Category Archives: Cinema

SOAS Centre for Film and Screen Studies presents: International Symposium: Rediscovering the Diva; Considering the Impact of Female Star Personae on Japanese Film and Visual Media

funeralparadeofroses

‘Diva fight’ – Still taken from Bara no soretsu [Funeral Parade of Roses] – Matsumoto Toshio, 1969

I will be presenting a paper at the SOAS Centre for Film and Screen Studies Symposium on the 11th of June entitled ‘The angura Diva: Photodynamism and Identity in Matsumoto Toshio’s Funeral Parade of Roses’. The paper examines the role of the transvestite diva  within a theoretical framework focusing on the visual collage and countercultural subtext of Matsumoto’s film.

Eddie

Eddie! Still taken from Bara no soretsu

If you are in London on either Monday 10th (for the Symposium screening of Kurosawa’s The Idiot), or Tuesday the 11th for what looks to be fascinating programme of speakers charting and unpicking the  diva persona in Japanese film, please do come along. Register online here and take a look at the exciting programme

Funeral parade mask

 

Still from Bara no soretsu

 

Sarah Pucill’s ‘Magic Mirror’ – Claude Cahun, Narcissus, and scattered selves

 

Last Monday I attended the world premiere screening of British artist filmmaker Sarah Pucill’s feature on the text and images of Surrealist Claude Cahun. While I was fully aware of Pucill’s work, I was drawn to the screening primarily because of my own interest in Surrealism and its legacies. Upon arrival at the Tate Modern cinema, it was very pleasing to see a full house (with a queue for return tickets) because I’ve recently experienced quite empty cinemas at both Tate and the ICA (why so few people at the ICA screening of Post Tenebras Lux a month or so ago? ). So yes, a great turnout.

Pucill Magic Mirror Hands and lenses

Still taken from Magic Mirror, Sarah Pucill, 2013

French artist and writer Claude Cahun, (1894 – 1954, née Lucy Schwob)  is now well known, her work appropriated by art historians, feminist and queer theorists, who have focused on the imagery in her photographs and its positive transgressions of heteronormative discourse. This was not always the case, and she and her work were largely forgotten until  French poet François Leperlier came across Cahun as a somewhat marginal figure in his research for a publication on Surrealism.  By all accounts intimidated by Breton’s circle (hardly surprising), Cahun was nevertheless friends with some of the Paris circle, such as Soupault and Desnos, and eventually met Breton in Paris,, photographing him and Jacqueline Lamba as well as contributing photographs to journals such as Bifur (a journal publishing works by former Surrealists).

Claude Cahun - Jacqueline Lamba & Andre Breton, 1935

 Jacqueline Lamba and André Breton, Claude Cahun , 1935

For Pucill, who spoke before and after the screening, Claude Cahun had been on her radar since being introduced to her work as an undergraduate in the 1990s. Pucill feels an affinity with Cahun’s artistic practice and her use of mirroring and fragmentation to explore sexuality and clichés of identification such as the Narcissus myth and self-portraiture. The majority of Cahun’s visual works are self-portraits in which costume, artifice, superimposition, reversals of gender stereotypes, the interchangeability of animate and inanimate objects, mirrors, closeted space, and collage, prevail. Although Cahun is best known for her images, she was a prolific writer, and Pucill explained how her book Avenue non avenues (1930) (published in English as Disavowals, but translated by Pucill as ‘confessions untold’) with its photomontages and heliogravurs served for her (making the film) as an expansion and  clarification of the photographs.

Cahun opening image Aveux non avenuesClaude Cahun and Marcel Moore, Phontomontage, Plate 1, Aveux non avenus, 1919 -1929

Pucill finds Cahun’s obsession with mirrors and other reflecting surfaces such as window glass and water, intriguing, pointing out that the opening words in Aveux non avenus: ‘Sash Window. Glass sheet. Where shall I put the silvering? On this side or the other; in front of or behind the pane?’ bring to the fore questions of self and of reflecting on the self in her film work.  The text continues: ‘In front. I imprison myself. I blind myself […] Leave the glass clear, and according to chance and the hours see, confused and partially, sometimes fugitives and sometimes my own look. Then, break the glass panes … with the fragments, compose a stained glass. Byzantine work! Transparency, opacity. What a vow of artifice.’ Dawn Ades notes how this is an overt criticism of Narcissus, of his death, deceived by an image. Cahun understands the artifice, dissolving herself ‘into a never-ending series of masks that have no ‘real’ underneath. These are not so much disguises as adoptions of the socially imposed shells of feminine or masculine identities (like the doll-woman) which need first to be displayed inorder then to be stripped.’ (Ades, ‘Surrealism, Male-Female’, in Surrealism. Desire Unbound, Jennifer Mundy (ed.), 2002,  171-201).

Narcissus Pucill

Sarah Pucill, Magic Mirror, 2013

Pucill’s film re-enacts the figures and mise en scene in Cahun’s photographs, creating further uncanny reflections and expansions of the original self that ultimately, for me, seem most akin to the photomontages in Aveux non avenus. More significant to my mind, is the dissemination of the self into a mise en abîme of self-reflexivity, a kaleidoscopic, polymorphous self that travels back and forth between Pucill and Cahun, refusing, unlike Narcissus, to die. Pucill terms this effect, the scattered self.

Self Portrait Claude

Self Portrait, Claude Cahun, 1928

It has oft been noted that Cahun’s work anticipated the work of Cindy Sherman, or the critical writing of Judith Butler on the ‘troubling’ parameters of socially ordained ‘gender identities’. Gender and self is, of course, at the centre of her work, and the play of feminine and masculine masquerades, yet Cahun’s work is much more than self portraiture and ‘gender-bending’. Although not a fully ‘signed-up’ member of the Surrealist group, her work exemplifies both Bretonian ideas of convulsive beauty, chance and merveilleux, but also the more abject, ‘primitive’, visceral power of Bataillean philosophy. There is a sinister, abject body that exceeds the images of women manifested in Breton or Soupault’s writing, or Man Ray’s photographs of the female form (for example), and offers alternative female bodies that tell of much deeper, experiential view of reality, and of the horrors of modern life.

 

Kinetic Connections – Laura Mulvey reflects on her career as avant-garde filmmaker and feminist film critic | Events Blog

 

Here is my brief account of Birkbeck’s celebration of Laura Mulvey back in February this year, at which the revered filmmaker and critic looked back on her career:

Kinetic Connections – Laura Mulvey reflects on her career as avant-garde filmmaker and feminist film critic | Events Blog.

‘Site and Specificity in Japanese Expanded Cinema: Intermedia and its Development in the late-60s’ by Julian Ross | Décadrages

‘Site and Specificity in Japanese Expanded Cinema: Intermedia and its Development in the late-60s’ by Julian Ross | Décadrages

Matsumoto Toshio, Tsuburekakatta Migimeno Tameni (For My Crushed Right Eye, 1968), Still

I have just read Julian Ross’s invaluable article on expanded cinema and projection space in 1960s/early 1970s Japan. Particularly interesting is his account of the changing relationship between viewer and projection space, which was eventually marked by the waning success of Expo film programmes, towards an ‘Anti-Expo’ sentiment regarding festival screenings. The ‘space’, he argues, is never neutral, never static, and expanded cinema challenges conventional spectatorial perspective founded on a simple linear bridge between spectator and screen. Gone too, is the prescriptive concept of space as  hierarchic ally ordered – the screen is freed.

‘space is never in a state of stasis and, instead, in a perpetual state of becoming, which is most prominently displayed in the event of an expanded cinema projection’ – Ross, 2013.

Have a read:

‘Site and Specificity in Japanese Expanded Cinema: Intermedia and its Development in the late-60s’ by Julian Ross | Décadrages.

Hors Satan’s Tense Hyperrealism

 

I’m very interested in forms of mysticism. I think mysticism is essentially cinematographic. It’s present in my form of expression, it’s a vision that is very rich and something that I think has a lot in common with cinema. In fact, I think that mystical experience helps me understand cinema better. When you’re approaching mysticism, then you’re dealing with something that has nothing to do with the rational, logical mind. It reaches zones or areas touching on ecstasy, ecstatic experiences that I find absolutely astonishing. And I feel that when I’m making a film very quickly, I reach over into this other side, I attain this nonlogical, nonverbal area. It’s an experience I don’t entirely understand, but which interests me deeply. – Bruno Dumont.

The above citation is taken from an interview with director Bruno Dumont for Filmmaker Magazine in 2010, in which he discusses his filmmaking, and this passage in particular informs my approach to his astonishingly affective film, Hors Satan.

Dumont’s sixth feature film Hors Satan [Outside Satan, interestingly Fuera de Satan in Spanish] is on general release in London this week. I watched it yesterday afternoon at Curzon Renoir and am still mulling it over. It made me incredibly tense, which is quite a feat for such a slow-paced film with sparse dialogue. For the first ten or fifteen minutes all I could hear was a noise in my own head, Why? Where? Who? ..to accompany the long establishing shots of the Pas-de-Calais region near Boulogne, and to question the movements of two silent characters set within them. The landscape begins to feel familiar over the course of the initial scenes. The undulating expanse of the coastal village and its surroundings is revealed through the eyes of a character who sleeps outdoors, relies on the kindness of locals for food, and sporadically falls to his knees, arms outstretched to the sun or the horizon before him, as if collecting raw spiritual energy. When not following his point of view, the camera tracks the man’s slow progress as he walks up and down between the village and the sea, stopping to light fires or perform his genuflections. At times the shots are cut more rapidly, and feature close-us that disorientate as the focus shifts in and out.Often the only sound is that of the wind and the laboured breath of the man as he moves over the land. Dumont names this character le gars (the guy), which reminds me of Murnau’s nameless protagonists in Sunrise denoting an ‘everyman’ or ‘everywoman’. To David Dawaele’s ‘guy’ comes Alexandra Lemâtre’s ‘Elle’ (Her, the girl), a pallid, sensitive teenage girl (I refuse to call her a Goth as other reviews have done – this is a lazy comparison) desperate for the means to escape from her abusive step father. Infatuated with the guy, the girl spends the majority of her days following him, his routines shaping hers. He rejects her advances, seeming to respect her innocence and youth.

 Given that the rhythm is set by the slow repetition of the couple’s movements through their rural existence, whenever the guy acts to protect the girl his spontaneous violence seems doubly shocking. He picks off the evil step father with a single close-range rifle shot as the girl stands by his side in silence. A local boy who has shown interest in her is subsequently bludgeoned to death by the guy with a stick. This sudden, controlled violence interrupts the rhythm of the landscape; Dumont leaves little space for the spectator to imagine and thus prepare for the guy’s actions. The shift in the length of the shots between the panoramic long shots of the countryside and the close-ups of the characters exacerbates these explosive contrasts.

I don’t wish to continue with a plot synopsis, but instead focus on the role of the supernatural in the film, with recourse to the director’s own words, above, on the mystical.

In his introduction to The Postmodern Condition, Jean- Francois Lyotard makes an interesting point about the role of modern art. He argues that what is ‘at stake’ in modern painting is making visible that which cannot be represented: ‘something which can be conceived and which can neither be seen nor made visible.’ (Lyotard, ‘Introduction’, Bennington and Massumi, 1984) This is something that Surrealists and magic realists alike have sought to capture in their work. In the modernist avant-garde, which railed against rationalism and the sublimation of magical, mystical, and sensationalist content in art, artists played with the imperceptible join upon which fantasy and reality, one’s conscious and unconscious lives converge. For Dumont this state of being is ecstatic, non rational, and non-verbal. It is less to do with the good and evil usually associated with religious doctrine, and more to do with the shifting, intangible mysticism of life itself. The main character receives and gives something that we can only measure by its results: his outstretched arms take in something unseen from nature and in return he is able to suck sickness from a child, fuck demonically charged energy into a passer-by, set the land on fire and then extinguish it, and finally reanimate a dead corpse. Reanimation of the dead is not simply a fantasy as is often portrayed in the horror genre, but a chillingly uncanny possibility of modern science, and a philosophical metaphor in many cinematic works. In Dumont’s hands, the scene in which the girl’s body ‘wakes up’ seems impossible, and yet given the traumatic circumstances of her attack, could plausibly (we do not witness an autopsy) be a regaining of consciousness. The girl staggers home to her mother, who reacts in sheer terror upon witnessing the figure of her resurrected daughter. This sequence recalls something of the Edgar Allen Poe tale, or the ‘resurrection’ morgue scene in Alexander Sokurov’s Days of Eclipse. 

The resurrected body is the final sign we witness of the guy’s supernatural power, yet we are no closer to knowing what this is, or how, fundamentally, this works. His pagan rituals, echoed in the film’s title suggest a demonic possession of nature’s powers, but he remains outside, unnameable, as we try to reconcile the purpose of his deeds and their physical violence. Yet, as a spectator, at no point did I disbelieve what I saw. This is primarily due to Dumont’s skill at making the ordinary, if isolated, rural village and the chain of events seem realistic; hyperreal. Hyperreality, not in Baudrillard’s postmodern sense, but in the modernist Neue Sachlickeit sense, aims ‘to suggest the mystery of the unconscious mind by translating the most usual objects into sentimental terms, into forms as bizarre, as disturbing, as melancholy, as tragic and nightmare-like as possible.[i] Hyperrealism is an augmentation of reality determined by affect. Affect[i] in Dumont’s film is produced by the overlap of real and horrific violence, supernatural, unexplained shifts in nature, and the emotional scars carried by the characters. The combined impact of the affect causes the landscape to seem invested of special powers – the fire, wind, sun, rocks, flora and fauna – and imbues the film with an unheimlich, non-logical yet emotionally stirring version of the world. In his review of the film for Sight and Sound, Tony Rayns writes that regardless of whether you think ‘Dumont is inspired, deluded or fraudulent, there’s no denying that his project has a certain berserk integrity.’  As for the title, there is nothing outside or inside Satan, for as John Milton’s rendering of the myth illustrates:

The mind is its own place, and in itself

Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n. (Satan: Paradise Lost)

Life, beyond life, outside life – there are no clear dividing borders, no compelling, binding words with which to fix our existence outside of the purely social.

For me, the film is not about retribution, or the battle of good and evil, but the visualisation of hidden energy (spiritual faith, superstition, trauma, desire) in a hyperrealised representation of everyday life. Hors Satan makes us feel the improbable palpitating in our veins.


[i] This definition of hyperrealism is taken from Maurice Raynal, 1928, Modern French Painters, Contemporary Art Series Issue 32, Ayer Publishing

[i]Attempts to theorise affect have been numerous (Spinoza, 1677, (English version, 1883); Tomkins, 1962, 1963; Deleuze and Guattari (throughout their work); Sedgwick and Frank, 1995; Massumi, 2002), and it remains a vast and contradictory field. In Part III of his five-volume Ethics, entitled ‘On the origin and nature of the emotions’(1667), Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677) defines affect as mixed emotional responses to objects and ideas in the exterior world that may or may not be conscious: ‘Everyone shapes his actions according to his emotion […] a mental decision and a bodily appetite, or determined state, are simultaneous, or rather are one and the same thing’ (Spinoza, III, Prop II). Affect is comprised of both ‘primal’ (instinctive) and cognitive processes, yet it needs, like the structure of magic realism, some contradiction or tension to proceed. Spinoza divides affect along positive and negative lines, with joy, pleasure, and love belonging to the former, and suffering, pain, jealousy and hatred to the latter. Each emotion, or affect, is replaced and overpowered by subsequent affects in the constant metamorphosis of existence – of becoming. According to Spinoza, affect is, for the most part, structured by a social conditioning in which certain common links between objects and emotional response exist (for example fear or hatred of an object that has been publicly constructed). However, there is also room in his list of emotional responses for ‘vacillations of spirit’ or ‘Wonder’, an affective state linked to things never experienced before: a ‘mental modification, or imagination of a particular thing,’ that is ‘alone in the mind’ (III, Prop LII). Imagination, is described as an active, conscious process in which the subject deliberates over a set of images based on prior experience, rather than the domain of dreamy, magical realms and fantastic utopias. More recent criticism on affect has tended towards commentary on the ‘virtual’ or ‘unrepresentable’ aspects of existence or, to put it plainly, the accumulation of affect in the relation between the living and the non-living; the affect created in the political relations between states and systems; incremental shifts in the relations between things that go beyond earlier theories of emotional resonse. Not all theories of affect are political, but most implement a structural analysis that examines transition, crisis and convergence in the relations between the subject and the socio-historical. In their introduction to The Affect Theory Reader, the editors surmise that there can be no general theory of affect. Their volume, however, fills in many of the gaps left by earlier theories, picking out what they call the ‘palimpsests’ of affective ‘force-encounters’ that pass between objects for investigation – in other words, the traces of non-objective interaction. They state that although affect is synonymous with force, it is not forceful, and most often transpires in the’ miniscule and molecular events of the unoticed’ . (Gregg and Seigworth, 2010, 2)


 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Shutters and Claws by Bradley Eros

Bradley Eros, ‘magenta space’, 1988.

(images courtesy of http://www.no-w-here.org.uk)

The octopusmachine oozes into sight in the grotto-booth, its monstrous presence ignored by the horse-blindered staff, but is secretly enamored & slobber-obsessed over by the geek-pirates called projectionists. The hard-candy shell shields the lacquered guts of the mollusc-plastique of this cephaloped-celluloid, that is, its insectoid-slime secretions that constitute the cinema-viscera. This intestinal skin is dragged through the digestive tract of rotary blades & greased gears scratched by the lobster arm of the stuttering shuttering-claw that blinks incessantly through its Cyclops-orb. These frissons of horror admit to the sublime ejaculate of eruption as the tentacled lights sputter & spill all manner of haunted danse-macabre on the milky cave wall of our dark nautilus chamber. From the oily Medusa-machine, our optical-oedipus, illuminations expell through the orifice like a vacuum in reverse, a chimera shitting its inky spew in sphinctal-negative. Here the light-jets entangle the crystallized veins of subterranean eyes caught in the catacombs of the ocula-beast. 

(Italics and font colour remain faithful to the original)

 Bradley Eros, ‘Chinese Nightingagle No.2, 2008

Find more ruminations on the materiality of film practice here, where, in addition several of Eros’ wonderful  slide collages (or collage slides) are published.

 

Three Crowns of the Sailor: Man versus Ghosts

 

In 1982, Chilean filmmaker Raúl Ruiz made the French language film Three Crowns of the Sailor, a voyage into ancient maritime myth, the human unconscious, and the surreality of identity. By his own account, Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s narrative poem ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’, in which an old sailor forces his moralistic tale of supernatural forces onto an impressionable young man, provided Ruiz with material for his own treatise on the human condition.

He holds him with his glittering eye –
The Wedding-Guest stood still,
And listens like a three years’ child:
The Mariner hath his will.

The Wedding-Guest sat on a stone:
He cannot choose but hear;
And thus spake on that ancient man,
The bright-eyed Mariner […]

[…] The loud wind never reached the ship,
Yet now the ship moved on!
Beneath the lightning and the moon
The dead men gave a groan.

They groaned, they stirred, they all uprose,
Nor spake, nor moved their eyes;
It had been strange, even in a dream,
To have seen those dead men rise.

The helmsman steered, the ship moved on;
Yet never a breeze up blew;
The mariners all ‘gan work the ropes,
Where they were wont to do;
They raised their limbs like lifeless tools –
We were a ghastly crew. – Samuel Taylor Coleridge ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ (Published in the collection Lyrical Ballads, 1798)

Ruiz’s shadowy film drifts in and out of the overlapping memories of a sailor who, like Coleridge’s mariner, sets about telling his story to a young student, Tadeusz. The sailor witnesses the young man murder his professor, and prevents him from fleeing the scene (and the country) with a promise to procure him a job aboard a large ship preparing for imminent departure. In return he must pay the sailor three Danish crowns and listen to his story in its entirety. The contingent spontaneity of their meeting seems anything but coincidental, and yet, as in its surrealist incarnation, chance forms the structure that drives this perforated narrative.

The sailor, a native of Valparaiso – a thriving town used as a stopover by sailors travelling between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans – is haunted by memories of his childhood home and by the expectations of the family whom he has left behind; and although he encounters surrogate family members on his travels, his compass ultimately points home. The spectator is presented with a series of episodes from the Sailor’s past, recalled through what Ruiz terms the colours of a ‘siesta nightmare’ : a mainly desaturated palette which ebbs and flows between the contrastive monochrome of the ‘real time’ scenes shot in Russia as the sailor recounts his tale to Tadeusz, and the strong blue and red contrasts of exoticised ‘location’ memories shot with Agfa film stock. The resulting atmosphere is one of uncertainty, in which the boundaries between the real world and that of the imagination, or the supernatural become increasingly indiscernible. In his recounted history, the sailor is the only living protagonist on a ship of ghosts. Crew members die only to be resurrected, and Ruiz emphasises the exchange value of human identity by constantly underpinning the eternal return of history in which an individual is but flotsam at sea. The characters often repeat the refrain “It’s not me. It’s someone else’ when the sailor attempts to grasp their identity – an absurd exchange that confounds him. Finally he realises that he alone is ‘different’ among these interchangeable ghostly bodies, because he is still alive. And yet the fate of death, of becoming a fragment in the unconscious discourse of history, will not elude him either. This is not a film with an ending,and, unlike Coleridge’s poem, does not offer moral guidance. It is a film about return, and thus, the recurrent human intrigue in what lies beyond.

For me, two aspects of this film are intriguing: firstly Ruiz’s own allusions to a literary heritage in which supernatural, folkloric, mytho-poetic events are narrated, and secondly the application of what Ruiz terms ‘bricolage’ (from Picasso) – to use whatever materials and media are to hand – to create cinema. Drawing from both classical and avant-garde sources, Ruiz’s film presents stories, vignettes, and visual traces of disparate cultures that all point to the same conundrum – how do we experience reality as an individual, an individual that is already a composite of layers and layers of history? The direct approach is to break down and disrupt narrative through fragmentation.

In the first volume of his Poetics of Cinema (2005) Ruiz writes a compelling analysis of film that refutes the ‘central conflict’ structure beloved of Hollywood screenwriters in which narrative is driven by establishing and resolving conflict. Rather, he believes, a film must consist of a myriad of ‘micro-actions’ that may or may not have a relation to the ‘main’ action. Moreover, he argues that within the diegetic world of a film is a hidden, or secret, film that unfolds simultaneous to the viewing experience, shaped by a spectator’s apriori experience and knowledge of other worlds, other films. Rather than beginning with a symbolic motif to mark the ‘conflict’, Three Crowns commences with a murder that is not followed through, and ends with another murder that does not resolve, but echoes this action. The killer’s motivation is not explored, neither is his punishment or his actual escape. His presence triggers the storytelling and ends it. As Ruiz explains, the departure point for an idea, or a scene is an image-situation: ‘The image-situation is the instrument that permits the evocation or the invocation of the imaged beings. It serves as a bridge, an airport, for the multiple films that will coexist in the film that is finally seen.’ (Ruiz, The Poetics of Cinema Vol. I, 2005, 116) The murder evokes thousands of real and screen murders, and it invokes the possibility of more to come, for Ruiz the action is generated in the constant back-and-forth between what has happened and what could possibly happen, the constant pain of thought. “What’s life?” a  nameless character asks rhetorically, “It’s just an absurd wound!”

As Surrealist critic Michael Richardson has pointed out, Ruiz is a master of filming objects, ‘respecting their integrity’ and giving them a life force that is not merely tied to the libidinal desires of the protagonists. In Three Crowns religious icons and childhood objects are imbued with an uncanny sense of autonomy, charging the diegetic spaces with additional layers of hybrid historicity. The sailor’s recounting of his travels is pure automatism, and Ruiz  encourages the geographical and cultural breadth of these hazily pictured voyages to spark associations with objects to create dynamism.


Finally, hierophany – the breakthrough of the sacred into the everyday world – is a standard concern in Ruiz’s work. In religious discourse, manifestations of gods is given purpose and reason within the cultural bounds of a given social reality, yet the illumination of the supernatural is more often criticised and termed irrational. Three Crowns questions the supernatural beliefs of the sailors, the myths of storytelling, of Coleridge’s poem (based on a neighbour’s dream), and the vivid imagination needed to create meaning from these convergent strands. Ruiz explains that his films are designed to go beyond the limited, moving from one world to another, playing with the four levels of medieval rhetoric : literal, allegorical, ethical, and anagogical (spiritual or mystical interpretation). Non-existent events, he says, are closer to reality because they may happen, they have the potential to happen, they seem real. Real events are dying, in contrast. They have already happened.

We can see in Ruiz’s film something of the magic realism that Jorge Luis Borges notes in Edgar Allen Poe’s colonial sea-horror ‘The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym':

‘A quite different sort of order rules […] , one based not on reason but on association and suggestion – the ancient light of magic.’ (Borges, ‘Narrative Art and Magic’, in Monegal and Reid (eds.), 1981, 37)