black and white and re(a)d all over
Peter Greenaway and Louis Andriessen
Welcome back, after nearly a year of absence, to Preposterous Reading. To those of you who have subscribed since 2024, welcome, and thank you. This iteration—on the decade-long collaboration between the Welsh-born filmmaker Peter Greenaway and the late Dutch composer Louis Andriessen—has been eleven months in the making. It is also monstrously long, longer than I ever anticipated and certainly longer than Substack will conveniently allow. An excerpt of the essay—its introductory section—is reprinted below. If it’s enough to make you want to watch it all connect, in too-close detail, to Greenaway and Andriessen, the link to the PDF is here:
The preoccupying question here: how can opera express this complicated question of bedsheets?
Next time—whenever that may be—we’ll look at Olga Neuwirth’s ongoing creative companionship with Elfriede Jelinek. Until then—
you know this I love you
tb
[excerpt from black and white and re(a)d all over]
I. The Comedy of Killing
Q: What’s black and white and re(a)d all over?
A: A newspaper.
—from which one can fairly assume the following:
1. Black and white are never quite as stable as first appearances suggest.
2. Color will be problematic if reading be the aim.
3. That infinitesimal difference of a letter separating reading from a totalizing violence.
The riddle hinges on a homonymic misidentification assuming color in place of legibility: red, that is to say, always too easily read. But it is the effortless ascription of a certain impulse to totality—the extreme all over seemingly common to both—that houses what is the joke’s uneasy and accidental proximity to violence. As a basic premise, of course, violence is nowhere to be found: in its classic Midwest-father-to-elementary-school-child iteration, the newspaper riddle relies solely on the predicament of answering to the obvious epistemic impossibility that anything could be in black-and-white and still be wholly red. (We’ll ignore for a moment [but not forever] that a careful interpretation of a single shot in Battleship Potemkin would be a perfectly acceptable answer.) Its comedy is the comedy of mishearing, of a perfectly rational solution where no ratio first appeared. The listener is made retrospectively aware of a surfeit of meaning just as she becomes aware of her own linguistic lack, and it is that surfeit we find funny. (Although the moralizing undertones of the revelation are not hard to ascertain: the child learns that communication will fail if some parties lack the necessary information to agree on what exactly is being said. It is the parable of misunderstanding’s risk: be careful to be clear.)
But the newspaper riddle knows an adjacent collection of playground anti-answers whose defiance of the pun’s linguistic trajectory drags it firmly back onto terrain that, though never explicitly sanctioned by the joke, remains as a necessary if unspoken excess on which the concrete danger of that risk in miscommunication is figured. To the question What’s black and white and red all over?, “a wounded nun” is the emblematic wrong response,1 although “a bloody zebra” and “a murdered penguin” were just as common on the swing sets of a Michigan suburban childhood. (See Figure 1) In their refusal to participate in language-play, these answers unconceal an otherwise invisible and frightening impulse lurking in the gap between the riddle’s question and (safe) answer. Declining to play for the homonym, they concretize an instinctive, bull-like compulsion for violent thought at the sight/site of color: hear red all over, think bloody mess, all the way down.
(And here we almost certainly expect a reinforcement by citational excess, a historicizing and contiguous assemblage of evidence to the many iterations where red is the frictionless equivalent to blood. Such a paragraph would, perhaps, cite the 1904 lecture on Macbeth in which A.C. Bradley never has to name the color: “Macbeth leaves a decided impression of colour; it is really the impression of a black night broken by flashes of light and colour, sometimes vivid and even glaring… the colour is the colour of blood.”2 Or it would jump ahead a bit to Pound’s 1945 Pisan Cantos, in which national violence is metonymizing every red into every blood, even the red of beauty that would be roses: “Tudor indeed is gone and every rose/Blood red blanche white that in the sunset glows/Cries blood blood blood/Against the gothic stone of England[.]”3 Or it looks for social roots in the colorist association with the medieval humours where choler was hot-blooded, prone to anger, a boiling of the blood, and always red: the about-to-become-violent. For such a reference, begin with Cornelius Agrippa’s spectrum in the Three Books on Occult Philosophy that makes choler an intensified red against red’s more regular bloodiness—“reddish colour shews blood, but fiery, flaming, burning-hot shew choler”4—and finish with Robert Burton’s description of choler’s burnt-out residue: “choler adust becomes æruginosa melancholia [rusty melancholy].”5 See also: seeing red.
It is this troubling impulse to affirm colorism by catalogue about which we ought to think further. Baudrillard’s assertion that “colours generally derive their significance from outside themselves” and as a result “are simply metaphors for fixed cultural meanings”6 reinforces their inherent plasticity: color is excessively amenable to the ascription of significance, provided one amass enough exterior points of reference. Color is always a question of reading. This is the premise of that old blue curtains chestnut: the very premise of design—that objects are forced to take color—becomes the peril of analysis: negotiate the significance of such decisions. [After all, ”millions of dollars of countless jobs” distinguishes cerulean from blue in The Devil Wears Prada.] The result is a maddening impossibility of writing about color generally: one can hardly begin—perhaps we already failed in this, if the epigraphs suggest anything—without falling prey to the collector’s impulse to bolster our feelings about a color with an array of historical evidence that others have felt the same. Color reading thinks by accrued contiguity, and even then inevitably relies on associations with more stable concretes. Sergei Eisenstein—whose color film production is confined to a few short reels at the end of Ivan the Terrible and who nevertheless remains one of film’s most evergreen theorists on the subject—articulates his theory of yellow in the chapter devoted to color in The Film Sense by means of a virtuosic series of sequential examples from literature, poetry, and painting. Derek Jarman’s Chroma is a likewise compilation of references both occult, filmic, and literary. The de facto form of the color theory is the index: “Species of colors are infinite,” writes Barthes, “and cannot be mastered without setting up a painstaking list.”7[7] We will return to this problem in time, but for now let it be enough to have noted the almost enforced rhetorical expectation where this parenthesis first began: that in staking any association of a color to a psychological, literary, or cultural meaning, it becomes frighteningly easy and always too natural to compile as many likewise associations as possible.)
So: red calls to psychic violence every way you slice it. The newspaper riddle then inadvertently but forcibly brings us to an uncomfortable awareness of what Freud considered humanity’s animal aggression: “[Men are] creatures among whose instinctual endowments is to be reckoned a powerful share of aggressiveness. As a result, their neighbor is […] someone who tempts them to satisfy their aggressiveness on him, to exploit his capacity to work without compensation, to use him sexually without his consent, to seize his possessions, to humiliate him, to cause him pain, to torture and to kill him.”8 The receiver of the joke is caught, as it were, with their animalistic pants down, suddenly faced with their own instinctual endowment of aggression as a newfound object of attention. And it is that excess awareness that is, as Alenka Zupančič would have it, what makes the punchline funny at all:
Comedy or, more precisely, comic sequence is always inaugurated by some unexpected surplus-realization. This surplus-realization may well be produced by failure, by a mistake, an error, through misunderstanding (and it usually is), but the moment it occurs it changes the very structure of the field. The field of comedy is essentially a field in which the answer precedes the question, satisfaction precedes the demand. Not only do we (or the comic characters) not get what was asked for, on top of it (and not instead of it) we get something we haven’t even asked for at all. And we have to cope with this surprising surplus, respond to it[.]9
The affronting, unasked-for recognition—that we for a moment saw color and thought murder—is precisely such a surplus-realization. We are time and again grateful that the answer is so evidently harmless. We laugh in the space of abating anxiety, anxiety that our brutality was very nearly affirmed or, worse, spoken aloud. A newspaper—of course. Misunderstanding changed the structure of our field, temporarily revealing something frightening that is now tucked safely away again.
—but then, who among us would deny the strange unshakable sensation that, even after the innocence of the answer has been tauntingly revealed, a quantity of that cruelty lingers still, unresolved, shuttled in under the sign of totality? Who would deny the trace but unmistakable impression that reading too much, too thoroughly, too close and all over has, indeed, left that poor newspaper exploited, used, seized, humiliated, violated, tortured, bleeding? “Dude, you killed”: an appraisal of being funny. Something more than color is ferried between a newspaper read and a zebra bloodied [the reading of a bloody zebra will return again, in time]: we might do well to ask what it is precisely that crosses over.
Close reading makes a mockery of violence.
That does not mean it does no harm.10
.
.
.
This is the fake-out given in Elliott Oring, Engaging Humor (University of Illinois Press, 2010), 24.
A.C. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy: Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth, 2nd ed. (Macmillan, 1905), 334-335.
Ezra Pound, “Canto LXXIV,” in The Cantos of Ezra Pound, (Faber and Faber, 1987), 449.
Henry Cornelius Agrippa, Three Books of Occult Philosophy or Magic, ed. Willis F. Whitehead (Hahn & Whitehead, 1898), 149.
Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, ed. Holbrook Jackson (New York Review of Books, 2001), 174.
Jean Baudrillard, The System of Objects, trans. James Benedict (Verso, 1996), 30-31.
Roland Barthes, The Fashion System, trans. Richard Howard (University of California Press, 1990), 106.
Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents, trans. and ed. James Strachey (Norton, 1961), 68-69.
Alenka Zupančič, The Odd One In: On Comedy (MIT Press, 2008), 132.
This formula from Eugenie Brinkema, Life-Destroying Diagrams (Duke University Press, 2021), 305. There the saying goes “Love always discharges blanks. That does not mean that it does no damage.”