Ways of Seeing in the Neoliberal State:

A Controversial Play and Its Contexts

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Ways of Seeing in the
Neoliberal State
A Controversial Play
and Its Contexts

Asbjørn Skarsvåg Grønstad

Ways of Seeing in the Neoliberal State
 Asbjørn Skarsvåg Grønstad

Ways of Seeing
in the Neoliberal State
A Controversial Play and Its Contexts
Asbjørn Skarsvåg Grønstad
University of Bergen
Bergen, Norway

ISBN 978-3-030-85983-1 ISBN 978-3-030-85984-8 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-85984-8

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 It is at the same time true that the world is what we see and that,
nonetheless, we must learn to see it (Maurice Merleau-Ponty).1

1 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible [1964], Evanston: Northwestern
University Press, 1968, 4.
 Acknowledgments

The kernel of this book dates from a paper that I gave at “The Ethics
of Surveillance” seminar in Paris in late November 2019. I would like
to extend my gratitude to our gracious hosts at the Centre Universi-
taire de Norvège à Paris, Johs. Hjellbrekke and Kirstin Skjelstad, for their
incomparable hospitality. I would also like to thank the participants for
their knowledgeable feedback and generous contributions to the work-
shop as a whole, in no particular order: Clare Birchall, Emmeline Taylor,
Henrik Gustafsson, Anders Lysne, Tonje Sørensen, Kristine Jørgensen,
Tuva Mossin, Astrid Gynnild, and Øyvind Vågnes. I first saw the play
Ways of Seeing at the Bergen International Festival in late May 2019,
and I knew right away that it would be a research project. Too rich
and multilayered to be dealt with in an article format, the play seemed
quite a suitable project for Palgrave’s Pivot series. I would like to thank
commissioning editor Eileen Srebernik for her excellent stewardship of
the process. Thanks are also due to the anonymous reviewers of the
manuscript, for their generous and astute suggestions. In early June 2020,
Pia Roll and Hanan Benammar sat down with me for a whole Oslo after-
noon to be interviewed about Ways of Seeing; my warmest appreciations
to both for taking time to discuss the play so exhaustively with me. I
wrote the bulk of this book between November 2020 and April 2021. I
would like to thank the Faculty of Social Sciences and the Department of

vii
viii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

information science and media studies for providing me with a sabbatical

to make that possible. No part of this work has been previously published.

Bergen Asbjørn Skarsvåg Grønstad

April 2021
 Contents

1 Introduction: The Public Confronts Other Ways

of Seeing 1
2 New Ways of Seeing: The Judicial 23
3 Censorship and Free Speech: The Aesthetic 51
4 Neoliberalism and Rojava: The Political 79

Epilogue 109
Index 111

ix
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction: The Public Confronts Other

Ways of Seeing

Abstract The introductory chapter provides relevant background infor-

mation for the case of Ways of Seeing and presents the overall research
questions to be pursued in the book. Approaching the play as a work of
sousveillance—surveillance from below—the chapter argues that its chief
ambition is to expose hegemonic practices of looking, practices that are
intimately tied to the rise of neoliberalism, xenophobia, and right-wing
nationalism. For the artists behind the play, this development is inter-
laced with the escalation of surveillance as a form of control targeting
immigrants in particular. The acts of sousveillance shown in the play are
a reversal of the mainstream gaze in which the disempowered minori-
ties directly engage those who wield power over them. Featured in
this part is a detailed narrative of the case from the play’s opening in
November 2018 to the trial in September 2020. Careful attention is also
given to the massively controversial public reception of Ways of Seeing,
one significant argument being that key social institutions such as the
media, the government, and the judicial system were unable to recog-
nize the fictional-aesthetic character of the play. The chapter furthermore
contextualizes the play with reference to the tradition of postdramatic
performance art. Last but not least, it engages with Walter Benjamin’s
reflections on the artwork’s position within its material conditions of
production as well as with Nicholas Mirzoeff’s notion of the right to look
in order to unpack some of the theoretical resonances of the play.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Switzerland AG 2021
A. S. Grønstad, Ways of Seeing in the Neoliberal State,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-85984-8_1
2 A. S. GRØNSTAD

Keywords Sousveillance · Racism · Experimental geography · Activism ·

The right to look · The postdramatic · Vandalism · Laila Bertheussen

How could a small, independent theater in Oslo trigger the ousting of the
country’s minister of justice, as well as being the root cause of a substan-
tial court case spanning several months and featuring fifty witnesses?
While remarkable in themselves, these events constitute merely a point
of departure for the current book, which offers an in-depth examina-
tion of the complex issues that the play Ways of Seeing raises around the
subjects of surveillance, neoliberalism, xenophobia, and the rise of right-
wing nationalism. In three individual but interconnected chapters, Ways
of Seeing in the Neoliberal State asks both what practices of looking are
emerging in western democracies, and what alternative modes of looking
might facilitate an exposure of such practices and gesture toward ethically
healthier forms of government. Perceived as a deeply controversial work,
Ways of Seeing was the target of suppressive political measures, and so
the book also considers questions of aesthetic transgression, censorship,
and artistic freedom. What the play foregrounds are, first, the aesthetics
of sousveillance (of which more below), second, the visualization of the
material infrastructure of racism and right-wing populism, and third, the
promotion of an alternative mode of political governance—grounded in
feminism and ecological awareness—through the example of the Rojava
experiment.
In December 2018, a woman named Laila Anita Bertheussen reported
three theater workers to the police for violation of privacy. A few months
later, in March 2019, the Oslo police issued similar charges against the
same individuals, as well as the manager of the Black Box Theatre.1 At
the center of these events was the aforementioned play, whose opening on
November 21, 2018 immediately caused a degree of turbulence among
the public and in the media rarely if ever seen in the art sphere in Norway.
The play quickly acquired notoriety for containing footage of the resi-
dences of a number of influential politicians and financial contributors—in
short, the nation’s economic and political elite. The public reception of

1 Those accused were the actors Hanan Benammar and Sara Baban, as well as the play’s
director, Pia Maria Roll. After the original charges were dismissed, the District Attorney
demanded in February 2019 that the investigation be reopened.
 1 INTRODUCTION: THE PUBLIC CONFRONTS OTHER WAYS OF SEEING 3

Ways of Seeing was immersed in drama, complete with baroque twists and
turns that at times seemed to surpass those of a conventional fictional
narrative. The pinnacle of all the brouhaha came on March 28, 2019,
when the National Police Security Service (NPSS) charged Bertheussen
with several counts of vandalism against her own home. By that time,
almost four months after the play premiered, the public had been made
to believe that the defacement of the property was a corollary of the
play’s use of the house front as an integral part of its scenographic design.
“Outing” the home of Bertheussen in the context of a critique of racism,
most people assumed, was an incitement to do violence against it. The
occupant of this particular address was Tor Mikkel Wara, a well-known
politician from the Progress Party who at the time was Minister of Justice
and Immigration in Prime Minister Erna Solberg’s conservative govern-
ment. He is also Bertheussen’s life partner, and on the same day that she
was accused of the crime, he resigned from his post (the 5th Minister of
Justice in this particular government to do so). In the fall of 2019, the
NPSS confirmed that their charges had been forwarded to the National
Prosecuting Authority (NPA). Bertheussen stands accused of violation
of article 115 of the Penal Code—assault on the country’s democratic
institutions. Her case went to trial in September 2020, and on January
15, 2021, she was sentenced to 20 months in prison for attack on the
country’s democratic institutions.
Founded in 1985, The Black Box Theatre programs and co-produces
contemporary and experimental work by domestic as well as international
companies. Its two stages combined have a capacity of 280 seats. After
it opened in late November 2018, Ways of Seeing was on for about a
week and a half. So how did such a small institution become the cata-
lyst for so much political and legal turmoil? What was the source of its
powers of provocation? To what extent could the reception of the play be
considered an extension of the work itself? How do the multiple acts of
surveillance in which the play is embroiled connect with larger social issues
such as immigration, neo-fascism, censorship, free speech, and neoliber-
alism? What, exactly, are those ways of seeing that the play addresses?
These are some of the questions with which the current book engages.
At the core of Ways of Seeing is the subject of surveillance and the
establishment’s expanded authority to spy on its citizens, particularly with
regard to the Eggemoen Aviation and Technology Park near the city of
Hønefoss in South-Eastern Norway, a site about which the mainstream
media have been conspicuously silent. Curiously, only the people who
4 A. S. GRØNSTAD

have seen the play—a very low number—will know this. Everybody else
assumes that the work deals with a much different kind of surveillance,
namely, the clandestine photographing of private residences, by many
felt to be morally problematic and even—if you were a politician on the
right—illegitimate. Generic as they might be, however, the facades gesture
toward a particular demographic. Their dwellers belong to a given socio-
economic group, a group defined by capital and privilege who enjoy a
sheltered existence far away from the city’s multiracial reality. In addition
to the then Justice Minister Wara’s house, those filmed were the homes
of, among others, Christian Tybring-Gjedde, a prominent Progress Party
politician, Jens Stoltenberg, former Prime Minister from the Labor Party
(2005–2013) and current Secretary General of NATO, Jan Haudemann-
Andersen, a major investor in the Oslo Stock Exchange, Øystein Spetalen,
a billionaire and investor, and Stein-Erik Hagen, a businessman who is the
second richest person in the land. When spliced together in the projected
footage shown on the Black Box stage, these domiciles make manifest a
cartography of wealth and political influence, or more importantly, the
effect of the former on the latter.
In the literature on surveillance there is a technical term for this kind
of mapping: sousveillance, or alternatively counter-surveillance. Absent
from the public discourse about the play and its alleged indiscretions,
the concept sheds light on the larger meaning of Ways of Seeing.2
From Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon (and Michel Foucault’s influential
re-reading of this structure)—an ocular technology for monitoring the
self and implanting conformity—to modern methods of biometric classi-
fication and digital tracking devices, surveillance creates a way of seeing
that is always also about control and behavior modification. Its interven-
tionist gaze is not neutral and tends to reinscribe differences tied to race,
gender, sexuality, class, and age. Above all, surveillance manages relations
of power. Nowadays, it has become exceedingly difficult to escape this
gaze. As one of the field’s foremost theorists has observed, living in an

2 In an article for the major daily newspaper Aftenposten in the fall of 2020, I
introduce the term “sousveillance” as an interpretive frame for the play. See Asbjørn
Grønstad, “Har vi forstått hva ‘Ways of Seeing’ egentlig handler om?,” Aftenposten,
September 25, 2020, https://www.aftenposten.no/meninger/kronikk/i/JJ1Aq6/har-vi-
forstaatt-hva-ways-of-seeing-egentlig-handler-om, accessed April 19, 2021.
 1 INTRODUCTION: THE PUBLIC CONFRONTS OTHER WAYS OF SEEING 5

information society ineludibly means living in a surveillance society.3 Prac-

tices of surveillance saturate most spheres of life, to the extent that they
usher in a new modality of being in the world. Civilian society, since the
Edward Snowden case in particular, has grown more vigilant with regard
to state surveillance, and the topic was instrumental in the play’s incu-
bation phase. As there has been little curiosity or concern about facilities
like Eggemoen on part of the mainstream media, it was left to the artists
to scrutinize the operation of asymmetrical power structures that remain
largely invisible and covert.
Etymologically, the word surveillance means “to look from above,”
whereas sousveillance, inversely, means “to look from below.” Coined
by the Canadian engineer and academic Steve Mann, the latter idea
signifies acts of resistance to state or corporate surveillance.4 Often an
instrument of political activism, counter-surveillance has been defined
as “intentional, tactical uses, or disruptions of surveillance technolo-
gies to challenge institutional power asymmetries.”5 Some scholars in
the field distinguish between acts of opposition and acts of resistance;
where the former work to influence policy through organizations such
as the American Civil Liberties Union, the latter denote more impro-
vised approaches designed to evade or undercut the epistemic imbalance
of systemic surveillance. When artists get involved in acts of sousveil-
lance, it typically falls under the second category. Comprising a diversity
of procedures, artistic sousveillance draws inspiration both from Situa-
tionism, the Theater of the Absurd, the Civil Rights Movement, the
Women’s Movement, and the Environmental Movement. It spans prac-
tices such as those of the Surveillance Camera Players, whose videotaped
plays in public places feature participation from unsuspecting civilians,
Trevor Paglen’s photographing of secret military installations, Zach Blas’s
face masks, and digital obfuscation programs such as FaceCloak or Track-
MeNot, to name just a small selection. One of the most paradigmatic
cases of sousveillance is George Holliday’s video capture of Rodney King
being senselessly beaten by LAPD officers in March 1991. Filming the

3 David Lyon, Surveillance Studies: An Overview, Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2007.

4 Steve Mann, Jason Nolan, and Barry Wellman, “Sousveillance: Inventing and
Using Wearable Computing Devices for Data Collection in Surveillance Environments,”
Surveillance and Society, 1. 3 (2003): 331–355.
5 Torin Monahan, “Counter-Surveillance as Political Intervention,” Social Semiotics, 16.
4 (2006): 515–534; 515.
6 A. S. GRØNSTAD

incident from his adjacent balcony, Holliday sent the footage to local
news station KTLA, after which it was picked up by other broadcasters
and seen across the world. The spring 1992 acquittal of the four offi-
cers involved induced widespread riots across Los Angeles, leaving 63
dead and thousands injured or incarcerated. Holliday’s footage provides
the blueprint for what in the 2010s sadly became almost its own genre
within visual culture, the bystander video documenting police brutality
against African-Americans. The murder of Oscar Grant by BART police
in Oakland in 2009, the killing of Eric Garner by New York police in July
2014, and the slaying of Alton Sterling by officers in Baton Rouge in July
2016 constitute only a small fraction of such projects of sousveillance.6
Such bystander videos are at the same time a reminder of the racialized
history of surveillance. As Simone Browne has suggested in an important
study,

rather than seeing surveillance as something inaugurated by new tech-

nologies, such as automated facial recognition or unmanned autonomous
vehicles (or drones), to see it as ongoing is to insist that we factor
in how racism and antiblackness undergird and sustain the intersecting
surveillances of our present order.7

If surveillance originates in racism, and there is certainly evidence

throughout the histories of biometric classification to corroborate this,
then anti-surveillance measures like those mentioned above could be
conceived as aestheticizations of resistance. Historically, surveillance has
tended to target groups that imperil the status quo; immigrants, crimi-
nals, prostitutes, the mentally ill, the poor, and the ethnically other. The
monitoring of slaves on the plantations, the pseudo-science of phrenology,
and the contemporary over-policing of black bodies in the United States
are all surveillance practices whose common denominator is racist poli-
tics. The solicitation on behalf of the islamophobe activist Hege Storhaug
of photographs of Norway’s muslim population (a case I will return to in
Chapter 2) is a project with a certain family resemblance to such historical

6 Consult the website WITNESS Media Lab for more further data, https://blog.wit
ness.org/2015/07/bystander-videos-of-police-misconduct-in-the-u-s/, accessed April 20,
2021.
7 Simone Browne, Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness, Durham: Duke
University Press, 2015, 8–9.
 1 INTRODUCTION: THE PUBLIC CONFRONTS OTHER WAYS OF SEEING 7

practices. It is in the context of sousveillance as resistance to standard-

ized forms of institutional surveillance that a work such as Ways of Seeing
should be comprehended.
The commotion around the play regrettably served to obfuscate the
deeper meaning of the acts of sousveillance, and in Chapter 2: New
Ways of Seeing: The Juridical, I discuss the strategies that enable the
play to challenge culturally hegemonic ways of seeing. By literally inhab-
iting a specific, socioeconomically marked zone, Roll and her colleagues
stage a symbolic intervention that encapsulates a certain aesthetic practice
that Walter Benjamin describes in his essay “The Author as Producer,”
first given as a paper at the Institute for the Study of Fascism in Paris on
April 27, 1934. In this text, Benjamin distinguishes between works that
come to occupy a political position from those that merely convey some
kind of political message.8 Rather than posing the familiar Marxist ques-
tion about the artwork’s “attitude” to the “relations of production of its
time,” Benjamin urges us to ask what the work’s position in these rela-
tions might be.9 Reframed in this way, the question involves the function
of the work within particular material relations of production, and for
Benjamin analyzing the precise nature of this function entails a consid-
eration of the concept of technique. This he understands as the quality
that makes the work “accessible to an immediately social, and therefore
materialist, analysis.”10 I take it that, in this context, technique is that
which overcomes the form-content partition, which Benjamin dismisses,
and which also determines the work’s mode of operation within a specific
political environment.
The idea of occupying a position—revitalized in recent progressive and
anti-austerity movements such as Occupy Wall Street and its numerous
tributaries around the world (Occupy Toronto, Occupy LA, etc.)—has
been taken up again by, among others, the American artist and geogra-
pher Trevor Paglen, who has pointed out that the creation of cultural
artifacts and texts is also at the same time a resoundingly spatial practice
because aesthetic works directly contribute to the invention of new spaces
of experience. “[T]he task of transformative cultural production,” he

8 Walter Benjamin, “The Author as Producer” [1934], Understanding Brecht, trans.

Anna Bostock, introd. Stanley Mitchell, London: Verso, 1998.
9 Ibid., 87.
10 Ibid.
8 A. S. GRØNSTAD

writes, is “to reconfigure the relations and apparatus of cultural produc-

tion.”11 The kind of “field work” undertaken by the Ways of Seeing crew
shares some of the attributes of the occupy movements—for instance
nonviolence and using one’s body to claim a particular site—but it also
powerfully performs what Nicholas Mirzoeff calls the right to look. In his
book of the same name, Mirzoeff equates that right with “a right to the
real” as well as a right to “autonomy” and to “a political subjectivity and
collectivity.”12 The subjectivity he has in mind is an emancipated one,
empowered to reconstitute, if need be, the material and expressive infras-
tructures of the political position of which it forms a part. In a startling
formulation, Mirzoeff claims that “[t]he opposite of the right to look is
not censorship, then, but ‘visuality’.”13 Dating the origin of the term to
1840, when the Scottish historian and philosopher Thomas Carlyle used
it to describe a heroic kind of military leadership, Mirzoeff traces the
history of the concept from the systemic acts of surveillance pertaining
to the slave plantation through to ever more sophisticated methods for
visualization of the battlefield. On this account, the “complex of visual-
ity” denotes a discursive act consisting of three operations—classification,
separation, and aestheticization.14 The first, classification, is similar to
what Michel Foucault terms “the nomination of the visible,” and is closely
linked to the spatial organization of labor, slavery being the historical
model.15 Separation designates the social segregation of groups in order
to discourage the galvanization of political participation. Aestheticization,
finally, is the process of the naturalization of the former operations. The
right to look is a historically and culturally variable stance that refuses
the authority of visuality, finding expression for example in anticolonial

11 Trevor Paglen, “Experimental Geography: From Cultural Production to the Produc-

tion of Space,” in Experimental Geography: Radical Approaches to Landscape, Cartography,
and Urbanism, eds. Nato Thompson, Brooklyn: Melville House, 2009. Henri Lefebvre’s
classic study The Production of Space (1974; English trans., 1991) is one of the sources
that inform Paglen’s insights in this regard.
12 Nicholas Mirzoeff, The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality, Durham: Duke
University Press, 2011, 1.
13 Ibid., 2.
14 Ibid., 3.
15 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences,
London: Tavistock, 1970, 132.
 1 INTRODUCTION: THE PUBLIC CONFRONTS OTHER WAYS OF SEEING 9

and anti-fascist movements. Mirzoeff also notes that each of these oper-
ations—which comprise the complex of visuality—has engendered their
own countermeasure. The abuses of classification are countered by educa-
tion, the evils of separation are offet by democracy, and the effects of
aestheticization are undone by an emphasis on sustainability and corporeal
affect.
I would like to suggest that it makes sense to consider Ways of Seeing ’s
act of counter-surveillance in the context of the theories of Benjamin,
Paglen, and Mirzoeff. Two of the actors in the play, the French-Algerian
Hanan Benammar and the Kurdish-born Sara Baban, who both took part
in the photographing of the houses, are immigrants who play themselves.
Benammar hails from France, the daughter of an Algerian resistance
fighter. Baban’s family had to flee Iraq when her father, a bureaucrat
under Saddam Hussein’s regime, opposed the dictator’s persecution of
Kurds. Baban also tells the audience that she has visited Rojava, the self-
governed, multiethnic, and socialist province in northeastern Syria that
was under attack from Turkey in October 2019. In the play, Benam-
mar’s deceased father Halim, who returns as a ghost, is played by Ali
Djabbery, an immigrant from Iran. Turning their camera toward the
residences of some of the most influential figures in the political-financial-
military complex—in other words, the complex of visuality—Benammar
and Baban place their own bodies close to the homes of those in part
responsible for the facilitation of racism and xenophobia in their chosen
country. With Benjamin, one might say that they divulge not just a polit-
ical attitude; they also occupy a position in the socio-political relations in
which they are themselves enmeshed. With Paglen, one might say that
their work enacts a form of experimental geography, staking claim to an
experiential space that was not there before. Finally, with Mirzoeff one
might say they exercise their right to look in the face of a prevailing and
seemingly impenetrable complex of visuality.
In juridical terms, the recording of the houses is uncomplicated. To
produce footage of someone’s house from a distance is not a violation
of any law, nor is exhibiting it in the context of an art performance. To
identify real persons as well as their political affiliations in the context
of an artistic work is likewise permissible. Yet there is no denying the
deliberately confrontational gaze of the women’s camera. They watch the
watchers, and by doing that they subvert what one might call an officially
sanctioned politics of surveillance. This gesture is at once aesthetic and
critical. In Chapter 3: Censorship and Free Speech: The Aesthetic, I
10 A. S. GRØNSTAD

explore the nature of the play’s powers of provocation and suggest that it
may be understood in the context of what Kieran Cashell calls an “oppo-
sitional practice.”16 Geared toward destabilizing social rather than legal
structures, such practices enlist art as a means of expression through which
to convey political or cultural critique. With regard to Ways of Seeing,
Cashell’s terms are particularly helpful in that they provide a conceptual
frame for the play’s espousal of sousveillance as a formal method.
The success of Ways of Seeing in upsetting the public unsurprisingly
caused a backlash that brought Norway to the attention of Freemuse,
the autonomous international organization for the protection of artistic
expression. Issues relating to censorship and the curtailment of aesthetic
forms of communication are thus, in this case, intimately connected with
the process of transgression (as they often are). In Chapter 3, I also
consider the paradox of calling for a defunding of the Black Box Theatre
while at the same time promoting a kind of free speech that is quite
permissive of racist inflections. The critics who reviewed the play during
its first week were able to define, to a large extent, the initial public recep-
tion of Ways of Seeing. Per Christian Selmer-Andersen’s rancid piece in the
major daily Aftenposten, historically a conservative publication, dismissed
the play as radical, leftist proselytizing, although, to be fair, it admitted
that its topic was treated with some subtlety. More detrimental to the
accuracy with which Ways of Seeing was presented in the media, though,
was Selmer-Andersen’s disproportionate emphasis on the inclusion of
Justice Minister Wara’s house (the title of his review is “When Leftist
Performance Artists Hide in the Thuja Hedge”). Some of the terms and
phrases he uses became keywords in the controversy that ensued, for
example “guerilla theater,” “lie in the bushes,” “stealth filming,” and
“threat,” not forgetting his perhaps slightly inflated comparison of the
actors’ activities to those of the Rote Armé Fraktion (RAF).
The day after the newspaper ran Selmer-Andersen’s review,
Bertheussen showed up at the Black Box Theatre, where she proceeded
to record the performance. It is not unlikely although difficult to ascer-
tain that she was triggered by the critic’s words, which spread like wildfire
throughout the domestic media and among the political echelons, in
the process creating a largely fictitious narrative about the nature and
content of the play. The day after Bertheussen’s appearance, the Progress

16 Kieran, Cashell, Aftershock: The Ethics of Contemporary Transgressive Art, London:

I. B. Tauris, 2009.
 1 INTRODUCTION: THE PUBLIC CONFRONTS OTHER WAYS OF SEEING 11

Party’s Christian Tybring-Gjedde, a high-profile politician, wrote on

his Facebook page that the Black Box Theatre “legitimates its hatred
against Norwegians through an absurd, state-sponsored performance.”17
Wara’s property was vandalized, leading everyone to assume that it was
a direct consequence of the visibility bestowed upon the house in Ways
of Seeing. Soon proposals were launched from the Right to curtail state
funding of the theater. Prime minister Erna Solberg attacked the play in
public, claiming that it had negatively impacted the working conditions
of national politicians. While this happened before the National Police
Security Service charged Bertheussen with sabotage and defacement of
her own property in March 2019, Solberg has (at the time of writing)
yet to apologize for her at best inappropriate indictment of the artists.
As the public reception of this play has demonstrated, performing acts of
sousveillance may come at a cost.18
The task of surveying the affluent spaces of political influencers
produces a clear, topographical outline of the entanglements of conser-
vative politics and capital, but in order to go beyond the surface structure
of Black Box’s observations, we need the explanatory power of another
crucial concept. Adding context and interpretive depth to the aesthetics
of sousveillance at work in Ways of Seeing is the concept of neoliber-
alism, which is foregrounded in Chapter 4: Neoliberalism and Rojava:
The Political. A guiding premise for the analysis in this section is the
way in which neoliberalism over the last decades has mutated from the
domain of economics to become what Wendy Brown sees as “a normative
order of reason.”19 Neoliberal rationality, she argues, has infected “every
human domain,” remodeling all conduct as “economic conduct.”20 The
neoliberalization of political culture, the educational system, the media,

17 Steinar Solås Suvatne, “Teaterstykke filmet hjemmet til Tybring-Gjedde. Skuespilleren

har mottatt grove trusler,” Dagbladet, November 28, 2018, https://www.dagbladet.no/
nyheter/teaterstykke-filmet-hjemmet-til-tybring-gjedde-skuespilleren-har-mottatt-grove-tru
sler/70500779, accessed November 20, 2019.
18 See Jessica Lake, “Red Road (2006) and the Emerging Narratives of ‘Sub-Veillance,’”
Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies, 24. 2 (2010): 231–240; and Steve
Mann, Jason Nolan, and Barry Wellman, “Sousveillance: Inventing and Using Wearable
Computing Devices for Data Collection in Surveillance Environments,” Surveillance and
Society, 1. 3 (2003): 331–355.
19 Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution, Brooklyn:
Zone Books, 2015, 9.
20 Ibid., 10.
12 A. S. GRØNSTAD

and even language itself is gradually eroding democratic values, which, I

would like to suggest, is one of the key issues that Ways of Seeing raises.
When the optimization of value championed by the modern corporate
company comes to colonize the life worlds of both governments and indi-
viduals, turning them into assets to be managed, the ramifications may
be increased inequality, financial volatility, the withering away of public
welfare, rampant commodification, and the demise of the idea of the
social. The argument in this chapter is ultimately that Ways of Seeing chal-
lenges not only the financial enablers of right-wing politics but perhaps
more pressingly the neoliberal modes of governance that generate them
in the first place.
The rejuvenated ways of seeing that the play empowers manifest what
in ancient Greece was known as isegoria, equal speech (an expressive cate-
gory distinct from the notion of free speech), understood as the claim
to be heard in public meetings. What sets Black Box apart from other
critiques of neoliberalism is that the play engenders a form of speech that
is not content merely with disclosing its injurious effects but that also
pauses to focus on healthier modes of political governance. A recurring
subject in Ways of Seeing is the stateless democracy of Rojava in Northern
Syria, a place that Sara Baban’s character visits and talks about at length in
the play. Since its inception in December 2018, The Democratic Feder-
ation of North Syria (DFNS) pursues a participatory model for political
organization rooted in feminist and ecological principles.21 Arguing that
the references to Rojava are crucial in understanding the ethics of the
play, I explore the political philosophy of the Rojava experiment through
an engagement with the work of the theoretician and political prisoner
Abdullah Öcalan as well as the American eco-anarchist Murray Bookchin,
who is a major influence on the former.
In the book’s Epilogue: Seeing Ethically, I tie together the separate
thematic strands of the preceding chapters to elucidate the particular form
of ethics embedded in the aesthetic structure of the play. In a reading that
considers Ways of Seeing as a timely update of John Berger’s epochal work
of the same name (1972), and as one that also continues with the launch
in September 2020 of the Ways of Seeing TV , the epilogue contrasts the
play’s way of seeing with postcapitalist ways of seeing. Drawing on Hagi

21 Self-autonomy was declared in 2012, and the forerunner to the DFNS, The
Democratic Federation of Rojava, was established in March 2016.
 1 INTRODUCTION: THE PUBLIC CONFRONTS OTHER WAYS OF SEEING 13

Kenaan’s work on the ethics of visuality, I read the play’s aesthetic practice
as a mode for voicing political dissent in a neoliberal environment.
With the surfeit of expressive possibilities available for social and polit-
ical critique in our contemporary media ecology, one question that should
be asked is why theater became the primary vehicle for addressing the
most urgent and uncomfortable issues in Norwegian society post-July
22. During the 1990s and noughties, cinema was arguably a flagship
art form when it came to dealing with culturally controversial subject
matter, as evidenced by films like Natural Born Killers (Oliver Stone,
1994), Romance (Catherine Breillat, 1999), The Piano Teacher (Michael
Haneke, 2001), Irreversible (Gaspar Noé, 2002), Capturing the Fried-
mans (Andrew Jarecki, 2003), and Antichrist (Lars von Trier, 2009), to
name just a tiny fraction of works that delved into distressing thematic
territories. In the culture wars of the 1980s and 1990s, as the next chapter
will show, painting and photography were often in the legal limelight.
With the soaring influence of newer media like computer games and VR,
one could imagine politically unpleasant topics to emerge out of such
expressive channels. And yet a piece of performance art came to stand out
as the galvanizing force for discussions deemed too precarious to have in
the years after July 22.22 Why was that?
While in Friedrich Schiller’s time theater could exert “a more
profound” influence than both law and morality, instilling as it suppos-
edly does “[m]ore correct notions, more refined precepts [and] purer
emotions,”23 in the early twenty-first century it exists alongside a diverse
assortment of apparatuses of visibility. Commanding a somewhat less

22 It should be noted that the national public discourse, in approaching the ten-year
commemoration of the 2011 massacre, has shifted toward a greater sense of acknowl-
edgment of the reluctance to politicize the tragedy that characterized the first few
years after the event, a reluctance shared even by the Labor Party itself as the victim
of the atrocities. The general perception in 2021 appears to be that the media and
the center-to-left parties have been wrong in not confronting the political ideologies
that directly motivated the terrorism of July 22. See for instance Frode Bjerkstrand,
“De som overlevde 22. juli-terroren tar hanskene av. Det er på tide,” Bt.no, April 6,
2021, https://www.bt.no/btmeninger/kommentar/i/x32XjR/de-som-overlevde-22-juli-
terroren-tar-hanskene-av-det-er-paa-tide, accessed April 7, 2021. Bjerkestrand’s text is a
comment on the publication of the book Aldri tie, aldri glemme, written by the Labor
Youth Party.
23 Friedrich Schiller, “Theater Considered as a Moral Institution,” [1784], trans. John
Sigerson and John Chambless, The Schiller Institute, 2002–2005, https://archive.schilleri
nstitute.com/transl/schil_theatremoral.html, accessed March 22, 2021.
14 A. S. GRØNSTAD

central position in the public sphere than earlier in its history, theater
might, on the other hand, be less susceptible to the pressures of commod-
ification that suffuse more recent media such as cinema, television, and
videogames. Its parameters of the sayable may therefore be wider. A
second reason could have to do with the crucial presence of minority
voices in the ensemble, the effect of which is to actualize alternative ways
of seeing—points of view that are more closely aligned with a postcolo-
nial perception of Norwegian culture. This is a point that should not be
underestimated. Hanan Benammar’s character’s soliloquy at the start of
the play represents a pivotal moment in the reckoning with the polit-
ical stratifications of July 22 in a larger European context. A third reason
involves the nature of the artistic approach that made Ways of Seeing
famous in the first place. The amount of outrage its acts of sousveillance
caused ensured it received far more exposure than most aesthetic artifacts.
While in truth its method was a mix of ethnography and investigative jour-
nalism, in the end, it served the play well that it was falsely construed as
a violation of privacy.
This study treats Ways of Seeing as a work of visual culture, a conceptual
enframing supported by a host of pungent markers: the rather overt allu-
sion to John Berger’s groundbreaking program and book, the adoption
of the techniques of sousveillance—strongly associated as they are with
video, film, and media—as well as the wholesale inclusion of recorded
footage as part of the play’s overall aesthetic. But Ways of Seeing is
also performance art, and while in the next chapter I shall address the
work’s affinity with a recent tradition of participatory and interactive
poetics, some contextualization of the play’s position vis-à-vis the broader
field of contemporary theater seems apposite. Although Pia Roll has
stated in interviews that her work is not necessarily post-theatrical and
that Aristotelian structure is still important to her, Ways of Seeing could
assuredly be considered in terms of postdramatic aesthetics.24 Describing
her practice, Roll figures that her projects amount to “negotiations with
theatre as form,” arguing that the documentary approach is just one
of several different “techniques” drawn upon. In her methodology, the
documentary impulse should be seen in conjunction with the fictional,
the therapeutic, and the activist. A breakthrough moment of sorts, she

24 Fritt Ord, “En forestilling som aldri tar slutt: Backstage med Ways of Seeing,” Fritt
Ord, October 6, 2020, https://frittord.no/nb/arrangementer/en-forestilling-som-aldri-
tar-slutt-backstage-med-ways-of-seeing, accessed October 7, 2020.
 1 INTRODUCTION: THE PUBLIC CONFRONTS OTHER WAYS OF SEEING 15

submits, came when she realized that she could actually venture outside
the theater for material. A reflection of this awareness, presumably, is her
work’s gravitation toward contemporary concerns, as well as the frequent
use of characters playing themselves. She also emphasizes the vital role her
artistic practice plays in generating new insight; all her plays, she concedes,
could have been entitled Ways of Seeing.
It was with the publication of Hans-Thies Lehmann’s Postdramatic
Theatre in 1999 that the formal and stylistic evolution within theater that
started in the 1960s toward performance and relational poetics crystal-
lized in a canonic concept. The circumstances of this evolution are too
convoluted, both in historical and theoretical terms, to recount compre-
hensively here, but I will try to map their principal features succinctly
and to the degree that they are relevant for a richer understanding of
the aesthetics of Ways of Seeing. The notion of the postdramatic as it
gets presented by Lehmann denotes an innovative form of theater—with
antecedents in the work of Erwin Piscator, Antonin Artaud, and the early
twentieth-century avant-garde movements—that relaxes the prominence
of plot linearity and narrative unity and accentuates gesture and corpo-
real choreography. Lehmann’s work has to some extent been taken as a
rejoinder to Peter Szondi’s landmark study Theory of the Modern Drama
(1956), in which the author addresses the crisis in modern drama that
unfolded from the clash between Aristotelian principles of composition
and the then contemporary drama’s need to engage with social issues.
Analyzing playwrights from Henrik Ibsen, August Strindberg, and Anton
Chekov to Arthur Miller and Eugene O’Neill, Szondi—like many critics
of his generation—considers drama as literature. For Lehmann, on the
other hand, theater means performance. The cornucopia of performance-
related practices from the 1960s onward—happenings, live art, Fluxus
shows, Situationism—consolidated the shift from literature-based theater
to Performance art, but the postdramatic also materialized in the work of
a broad and eclectic range of institutions, writers and artists, from Berlin’s
Hebbel-Theater, Amsterdam’s Mickery Theater, and Glasgow’s Tramway
to practitioners such as Peter Brook, Meredith Monk, Pina Bausch,
and Jan Fabre to Robert Wilson, Robert Lepage, Anatoli Vassiliev, Jan
Lauwers, Sarah Kane, Martin Crimp, and The Wooster Group. Palpable
in Lehmann’s re-interpretation of theater as performance is a perspica-
cious sense of medium specificity, perhaps sparked by the profusion of
new visual media in the last decades. Acknowledging that theater does
not generate “a tangible object which may enter into circulation as a
16 A. S. GRØNSTAD

marketable commodity,” Lehmann instead underscores the emphatically

embodied experience of the performance situation:

Theatre is the site not only of ‘heavy’ bodies but also of a real gathering, a
place where a unique intersection of aesthetically organized and everyday
real life takes place. In contrast to other arts, which produce an object
and/or are communicated through media, here the aesthetic act itself (the
performing) as well as the act of reception (the theatre going) take place
as a real doing in the here and now. Theatre means the collectively spent
and used up lifetime in the collectively breathed air of that space in which
the performing and the spectating take place.25

While it may be difficult to argue that theater continues to be a mass

medium, it is still one in which a mass of people gathers.
Postdramatic theater functions as an umbrella term for a heterogeneity
of performative practices. With its origin “in times of extremity,” early
performance-oriented art such as Dadaism and Futurism could be seen
as a reaction to the failure of more conventional forms to provide “emo-
tive responses to fascism.”26 The genre also shares aesthetic DNA with
process-focused approaches such as investigative theater, documentary
theater, ethnodrama, and verbatim theater, the latter of which has pedi-
grees that go back to the 1920s Soviet agitprop theater known as the
“Blue Blouses,” as well as Piscator’s use of contemporary political docu-
ments in his In Spite of Everything (1925). Ways of Seeing is connected
to these forms both in sensibility and poetics, as it is to the more recent
“emergency narratives” dealing with various states of precarity; recession,
migration, terrorism, populism, to name some.27
If postdramatic theater is defined by the ways in which it re-modulates
the time-honored components of the medium—conflict, causality, plot,
catharsis, illusion, imitation, fiction—differently from literary, text-based
drama, then Ways of Seeing clearly falls within the scope of this aesthetic.
As I will return to in Chapter 4, the play espouses a kind of montage

25 Hans-Thies Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre [1999], trans. Karen Jürs-Munby,

London: Routledge, 2006, 16–17.
26 Jay Pather and Catherine Boulle, “Introduction,” in Acts of Transgression: Contempo-
rary Live Art in South Africa, eds. Jay Pather and Catherine Boulle, Johannesburg: Wits
University Press, 2019, 1–16; 2.
27 See for instance Sam Haddow, Precarious Spectatorship: Theatre and Image in an
Age of Emergencies, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2019.
 1 INTRODUCTION: THE PUBLIC CONFRONTS OTHER WAYS OF SEEING 17

that illustrates Lehmann’s point that postdrama replaces dramaturgy with

“collage.”28 Having actors portray a version of themselves, abandoning
the conventions of classical narrative, encompassing shards of the outside
world as an integral part of the mise-en-scène, employing technologies of
visual reproduction, eschewing any sense of plot resolution, and blurring
the line between fiction and reality—these are all compositional choices
made by the play. In what follows, I would like to suggest that Ways of
Seeing also helps to push postdramatic performance art in a progressive
direction, in the process amending some of the criticism or reservations
that have been voiced against it. More specifically, various skeptics have
decried the formalism of postdramatic theater, while others have noted
its neglect of feminist perspectives. To this list, one might add the relative
paucity of ethnic and cultural minorities and of minority issues in this
field.
The concept of postdramatic theater has been faulted for promoting
“apoliticism and elitist escapism.”29 Part of the problem some have with
postdrama is that its attention to formal matters comes at the expense of
contextual understanding. As the editors of a recent volume argue, “to
say that postdramatic theatre moves toward form and away from drama
signals a shift toward theatrical form and away from drama’s particular
dialectic of form and content.”30 The study of aesthetic form, from the
work of the New Critics in the 1930s and onward, has been linked to
the method of close reading and to traits such as hermetic textualism,
indifference to historical and material context, structural unity, rejection
of authorial intent and affective response, autonomy, and textual purity.
It is also rather unquestionable that formalist approaches, at least in their
early incarnations, were not particularly sensitive to problems of gender,
race, and class. A performance like Ways of Seeing negates all of the
above descriptors, yet its aesthetic affordances are neither more nor less
active than in a more purely formalist work. As I have argued at length
elsewhere, the renewal of form is critically important for artworks’ epis-
temic and ethical contribution—a repetition of tried and tested formulas

28 Ibid., 26–27.
29 Michael Shane Boyle, Matt Cornish, and Brandon Woolf, “Introduction: Form and
Postdramatic Theatre,” in Postdramatic Theatre and Form, eds. Michael Shane Boyle,
Matt Cornish, and Brandon Woolf, London: Bloomsbury, 2019, 8.
30 Ibid., 3.
18 A. S. GRØNSTAD

rarely yields new insights—so an abandonment of formal experimenta-

tion is hardly the best option for artists who intend to convey events
and ideas in the world in ever more accurate ways.31 But does formally
adventurous art necessarily have to be solipsistic, rigid, and closed off
from societal concerns? Such as view comes across as unreasonable and
ill-attuned to developments both in the art sphere and in criticism and
theory since the age of New Criticism. For one thing, the rise of rela-
tional and participatory art provides a telling example of a space in which
formal innovation and social engagement intersect. Secondly, formalist-
oriented theory has come a long way since the days of Cleanth Brooks
and Monroe Beardsley. Poststructuralism is no doubt partly to blame for
postdramatic theater’s reputation as apolitical. Liz Tomin, for example,
attributes the long reigning view that properly radical theater should not
hold any “ideological steer” to the influence of poststructuralist reason.32
But the re-formulation of formalism in the work of, say, Lauren Berlant,
Sianne Ngai, and Caroline Levine presupposes a much more expansive
concept of form than that found in earlier approaches.33 Relations of
power, the materiality of social environments, the historical contingencies
of aesthetic mediations—these are all phenomena absorbed in contempo-
rary refractions of formalist thought. On the one hand, form is “integral
rather than incidental to theatre,” as Boyle, Cornish and Woolf put it.34
“Instead of sealing theatre off from society,” they suggest, “form is what
theatre and society share.”35 On the other hand, across the last century
or so theater has also waxed more political, enquiring stridently into “the
fundamental organization of society.”36 Moreover, there are also critics

31 Asbjørn Grønstad, Film and the Ethical Imagination, London: Palgrave Macmillan,
2016, 68.
32 Liz Tomlin, Political Dramaturgies and Theatre Spectatorship: Provocations for
Change, London: Methuen, 2019, 18.
33 See Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism, Durham: Duke University Press, 2011; Sianne
Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting, Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univer-
sity Press, 2012; and Caroline Levine, Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network,
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015.
34 Boyle, Cornish, and Woolf, 15.
35 Ibid.
36 Michael Patterson’s, Strategies of Political Theatre, Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2008, 1.
 1 INTRODUCTION: THE PUBLIC CONFRONTS OTHER WAYS OF SEEING 19

who maintain that postdramatic theater is more appropriate than tradi-

tional theater for covering political and social topics.37 In many ways,
Ways of Seeing encapsulates both these tendencies, a formal audacious-
ness (after all, it was a compositional device that caught the attention of
the public) and an unflinching commitment to the political. As a style of
postdramatic theater, Ways of Seeing enacts what one might term a socially
sensitive formalism.
Another suspected oversight in the arguments swirling around post-
dramatic theater is feminism.38 With inspiration from the texts of Hélène
Cixous, in particular her “The Laugh of the Medusa” and the idea
of “insurgent writing,” Cara Berger reflects upon the possibilities of
coalescing the formalism of postdrama and feminism. With references to
Pina Bausch and the Wooster Group, Berger conjures up “an oblique
postdramatic feminism” defined by valuing “affect and sensation over
narration, function over representation” and by potentially being able to
engender “new subjectivities over empowering already known or familiar
identities.”39 Berger also recognizes that postdramatic art and feminist
politics are united in their joint awareness that one of the effects of neolib-
eralism is the diffusion of political and social power.40 In the case of
Ways of Seeing, the postdramatic elements are enveloped by a comprehen-
sively feminist sensibility. Not only are the play’s main writers and actors
women, but the thematic weight placed on Rojava as a singular experi-
ment in jineology ensures that the work is worthy of the characterization
as one of our most significant contributions to a feminist aesthetics. With
regard to the strategy of sousveillance, furthermore, it is by no means
extraneous to the meaning of the gesture that the bodies of the marginal-
ized positioned so close to the insular world of the economically and
politically privileged are gendered bodies.

37 Jerome Carroll, Karen Jürs-Munby, and Steve Giles, “Introduction: Postdramatic

Theatre and the Political,” in Postdramatic Theatre and the Political: International Perspec-
tives on Contemporary Performance, eds. Karen Jürs-Munby, Jerome Carroll, and Steve
Giles, London: Bloomsbury, 2013, 3.
38 Cara Berger, “‘Knowledge and Taste Go Together:’ Postdramatic Theatre, Écriture
Féminine, and Feminist Politics,” Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, 30. 2 (2016):
39–60.
39 Cara Berger, “Feminism in Postdramatic Theatre: An Oblique Approach,” Contem-
porary Theatre Review, 29. 4 (2019): 423–438.
40 Ibid., 433.
20 A. S. GRØNSTAD

They are also, finally, racialized bodies. If the White optics of Western
Modernism to a certain extent has persisted in postdramatic theater, Ways
of Seeing breaks free from this tradition in its consistent commitment to
a postcolonial ethics. Hanan’s allusion to the Algerian War of Indepen-
dence comes at the very beginning of the play and provides a frame for
the narrative to come. NATO’s bombing of Syria and the topicalization
of Rojava are other postcolonial references in the play, and its emphasis on
the immigrant experience aligns Ways of Seeing with the work of someone
like British filmmaker John Akomfrah. His The Nine Muses (2010), for
instance, examines the cultural encounter of the African diaspora with
the conditions of postwar Europe. In a certain sense, Ways of Seeing
marries aspects of postdramatic practice with those of postcolonial theater.
Writing about the social function of theater in Nigeria, Awam Amkpa
holds that performance art furnishes communities with a meaningful site
upon which to negotiate questions of identity and cultural belonging. A
fertile ground for activism and struggles over decolonization, Nigerian
theater is nourished by hybridity and what Amkpa calls postcolonial desire,
understood as “the act of imagining, living, and negotiating a social reality
based on democracy, cultural pluralism and social justice.”41 Rejecting
any notion of identity as something unchanging and essentialist, this kind
of desire also labors to counter oppression, to comprehend “the residual
and active narrative of colonial modernity” and to repudiate “colonial
epistemology.”42 Only now, the chief oppressor is not so much European
nation-states as global, neoliberal corporations. In Amkpa’s recounting,
theatrical practices are key in mediating this desire:

The singing and dancing, masquerades and folk-tales, the rituals and festi-
vals that peppered family and communal life in West Africa all contributed
to a theatre of engagement. As practiced in auditoria, market places,
community halls, schools, streets, and in religious and secular ceremonies,
theatre came to mean a symbolic interpretation of social reality that
facilitated communication, socialization, and community.43

While performance art may thus constitute a space of empowerment and

epistemological renewal, it can also, in different geographical contexts, be

41 Awam Amkpa, Theatre and Postcolonial Desires, Florence: Routledge, 2003, 10.
42 Ibid., 9.
43 Ibid., 5.
 1 INTRODUCTION: THE PUBLIC CONFRONTS OTHER WAYS OF SEEING 21

subject to less benign interpositions. As theorized by among others Helen

Gilbert and Joanne Tompkins, postcolonial theater more so than litera-
ture has the power to “critique political structures,” but it also “run[s]
a greater risk of political intervention in [its] activities in the forms of
censorship and imprisonment.”44 Although operating in a Scandinavian
context, a particular variant of postcolonial desire is also what energizes
Ways of Seeing, which more than anything is a play that opposes those
residual colonial narratives and their entanglement with neoliberalism.
Out of this desire, new epistemes and new ways of seeing emerge.

44 Helen Gilbert and Joanne Tompkins, Post-Colonial Drama: Theory, Practice, Politics,
New York: Routledge, 1996, 3.
Another random document with
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out his arms. Well poor little Susie wouldn’t like me to be here....
Everything for her and the bonny wee bairn.
“Hey there yous how about settlin?” bawled the barkeep after him
when he reached the door.
“Didnt the other feller pay?”
“Like hell he did.”
“But he was t-t-treating me....”
The barkeep laughed as he covered the money with a red lipper.
“I guess that bloat believes in savin.”

A small bearded bandylegged man in a derby walked up Allen

Street, up the sunstriped tunnel hung with skyblue and
smokedsalmon and mustardyellow quilts, littered with second hand
gingerbread-colored furniture. He walked with his cold hands
clasped over the tails of his frockcoat, picking his way among
packing boxes and scuttling children. He kept gnawing his lips and
clasping and unclasping his hands. He walked without hearing the
yells of the children or the annihilating clatter of the L trains overhead
or smelling the rancid sweet huddled smell of packed tenements.
At a yellowpainted drugstore at the corner of Canal, he stopped
and stared abstractedly at a face on a green advertising card. It was
a highbrowed cleanshaven distinguished face with arched eyebrows
and a bushy neatly trimmed mustache, the face of a man who had
money in the bank, poised prosperously above a crisp wing collar
and an ample dark cravat. Under it in copybook writing was the
signature King C. Gillette. Above his head hovered the motto no
stropping no honing. The little bearded man pushed his derby
back off his sweating brow and looked for a long time into the
dollarproud eyes of King C. Gillette. Then he clenched his fists,
threw back his shoulders and walked into the drugstore.
 His wife and daughters were out. He heated up a pitcher of water
on the gasburner. Then with the scissors he found on the mantel he
clipped the long brown locks of his beard. Then he started shaving
very carefully with the new nickelbright safety razor. He stood
trembling running his fingers down his smooth white cheeks in front
of the stained mirror. He was trimming his mustache when he heard
a noise behind him. He turned towards them a face smooth as the
face of King C. Gillette, a face with a dollarbland smile. The two little
girls’ eyes were popping out of their heads. “Mommer ... it’s popper,”
the biggest one yelled. His wife dropped like a laundrybag into the
rocker and threw the apron over her head.
“Oyoy! Oyoy!” she moaned rocking back and forth.
“Vat’s a matter? Dontye like it?” He walked back and forth with the
safety razor shining in his hand now and then gently fingering his
smooth chin.
II. Metropolis

T
here were Babylon and Nineveh: they
were built of brick. Athens was gold
marble columns. Rome was held up on
broad arches of rubble. In Constantinople
the minarets flame like great candles round
the Golden Horn ... Steel, glass, tile,
concrete will be the materials of the
skyscrapers. Crammed on the narrow island
the millionwindowed buildings will jut
glittering, pyramid on pyramid like the white
cloudhead above a thunderstorm.

W
hen the door of the room closed behind him, Ed Thatcher felt
very lonely, full of prickly restlessness. If Susie were only here
he’d tell her about the big money he was going to make and
how he’d deposit ten dollars a week in the savings bank just for little
Ellen; that would make five hundred and twenty dollars a year....
Why in ten years without the interest that’d come to more than five
thousand dollars. I must compute the compound interest on five
hundred and twenty dollars at four per cent. He walked excitedly
about the narrow room. The gas jet purred comfortably like a cat. His
eyes fell on the headline on a Journal that lay on the floor by the
coalscuttle where he had dropped it to run for the hack to take Susie
to the hospital.
MORTON SIGNS THE GREATER NEW YORK BILL

Completes the Act Making New York World’s Second

Metropolis
 Breathing deep he folded the paper and laid it on the table. The
world’s second metropolis.... And dad wanted me to stay in his ole
fool store in Onteora. Might have if it hadnt been for Susie....
Gentlemen tonight that you do me the signal honor of offering me the
junior partnership in your firm I want to present to you my little girl,
my wife. I owe everything to her.
In the bow he made towards the grate his coat-tails flicked a piece
of china off the console beside the bookcase. He made a little
clicking noise with his tongue against his teeth as he stooped to pick
it up. The head of the blue porcelain Dutch girl had broken off from
her body. “And poor Susie’s so fond of her knicknacks. I’d better go
to bed.”
He pushed up the window and leaned out. An L train was
rumbling past the end of the street. A whiff of coal smoke stung his
nostrils. He hung out of the window a long while looking up and
down the street. The world’s second metropolis. In the brick houses
and the dingy lamplight and the voices of a group of boys kidding
and quarreling on the steps of a house opposite, in the regular firm
tread of a policeman, he felt a marching like soldiers, like a
sidewheeler going up the Hudson under the Palisades, like an
election parade, through long streets towards something tall white
full of colonnades and stately. Metropolis.
The street was suddenly full of running. Somebody out of breath
let out the word Fire.
“Where at?”
The group of boys melted off the stoop across the way. Thatcher
turned back into the room. It was stifling hot. He was all tingling to be
out. I ought to go to bed. Down the street he heard the splattering
hoofbeats and the frenzied bell of a fire engine. Just take a look. He
ran down the stairs with his hat in his hand.
“Which way is it?”
“Down on the next block.”
“It’s a tenement house.”
 It was a narrowwindowed sixstory tenement. The hookandladder
had just drawn up. Brown smoke, with here and there a little trail of
sparks was pouring fast out of the lower windows. Three policemen
were swinging their clubs as they packed the crowd back against the
steps and railings of the houses opposite. In the empty space in the
middle of the street the fire engine and the red hosewagon shone
with bright brass. People watched silent staring at the upper
windows where shadows moved and occasional light flickered. A thin
pillar of flame began to flare above the house like a romancandle.
“The airshaft,” whispered a man in Thatcher’s ear. A gust of wind
filled the street with smoke and a smell of burning rags. Thatcher felt
suddenly sick. When the smoke cleared he saw people hanging in a
kicking cluster, hanging by their hands from a windowledge. The
other side firemen were helping women down a ladder. The flame in
the center of the house flared brighter. Something black had dropped
from a window and lay on the pavement shrieking. The policemen
were shoving the crowd back to the ends of the block. New fire
engines were arriving.
“Theyve got five alarms in,” a man said. “What do you think of
that? Everyone of ’em on the two top floors was trapped. It’s an
incendiary done it. Some goddam firebug.”
A young man sat huddled on the curb beside the gas lamp.
Thatcher found himself standing over him pushed by the crowd from
behind.
“He’s an Italian.”
“His wife’s in that buildin.”
“Cops wont let him get by.” “His wife’s in a family way. He cant talk
English to ask the cops.”
The man wore blue suspenders tied up with a piece of string in
back. His back was heaving and now and then he left out a string of
groaning words nobody understood.
Thatcher was working his way out of the crowd. At the corner a
man was looking into the fire alarm box. As Thatcher brushed past
him he caught a smell of coaloil from the man’s clothes. The man
looked up into his face with a smile. He had tallowy sagging cheeks
and bright popeyes. Thatcher’s hands and feet went suddenly cold.
The firebug. The papers say they hang round like that to watch it. He
walked home fast, ran up the stairs, and locked the room door
behind him. The room was quiet and empty. He’d forgotten that
Susie wouldnt be there waiting for him. He began to undress. He
couldnt forget the smell of coaloil on the man’s clothes.

Mr. Perry flicked at the burdock leaves with his cane. The real-
estate agent was pleading in a singsong voice:
“I dont mind telling you, Mr. Perry, it’s an opportunity not to be
missed. You know the old saying sir ... opportunity knocks but once
on a young man’s door. In six months I can virtually guarantee that
these lots will have doubled in value. Now that we are a part of New
York, the second city in the world, sir, dont forget that.... Why the
time will come, and I firmly believe that you and I will see it, when
bridge after bridge spanning the East River have made Long Island
and Manhattan one, when the Borough of Queens will be as much
the heart and throbbing center of the great metropolis as is Astor
Place today.”
“I know, I know, but I’m looking for something dead safe. And
besides I want to build. My wife hasnt been very well these last few
years....”
“But what could be safer than my proposition? Do you realize Mr.
Perry, that at considerable personal loss I’m letting you in on the
ground floor of one of the greatest real-estate certainties of modern
times. I’m putting at your disposal not only security, but ease,
comfort, luxury. We are caught up Mr. Perry on a great wave whether
we will or no, a great wave of expansion and progress. A great deal
is going to happen in the next few years. All these mechanical
inventions—telephones, electricity, steel bridges, horseless vehicles
—they are all leading somewhere. It’s up to us to be on the inside, in
the forefront of progress.... My God! I cant begin to tell you what it
will mean....” Poking amid the dry grass and the burdock leaves Mr.
Perry had moved something with his stick. He stooped and picked
up a triangular skull with a pair of spiralfluted horns. “By gad!” he
said. “That must have been a fine ram.”
Drowsy from the smell of lather and bayrum and singed hair that
weighed down the close air of the barbershop, Bud sat nodding, his
hands dangling big and red between his knees. In his eardrums he
could still feel through the snipping of scissors the pounding of his
feet on the hungry road down from Nyack.
“Next!”
“Whassat?... All right I just want a shave an a haircut.”
The barber’s pudgy hands moved through his hair, the scissors
whirred like a hornet behind his ears. His eyes kept closing; he
jerked them open fighting sleep. He could see beyond the striped
sheet littered with sandy hair the bobbing hammerhead of the
colored boy shining his shoes.
“Yessir” a deepvoiced man droned from the next chair, “it’s time
the Democratic party nominated a strong ...”
“Want a neckshave as well?” The barber’s greasyskinned
moonface poked into his.
He nodded.
“Shampoo?”
“No.”
When the barber threw back the chair to shave him he wanted to
crane his neck like a mudturtle turned over on its back. The lather
spread drowsily on his face, prickling his nose, filling up his ears.
Drowning in featherbeds of lather, blue lather, black, slit by the
faraway glint of the razor, glint of the grubbing hoe through blueblack
lather clouds. The old man on his back in the potatofield, his beard
sticking up lathery white full of blood. Full of blood his socks from
those blisters on his heels. His hands gripped each other cold and
horny like a dead man’s hands under the sheet. Lemme git up.... He
opened his eyes. Padded fingertips were stroking his chin. He stared
up at the ceiling where four flies made figure eights round a red
crêpe-paper bell. His tongue was dry leather in his mouth. The
barber righted the chair again. Bud looked about blinking. “Four bits,
and a nickel for the shine.”
ADMITS KILLING CRIPPLED MOTHER ...
“D’yous mind if I set here a minute an read that paper?” he hears
his voice drawling in his pounding ears.
“Go right ahead.”
PARKER’S FRIENDS PROTECT ...
The black print squirms before his eyes. Russians ... MOB
STONES ... (Special Dispatch to the Herald) Trenton, N. J.
Nathan Sibbetts, fourteen years old, broke down today
after two weeks of steady denial of guilt and confessed to the
police that he was responsible for the death of his aged and
crippled mother, Hannah Sibbetts, after a quarrel in their
home at Jacob’s Creek, six miles above this city. Tonight he
was committed to await the action of the Grand Jury.
RELIEVE PORT ARTHUR IN FACE OF ENEMY ... Mrs. Rix
Loses Husband’s Ashes.
On Tuesday May 24 at about half past eight o’clock I came
home after sleeping on the steam roller all night, he said, and
went upstairs to sleep some more. I had only gotten to sleep
when my mother came upstairs and told me to get up and if I
didn’t get up she would throw me downstairs. My mother
grabbed hold of me to throw me downstairs. I threw her first
and she fell to the bottom. I went downstairs and found that
her head was twisted to one side. I then saw that she was
dead and then I straightened her neck and covered her up
with the cover from my bed.
Bud folds the paper carefully, lays it on the chair and leaves the
barbershop. Outside the air smells of crowds, is full of noise and
sunlight. No more’n a needle in a haystack ... “An I’m twentyfive
years old,” he muttered aloud. Think of a kid fourteen.... He walks
faster along roaring pavements where the sun shines through the
Elevated striping the blue street with warm seething yellow stripes.
No more’n a needle in a haystack.

Ed Thatcher sat hunched over the pianokeys picking out the

Mosquito Parade. Sunday afternoon sunlight streamed dustily
through the heavy lace curtains of the window, squirmed in the red
roses of the carpet, filled the cluttered parlor with specks and
splinters of light. Susie Thatcher sat limp by the window watching
him out of eyes too blue for her sallow face. Between them, stepping
carefully among the roses on the sunny field of the carpet, little Ellen
danced. Two small hands held up the pinkfrilled dress and now and
then an emphatic little voice said, “Mummy watch my expression.”
“Just look at the child,” said Thatcher, still playing. “She’s a
regular little balletdancer.”
Sheets of the Sunday paper lay where they had fallen from the
table; Ellen started dancing on them, tearing the sheets under her
nimble tiny feet.
“Dont do that Ellen dear,” whined Susie from the pink plush chair.
“But mummy I can do it while I dance.”
“Dont do that mother said.” Ed Thatcher had slid into the
Barcarole. Ellen was dancing to it, her arms swaying to it, her feet
nimbly tearing the paper.
“Ed for Heaven’s sake pick the child up; she’s tearing the paper.”
He brought his fingers down in a lingering chord. “Deary you
mustnt do that. Daddy’s not finished reading it.”
Ellen went right on. Thatcher swooped down on her from the
pianostool and set her squirming and laughing on his knee. “Ellen
you should always mind when mummy speaks to you, and dear you
shouldnt be destructive. It costs money to make that paper and
people worked on it and daddy went out to buy it and he hasnt
finished reading it yet. Ellie understands dont she now? We need
con-struction and not de-struction in this world.” Then he went on
with the Barcarole and Ellen went on dancing, stepping carefully
among the roses on the sunny field of the carpet.

There were six men at the table in the lunch room eating fast with
their hats on the backs of their heads.
“Jiminy crickets!” cried the young man at the end of the table who
was holding a newspaper in one hand and a cup of coffee in the
other. “Kin you beat it?”
“Beat what?” growled a longfaced man with a toothpick in the
corner of his mouth.
“Big snake appears on Fifth Avenue.... Ladies screamed and ran
in all directions this morning at eleven thirty when a big snake
crawled out of a crack in the masonry of the retaining wall of the
reservoir at Fifth Avenue and Fortysecond Street and started to
cross the sidewalk....”
“Some fish story....”
“That aint nothin,” said an old man. “When I was a boy we used to
go snipeshootin on Brooklyn Flats....”
“Holy Moses! it’s quarter of nine,” muttered the young man folding
his paper and hurrying out into Hudson Street that was full of men
and girls walking briskly through the ruddy morning. The scrape of
the shoes of hairyhoofed drayhorses and the grind of the wheels of
producewagons made a deafening clatter and filled the air with sharp
dust. A girl in a flowered bonnet with a big lavender bow under her
pert tilted chin was waiting for him in the door of M. Sullivan & Co.,
Storage and Warehousing. The young man felt all fizzy inside, like a
freshly uncorked bottle of pop.
“Hello Emily!... Say Emily I’ve got a raise.”
“You’re pretty near late, d’you know that?”
 “But honest injun I’ve got a two-dollar raise.”
She tilted her chin first to oneside and then to the other.
“I dont give a rap.”
“You know what you said if I got a raise.” She looked in his eyes
giggling.
“An this is just the beginnin ...”
“But what good’s fifteen dollars a week?”
“Why it’s sixty dollars a month, an I’m learning the import
business.”
“Silly boy you’ll be late.” She suddenly turned and ran up the
littered stairs, her pleated bellshaped skirt swishing from side to side.
“God! I hate her. I hate her.” Sniffing up the tears that were hot in
his eyes, he walked fast down Hudson Street to the office of Winkle
& Gulick, West India Importers.

The deck beside the forward winch was warm and briny damp.
They were sprawled side by side in greasy denims talking drowsily in
whispers, their ears full of the seethe of broken water as the bow
shoved bluntly through the long grassgray swells of the Gulf Stream.
“J’te dis mon vieux, moi j’fou l’camp à New York.... The minute we
tie up I go ashore and I stay ashore. I’m through with this dog’s life.”
The cabinboy had fair hair and an oval pink-and-cream face; a dead
cigarette butt fell from between his lips as he spoke. “Merde!” He
reached for it as it rolled down the deck. It escaped his hand and
bounced into the scuppers.
“Let it go. I’ve got plenty,” said the other boy who lay on his belly
kicking a pair of dirty feet up into the hazy sunlight. “The consul will
just have you shipped back.”
“He wont catch me.”
 “And your military service?”
“To hell with it. And with France too for that matter.”
“You want to make yourself an American citizen?”
“Why not? A man has a right to choose his country.”
The other rubbed his nose meditatively with his fist and then let
his breath out in a long whistle. “Emile you’re a wise guy,” he said.
“But Congo, why dont you come too? You dont want to shovel
crap in a stinking ship’s galley all your life.”
Congo rolled himself round and sat up crosslegged, scratching his
head that was thick with kinky black hair.
“Say how much does a woman cost in New York?”
“I dunno, expensive I guess.... I’m not going ashore to raise hell;
I’m going to get a good job and work. Cant you think of nothing but
women?”
“What’s the use? Why not?” said Congo and settled himself flat on
the deck again, burying his dark sootsmudged face in his crossed
arms.
“I want to get somewhere in the world, that’s what I mean.
Europe’s rotten and stinking. In America a fellow can get ahead.
Birth dont matter, education dont matter. It’s all getting ahead.”
“And if there was a nice passionate little woman right here now
where the deck’s warm, you wouldn’t like to love her up?”
“After we’re rich, we’ll have plenty, plenty of everything.”
“And they dont have any military service?”
“Why should they? Its the coin they’re after. They dont want to
fight people; they want to do business with them.”
Congo did not answer.
The cabin boy lay on his back looking at the clouds. They floated
from the west, great piled edifices with the sunlight crashing through
between, bright and white like tinfoil. He was walking through tall
white highpiled streets, stalking in a frock coat with a tall white collar
up tinfoil stairs, broad, cleanswept, through blue portals into streaky
marble halls where money rustled and clinked on long tinfoil tables,
banknotes, silver, gold.
“Merde v’là l’heure.” The paired strokes of the bell in the
crowsnest came faintly to their ears. “But dont forget, Congo, the first
night we get ashore ...” He made a popping noise with his lips.
“We’re gone.”
“I was asleep. I dreamed of a little blonde girl. I’d have had her if
you hadnt waked me.” The cabinboy got to his feet with a grunt and
stood a moment looking west to where the swells ended in a sharp
wavy line against a sky hard and abrupt as nickel. Then he pushed
Congo’s face down against the deck and ran aft, the wooden clogs
clattering on his bare feet as he went.

Outside, the hot June Saturday was dragging its frazzled ends
down 110th Street. Susie Thatcher lay uneasily in bed, her hands
spread blue and bony on the coverlet before her. Voices came
through the thin partition. A young girl was crying through her nose:
“I tell yer mommer I aint agoin back to him.”
Then came expostulating an old staid Jewish woman’s voice: “But
Rosie, married life aint all beer and skittles. A vife must submit and
vork for her husband.”
“I wont. I cant help it. I wont go back to the dirty brute.”
Susie sat up in bed, but she couldn’t hear the next thing the old
woman said.
“But I aint a Jew no more,” suddenly screeched the young girl.
“This aint Russia; it’s little old New York. A girl’s got some rights
here.” Then a door slammed and everything was quiet.
Susie Thatcher stirred in bed moaning fretfully. Those awful
people never give me a moment’s peace. From below came the
jingle of a pianola playing the Merry Widow Waltz. O Lord! why dont
Ed come home? It’s cruel of them to leave a sick woman alone like
this. Selfish. She twisted up her mouth and began to cry. Then she
lay quiet again, staring at the ceiling watching the flies buzz teasingly
round the electriclight fixture. A wagon clattered by down the street.
She could hear children’s voices screeching. A boy passed yelling
an extra. Suppose there’d been a fire. That terrible Chicago theater
fire. Oh I’ll go mad! She tossed about in the bed, her pointed nails
digging into the palms of her hands. I’ll take another tablet. Maybe I
can get some sleep. She raised herself on her elbow and took the
last tablet out of a little tin box. The gulp of water that washed the
tablet down was soothing to her throat. She closed her eyes and lay
quiet.
She woke with a start. Ellen was jumping round the room, her
green tam falling off the back of her head, her coppery curls wild.
“Oh mummy I want to be a little boy.”
“Quieter dear. Mother’s not feeling a bit well.”
“I want to be a little boy.”
“Why Ed what have you done to the child? She’s all wrought up.”
“We’re just excited, Susie. We’ve been to the most wonderful play.
You’d have loved it, it’s so poetic and all that sort of thing. And
Maude Adams was fine. Ellie loved every minute of it.”
“It seems silly, as I said before, to take such a young child ...”
“Oh daddy I want to be a boy.”
“I like my little girl the way she is. We’ll have to go again Susie
and take you.”
“Ed you know very well I wont be well enough.” She sat bolt
upright, her hair hanging a straight faded yellow down her back. “Oh,
I wish I’d die ... I wish I’d die, and not be a burden to you any more....
You hate me both of you. If you didnt hate me you wouldnt leave me
alone like this.” She choked and put her face in her hands. “Oh I
wish I’d die,” she sobbed through her fingers.
 “Now Susie for Heaven’s sakes, it’s wicked to talk like that.” He
put his arm round her and sat on the bed beside her.
Crying quietly she dropped her head on his shoulder. Ellen stood
staring at them out of round gray eyes. Then she started jumping up
and down, chanting to herself, “Ellie’s goin to be a boy, Ellie’s goin to
be a boy.”

With a long slow stride, limping a little from his blistered feet, Bud
walked down Broadway, past empty lots where tin cans glittered
among grass and sumach bushes and ragweed, between ranks of
billboards and Bull Durham signs, past shanties and abandoned
squatters’ shacks, past gulches heaped with wheelscarred
rubbishpiles where dumpcarts were dumping ashes and clinkers,
past knobs of gray outcrop where steamdrills continually tapped and
nibbled, past excavations out of which wagons full of rock and clay
toiled up plank roads to the street, until he was walking on new
sidewalks along a row of yellow brick apartment houses, looking in
the windows of grocery stores, Chinese laundries, lunchrooms,
flower and vegetable shops, tailors’, delicatessens. Passing under a
scaffolding in front of a new building, he caught the eye of an old
man who sat on the edge of the sidewalk trimming oil lamps. Bud
stood beside him, hitching up his pants; cleared his throat:
“Say mister you couldnt tell a feller where a good place was to
look for a job?”
“Aint no good place to look for a job, young feller.... There’s jobs
all right.... I’ll be sixty-five years old in a month and four days an I’ve
worked sence I was five I reckon, an I aint found a good job yet.”
“Anything that’s a job’ll do me.”
“Got a union card?”
“I aint got nothin.”
 “Cant git no job in the buildin trades without a union card,” said
the old man. He rubbed the gray bristles of his chin with the back of
his hand and leaned over the lamps again. Bud stood staring into the
dustreeking girder forest of the new building until he found the eyes
of a man in a derby hat fixed on him through the window of the
watchman’s shelter. He shuffled his feet uneasily and walked on. If I
could git more into the center of things....
At the next corner a crowd was collecting round a highslung white
automobile. Clouds of steam poured out of its rear end. A policeman
was holding up a small boy by the armpits. From the car a redfaced
man with white walrus whiskers was talking angrily.
“I tell you officer he threw a stone.... This sort of thing has got to
stop. For an officer to countenance hoodlums and rowdies....”
A woman with her hair done up in a tight bunch on top of her head
was screaming, shaking her fist at the man in the car, “Officer he
near run me down he did, he near run me down.”
Bud edged up next to a young man in a butcher’s apron who had
a baseball cap on backwards.
“Wassa matter?”
“Hell I dunno.... One o them automoebile riots I guess. Aint you
read the paper? I dont blame em do you? What right have those
golblamed automoebiles got racin round the city knockin down
wimen an children?”
“Gosh do they do that?”
“Sure they do.”
“Say ... er ... kin you tell me about where’s a good place to find out
about gettin a job?” The butcherboy threw back head and laughed.
“Kerist I thought you was goin to ask for a handout.... I guess you
aint a Newyorker.... I’ll tell you what to do. You keep right on down
Broadway till you get to City Hall....”
“Is that kinder the center of things?”
 “Sure it is.... An then you go upstairs and ask the Mayor.... Tell me
there are some seats on the board of aldermen ...”
“Like hell they are,” growled Bud and walked away fast.

“Roll ye babies ... roll ye lobsided sons o bitches.”

“That’s it talk to em Slats.”
“Come seven!” Slats shot the bones out of his hand, brought the
thumb along his sweaty fingers with a snap. “Aw hell.”
“You’re some great crapshooter I’ll say, Slats.”
Dirty hands added each a nickel to the pile in the center of the
circle of patched knees stuck forward. The five boys were sitting on
their heels under a lamp on South Street.
“Come on girlies we’re waitin for it.... Roll ye little bastards,
goddam ye, roll.”
“Cheeze it fellers! There’s Big Leonard an his gang acomin down
the block.”
“I’d knock his block off for a ...”
Four of them were already slouching off along the wharf, gradually
scattering without looking back. The smallest boy with a chinless
face shaped like a beak stayed behind quietly picking up the coins.
Then he ran along the wall and vanished into the dark passageway
between two houses. He flattened himself behind a chimney and
waited. The confused voices of the gang broke into the passageway;
then they had gone on down the street. The boy was counting the
nickels in his hand. Ten. “Jez, that’s fifty cents.... I’ll tell ’em Big
Leonard scooped up the dough.” His pockets had no bottoms, so he
tied the nickels into one of his shirt tails.
 A goblet for Rhine wine hobnobbed with a champagne glass at
each place along the glittering white oval table. On eight glossy white
plates eight canapés of caviar were like rounds of black beads on
the lettuceleaves, flanked by sections of lemon, sprinkled with a
sparse chopping of onion and white of egg. “Beaucoup de soing and
dont you forget it,” said the old waiter puckering up his knobbly
forehead. He was a short waddling man with a few black strands of
hair plastered tight across a domed skull.
“Awright.” Emile nodded his head gravely. His collar was too tight
for him. He was shaking a last bottle of champagne into the
nickelbound bucket of ice on the serving-table.
“Beaucoup de soing, sporca madonna.... Thisa guy trows money
about lika confetti, see.... Gives tips, see. He’s a verra rich
gentleman. He dont care how much he spend.” Emile patted the
crease of the tablecloth to flatten it. “Fais pas, como, ça.... Your
hand’s dirty, maybe leava mark.”
Resting first on one foot then on the other they stood waiting, their
napkins under their arms. From the restaurant below among the
buttery smells of food and the tinkle of knives and forks and plates,
came the softly gyrating sound of a waltz.
When he saw the headwaiter bow outside the door Emile
compressed his lips into a deferential smile. There was a
longtoothed blond woman in a salmon operacloak swishing on the
arm of a moonfaced man who carried his top hat ahead of him like a
bumper; there was a little curlyhaired girl in blue who was showing
her teeth and laughing, a stout woman in a tiara with a black velvet
ribbon round her neck, a bottlenose, a long cigarcolored face ...
shirtfronts, hands straightening white ties, black gleams on top hats
and patent leather shoes; there was a weazlish man with gold teeth
who kept waving his arms spitting out greetings in a voice like a
crow’s and wore a diamond the size of a nickel in his shirtfront. The
redhaired cloakroom girl was collecting the wraps. The old waiter
nudged Emile. “He’s de big boss,” he said out of the corner of his
mouth as he bowed. Emile flattened himself against the wall as they
shuffled rustled into the room. A whiff of patchouli when he drew his
breath made him go suddenly hot to the roots of his hair.
“But where’s Fifi Waters?” shouted the man with the diamond
stud.
“She said she couldnt get here for a half an hour. I guess the
Johnnies wont let her get by the stage door.”
“Well we cant wait for her even if it is her birthday; never waited
for anyone in my life.” He stood a second running a roving eye over
the women round the table, then shot his cuffs out a little further from
the sleeves of his swallowtail coat, and abruptly sat down. The caviar
vanished in a twinkling. “And waiter what about that Rhine wine
coupe?” he croaked huskily. “De suite monsieur....” Emile holding his
breath and sucking in his cheeks, was taking away the plates. A frost
came on the goblets as the old waiter poured out the coupe from a
cut glass pitcher where floated mint and ice and lemon rind and long
slivvers of cucumber.
“Aha, this’ll do the trick.” The man with the diamond stud raised
his glass to his lips, smacked them and set it down with a slanting
look at the woman next him. She was putting dabs of butter on bits
of bread and popping them into her mouth, muttering all the while:
“I can only eat the merest snack, only the merest snack.”
“That dont keep you from drinkin Mary does it?”
She let out a cackling laugh and tapped him on the shoulder with
her closed fan. “O Lord, you’re a card, you are.”
“Allume moi ça, sporca madonna,” hissed the old waiter in Emile’s
ear.
When he lit the lamps under the two chafing dishes on the serving
table a smell of hot sherry and cream and lobster began to seep into
the room. The air was hot, full of tinkle and perfume and smoke.
After he had helped serve the lobster Newburg and refilled the
glasses Emile leaned against the wall and ran his hand over his wet
hair. His eyes slid along the plump shoulders of the woman in front of
him and down the powdered back to where a tiny silver hook had
come undone under the lace rushing. The baldheaded man next to
her had his leg locked with hers. She was young, Emile’s age, and
kept looking up into the man’s face with moist parted lips. It made
Emile dizzy, but he couldn’t stop looking.
“But what’s happened to the fair Fifi?” creaked the man with the
diamond stud through a mouthful of lobster. “I suppose that she
made such a hit again this evening that our simple little party dont
appeal to her.”
“It’s enough to turn any girl’s head.”
“Well she’ll get the surprise of her young life if she expected us to
wait. Haw, haw, haw,” laughed the man with the diamond stud. “I
never waited for anybody in my life and I’m not going to begin now.”
Down the table the moonfaced man had pushed back his plate
and was playing with the bracelet on the wrist of the woman beside
him. “You’re the perfect Gibson girl tonight, Olga.”
“I’m sitting for my portrait now,” she said holding up her goblet
against the light.
“To Gibson?”
“No to a real painter.”
“By Gad I’ll buy it.”
“Maybe you wont have a chance.”
She nodded her blond pompadour at him.
“You’re a wicked little tease, Olga.”
She laughed keeping her lips tight over her long teeth.
A man was leaning towards the man with the diamond stud,
tapping with a stubby finger on the table.
“No sir as a real estate proposition, Twentythird Street has
crashed.... That’s generally admitted.... But what I want to talk to you
about privately sometime Mr. Godalming, is this.... How’s all the big
money in New York been made? Astor, Vanderbilt, Fish.... In real