fait accompli. What is shown is already past, and although it opens
itself up to the populations of the world through distribution and low
entry prices, the cinema excludes its public by means of the fatalism with
which a film plays itself out in being screened (even if audience members
stop the projection, they are too late to influence the film). In the epilogue
to his text Benjamin warns that fascism is turning politics into a theatrical
performance. 4 Yet were one to base one's judgment solely-and with no
doubt an inexcusable degree of historical irresponsibility, but here that is
not to the point-on their structural similarities, one might await a recon-
version of the theatrical into the political. From this perspective Cavell's
diagnosis of the politics of cinema in 7he World Viewed seems much more
desperate. The past that film restores to us is not myth (the continuity of
culture and the vitality of traditions) but the raw fact of a here and now
from which we are excluded:

On film, the past which is present is pastness or presentness itself, time itself, visu-
ally preserved in endless repetition, an eternal return, but thereby removed from the
power to preserve us; in particular, powerless to bring us together. The myth of mov-
ies replaces the myth according to which obedience to law, being obedience to laws
I have consented to and thus established, is obedience to the best of myself, hence
constitutes my freedom-the myth of democracy. In replacing this myth, it suggests
that democracy itself, the sacred image of secular politics, is unliveable. 5

Film is illusionist not simply in certain of its themes; it is in itself an opiate

because it gives us a here and now in which we cannot do anything.
It is specifically as cinema that cinema intervenes against the myth
of the accommodating openness of democracy. A greater danger to demo-
cratic openness lies in this specificity than in what may have seemed to
favor early conceptions of cinema as a Gesamtkunstwerk. Each component
that is brought into play in the significant whole of a Wagnerian opera is
an art. In cinema, however, the passivity of the recording apparatus is a
mechanical intruder on the literary, musical, histrionic, and other artistic
components. Given the disparity between its artistic and mechanical con-
stituents, film may attain a degree of internal dissent incompatible with
the notion of a Gesamtkunstwerk. But this dissent, as much as it works
against the totalizing procedures of ideology that Kracauer deplores, does
not suffice to establish cinema's democratic credentials. Cinema effects its
6 James Phillips

own kind of closure: in place of the closed world of ideology, it presents

the closed world of the past. That the means of playing audiovisual mate-
rial can be employed to show, rather than what was, that which is occur-
ring simultaneously-as in the case of live feeds on the Internet or the
now customary giant screens that magnify the proceedings at a concert or
political rally-is an argument not so much against defining cinema by a
relation to the past as for excluding such uses from the class of phenomena
to be discussed. Where recordings survive their immediate relay, their
subsequent appearance in television schedules and screening programs,
alongside what has come to be known as cinema, reconfigures their con-
tent as what is past.
Cinema is not incidentally but essentially a mass medium. It creates
a mass mentality as much as it caters to it. Claiming that the presence of
the actors in a theater stands in the way of the oneiric stupor in which
a film screening takes its course, Andre Bazin ascribes to theater an in-
sistence on an "active individual consciousness."6 Even if this insistence
is intellectual in what it demands of the audience, it is grounded in the
lived experience of a body among bodies. Cinema may appeal to what are
called the lowest instincts, but the circumstances of its reception, when
contrasted with the shared physical space of a theatrical performance, are
further removed from the pheromone-filled air of prehistoric life on the
savannah. Cinema cheats itself and its audience of an engagement with
the present insofar as its technological means of recording what is can
only put forward reproductions of what is past. The price of the realism
of its reproduction is an unreality in the circumstances of its reception.
The realism that is the automatic achievement of the technology of cin-
ema reformulates rather than solves the problem in the visual arts of the
relation to what is: its deviations in the representation of what is have to
do not with fantasy and inaccuracy but with pastness. Technological pro-
ficiency in the replication of phenomena is the starting point of cinema,
whereas in the visual arts it is a goal. As this technological proficiency
does not allow itself to be appropriated by the individual filmmaker, the
exhaustiveness of its reality can however be called into question. The
supplementary reality that is not a technological given in the reception
of cinema (precisely because of the technological nature of this recep-
tion) is also not an achievement of the mimetic technique (or naturalist
commitments) of the individual filmmaker. It is the reality that certain
politicized filmmakers in the New Cinema will conceive as the outcome
 Introduction 7

of breaking the technological spell in which the masses are held-cinema

is to leap out of the hermetically sealed abstract space of its reception into
the here and now of the political.
The struggle against the intrinsic unreality of cinema is invariably
tied up with the struggle against the illusionism that is the prevailing
possibility of film, in other words, with the struggle against Hollywood.
Campaigns in defense of small national film industries often claim too
much and too little politically for local productions, since substitut-
ing familiar accents, scenery, and so forth is incapable of annulling the
cinemagoer's entrenched alienation, just as framing the debate around the
notion of "cultural products" needlessly preempts the decision regarding
the relation of these works to the (other) arts, the political, and truth. The
extraordinary appeal of cinematic illusionism is due, not in small part, to
the plausibility that the cinema's technological exactitude of reproduction
lends to the fantastic: the cinema offers not so much fantasies as docu-
ments of fantasies. The truthfulness of cinema, its forensic admissibility
(Hitchcock's films, for instance, are films of information), distinguishes
it from a cultural product (nonetheless, this distinction, never absolute, is
in the process of being corroded by the incursion of computer-generated
images). Hence what the flourishing of national film industries in the
1960s and 1970s could set forth in self-defense was, above and beyond an
upsurge of non-American perspectives, the works' truthfulness.
Yet the culturally and regionally specific truthfulness of what the
image presents is rarely in accord with its conditions of possibility in the
imported technology. In this way, as well, realism in cinema is both a
given and a problem. Illusionist cinema, which could long be recognized
by its disavowal of the problem, has of late applied itself, by means of a
saturation with special effects, to erasing realism even as a given of the
cinematic image. Such films stage the bankruptcy of the skeptical tradi-
tion of Anglo-Saxon culture. It is the essential absurdity of abusing film to
advance the thesis of the unknowability of reality that makes 7he Truman
Show, Fight Club, and 7he Matrix suffocating exercises. The New Cinema's
suspicion of the image is taken up, but its "exaggeration" to the point of a
hackneyed metaphysical position amounts to the vitiation of the properly
political critique of illusionism. As in the days when Jack Valenti, head of
the Motion Picture Association of America, crisscrossed the world bully-
ing heads of state into rescinding support for local film industries, illu-
sionist cinema knows when to put aside its doubts concerning its relation
8 James Phillips

to reality and to pursue a policy of formidable pragmatism and opportun-

ism, securing and increasing its lion's share of the global market.
Cinema, which was seen to situate itself on the threshold between art
and reality, between the expressiveness of manipulated material and the
impassivity of bare fact, is prone to an alienation from the here and now, to
a hermetism from which traditional works of art are exempt. Cinema is life
itself and an unprecedented parody of life. To be sure, the life that the pro-
jector brings to the lifeless photographic stills of which a film is composed
requires the participation of its immediate audience, since the cinematic
golem of movement owes its appearance of animation to the memory traces
in the perceptual apparatus of those viewing it. The specificity of cinema is
nothing technological: cinema differentiates itself from photography by a
negation of the individual frames that are the sum of its actuality, coming
into its difference from photography between the frames, in the caesura
where its nonmaterial essence colludes with the synthetic prejudices of hu-
man perception. The romanticism of cinema is this setting to work of what
is not there. In this respect at least, cinema precludes totalization, since it
comes about less by putting images together than by preserving the inter-
vals that hold images apart. A film does not begin and end as cinema but
rather as photography: the film is reclaimed by the still in the same way
that poetry yields to prose after the final enjambment. But the aesthetic
engagement whereby cinema comes into its element in the immediacy of
an audience's sensory processes does not resolve the ambiguity in which
cinema is at once life and a parody of life because the mere immediacy of
life is a shadow of life. Ontologically, the essence of cinema belongs more
to the transcendental structures of experience than to the phenomenal
realm, yet this intimacy that characterizes our relation to cinema goes
hand in hand with the disengagement that marks our reception of the
interchangeable copies of a film.

Whatever negative appraisal might be made of cinema through

comparing it with the traditional arts is risible in the face of the con-
temporary pervasiveness of film: the judgment's pretensions to critical
negativity dissolve into nostalgia. It is not just that cinema now has a
one-hundred-year history; the history of the last one hundred years has
itself become cinematic for us-the nature of the technology of film in a
given period reaches into the period to define it for us and to date it so that
 Introduction 9

our sense of the historical continuum of events is inextricable from our

understanding of the developments in the technology with which those
events were filmed. But if cinema cannot be dislodged by criticism, it can
at least be better understood. This involves, in part, thinking through
the way in which the sense of the here and the now of the political has
been irrevocably transformed by cinema. Cinema was always destined to
leave the planet, to rediscover Earth as the reality of the miraculous. Since
everything has been reinscribed on the shed skin of light that may or may
not be spooled on a reel of film, the question of cinema can no longer be
posed from outside of cinema. There is no authoritative vantage ground
from which a normative judgment could be passed concerning cinema as
such. The question, because it now belongs to cinema, asks, "What can
cinema do?"
 1
Alfred Hitch cock
Fowl Play and the Domestication of Horror

KELLY OLIVER

ALFRED HITCHCOCK'S PSYCHO, arguably the most shocking and

groundbreaking Hollywood film of 1960, ushered in a new era of Ameri-
can film. 1 With its opening scene suggesting illicit sex in a cheap hotel,
the first look at a toilet in American cinema, heartthrob Anthony Perkins
playing a peeping tom, and the stunning shower scene in which the hero-
ine (Janet Leigh as Marion Crane) is brutally murdered early on, Psycho
flirted with censorship from beginning to end; however, what the censors
found most objectionable was the use of the word transvestite applied to
Norman in the penultimate scene. 2 With the corpse of Norman's moth-
er, which Norman stuffed like one of his birds, Psycho also plays at the
boundary between thriller and horror.
Before Psycho the horror genre was dominated by Britain's Hammer
Studios and Hollywood's Roger Corman and their formula for box-office
success, B creature features with human-cum-animal, sexy women, super-
natural monsters, and mad scientists. Hitchcock was inspired by these
low-budget moneymakers to show what a "master" could do with such
restrictions. 3 And, with Psycho and then The Birds (1963), Hitchcock not
only transformed the horror genre but also made it respectable by mov-
ing horror out of the realm of the fantastic and into the realm of the
everyday. By suggesting that horror lies within the mundane rather than
the supernatural, that it haunts rural landscapes and picturesque homes
rather than cemeteries and laboratories, Hitchcock's mixture of suspense
and horror hit home. What have become formulaic elements of contem-
porary horror films began with Psycho and The Birds in the early 1960s.

11
12 Kelly Oliver

In Terror and Everyday Life: Singular Moments in the History of the

Horror Film, Jonathan Lake Crane sets out three key elements of contem-
porary horror, which he claims originate with Night of the Living Dead
(1968) and Halloween (1978): "all collective action will fail; knowledge and
experience have no value when one is engaged with the horrible; and the
destruction of the menace (should it occur) carries no guarantee that the
future will be safe"; in fact the most popular horror films are those in
which the monster is not killed but returns over and over again in sequels. 4
Crane also maintains that what is horrific in these films is their connec-
tion to everyday life, which separates them from earlier horror films that
no longer seem scary at all. Given Crane's description of the contempo-
rary horror genre, Hitchcock's turn to horror in the early 1960s seems
definitive.
In neither Psycho nor lhe Birds is the "monster" killed; in fact, lhe
Birds ends with thousands of birds covering the landscape and the sugges-
tion that they may be moving into more urban areas; and Psycho spawned
several sequels in which "mother" continues to terrorize. Although terror
in lhe Birds acts as a form of "family therapy" that brings Mitch and
Melanie together and gives Melanie the mother that she never had, it
comes at the price of the continued threat of the birds and Melanie's cata-
tonia. This type of melancholy "resolution" that leaves open the threat of
the "monster" continues to be popular today in films such as Alien (1979,
1992), Aliens (1986), and War of the Worlds (2005). In addition, the film
never reveals why the birds attack. And although Psycho ends with the
psychiatrist explaining Norman's psychosis, this is the most disappointing
scene in the film-even Hitchcock told his screenwriter that it was "a hat
grabber," meaning that viewers would grab their hats and leave the the-
ater.5 In the end it is "mother" who has the last word when we see Norman
in his cell and hear mother's voice saying that she wouldn't hurt a fly, while
her skull is superimposed on Norman's face. The last scene, of Marion's car
being pulled from the swamp, suggests just the beginning of the process
of dredging the swamp for others. Psycho and lhe Birds prefigure the con-
temporary horror genre's lack of resolution and the failure of knowledge
and action to prevent horror, but most shocking of all, they locate horror
in the everyday.
Hitchcock moves the animal, whose supernatural threat dominated
earlier horror films, into the realm of the natural and everyday and re-
places earlier literal transformations of humans into monstrous animals
 Alfred Hitchcock 13

with allegorical and metaphorical associations between humans and ani-

mals.6 Birds in particular, associated with women and with the deadly
gaze of the camera, play a central role in both Psycho and The Birds. And
Marnie (1964) revolves around the association of woman and animal that
drives Mark Rutland (Sean Connery) wild. Rather than give us mad sci-
entists or science gone wrong, Hitchcock gives us cool-headed lawyers and
zoologists who interrogate and study nature I woman in their attempts to
domesticate her. In his films from the early 1960s Hitchcock makes sexual
perversion and illicit sex the mundane triggers for gruesome horror that
shocks precisely because it domesticates the monstrous. In this chapter
I will explore the association of women and animals as horrific in what
Michele Piso calls Hitchcock's "trilogy of modern despair": 7 Psycho, The
Birds, and Marnie.
In her analysis of Hitchcock's Frenzy (1972), with its grisly rape and
murder scenes and connections between cooked animal parts and women's
corpses, Tania Modleski argues that the film's graphic violence should be
considered "not simply as the reflection of the dirty mind of a frustrated
old man nor even of a new 'freedom' in sexual mores, but rather as a cul-
tural response to women's demands for sexual and socialliberation." 8 The
same can be said of Hitchcock's trilogy from the early 1960s. Throughout
the 1950s and 1960s birth control advocates were going to court to legal-
ize birth control; and in 1960, the same year that Psycho was released, the
Food and Drug Administration approved birth control pills, which gave
women more sexual freedom. In 1963, the same year that The Birds was
released, the first report of the President's Commission on the Status of
Women indicated that women were discriminated against in the work-
force; and The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan's commentary on white
middle-class housewives' dissatisfaction with domestic life, was published.
In the context of this history it is noteworthy that women have been called
"birds" and "chicks." In 1964, the year that Marnie was released, Title VII
of the Civil Rights Act, which bars discrimination in employment on the
basis of race or sex, was passed; and the Equal Employment Opportunity
Commission was established-Marion Crane, Mamie Edgar, and her
mother, Bernice Edgar, are, after all, working girls.
In Psycho, The Birds, and Marnie the association between women
and animals becomes explicit, and the mother comes to occupy an espe-
cially significant and threatening position. Although the mother is a lim-
inal figure throughout Hitchcock's work, especially in films such as The
14 Kelly Oliver

Lady Vanishes (1938), Rebecca (1940), Notorious (1946), Strangers on a Train

(1951), Vertigo (1958), and even North by Northwest (1959), she dominates
plot motivation in the films from the early 196os. Perhaps not coinci-
dently, at this same time Hitchcock introduces animals, particularly birds,
and turns from thrillers to horror. The most dramatic invocation of the as-
sociation of the mother with horror is Psycho, where Norman Bates dresses
up as his mother and takes on her persona to murder young women to
whom he is attracted. The film suggests that Norman's relationship with
his mother motivates his psychotic homicidal violence, which is triggered
by animal lust and executed in the famous shower scene in the bathroom,
sandwiched between scenes of Marion eating and a toilet flushing that
also evoke animality.
The threat of the animal and attempts to contain it are more obvious
with Norman's hobby, taxidermy: his parlor is filled with stuffed birds of
prey; and it is there that he tells Marion that she "eats like a bird" and in-
forms her that "birds eat a tremendous lot." After the shower scene Marion
is again compared to a bird, this time visually, when the picture of a bird
falls off of the hotel-room wall when Norman recoils from Marion's dead
body; the bird stares up at Norman from the floor just as Marion's lifeless
eye stares into the camera from the bathroom floor after her murder. In
this context it is noteworthy that like a crane, a bird of prey who eats fish,
Marion Crane ends up in the swamp. Several times in the film, Norman
also compares his mother to a bird. He tells Marion that his mother is as
harmless as one of his stuffed birds; and in the final scene Norman-as-
mother tells the audience in voice-over that "she" is as harmless as one of
her son's stuffed birds. Of course, Norman has stuffed her like one of his
birds. And like a bird of prey, "she" preys on the young women to whom
Norman is attracted. This association between mother and the stuffed
birds in Norman's parlor adds to the creepiness of the film and of the hor-
rible revelation that he keeps her stuffed corpse in the house.
In her analysis of Psycho, Barbara Creed argues that "woman as mon-
strous is associated with bodily appetites, cruel eyes, a pecking beak." 9 She
catalogues the many ways that both Marion and mother are associated
with birds, including the birdlike screeching on the sound track whenever
"mother" enters with a knife and the way that the knife pecks like a beak
at its victims; before Norman tells Marion that she eats like a bird, in
voice-over "mother" reprimands Norman that she won't have women sat-
isfying their "ugly appetites" with her food or her son. Raymond Bellour
 Alfred Hitchcock 15

also comments on the association between Marion, Norman-mother, and

birds not only in the dialogue but also in the imagery of the film, wherein
Norman visually comes to occupy the position of the stuffed owl with out-
stretched beak and widespread wings while Marion occupies the place of
winged angels in a painting above her head in the parlor scene, a painting
that is "penetrated" by "the menacing shadow of a crow ... like a knife-
blade or penis." 10 For Bellour the menacing phallic bird of prey is associ-
ated with Norman as mother, ultimately with the mother, while Marion
is associated with the angel bird that becomes the phallic mother's prey.
If Bellour reads Mrs. Bates as a phallic mother (this is also suggested by
Hitchcock in the preview when he identifies the mother as domineering),
Creed argues that she is not so much phallic as castrating; in fact, Creed
makes a point of distinguishing the phallic from the castrating mother in
order to motivate Norman's urge to identify with the mother to castrate
rather than be castrated.
Thinking about Psycho in the context of the cultural transitions play-
ing out from the 1950s to the 1960s, especially in terms of the women's
movement and calls for sexual liberation, it is useful to think of Mrs.
Bates-along with Mrs. Brenner of 1he Birds and Mrs. Edgar of Marnie-
as representing maternal authority at odds with the supposed paternal
authority of patriarchal culture. In all of these cases maternal authority
challenges paternal authority at the same time that it lays down the law in
relation to the daughters' sexuality. In both Psycho and 1he Birds this mater-
nal authority is associated with vengeful animality, particularly with birds
of prey that attack daughters who exhibit sexual agency reserved within a
patriarchal economy for men. These mothers, then, become the surrogates
for the punishing paternal superego. In both Psycho and 1he Birds, mothers
take the place of the father after he is dead and because their sons are not
man enough (especially Nor-man) to take the paternal positionY In Marnie
the paternal position is vacant (Mamie's mother, Bernice Edgar, was im-
pregnated at fifteen by a boy named Billy in exchange for his sweater), and
Mrs. Edgar and Mamie resist any man's attempt to fill it, to the point that
Mamie won't let men touch her (because her mother raised her to be "de-
cent"). But at the same time that these mothers are enforcing patriarchal
prohibitions against women's sexual liberation and sexual agency, they are
themselves displacing paternal authority and assimilating it as their own.
Modleski argues that "fear of the devouring, voracious mother is
central in much of Hitchcock's work" and that in this regard Psycho is not
16 Kelly Oliver

only "paradigmatic of the fear haunting many Hitchcock films" but also
"the quintessential horror film." 12 In her commentary on Frenzy Modleski
uses Julia Kristeva's theory of abjection to formulate a connection between
women and impure animals; discussing the scene in which the serial rapist
and murderer Bob Rusk (Barry Foster) returns to the corpse of one of his
victims, whom he has stuffed into a potato sack, Modleski says that "the
feeling is very much one of violating an ultimate taboo, of being placed
in close contact with the most 'impure' of 'impure animals': the carcass
of the decaying female." 13 Modleski invokes Kristeva's analysis of phobia
in Powers of Horror, in which Kristeva identifies the source of all pho-
bia, particularly dietary prohibitions against eating certain animals and
fear of contamination by carcasses of impure animals, with the mother,
whose body is made abject by the male child and by patriarchal culture
generally. 14
In Powers ofHorror Kristeva proposes that within patriarchal culture
the mother's body and her authority must be contained. Kristeva main-
tains that various rituals, particularly religious rituals, serve that function.
The threat of the maternal body is one of abjection or contamination that
threatens the very identity of the child, especially the male child, who must
distinguish his identity from the maternal I female. Kristeva defines the
abject as what calls into question boundaries; the abject, then, is anything
that threatens identity. On the level of individual development, the infant's
own identity is threatened by its identification with its mother. It must
"abject" its mother, turn away from her, to become an individual. On the
level of social development, families, groups, and nations are also defined
against what has been made abject or jettisoned from the group's identity,
which are parts of itself that it imagines as unclean or impure. On both
levels the figure that poses the greatest threat to identity is the maternal
body or the female body insofar as it conjures maternity. This is because we
were all once part of that body; and on both the individual and social levels
we continue to struggle to distinguish ourselves from it, especially insofar
as the maternal is associated with the natural and the animal.
Certainly, Kristeva's analysis seems to fit Norman Bates, who cannot
distinguish himself from his mother and as a result finds his own sexual
desires and their objects abject and therefore becomes abject himsel£ The
film forces the viewer to identify with Norman, thereby challenging the
viewer's identity and putting him or her into the position of the abject
as well as the position of one abjecting both the mother and Norman's
 Alfred Hitchcock 17

victims. In this regard it is important to note that for Kristeva the abject
is not only horrifying but also fascinating; we are drawn to it even while
it repulses us. This is why Kristeva's theory of abjection has been popular
among feminist film critics who discuss the horror genre, which both fas-
cinates and terrifies viewers who are drawn to horror. 15
Kristeva's theory also links the threat of the maternal and the femi-
nine with the threat of the animal and animality:

[T]he abject confronts us, on the one hand, with those fragile states where man
strays on the territories of animal. Thus, by way of abjection, primitive societies have
marked out a precise area of their culture in order to remove it from the threatening
world of animals and animalism, which were imagined as representatives of sex and
murder. The abject confronts us, on the other hand, and this time within our per-
sonal archeology, with our earliest attempts to release the hold of maternal entity. 16

Within this analysis the animal and the maternal are the original threats to
our identities as human and as individuals; and the animal and maternal
are linked in their relation to the threat of the natural world, the threat of
sex, birth, and death that makes them abject. But what makes the mother's
body abject is also what gives her authority, an authority that comes from
her connection with the natural world, particularly her power to give birth
and the infant's dependence on her body for its life. The women in Hitch-
cock's films, particularly the films from the early r96os, are mothers and
daughters who represent the power and threat of maternal authority and the
power and threat of feminine sexuality unchecked by that authority. These
women are presented as abject in the double sense of horrifying and yet fas-
cinating, especially in their association with the animal and animality. And
the struggle between these two aspects of the maternal I feminine-horri-
fying and fascinating-is represented in the tension between mothers and
daughters in these films.
It is noteworthy that the "daughters" in these films are associated
with the mother at the same time that they are punished by her. Their
names all begin with M, as if for "mother": Marion, Melanie, Mamie.
And all of Mamie's names are versions of Mary, as in the Virgin Mary:
Margaret, Mary, Marion (an echo of Psycho)P If we trace the trajectory
of mother-daughter relations from Psycho to Marnie, we see first Marion
Crane, who mentions her mother in the opening scene with her lover
in the hotel room in Phoenix when she tells him that she would like to
meet him "respectably," with her "mother's picture on the mantel." Soon
18 Kelly Oliver

after, she is brutally murdered, seemingly for her sexual freedom and the
freedom of movement that allows her to check into a hotel room alone on
the way to find her lover and give him the money she has stolen. Marion's
mother represents respectability while Marion compromises respectability
to meet her lover for lunchtime trysts in cheap hotels, steals money to be
with her lover, and checks into another cheap roadside motel alone using
an alias. Norman's mother also represents a type of maternal superego,
only now dominating her son (at least within his imaginary since it is only
through Norman that we know his mother). We also find out that Nor-
man killed his mother and her lover, according to the psychiatrist because
he was jealous of the lover. Norman has internalized maternal prohibi-
tions to the point that his persona is split between the dutiful son and
the threatening and vengeful mother. The mother herself was murdered
for her own outlaw desire, for taking a lover after the death of Norman's
father. And maternal authority is represented in the film by the person of
the "transvestite" and feminine son.
In The Birds, after Mitch Brenner (Rod Taylor) tells Melanie Daniels
(Tippi Hedren) that she needs "a mother's care," she replies that her mother
ran off with a "hotel man" when she was young. Perhaps the "hotel man" is
an allusion to Norman Bates, who within the narrative of Psycho is a seem-
ingly potential lover for sexually available Marion. 18 Unlike Psycho, in The
Birds there is an actual mother character, Mitch's mother, Lydia Brenner
(Jessica Tandy). Melanie is warned by Mitch's former girlfriend, Annie
(Suzanne Pleshette), that his mother controls his relationships with women
and that she broke up her own relationship with Mitch. As Jacqueline Rose
points out, Mitch is a lawyer and represents the paternal law, which does not
hold sway at his mother's house, where her authority is at odds with the law. 19
Melanie is seen as transgressing both the paternal law (Mitch first meets her
in court because of her practical jokes that led to the destruction of prop-
erty) and the maternal authority (she is represented as competing with the
mother for Mitch's attention). While in San Francisco, the realm of paternal
law, all of the birds are in cages and therefore harmless; but in Bodega Bay,
the realm of maternal authority, the birds are wild and hostile and seem to
act as surrogate mothers who punish Melanie (and those around her) for her
sexual advances toward Mitch. After all, Melanie is the one pursuing Mitch
to the point of finding out where his mother lives and making a surprise
visit. The birds attack whenever Melanie is near; and as her desire for Mitch
becomes more obvious, so does the intensity of the attacks.
 Alfred Hitchcock 19

At the beginning of the film, Melanie is presented as confident of

her own agency. In the first scene, she plays the part of a saleswoman in
a pet store to fool Mitch. Soon we find out that she is a rich playgirl used
to having her own way, who has been in the society papers for her antics,
including breaking a plate-glass window and jumping into a fountain in
Rome, nude. But in the opening scene she is also put in her place by
Mitch (representative of paternal law). He catches the bird that Melanie
accidentally freed, saying, "Back in your gilded cage Melanie Daniels,"
indicating that he is the true agent in control not only of the situation but
also of Melanie, whom he compares to the bird that he catches and cages.
Later in the film, Melanie is shown in a phone booth under attack by
birds; in an interview Hitchcock describes this scene as a reinforcement of
the comparison between Melanie and the caged bird; only now her cage is
not gilded but dangerous. 20 Melanie is also associated with the birds that
are breaking the glass of the phone booth and windows throughout the
movie in that like the birds she has broken a plate-glass window, which is
why she went to court.
The most haunting scene of the film comes at the same time as Mel-
anie and Mitch apparently consummate their desire: Melanie is shown
in her nightgown, brushing her hair and putting on lipstick, as Lydia
drives off to talk to her neighbor about the chickens not eating their feed.
When Lydia returns, after seeing her neighbor with his eyes pecked out,
she catches Mitch and Melanie (still in her nightgown under her coat
with her hair down) in a romantic pose; when they approach her to see
what is wrong, she violently pushes them both out of her way and runs
into the house. She was composed enough to leave the scene of the gory
bird attack and drive the truck back home, but when she sees Mitch and
Melanie after they have perhaps consummated their desire, she becomes
violent. Next Lydia is in bed, telling Melanie, who brings her tea, that she
cannot stand to be alone and that she wishes she were stronger-a phrase
she repeats several times. Although she has just witnessed the horrors at
the chicken farm, her only fear is being abandoned and losing Mitch to
Melanie, whom, as she says, she doesn't even know if she likes. In the end
the mother-surrogates, the birds or Mother Nature, render Melanie delu-
sional and catatonic after a brutal bird attack in the attic. It is only after
Melanie's agency is taken away completely that Lydia can embrace her. By
the end of the film, the sexually active "playgirl" is both punished for her
sexual agency and rendered passive.
20 Kelly Oliver

Given that The Birds was released during the cold war and just one
year after the Cuban missile crisis, when the threat of nuclear destruction
hung in the collective imagination like an ominous cloud, combined with
rising concerns over capitalism's wanton destruction of the environment,
the birds also represent the revenge of Mother Nature. 21 As Mrs. Bundy
(Ethel Griffies), an ornithologist, tells the people gathered in the restau-
rant, birds are not by nature aggressive creatures; rather, man is. Birds, she
says, have no reason to start a war with man. At this same moment the
waitress yells out "two fried chickens!" A little boy, who has been eating
chicken, asks his mother, ''Are the birds going to eat us, Mommy?" And
a man at the bar rants about birds being messy animals that should be
wiped off the face of the earth. In this scene Mrs. Bundy suggests that
whereas birds are by nature passive and peaceful creatures, humanity de-
serves to be attacked by them as recompense for what humans have done
to nature; if the birds have become aggressive, then humanity is respon-
sible. If humans eat birds, then why shouldn't birds eat humans? In an
interview, in his own tongue-in-cheek way, Hitchcock expresses sympathy
for the birds against humans:

I can look at a corpse chopped to bits without batting an eyelid, but I can't bear the
sight of a dead bird. Too heartrending. I can't even bear to see them suffer, birds, or
get tired. During the making of my movie, in which I used fifteen hundred trained
crows, there was a representative of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty
to Animals on the scene at all times, and whenever he said, "That's enough now,
Mr. Hitchcock, I think the birds are getting tired," I would stop at once. I have the
highest consideration for birds, and, quite apart from the movie, I think it very right
they should take their revenge on men that way. For hundreds of centuries birds have
been persecuted by men, killed, put in the pot, in the oven, on the spit, used for writ-
ing pens, feathers for hats, turned into bloodcurdling stuffed ornaments.... Such
infamy deserves exemplary punishment. 22

In his films Hitchcock gives us birds carved and eaten in scene after
scene, worn in hats along with other animals (in those beautiful Edith Head
costumes), and turned into bloodcurdling stuffed ornaments in Psycho.
Should it surprise us that Hitchcock's father was a poultry dealer in Lon-
don? When asked why he didn't use wild birds instead of trained ones in
The Birds, Hitchcock replied, "I don't trust them." 23 And while he says that
"blood is jolly, red," he claims to be frightened of eggs because the yolks
spill "revolting yellow liquid." 24 If "man's infamy deserves exemplary pun-
 Alfred Hitchcock 21

ishment," Hitchcock's films deliver; yet more often they punish woman,
man's victim, for her association with the abject threat of Mother Nature's
revenge. His films are littered with female corpses, associated with animal-
ity, food, and death. Just as food is served in nearly every film, women are
served up as dishes (in Marnie, Mark's sister-in-law, Lil, asks him, "Who's
the dish?" in reference to Mamie): Janet Leigh is covered in chocolate
sauce "blood" for her black-and-white demise in the shower; the sound of
the knife being plunged into her naked body is the sound of a knife being
plunged into a melon; and as Tania Modleski points out, the grotesque as-
sociations between women and food in Frenzy are the basis of the so-called
black humor of the film. 25 More specifically, in Frenzy women's corpses are
compared to the animal parts that the inspector's wife feeds him: fish heads
and pigs' feet. In these films from the 1960s and early 1970s, through both
visual and narrative conceits, women's bodies, particularly women's dead
bodies, are compared to dead animals or animal parts: Marion Crane and
the stuffed and painted birds from Psycho; Melanie Daniels and the evil
and dead birds from The Birds (not to mention her fur coat that catches
the attention of every man she passes); Mamie as the wild animal hunted,
caught, and domesticated by Mark Rutland; Rusk's victims in Frenzy, one
stuffed into a potato sack, whose bodies are interchangeable with dead
cooked animal parts, suggesting cannibalism humor.
In The Birds it is the mother who had been eating chicken with her
kids in the restaurant who blames Melanie for the bird attacks. After the
birds attack the gas station across the street, the women, huddled in a hall-
way, stare at Melanie, and the mother becomes hysterical, accusing Mela-
nie of being the cause of the attacks and calling her "evil." The mother
screams at Melanie, "Who are you? What are you?" and Melanie slaps her
face. The mother's "What are you?" suggests that Melanie is not human
but some kind of monster or animal that incites the bird attacks. The con-
nection throughout the film between Melanie and the birds, and Mrs.
Bundy's lecture on how it isn't natural for birds to be aggressive, suggests
that Melanie's aggressive behavior toward Mitch is not natural. She is not
passive like a good "bird" should be; she has left her gilded cage, flown
to Bodega Bay, and with the fury of Mother Nature herself, is wreaking
havoc on even innocent children.
Perhaps the most troubling representation of mothers and daughters
in Hitchcock's films, however, comes in Marnie, where the daughter is
constantly compared to a wild animal, studied, hunted, trapped, raped,
22 Kelly Oliver

and "domesticated" by the male protagonist. And the mother is a crippled

man-hating former prostitute who removes her daughter from their bed
whenever one of her sailor johns knocks at the door. The daughter, Mar-
garet Edgar or "Mamie," is traumatized by a repressed childhood memory
of one of her mother's johns who kissed her and whom she killed. This
episode with the john-"my accident," as Mrs. Edgar calls it-leaves Mrs.
Edgar lame with pain in her leg and leaves Mamie psychologically scarred
in a painful relationship to her mother. Mamie wants her mother's love
but never receives it because, although as we find out in Mrs. Edgar's final
confession, she loved Mamie more than anything and fought to keep her,
apparently the "accident" tainted her love for her daughter; and it left
Mamie unable to tolerate any man's touch, what within the patriarchal
imaginary is considered frigidity. What the film and its male protagonist,
Mark Rutland, identify as sexual aberrations are identified with Mamie's
relationship to her mother.
Mark is the son of a wealthy man and a part-time zoologist who,
as E. Ann Kaplan points out, is attracted to Mamie because "she repre-
sents the wild animal in the jungle that always threatens to overwhelm
society." 26 Several critics have commented on the way that Mark hunts
and traps Mamie like a wild animal, 27 a reading that is made explicit in
the dialogue of the film, particularly in the scene where Mark finds Mar-
nie after she has robbed Rutland's safe and blackmails her into marrying
him. She tells Mark that she is "just some animal" that he has caught;
and he replies that he caught a "wild one" this time. Like Sophie, the wild
Jaguarondi whose picture he keeps in his office, whom he claims to have
"trained to trust" him, Mark proceeds to try to "train" Mamie through-
out the rest of the film. Marnie is filled with allusions to animals, animal
lust, and animal instincts. As Mary Lucretia Knapp points out, from the
beginning of the film Mamie is associated with the girls' jump-rope song
about the lady with the alligator purse. Mamie's yellow purse dominates
the screen in one of the first scenes of the film. After her first robbery she
visits her mother's apartment in Baltimore, where the girls are jumping
rope outside; they are singing the same song at the end of the film when
Mark and Mamie leave her mother's apartment after the revelation that
Mamie killed the sailor. Robin Wood argues that the giant ship looming
on the painted set behind the street on which her mother lives suggests
a trap, the trap of false memory and unreality from which the truth will
set Mamie free. 28
 Alfred Hitchcock 23

But the association between Mamie and trapped animals goes be-
yond the visual connections to alligator purses or claustrophobic fake sets.
Mamie's most satisfying relationship is with her horse, Faria, whom she
shoots near the end of the film; the only being with whom she is free is
Faria, and her whole personality changes when she is riding. The first time
that we see her riding, it looks as if she rides her horse right up the street
in front of her mother's apartment; the perspective is hers (or the horse's)
as we ride through the trees and then up the street toward the fake ship,
riding into the trap of her childhood. This "trap" is the supposed cause of
her "illness," an illness foretold in the girls' jump-rope song:
Mother, Mother, I am ill.
Call for the doctor over the hill.
Call for the doctor. Call for the nurse.
Call for the lady with the alligator purse.
"Mumps," said the doctor. "Measles," said the nurse.
Nothing said the lady with the alligator purse.

Mamie repeatedly gives the response "nothing" throughout the film when
asked what is wrong. She insists that nothing is wrong; like the lady with
the alligator purse, she says "nothing."
When she arrives at her mother's apartment, she is hurt to see the
little neighbor girl "roosting" there and receiving her mother's attention.
She presents her mother with a fur collar (another dead animal), and we
first realize that the color red is the catalyst for her seeing red, the color of
blood. Shortly after, we see Mamie (in "drag" as a mild-mannered secre-
tary) at Rutland's office, where Mark insists that the office manager hire
her. In the first scene between Mark and Mamie, we learn that Mark is
a zoologist who studies predatory behavior, especially in female animals.
He tells Mamie that he studies instinctual behavior in animals, and she
asks if he studies human beings and "lady animals." Mark answers that
he studies the criminal class of the animal world in which "lady animals"
figure largely as predators. All the while, the audience knows (and Mark
suspects) that Mamie is herself a "lady criminal" preying on unsuspecting
employers.
When Mark discovers that Mamie is interested in horses, he in-
vites her to the horse races (where she has another attack of seeing red
prompted by the jockey's jersey on a horse named "Telepathy"). It is there
that Mamie tells Mark that she believes in "nothing . .. horses maybe, but
24 Kelly Oliver

not people." When Telepathy wins the race after Mamie tells Mark not to
bet on him because he is "wall-eyed," Mark says that she shouldn't have
"chickened" out because her wall-eyed reject won. Taking Mamie to meet
his father, Mark reassures Mamie (who didn't expect to be making the
visit) that his father "goes by scent-if you smell anything like a horse,
you're in." And when he introduces her to his father-who exclaims, ''A
girl!"-Mark says, "Not really a girl, a horse fancier." In the next scene
Mamie is robbing the safe at Rutland's office, after which Mark tracks
her down. And, as I mentioned earlier, the exchange between Mark and
Mamie at this point revolves around the metaphor of Mamie as a trapped
animal. Mark says that he can't just turn her "loose" after she accuses
him of trapping her. And when Mark imagines his father's response to
their sudden marriage, he says, "Dad admires wholesome animal lust."
When Mamie is worried about the name that would appear on the mar-
riage license (she has been using the alias Mary Taylor), Mark says that it
doesn't matter if the license says "Minnie Q Mouse"; it is still legal. And
he says that he can easily explain why he is calling her Mamie rather than
Mary, by saying that it is a "pet" name. On their honeymoon, when she
screams for Mark to unhand her, she exclaims that she cannot "bear to be
handled" as if she is a horse or an animal. Indeed, she says that marriage is
degrading; "it's animal!" And when Mark suggests that she is sick because
she won't let him touch her, she tells him, "Men, you say no thanks to one
of them and you're a candidate for the funny farm," again an allusion to
the animal.
During a conversation on their honeymoon, Mark is explaining how a
certain coral-colored insect evades detection by birds by taking the shape of
a flower; Mamie is likened to this insect insofar as she is a criminal evading
detection by taking the shape of a beautiful mild-mannered widow. Later
that evening, Mark leaves his book Animals ofthe Seashore and Marine Life
behind to fulfill his uncontrollable animal lusts by raping Mamie; but
the next morning, he finds her floating face-down in the swimming pool.
When he asks her why she didn't just jump overboard (they are on a ship),
she replies that she wanted to kill herself, "not feed the damned fishes."
When they return home, she clandestinely calls her mother, explaining her
absence by telling her that she had the flu and couldn't visit or call, saying,
''I'm still a little hoarse," a homophone of ''I'm still a little horse." Mark
trades in his marine biology books for Sexual Aberrations of the Criminal
Female and begins to interrogate Mamie about her childhood, to the point
 Alfred Hitchcock 25

that Mamie says, "You Freud, me Jane," again pointing up Mark's (and the
film's) linking of Mamie and the primitive.
Like so many detectives in Hitchcock's earlier films, Mark searches
for clues to the mystery of Mamie's sexuality. 29 As he discovers, the key
to the mystery of her sexual "aberration" lies with her mother. Raymond
Bellour suggests that Mamie's horse, Forio, is one key to her sexuality
insofar as the horse represents Mamie's desire for the phallus. 30 And
Knapp argues that the horse is a lesbian fetish onto which the desire
between Lil and Mamie is displaced. 31 But the film suggests a link be-
tween the horse and Mamie's mother. Mamie's love for her horse and,
more significant, her love for her mother compete with Mark and seem
to foreclose the possibility of her love for him. It is her mother who made
her "decent" and taught her to hate men. But her mother's link to Mar-
nie's beloved horse, Forio, goes beyond Mamie's love. It is also evidenced
in the words that Mamie says to comfort the horse after she shoots him,
suggesting that the horse's broken leg represents her mother's broken leg
(suffered in her accident, when the sailor falls on top of her), the horse's
pain becomes her mother's pain, and his screams are like her screams for
help. After she shoots the horse, Mamie says, "There, there now," as if
to comfort him. She hysterically insists on getting a gun to shoot him
because he is "screaming" in pain, and she desperately wants to stop
both his screaming and his pain. As we discover at the end of the film in
flashback, when she was a small girl, her mother defended her against a
drunken sailor who began to beat Mrs. Edgar. Mamie wanted the sailor
to stop and when the sailor fell on her mother and her mother screamed
for Mamie to help her, Mamie grabbed the fire-poker and hit the sailor
on the head. After we see the sailor fall dead (in her flashback), Mamie
says, "There, there now," as if comforting her mother. Finally, Mamie's
mother is indirectly compared to the horse when Lil quips to Mark in
reference to Mamie that she thought that "a girl's best friend is her
mother." The adage is, of course, that man's best friend is his dog; and in
Mamie's case her best friend is her horse.
In the end both Mark and the film hold Mrs. Edgar responsible for
Mamie's criminal and sexual perversions, which is why Mark can reas-
sure Mamie that after he tells the authorities what he has to tell, she won't
go to jail. Mrs. Edgar, a loose woman hersel£ has ensured that her daugh-
ter will be "decent" to the point of hating men and "preying" on them for
their money. Here, the mother, herself an outlaw who lives in a world of
26 Kelly Oliver

women (she plans to invite the little girl Jesse and her mother to live with
her), has such a powerful hold on her daughter that its excess threatens
patriarchal order in which men possess women. Although Mrs. Edgar has
been exploited by men sexually, she was never possessed by them. Mamie
is torn from this world of women-the world of her mother, to which she
regularly returns with her plunder, and the women's world of secretar-
ies-by Mark, who captures and possesses her like a wild animal. But in
spite of his attempts to "train" her to trust him, he cannot train her to love
or desire him. As they leave her mother's apartment, with the girls sing-
ing the jump-rope song in the background, Mamie tells Mark that she
would rather stay with him than go to jail, which is hardly a declaration
of love. As she reminds him (and us) throughout the film, he is as "ill"
as she insofar as he has a "pathological" desire for a man-hating criminal
who cannot stand his touch. Perhaps as Norman Bates tells Marion, we
are all in our own private traps, and we "scratch and claw" at each other
to escape.
In conclusion, Hitchcock's films from the early 1960s associate wo-
men, animals, and animality with an outlaw maternal authority at odds
with paternal law and patriarchal order. Within the logic of his films, this
authority has its source in the generative power of women and Mother
Nature, and its aim is revenge against the animals who have, in Hitch-
cock's words, been persecuted by men for centuries. These films can be
read as a response to the women's movement, particularly the struggle for
greater sexual freedom and sexual agency. Hitchcock's films represent both
the threat and the power of maternal authority, both the threat and the
power of women's sexual agency, both the possibility of confident, strong
women characters and the desire to reinscribe them within patriarchal
order by domesticating them.
 2
Luchino Visconti
Insights into Flesh and Blood

ALEXANDER GARciA DUTTMANN

LUCHINO VISCONTI'S FILMS give expression to an insight of

Adorno's from Negative Dialectics. At the end of his introduction Adorno
1

writes: "Utopia is blocked off by possibility, never by immediate reality." 2

As a declaration of my intent, such a claim raises a number of questions,
questions regarding intellectual and historical links, questions regarding
definitions, questions regarding the relationship between art and concept.
Do I wish to understand Visconti's films as an emotive or vivid illustration
of an insight that he and Adorno share but that the latter grasps conceptu-
ally? Perhaps there would be no objection to such a view or interpretation,
at least not if one's starting point is that one can speak of an insight and
that speaking of an insight does not imply a priority of the concept. Some-
thing can be understood as much by the means of the expression elevating
the films above blind intuition as by the aphoristic sharpness issuing from
the resources of the concept, even as it remains bound to experience. The
exercises of the understanding and the respective intelligibility that they
produce may, however, turn out to be scarcely comparable, perhaps even
incomparable.
Here one might recall the following entry in Hans-Erich Nossack's
diary: "Indeed, how could you then even want to share a thought that
has passed into your flesh and blood? Such a thought can be expressed no
longer in words, but only in an act." 3 Nossack is not saying that between
thought and act a mediating authority intrudes, a reflection similar to his
diary entry. Rather, the thought has shed its ties to reflection. Without
ceasing to be a thought, it has thereby transformed itself, and, as an act, it

27
28 Alexander Garda Di.ittmann

maintains a grip on an insight and expresses it. A thought's understandabil-

ity, which an act alone is able to furnish, is not simply identical with that
intelligibility for which a meaningful linguistic utterance provides. Hence
it is not simply the same whether one understands something through the
expression of individual films, through the constellation that a series of
films composes, or through conceptual means whereby one attempts to
conceptualize an insight. There are many ways of understanding, and in all
of them the faculty of understanding itself, the possibility of understanding
something, has a part. Must, however, the insight-that which is under-
stood-be so affected by this difference that in the end only in the case
of the knowledge employing and indebted to conceptual means can one
speak of an insight? Such a restriction seems arbitrary.
Is the insight therefore something preexisting, which the illustration
as much as the concept can approach in order to give it expression? In the
first scene of Somnambula, which Visconti together with Bernstein and Cal-
las so successfully brought to the stage at La Scala, the overwhelmed Amina
sings, "Ma la voce, o mio tesoro, I non risponde al mio pensier." 4 Can the
incapacity of the voice to articulate explanatory words be separated from a
pure thought whose service it quits? That one cannot differentiate between
the pure thought, on the one hand, and the voice and its failure, on the
other, means that nothing is able to express the thought more purely than
that very failure of explanation that arises from being overwhelmed. The
opera comes into existence. Amina's fiance replies:

Tutto, ah! Tutto in questo istante

parla a me del foco ond'ardi:
io lo leggo ne' tuoi sguardi,
nel tuo vezzo lusinghier. 5

Hence, instead of regarding the insight as something given, one could

view it as something that first achieves an essential concreteness with the
image, having no existence independent of it. The image: an eye that sur-
veys the world and that is surveyed by the world. "In the eye the soul is
concentrated and the soul does not merely see through it but is also seen in
it," Hegel says in his lectures on aesthetics, immediately before describing
the work of art as a "thousand-eyed Argus."6 With each film Visconti con-
tributes to the expression of an insight, to its discovery and development,
to the illumination of an aspect. The significance of the insight measures
itself against its very inseparability from its expression. The insight is not
 Luchino Visconti 29

simply put forward as a thesis in a dialogue, since the enunciation of the

thought in the form of a thesis itself belongs to a discovery and develop-
ment overreaching such enunciation.
In this way the "cinematic circle" is formed of which, following
hermeneutics, Stanley Cavell speaks. It rests on the "reciprocity of ele-
ment and significance." 7 The "aesthetic possibilities" of the medium of
film are not "givens"; 8 each film must conquer them through their real-
ization; the "medium" first needs to be created. The film is an actuality
that does not presuppose any possibility. Of course, Cavell occasionally
wavers between two arguments, between a historicist argument, which
observes in modernity a loss of existing schemata or "automatisms" bind-
ing medium and instance, and a structural argument, which never grasps
the instance as a mere actualization of the possibilities of an existing
medium. The "cinematic circle" attests not only to the formal or logical
possibility of that which is to be understood, given that the intuition of
the "element" presupposes comprehension of the "significance," which
in turn presupposes an intuition of the "element." The "cinematic circle"
attests likewise to the sensuously and intellectually experienceable tran-
sition of the "element" to "significance," to a certain kind of utopia, if
utopia can be understood as a removal of barriers. In a film that has
turned out well, in a film that is art and precisely on that account can-
not be included in the repellent genre of art films, no "element" is to be
met for its own sake, as a mere thing so to speak, and no "significance"
shoots beyond the "elements," as an abstract thought. Should one wish
to use the concept of experience as a concept for a certain kind of resis-
tance, one could also say that the "cinematic circle" demarcates the dis-
tance between thing, sign, and referent without the demarcation leaving
behind a trace, the trace of an experience. The criterion for the success of
a film is thus not the classical ideal of a complete mediation of form and
content-this ideal is the accompaniment of a primacy of spirit and the
end of art. The criterion is the shaping through and imaging of the work,
for which the disruption of mediation, the thingliness of the "element"
or "significance," is still not entirely arbitrary, as though a spiritless end
of art were to appear beside the spiritual. The disruption of mediation,
the experience, remains in a state of tension with respect to that shaping
through of the work that aims at mediation, at the closure of the "cin-
ematic circle." The failing voice, the voice as sound, is in the work of art
not a free-floating effect.
30 Alexander Garda Di.ittmann

In Morte a Venezia, a film in which Visconti is extremely sparing

with dialogue, word and image drift apart. The words dominating the
brief, inserted flashbacks, the arguments about the life and death of art,
have something awkward and clumsy about them, something aesthetically
vulgar that does not fit the image. Is Visconti trying to make a silent film,
the silent film that, according to Cavell, has never been made? 9 Do the
flashbacks therefore underline the helplessness and tedium of the words
while the music pursues an investigation of the gestural as that which is
the essence of cinema? The gestural composes the intensity of the image
and thus does not include only iconic poses, the boy's upraised arm, but
also the city itself, the elements, light, colors, moods. Intensive images are
images at which one gazes to one's fill, insatiably, because they possess the
power to awaken the dead, the power of a "That's how it is." The dead of
the work of art are neither those who lived in the past nor the living who
have died a death in life and to whom the work of art addresses itself. 10 To
speak of the dead is, however, not on this account senseless, because the
figures, even the landscapes that draw the figures into themselves and for
their part turn into figures, are just as little fanciful concoctions. Some-
thing somnambulistic corresponds to them. Before Amina sings and the
enlightened count familiarizes the baffied villagers with the phenomenon
of somnambulism, she is considered a ghost. Morte a Venezia reminds
the viewer that the dead have arisen, that the life that the film gives them
is both immortal and transitory, as though the dead were at the same
time unborn. Perhaps those images are beautiful that are traversed by this
muteness, the muteness of the point of indifference of transitoriness and
immortality to which no utterance comes near. The question before which
the film places the hesitant viewer is whether the "That's how it is" is
more than gay kitsch, the "That's how it is" of a self-indulgent and hollow
aestheticism or of a complacent and no less hollow yearning that reifies
beauty. The famous ball scene at the end of II gattopardo opens the "cin-
ematic circle" through its excess, even if the prince's dance with the village
girl, the reflections on age and death before a painting by Greuze, and the
caricature of a general who carries himself as a social lion all have a dra-
maturgic function. It is as though Visconti wants to lead the film to the
threshold of the modern, as though by means of duration, of the turning
circle of repeated entries, movements, colors, and forms become autono-
mous and give rise to a web that lays itself over the tracks of the plot and
steadily breaks them up. There is a visible threat of a loss of overview.
 Luchino Visconti 31

Convention disintegrates, and the liberation of the compositional materi-

als of the film directs attention to their contingency. But does not the gaze
likewise dive into the peculiarity of that world of the aristocracy to which,
as it is already said in the novel, specific laws apply? Indeed, this world, as
Deleuze writes in his book The Time-Image, resembles a "synthetic crys-
tal."11 It has its place outside of history and nature, outside of the Divine
Creation, and is perhaps nothing other than a world without acts.
In the utopia of the "cinematic circle"-to which Visconti surren-
ders himself perhaps above all in La terra trema, a film epic in which
the individual passes over into the type, history into myth, the image
of reality into the reality of the image-"element" and "significance,"
thing and thought, are immediately real. Here the abyss between reality
and possibility closes, and the possible (the possibility of the "element"
or "significance") no longer blocks the very way that it seems to open.
But here an observation that Cavell makes in the appendix to his film
book is important. He speaks of"ideas" that find "incarnation" in certain
images, and he adds that a "power" corresponds to them that he compares
with the "power" of a phrase of music or of poetry. This "power" is pro-
nounced "inexplicable." 12 Is it a "power" because it is inexplicable? What
does Cavell mean? Perhaps that there is no idea of the idea, no signifi-
cance of the significance, no significance that could emerge from the "cin-
ematic circle," crossing out its actuality and investing it with a definition.
The significant thing, the sign, has no significance outside the "cinematic
circle." In other words one never does justice to a film by explaining its
significance, by assigning to each "element" and the coherence of the "ele-
ments" a significance that elevates itself above the "elements." Whenever
one measures a film by whether or not one is able to explain its signifi-
cance, it inevitably comes across as formalistic or melodramatic, as though
it had succumbed to a surplus of thingliness or an exaggerated emotional-
ism. Conversely, going no further than bare descriptions of "elements,"
a stasis against which Cavell warns repeatedly, proves just as unsatisfac-
tory and alien to art. The significance of the significance crosses out the
actuality of the "cinematic circle," turning the immediate reality of the
"elements" into something possible, into the indifferent and thus always
merely possible reality of bearers of significance. Or is it the case that only
by accepting a significance of the significance one can speak of a closure of
the circle-indeed, of a circle at all? The drifting apart of word and image
in Morte a Venezia is, for one, the lack of a context, whereas for another,
32 Alexander Garda Duttmann

it is its creation. Solely on condition that one can define art conceptually,
subordinate significance and element to a specific determination-and
thereby, for example, assess every drifting apart of significance and element
as a failure, as a deficient spiritualization of the sensuous or a deficient
sensualization of the spiritual-does this conflict admit of resolution: the
prize for settling the dispute is however the end of art, thus the reopening
of the circle whose closure is observed.
In a certain respect, then, the understanding of a film is never a
purely conceptual understanding. One can never reduce a film to its con-
cept. Art requires an indirect address. Perhaps that is true even of philo-
sophical discourse. If there is no significance of the significance, no idea
of the idea, no concept of art, no spiritual end of art, then the insight, for
example, that it is always the possible but never the "immediately real"
that blocks the way to Utopia, cannot be straightforwardly separated
from the form of thinking, in the end not even from its own formulation.
The thought has become "flesh and blood," something real, or rather it
has not fashioned itself in a distinct spiritual sphere in order finally to ex-
ternalize itself. The film or the philosophical text is an act, an expression
of thought in "flesh and blood" to which in turn only another act can an-
swer, another expression, another philosophical text or film that does not
remain in possibility but rather itself grounds the reality or actuality of
a circle of "element" and "significance." In this way the "force" to which
Cavell refers communicates itself. That also befits its inexplicability.
"Utopia is blocked off by possibility, never by immediate reality." In
Visconti attempts at change founder as a consequence of an orientation
by the difference between reality and possibility. Almost all of his films
revolve around this theme. Lo straniero forms an exception, L'innocente a
limited case. In L'innocente, Visconti's last film, a man of the world takes it
for granted that the change has already taken place. What is at issue is the
experiment of a life beyond good and evil. Treating the possible as real,
this life shatters against reality because the possible is not real but rather
only an illusion, a deception. It is not real in the sense of the prevailing
society that maintains itself through double standards. Nor is it real in the
sense of a relationship that would be free of deceptions because it would
no longer equate freedom with permissiveness. The "stranger," the central
figure in the film of Camus' novel, passes over entirely into the anonym-
ity of the social immanence with which he involuntarily collides, in an
unexpected movement of exaggeration, of the exaggerated effect of the
 Luchino Visconti 33

sunlight whose conspicuousness Visconti ensures throughout, even strew-

ing the sand with blindingly reflective, tiny mirrors. The glinting knife
of the Arab youth stabs at his murderer's eyes. Meursault refuses to wear
the mask of subjectivity that, within the prevailing society, imposes a re-
lationship to a transcendence-to the transcendence of a meaning whose
possibility hypocrisy realizes. Such a meaning, for which the "stranger"
is sued, can take on the shape of a son's or husband's love, reverence for
God, camaraderie, or respect for institutions. One could claim that soci-
ety must first become like Meursault, that it must tear down the barrier
of the possible as the barrier of meaning grown rigid, and that it must put
an end to the confusion of reality and possibility in order to prepare the
way to utopian openness. Perhaps this thought would have emerged more
graphically from the film if Visconti had not had to bow to the wishes of
the Algerian French writer's widow. In the event, Visconti was not able
to draw the social and historical context more sharply: its exposition is
limited to vignettes sometimes bearing grotesque traits and to the use of
authentic objects and locations.U In a text written in 1967 Visconti refers
to the student riots and says that in the literature of the period there are no
heroes who have a stronger tie to the moment than Meursault: "The figure
that best expresses the mentality of the young belongs to their parents'
generation." 14
Even though nearly all ofVisconti's films revolve thematically around
the failure of attempts at transformation, the theme varies from film to
film. Four variations on the failure resulting from an orientation by the
difference between reality and possibility can be discerned, four groups
that occasionally overlap and in turn require differentiation.
To the first group belong those films in which the possible clings
to a love or a passion that breaks with the real, that seeks to break through
a historical, social, artistic paralysis. In Ossessione, Visconti's first feature
film, whose plot is drawn from an American crime novel, a drifter falls
in love with an ambitious woman, a former prostitute unable to hold out
any longer in the narrowness of a petty-bourgeois, fascistoid environment.
She seizes the opportunity for transformation but only in order to climb
the social ladder. Making his appearance as a fairground artist and por-
trayed as a homosexual, the figure of an entirely uninhibited veteran from
the Spanish Civil War touches, as it were, tangentially the fateful circle
drawn by reality and possibility. This figure, because it does not promise
simply a possible life, a life that has still first to be lived, opens the circle.
34 Alexander Garcia Duttmann

And because it probably denounces the lovers in their guilt, it closes the
circle. In Senso, in which operatic melodrama and an exacting exposition
of historical events keep company, a countess committed to the resistance
during the Austrian occupation ofVenice falls under the spell of a young
officer in the occupying army and, in the name of passion, betrays her
background and convictions. In Le notti bianche, adapted from the novella
by Dostoyevsky, the forces of a love that bursts every social convention
and therefore appears a delusion, a pure possibility, come up against the
forces of a love for whose reality recognition according to the dominant
customs stands guarantor. In Illavoro, the captivating chamber play that
Visconti contributes to the portmanteau film Boccaccio 70, a spoiled girl
with a rich father in Burgenstock has to acknowledge that the Milanese
count whom she has married is a conformist halfwit. Even love is not ex-
empted from the law of exchange, proving to be labor, business, prostitu-
tion. The last shot shows a part of a woman's mouth, distorted, as though
a fetishistically dismembering gaze wanted to pin itself to the body, as
though such labor were the work not only of the prostitute but likewise of
the camera. It thereby perhaps remains undecided whether the girl, whom
her spouse calls simply "Dolly," sheds tears, with which she avows her
failure, or smiles like a sphinx because she has understood that the pos-
sible blocks the path to Utopia, to a state of affairs no longer defined by
socially imposed barriers. The doll becomes an adult, as a prostitute or as
a wife. Valuable and beautiful objects increasingly fill the rooms traversed
by the precise camera. They are either bourgeois status symbols, or in their
fullness they are no longer distinguishable from vacuity, beautiful and
valuable, because they no longer possess a function. In Marte a Venezia the
sight of a desired beautiful body, like a helpless yearning pointing beyond
a society in decline and an art become stale, seals the death of the artist. In
Gruppo di famiglia in un interno the forces of an art connoisseurship van-
ishing completely into the past clash with the forces of an unexpected love
that wavers between physical and paternal love and neglects to produce a
continuity, to pass on a legacy. The son, who nonetheless is not a son, dies
before his father and thereby condemns him likewise to death.
To the second group belong those films in which the possible is the
occasion of a revolt against social exploitation, against the unjust distribu-
tion of property. In these films reality again and again robs the hope for a
transformation of its force. La terra trema narrates the story of such a revolt
in a Sicilian fishing village: the lack of solidarity among the fishermen, in a
 Luchino Visconti 35

compact with the superior power of nature, sees to it that the possible trans-
formation dashes against the reality of the way things are. Rocco e i suoi
fratelli relates the tale of conformism after an attempt at change has gone
wrong: transformation through conformity is a betrayal of transforma-
tion, against which some measure their success and others do not survive.
Le caduta degli dei recounts the history of an irrevocable end to attempts
at transformation, the history of their parody or travesty, of their hellish
mockery by means of the alliance between capitalism and National Social-
ism. To this group II gattopardo also surely belongs, a film concerned with
the improbable maintenance of a superfluous social class, whose conven-
tions promise freedom from the unrestrained striving for profit and gain
after the revolution has extended reality, instead of realizing the possible.
The films in which not love and passion but rather art's beauty and
semblance vouch for the possible belong to a third group. Here, alongside
Marte a Venezia, a film that schematically sets in opposition two concep-
tions of art, and Gruppo di famiglia in un interno, a film that brings to
the fore the beauty of works of the past and maneuvers it into a reflected
antithesis to the ugliness of the present, Bellissima and Ludwig must be
cited. In Ludwig a world of art, literally, is created: it is to remain undis-
turbed by the overpowering world of realpolitik, intrigues, and war, while
nonetheless filmically the plain documentation continually disrupts the
parade of sumptuous images. In Bellissima the longing to leave behind
everyday misery unmasks, against its will, the appearance of cinema as
mere illusion. Two short films keep company with this unmasking: Anna
Magnani, an anecdote that deals with the real Rome of fascism and the
Rome evoked by the stage song, and La strega bruciata viva, a sketch that
tears the mask away from the face of the film diva and then restores it. She
floats off in a helicopter.
There is, finally, a fourth group that, consisting of a single member,
can scarcely be characterized as a group. In Vaghe Stelle dell'Orsa what
forces itself as something possible on the modern married woman and
Etruscan daughter is the enigmatic past itself. It contains the seed of a
liberation from the indifference of the present, encumbering the latter at
the same time with the reality of traumatic events. Into the vortex of this
reality, visually brought out by meanderings and whirlings, by reflections
and shadow plays, the free conduct of the women threatens to be swept.
How should one understand Adorno's proposition that the possi-
ble, not the "immediately real," blocks the way to Utopia, the insight that
36 Alexander Garda Diittmann

Visconti's films give expression in "flesh and blood"? From the perspective
of intellectual history one can discern in the proposition an allusion to
the political debate over possibilism, in which, for instance, Rosa Luxem-
burg took part with her article on the alternative between possibilism and
opportunism. Luxemburg quotes in this article a definition according to
which possibilism is a politics that strives for "that which is possible in the
given circumstances." She then develops the thought of a praxis that is
not opportunistic: it neither renounces the analysis and consideration of
the "given circumstances" nor lets itself be ruled by the axiom that "one
meets with the most success on the path of concession." 15 Without refer-
ring to the debate, deconstruction takes up this thought anew. It con-
ceives it as the tension between the possible and the impossible, between
the impossible that remains dependent on the possible and the possible
that remains dependent on the impossible, for example in the form of
right and justice. (I say "deconstruction''-Jacques Derrida thought its in-
sight in "flesh and blood.") From the perspective of textual history one can
recognize in the proposition concerning the roadblock of the possible the
impact of an anarchic impulse. It is the same impulse that leads Adorno
in the mid-196os to insist during his lectures on the theory of history and
freedom that at every moment the possibility of change is present and must
not be deferred into an uncertain future-as though precisely the possible
as the conditional had brought about the omission of the realization diag-
nosed at the beginning of Negative Dialectics. The possible is, so to speak,
in itself conservative. It prolongs the real and, as a consequence, renders
impossible the change that it at the same time announces or on which it
opens up a view. Would one be able to speak of change at all in a world
in which everything were real? Adorno, one might conclude, denounces
the transcendental illusion of possibility. The possible is not impossible
enough. Or else it is all too impossible, remaining abstract and bordering
on delusion. Not impossible enough and then again all too impossible, the
possible becomes entangled in the conflict in which it loses out every time
to the real. At the end ofVisconti's Le notti bianche, the young woman Na-
talia catches sight in the snow of the hieratic figure of the feverishly awaited
stranger and leaves in the lurch the kind, but dull, office worker. Thereby
the concreteness of the possible that perpetuates reality is smothered by the
abstractness of the possible that appears to the viewer a delusional fantasy.
As a result, it is irrelevant whether or not the stranger, in fact, returns.
Nearly all the flashbacks depicting Natalia's encounters with the stranger
 Luchino Visconti 37

have something unreal about them, as though the object of depiction were
her perception of reality. One must distinguish between two ways in which
the possible is impotent, but likewise between a reality to which change
addresses itself because it blocks the paths and a reality from which the
barriers have been removed. Does the mysterious figure of the sister in La
terra trema not embody this reality? Does it not embody the freedom from
externally imposed barriers, from the barrier of reality and from the barrier
of the twofold helpless possibility?
In his films, as in his opera and theater productions, Visconti sets
considerable value on a particular sense of reality, on the significance of
the "immediately real." In 1966, reviewing the experiences with the the-
ater that he had gathered over the course of two decades, he alludes, seem-
ingly ironically, to the image that people had made of him and put into
circulation: "This lunatic Visconti, so it is believed, he wants real, authen-
tic jewellery by Cartier, taps from which real, authentic water flows, real,
authentic French perfume in the phials standing on the dressing table,
Flemish linen on the beds.''l6 In an essay on invention and tradition, in
which six years before shooting was to start he is already thinking over the
film that would come to be known as La terra trema: Episodio del mare,
Visconti justifies the relevance that the sound of a voice or the roar of the
ocean has for him, as though the authenticity of the reproduced sounds
would help the work disclose an essential reality and secure it for itself. 17
The roar of the sea was for the composer Luigi Nono the true central
character of the film; when he was to collaborate on producing the sound
track for Lo straniero, he wanted to draw his compositional material from
noises and thereby avoid the impression that they were being heard only
"by chance." 18 Coining the phrase "visionary aestheticism," Deleuze con-
tends that the objects and the surroundings in Visconti take on an "au-
tonomous, material reality" that gives them an importance in themselves
whereby they no longer operate as the frames, recipients, and vehicles of
action. The senses, free of their orientation by the precepts of action, invest
the objects and surroundings so that "dreamlike" connections arise: "It is
as if the action floats in the situation, rather than bringing it to a conclu-
sion or strengthening it." 19 Is the "dreamlike" connection not evidence
of that reality that is no longer the reality of a barrier-in La terra trema
"the grand vision of man and nature, of their perceptible and sensual
unity"-which more deeply defines the "communist consciousness" than
the "struggle with nature and between men"? Is that which is indissolubly
38 Alexander Garda DUttmann

possible in the event-Deleuze names it the "visionary's part" 20 -not in

turn precisely this "immediately real," by no means the possible that is
distinguished from the real and hence doubly helpless?
Youssef Ishaghpour claims that in some of Visconti's films there
is not too much, but rather too little, sense, as though the director and
viewer would take pleasure in things that extricate themselves from the
"tyranny of meaning." 21 One can, however, also infer from this movement
of flight that the "cinematic circle" is not made to revolve by an idea of
the idea or a significance of the significance. In a review of the pioneering
production of Goldoni's comedy La locandiera, 22 with which Visconti in
1956 visited Paris, Roland Barthes interprets the attention paid to things
as a reference to the mediation that marks the historical transition from
the character part to the social type. 23 The individual achieves objectiv-
ity with the object, by means of it, through the resistance that it offers.
Naming Brecht, Barthes speaks of a "realistic theatre." Such an interpreta-
tion complements the remarks on the relationship between human beings
and things in Visconti's early manifesto concerning "anthropomorphic
cinema." Taking the place of the reified, conventional, and rhetorical, of
the interest in things "for their own sake," a "reality of art" is to emerge
that concerns itself with "living human beings in the midst of things." 24
What happens at the beginning of Rocco e i suoiJratelli is, according to the
Catalonian filmmaker Marc Recha, just as inseparable from "every corner
of the basement apartment" as from the "gestures" of the figures. 25
The care that Visconti expended on the selection and display of
objects in his works need not be reduced to a concern with the effective-
ness of a given production design and the response of the audience. Per-
haps it can be taken as a sign for that "immediate reality" that he wanted
to create with every film, every theater and opera production, as a sign for
an awareness of that reality that the work of art itself is. Like the text in
which Adorno's proposition stands, works of art strive for a reality that
comes toward them whenever between element and significance a conti-
nuity arises that for its part is not subordinate to a significance and that
on no account excludes, for example, the interruption of the "cinematic
circle." For philosophy this is as much as to say that one does not possess
truth but rather holds oneself within it. For art this is as much as to say
that art is not something possible or a proxy of a possibility, not even criti-
cally or negatively. What the successful films created by Visconti express is
that transformations have always already occurred. They do so by means of
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[921] Historia, dec. ii. lib. x, cap. 18.

[922] [Cf. the bibliography of these letters in chap. vi. The notes in
Brinton’s Floridian Peninsula are a good guide to the study of the
various Indian tribes of the peninsula at this time.—Ed.]

[923] [Cf. chap. vi. of the present volume.—Ed.]

[924] Vol. xxvi. pp. 77-135.

[925] Epis. June 20, 1524, in Opus epistolarum, pp. 471-476.

[926] Historia, lib. xxxiii. cap. 2, p. 263.

[927] Historia, dec. iii. lib. v. cap. 5. Cf. also Barcia, Ensayo
cronológico, p. 8, and Galvano (Hakluyt Society’s ed.), pp. 133,
153.

[928] Coleccion de documentos inéditos, x. 40-47; and the

“testimonio de la capitulacion” in vol. xiv. pp. 503-516.

[929] Vol. xxxiv. pp. 563-567; xxxv. 547-562.

[930] Vol. iii. p. 69. His conjectures and those of modern writers
(Stevens, Notes, p. 48), accordingly require no examination. As
the documents of the first voyage name both 33° 30´ and 35° as
the landfall, conjecture is idle.

[931] Dec. ii. lib. xi. cap. 6. This statement is adopted by many
writers since.

[932] Pedro M. Marquez to the King, Dec. 12, 1586.

[933] Gomara, Historia, cap. xlii.; Herrera, Historia, dec. iii. lib. v.
cap. 5.

[934] Vol. ii. lib. xxi. cap. 8 and 9.

[935] Ecija, Relacion del viage (June-September, 1609).

[936] Vol. iii. pp. 72-73. Recent American writers have taken
another view. Cf. Brevoort, Verrazano, p. 70; Murphy, Verrazzano,
p. 123.
[937] Historia, lib. xxxvii. cap. 1-4, in vol. iii. pp. 624-633.

[938] Documentos inéditos, iii. 347.

[939] Galvano (Hakluyt Society’s ed., p. 144) gives the current

account of his day.

[940] Cf. Vol. IV. p. 28. The capitulacion is given in the Documentos
inéditos, xxii. 74.

[941] [Harrisse, Bibl. Amer. Vet., no. 239; Sabin, vol. iii. no. 9,767.
There is a copy in the Lenox Library. Cf. the Relacion as given in
the Documentos inéditos, vol. xiv. pp. 265-279, and the
“Capitulacion que se tomó con Panfilo de Narvaez” in vol. xxii. p.
224. There is some diversity of opinion as to the trustworthiness
of this narrative; cf. Helps, Spanish Conquest, iv. 397, and
Brinton’s Floridian Peninsula, p. 17. “Cabeça has left an artless
account of his recollections of the journey; but his memory
sometimes called up incidents out of their place, so that his
narrative is confused.”—Bancroft: History of the United States,
revised edition, vol. i. p. 31.—Ed.]

[942] The Comentarios added to this edition were by Pero

Hernandez, and relate to Cabeza de Vaca’s career in South
America.

[943] [There are copies of this edition in the Carter-Brown

(Catalogue, vol. i. no. 197) and Harvard College libraries; cf.
Sabin, vol. iii. no. 9,768. Copies were sold in the Murphy (no.
441), Brinley (no. 4,360 at $34), and Beckford (Catalogue, vol. iii.
no. 183) sales. Rich (no. 28) priced a copy in 1832 at £4 4s.
Leclerc (no. 2,487) in 1878 prices a copy at 1,500 francs; and
sales have been reported at £21, £25, £39 10s., and £42.—Ed.]

[944] [Vol. i. no. 6. Cf. Carter-Brown, iii. 893; Field, Indian

Bibliography, no. 79.—Ed.]

[945] [Nova typis transacta navigatio Novi Orbis, 1621. Ardoino’s

Exámen apologético was first published separately in 1736
(Carter-Brown, iii. 545).—Ed.]

[946] Vol. iii. pp. 310-330.

[947] Following the 1555 edition, and published in his Voyages, at
Paris.

[948] Vol. iv. pp. 1499-1556.

[949] [Menzies Catalogue, no. 315; Field, Indian Bibliography, nos.

227-229.—Ed.]

[950] [Cf. Field, Indian Bibliog., no. 364.,—Ed.]

[951] Printed by Munsell at Albany, at the charge of the late Henry

C. Murphy. [Dr. Shea added to it a memoir of Mr. Smith, and Mr.
T. W. Field a memoir of Cabeza de Vaca.—Ed.]

[952] [The writing of his narrative, not during but after the
completion of his journey, does not conduce to making the
statements of the wanderer very explicit, and different
interpretations of his itinerary can easily be made. In 1851 Mr.
Smith made him cross the Mississippi within the southern
boundary of Tennessee, and so to pass along the Arkansas and
Canadian rivers to New Mexico, crossing the Rio Grande in the
neighborhood of thirty-two degrees. In his second edition he
tracks the traveller nearer the Gulf of Mexico, and makes him
cross the Rio Grande near the mouth of the Conchos River in
Texas, which he follows to the great mountain chain, and then
crosses it. Mr. Bartlett, the editor of the Carter-Brown Catalogue
(see vol. i. p. 188), who has himself tracked both routes, is not
able to decide between them. Davis, in his Conquest of New
Mexico, also follows Cabeza de Vaca’s route. H. H. Bancroft
(North Mexican States, i. 63) finds no ground for the northern
route, and gives (p. 67) a map of what he supposes to be the
route. There is also a map in Paul Chaix’ Bassin du Mississipi au
seizième siècle. Cf. also L. Bradford Prince’s New Mexico (1883),
p. 89.—Ed.] The buffalo and mesquite afford a tangible means of
fixing the limits of his route.

[953] Including the petition of Narvaez to the King and the royal
memoranda from the originals at Seville (p. 207), the instructions
to the factor (p. 211), the instructions to Cabeza de Vaca (p.
218), and the summons to be made by Narvaez (p. 215). Cf.
French’s Historical Collections of Louisiana, second series, ii. 153;
Historical Magazine, April, 1862, and January and August, 1867.
[954] Smith’s Cabeça de Vaca, p. 100; Torquemada (Monarquia
Indiana, 1723, iii. 437-447) gives Lives of these friars. Barcia says
Xuarez was made a bishop; but Cabeza de Vaca never calls him
bishop, but simply commissary, and the portrait at Vera Cruz has
no episcopal emblems. Torquemada in his sketch of Xuarez
makes no allusion to his being made a bishop. and the name is
not found in any list of bishops. We owe to Mr. Smith another
contribution to the history of this region and this time, in a
Coleccion de varios documentos para la historia de la Florida y
tierras adyacentes,—only vol. i. of the contemplated work
appearing at Madrid in 1857. It contained thirty-three important
papers from 1516 to 1569, and five from 1618 to 1794; they are
for the most part from the Simancas Archives. This volume has a
portrait of Ferdinand V., which is reproduced ante, p. 85. Various
manuscripts of Mr. Smith are now in the cabinet of the New York
Historical Society.

[955] Oviedo’s account is translated in the Historical Magazine, xii.

141, 204, 267, 347. [H. H. Bancroft (No. Mexican States, i. 62)
says that the collation of this account in Oviedo (vol. iii. pp. 582-
618) with the other is very imperfectly done by Smith. He refers
also to careful notes on it given by Davis in his Spanish Conquest
of New Mexico, pp. 20-108. Bancroft (pp. 62, 63) gives various
other references to accounts, at second hand, of this expedition.
Cf. also L. P. Fisher’s paper in the Overland Monthly, x. 514.
Galvano’s summarized account will be found in the Hakluyt
Society’s edition, p. 170.—Ed.]

[956] Bancroft, United States, i. 27.

[957] Cabeça de Vaca, p. 58; cf. Fairbanks’s Florida, chap. ii.

[958] Cabeça de Vaca, pp. 20, 204.

[959] [Tampa is the point selected by H. H. Bancroft (No. Mexican

States, i. 60); cf. Brinton’s note on the varying names of Tampa
(Floridian Peninsula, p. 113).—Ed.]

[960] B. Smith’s De Soto, pp. 47, 234.

[961] Nouvelle France, iii. 473.

[962] Barcia, p. 308. The Magdalena may be the Apalachicola, on

which in the last century Spanish maps laid down Echete; cf.
 Leroz, Geographia de la America (1758).

[963] The manuscript is in the Hydrographic Bureau at Madrid. The

Lisbon Academy printed it in their (1844) edition of the Elvas
narrative. Cf. Smith’s Soto, pp. 266-272; Historical Magazine, v.
42; Documentos inéditos, xxii. 534. [It is dated April 20, 1537. In
the following August Cabeza de Vaca reached Spain, to find that
Soto had already secured the government of Florida; and was
thence turned to seek the government of La Plata. It was
probably before the tidings of Narvaez’ expedition reached Spain
that Soto wrote the letter regarding a grant he wished in Peru,
which country he had left on the outbreak of the civil broils. This
letter was communicated to the Historical Magazine (July, 1858,
vol. ii. pp. 193-223) by Buckingham Smith, with a fac-simile of
the signature, given on an earlier page (ante, p. 253).—Ed.]

[964] [Rich in 1832 (no. 34) cited a copy at £31 10s., which at that
time he believed to be unique, and the identical one referred to
by Pinelo as being in the library of the Duque de Sessa. There is
a copy in the Grenville Collection, British Museum, and another is
in the Lenox Library (B. Smith’s Letter of De Soto, p. 66). It was
reprinted at Lisbon in 1844 by the Royal Academy at Lisbon
(Murphy, no. 1,004; Carter-Brown, vol. i. no. 596). Sparks says of
it: “There is much show of exactness in regard to dates; but the
account was evidently drawn up for the most part from memory,
being vague in its descriptions and indefinite as to localities,
distances, and other points.” Field says it ranks second only to
the Relation of Cabeza de Vaca as an early authority on the
Indians of this region. There was a French edition by Citri de la
Guette in 1685, which is supposed to have afforded a text for the
English translation of 1686 entitled A Relation of the Conquest of
Florida by the Spaniards (see Field’s Indian Bibliography, nos.
325, 340). These editions are in Harvard College Library. Cf.
Sabin, Dictionary, vi. 488, 491, 492; Stevens, Historical
Collections, i. 844; Field, Indian Bibliography, no. 1,274; Carter-
Brown, vol. iii. nos. 1,324, 1,329; Arana, Bibliografía de obras
anónimas (Santiago de Chile, 1882), no. 200. The Gentleman of
Elvas is supposed by some to be Alvaro Fernandez; but it is a
matter of much doubt (cf. Brinton’s Floridian Peninsula, p. 20).
There is a Dutch version in Gottfried and Vander Aa’s Zee-und
Landreizen (1727), vol. vii. (Carter-Brown, iii. 117).—Ed.]
[965] [Carter-Brown, vol. ii. no. 86; Murphy, no. 1,118. Rich (no.
110) priced it in 1832 at £2 2s.—Ed.]

[966] Field, Indian Bibliography, no. 1,338.

[967] [It is also in Vander Aa’s Versameling (Leyden, 1706). The

Relaçam of the Gentleman of Elvas has, with the text of
Garcilasso de la Vega and other of the accredited narratives of
that day, contributed to the fiction which, being published under
the sober title of Histoire naturelle et morale des Iles Antilles
(Rotterdam, 1658), passed for a long time as unimpeached
history. The names of César de Rochefort and Louis de Poincy are
connected with it as successive signers of the introductory matter.
There were other editions of it in 1665, 1667, and 1681, with a
title-edition in 1716. An English version, entitled History of the
Caribby Islands, was printed in London in 1666. Cf. Duyckinck,
Cyclopædia of American Literature, supplement, p. 12; Leclerc,
nos. 1,332-1,335, 2,134-2,137.—Ed.]

[968] [A copy of the original Spanish manuscript is in the Lenox

Library.—Ed.]

[969] Recueil des pièces sur la Floride.

[970] In the volume already cited, including Hakluyt’s version of the

Elvas narrative. It is abridged in French’s Historical Collections of
Louisiana, apparently from the same source.

[971] Pages 47-64. Irving describes it as “the confused statement

of an illiterate soldier.” Cf. Documentos inéditos, iii. 414.

[972] [Carter-Brown, vol. ii. no. 42; Sunderland, vol. v. no. 12,815;
Leclerc, no. 881, at 350 francs; Field, Indian Bibliography no.
587; Brinley, no. 4,353. Rich (no. 102) priced it in 1832 at £2 2s.
—Ed.]

[973] [Brinton (Floridian Peninsula, p. 23) thinks Garcilasso had

never seen the Elvas narrative; but Sparks (Marquette, in
American Biography, vol. x.) intimates that it was Garcilasso’s
only written source.—Ed.]

[974] [Theodore Irving, The Conquest of Florida by Hernando de

Soto, New York, 1851. The first edition appeared in 1835, and
there were editions printed in London in 1835 and 1850. The
 book is a clever popularizing of the original sources, with main
dependence on Garcilasso (cf. Field, Indian Bibliography, no.
765), whom its author believes he can better trust, especially as
regards the purposes of De Soto, wherein he differs most from
the Gentleman of Elvas. Irving’s championship of the Inca has not
been unchallenged; cf. Rye’s Introduction to the Hakluyt Society’s
volume. The Inca’s account is more than twice as long as that of
the Gentleman of Elvas, while Biedma’s is very brief,—a dozen
pages or so. Davis (Conquest of New Mexico, p. 25) is in error in
saying that Garcilasso accompanied De Soto.—Ed.]

[975] [There was an amended edition published by Barcia at Madrid

in 1723 (Carter-Brown, iii. 328; Leclerc, no. 882, at 25 francs);
again in 1803; and a French version by Pierre Richelet, Histoire
de la conquête de la Floride, was published in 1670, 1709, 1711,
1731, 1735, and 1737 (Carter-Brown, vol. ii. no. 1,050; vol. iii.
nos. 132, 470; O’Callaghan Catalogue, no. 965). A German
translation by H. L. Meier, Geschichte der Eroberung von Florida,
was printed at Zelle in 1753 (Carter-Brown, vol. iii. no. 997) with
many notes, and again at Nordhausen in 1785. The only English
version is that embodied in Bernard Shipp’s History of Hernando
de Soto and Florida (p. 229, etc.),—a stout octavo, published in
Philadelphia in 1881. Shipp uses, not the original, but Richelet’s
version, the Lisle edition of 1711, and prints it with very few
notes. His book covers the expeditions to North America between
1512 and 1568, taking Florida in its continental sense; but as De
Soto is his main hero, he follows him through his Peruvian career.
Shipp’s method is to give large extracts from the most accessible
early writers, with linking abstracts, making his book one mainly
of compilation.—Ed.]

[976] Letter of Hernando de Soto, and Memoir of Hernando de

Escalante Fontaneda. [The transcript of the Fontaneda Memoir is
marked by Muñoz “as a very good account, although it is by a
man who did not understand the art of writing, and therefore
many sentences are incomplete. On the margin of the original [at
Simancas] are points made by the hand of Herrera, who
doubtless drew on this for that part [of his Historia general]
about the River Jordan which he says was sought by Ponce de
Leon.” This memoir on Florida and its natives was written in Spain
about 1575. It is also given in English in French’s Historical
Collection of Louisiana (1875), p. 235, from the French of
Ternaux; cf. Brinton’s Floridian Peninsula, p. 26. The Editor
 appends various notes and a comparative statement of the
authorities relative to the landing of De Soto and his subsequent
movements, and adds a list of the original authorities on De
Soto’s expedition and a map of a part of the Floridian peninsula.
The authorities are also reviewed by Rye in the Introduction to
the Hakluyt Society’s volume. Smith also printed the will of De
Soto in the Hist. Mag. (May, 1861), v. 134.—Ed.]

[977] [A memorial of Alonzo Vasquez (1560), asking for privileges

in Florida, and giving evidences of his services under De Soto, is
translated in the Historical Magazine (September, 1860), iv. 257.—
Ed.]

[978] [Buckingham Smith has considered the question of De Soto’s

landing in a paper, “Espiritu Santo,” appended to his Letter of De
Soto (Washington, 1854), p. 51.—Ed.]

[979] [Colonel Jones epitomizes the march through Georgia in

chap. ii. of his History of Georgia (Boston, 1883). In the Annual
Report of the Smithsonian Institution, 1881, p. 619, he figures
and describes two silver crosses which were taken in 1832 from
an Indian mound in Murray County, Georgia, at a spot where he
believed De Soto to have encamped (June, 1540), and which he
inclines to associate with that explorer. Stevens (History of
Georgia, i. 26) thinks but little positive knowledge can be made
out regarding De Soto’s route.—Ed.]

[980] [Pages 25-41. Pickett in 1849 printed the first chapter of his
proposed work in a tract called, Invasion of the Territory of
Alabama by One Thousand Spaniards under Ferdinand de Soto in
1540 (Montgomery, 1849). Pickett says he got confirmatory
information respecting the route from Indian traditions among
the Creeks.—Ed.]

[981] “We are satisfied that the Mauvila, the scene of Soto’s bloody
fight, was upon the north bank of the Alabama, at a place now
called Choctaw Bluff, in the County of Clarke, about twenty-five
miles above the confluence of the Alabama and Tombigbee”
(Pickett, i. 27). The name of this town is written “Mauilla” by the
Gentleman of Elvas, “Mavilla” by Biedma, but “Mabile” by Ranjel.
The u and v were interchangeable letters in Spanish printing, and
readily changed to b. (Irving, second edition, p. 261).
[982] Bancroft, United States, i. 51; Pickett, Alabama, vol. i.;
Martin’s Louisiana, i. 12; Nuttall’s Travels into Arkansas (1819), p.
248; Fairbanks’s History of Florida, chap. v.; Ellicott’s Journal, p.
125; Belknap, American Biography, i. 192. [Whether this passage
of the Mississippi makes De Soto its discoverer, or whether
Cabeza de Vaca’s account of his wandering is to be interpreted as
bringing him, first of Europeans, to its banks, when on the 30th
of October, 1528, he crossed one of its mouths, is a question in
dispute, even if we do not accept the view that Alonzo de Pineda
found its mouth in 1519 and called it Rio del Espiritu Santo
(Navarrete, iii. 64). The arguments pro and con are examined by
Rye in the Hakluyt Society’s volume. Cf., besides the authorities
above named, French’s Historical Collections of Louisiana;
Sparks’s Marquette; Gayarré’s Louisiana; Theodore Irving’s
Conquest of Florida; Gravier’s La Salle, chap. i., and his “Route du
Mississipi” in Congrès des Américanistes (1877), vol. i.; De Bow’s
Commercial Review, 1849 and 1850; Southern Literary
Messenger, December, 1848; North American Review, July, 1847.
—Ed.]

[983] Jaramillo, in Smith’s Coleccion, p. 160.

[984] [See chap. vii. on “Early Explorations of New Mexico.”—Ed.]

[985] Pioneers of France in the New World; cf. Gaffarel, La Floride

Française, p. 341.

[986] There is a French version in Ternaux’ Recueil de la Floride,

and an English one in French’s Historical Collections of Louisiana
and Florida (1875), ii. 190. The original is somewhat diffuse, but
is minute upon interesting points.

[987] Cf. Sparks, Ribault, p. 155; Field, Indian Bibliography, p. 20.

Fairbanks in his History of St. Augustine tells the story, mainly
from the Spanish side.

[988] Edited by Charles Deane for the Maine Historical Society, pp.
20, 195, 213.

[989] Life of Ribault, p. 147.

[990] [This original English edition (a tract of 42 pages) is

extremely scarce. There is a copy in the British Museum, from
which Rich had transcripts made, one of which is now in Harvard
 College Library, and another is in the Carter-Brown Collection (cf.
Rich, 1832, no. 40; Carter-Brown, i. 244). The text, as in the
Divers Voyages, is reprinted in French’s Historical Collections of
Louisiana and Florida (1875), p. 159. Ribault supposed that in
determining to cross the ocean in a direct westerly course, he
was the first to make such an attempt, not knowing that
Verrazano had already done so. Cf. Brevoort, Verrazano, p. 110;
Hakluyt, Divers Voyages, edition by J. W. Jones, p. 95. See also
Vol. III. p. 172.—Ed.]

[991] [This is the rarest of Hakluyt’s publications, the only copy

known in America being in the Lenox Library (Sabin, vol. x. no.
39,236)—Ed.]

[992] [Brinton, Floridian Peninsula, p. 39. The original French text

was reprinted in Paris in 1853 in the Bibliothèque Elzévirienne;
and this edition is worth about 30 francs (Field, Indian
Bibliography, no. 97; Sabin, vol. x. no. 39,235). The edition of
1586 was priced by Rich in 1832 at £5 5s., and has been sold of
late years for $250, £63, and 1,500 francs. Cf. Leclerc, no. 2,662;
Sabin, vol. x. no. 39,234; Carter-Brown, i. 366; Court, nos. 27,
28; Murphy, no. 1,442; Brinley, vol. iii. no. 4,357; Field, Indian
Bibliography, p. 24. Gaffarel in his La Florida Française (p. 347)
gives the first letter entire, and parts of the second and third,
following the 1586 edition.—Ed.]

[993] Cf. Stevens Bibliotheca historica (1870,) p. 224; Brinton,

Floridian Peninsula, p. 32.

[994] Brevis narratio eorum quæ in Florida Americæ provīcia Gallis

acciderunt, secunda in illam Navigatione, duce Renato de
Laudoñiere classis Præfecto: anno MDLXIIII. Quæ est secunda
pars Americæ. Additæ figuræ et Incolarum eicones ibidem ad
vivū expressæ, brevis etiam declaratio religionis, rituum,
vivendique ratione ipsorum. Auctore Iacobo Le Moyne, cui
cognomen de Morgues, Laudoñierum in ea Navigatione Sequnto.
[There was a second edition of the Latin (1609) and two editions
in German (1591 and 1603), with the same plates. Cf. Carter-
Brown, vol. i. nos. 399, 414; Court, no. 243; Brinley, vol. iii, no.
4,359. The original Latin of 1591 is also found separately, with its
own pagination, and is usually in this condition priced at about
100 francs. It is supposed to have preceded the issue as a part of
De Bry (Dufossé, 1878, nos. 3,691, 3,692).
 The engravings were reproduced in heliotypes; and with the
text translated by Frederick B. Perkins, it was published in Boston
in 1875 as the Narrative of Le Moyne, an Artist who accompanied
the French Expedition to Florida under Laudonnière, 1564. These
engravings have been in part reproduced several times since their
issue, as in the Magazin pittoresque, in L’univers pittoresque, in
Pickett’s Alabama, etc.—Ed.]

[995] Sabin, vol. x. no. 39,631-32; Carter-Brown, i. 262.

[996] [Sabin, vol. x. no. 39,634; Carter-Brown, vol. i. no. 263. An

English translation, following the Lyons text, was issued in
London in 1566 as A True and Perfect Description of the Last
Voyage of Ribaut, of which only two copies are reported by
Sabin,—one in the Carter-Brown Library (vol. i. no. 264), and the
other in the British Museum. This same Lyons text was included
in Ternaux’ Reçueil de pièces sur la Floride and in Gaffarel’s La
Floride Française, p. 457 (cf. also pp. 337-339), and it is in part
given in Cimber and Danjon’s Archives curieuses de l’histoire de
France (Paris, 1835), vi. 200. The original Dieppe text was
reprinted at Rouen in 1872 for the Société Rouennaise de
Bibliophiles, and edited by Gravier under the title: Deuxième
voyage du Dieppois Jean Ribaut à la Floride en 1565, précédé
d’une notice historique et bibliographique. Cf. Brinton, Floridian
Peninsula, p. 30.—Ed.]

[997] [O’Callaghan, no. 463; Rich (1832), no. 60. There was an
edition at Cologne in 1612 (Stevens, Nuggets, no. 2,300; Carter-
Brown, ii. 123). Sparks (Life of Ribault, p. 152) reports a De
navigatione Gallorum in terram Floridam in connection with an
Antwerp (1568) edition of Levinus Apollonius. It also appears in
the same connection in the joint German edition of Benzoni,
Peter Martyr, and Levinus printed at Basle in 1582 (Carter-Brown,
vol. i. no. 344). It may have been merely a translation of Challeux
or Ribault (Brinton, Floridian Peninsula, p. 36)—Ed.].

[998] Murphy, nos. 564, 2,853.

[999] Sabin, vol. x. no. 39,630; Carter-Brown, vol. i. no. 330;

Dufossé, no. 4,211.

[1000] This petition is known as the Epistola supplicatoria, and is

embodied in the original text in Chauveton’s French edition of
Benzoni. It is also given in Cimber and Danjon’s Archives
 curieuses, vi. 232, and in Gaffarel’s Floride Française, p. 477; and
in Latin in De Bry, parts ii. and vi. (cf. Sparks’s Ribault, appendix).
[There are other contemporary accounts or illustrations in the
“Lettres et papiers d’état du Sieur de Forquevaulx,” for the most
part unprinted, and preserved in the Bibliothèque Nationale in
Paris, which were used by Du Prat in his Histoire d’Élisabeth de
Valois (1859), and some of which are printed in Gaffarel, p. 409.
The nearly contemporary accounts of Popellinière in his Trois
mondes (1582) and in the Histoire universelle of De Thou,
represent the French current belief. The volume of Ternaux’
Voyages known as Recueil de pièces sur la Floride inédites,
contains, among eleven documents, one called Coppie d’une
lettre venant de la Floride, ... ensemble le plan et portraict du fort
que les François y ont faict (1564), which is reprinted in Gaffarel
and in French’s Historical Collections of Louisiana and Florida, vol.
iii. This tract, with a plan of the fort on the sixth leaf, recto, was
originally printed at Paris in 1565 (Carter-Brown, i. 256). None of
the reprints give the engravings. It was seemingly written in the
summer of 1564, and is the earliest account which was printed.—
Ed.]

[1001] Ensayo cronológico.

[1002] [Parkman, however, inclines to believe that Barcia’s

acceptance is a kind of admission of its “broad basis of truth.”—
Ed.]

[1003] Page 340. Cf. Manuscrits de la Bibliothèque du Roi, iv. 72.

[1004] [They are: a. Preserved in the Château de Vayres, belonging

to M. de Bony, which is presumably that given as belonging to
the Gourgues family, of which a copy, owned by Bancroft, was
used by Parkman. It was printed at Mont-de-Marsan, 1851, 63
pages.
b. In the Bibliothèque Nationale, no. 1,886. Printed by
Ternaux-Compans in his Recueil, etc., p. 301, and by Gaffarel, p.
483, collated with the other manuscripts and translated into
English in French’s Historical Collections of Louisiana and Florida,
ii. 267. This copy bears the name of Robert Prévost; but whether
as author or copyist is not clear, says Parkman (p. 142).
c. In the Bibliothèque Nationale, no. 2,145. Printed at
Bordeaux in 1867 by Ph. Tamizey de Larroque, with preface and
notes, and giving also the text marked e below.
 d. In the Bibliothèque Nationale, no. 3,384. Printed by
Taschereau in the Revue rétrospective (1835), ii. 321.
e. In the Bibliothèque Nationale, no. 6,124. See c above.
The account in the Histoire notable is called an abridgment by
Sparks, and of this abridgment there is a Latin version in De Bry,
part ii.,—De quarta Gallorum in Floridam navigatione sub
Gourguesio. See other abridgments in Popellinière, Histoire des
trois mondes (1582), Lescarbot, and Charlevoix.]

[1005] Floridian Peninsula, p. 35.

[1006] Such as Wytfliet’s Histoire des Indes; D’Aubigné’s Histoire

universelle (1626); De Laet’s Novus orbis, book iv.; Lescarbot’s
Nouvelle France; Champlain’s Voyages; Brantôme’s Grands
capitaines François (also in his Œuvres). Faillon (Colonie
Française, i. 543) bases his account on Lescarbot.

[1007] Cf. Shea’s edition with notes, where (vol. i. p. 71) Charlevoix
characterizes the contemporary sources; and he points out how
the Abbé du Fresnoy, in his Méthode pour étudier la géographie,
falls into some errors.

[1008] American Biography, vol. vii. (new series).

[1009] Boston, 1865. Mr. Parkman had already printed parts of this
in the Atlantic Monthly, xii. 225, 536, and xiv. 530.

[1010] Paris, 1875. He gives (p. 517) a succinct chronology of

events.

[1011] Cf., for instance, Bancroft’s United States, chap. ii.; Gay’s
Popular History of the United States, chap. viii.; Warburton’s
Conquest of Canada, app. xvi.; Conway Robinson’s Discoveries in
the West, ii. chap. xvii. et seq.; Kohl’s Discovery of Maine;
Fairbanks’s Florida; Brinton’s Floridian Peninsula,—among
American writers; and among the French,—Guérin, Les
navigateurs Français (1846); Ferland, Canada; Martin, Histoire de
France; Haag, La France protestante; Poussielgue, “Quatre mois
en Floride,” in Le tour du monde, 1869-1870; and the Lives of
Coligny by Tessier, Besant, and Laborde. There are other
references in Gaffarel, p. 344.
There is a curious article, “Dominique de Gourgues, the
Avenger of the Huguenots in Florida, a Catholic,” in the Catholic
 World, xxi. 701.

[1012] The Acts of the Apostles, xxviii. 2-6.

[1013] [See Chapter I.—Ed.]

[1014] Llorente adds that he had a personal acquaintance with a

branch of the family at Calahorra, his own birthplace, and that
the first of the family went to Spain, under Ferdinand III., to fight
against the Moors of Andalusia. He also traces a connection
between this soldier and Las Cases, the chamberlain of Napoleon,
one of his councillors and companions at St. Helena, through a
Charles Las Casas, one of the Spanish seigneurs who
accompanied Blanche of Castile when she went to France, in
1200, to espouse Louis VIII.

[1015] There is a variance in the dates assigned by historians for

the visits of both Las Casas and his father to the Indians. Irving,
following Navarrete, says that Antoine returned to Seville in 1498,
having become rich (Columbus iii. 415). He also says that
Llorente is incorrect in asserting that Bartholomew in his twenty-
fourth year accompanied Columbus in his third voyage, in 1498,
returning with him in 1500, as the young man was then at his
studies at Salamanca. Irving says Bartholomew first went to
Hispaniola with Ovando in 1502, at the age of about twenty-
eight. I have allowed the dates to stand in the text as given by
Llorente, assigning the earlier year for the first voyage of Las
Casas to the New World as best according with the references in
writings by his own pen to the period of his acquaintance with
the scenes which he describes.

[1016] The administration of affairs in the Western colonies of

Spain was committed by Ferdinand, in 1511, to a body composed
chiefly of clergy and jurists, called “The Council for the Indies.”
Its powers originally conferred by Ferdinand were afterward
greatly enlarged by Charles V. These powers were full and
supreme, and any information, petition, appeal, or matter of
business concerning the Indies, though it had been first brought
before the monarch, was referred by him for adjudication to the
Council. This body had an almost absolute sway alike in matters
civil and ecclesiastical, with supreme authority over all
appointments and all concerns of government and trade. It was
therefore in the power of the Council to overrule or qualify in
many ways the will or purpose or measures of the sovereigns,
 which were really in favor of right or justice or humane
proceedings in the affairs of the colonies. For it naturally came
about that some of its members were personally and selfishly
interested in the abuses and iniquities which it was their rightful
function and their duty to withstand. At the head of the Council
was a dignitary whose well-known character and qualities were
utterly unfavorable for the rightful discharge of his high trust.
This was Juan Rodriguez de Fonseca, successively Bishop of
Badajoz, Valencia, and Burgos, and constituted “Patriarch of the
Indies.” He had full control of colonial affairs for thirty years, till
near his death in 1547. He bore the repute among his associates
of extreme worldliness and ambition, with none of the graces and
virtues becoming the priestly office, the duties of which engaged
but little of his time or regard. It is evident also that he was of an
unscrupulous and malignant disposition. He was inimical to
Columbus and Cortés from the start. He tried to hinder, and
succeeded in delaying and embarrassing, the second westward
voyage of the great admiral. (Irving’s Columbus, iii.; Appendix
XXXIV.) He was a bitter opponent of Las Casas, even resorting to
taunting insults of the apostle, and either openly or crookedly
thwarting him in every stage and effort of his patient
importunities to secure the intervention of the sovereigns in the
protection of the natives. The explanation of this enmity is found
in the fact that Fonseca himself was the owner of a repartimiento
in Hispaniola, with a large number of native slaves.

[1017] There is an extended Note on Las Casas in Appendix XXVIII.

of Irving’s Columbus. That author most effectively vindicates Las
Casas from having first advised and been instrumental in the
introduction of African slavery in the New World, giving the dates
and the advisers and agents connected with that wrong previous
to any word on the subject from Las Casas. The devoted
missionary had been brought to acquiesce in the measure on the
plausible plea stated in the text, acting from the purest spirit of
benevolence, though under an erroneous judgment. Cardinal
Ximenes had from the first opposed the project.

[1018] As will appear farther on in these pages, Las Casas stands

justly chargeable with enormous exaggerations of the number or
estimate of the victims of Spanish cruelty. But I have not met
with a single case in any contemporary writer, nor in the
challengers and opponents of his pleadings at the Court of Spain,
in which his hideous portrayal of the forms and methods of that
cruelty, its dreadful and revolting tortures and mutilations, have
been brought under question. Mr. Prescott’s fascinating volumes
have been often and sometimes very sharply censured, because
in the glow of romance, chivalric daring, and heroic adventure in
which he sets the achievements of the Spanish “Conquerors” of
the New World he would seem to be somewhat lenient to their
barbarities. In the second of his admirable works he refers as
follows to this stricture upon him: “To American and English
readers, acknowledging so different a moral standard from that
of the sixteenth century, I may possibly be thought too indulgent
to the errors of the Conquerors;” and he urges that while he has
“not hesitated to expose in their strongest colors the excesses of
the Conquerors, I have given them the benefit of such mitigating
reflections as might be suggested by the circumstances and the
period in which they lived” (Preface to the Conquest of Mexico).
It is true that scattered over all the ably-wrought pages of Mr.
Prescott’s volumes are expressions of the sternest judgment and
the most indignant condemnation passed upon the most signal
enormities of these incarnate spoilers, who made a sport of their
barbarity. But those who have most severely censured the author
upon the matter now in view have done so under the conviction
that cruelty unprovoked and unrelieved was so awfully dark and
prevailing a feature in every stage and incident of the Spanish
advance in America, that no glamour of adventure or chivalric
deeds can in the least lighten or redeem it. The underlying
ground of variance is in the objection to the use of the terms
“Conquest” and “Conquerors,” as burdened with the relation of
such a pitiful struggle between the overmastering power of the
invaders and the abject helplessness of their victims.
As I am writing this note, my eye falls upon the following
extract from a private letter written in 1847 by that eminent and
highly revered divine, Dr. Orville Dewey, and just now put into
print: “I have been reading Prescott’s Peru. What a fine
accomplishment there is about it! And yet there is something
wanting to me in the moral nerve. History should teach men how
to estimate characters; it should be a teacher of morals; and I
think it should make us shudder at the names of Cortez and
Pizarro. But Prescott does not; he seems to have a kind of
sympathy with these inhuman and perfidious adventurers, as if
they were his heroes. It is too bad to talk of them as the soldiers
of Christ; if it were said of the Devil, they would have better fitted
 the character” (Autobiography and Letters of Orville Dewey, D.D.
p. 190).

[1019] Juan Ginez de Sepulveda, distinguished both as a theologian

and an historian, was born near Cordova in 1490, and died in
1573. He was of a noble but impoverished family. He availed
himself of his opportunities for obtaining the best education of his
time in the universities of Spain and Italy, and acquired an
eminent reputation as a scholar and a disputant,—not, however,
for any elevation of principles or nobleness of thought. In 1536
he was appointed by Charles V. his historiographer, and put in
charge of his son Philip. Living at Court, he had the repute of
being crooked and unscrupulous, his influence not being given on
the side of rectitude and progressive views. His writings
concerning men and public affairs give evidence of the faults
imputed to him. He was vehement, intolerant, and dogmatic. He
justified the most extreme absolutism in the exercise of the royal
prerogative, and the lawfulness and even the expediency of
aggressive wars simply for the glory of the State. Melchior Cano
and Antonio Ramirez, as well as Las Casas, entered into
antagonism and controversy with his avowed principles. One of
his works, entitled Democrates Secundus, seu de justis belli
causis, may be pronounced almost brutal in the license which it
allowed in the stratagems and vengefulness of warfare. It was
condemned by the universities of Alcala and Salamanca. He was
a voluminous author of works of history, philosophy, and
theology, and was admitted to be a fine and able writer. Erasmus
pronounced him the Spanish Livy. The disputation between him
and Las Casas took place before Charles in 1550. The monarch
was very much under his influence, and seems to some extent to
have sided with him in some of his views and principles.
Sepulveda was one of the very few persons whom the monarch
admitted to interviews and intimacy in his retirement to the
Monastery at Yuste.
It was this formidable opponent—a personal enemy also in
jealousy and malignity—whom Las Casas confronted with such
boldness and earnestness of protest before the Court and
Council. It was evidently the aim of Sepulveda to involve the
advocate of the Indians in some disloyal or heretical questioning
of the prerogatives of monarch or pope. It seemed at one time as
if the noble pleader for equity and humanity would come under
the clutch of the Holy Office, then exercising its new-born vigor
upon all who could be brought under inquisition for constructive
 or latent heretical proclivities. For Las Casas, though true to his
priestly vows, made frequent and bold utterances of what
certainly, in his time, were advanced views and principles.

[1020] Juan Antonio Llorente, eminent as a writer and historian,

both in Spanish and French, was born near Calahorra, Aragon, in
1756, and died at Madrid in 1823. He received the tonsure when
fourteen years of age, and was ordained priest at Saragossa in
1779. He was of a vigorous, inquisitive, and liberal spirit, giving
free range to his mind, and turning his wide study and deep
investigations to the account of his enlargement and
emancipation from the limitations of his age and associates. He
tells us that in 1784 he had abandoned all ultramontane
doctrines, and all the ingenuities and perplexities of
scholasticism. His liberalism ran into rationalism. His secret or
more or less avowed alienation from the prejudices and
obligations of the priestly order, while it by no means made his
position a singular or even an embarrassing one under the
influences and surroundings of his time, does at least leave us
perplexed to account for the confidence with which functions and
high ecclesiastical trusts were committed to and exercised by
him. He was even made Secretary-General of the Inquisition, and
was thus put in charge of the enormous mass of records, with all
their dark secrets, belonging to its whole history and processes.
This charge he retained for a time after the Inquisition was
abolished in 1809. It was thus by a singular felicity of opportunity
that those terrible archives should have been in the care, and
subject to the free and intelligent use, of a man best qualified of
all others to tell the world their contents, and afterward prompted
and at liberty to do so from subsequent changes in his own
opinions and relations. To this the world is indebted for a History
of the Inquisition, the fidelity and sufficiency of which satisfy all
candid judgments. He was restive in spirit, provoked strong
opposition, and was thus finally deprived of his office. After
performing a variety of services not clerical, and moving from
place to place, he went to Paris, where, in 1817-1818, he
courageously published the above-mentioned History. He was
interdicted the exercise of clerical functions. In 1822, the same
year in which he published his Biography and French translation
of the principal works of Las Casas, he published also his Political
Portraits of the Popes. For this he was ordered to quit Paris,—a
deep disappointment to him, causing chagrin and heavy
 depression. He found refuge in Madrid, where he died in the
following year.

[1021] Mr. Ticknor, however, says that these two treatises “are not
absolutely proved” to be by Las Casas.—History of Spanish
Literature, i. 566.

[1022] Conquest of Mexico, i. 80, n. Of his Short Account of the

Destruction of the Indies, this historian says: “However good the
motives of its author, we may regret that the book was ever
written.... The author lent a willing ear to every tale of violence
and rapine, and magnified the amount to a degree which borders
on the ridiculous. The wild extravagance of his numerical
estimates is of itself sufficient to shake confidence in the accuracy
of his statements generally. Yet the naked truth was too startling
in itself to demand the aid of exaggeration.” The historian truly
says of himself, in his Preface to the work quoted: “I have not
hesitated to expose in their strongest colors the excesses of the
conquerors.”

[1023] Llorente, i. 365, 386.

[1024] [Helps (Spanish Conquest) says: “Las Casas may be

thoroughly trusted whenever he is speaking of things of which he
had competent knowledge.” Ticknor (Spanish literature, ii. 31)
calls him “a prejudiced witness, but on a point of fact within his
own knowledge one to be believed.” H. H. Bancroft (Early
American Chroniclers, p. 20; also Central America, i. 274, 309; ii.
337) speaks of the exaggeration which the zeal of Las Casas
leads him into; but with due abatement therefor, he considers
him “a keen and valuable observer, guided by practical sagacity,
and endowed with a certain genius.”—Ed.]

[1025] Sabin’s Works of Las Casas, and his Dictionary, iii. 388-402,
and x. 88-91; Field’s Indian Bibliography; Carter-Brown
Catalogue; Harrisse’s Notes on Columbus, pp. 18-24; the Huth
Catalogue; Brunet’s Manuel, etc.

[1026] [Field says it was written in 1540, and submitted to the

Emperor in MS.; but in the shape in which it was printed it seems
to have been written in 1541-1542. Cf. Field, Indian Bibliography,
nos. 860, 870; Sabin, Works of Las Casas, no. 1; Carter-Brown
Catalogue, i. 164; Ticknor, Spanish Literature, ii. 38; and
Catalogue, p. 62. The work has nineteen sections on as many
 provinces, ending with a summary for the year 1546. This
separate tract was reprinted in the original Spanish in London, in
1812, and again in Philadelphia, in 1821, for the Mexican market,
with an introductory essay on Las Casas. Stevens, Bibliotheca
historica, 1105; cf. also Coleccion de documentos inéditos
(España), vol. vii.
The Cancionero spiritual, printed at Mexico in 1546, is not
assigned to Bartholomew Las Casas in Ticknor’s Spanish
Literature, iii. 44, but it is in Gayangos and Vedia’s Spanish
translation of Ticknor. Cf. also Sabin, vol. x. no. 39,122; Harrisse,
Bib. Am. Vet., Additions, No. 159.—Ed.]

[1027] [Field does not give it a date; but Sabin says it was written
in 1552. Cf. Field, nos. 860, 870, note; Sabin, no. 2; Carter-
Brown, i. 165; Ticknor Catalogue, p. 62.—Ed.]

[1028] [Field says it was written “soon after” no. 1; Sabin places it
in 1543. Cf. Field, no. 862, 870, note; Carter-Brown, i. 166;
Sabin, 3; Stevens, Bibl. Geog., no. 595; Ticknor Catalogue, p. 62.
—Ed.]

[1029] [Sabin says it was written in America in 1546-1547. Field,

nos. 863, 870, note; Carter-Brown, i. 167; Sabin, no. 6.—Ed.]

[1030] [There seems, according to Field (nos. 864, 865), to have

been two distinct editions in 1552, as he deduces from his own
copy and from a different one belonging to Mr. Brevoort, there
being thirty-three variations in the two. Quaritch has noted (no.
11,855, priced at £6 6s.) a copy likewise in Gothic letter, but with
different woodcut initials, which he places about 1570. Cf. Field,
p. 217; Carter-Brown, i. 168; Sabin, no. 8; Ticknor Catalogue, p.
62.
The initial work of Sepulveda, Democrates Secundus,
defending the rights of the Crown over the natives, was not
published, though he printed his Apologia pro libro de justis belli
causis, Rome, 1550 (two copies of which are known), of which
there was a later edition in 1602; and some of his views may be
found in it. Cf. Ticknor, Spanish Literature, ii. 37; Harrisse, Notes
on Columbus, p. 24, and Bib. Amer. Vet., no. 303; and the
general histories of Bancroft, Helps, and Prescott. The Carter-
Brown Catalogue, no. 173, shows a MS. copy of Sepulveda’s
book. It is also in Sepulveda’s Opera, Cologne, 1602, p. 423;
Carter-Brown, vol. ii. no. 15.—Ed.]
[1031] [Sabin dates it in 1543. Cf. Field, nos. 866, 870, note; Sabin,
no. 4; Carter-Brown, i. 170.—Ed.]

[1032] [Sabin says it was written in Spain in 1548 Cf. Field, nos.
867, 870, note; Sabin, no. 7; Carter-Brown, i. 171.—Ed.]

[1033] [Field, nos. 868, 870, note; Sabin, no. 9; Carter-Brown, i.

169.—Ed.]

[1034] [This is the longest and one of the rarest of the series. Sabin
says it was written about 1543. There were two editions of the
same date, having respectively 80 and 84 leaves; but it is
uncertain which is the earlier, though Field supposes the fewer
pages to indicate the first. Field, nos. 869, 870, note; Sabin, no.
5; Carter Brown, i. 172.—Ed.]

[1035] [It is only of late years that the entire series has been
described. De Bure gives only five of the tracts; Dibdin
enumerates but seven; and Llorente in his edition omits three, as
was done in the edition of 1646. Rich in 1832 priced a set at £12
12s. A full set is now worth from $100 to $150; but Leclerc (nos.
327, 2,556) has recently priced a set of seven at 700 francs, and
a full set at 1,000 francs. An English dealer has lately held one at
£42. Quaritch has held four parts at £10, and a complete set at
£40. Single tracts are usually priced at from £1 to £5. Recent
sales have been shown in the Sunderland (no. 2,459, 9 parts);
Field (no. 1,267); Cooke (vol. iii. no. 369, 7 parts); Stevens, Hist.
Coll. (no. 311, 8 parts); Pinart (no. 536); and Murphy (no. 487)
catalogues. The set in the Carter-Brown Library belonged to
Ternaux; that belonging to Mr. Brevoort came from the
Maximillian Library. The Lenox Library and Mr. Barlow’s Collection
have sets. There are also sets in the Grenville and Huth
collections.
The 1646 reprint, above referred to, has sometimes a
collective title, Las Obras, etc., but most copies, like the Harvard
College copy, lack it. As the titles of the separate tracts (printed
in this edition in Roman) retained the original 1552 dates, this
reprint is often called a spurious edition. It is usually priced at
from $15 to $30. Cf. Sabin, no. 13; Field, p. 216; Quaritch, no.
11,856; Carter-Brown, i. 173; ii. 584; Stevens, Hist. Coll., i. 312;
Cooke, iii. 370.
Some of the Tracts are included in the Obras escogidas de
filósofos, etc. Madrid, 1873.—Ed.]
[1036] [Field, no. 870, and note; Sabin, no. 11; the Carter-Brown
Collection lacks it. It was reprinted at Tübingen, and again at
Jena, in 1678. It has never been reprinted in Spain, says Stevens
(Bibl. Hist., no. 1,096).—Ed.]

[1037] [“Not absolutely proved to be his,” says Ticknor (Spanish

Literature, ii. 37).—Ed.]

[1038] [There were a hundred copies of these printed. They are:—

1. Memorial de Don Diego Colon sobre la conversion de las
gentes de las Yndias. With an Epistle to Dr. Reinhold Pauli. It is
Diego Colon’s favorable comment on Las Casas’s scheme of
civilizing the Indians, written at King Charles’s request. Cf.
Stevens, Hist. Coll., i. 881.
2. Carta, dated 1520, and addressed to the Chancellor of
Charles, in which Las Casas urges his scheme of colonization of
the Indians. Mr. Stevens dedicates it to Arthur Helps in a letter.
Cf. Stevens, Hist. Coll., i. 882; the manuscript is described in his
Bibl. Geog., no. 598.
3. Paresçer o determinaciō de los señores theologos de
Salamanca, dated July 1, 1541. This is the response of the
Faculty of Salamanca to the question put to them by Charles V., if
the baptized natives could be made slaves. Mr. Stevens dedicates
the tract to Sir Thomas Phillipps. Cf. Stevens, Hist. Coll., i. 883.
4. Carta de Hernando Cortés. Mr. Stevens, in his Dedication to
Leopold von Ranke, supposes this to have been written in 1541-
1542. It is Cortes’ reply to the Emperor’s request for his opinions
regarding Encomiendas, etc., in Mexico. Cf. Stevens, Hist. Coll., i.
884.
5. Carta de Las Casas, dated Oct. 22, 1545, with an abstract in
English in the Dedication to Colonel Peter Force. It is addressed
to the Audiencia in Honduras, and sets forth the wrongs of the
natives. Cf. Stevens, Hist. Coll., i. 885. The manuscript is now in
the Huth Collection, Catalogue, v. 1,681.
6. Carta de Las Casas to the Dominican Fathers of Guatemala,
protesting against the sale of the reversion of the Encomiendas.
Mr. Stevens supposes this to have been written in 1554, in his
Dedication to Sir Frederick Madden. Cf. Stevens, Hist. Coll., i.
886. A set of these tracts is worth about $25. The set in the
Cooke Sale (vol. iii. no. 375) is now in Harvard College Library;
another set is shown in the Murphy Catalogue, no. 488, and there
is one in the Boston Public Library.—Ed.]
[1039] Field, p. 219.

[1040] Vol. i. p. 160.

[1041] [Harrisse, Notes on Columbus, says volumes i. and ii. are in

the Academy; but volume iii. is in the Royal Library. Cf., however,
the “Advertencia preliminar” of the Madrid (1875) edition of the
Historia on this point, as well as regards the various copies of the
manuscript existing in Madrid.—Ed.]

[1042] [Such is Quintana’s statement; but Helps failed to verify it,

and says he could only fix the dates 1552, 1560, 1561 as those of
any part of the writing. Life of Las Casas, p. 175.—Ed.]

[1043] [I trace no copy earlier than one Rich had made. Prescott
had one, which was probably burned in Boston (1872). Helps
used another. There are other copies in the Library of Congress,
in the Lenox Library, and in H. H. Bancroft’s Collection.—Ed.]

[1044] [Harrisse, Bibl. Amer. Vet., p. 119, says the purpose of the
Academy at one time was to annotate the manuscript, so as to
show Las Casas in a new light, using contemporary writers.—Ed.]

[1045] [It is worth from $30 to $40. It is called Historia de las

Indias, ahora por primera vez dada á luz por el Marqués de la
Fuensanta del Valle y José Sancho Rayon. It contains, beginning
in vol. v. at p. 237, the Apologética historia which Las Casas had
written to defend the Indians against aspersions upon their lives
and character. This latter work was not included in another
edition of the Historia printed at Mexico in two volumes in 1877-
1878. Cf. Vigel, Biblioteca Mexicana. Parts of the Apologética are
given in Kingsborough’s Mexico, vol. viii. Cf. on the Historia,
Irving’s Columbus, App.; Helps’s Spanish Conquest (Am. ed.), i.
23, and Life of Las Casas, p. 175; Ticknor, Spanish Literature, ii.
39; Humboldt’s Cosmos (Eng. tr.), ii. 679; H. H. Bancroft, Central
America, i. 309; Prescott’s Mexico, i. 378; Quintana’s Vidas, iii.
507.—Ed.]

[1046] [Llorente’s version is not always strictly faithful, being in

parts condensed and paraphrastic. Cf. Field, no. 889; Ticknor,
Spanish Literature, ii. 38, and Catalogue, p. 62; Sabin, nos. 14,
50; H. H. Bancroft, Central America, i. 309. This edition, besides
a life of Las Casas, contains a necrology of the Conquerors, and
other annotations by the editor.—Ed.]
[1047] [This earliest version is a tract of 70 leaves, printed probably
at Brussels, and called Seer cort Verhael vande destructie van
d’Indien. Cf. Sabin, no. 23; Carter-Brown, i. 320; Stevens, Bibl.
Hist., no. 1,097. The whole series is reviewed in Tiele’s Mémoire
bibliographique (who gives twenty-one editions) and in Sabin’s
Works of Las Casas (taken from his Dictionary); and many of
them are noted in the Carter-Brown Catalogue and in Muller’s
Books on America, 1872 and 1877. This 1578 edition was
reissued in 1579 with a new title, Spieghel der Spaenscher
Tirannije, which in some form continued to be the title of
subsequent editions, which were issued in 1596, 1607, 1609,
1610, 1612 (two), 1620 (two), 1621, 1627 (?), 1634, 1638, 1663,
1664, etc. Several of these editions give De Bry’s engravings,
sometimes in reverse. A popular chap-book, printed about 1730,
is made up from Las Casas and other sources.—Ed.]

[1048] [This included the first, second, and sixth of the tracts of
1552. In 1582 there was a new edition of the Tyrannies, etc.,
printed at Paris; but some copies seem to have had a changed
title, Histoire admirable des horribles insolences, etc. It was again
reissued with the original title at Rouen in 1630. Cf. Field, 873,
874; Sabin, nos. 41, 42, 43, 45; Rich (1832); Stevens, Bibl. Hist.,
no. 1,098; Leclerc, nos. 334, 2,558; Carter-Brown, i. 329, 345,
347; O’Callaghan, no. 1,336; a London catalogue (A. R. Smith,
1874) notes an edition of the Histoire admirable des horribles
Insolences, Cruautez et tyrraines exercées par les Espagnols, etc.,
Lyons, 1594.—Ed.]

[1049] [It is a tract of sixty-four leaves in Gothic letter, and is very

rare, prices being quoted at £20 and more. Cf. Sabin, no. 61;
Carter-Brown, i. 351; Stevens, Bibl. Geog., 596, Huth Catalogue,
i. 271. Cf. William Lightfoote’s Complaints of England, London,
1587, for English opinion at this time on the Spanish excesses
(Sabin, vol. x. no. 41,050), and the Foreign Quarterly Review
(1841), ii. 102.—Ed.]

[1050] [Field, p. 877; Carter-Brown, ii. 804; Sabin, no. 60. The first
tract is translated in Purchas’s Pilgrimes, iv. 1,569.—Ed.]

[1051] [Some copies read, Account of the First Voyages, etc. Cf.
Field, no. 880; Carter-Brown, vol. ii. no. 1,556; Sabin, no. 63;
Stevens, Bibl. Geog., no. 603; and Prince Library Catalogue, p.
34. Another English edition, London, 1689, is called Popery truly
 display’d in its Bloody Colours. Cf. Carter-Brown, vol. ii. no. 1,374;
Sabin, no. 62. Another London book of 1740, Old England for
Ever, is often called a Las Casas, but it is not his. Field, no. 888.
—Ed.]

[1052] [Sabin, no. 51; Carter-Brown, i. 510; Stevens, Hist. Coll., i.

319. It has no place. Muller calls a Warhafftiger Bericht of 1599,
with no place, the earliest German edition, with De Bry’s,
engravings,—which were also in the Oppenheim edition of 1613,
Warhafftiger und gründlicher Bericht, etc. Cf. Sabin, no. 54;
Carter-Brown, ii. 146. A similar title belongs to a Frankfort edition
of 1597 (based on the Antwerp French edition of 1579), which is
noted in Sabin, no. 52, and in Bib. Grenvilliana, ii. 828, and was
accompanied by a volume of plates (Sabin, no,. 53).
There seem to be two varieties of the German edition of 1665,
Umbständige warhafftige Beschreibung der Indianischen Ländern.
Cf. Carter-Brown, ii. 957; Sabin, no. 55; Field, no. 882. Sabin (no.
56) also notes a 1790 and other editions.—Ed.]

[1053] [It followed the French edition of 1579, and was reissued at
Oppenheim in 1614. Cf. Field, p. 871; Carter-Brown, i. 453, 524;
ii. 164; Sabin, nos. 57, 58.
The Heidelberg edition of 1664, Regionum Indicarum per
Hispanos olim devastatarum descriptio, omits the sixteen pages
of preliminary matter of the early editions; and the plates,
judging from the Harvard College and other copies, show wear.
Sabin, no. 59; Carter-Brown, ii. 944.—Ed.]

[1054] [As in the Istoria ò brevissima relatione, Venice, 1626, 1630,

and 1643, a version of the first tract of 1552, made by Castellani.
It was later included in Marmocchi’s Raccolta di viaggi. Cf. Sabin,
nos. 16, 17, 18; Carter-Brown, ii. 311, 360, 514; Leclerc, no. 331;
Field, no. 885; Stevens, Hist. Coll., i. 315; Bibl. Hist., no. 1,100.
The sixth tract was translated as Il supplice schiavo Indiano, and
published at Venice in 1635, 1636, and 1657. Cf. Carter-Brown, ii.
434, 816; Field, no. 886; Sabin, nos. 20, 21. It was reissued in
1640 as La libertà pretesa. Sabin, no. 19; Field, no. 887; Carter-
Brown, ii. 473. The eighth and ninth tracts appeared as Conquista
dell’Indie occidentali, Venice, 1645. Cf. Field, no. 884; Sabin, no.
22; Carter-Brown, ii. 566.—Ed.]

[1055] In Harvard College Library, with also the Ordenanzas reales

del Conseio de las Indias, of the same date.
[1056] There are convenient explanations and references
respecting the functions of the Casa de la Contratacion, the
Council of the Indies, the Process of the Audiencia, and the
duties of an Alcalde, in Bancroft’s Central America, vol. i. pp. 270,
280, 282, 297, 330.

[1057] See chap. iii. p. 203, ante.

[1058] At Medellin, in Estremadura, in 1485.

[1059] They are given in Pacheco’s Coleccion, xii. 225, Prescott’s

Mexico, app. i., and elsewhere. Cf. H. H. Bancroft, Mexico, i. 55.

[1060] There is much conflict of testimony on the respective share

of Cortés and Velasquez in equipping the expedition. H. H.
Bancroft (Mexico, i. 57) collates the authorities.

[1061] Prescott makes Cortés sail clandestinely; Bancroft makes his

departure a hurried but open one; and this is Helps’s view of the
authorities.

[1062] The authorities are not in unison about all these figures. Cf.
H. H. Bancroft, Mexico, i. 70.

[1063] See the long note comparing some of these accounts in H.

H. Bancroft’s Mexico, i. 102, etc.

[1064] Marina did more. She impressed Cortés, who found her
otherwise convenient for a few years; and after she had borne
him children, married her to one of his captains. What purports to
be a likeness of her is given in Cabajal’s México, ii. 64.

[1065] Prescott (Mexico, revised edition, i. 345) points out how this
site was abandoned later for one farther south, where the town
was called Vera Cruz Vieja; and again, early in the seventeenth
century, the name and town were transferred to another point
still farther south,—Nueva Vera Cruz. These changes have caused
some confusion in the maps of Lorenzana and others. Cf. the
maps in Prescott and H. H. Bancroft.

[1066] There is some discrepancy in the authorities here as regards

the openness or stealth of the act of destroying the fleet. See the
authorities collated in Prescott, Mexico, new edition, i. 369, 370.
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