Modernism Modernized: Truth and Ambiguity in The Good Soldier and F For Fake
This is the second part of the Modernism Modernized series. Be forewarned that it may contain spoilers for The Good Soldier and F For Fake.
If for nine years I have possessed a goodly apple that is rotten at the core and discover its rottenness only in nine years and six months less four days, isn’t it true to say that for nine years I possessed a goodly apple?
-Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier (1915)The important distinction to make when you’re talking about the genuine quality of a painting is not so much whether if it’s a real painting or a fake; it’s whether it’s a good fake or a bad fake.
-Clifford Irving, F For Fake (1973)
Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier is about many things: England’s transition into the industrial era, the state of Victorian and Romantic values in an age where those values were being questioned at every turn, and the ways people attempt to give order and meaning to an inherently disordered and chaotic world, among others, but one of its most deeply ingrained thematic concerns is the nature of memory and perspective. The novel tells the tale of the Ashburnhams, Edward and Leonora, and the Dowells, John and Florence, and how both these marriages were destroyed by Edward Ashburnham’s philandering ways. However, it’s far more complicated than that — at least the way John Dowell tells it. John narrates the novel as a stream of consciousness, taking the reader from one subject and point in time to another, proving himself an unreliable narrator in the process.
F For Fake, one of Orson Welles’ final films, is concerned with this subject as well, but in a different way, not just in medium or form, but in how it approaches its content. The story is not as contained as Ford’s, depicting less a web than a series of interconnected but separate instances of manipulation, intrigue, and artifice involving the Hungarian art forger Elmyr de Hory, his biographer Clifford Irving, tycoon/recluse/fellow Irving subject Howard Hughes, Welles himself, Welles’ girlfriend Oja Kodar, Welles’ cinematographer Francois Reichenbach, and Pablo Picasso, who was never called an asshole. Much like The Good Soldier, it operates outside of standard chronology, switching between places, times, and subjects in the space of a cut, but it takes The Good Soldier’s structure a step or two further through introducing that visual element and allowing a starker delineation between narration and content. One moment, using two distinct bits of interview footage, creates a dialogue, or rather the lack of a dialogue, an awkward silence:
As you can likely tell, both narratives deal with deception, but these deceptions are set in opposite directions. The Good Soldier is about the lies Edward Ashburnham and Dowell tell themselves, with Ashburnham ascribing his philandering ways to a desire to care for people in his role as a Good English Landlord and Dowell casting himself as an impartial observer when in fact it is left unclear if he’s responsible for the deaths of his wife and Edward Ashburnham. F For Fake is about the lies artists tell about themselves, and if these lies can really be considered lies if the entire core of their form is built on lying. The Good Soldier is about how people avoid having to confront the truth, whereas F For Fake posits that there is no truth to confront, that to call one artist a faker is to call all artists fakers.
I’m going to upend the normal structure of things, and start at the end, examining how the endings of both works act as statements of purpose. At the end of The Good Soldier, both chronologically and the end of the actual book, the reader is given this send-off, summing up the final score and ascribing a simple and simplistic heroes and villains formula to the novel’s cast:
Well, that is the end of the story. And, when I come to look at it I see that it is a happy ending with wedding bells and all. The villains — for obviously Edward and the girl were villains — have been punished by suicide and madness. The heroine — the perfectly normal, virtuous and slightly deceitful heroine — has become the happy wife of a perfectly normal, virtuous and slightly deceitful husband. She will shortly become a mother of a perfectly normal, virtuous slightly deceitful son or daughter. A happy ending, that is what it works out at.
It proposes that in a traditional novel of the time, this would indeed be the state of affairs. The philandering husband dies, the long-suffering wife moves on, and the normal state of affairs is carried on through progeny. The rest of the novel would seem to support that framework, if Edward’s justification for his adultery is treated as just that, a ruse meant to excuse his cheating, but Nancy, the girl in question, complicates things. Nancy is the young ward of the Ashburnhams, who Edward develops an affection towards and an attraction to, but unlike the other subjects of his affection, he does not act. He keeps her unaware of his love/lust for her, and when Leonora, Dewell’s “heroine”, reveals his adulterous nature to her, she goes mad. This hero/villain dichotomy is deeply flawed, as Leonora, ostensibly the hero, drives a character who is unambiguously an innocent to madness. The Good Soldier therefore bends the moral rules of the English novel by presenting us a world where those who would be defined as “heroes” are capable of cruel acts and the “villain” is motivated primarily through a sense of altruism, though it is a patronizing and self-serving definition of the term. And, of course, it does this through a narrator who positions himself in the god’s-eye-view of the traditional narrator while in fact being deeply embroiled in the events at hand, no matter how much he tries to distance himself.
F For Fake’s ending is somewhat different. It doesn’t relate to the previous events of the film in a practical sense, but it does relate thematically. It takes the form of one uninterrupted story, striking in contrast to the fragmented and fleeting narrative of the previous hour, and what’s more, it appears, at first, to be told in a traditional narrative re-enactment structure. But though it does not play with chronology, it begins to deviate from this structure, becoming more and more abstract as it goes along, beginning with this shot, in which a picture of Picasso is made to represent Picasso himself:
That picture of Picasso is replaced with a Picasso, or to be more exact, a painting by Picasso:
This abstraction goes further and further, until the visual representation is entirely stripped away, and the only things on screen are Oja and Orson, playing Picasso and Oja’s grandfather, another art forger:
In this story, Oja(as herself, not as her grandfather, mind you) has posed for 22 Picassos under the condition that they are hers to leave with, and she is not allowed to sell them. Later, Picasso reads about an art exhibit containing 22 amazing new Picassos sold by Oja Kodar, and is obviously incensed. When he reaches this gallery, expecting to see the 22 Picassos she posed for, he is surprised to find that not a single one of the Picassos on display was painted by him. He confronts Oja, and it is revealed that Oja’s dying grandfather is the man who painted these 22 Picassos. When the two confront each other, the closing statement of the film is made:
The conversation begins with Welles-as-narrator introducing them as “the world’s best and least known geniuses”, and at first, it’s somewhat amicable, with Kodar’s grandfather introducing himself as a student of Picasso, having imitated “all the great Picasso periods.” But it quickly turns hostile, with Picasso demanding the return of his 22 paintings, and calling both Oja and her grandfather “a couple of crooks”. The grandfather responds by reminding Picasso that those 22 forged paintings in the gallery have been acclaimed as masterworks, and Picasso acclaimed as their master, while the forger is forever unknown:
Welles(as Oja’s grandfather): “But you have so little reason to be petty. Is there a man in all the world who doesn’t know your name? And who in all the world knows mine?”
Kodar(as Picasso): “You are one of those who use so many names that you forget your own!”
Welles: “I, sir, am not one of anything. Like you, I am unique. You’ve seen my big Cezanne at the Metropolitan? Is that just a forgery, my friend? Is it not also a painting?”
The two continue the conversation, in which Oja’s grandfather notes that he has paintings in galleries all around the world, in Chicago, London, Brazil, Tokyo, Cincinatti, Detroit, under many names, Manet, Monet, Tintoretto, Goya, Greco, none of them his own. Finally, he asks the most important question of the film:
Am I not then myself one of the great painters? Yet here you are, Picasso, standing at the bed of a ghost. For all my life I’ve been a ghost. And for all time the galleries and museums will be haunted by my work. Do you think I should confess? To what? Committing masterpieces? They’d all be torn down from the walls. And what then would be left of me?
After this challenge(which I promise I will discuss later), Oja’s grandfather turns the focus of his critique from himself to Picasso:
Picasso, you move so easily from one Picasso period to another, change like an actor, like an art forger yourself. Won’t you give to me, who admires you so much, a happy death? Can you not let me go knowing that at last I have managed to give something new to the world? One whole Picasso period.
It all comes back to the apple question. Even if these Picassos, these Monets, these Goyas, so goodly on the outside, carry the stain of art forgery inside them, are they not still good? Is the stain of art forgery enough to ruin their beauty? By the same token, does the fact of Edward Ashburnham the person, his adultery, his predatory chivalry that itself masks lust in a sense of duty, blemish his works? Do his cheating ways stain his conduct as a landlord? Do they stain his service to his country, his status as an obedient subject to the crown? Was he not, despite his vices, a good soldier?
If we consider the final fates of the characters in The Good Soldier, this question becomes even more compex: will these vices even be remembered? It’s said that three can keep a secret if two of them are dead, and of the five people who knew of Edward Ashburnham’s secret, Edward and Florence are dead, Nancy is unable to speak coherently, and Dowell has dedicated himself to a hermit’s existence taking care of Nancy. Leonora has remarried, and put the past behind her. Apart from the existence of this novel, there is no evidence that the story of Ashburnham’s wrongdoing would survive the deaths of the 3 individuals left alive at the end of the novel. Dowell and Leonora may know that the apple had rotted, but they’re the only ones. To society at large, Edward Ashburnham is still a goodly apple, a good landlord, and a Good Soldier.
Time for a confession?
But that’s not the end of F For Fake. After the story of Oja and Picasso ends, the curtain is lifted:
At the very beginning of all this, I did make you a promise. Remember? I did promise that for one hour, I’d tell you only the truth. That hour, ladies and gentlemen, is over. For the past 17 minutes, I’ve been lying my head off. The truth-and please forgive us for it-is that we’ve been forging an art story. As a charlatan, of course, my job was to try to make it real, not that reality has anything to do with it. Reality? It’s the toothbrush waiting at home for you in its glass. A bus to get, a paycheck, and the grave.
Welles is a liar, he’s an actor, he’s a charlatan. He’s a forger. And he’s honest about it: the opening of the film involves him performing a magic trick for a child, and one segment of the hour of truth mentioned involves a story from his youth, where he claimed to be a famous actor from America to become a famous actor in France. Ford’s Dowell makes no such confessions, and as such the murky waters of his narrative have no path, the signs are all in the wrong direction and the ferryman is pretending he doesn’t know what north means. That was modernism, and this is post-modernism at its finest, where the biggest grand narrative of them all has been cast aside: honesty is no longer a virtue, it’s a hindrance. It’s the banal unpleasant details of life. The new virtue is artifice. Not a cruel artifice, but a joyous one where you can see the strings if you look just right and the queen of hearts winks at you during three-card monte. For Ford Madox Ford there were no good soldiers, as each one was rotten in his own way, but for Welles a soldier is only as good as he can convince you he is:
What we professional liars hope to serve is Truth, I’m afraid the pompous word for that is Art. Picasso himself said it. “Art,” he said, “is a lie, a lie that makes us realize the truth.”
Truth is art, art is truth, but what is real? Real is what you make it.
