Sunday, Aoril 15, 1973 THE MICHIGAN DAILY Page Pies Sunday, April 15, l~73 THE MICHIGAN DAILY Page Five I im - 1- 11*1 1 1 Frag, frisbee, funky Dracula: Indiscreet id of the bourgeoisie A SUPPLEMENT TO THE OX- FORD ENGLISH DICTIONARY, Volume 1, A-G. Oxford, at the Clarendon Press, 1331 pages, $50. By JAY DILLON WE ARE accustomed to expect only that a dictionary per- form well-that it give cis the most direct possible access to what we like to think of as the "meaning" of a word or phrase, to its "proper pronunciation," or to details of its provenience. A dictionary is not to be read, or even to be aimlessly 1 e a f e d through. The bookish, grandilo- quent type is kidded about "read- ing the dictionary," or "having swallowed the dictionary." Such is the prevalent, utilitarian view of dictionaries. No more atten- tion is paid to a dictionary than is paid to our English language. Both are mere instruments. This is not even properly a dictionary of which I am writing; it is the first volume of an even- tual three volumes which will bring up to date the venerable Oxford English Dictionary, which was originally published between 1884 and 1928. In 1933, a one- volume supplement was publish-' ed, to accommodate those words. which had passed into the tongue too late for inclusion in the origi- nal. 1HE NEW Supplement greatly expands the utility of the OED. Thousands of new words, and new senses of old words, have established themselves in the English tongue since 1933. These words, or phrases, docu- ment much of the progress, or VENE TIA the retrogress, of the English- speaking world over the past fifty years. Only the OED, as a dic- tionary "on historical principles," can provide such a record. Every entry is supplied with illustra- tive quotations from well-bibliog- raphed sources, including the earliest known written appear- ance of the word, or "first attes- tation." The quotations are per- haps the items in the OED which provide the greatest delight to the nonsecialist. Now we can see quoted not only the Beowulf- Poet, Langland, Snenser, Shake- speare, Ralegh, Trollope, Dick- ens, Jefferson, Wollstonecraft, Melville, Kinling, and The Times, bht also T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf,' Henry Miller, Ezra Pound, Ogden Nash, Anais Nin, P. G. Wodehouse, Dorothy Parker, Cole Porter, Agatha Christie, D. H. Lawrence, Allen Ginsberg, and The Village Voice. As a bookseller, and one esne- cillr interested in English lexi- cography, I have often noticed that many customers seem to have the impression that the Ox- ford dictionaries, even the OED, are s o i e h o w dictionaries of "British English: I want an American dictionary." American lHritage and Webster's even en- co"rage this by calling some of their products dictionaries of the "American language." The en- thsistic Mr. Mencken notwith- standing, "the American ]an- guage" is a deliberate misnomer at best, and at worst a pernici- ons fictin. "American English" is a collection of dialects, just as is "British English." The OED is no more a dictionary of British Enelish than it is of American English, or of Anglo-Indian, or of Canadian English; it is a gen- eral dictionary of the English language. THE OED Supplement will be an unequaled treasury of our tongue as it has developed since the original Dictionary was com- pleted: it is not merely a monu- mental reference work for phil- logists. A few examples should suffice. The B. E. M. of science fiction is not known to have appeared earlier than eighteen years ago, in Arthur Koestler's The Trail of the Dinosaur, and Other Essays. The bagel seems to have found its way into our language in, or only shortly before, 1932 - not very long ago at all. Baloney, in the sense of "bosh" or "nonesense," is recorded as having appeared in the pages o The Saturday Evening Post in 1928. Henry Miller, in Sexus, has the first use of boobs (xsbreasts; a shortening of booby, from the much earlier-1686-b u b b y) in 1949. Boot-leg is as old as about 1889; "passing the buck" appears in print in 1865. Bullshit is the title of "an ex- cellent piece of scholarly ribal- dry" (probably one of the King Bolo poems) written by T. S. Vth. ANNIVERSARY SALE! thanks to your response, continues thru April. 10% OFF on al hardbound BOOKS and 78 phono records Wooden Spoon Used Books 200 N. 4th AVE. OPEN WED -SUNDAY NOON-6 769-4775 Eliot, sent to Wyndham Lewis, and mentioned by Lewis in a letter to Ezra Pound in about 1915. No earlier instance of the word is known. And so forth: People were get- ting upset about the linguistic ex- cesses of commercialese in 1910; copy-cats were so called in 1896, dingbats in 1838; dough meant "money" in 1851 at Yale. Burchfield, in his Introduction to the new Supplement, writes, "In 1957, when we began our work, no general English-lan- guage dictionary contained the more notorious of the sexual words; 'nous avons change tout cela,' and two ancient words, once considered too gross and vulgar to be given countenance in the decent environment of a dictionary, now appear with frill supporting evidence along with a wide range of colloqu- ial and coarse expressions re- ferring to sexual and excretory functions. There was, in about A.D. 1230 in London, a street named "Gro- pecuntlane." So there. Fuck is not known in Anglo-Saxon, or even in Middle English: in fact, no attestation for it has been fomd for earlier than about 1503, in the work of the Scots poet William Dunbar. The Sup- plement, oddly enough, does not comment upon the presumably fanciful folk-etymology of fuck as an acronym for "Fornication Under the Consent of the King," ply noted that the ulterior ety- ply noted that the ulterior sty- mology is unknown. A variant spelling, "f--k," is listed as hav- ing appeared from the seven- tenth century. Curiously enough, N o r m a n Mailer's euphenism "fig" is nowhere noted. Fasci- nating. Fascinating. iNE CAN, needless to say, find items which are missing from the new Suppnlemient, and which we woUl ha,e expected to have found there. Yet we must note that the first section of conv (A-aloha) for Volume 1 was sent to press in May 1965, almost eight years ago. So acid for TSD does not an- pear: nre'imably a note under "LSD" will be found in Volume TI. Missing also is recogniion of the recent bastardization of chauvinism in tie catch-phrase "male chauvinist pig." More sur- nrisingly, double dactvi, a verse form invented in 1951, and for which amnle and readily acces- sible attestations existed well be- fore the D's went to press, is not mentioned in the Supplement. Yet the defects are hard to find; Brchfield and his staff have produced a lexicon emmi- nently worthy of attachment to the OED. S e v e r a technical and tvpographical imorovements have been made, prime among which is that the first letters of head words set in bold face are no longer uniformly set in upper- case, regardless of their status. + The distinction, which I never quite understood, between "main words" and "subordinate words" has been dropped. r TE ULTIMATE difficulty is that any dictionarv of any "living" language will in very short order obsolesce. The new OED Supplement has alreadv be- gun. It is prohibitively expensive to revise and reset the text of the dictionary every few years; it is for this reason that we now have a supplement, rather than a re- vised OED. A series of supple- ments, even if each were to absorb the contents of all pre- vious supplements, would obvi- ously begin to cost as much as periodic revision of the the OED itself, to the vast and continu- ing expense of the buyers. The entire OED is now avail- able in a "micrographically re- produced" edition for $75, one quarter of the previous price. Volume I of the new Supplement costs $50, and there is little reason to expect that Volumes 11 and III will cost any less. A very great deal of money is in- volved, and the magnitude of the expense will surely, and unfor- tunately, d i s s u a d e many who might otherwise buy the diction- ary. Yet it is all more than worth the money. IN SEARCH OF DRACULA, by Raymond McNally and Radu Florescu. New York Graphic So- ciety, 223 pages, $8.95. By NIGEL GEARING IN THE LAST year the market seems to have been flooded with books on Dracula, each with its own inflection and prejudice: Dracula as verifiable historical figure, Dracula as anthropologi- cal myth, Dracula as Jungian archetype. Etc., etc. This one takes the first of the direttions, finding in the fif- teenth century the original source of numerous folktales,,the distant ancestor of Bram Stoker's count and the inspiration of over one hundred movies, Transylvania (according to le- gend, the ghoulish Count's home- land) is, it turns out, a real place-for almost one thousand years a province of Hungary and now part of modern Romania. Similarly, Dracula himself can be traced back to an actual Prince of Wallachia who reigned sporadically from 1448 to 1476. Known variously as Vlad Tepes (The Impaler) and Dracula (Son of the Devil and/or Dragon) he is reported to have authorized the killings of 100,000 people---ap- proximately one fifth of his prin- cipality's population. As his name suggests, his favorite method of dispatch was to skewer his vic- tims on pikestaffs; other amus- ing variations are recorded in this book and make for those le- gands which persist to this day in the original Dracula's native country. Authors McNally and Florescu tirelessly adumbrate those other factors (often philo- logical) which account for the connotations of vampirism etc. that Stoker picked up on and blended in his sensational pot- boiler of 189~. The book is beauti- fully mounted, has some exqui- site photographs, and is--for my money-a trifle tedious. Count Dracula's current resur- rection will certainly not be his last. This not merely proves what we already knew (that you can't keep a good vampire down): it validates the premise that the Gothic mode proper tends to sur- face in periods of acute social crisis. And if I seem a bit weary of this present trend it's for rea- sons related to that surely self- evident social correlation. For if it is self-evident, why have none of these books accounted (to my knowledge) for The Real Truth Behind Count Dracula? At the risk of compounding the felony of others, here we go on what- till the next time-is the "defini- tive" reading of the Dracula myth . BRAM STOKER'S novel is the real inspiration behind this present century's continued in- terest. It appeared in a society which, once ebullient and self- confident, was now falling into "the sear, the yellow leaf." (It is, after all, the "decadent" per- iod of Aubrey Beardsley's Yellow Book). Thus Dracula can now be seen in much the same way we view Rasputin's relation to the deca- dent, inbred court of Nicholas and Alexandra: Stoker's crea- tion was to the Victorian bour- geois both the masochistic sym- bol of his own destruction and, somewhere in his unconscious, the unadmitted symbol of a more forceful and vital life. The death-wish and the libido have, as we know, a close relation in psychoanalytic thought; Dracula is the personification of those re- pressed and sublimated sexual urges which the rituals and cos- tuies of this "civilized" society attempted to cover up. Not to have done so would have been to acknowledge the potency of what radically threatened the embattled (self-) consciousness of that culture. We know that Rasputin-the word means "de- bauchee"-could cure the sick tsarevich, but just as really could he undermine that lineage and resist the murderous intent of that dynasty whose last life- blood he (figuratively speaking) sucked dry: poisoned, shot, bludgeoned-significantly by an extreine right-wing faction-he was still alive when they ended up drowning him in the frozen Neva. In like manner, Dracula is always there to riseagain, his lips newly smeared with blood, his scarcely-veiled sexual- ity as vibrant and frightening as ever. The Victorian bourgeois, we re- call, dichotomized his sexist so- cial-life: on the one hand, the "compliant" housewife, on the other the East-end whore. In public discourse he paid lip-serv- ice to a phoney morality and de- nounced his private and seamy underside. Dracula, his own re- pressed id, was put beyond the pale of even this private life - cast and harangued as an outra- geous intruder. It is no coincidence that Sto- ker (good bourgeois himself) should emphasize Dracula's no- bility. That Dracula should' be graced with the charisma of "Count" speaks volumes on this bourgeoisie's class - conscious- ness. In his social position as in so much else, he is what the bourgeois can never be and these "respectable" hypocrites had here-again, as in so much else -an ambivalent attitude despite their rhetoric. The vampire's ar- istocratic life style is both be- smirched and secretly envied by a stodgy Protestant work ethic. His nobility is simultaneously raised on a pedestal by a cring- ing bourgeois awe and pulled down again (when he gefs his come-uppance) in a vulgar class- reading of "Pride comes before a fall, you know. .. ." As such Dracula connects with the aristo- crat (or "gentleman") who sur- faces in the earliest middle-class novels as seducer and villain: Once again, the combined envy and fear bred by a more re- stricted sociosexual norm. Though Samuel Richardson's Lovelace archetype prevails at least to George Elliot's Donnithorne, by our own time-when the middle class has swallowed practically all others-the seducer-killer will have evolved from Dracula to James Bond, where the aristo- cratic residue is sustained in the classy (sic) descrimination he brings to the consumer-cap- italist society he now effectively safeguards: "Shaken, not stirred, please. . ." AND as regards that Protes- L that ethic, who can doubt the reasons for Dracula always be- ing laid low by an image of the cross? On one level it is, of course, merely the most spec- tacular metaphor of the Church's long collusion with a repressive State-that is to say, radical in- surrection forestalled in the name of Christian, (but class- oriented) morality, or, if not so much here, in the anaesthetizing promise of a sweeter after-life. Of course the Victorian busi- nessman would have liked to have been in there, biting the neck of the wasp Anglo-Saxon girl he is married to-or respect- ably courting. Of course he would have denied it. And I guess in such literature these schizoid an- tinomes come closest to a fusion with Stevenson's slightly earlier Dr. Jeklyy and Mr. Hyde. Clos- est; but not close enough. For, if at least it was recognized here that the repressed id-and the up- tight conscious self are likely to be internalized 'in one and the same person, the realization is still subordinated to that doppel- ganger stand-off which signifi- cantly permeates all fin-de-siecle literature. DR. JEKYLL was wrong to be- lieve himself the pure being utterly distinct from the ugly Mr. Hyde who has run beserk and drunk with blood through the pages of capitalist history. Now as never before yve can see the hairy paws clutching nervously at the starched cuffs. Now I as never before we should hear the heart thudding impatiently be neath the good Doctor's tight vest. Now as never before we should acknowledge Dracula in a dialectical spirit, embrace him even, as the liberator of inher- ited socio-psychological hang-ups. Who knows? Maybe if we hadn't outlawed him, attempted to bury him time and time again, we would have avoided some of the private frustrations and closet- horrors still with us (at worst) in the sexual assaults perpetrated by sad sick men or (at best) in the lines of men in dirty gray raincoats who file into blue movies. Right. Now on to the next in- terpretation. . Films & ideology: Romance into business Start your hope chest. 25(- --- ------ ---- - - Oneida Silversmiths P.O. Box 1. Oneida, New York 13421 I enclose 25c for the be~autiful Oneida sample stainless tea-poon Ii've checked below I understand] I can complete my service tine jewelry and department store.. KINO: A HISTORY OF THE RUSSIAN AND SOVIET FILM, by Jay Leyda. Collier Books, 501 panes, panerback, $4.95. AMERICAN F I L M CRITI- CISM: AN ANTHOLOGY, edited by Stanley Kauffmann and Bruce Henstell. Liveright, 443 pages, paperback, $3.95, By NIGEL GEARING EAN-LUC GODARD once said: "If you wish, my own way of denouncing the Soviet - American collusion is to deplore the fact that the present dream of the Soviets is to imitate Hollywood at the very moment the Ameri- cans no longer have anything to tell us." When he came to this realization, he effectively threw over those celluloid practices which had made him perhaps the most prestigious of contem- porary film directors in the Western world. It cannot have been an easy decision and the critical hositility to his subse- quent movies has certainly not made the transition any easier. W h a t creates difficulties for Godard and for all of us is a Western ideology and aesthetic which pretends so often to be free of ideology. We can recognize ideology all right in the Soviet cinema but less readily in 'our downtown local movie theater: keep the beam in your own eye long enough and it will seem part of the furniture. What compounds the confusion is just what Godard implies-the ultimate likeness of two distinct national cinemas, traditionally at odds with each other but, in the long run (i.e. by 1973) and beneath the rhe- toric, essentially identical. How two parallel lines can finally con- verge is made clear to us in these two excellent books-one tracing the history of the Russian movie from its birth to the death of Eisenstein (1948), the other collating significant American film reviews from The Great Train Robbery to Citizen Kane (1941). HE Kauffmann - Henstell an- thology is better skimmed and returned to than read cover to cover. If (like this reviewer) you take the second course, you end up with some nostalgia for the three-line New Yorker synopsis. Nonetheless, to read it consecu- tively is to note precisely that evolution-or degeneration-sug- gested above. Though no early r e c o r d e d experiences of the cinema here c o m p a r e with Gorky's magnificent account( ap- pended to the Leyda book), there is a marvelous sense of wonder and of hope in these first con- frontations with so unfamiliar a mediuin: wonder at the technical possibilities, hope that here at last (as with Whitman and litera- ture forty years before) was a genuinely democratic art form. "The facts merely show," says one reviewer of 1913, "that no single factor in our modern civilization has done more to emphasize the brotherhood of man than the motion picture..,. The gallery and the orchestra and the balcony have been merged in one great audience, which is none other than the whole people without distinction of class." It is easy for us now to be cynical about such hopes; how much harder for those clear- sighted few who sniffed out an incipient rottenness a decade even before the advent of the talkie: "The Cabinet of Dr. Cali- gari comes to us at a critical period of our motion picture in- dustry, when the public is jaded by many inferior domestic pic- tures and our producers them- selves are still at a loss as to how to get out of their rut." In- timated here are a number of things. A continuing controversy over the relative qualities of tives whose ideals are cramped by the elastic bands which sur- round their bank-rolls," that by the time of Citizen Kane these few h-ive multiplied, divided and multiplied again like the sylphs of a Busby Berkely musical: "All Hollywood films are about boys and girls with love trou- bles, unless they are about char- acter-actors disguisedtas famous men." Or (of Kane itself), "You have to go back to the days of Griffith, and to the almost for- gotten days of one or two Rus- sian and German directors, to catch that feeling of a sure hand directing the course of the pic- ture." rTHE RUSSIAN evolution is more complex and in some ways more frustrating. As Leyda points out in Kino, the earliest film audiences in the Russian movie theaters had a different appearance from those in American and other metropoli- tan film centers. Before 1917, film-going was definitely "a la mode" - the amusement of the Czar and his royal household (he even had a private cinema the- ater installed in his palace), the pastime of the Russian upper classes. His censorship of the movies-she was appalled at the thought of them reaching the low- booksbooks That we are better able to gauge the clash between the powers-that-be and the individual artists in Russia than we are in the U.S. is in large measure due to the fact that all the major Soviet directors committed their ideals-realized or unrealized-to print. Like their government par- ticularly concerned for the edit- cative possibilities of this art, Kuleshov, Pudovkin, Vertov, and Dovzhenko were anxious to ar- ticulate the problems of their craft, though it seems less ready to share an emergent emphasis on content at the expense of form. The Soviet administrators' aversion to "formalism" pievails to this day; in 1927 Mayakovsky deemed t h e antiexperimental bias an essential failing of any art tied-as this one had already become-to industry and monop- oly. For "Hollywood" now read "Sovkino." With the appointment in 1930 of Shumyatsky as new industrial administrator Eisen- stein was to be disciplined, "brought into line." Fortunately for this director (it is the notice- ably barren period of his artistic life) Shumyatsky would be de- nounced in a "Pravda" of 1938. Fortunately, also, for any sub- sequent Russian films, Shumyat- sky was on the verge of realizing plans for a "Soviet Hollywood" to be built on the shores of the Black Sea. HE LAST part of Leyda's book records the return in the next ten years of nearly all the original film creators who had been displaced, and for all my admiration of this book it is this section (and its related value judgments) which seems to me questionable to the point of dis- tortion. It is, of course, the per- iod of the Second.World War, the period of Alexander Nevsky and Ivan the Terrible, the period culturally dominated by the pro- grams Qf Stalin and Zhdanov. If Eisenstein was to be reinstated to his former preeminence by the Party, the government, and by Stalin personally, one who didn't return to his f o r m e r field of achievement was Dziga Vertov. If Leyda has "never understood" Vertov's "later difficulties," it is perhaps a related incompre- hension which leads him so con- spicuously to soft-pedal on the damages wrought by this period's administration, and to pass over the regressive-albeit eminently "orthodox"-character of Eisen- stein's last films. My guess is that Leyda is now so much Our Man On Eisen- stein (and I do not mean to be- little his achievements in this area) that he is more ready to countenance a policy-maker who favored his idol than denounce that same autocrat who also pushed a less reverenced, but arguably greater, talent back out in the cold. Leyda imputes to Vetrov "a fanatic dependence on than shooting a polehical line. (Ironically; he had the best of references: Engels had actually, said as much: Marx implied it.) Taking up that montage prin- ciple fundamental to the greatest Russian films, he extended it to its logical and most courageous extreme, thereby rejecting that tendency to "filmed theatre" which has continued to charac- terize post-Griffith Hollywood and which finally ensnared Eisen- stein. Needless to say, his savage and ever-purposeful editing of newsreel material, his disdain for the filmed story ("The scenario' is ;a tale thought up for us by literary people . . . Down with the bourgeois tale-scenario! Hur- rah for life as it is!") received the "formalist" smear of those dedicated - Eisenstein a, in o nlg them-to a more tendentious, more explicit cinema. His work perhaps represents the most suc- cessful attempt since the begin- nings of film to evolve a purely cinematic, nonliterary language. As such it is the lost chord in the increasingly palletable but- synthetic harmonies of Soviet- American cinema. N AMERICAN Film Criticism Paul Goodman is merely one- but the most penetrating-of those who lament, alongside the corruptions of an industry, the increased tendency toward this no doubt polished, no doubt beau- tifully photographed, but ulti- mately uncinematic c i n e m a; what he favors reads like a blue- print for 'the Man with a Movie Camera. Contrast with this that percep- tive commentator for The Nation who, (almost too joyfully) sees the skull beneath the skin of Alexander Nevsky: "First-class Hollywood with touches of Von Sternberg and Von Strohein! It has nothing to do with 'revolutionary art.' It is not proof of Eisenstein's resurgence but of his repression. IN THE FINAL analysis I be- lieve these two books bring home to usdtruths we already sensed behind those "transgres- sions,". t h o s e "unorthodoxies" created against the grain of the industries that reluctantly gave them life. Citizen Kane is as good a place as any for Kauffmann and Henstell to close their an- thology: Hollywood closed its ranks against Orson Welles, just as, one may conjecture, the So- viets would have closed their ranks against any genuinely radi- cal moves Eisenstein might have made post-14946 but for his death two years later. If the rest is silence, it's because these worlds go less often with the bang of Kane than with the amplified, negaphonic whimper of Ivan the Terrible. Today's writers . a Jay Dillon holds forth at Cen- Venetia Louisiana Paul Revere 7 c *No43 \ludcr iiAniique ( herie I Nordic (Crow~n f yV . .11red,, dC, t(=f , OONEIDA Thstr cbe {u reitcrmhti'xak 7extlec A m e r i c a n and non-American products. ("Of course," notes one unintentionally hilarious commen- tator, "trash is too often pro- duced on both sides of the ocean, but American trash generally has more novelty of ideas than for- eign trash.") Assessing Chaplin's A Woman of Paris, a reviewer claims, "The result is one of the few, in the strictly artistic sense, fine mo- tion pictures which have been produced since that potential art developed into an industry." An- other--and, again, at the stag- geringly early date of 1925-o'- serves of D. W. Griffith and Thomas IH. Ince: ' ,Both were part of a romance that has be- come a business." Little wonder that if a considerable few can complain in the 1920s of "cold- blooded distributors, and execu- er levels of his subjects-is para- doxically the first instance of that significance the Russian admin- istrators would continue to ac- credit to the medium. Come the revolution, the interest has been generated, but the ground has been cleared anew. Writing of his return from the Civil War, Eisenstein recorded: "We all came to the Soviet cinema as something not yet existent. We came upon no ready-built city; there were no squares, no streets laid out. We pitched our tents and drag- ged into camp our experiences in varied fields . . . all were pooled and went into the build- ing of something that had as yet no written traditions, no e x a c t stylistic requirements, nor even formulated demands." Those varied fields-extending to engineering (Eisenstein) and chemistry (Pudovkin)-were fer- tilized by the more strictly "aesthetic" experiences of May- akovsky, Gorky, and Meyerhold, and nourished by the fluke im- port in 1919 of D. W. Griffith's Intolerance. The American film, especially its montage technique, lave tremendous aesthetic and WA LKING TO SCHOOL? Why Not Ride-a-Bike! Announcement t4 ,. : ; 11il, , L . fr C' /^ i f x A I P . 1 K I ., M- A t 1® i /-! I ';"-,(F4A/NN 0* kRl FJ(-d-