William Kentridge’s “History of the Main Complaint”
Audrey Haque
William Kentridge’s “History of the Main Complaint” is one of nine video pieces of a
collection 9 Drawings for Projection produced between 1989 and 2003. The videos are
comprised of a series of 35 mm photographs of Kentridge’s evolving charcoal drawings.
Each drawing is photographed before parts of the drawing are painstakingly erased, redrawn, re-photographed, and assembled to unfold Kentridge’s narrative.
Set in an empty street, we hear a faint, distant siren, and a paper blows into the wind
and disappears. We come to a bare hospital room with a bowl of blue water on a stand
and a white curtain sectioning off an area. The curtain is uncovered to reveal a single
bed, where the viewer finds a large man lying in bed, still in his pin-striped suit, hooked
up to oxygen, and taking huge, lengthy breaths. A foreboding Monteverdi madrigal
plays in sync with the man’s breathing. His eyes never open, and we see a doctor appear
out of thin air, who looks exactly like the man lying in bed (Soho Eckstein). Our view
oscillates between looking at Soho’s body parts through the hospital machines and
looking at the Soho-like doctors, who have surrounded Soho in his bed. A stethoscope
is sent slithering down Soho’s spine and reveals a paper punch, and then a telephone,
encaged by Soho’s ribs, in place of his organs. We see many inanimate office objects
where organs or body parts should be. We soon realize that we are privy to Soho’s
dreams. We see him driving in his car down the road. We’re brought back to the hospital, and there are now ten Soho-clone doctors surrounding Soho. We see Soho driving
in his dream again, when he comes across two men beating up another man on the side
of the road. We are taken back to the hospital room, only for a moment, and then are
taken back into Soho’s dreams. We see Soho get into a car accident, and immediately as
his car hits the man, Soho’s eyes open and he wakes up, the hospital equipment screens
shatter as they now show body parts and not inanimate objects. It becomes apparent
that these were more than dreams, but memories of events to Soho. A giant eye opens
and closes, and all of the shattered glass from the hospital machines fixes itself, and
inanimate objects appear once again on the monitors. We arrive back in Soho’ hospital
room; it’s empty again, except for the untouched blue water in the bowl and the white
curtain covering Soho’s bed area. The curtain opens and his bed is no longer there.
Soho, looking fatter than ever, sits at a huge table surrounded by objects of business and
wealth, objects that were found in place of his organs. Void of emotion, he picks up the
phone when it rings and smokes his cigar. Noise surrounds him and we fade back into 75
the darkness.
within South Africa’s privileged white society.
When I walked into the room in the middle of the showing of “History of the Main
Complaint,” I immediately felt the somber, depressing mood that was set by the music’s
key and tone, as well as the screen’s depiction of a large man, still in his pin-striped
suit, hooked up to oxygen, and lying asleep or unconscious in his hospital bed. The
ominous music accompanying the sometimes startling sounds made by the inanimate
objects in the video, along with the hospital scene with a large man on life support,
led me to believe that something was obviously wrong, but I couldn’t tell what. I was
intrigued, in part because I sensed that this was going to be some sort of a cryptic
psychological short movie. I watched the entirety of it again, fully enthralled in all
of the details, asking questions such as “Why is he wearing his suit in the hospital?”,
“What is the significance of all of the testing equipment?”, “Why are we shown that he
has a typewriter in his chest?”, and “Who is the person that Soho hit, and why does this
memory wake him from his coma?” About twenty seconds later, the previous video
of the nine-video series, “Felix in Exile” began playing and I watched more disturbing
images enfold with graphic depictions of violence. Not until that finished, did I walk
out, only to be drawn back in again after reading the plaque on the wall, stating that
these were drawings from a South African artist during South Africa’s transition from
its apartheid era to its post-apartheid democratic era, and were fed off of the violence
associated with the country’s brutal history.
Much of the symbolism within “History of the Main Complaint” now became more
lucid. Soho’s identity as a white, wealthy businessman, and representative of a privileged, white South African culture, is apparent in his pin-striped suit, which remains on
him, even in his hospital bed. The doctors find no physical affliction; Soho’s problem
is in his psychological torment. His missing organs, replaced with inanimate objects,
status symbols associated with his profession, make him into a kind of machine, void of
humanity, and a representation the dehumanization of the apartheid era.
“History of the Main Complaint” cannot be analyzed adequately without reference to
its historical and political background. The sixth of Kentridge’s 9 Drawings for Projection, “History of the Main Complaint” surfaced in 1996, six years after apartheid was
officially abolished in South Africa, and two years after the end of the apartheid era,
marked by Nelson Mandela’s election to presidency. In the same year, shortly after the
release of “History of the Main Complaint,” a court-like system in South Africa, the
Truth and Reconciliation Commission was created. It sought to give restorative justice
through hearing cases of human-rights violations of the apartheid era from either the
victim or perpetrator’s side, and allowed perpetrators to request amnesty. Kentridge’s
films arouse the psychological trauma of this era and the guilt associated with living
Kentridge’s series, set in Johannesburg, narrate the experiences of the characters –
Soho Eckstein, a gluttonous, greedy man in a pin-striped suit, Mrs. Eckstein – Soho’s
neglected wife, and Felix Teitlebaum – sometimes described as the opposite of Soho,
innocent and notably naked. As the videos progress, more is revealed about the main
character, Soho Eckstein. In the first video, “Johannesburg: 2nd Greatest City After
Paris” (1990), Soho buys up almost half of Johannesburg and loses a fight with Felix;
he is later shown feeding the poor, but throws the food at them, literally obliterating
them from the scene. Soho, revealed to be a gold mine owner in “Monument” (1990),
erects a statue in honor of the workers he exploits, only for the viewer to find out, in
the end, that the huge “statue” is actually being held up by a human, painted to look
like the statue and breathing slow, agonizing breaths. Mine (1991) documents the
horrors of the conditions of the gold mines in South Africa, and “Sobriety, Obesity, and
Growing Old” (1991) includes love-making scenes between Mrs. Eckstein (who has
left Soho Eckstein) and Felix. “Felix in Exile,” made in 1994, (the pivotal year during
which South Africa’s first open elections occurred and Nelson Mandela was elected to
presidency) shows the viewer, through drawings, the violence and shock of stories of
violent killings piling up in newspaper clippings.
Watching “History of the Main Complaint” alone, without any context, reveals a sense
of urgency and trauma, but a full comprehension of the works and characters requires
an investigation of South Africa’s history of apartheid as well as Kentridge’s related
video pieces in the series, 9 Drawings for Projection. Without knowledge of the other
Soho Eckstein videos, the viewer would miss that a rare source of color in Kentridge’s
videos, the blue water, was a symbol of love and tranquility, and notably remained in
the hospital room completely untouched during Soho’s visit.
William Kentridge’s views on the inhumanity of apartheid were undoubtedly affected
by his upbringing. His father was a well-known anti-apartheid lawyer, who fought Nelson Mandela’s case, and Kentridge’s mother’s occupation was similarly noble in cause;
she was also a lawyer and gave legal advice to those who could not afford it. For Kentridge, growing up in an open-minded, wealthy family in South Africa, while attending
an all-white school, being privileged came with the price of guilt.
Critical to analysis is the observation that Kentridge’s character, Soho Eckstein, looks
strikingly like William Kentridge. As Kentridge’s aspirations were originally to be an
actor, it seems as though be become one, nonetheless, through Soho. Stating that Soho
and Felix are his alter egos, Kentridge encourages us to become aware of the duality of 77
a character, and of that character’s feelings and actions. Is Kentridge, born and raised in
Johannesburg in the midst of crisis, blaming himself/Soho/South African white culture
for enjoying the privileges white society? Probably. Is Kentridge blaming himself/
Soho/South African white culture for being indifferent to these injustices? Perhaps.
The feelings of injustice in being targeted because of one’s race or ethnicity should
resonate well with Kentridge, considering his Jewish heritage and Nazi Germany’s fairly
recent genocide of the Jews.
Another important element to note is Kentridge’s use of memory in his stop-motion
animations. Traumatic, yet pivotal memories from his childhood are often used in his
videos; when Kentridge was five, on a car-ride with his grandfather, he saw, and was terrified by the image of two men beating up a third man on the side of the street, which
was depicted in “History of the Main Complaint.” With this in mind, the narrative of
drawing tells the story of memories. Like charcoal-drawings, memories can never be
fully erased; they are layered and complex, fade with the passing time, but remnants of
them are always left, even when attempts are made to eliminate them.
The audio in “History of the Main Complaint” is a combination of machine-sounds
(ringing, alarms, etc.) overlaid with a Monteverdi madrigal, Ardo e scoprir, ahi lasso,
io non ardisco, a through-composed madrigal for two tenors, in a somber D-minor
tonality. Written in Monteverdi’s seconda pratica (second practice), a new Baroque
style characterized with fewer restrictions that allowed for sudden tempo changes,
“unprepared” dissonances, harmonic shifts, and ornamentation, the madrigal is about
being tormented by unrequited love. The title read: “I burn, and alas, I dare not reveal”.
Monteverdi’s development of stile concitato, or “agitated style”, is evident in Ardo e scoprir, in its rapid repetition of notes and extended trills, interpreted as anger or agitation.
The lyrics, though originally written about the torment of love, can also be read in
“History of the Main Complaint” to be about horror and guilt:
I burn, and alas, I dare not reveal
the burning that I bear concealed in my breast,
and the more I languish in constant suffering,
the more pain remains hidden.
Then I devise for myself a thousand schemes
so that my tongue may overcome its fear,
and thus emboldened, I am no longer afraid
to cry for help against this deadly torment.
Yet when I come before her
seeking peace and balm for my illness,
at once my face grows pale
and I must lower my eyes.
I would speak, but cannot; then, trembling,
I begin. Finally my feelings find expression.
A splitting of personality is evident in Kentridge’s works through the relationship
between Soho and Felix. After “Felix in Exile,” the fourth video of the series, Kentridge
realized that Felix and Soho had become a “split, displaced self-portrait,” and from then
on, Felix was absent from 9 Drawings (Kentridge, 238). Notably, in Kentridge’s expressionist-style drawings, form often alludes to content and content to form. In “History
of the Main Complaint,” Soho Eckstein, usually drawn with harsh and messy lines, was
drawn with the softer, deliberate lines associated with Felix, a symbolic fusing of the
two, yet signifying a change in Soho. Kentridge states that he identifies with Felix as
well as Soho, as parts of all society: “They both seem to encompass the good and bad
qualities that make us human: self proclamation, generosity, closeness, ambition, greed,
confidence, anxiety, all those things. Those two characters are both part of one brain
trying to figure out its relation to the world” (238).
As a splitting of personality, or consciousness, is evident in Kentridge’s alter egos Soho and Felix, it is also suggested in “History of the Main Complaint,” through the
duplication of Soho Eckstein’s body. As Soho Eckstein lies in bed, and doctor-clones
of Soho probe the comatose Soho for answers to his ailment, his complaint, a question
of unconsciousness and consciousness within the same person arises. Freudian theory
supposes that when an ego is unable to deal with something, it may split off into conscious and unconscious realms, “avoid[ing] a rupture…by effecting a cleavage or division of itself ” (Freud 12). Repression, Freud wrote, cannot “arise until a sharp cleavage
[occurs] between conscious and unconscious mental activity” (147). “We must be
prepared, if so, to assume the existence in us not only of a second consciousness, but of
a third, fourth, perhaps of an unlimited number of states of consciousness, all unknown
to us and to one another” (170).
Freud’s account of the possibility of multiple states of consciousness calls to attention the ten Soho-clone doctors, and their mental disconnect with comatose Soho,
despite their same body. Comatose Soho also can be further explained by Freud: “It
may happen, too, that a person is brought so completely to a stop by a traumatic event
which shatters the foundations of his life that he abandons all interest in the present
and future and remains permanently absorbed in mental concentration upon the past” 79
(276). Soho, being traumatized, remains in his coma, forced to re-live his past experiences through his dreams. Soho’s constant return to driving in his car can be explained
by Freud’s theory of trauma and repetitive compulsion to repeat.
Upon discovering a compulsion to repeat traumatic events in children, returning World
War I veterans, and in his own patients, Freud, unable to justify this compulsion to repeat through the pleasure principle, introduced the concept of the death drive, an “urge
in organic life to restore an earlier state of things”, an instinctual drive towards death,
in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (308). Dreams which bring back the “memory the
psychical traumas of childhood…They arise, rather, in obedience to the compulsion to
repeat…” (32). In other words, wish-fulfillment is not the original function of these
dreams; the dreams fulfill our compulsion to repeat the trauma, just as Soho’s repetitive
dreams of driving in the car fulfill his compulsion to repeat, until his trauma is realized
and he wakes up.
However, Freud further states that a physical injury compounded with trauma diminishes the likelihood of neurosis: “A gross physical injury caused simultaneously by the
trauma diminishes the chances the neurosis will develop…the mechanical violence of
the trauma would liberate a quantity of sexual excitation which, owing to the lack of
preparation for anxiety, would have a traumatic affect; but on the other hand, the simultaneous physical injury, by calling for a narcissistic hypercathexis of the injured organ,
would bind the excess of excitation (33). According to Freud, Soho, in our video,
should not have been in a coma. The physical trauma of the car accident should have
guarded Soho from psychological trauma. However, we must not assume that Soho’s
excessive psychological trauma was caused merely by a car accident.
As well as being read as a splitting of Soho’s (and Kentridge’s) consciousness, Soho’s
multiple bodies are also read as South Africa’s consciousness, or unconsciousness
with respect to its history and events, and the fading memories of acknowledged and
unacknowledged apartheid era trauma, now that South Africa has progressed into a
post-apartheid era.
I find myself drawn to this series of work, like most work concerned with trauma. I’m
not exactly sure why I’m drawn to trauma - perhaps because of my own experiences
of trauma, or its intensity of emotion with a portrayal of injustice and usual charge
towards change. Soho Eckstein however, is an antihero. The key to waking up from his
coma was remembering, remembering the accident, the trauma, or complaint, which
put him into his coma. But was the trauma of the car accident really what put him in
a coma? As he wakes up from his coma, we assume that he must get up; he cannot
continue to lie unresponsive in his bed, unresponsive to society. However, we find him
sitting at his desk, unchanged, smoking his cigar with a blank, emotionless stare, a body
representing cultural amnesia. We know he has realized a trauma, a complaint, but
was it his main complaint? It seems that he has either never remembered the original
trauma, he has forgotten it, or he no longer cares for it. Soho leaves you dissatisfied, but
effectively dissatisfied and rather concerned with his moral development. Will he ever
change? We must wait two years before our next glimpse of Soho Eckstein, in the next
video in the series, WEIGHING…AND WANTING (1998).
Sources:
Freud, Sigmund. Beyond the Pleasure Principle; Group Psychology and Other Works.
London: Hogarth and the Institute of Psycho-analysis, 1955. Print.
Freud, Sigmund, James Strachey, and Anna Freud. On the History of the Psycho-analytic Movement, Papers on Metapsychology and Other Works. London: Hogarth,
1953. Print.
Freud, Sigmund. On Metapsychology: The Theory of Psychoanalysis : ‘Beyond the
Pleasure Principle,’ ‘The Ego and the Id’ and Other Works. Middlesex, 1987. Print.
Kentridge, William, Mark Rosenthal, and Michael Auping. William Kentridge: Five
Themes. San Francisco, CA: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 2009. Print.
Strachey, James, Anna Freud, Alix Strachey, and Alan Tyson. “Introductory Lectures
on Psycho-Analysis (Part III).” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological
Works of Sigmund Freud. London: Hogarth, 1953. Print.
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