Am thinking now vaguely about swarms, "the immense, quivering mass" with "incessant ebb and flow;" the pressure of a person-swarm in Sarraute, the swarm of history in Ouologuem's Bound to Violence, the pessimism inherent in those swarms (the pressure never offering to stop: the swarm continues infinitely). A swarm of figures dies in the Iliad, somewhat (only somewhat because there are so many) sorted and named. The poet is dumb before the majority of the dead. Alice Oswald extracts the names and deaths for her book Memorial, an argument for the dignity of lists. The characters in Woolf's Waves are named too, marching, advancing, not swarming, even though they are conceived in a mass. Reading Dorothy Richardson's Selected Letters (ed. Gloria G. Fromm) I see the writer defending the word "personality" and refusing to use "individual," an utterance that is, to her, so remotely scientific that it does not have the wherewithal to indicate a person. She says she can't let go of aristocrats because at least they are not part of the mass: they are people. "Richardson's fundamental commitment was to neither sexes or genders but to selves," writes Fromm. "[I]t is a story of success that Richardson tells in Pilgrimage, a story of victory over great odds, a bid for selfhood." Her character Miriam navigates crowds and gatherings of people in London; in the mountains of Switzerland she wants to walk among the snowed trees "into their strange close fellowship that left each one a perfect thing apart." (Oberland.) What about Louis Marlow (really Wilkinson) who sorted the Powys sisters into his own Linnean categories?
In the sisters, inheritance of Powys physical characteristics is on the whole rather less strongly marked than it is in the brothers. Philippa, however, is as much a Powys in appearance and in herself as any of them. She is very like Bertie, though she has not quite the same emphatic resemblance to their father as he has. Bertie's elder daughter is thoroughly Powys, and his younger daughter, by his second marriage, is is very like the Powys sister who died in childhood: her little twin-brother astonishingly, and sometimes ludicrously, resembles his father's father. No Powys could be cuckolded without certain detection if the the cuckoldry resulted in the birth of a boy.
A strange construction of individualisms.
Posts
ironic that masses of people exert pressure on the individual, but the latter are isolated in their own minds; insulated one might say from the outside world except for the five senses that are used as tools to feel with. still, the pressure is there, sometimes a delicate push, sometimes an overwhelming shove; maybe this is evolution at work on a level other than that of human understanding. few authors, i think, manage to convey realistically the effect of pressure on the individual save in occasional or temporary passages. i'm prejudiced but i think woolf did it better than anyone...
ReplyDeleteI want to say that Richardson was as effective as Woolf but they're so different that I don't think I can compare them. She only works through one consciousness but she's extremely sensitive to the nuances of weight that she can feel pressing on that single intellect, down to very precise situations. (What is it like when you come down to breakfast late at your hotel, and the friend of another tourist sits in the room with you after glancing at you and expecting you to respond in a certain way, but you don't respond in that way, and now he is addressing the friend but not addressing you, and you are aware that he is trying to work out how to cope with you since you have not responded in the way he expected you to respond, and then how does the mood change when a little girl who knows him comes into the room?)
Deleteexactly. i've experienced the same sort of thing myriads of times, as have most sensitive persons. i sometimes wonder if that had something to do with the development of magical ideas in former times; it might include everything from witchcraft to out-of-body adventures...
Deletemore, i suspect awareness of that kind of pressure becomes unconscious after childhood and is responsible for seemingly spontaneous mood changes that occur sometimes to most people, often creating havoc in personal relationships and even in public forums. the older i get the more i begin to think that communication and connections between people are nonlingual or subliminal and that language is just a means of covering the real personality so as to make some sort of commonality amid groups. what's remarkable is the ability of some gifted writers to be able to convey in a way that sort of awareness.
DeleteI think writing can be used to approach those motions of nuance in ways that other forms of art can't replicate. Music has its abstract self-absorption, painting has its immediate chronology, but writing has its roaming infinite nose.
Deleteyou're right about the music. i was a classical musician in my younger days and it was more of an attempt to duplicate what was going on in my head on the instrument; not at all the kind of experience i get with vw or r or s...
Delete"roaming infinite nose": you're so right; doggies know everything!
DeleteI think it was Walser -- no, it was W.G. Sebald who compared his writing to the action of a scouting dog. "Not even my Ph.D. research was done systematically. It was done in a random, haphazard fashion. The more I got on, the more I felt that, really, one can find something only in that way—in the same way in which, say, a dog runs through a field. If you look at a dog following the advice of his nose, he traverses a patch of land in a completely unplottable manner. And he invariably finds what he is looking for. I think that, as I’ve always had dogs, I’ve learned from them how to do this."
Delete(Would "showing process" be the equivalent of that dog-action in the visual arts? Here I am, you say: exposing my search.)
Deletei'm speechless...
DeleteJust came across a Richard Tuttle interview in which he says this: 'We need mythology the way dogs need to sniff. Their brains don't work without sniffing.")
Deletehttp://www.artinamericamagazine.com/news-features/magazine/in-the-studio-richard-tuttle/
Sometimes I will find myself confronted by a public memorial, usually a wall of some sort, carved with countless names, all grouped together by one thing they've done (died tragically and horribly, in most cases; rarely though sometimes by having done something brave and selfless), and the number of these names is overwhelming, in the sense of being swamped by a wave. There is no way to see them all, each of them, to give any sort of individual meaning to the mass, and so I tend to imagine a vague outline of a human, create a translucent typical person and wander off from the memorial wall, having diminished everyone into something much less than human, but now handily pocket-sized. The striving for a noticeable individuality, a special singleness, does the same thing, I think, ironically enough. It's some tricky.
ReplyDeleteI think the thing about writing is that it's made of language, and so there is always some signified, which forces you to point to things, to investigate, to sort into categories. Music, as you say, doesn't do that. The plastic arts are different, too, but I'm not confident to say much about them.
The seeing is so different in each discipline. A novelist can write "a green chair" and not say anything more about it (and the colour can be arbitrary), but in a painting the thing known as "chair" becomes an extensive field of enquiry. The green chair is a challenge. What kind of green do you choose? Why? Where does the green end? Is the chair shaded? If so then where are the shadows? What if the green is not shaded: what happens then? If the novelist went into this much detail then the book would seem weirdly obsessive; you'd spend a whole chapter on this chair, but if you're a visual artist then it's expected. It's mandatory. Your entire work can revolve around the colour of this chair. It might take you weeks. And meanwhile there's the writer, in three seconds, writing, "a green chair."
DeleteThere is still, I think, at least for nontrivial (which term I leave undefined) art, both plastic and literary, the process of revelation to the viewer/reader. At first I thought about this in terms of how a novel is exposed to a reader a word at a time, and the thing is an accumulation of material, and a sculpture (even your found-object pieces when they are displayed against a wall and can't be circumnavigated by a viewer) can be viewed from several angles, the viewer moving around the piece, etc. Then I thought that even a painting does not necessarily reveal itself at first sight; what can you take in first? The general composition, the main object in the foreground, an impression of light and color, etc, and other details or elements become important only as you study the piece. So there's the work put into the work by the creator, and at some point it's more or less fixed, even in terms of literature it's just as fixed as a painting is fixed, and then there's the audience who comes to it and receives it only a bit at a time, understanding always incomplete and there is, I think, always the tendency to classify and simplify and reduce the created thing to an aspect of the viewer.
Deleteit seems to me the magic of creating occurs when the observer/appreciator studies the object/book; understanding/admiration are different in every individual so when a consensus is achieved in spite of all the varying interpretations, it's miraculously revelational!
DeleteI believe -- or I feel -- and this feeling has been directed and fashioned by books that I've read -- that there is an open space of nonexistence behind words, and that this space offers itself up to be filled, and that the same space does not exist in painting or the other plastic arts; and that this space in some sense or another defines literature against those other arts. This afternoon I began to wonder about the word "someone." What is the content of the word "someone," I wondered. What is "someone"? Agnes Martin is the one visual artist I can think of at this moment who might have come close to the word "someone" in another medium.
DeleteHmm. I'm immediately inclined to think that the open space of nonexistence behind words is something we invent ourselves in order to project ourselves into/through/beyond the work, that this space either doesn't exist except in our imaginations or it exists in all things and we only consider it in literature. Or, rather, that this is one of the ways that certain types of readers view literature, that it's not true for all readers, and that it's a way of interpreting, but not an inherent quality of literature. Why can't you fill up a negative space behind a painting, within a statue (or surrounding a sculpture), etc with yourself? Likely I misunderstand quite what you mean. I have a friend who is a composer of music (for everything from solo instruments to symphonies) and he strongly views a musical work as a space into which a listener enters and puts himself and not just an organized collection of sounds presented to a hearer. I think these are ways of interpretation or interaction, but I don't think they are part of the art any more than this phenomenon is part of everything else. But like I say, I'm probably not sure what you're saying but I insist on saying something in response. It's that sort of morning.
DeleteIt's also, I confess, just another version of my growing doubts about any sort of fixed understanding/expression of reality, doubts that increase the more things I personally create; I doubt my personal claims about reality, so I doubt everyone else's, too. It's going to become impossible for me to say anything at all except "I don't know" and "maybe" very soon. That will, at least, be easier.
It's not literature I'm thinking of; it's the content of -- in this case, the word "someone." If the content of a brushstroke is a discernible three-dimensionality and a visible shade, and if the content of a note is sound, a tremour in the air to which our membranes respond, then what is the equivalent content of "someone"?
Delete(On "I don't know": would it be helpful at all to turn it around and ask "What don't I know?" If you knew, then what would knowing consist of?)
DeleteWhat don't I know? Hahah, that's a good one. I'm having a crisis of objective reality. Whenever I ask myself "Is X a true statement?" I find I have no fixed point against which to judge. This all has to do with my own writing, of course, and my growing doubts about being able to say what I mean, as well as being able to actually mean anything when I speak. The provisional nature of knowledge is giving me a headache these days and I doubt everything everyone says. Though I am beginning to understand the appeal of fundamentalism and fascism: all the thinking is done for you, a huge relief, etc. But I don't want to make that the topic of my writing. All of this probably explains why I am more attracted to playing the violin than writing novels these days. "How did that sound?" is a comfortingly subjective question.
DeleteI've been thinking about the comment you made, and trying to think, as well, of art and doubt, and it seems to me (when I think) that the moment of doubt in the artist is also the moment when the sickness or blister that has built up has to find a way to burst, & it bursts into an act that builds on and transforms the acts that have gone before. This is not rescue but it is something else; or maybe it is rescue after all, or maybe it is rescue but the rescue is carried out by a shark.
DeleteE.P. in his ABC argues that direct topics aren't necessary: "Good writing is coterminous with the writer's thought, it has the form of the thought, the form of the way the man feels his thought."
there have been attempts in the past to quantify these kinds of differences. i'm recalling "memories, dreams and reflections" and also the work on Jung by others resulting in the meyer''s-briggs personality types that are sometimes useful in understanding otherwise incomprehensible human behavior, for one example...
ReplyDeleteAnd then (once those things are written down, and nice, and clarified) the temptation is to qualify the qualifications, and then to debate the qualifications of the qualifications, and then wonder about the motives of the qualifiers of the qualifiers --
Deleteyou're so right! and pretty soon another discipline evolves that someone can get educated in. i like it...
Deletesupport your local university!
DeleteI was round the campus this evening, watching the marching band rehearse. "Legs a-PART for Viva Las Vegas!"
Delete