Eating Eumolpus: Fellini Satyricon and Dreaming Tradition

Comp. by: pg2720 Stage : Proof ChapterID: 0001237721 Date:28/ 12/10 Time:12:45:02 Filepath:d:/womat-filecopy/0001237721.3D OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRST PROOF, 28/12/2010, SPi 5 Eating Eumolpus Fellini Satyricon and Dreaming Tradition Richard Armstrong Fellini Satyricon represents a brilliant moment in the visualization of antiquity. Anyone who has seen the film might find that a surprising statement, but I argue here that we can learn much from the film if we see it as a consubstantial nexus of translation, refragmentation, oneiric imagining, and pure creative fantasy. I clearly do not mean ‘visualization’ in the usual sense of archaeological illustration, or ‘making a picture’ that will render us a gratifying illusion of wholeness and presence. The film does not ‘project’ a coherent image of Petronius, but rather projects in a more dynamic, psychological sense—and that is not a bad thing here. Fellini’s project from the start deliberately estranges us from the previous visual styles and narrative strategies that filled the screens before—and after—its debut in 1969. But it is wrong to think this film was merely an effort at estrangement in order to ruin the sacred truths of antiquity—or rather, to ruin the boring postures and facile appropriations that comprised the filmic repertoire of ‘antiquity’.1 While it snakes around Roman themes and characters, it ultimately shows us that visualization can be a way of releasing powerful new creative energies, thus putting ancient culture at an even greater value. But one must dare to dream. Fellini Satyricon was a reaction, from within the director’s own creative turmoil, to a reception of antiquity that was oppressively in 1 Relevant overviews of antiquity in film are Solomon (1996 and 2001) and Wyke (1997). Comp. by: pg2720 Stage : Proof ChapterID: 0001237721 Date:28/ 12/10 Time:12:45:02 Filepath:d:/womat-filecopy/0001237721.3D OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRST PROOF, 28/12/2010, SPi 110 Richard Armstrong evidence by the time of the film’s making, especially in Italy. ‘The first time I ever saw a picture,’ he recalled, ‘it was one of those Roman epics, Ursus or Tiberius. The first time I was at Cinecittà, I saw a Roman film being made and there were gladiators running over to the bar.’2 Antiquity was a going concern for the powers that were. On the one hand, Mussolini’s Italy had piled up decades of dubious neoRoman appropriations, which seeped into the cinema, a medium Il Duce valued highly enough to create the massive production studios of Cinecittà.3 In Carmine Gallone’s swollen epic Scipione l’Africano (1937), Scipio Africanus emerged in a full-bodied nationalism, conveniently in tune with the Dictator’s interests, just as Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevksy did for Stalin a year later.4 Outside the nationalist camp, on the other hand, Hollywood bankrolled gargantuan spectacles, some of which were filmed in the same Cinecittà studios as later would be used for Fellini Satyricon. Films such as Ben Hur (1959), Spartacus (1960), Cleopatra (1963), and The Fall of the Roman Empire (1964) said more about the high-capitalist stratagems of the American movie industry in its war against television than any real interest in Jewry, Egypt, or the plight of slaves in antiquity. Fellini Satyricon did not aim merely to dismantle the blockbuster approach to antiquity, nor was it meant to ventriloquize social satire, though one might think that a logical move for the maker of La Dolce Vita (1960). Fellini had given up the idea that the Satyricon could be adapted as a satire of the Fascist era, and he could not make it a satire of ancient Rome, which he did not know well enough to ridicule.5 The project was a creative escape from the torment of his greatest failure, Il Viaggio di G. Mastorna, ‘the most famous film in Italy that was never made’.6 In a sense, Fellini Satyricon was an act of creative healing—one could even say it cured him of an artistic impotence. The film still retains its power to shock for the violence and bizarreness of its images, and for its fragmented narrative. To critique this work solely from the standpoint of ‘putting Petronius on 2 Hughes (1971), 15. For Mussolini and Rome, see Bondanella (1987), ch. 7. On Scipione l’Africano, see Landy (1986), 194–200; Hay (1987), 155–61. 5 As Fellini confided to Dario Zanelli (1970), 8. 6 Alpert (1986), 190. Fellini Satyricon was actually the second of two films based on literary texts, the first being Toby Dammit, very—very—loosely based on Edgar Allen Poe’s story, ‘Never Bet the Devil Your Head’. In contrast to that film, Satyricon remains much more tied to the literary original. 3 4 Comp. by: pg2720 Stage : Proof ChapterID: 0001237721 Date:28/ 12/10 Time:12:45:02 Filepath:d:/womat-filecopy/0001237721.3D OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRST PROOF, 28/12/2010, SPi Fellini Satyricon and Dreaming Tradition 111 screen’ is certainly to miss vital truths about the translation of texts into films.7 But to understand the film solely as a rebellion against film conventions would also lose a valid connection between the Satyrica’s textual threads and themes, and Fellini Satyricon’s digestion and reconfiguration of them.8 Fundamentally, I want to argue that Fellini Satyricon still has considerable value as a kind of allegory of reception—beyond the simple fact that it is itself an instance of reception, one that captures quite well something of the late 1960s’ cultural upheavals. It represents a clear case of aggressive fantasy freed up by engaging the fragments of the ancient past in their opacity and irreparable loss as much as in their vital retention. It was a help that the Satyrica is a highly fragmented text—all sense of responsibility to a unified plot with an evident thrust was easily jettisoned (imagine what Fellini Aeneid would look like). Modern artists are easily seduced by fragments. A prime example from Italy is Salvatore Quasimodo’s influential translations of Greek lyric, where fragments are subjected to further lyrical fragmentation.9 Fragments suggest so much and yet never seem to menace, bore, or overwhelm us. Fellini himself waxed quite eloquent on the process of fragmentation. Are not the ruins of a temple more fascinating than the temple itself? An amphora patiently put together again fragment by fragment is invested with meanings and resonances which the new-fired amphora certainly could not have had; it is an object which has been dipped in the river of time, and thus emerges with a metaphysical aura that makes it more mysterious, more ineffable. The surrealists, at least, are well aware of this: corruption, the leprosy of time makes everything more ambiguous, indecipherable, obscure, and thus full of enchantment.10 7 Not surprisingly, initial reactions tended along these lines. See Highet (1970) and Segal (1971). Sullivan (2001) is a useful corrective to this simplistic view. 8 I will use the title Satyrica for the Latin work ascribed to Petronius, and Satyricon and Fellini Satyricon for the film. For convenience, I shall use the Latin names of characters when referring to the Satyrica, and the Italian names when referring to Fellini Satyricon. 9 Quasimodo, Lirici Greci ([1944] 1967), which stands behind Mary Barnard’s famous edition of Sappho (1958). See also the curious bilingual Sapphic pastiches of Odysseas Elytis ([1984] 1997). 10 Zanelli (1970), 4. Fragmentation also fits well with the ‘Fellini manner’ of the open form, where more attention is paid to the parts than the whole; see Stubbs (1993). Comp. by: pg2720 Stage : Proof ChapterID: 0001237721 Date:28/ 12/10 Time:12:45:02 Filepath:d:/womat-filecopy/0001237721.3D OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRST PROOF, 28/12/2010, SPi 112 Richard Armstrong But the very nature of what still glows amid the Satyrica’s scattered embers—its picaresque structure, homoeroticism, highly visual quality, overt theatricality, and pervasive obsession with eating—worked wonders against Fellini’s fermentive imagination.11 Its unruly style and scattershot agenda were good models for a deconstructive sword and sandal flick. Petronius’ work runs against the grain of classical aesthetics and established genres, subverting the social and literary world typically presented in epic, tragedy, or—to think perhaps anachronistically—prose romance.12 But rather than trying quixotically to illustrate such a literary text through film, Fellini met the text on a different field of representation: his dreams. As he explained to Alberto Moravia, he was fundamentally trying to express an intimate sense of alienation towards the ancient world. To express it, I’ve tried first of all to eliminate what is generally called history. That is to say, really, the idea that the ancient world ‘actually’ existed. Thus the atmosphere is not historical but that of a dream world. The ancient world perhaps never existed; but there’s no doubt that we have dreamt it . . . Satyricon should have the enigmatic transparency, the indecipherable clarity of dreams.13 In place of the bourgeois naturalism endemic in historical film, Fellini adopted a kind of oneiric realism, where there is a wealth of striking detail but only flickering recognition.14 The sense of the real is more uncanny than depictive, and it moves well beyond the cognitive pleasure tied up in Aristotle’s mimetic moment of ‘this is that’.15 Fellini’s technique required both impassioned imagination—as so much of the detail in this filmic world was pure invention—and utter detachment with regard to the fruit of that imagination, ‘in order to be able to explore it afresh from a disquieting viewpoint, to find it afresh both intact and unrecognizable’.16 The parallel with the dream was clear to Fellini, since dreams 11 For a detailed structural comparison between the text and the film, see Sütterlin (1996). 12 Zeitlin (1971). On the question of Petronian intertextuality with the Greek novel, see Courtney (2001), 12–31; Bowie (2008), 35–8; and Harrison (2008), 227–36. 13 Moravia (1970a), 26. 14 See Barthes ([1957] 1972), 26–8. 15 Aristotle, Poetics 1448b10–19. The oneiric realism is also a new twist on what Auerbach ([1946] 1974), 27 highlights as the Petronian technique of achieving objective ends by subjective means. 16 Moravia (1970a), 26. Comp. by: pg2720 Stage : Proof ChapterID: 0001237721 Date:28/ 12/10 Time:12:45:02 Filepath:d:/womat-filecopy/0001237721.3D OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRST PROOF, 28/12/2010, SPi Fellini Satyricon and Dreaming Tradition 113 contain things that belong to us deeply, through which we express ourselves, but in the light of day the only cognitive relationship we can have with them is of an intellectual, conceptual kind. That is why dreams seem to our conscious selves so fugitive, alien, and incomprehensible. So in order to give the film this feeling of alienation, I have adopted a dream language, a figurative cipher which will have the allusiveness and ineffability of a dream.17 So in this project, historical drama ceded to oneiric representation, or ‘the documentary of a dream’.18 Any melodramatic reliance upon plot was tossed aside, and the mise-en-scène was ruthlessly purged of classicizing clichés. Fellini even mischievously dismantled an economy of the gaze that had safely ruled cinema for decades. One of the film’s impertinent features is that its figures have an astonishing tendency to stare back at us, to challenge what we are doing by gawking at them. We are not allowed to feel always certain this spectacle is there for us; for all we know, perhaps we are there for them to stare at. At times, the glances in our direction quote Fayyum portraiture’s quiet earnestness, the look that bores into you with inexplicable but subtle insistence. At other times, the look is itself bored, as if the tedium of this antique life (particularly at Trimalcione’s banquet) has become overwhelming, and performing it for us is no longer interesting. Throughout the film, Fellini quotes, copies, toys with, and parodies the ancient representational styles of mosaic, encaustic portraiture, wall frescoes, graffiti, masks, imagines maiorum, and statuary—in forms that vary from the august and official to the pornographic and crudely ridiculous. He was a film-maker whose creative impulses for casting were largely driven by faces (he sorted through mountains of head shots to find the right person, even for minor parts), so it is understandable that he took from ancient art whatever had the highest face value. FELLINI BY THE POUND Since the film was not intended to ‘project the text’ of Petronius, we must look elsewhere for the logic behind its mise-en-scène—or rather, 17 18 Moravia (1970a), 26. This was Fellini’s final characterization of the film, Moravia (1970a), 27. Comp. by: pg2720 Stage : Proof ChapterID: 0001237721 Date:28/ 12/10 Time:12:45:02 Filepath:d:/womat-filecopy/0001237721.3D OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRST PROOF, 28/12/2010, SPi 114 Richard Armstrong mise-en-rêve. As a work modelled upon dreaming, Fellini Satyricon performs a constant regression to the visual, and its poetics are therefore imagistic, understood in the proper modernist vein.19 ‘An “Image”’, Ezra Pound stated, ‘is that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time.’ Pound meant ‘complex’ in the full psychological sense, and added, ‘It is the presentation of such a “complex” instantaneously which gives that sense of sudden liberation; that sense of freedom from time limits and space limits; that sense of sudden growth, which we experience in the presence of the greatest works of art.’20 But liberation through the image for Fellini does not lead to a cult of facile, beaux-arts beauty. Fellini’s imagery is often unforgivably ugly, and when it is beautiful, it is usually a whore’s beauty—suspicious, undermined, and tainted. It seems fitting, for example, that an early scene is set in the degraded theatre of Vernacchio, where the gorgeous Gitone (played by the highly androgynous Max Born) appears in a ludicrous theophany as Eros descending from the clouds. Soon he is being auctioned off, and his beautiful face betrays an obscene satisfaction at the skyrocketing price he is fetching. Fellini has mixed together here some themes and techniques of theatricality that run through the Satyrica with what he read about the debased theatre of imperial times in Carcopino’s Daily Life in Ancient Rome.21 But neither literature nor history is illuminated by Vernacchio’s stage, which bodies forth instead an amalgam of cruelty, venality, and political farce, from which we are hardly redeemed by Encolpio’s passion for the boywhore Gitone. The audience is no disciplined throng of citizens, but a random mix of neurotics (some of the extras were literally taken from an asylum). The image of this dismal theatre quickly dismantles what we think we know about the glories of Rome (so tied to toga dramas as our ‘knowledge’ is) or the ennobling passions of beautiful, starcrossed lovers. Gitone is no Eros, no Ganymede, and the wretched 19 The notion that dream imagery is regressive is foundational to Freudian dream theory, which assumes the visual is more indicative of ‘primary process’ thinking than the verbal. See Freud ([1900] 1999), 346–59. 20 Pound (1913), 200–01. 21 On Fellini’s reading of Carcopino, Zanelli (1970), 3–4; Alpert (1986), 201. For the imperial theatre, see Carcopino ([1940] 1960), 221–31. Cf. his judgement, ‘As the mime reached the height of its achievement, it drove humanity as well as art off the Roman stage’, 231. On theatrical elements in the Satyrica, see Bartsch (1994), 197–9; Panayotakis (1995); Plaza (2000); and Rimmel (2002). Comp. by: pg2720 Stage : Proof ChapterID: 0001237721 Date:28/ 12/10 Time:12:45:02 Filepath:d:/womat-filecopy/0001237721.3D OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRST PROOF, 28/12/2010, SPi Fellini Satyricon and Dreaming Tradition 115 man whose hand is severed for the amusement of a half-crazed audience is no Mucius Scaevola (whose name is shouted tauntingly at his entrance). Through this grotesque vision of the ancient theatre, we are freed of our theatrical illusions about antiquity’s being the perennial stage of noble actions, tragic grandeur, or ‘sweetness and light’. All the same, the scene is highly functional. The stunning Gitone makes a literally dramatic entrance into the film, and we learn all we need to know about him: he must be had—he can be had. It is perfect character exposition, and yet Gitone utters not a word; he is a smile, a glance, a luminous body in a sinister world. To cite another example of ugly but liberating imagism, Fellini intrudes a sequence that allows for a visually arresting location for the amorous escapade of Encolpio and Gitone as well as the later confrontation with Ascilto that leads to the break-up of the happy couple (scenes taken from the Satyrica, see 9–11). Fellini framed these scenes in an expressionistic rendition of an enormous ancient tenement, the Insula Felicles—about which he had also learned from reading Carcopino—because of its uncanny parallel with modern urbanism.22 One instantly recognizes urban poverty and the sad lives pigeonholed by the massive architecture—the background to this is Italian NeoRealism, like the tenements of The Bicycle Thief (1948). Yet one cannot really recognize this urban life, given the bizarre vignettes and neurotic rituals that glide by, glimpsed through thresholds unguarded by any a door. People argue, ail, burn, eat, pray, and shit right next to meandering animals. As the camera pans up the full interior of the building towards the open compluvium, we sense a totality being presented to us: a full gallery of urban life, we know not where. Yet the building’s sudden collapse—a common occurrence in antiquity, as Fellini knew from Carcopino—has nothing to do with Petronius or archaeological accuracy. It enacts the literal ruina that is antiquity, and is a kinetic mix of Pompeian and earthquake imagery.23 The insula morphs into a nightmare, intruding on the terrified 22 Carcopino ([1940] 1960), 23–30. Note especially the observation, ‘Height was its dominant characteristic and this height [ . . . ] still astounds us by its striking resemblance to our own most daring and modern buildings’, 24. Nethercut (1971), 56–7, is quite off the mark here in wanting to make this an allusion to the Colosseum (for one thing, the building’s aperture is square, not round as he claims). 23 The Pompeian parallel is explicit in the screenplay, where it says the fleeing inhabitants will appear ‘all as if already immobilized and reminding the spectator of the famous figures of those who died in the ruins of Pompeii’, Fellini (1970), 215. Comp. by: pg2720 Stage : Proof ChapterID: 0001237721 Date:28/ 12/10 Time:12:45:02 Filepath:d:/womat-filecopy/0001237721.3D OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRST PROOF, 28/12/2010, SPi 116 Richard Armstrong sleepers and evoking the tell-tale fear of suffocation, while horses run madly through the scene.24 But nothing is explained by this event, nor does it motivate any action. Encolpio is caught in the middle of this catastrophe, yet mysteriously reappears seconds later in a picture gallery, dapper and unharmed, but still bitter about his break-up with Gitone. There is a visual surfeit to the insula sequence that speaks to more than voyeurism or special effects. It seems powered by an underlying dread, not orchestrated by the plot but by the very world of the film itself. The camera has peered far too intimately into a dirty corner of antiquity, and now the image has crumbled away, and we are whisked off to a museum that consists only of pretty fragments of ancient art—something more like our conventional experience of antiquity. These visual fragments quote everything from Minoan wall-painting to Byzantine mosaics. At the centre of the gallery, a large bronze head appears bandaged, as if recovering from the previous scene. It is as though the gallery is a visual hospital, a recovery room for what we just saw and experienced—the grotesque theatre, the seething colony of whores, a world of hopeless indignities. Poverty is now nobly reconfigured in the guise of the ascetic artist, the poet Eumolpo. His diatribe about the decline of culture traces social ills to a simple inattention to artistic masterpieces. Through this aestheticism, we transition from sheer terror and estrangement to mild cultural guilt. We too are being enrolled in a recovery programme as we reflect on our own desire to see this ancient, fragmentary masterpiece, the Satyrica. There is a surreal moment in the scene, when a huge wheeled scaffold full of immobile spectators whisks by in the background without comment. Perhaps we are being cued in to our role as the moving spectators of this moving picture. Perhaps we are being ridiculed for wanting a quick and effortless glimpse of the ancient world, like tourists on a whirlwind tour of Rome. But like the bolting horses, the scaffold also seems to say: this film will make your eyes fly. 24 As Dick ([1981] 1993), 136 points out, this is one of many self-quotations Fellini makes in this film, this time of the riderless horse from La Strada. At the filming, the horses bolted spontaneously as the collapse happened in the studio; Hughes (1971), 22–3. Comp. by: pg2720 Stage : Proof ChapterID: 0001237721 Date:28/ 12/10 Time:12:45:02 Filepath:d:/womat-filecopy/0001237721.3D OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRST PROOF, 28/12/2010, SPi Fellini Satyricon and Dreaming Tradition 117 FELLINI REFRACTOR Besides oneiric realism, Fellini significantly reshaped Petronian material through a process of refragmentation. This technique is quite apparent in the manner in which he created a remarkably coherent ending, compared at least with the shredded Latin text. Originally, the death of Ascilto was to shift the film into a new key towards the end, introducing an enigmatic theophany. The screenplay states, ‘Among the trees, in the bushes, on the sea, transparent visions have appeared, dazzling in the luminous air. They are the gods. Gigantic heads, with serene smiles; or minuscule, uncertain, slightly mocking.’25 They were then gradually to vanish; the film’s treatment reads, ‘The gods no longer flit out of hiding; the sun has risen in the sky and dispersed them, fused them once more with the nature whence they sprung.’26 This theophany did not make it into the final version, and the film thus remained true to the nature of religion in the Satyrica, where the gods are only present in discourse and ritual, not in person as in epic. The one exception in the film is the episode of the Hermaphrodite, an alleged demigod whose squalid death debunks his divinity and makes his cult appear foolish superstition. This sickly creature seems a weak imitation of the stage-god Gitone, another divinely androgynous, luminous figure, but one radiating a lubricious vitality. As with Gitone earlier in the theatre, the trappings of divinity fall away and the Hermaphrodite becomes simply something worth stealing— again, a bathetic erosion of religious sincerity, but a closer approximation to the gritty local cults and attitudes in the Satyrica. Instead of the flickering image of a divine chorus towards the end of the film as originally planned, we see Encolpio intoning a brief elegy over the dead Ascilto against an empty sky. Here we see Fellini’s strategy of refragmentation keenly at work, since Encolpio’s words are based on the archly rhetorical elegy for the drowned Lichas from the Satyrica (115.12–19), now transformed to give some emotional substance to the two young men’s relationship. It matches in emotional intensity the vehement tirade against Ascilto that opens the film, where Encolpio rails melodramatically against a graffiti-scarred wall. Fellini often uses melodrama to echo the rhetorical moments of 25 26 Fellini (1970), 268, shots 1202–4. Fellini (1970), 89–90. Comp. by: pg2720 Stage : Proof ChapterID: 0001237721 Date:28/ 12/10 Time:12:45:02 Filepath:d:/womat-filecopy/0001237721.3D OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRST PROOF, 28/12/2010, SPi 118 Richard Armstrong the Satyrica, but his careful reduction of the Petronian dialogue always points beyond verbal fireworks and endows it with oneiric resonances. For example, Petronius’ Encolpius uses the death of Lichas as a jejune moral exemplum, expounding upon it to observe how, ‘If you add it up right, shipwreck is everywhere’ (115.16). But where Encolpius rhetorically launches out with ‘Go now mortals, fill your hearts with grand schemes’, Fellini’s Encolpio shifts this tellingly to, ‘Come on now, mortals, fill yourselves with dreams.’ The last line of the scene, ‘Great gods, how far he lies from his destination!’ is taken almost verbatim from the Satyrica (dii deaeque, quam longe a destinatione sua iacet—115.15), yet is now used to suggest that Encolpio will keep travelling toward his destination, but utterly alone. This is followed by a shot of him heading off among the dunes, starkly silhouetted against a menacing sky (which moments before was blue and empty). Here we see how much craft emerges from the refragmentation process in the film. Though Petronius’ Encolpius seems to remain enmeshed in relationships throughout the extant text, Fellini’s protagonist gradually loses his attachments and becomes a kind of social fragment. His ‘spouse’ Lica is decapitated by soldiers after the child Emperor is deposed; his lover Gitone disappears from the film (taken away by soldiers, it seems); his friend and rival Ascilto is wretchedly murdered by a boatman; and finally Encolpio discovers that Eumolpo, who has been an important figure of continuity throughout the film, has died an apparently natural death. The gradual isolation of Fellini’s protagonist makes this plot seem far less episodic and picaresque than that of the Satyrica; the film’s plot tapers down the dramatis personae to fewer and fewer known characters.27 Observe also the careful crafting of the final sequences. Eumolpo has engineered Encolpio’s escape on a ship, which will carry him outside the action of the film to further adventures.28 Though we do not know his final destination, it is clear Encolpio now at least has the capability of going somewhere. We see the image of an island fluctuate before us far in the distance as Encolpio relates a story he heard from a Greek . . . but here the voice-over stops, literally creating a narrative 27 The film’s plot has been given a thorough mythic analysis à la Joseph Campbell in Prats (1979). 28 It is often overlooked that the ship at the end had been promised to Encolpio in the Garden of Delights, after the young man’s failure to find his cure for impotence. Comp. by: pg2720 Stage : Proof ChapterID: 0001237721 Date:28/ 12/10 Time:12:45:02 Filepath:d:/womat-filecopy/0001237721.3D OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRST PROOF, 28/12/2010, SPi Fellini Satyricon and Dreaming Tradition 119 fragment. By way of a final gesture, Fellini has Encolpio complete his fragmentation by becoming a visual fragment: his smiling face dissolves into a fresco on a wall, and the camera pulls back, revealing various other painted figures from the film, caught in tell-tale poses on the crumbling surface of a ruin by the sea.29 The real crux of this dream-film is revealed in the penultimate scene, just before the total fragmentation of Encolpio is complete. It is a scene of marked contrasts, both syntagmatic and associative, involving two groups of men. In one group, young men are leaving on a ship, happy—even elated, as if newly freed. Another group comprises the heirs of Eumolpo—older, graver characters (their costumes seem a fantastical riff on senatorial attire). The heirs have been enjoined by Eumolpo’s will to cut his body into pieces and eat it; they slowly convince themselves to do this, citing historical precedents. Aware of the great fortune that is at stake, they set about with lugubrious determination, unwrap the mummy-like corpse, and are seen stolidly chewing on the shore. The joke, it seems, is on them, and the young men are rightly laughing at them. The ship’s Captain, who reads out the will for Encolpio, suggests as much when he remarks: ‘È impossibile! È uno scherzo!’ The young men, who we assume comprise the ship’s crew, set off towards the ship lightheartedly. Encolpio initially looks on the grim rite with a quiet smile, as does the Captain of the ship. The Captain then invites him to go with them, and they depart. It is easy to read this scene against the turmoil of the 1960s and to conclude the youth culture of the times is being given Fellini’s blessing to depart from the old Judaeo-Christian world.30 After all, Fellini deliberately soaked up the hippy energies of his young lead actors, who were cast as ancient ‘drop-outs’ from the university. Max Born (Gitone) was a 17-year-old flower child Fellini plucked from a commune in London. Hiram Keller (Ascilto), was in the original Broadway cast of Hair. The film also broke free of the old European frame in that it was very open to the bodies, beauties, sights, and sounds of the non-Western world. African Xalam, Javanese gamelan, Balinese Monkey Chant, and other exotic music all flowed together to make up 29 The sea often appears at the end of a Fellini film; see the comment in Hughes (1971), 136 on the filming of the final scenes of Fellini Satyricon; also Grossvogel (1971), 53–4. 30 This is the conventional reading by such Fellini experts as Peter Bondanella (1992), 248–52, reflecting some of Fellini’s own comments (Hughes, (1971): 130–1). Comp. by: pg2720 Stage : Proof ChapterID: 0001237721 Date:28/ 12/10 Time:12:45:02 Filepath:d:/womat-filecopy/0001237721.3D OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRST PROOF, 28/12/2010, SPi 120 Richard Armstrong Nino Rota’s vibrant palette in the soundtrack. But to reduce Fellini Satyricon to a simplistic endorsement of the Age of Aquarius or a declaration of Terzomondismo is to mistake day residue for the deep thinking of the dream. Petronius is not being updated here; rather, certain cultural contrasts are being backdated. FELLINI CANNIBAL To get finally at the kernel of the dream thought that lies behind Fellini Satyricon, we must unwrap Eumolpo. Fellini has made him a far more structural figure than the poeta callidus in Petronius. Eumolpo first appears as in the Satyrica in a picture gallery, expounding theories of art (cf. Satyrica 83–4); but he then leads Encolpio into the world of Trimalcione, guiding him like Dante’s Virgil through the inferno of the freedman’s bad taste. We know the poet is morally dissolute and a self-conscious parasite; yet he is passionate enough about real art to risk Trimalcione’s wrath and is consigned to the roaring ovens of the freedman’s kitchen over a literary dispute. Eumolpo later reappears, beaten nearly to death by the cooks and kitchen boys, the demons of infernal gluttony. Lying in the furrows of a field in the early morning light, the poet makes his first will and testament to Encolpio. Poets die, he tells the young man, only poetry remains. Then he says, ‘If I were as rich as Trimalcione, I’d leave you some land or a ship’—which is ironic, since he does leave behind a ship Encolpio uses. ‘I can only make you heir of that which I have had. I leave you poetry. I leave you the seasons, especially spring and summer. I leave you the wind and the sun’, Eumolpo continues, bequeathing to Encolpio all that poets love and value—the good sea, the good earth, mountains, rivers, clouds, trees, birds. This scene suggests that Encolpio has an intimate bond with Eumolpo; he is heir to the poet’s mission and world-view, which owns nothing and yet encompasses everything. It seems telling that Eumolpo later reappears only when Encolpio, now styled studente and poeta, has utterly failed to perform his role in an archaic ritual. He is thrust into the position of playing Theseus against a massive Minotaur in a gladiatorial combat staged before a large audience. He begs for mercy and claims he is an unworthy Theseus for such a Minotaur, and the combat melts away into a joke, performed by the Comp. by: pg2720 Stage : Proof ChapterID: 0001237721 Date:28/ 12/10 Time:12:45:02 Filepath:d:/womat-filecopy/0001237721.3D OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRST PROOF, 28/12/2010, SPi Fellini Satyricon and Dreaming Tradition 121 Roman Proconsul in honour of the God of Laughter (this episode is partly lifted from Apuleius, Metamorphoses 3.1–11). But now another ordeal begins, as Encolpio is awarded the role of Theseus once more, obliged to consummate a hieros gamos with an Ariadne in front of all assembled. Here the crisis of his impotence erupts, the laughter melts to sadness and disgust, and Eumolpo alone appears to help the young man. We should pause a moment to see where this plot is taking us: Encolpio fails twice to perform a mythic role; he lacks the fighting and sexual power to become the traditional hero. The labyrinth is an accessible symbol for the unconscious, and the ritual setting adds to the nightmarish feel that this is an exposure or even an examination dream. And only the poet Eumolpo shows him sympathy, saying, ‘il tuo Eumolpo ti guarirà !’ But quantum mutatus ab illo! Eumolpo now has acquired all the trappings of great wealth, including that status symbol he so conspicuously lacked before: the litter, which now ironically bears him aloft through his life of gouty excess. His sudden wealth seems a cosmic joke, even to him; in a sense, he has become Trimalcione. It is easy to see why Fellini identified so strongly with this rascally artist, whose wheeling and dealing ultimately build him a considerable fortune and a flock of pesky captatores. In Eumolpo’s conflict between true art and hard business, we can readily see a figure like a great film director, who must balance the demands of creativity against the vulgarity of the movie industry—something Fellini had already brilliantly explored in 8½ (1963).31 In contrast, Petronius’ Eumolpus remains a man of empty air to his heirs; he fakes being rich in order to get the legacy-hungry people of Croton to fête and entertain him (Satyrica 116–17). He tells them a ship laden with riches is coming soon from Africa, but this ship does not exist and its non-arrival clearly makes the captatores very annoyed (Satyrica 141.1). The whole business of the will in which Eumolpus requires his heirs to eat him was most likely supposed to put them off, though it is difficult to know what was happening at this point in the increasingly fragmentary text (Satyrica 141.2–5). When one of them appears ready to 31 Fellini remarked that the picture industry ‘is still so vulgar that if the film author tried to oversee what happens to his work he would quickly die of a broken heart. Between censorship, the vulgarity of the advertising, the stupidity of the exhibitors, the mutilation, the inept dubbing into other languages—when I finish a picture it’s best to forget I ever made it.’ Alpert (1986), 208. See also Hughes (1971), 129. Comp. by: pg2720 Stage : Proof ChapterID: 0001237721 Date:28/ 12/10 Time:12:45:02 Filepath:d:/womat-filecopy/0001237721.3D OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRST PROOF, 28/12/2010, SPi 122 Richard Armstrong engage in this cannibalism, this may have constituted a kind of comic catastrophe (Satyrica 141.5).32 But Fellini’s Eumolpo undergoes a real transformation into a wealthy man of business; his ship is also real, only it is headed for Africa, not from it. His death is also quite real, and we see him laid out on a bier by the sea with an enigmatic smile on his face. The will in the film reads very much like the one in Petronius (141.2), and the assembled heirs immediately interpret it quite literally. Once again we see how Fellini’s oneiric realism works to transform the verbal tartuffery of the Petronian world into powerfully ambivalent images. These images work by careful contrast: whereas Trimalcione was a languid mummy at the centre of his gluttonous world and played at being dead in his mausoleum, forcing his parasites to mourn him, Eumolpo becomes a literal mummy and makes himself the main course for his parasites, as if in perverse competition with the freedman. While the heirs are dressed alike and act grimly together in their unholy communion, Encolpio sets off with a motley, joyous crew, made up of social fragments like himself. Such studied contrasts suggest powerful ambivalences at work behind the images. And ambivalence inheres in Eumolpo’s last act of wit. The cannibalism at the end of this film can certainly be taken as a polemic with Christianity. The dying culture of the old Europe with its dreary rituals and cultural re-mastication is left behind by the young and groovy, who have no myth, no plan save for adventure and escape. Indeed, some scholars, like G. W. Bowersock, have argued the cannibalism in Petronius was already meant to be a comic allusion to Christianity and its myth of the edible god—the first such mention of it, in fact.33 In this regard, Fellini would be revisiting a primal scene to make fun of the same ritual but from a different perspective. Moreover, oral aggression permeates this film, and is often oddly coupled with literature, as when the Homerists appear at Tramalcione’s banquet.34 One diner with a vulgar accent comments directly into the camera, ‘mi piace il greco a tavola’, stuffing his peasant face. One could also argue that Eumolpo’s will aptly plays a very Petronian joke on his heirs. Just as Petronius, the condemned man, allegedly 32 For attempts to understand the Satyrica’s ending, see Sullivan (1968), 75–8; Slater (1990), 133; Courtney (2001), 210–13. 33 Bowersock (1994), 134–9. 34 For oral aggression in Petronius, see especially Rimmel (2002), ch. 3. Comp. by: pg2720 Stage : Proof ChapterID: 0001237721 Date:28/ 12/10 Time:12:45:03 Filepath:d:/womat-filecopy/0001237721.3D OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRST PROOF, 28/12/2010, SPi Fellini Satyricon and Dreaming Tradition 123 implicated the Emperor Nero in a huge list of vices and crimes and revealed the hypocrisy of the times (Tacitus, Annales 16.18–19), so here the poet trumps the voracious materialism of his philistine heirs in a perfect contrapasso: you have no taste for art, so fine: eat the artist. This is oral aggression turned on itself: ‘I exhort my friends not to refuse my invitation, but to devour my body with that same ardour with which they sent my soul to hell’, the will cleverly states.35 And if they comply, the heirs will ironically give Eumolpo the ultimate Orphic sparagmos, a fine end for a poet.36 But this regressive, oral-aggressive image encodes something else about the economy of art and the dynamics of tradition. Ingestion is a powerful metaphor for cultural reception; through eating, the eaten and the eater are both transformed. In fact, it is an ancient metaphor, one used by Romans such as Seneca and Quintilian to explain how one must properly read and digest tradition. What we ingest in our reading will remain alien, burdensome until it is transformed and can pass into our bloodstream. ‘Let us digest these things’, says Seneca, ‘otherwise they will go into our memory, but not into our ingenuity (ingenium).’37 The metaphor of intellectual rumination was further explored in Renaissance Humanism by Petrarch, Erasmus, and Montaigne. As Petrarch put it in reference to his own reading of the classics, ‘I ate in the morning what I would digest later; I swallowed as a boy what I would chew over when older. These things have become so thoroughly ingested and fixed—not just in my memory but in my very marrow—and made one with my creative mind (ingenium), that even if I read them no more for the rest of my life, they shall hold fast with their roots driven deep into my soul.’38 So, although the eating of Eumolpus seems violent and regressively cannibalistic, it does body forth a perennial truth about the reception of ancient culture: art really is a dog-eat-dog world, a world in which eating your ancestors bestows great wealth and freedom. 35 Fellini clearly interpreted the Latin text, which he follows closely, in a manner that punitively highlights the captatores’ eagerness for the poet to die and forces them now to muster the same eagerness to do away with his body. For more on textual problems here in Petronius, see Bowersock (1994), 135 n. 37. 36 I am indebted to Branham and Kinney (1996), 151 n. 141.1 for this observation. 37 Seneca, Epistulae Morales 84.3–8; Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria 10.1.1; see Fantham (1978), 110–11. 38 Petrarch, Epistulae ad familiares 22.2.12–13. For a general discussion, see Greene (1982) and Jeanneret (1995). Comp. by: pg2720 Stage : Proof ChapterID: 0001237721 Date:28/ 12/10 Time:12:45:03 Filepath:d:/womat-filecopy/0001237721.3D OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRST PROOF, 28/12/2010, SPi 124 Richard Armstrong Here I depart from a conventional reading of the film. Fellini scholars like Peter Bondanella are convinced that in the final moments Encolpio rejects ‘the verbal culture of his own time’, represented by the poet and orator Eumolpo.39 Encolpio runs off freed from all cultural baggage—baggage literally lines the shores in the final scene—and open to a new, unscripted adventure. For Bondanella, it can only be ironic that Fellini freed up his imagination and cured his own creative impotence by a return to an ancient masterpiece, since the ‘message’ of the film seems to be one of flat out rejection of tradition, of moving beyond all hallowed myths, plots, styles, and cults. But I think Bondanella has not taken seriously enough the nature of the dream-text that this film presents. Eumolpo and Encolpio are in fact two sides of the author, something suggested to Fellini early on by the eminent Petronian scholar, Ettore Paratore, whom Fellini had visited when dreaming up the film.40 Eumolpo may seem very much like the self-ironic film director, but Encolpio becomes a vital, creative force on his own, one clearly in league with and in need of Eumolpo. The end of the film shows Encolpio freed of impotence, thanks to a cure enacted through coupling with an earth mother, Enotea, who bears Virgilian fire in her loins (the story of her punishment by a magus whom she tricked is one of the widespread medieval legends about Virgil).41 The scene is a literal rendering of the Virgilian injunction: ‘seek out the ancient mother’ (antiquam exquirite matrem—Aen. 3.96). Encolpio does not need to join the captatores in their grim ritual, because he has already inherited the world from Eumolpo in a previous scene. Only now with Eumolpo really gone is he ready to embrace it. Here lies the secret to Encolpio’s enigmatic smile at the end. As described in the screenplay, Encolpius was to follow the heirs’ actions seriously, then break out in ‘a weary laugh, and rather crazier than the usual one. A laugh of understanding, of comprehension, of acceptance.’42 By the final filming, the crazy laughter is displaced onto the crew, and Encolpio’s smile remains a placid understanding and acceptance of what is going on as he is released from his last bond. Through this film, Fellini opened up his psyche to a radical freedom; he dismembered and devoured his auctor, Petronius, and released a powerful imaginative force that saved him from crippling self-doubt 39 41 Bondanella (1992), 252. Spargo (1934), ch. 5. 42 40 Zapponi (1970), 35. Fellini (1970), 273, shot 1242. Comp. by: pg2720 Stage : Proof ChapterID: 0001237721 Date:28/ 12/10 Time:12:45:03 Filepath:d:/womat-filecopy/0001237721.3D OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRST PROOF, 28/12/2010, SPi Fellini Satyricon and Dreaming Tradition 125 and impotence. Rather than an act of arbitrary appropriation, Fellini’s film was the ultimate act of sincerity. As Robert Frost once said, ‘There is such a thing as sincerity. 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