'What, into this?' It is the essential incongruity they capture which makes the words of Haile Selasse, Emperor of Ethiopia, Lion of Judah, as he was unceremoniously bundled by the revolutionary guards into the back of an orange Volkswagen van, so much more telling than other images of revolution - the lonely figure on the balcony of the Winter Palace, besieged by his hungry people, the voluptuary tyrant shot through his immaculate shirt-front at his own banqueting table and bleeding into the fish, the scurrying fugitive clutching the crown jewels as he escapes to Claridge's in his private jet. All too single, the dramatic images miss their mark. 'What, into this?' The words are those of the king of infinite space up against his nutshell, the 'etherial spirit of man' as Carlyle put it, up against 'two or three feet of sorry tripe full of-', the voice of whatever it is in us which in love, in religion and in ill health, sees itself as emperor, betrayed by his own base subject, the body.

LRB 25 January 1990 | PDF Download