Abstract /
Decades ago, after reading Ernest Hemmingway’s A Moveable Feast - his autobiographical reflections on his experience of living in Paris - I headed to my university library to borrow and reread Henry Miller’s autobiographical novel Quiet Days at Clichy, preparing to compare the way the two writers experienced the city. Thanks to alphabetical ordering, as I got to the shelf that held the Miller novel, I saw a book situated next to it, Arthur Miller’s play Incident at Vichy, which was familiar to me in the made-for-television version I had seen years before. Borrowing both, I ended up spending more time with the play than the novel. It's a stunning drama in which the interactions in a single room in a Paris police station during the WW II Nazi occupation distil the political consequences of mentalities with considerable range and historical depth. In this essay I return to the play inspired by an observation in Roberto Calasso’s K, an intellectual biography of Franz Kafka, where he states that in Kafka’s stories, “a room can be as charged as a continent…in the room, the power relations will manifest themselves with maximum linearity because potential distractions are minimal.” As I read that remark, I thought first about Kafka’s retort in his Letter to My Father, about the way Herman Kafka dominated a room - “From your armchair you ruled the world. Your opinion was correct, every other was mad, wild, meshugge, not normal.” - and then about Miller’s play, which exemplifies and performs such a charged atmosphere (with more dire consequences). As my reflections on the play proceeded, I was encouraged to think about how an exploration of a variety of rooms can live up to critical thinking about the larger spaces that their charged dynamics reference.
Speaker bio /
Michael J. Shapiro is an Emeritus Professor at The University of Hawai’i, Manoa. Focused in recent years on the politics of aesthetics and compositional methods, his publications since 2018 include Aesthetics of Equality (Oxford University Press, 2023), Writing Politics: Studies in Compositional Method (Routledge, 2021). The Phenomenology of Religious Belief (Bloomsbury, 2021). The Cinematic Political: Film Composition as Political Theory (Routledge, 2020), Punctuations: How the Arts Think the Political (Duke University Press, 2019 The Political Sublime Duke University Press (2018).
*** Wine reception to follow ***