- News>
- Newspapers
The name of the pose: Hindustan Times
New Delhi, Apr 19: Call it a weakness for my own past but I`ve always been a Madonna fan. I`ve remained loyal to her long after I`ve outgrown my fascination with many of the things I was fascinated by (Alistair MacLean novels, long hair, T-shirts with one-liners on them and Kenny Rogers songs) when I first fell under her spell. I`ve read her most recent biography by J Randy Taraborrelli. And I`ll buy her new album American Life even though critics say it isn`t really up to scratch.
New Delhi, Apr 19: Call it a weakness for my own past but I've always been a Madonna fan. I've remained loyal to her long after I've outgrown my fascination with many of the things I was fascinated by (Alistair MacLean novels, long hair, T-shirts with one-liners on them and Kenny Rogers songs) when I first fell under her spell. I've read her most recent biography by J Randy Taraborrelli. And I'll buy her new album American Life even though critics say it isn't really up to scratch.
I don't know why I do it. There are singers I admire much more than her. There are women I find more attractive than her. (Frankly, in terms of looks, I was enchanted by her in her Like a Virgin and Desperately Seeking Susan phase, the time when she, according to Pauline Kael, looked like an "indolent trampy goddess". Once she became Iron Biceps, I went off her. And Sweet Wife/Loving Mother was worse.) There are icons who have a more treasured place in my snapshot of memories.
But I know this: I don't keep in touch with her protean talents (a full-time job with Madge threatening to become a children's writer this autumn) because she is a post-modern deconstructionist's dream. I don't because I know that that isn't so. More than her knack of mass producing new trends in club music for the pop mainstream, more than her ability to churn out chart-topping singles, more than her charisma as a performer, more than the triumph of will over talent that she exemplifies, Madonna is endlessly dissected and discussed for one thing: her ability to reinvent herself.
Everyone talks about how she assumes a different persona for each new film, album, photo-shoot or shopping spree. Her ability to reinvent herself, commentators have said, is what makes her so much of a postmodern icon; it helps her cash in, with each persona overhaul, on the truncated attention spans of today's youth. Here, for instance, is Martin Amis writing on Madonna on the eve of the release of her book Sex: "…She is the self-sufficient postmodern phenomenon (even her publicity gets publicity), a masterpiece of controlled illusion."
Now hang on a minute. Why is reinvention so quintessentially a thing to do with our times? Hasn't it been the stuff of folklore, legends, art and literature for ages? Metamorphoses, the Roman poet Ovid's most enduring work, is a series of tales, taken largely from the Greek myths and also from Biblical sources, about, well, metamorphoses. Humans constantly mutate into other forms in this classic Latin text. It is not merely a retelling of the classical myths; the philosophical stand that the poet (born in 43 BC) takes is this: flux is eternal and the physical transformation in a person is linked to or symbolises a transformation in persona as well.
Ovid was Shakespeare's favourite classical poet. Shakespeare takes the central theme of Metamorphoses and makes it his own. Changes of identity effected by disguise is one of the recurring motifs in his romantic comedies. In As You Like It, Rosalind disguises herself as Ganymede; in Julius Caesar, Portia becomes the barrister Balthazar; and in Twelfth Night, Viola becomes Cesario.
In Chaucer's Wife of Bath's Tale, an old hag is overnight transformed into a beautiful young woman after the knight who promises to marry her keeps his word. And who can forget the fairytale of the frog prince, the prince who, under an evil spell, had been turned into a frog and who, by the kiss of a princess, became a prince again? Several centuries down the line, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is as much a story of transformation as the tale of Kafka's Gregor Samsa. The British writer and critic Marina Warner has tapped this rich vein of metamorphoses inherent in the history of art and literature. In Fantastic Metamorphoses, Other Worlds: Ways of Telling the Self (OUP), Warner takes Ovid's classic as the founding text of the metamorphic tradition. She then broadens her scope of her study to include examples from fields as diverse as the art of Hieronymous Bosch or the life cycle of the butterfly. "Warner suggests," wrote David Jays in his review when the book came out late last year, "that metamorphosis might work as natural law…"
It does. Nothing is more natural than change, nothing probably worse than immutation. For centuries the story of transformations have been woven into the tapestry of art and literature. It wasn't called something specific. It is only now that we have given it a name: reinvention.
Reinvention (or self-invention in the case of Madonna) is not a postmodern phenomenon. Finding names for things, classifying, repackaging something old as something new, as something essentially of our times, is a classic postmodern malaise.
Bureau Report
I don't know why I do it. There are singers I admire much more than her. There are women I find more attractive than her. (Frankly, in terms of looks, I was enchanted by her in her Like a Virgin and Desperately Seeking Susan phase, the time when she, according to Pauline Kael, looked like an "indolent trampy goddess". Once she became Iron Biceps, I went off her. And Sweet Wife/Loving Mother was worse.) There are icons who have a more treasured place in my snapshot of memories.
But I know this: I don't keep in touch with her protean talents (a full-time job with Madge threatening to become a children's writer this autumn) because she is a post-modern deconstructionist's dream. I don't because I know that that isn't so. More than her knack of mass producing new trends in club music for the pop mainstream, more than her ability to churn out chart-topping singles, more than her charisma as a performer, more than the triumph of will over talent that she exemplifies, Madonna is endlessly dissected and discussed for one thing: her ability to reinvent herself.
Everyone talks about how she assumes a different persona for each new film, album, photo-shoot or shopping spree. Her ability to reinvent herself, commentators have said, is what makes her so much of a postmodern icon; it helps her cash in, with each persona overhaul, on the truncated attention spans of today's youth. Here, for instance, is Martin Amis writing on Madonna on the eve of the release of her book Sex: "…She is the self-sufficient postmodern phenomenon (even her publicity gets publicity), a masterpiece of controlled illusion."
Now hang on a minute. Why is reinvention so quintessentially a thing to do with our times? Hasn't it been the stuff of folklore, legends, art and literature for ages? Metamorphoses, the Roman poet Ovid's most enduring work, is a series of tales, taken largely from the Greek myths and also from Biblical sources, about, well, metamorphoses. Humans constantly mutate into other forms in this classic Latin text. It is not merely a retelling of the classical myths; the philosophical stand that the poet (born in 43 BC) takes is this: flux is eternal and the physical transformation in a person is linked to or symbolises a transformation in persona as well.
Ovid was Shakespeare's favourite classical poet. Shakespeare takes the central theme of Metamorphoses and makes it his own. Changes of identity effected by disguise is one of the recurring motifs in his romantic comedies. In As You Like It, Rosalind disguises herself as Ganymede; in Julius Caesar, Portia becomes the barrister Balthazar; and in Twelfth Night, Viola becomes Cesario.
In Chaucer's Wife of Bath's Tale, an old hag is overnight transformed into a beautiful young woman after the knight who promises to marry her keeps his word. And who can forget the fairytale of the frog prince, the prince who, under an evil spell, had been turned into a frog and who, by the kiss of a princess, became a prince again? Several centuries down the line, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is as much a story of transformation as the tale of Kafka's Gregor Samsa. The British writer and critic Marina Warner has tapped this rich vein of metamorphoses inherent in the history of art and literature. In Fantastic Metamorphoses, Other Worlds: Ways of Telling the Self (OUP), Warner takes Ovid's classic as the founding text of the metamorphic tradition. She then broadens her scope of her study to include examples from fields as diverse as the art of Hieronymous Bosch or the life cycle of the butterfly. "Warner suggests," wrote David Jays in his review when the book came out late last year, "that metamorphosis might work as natural law…"
It does. Nothing is more natural than change, nothing probably worse than immutation. For centuries the story of transformations have been woven into the tapestry of art and literature. It wasn't called something specific. It is only now that we have given it a name: reinvention.
Reinvention (or self-invention in the case of Madonna) is not a postmodern phenomenon. Finding names for things, classifying, repackaging something old as something new, as something essentially of our times, is a classic postmodern malaise.
Bureau Report