Allusory

 

Rembrandt dishcloth

I don't watch a lot of TV, although I do have a bit of a Netflix habit on my iPad, which is not quite the same thing. Our actual TV – which until recently was a 12" portable, but is now a massive 32" flatscreen – is monopolised by my partner, a current affairs junkie. Personally, having heard the news once in the morning on the radio, and again in the early evening while cooking, I rarely feel any need to watch it again on TV, much less repeatedly throughout the evening, like an extended piece of rather repetitive minimalist video-art on a continuous loop. I also suffer from an inability to split my attention in various conflicting directions. I'm either watching, reading, or listening to something, or I'm not; the idea of TV or music as ambient filler in a multitasking environment is profoundly alien to me.

However, on the occasions when I enter the living room – bringing a cup of tea or a meal, say, to sustain the multitasker working therein – it surprises me how often there is yet another documentary about the Nazis playing on one of those obscure channels that live somewhere between the heavyweight channels and the fluff lower down the list. For a regime that lasted little more than a decade, Nazi Germany really is the gift that keeps on giving for documentary makers, conspiracy theorists, and history nuts.

Located further down the scale, down below the latest rehashed documentary about the Siege of Leningrad or Hitler's secret weapons, lurk dubious programmes about "occult Nazis", one of the more curious tropes of popular culture. From Indiana Jones to Hellboy, Luger-toting SS officers in long leather greatcoats are forever seeking to commandeer and weaponize some ancient power-gizmo in crazed pursuit of world domination. As it happens, some of this world war woo-woo is not entirely without foundation: most people know that Hitler & Co. relied to an extent on astrology, and that the Aryan thing had a pseudo-mythological underpinning, but had you ever heard of World Ice Theory (Welteislehre)? Me neither. Of course, in pop culture this occult angle seems to keep permanent company with that other campy trope: the association of Nazi uniforms with BDSM inclinations. No trashy film or comic is complete without some blonde, busty, uniformed dominatrix flexing a crop. It's all a bit sleazy, not to say hypocritical, and – given what the real-life Nazis got up to – not a little tasteless: perhaps it's time certain aspects of the western mind were de-Nazified?

Which all leads me to wonder: why are only some few moments in history so endlessly fruitful? Is it pure chance, or do certain mythic conditions have to be met? The Wild West is certainly another such time. Again, this was a mere decade or two in "diachronic" historical terms, but is an infinite well of "synchronic" story-telling, repeatedly extracting gallon upon gallon of documentary, character, narrative, themes, and myth-making from the same little pint pot of history, far more than could ever actually have taken place in that limited chunk of space and time. In contrast, the First World War, with its cast of millions and multiple far-flung stages is by and large a single story, rarely elaborated or extended beyond the mud and trenches of the Somme. Does anyone even think of, say, Lawrence of Arabia as a "First World War film", for example? There are no "Krazy Kaiser's Witchcraft Weaponry" documentaries, as far as I know, or  even any "I was the Red Baron's Sex Slave" tales (notably, DC Comics' Enemy Ace ends up flying out of WW1 into WW2 to liven things up with the inevitable Nazi-themed storyline). Could this be because the USA was absent for most of that conflict, rendering it parochial to the Hollywood imagination? Or is there some vital missing ingredient: surely it's not just the Hugo Boss uniforms?

But if you're looking for a truly world-class yield of culture per square inch of source, though, the Bible springs readily to mind. The churches were the main patrons of art in Europe for centuries: if you wanted to live by your wits or talents, you pretty much had to fashion something you could sell to a pope or a bishop. Most of those excruciatingly dull, dull, dull religious paintings that fill the walls of the world's museums are variations on a very limited range of approved biblical scenarios, albeit enlivened by the occasional gory martyrdom. It's a great story, the New Testament, with its distinctly post-modern retelling from four different perspectives, but as the official manual of Christianity it's short on scope for creative re-interpretation and, besides, you deviated from the official line at your peril. Artists may claim to suffer for their art, but nobody wants to be burned at the stake as a heretic for, you know, just making some painting. There were also fairly rigid non-Biblical traditions to follow. Mary always dresses in blue? Jesus's cross was bigger than the other two? Of course, your holiness... And I promise I'll put a bit more drapery on the angels this time.

With the Old Testament it's a different story, though, and, best of all, there are lots and lots of different stories. Pillars of fire! Floods! Plagues of frogs! Ladders ascending to heaven! Smiting! Beheadings, deceptions, bed-tricks, begettings a-plenty, and even a little incest and sodomy! Nobody seems entirely sure why all that stuff in Hebrew has been appropriated and put up front as a massive, rambling prequel to the main Greek action, but there it is: a bottomless pit of stories, all told in terse but colourful language, with the extra cachet of having been retrospectively declared gospel truth. Once the Bible had finally been translated into various European vernaculars – and Bible scholars seemed commendably less reluctant than artists to end up in the flames for their trouble – it became the main (if not sole) reading matter for the literate masses for quite a few centuries. It was even available as a serial audio-book for the illiterate, courtesy of your local church. Come back next week for the next exciting, but randomly chosen instalment! All of which meant that an awful lot of imaginative energy was focussed for an awfully long time on mining the text of the Bible for parables, metaphors, similes, turns of phrase, and so on, not to mention its role as a treasury of splendidly sonorous first names.

But by now, of course, even in "Christian heritage" countries, biblical allusions are becoming as baffling as allusions to classical literature and mythology have always been to most of us. A poem like Milton's "Lycidas", however celebrated it has been in the past, is virtually unreadable today; it is so thoroughly swathed in classical winks and nudges that the poem itself is barely visible. Although it is true that, in the right mood, it can be an amusing read, with its baroque impenetrability and infuriating evasion of just getting down to saying what it bloody well wants to say. As Samuel Johnson put it:

It is not to be considered as the effusion of real passion; for passion runs not after remote allusions and obscure opinions. Passion plucks no berries from the myrtle and ivy, nor calls upon Arethuse and Mincius, nor tells of rough satyrs and fauns with cloven heel. Where there is leisure for fiction there is little grief.
Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets, 1783

Quite so, Sam! In the end, all intertextual allusions have a half-life, which dooms to obscurity any art which is draped in them. The Bible and the classics have had a good run, but are rapidly decaying into inert cultural geology. There will also inevitably come a point when any invocation of or comparison with the Little Bighorn, D-Day, or Dien Bien Phu will have joined them in the compacted sedimentary layers of footnoted, hyperlinked obscurity, along with all those painted depositions, annunciations, and martyrdoms. In fact, I'm pretty sure that Tatooine, Lothlórien, and the Millennium Falcon are already rather more firmly rooted in the minds of the young as points of reference than, say, the OK Corral, Stalingrad, or the Enola Gay.

In complete contrast, we recently visited the exhibition of Holbein portraits in the King's Gallery, at Buckingham Palace. What a treat! Whatever allusions are present in those pictures – and I'm sure there must be plenty, especially in the finished paintings – no passage of time or decay of cultural capital will ever detract from the skill that captured the human presence of those aristocratic sitters in such wonderful drawings on paper. Who really needs to know which Lady This or Lord That this happened to be, or what they did or was done to them, when you can encounter them so vividly, unmediated by anything other than a stick of charcoal, some chalk, and the hand-eye co-ordination of a draughtsman of genius? 

Although, that said, to know that this man looking warily over his shoulder is Thomas Wyatt is priceless. What wouldn't we give for a "sketch" from life of this quality of Shakespeare?

Lux, my fair falcon, and your fellows all,
How well pleasant it were your liberty,
Ye not forsake me that fair might ye befall.
But they that sometime liked my company,
Like lice away from dead bodies they crawl.
Lo, what a proof in light adversity.
But ye, my birds, I swear by all your bells,
Ye be my friends, and so be but few else.

Sir Thomas Wyatt