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Sunday, November 25th, 2001
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5:39 pm - Thoughts on The Defense of Guenevere by William Morris
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William Morris was a visual artist, and though one painting of his survives--of Guenevere, using his Jane Morris as the model (how ironic!)--it is easy to imagine his depiction of Guenevere in this poem as a Pre-Raphaelite painting. Her defiant stance, her wild hair, her "cheek of flame" (9)--she's a Pre-Raphaelite stunner, sure as I'm born.
One of the criticisms, as I understand it, in the essay "The Fleshly School of Poetry" (I haven't been able to find the actual text of it) was that Rossetti's Jenny (which I've read most of), does not present the subject-matter of the poem from a perspective that allows for judgement. This is true of The Defense of Guenevere, as well. The larger framework of Guenevere's defense is lacking, so we get only her words, her actions, without the perspective of Gauwaine or the other knights prejudicing her. Guenevere stands alone. In this, too, she is a Pre-Raphaelite heroine. I am surprised that none of them took up the poem as a subject for their paintings, Rossetti, especially.
Her defiance rings in her words, which she speaks "with no more trace of shame" (59), and in her movements, which are anything but delicate, characterized as "passionate twisting of her body" (60). What is stressed in the poem is the right of the individual to experience happiness in their lives--the supremacy of happiness over "a little word" (86) like a marriage vow. Guenevere's brief mention of her husband makes one think that she could be fiercely sarcastic in him, but she merely brushes him aside, citing his "great name and his little love" (83) that "bought" her (83). She is equally disdainful of other "great lords" (15)--the sarcasm is barely below the surface as she says that God knows she ought to beg the forgiveness of such great lords.
Part of the Aesthetic idea of pleasure, of course, is the experiencing of beauty, and the day when Guenevere first kisses Launcelot, she is "half mad with beauty" (109)--enamored of her own beauty, as well as that of her garden. The garden is significant in that it is walled--much as Guenevere herself is enclosed, but also because it is a place of privacy. She visits her garden as a solitary woman, not as a queen with attendants, and it is as a woman that Launcelot finds her.
Guenevere is perhaps a person whose emotion overtakes her rational mind, for she reminds Gauwaine of his own painful past--the murder of his mother by his brother--,implies that she will haunt him if he has her killed, and uses her position as queen to assert her immunity to their judgement, though she had disdained their own noble positions. She uses her beauty in her defense, as well--"say no rash word / Against me, being so beautiful" (223-24) as if beauty were a defense in itself.
Her descriptions of her loneliness are more affecting, and more effective--"no man cares now to know why I sigh; / And no man comes to sing me pleasant songs, / Nor any brings me the sweet flowers that lie // So thick in the gardens" (256-59).
But though Guenevere pleads for the knight's pity and offers a brief look into her loneliness, in the end she remains defiant, refusing to finish her story, keeping her dignity by not repeating what by now is common gossip.
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| Saturday, November 24th, 2001
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5:36 pm - Thoughts on The Wood Beyond the World by William Morris
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"Apart from my desire to create beautiful things," wrote William Morris, "the leading passion of my life has been and is hatred of modern civilization." A book like The Wood Beyond the World speaks to both of William Morris's passions. It is a beautiful book--in content as well as in its exterior form--and its very beauty is a rebellion against the modern world.
I have never read anything quite like The Wood Beyond the World. There is something of it in Lord Dunsany's work, of course, and Neil Gaiman's Stardust, and in J.R.R. Tolkien, but the whole experience of it--the Kelmscott edition, with its pseudo-illuminated manuscript look to match Morris's pseudo-medieval prose--is something quite unique. The design makes reading an experience in itself--one does not transcend the pages or the words. The words and the pages are part of the story, an intrinsic part of the work of art, not to be ignored or made transparent.
The Wood Beyond the World is not mimetic. The characters are not psychologically complex; the story is not something relatable to real life. The book is purely artificial, from its form to its content, and it is full of the Pre-Raphaelite, Aesthetic spirit. It is one of his late works, published only a few years before he died, and I read it before I read his earlier work, The Defense of Guenevere.
The allusions begin early in the book. On page six, Walter watches the sailors and passengers on a dock, "and all these were to him as the curious images woven on a tapestry." "The Lady of Shalott" easily comes to mind, and also the idea of reality as unreality. In this tapestry comes a dwarf, a lovely maiden, and a lady so striking "that it were hard to say what like she was" (7). The juxtaposition of the ugly, malformed dwarf, the simple beauty of the maiden, and the unnatural beauty of the lady is grotesque, but perhaps the unsettling beauty of the lady is in itself also grotesque.
The theme of life as a work of art continues as Walter contemplates the three people he had seen--"they were ever before his eyes, as if they had been painted on a table by the best of limners" (10). Walter leaves the "real" world in pursuit of these three, and the world where he finds himself is one of decadence and opulence, of luxury and sensual pleasures. He discovers that the wood beyond the world is "a land of mere lies, and that there is nought real and alive therein save me" (140).
The description of the maiden's and the lady's clothing is very intricate throughout the book, perhaps owing to Morris's skill as a designer of patterns--carpet and wallpaper and the like. The clothing of the lady in particular seems to be meant to reveal rather than conceal, as the gown in chapter twenty-seven: "for now she was clad but in one garment of some dark grey silky stuff, embroidered with, as it were, a garland of flowers about the middle, but which was so thin that, as the wind drifted it from side and limb, it hid her no more, but for the said garland, than if water were running over her" (127-28).
The sensuality in The Wood Beyond the World is muted by modern standards, but it certainly is palpable, often expressed in ways that are charmingly archaic: "So they wandered here and there through the waning of the day, and when they entered at last into the cool dusk house, then they loved and played together, as if they were a pair of lovers guileless, with no fear for the morrow, and no seeds of enmity and death sown betwixt them" (133). There's a startling juxtaposition there, too--of lovemaking and death.
It's interesting to me that Walter is propelled along by the actions of others--his father, the lady, the maiden. He himself notices it, deeming "that it was little manly to be as the pawn upon the board, pushed about by the will of others" (142). Walter makes the decision search for the trio that had fascinated him and to leave the lady, and he performs a few manly deeds as he saves the maiden, but the success of the journey he makes with the maiden is all due to her abilities and knowledge. In the end, Walter becomes king because he chooses the array of a warrior rather than that of a monarch, confirming the superiority of action over leisurely opulence. Like The Picture of Dorian Gray, has an ending that is strangely moralistic--even extolling Matthew Arnold's noble action. Likewise, the maiden (the poor girl has no name) is sexually pure, and she earns love and respect because of her purity, while the lady, who is expresses herself sexually quite freely, is decadent and depraved. Not quite what one would expect from a man who was named in the famous "The Fleshly School of Poetry" essay! But then, this is a later work. The Defense of Guenevere and "The Haystack in the Floods" may give us something different.
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| Friday, November 23rd, 2001
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5:35 pm - Thoughts on "The Lady of Shalott" by Alfred, Lord Tennyson
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"The Lady of Shalott" is a medievalist work, rather than one about the Renaissance. Here we have knights, a fairy lady, Camelot. It is a medievalist work about a time and place that never happened--a time and place that medieval writers wrote about.
The Lady of Shalott, with the "curse upon her if she stay / To look down to Camelot" (40-41) reminds me of Plato's allegory of the cave, with every person looking at shadows of objects cast by dim candlelight. But the Lady's "shadows of the world" (48) are reflection, and she is "half-sick of" them (71). The Lady of Shalott lives in a world that is illusion, seeing only a narrow, limited part of the real world. In other words, she sees the world just as we do.
But she is an artist, weaving the images of her world into a tapestry, images that people, as Fra Lippo Lippi says, might have "passed / Perhaps a hundred times nor cared to see." So the narrow vision of the world, under her hands, becomes a purified representation of life--more real than real, a work of art for life to imitate.
Then comes Lancelot. If the Lady of Shalott an artist and the mirror her image of the world, what is he? The sight and sound of him brings the Lady to action, and her action destroys her "innocent" view of the world as "the mirror cracked from side to side" (115). The woman in the dungeon in Emily Brontė's "The Prisoner" escapes from the pain of life in her visions--imaginings that are works of art, if we think broadly--as the Lady of Shalott devotes herself to her tapestry. Both the Lady and the prisoner are not afraid to face death, indeed think it better to die than to live as they have.
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5:35 pm - Thoughts on Fra Lippo Lippi by Robert Browning
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Here is a poem to inspire Pater and Wilde, a poem about the early Renaissance. The philosophy of art that Browning invents for Lippi is full of the Aesthetic spirit, full of the rebellion against those who would have art be didactic, who say "Give us no more o the body than shows soul!" (188). "Paint the soul, never mind the legs and arms!" (193). As Wilde quipped, "Those who see a difference between body and soul have neither," so believes Fra Lippi. And in the supremacy of beauty as well--"If you get simple beauty and naught else,/You get about the best thing God invents" (217-18).
The devotion to experiencing sensations is Lippi's, too--"And my whole soul revolves, the cup runs over, / The world and life's too big to pass for a dream" (250-51). Here is the converse side of Aestheticism, contradicting yet coexisting comfortably with the grotesque. If the Aesthete is devoted to experiencing every sensation he can, then he must accept the despair with the joy, the decay with the renewal. Fra Lippo Lippi represents the joy of sensation--"I always see the garden and God there/A-making man's wife: and, my lesson learned, / The value and significance of flesh,/I can't unlearn ten minutes afterward" (266-690). The "figures of man, woman, child" (289) are to be "dwelt upon/Wondered at" (291-92).
Browning anticipates here Wilde's belief in the supremacy of art over life. "We're made so that we love/First when we see them painted, things we have passed / Perhaps a hundred times nor cared to see;/And so they are better, painted--better to us, / Which is the same thing. Art was given for that" (300-304).
Fra Lippo Lippi is a narrator that does not inspire pity because of his ignorance of himself. Rather, one feels sorry for him as a man who lives before his time, forced to paint by command rather than by inspiration.
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5:34 pm - Thoughts on Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came by Robert Browning
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I have always had difficulty interpreting this poem. "He who endureth to the end shall be saved," is what a friend of Robert Browning suggested. And this makes sense if death is a salvation. Childe Roland anticipates death as part of his quest for the Dark Tower. As he travels through the barren, cruel land, the images of life he conjures up to get him through it are fleeting, quickly disappearing or being replaced by images of death. If the grotesque is instilling a fear of life, rather than of death, perhaps it is also acknowledging the permanence of death as superior to the brevity of life. The remnants in life in the barren country remind Roland of cruelty--a skinny horse, a river that poisons the vegetation, rusting machines of torture, the very landscape scarred and wounded.
Death comes unexpectedly; Roland recognizes the Tower--"burningly it came on me all at once" (30.175)--not realizing it until he's been in sight of it for some time. As he enters, the shades of his dead comrades appear. Are they there to hail his accomplishment, or to welcome him to their home? Or both? Roland has been wandering the world, his hope "dwindled into a ghost" (4.21), and when he undertakes to go to the Dark Tower, expecting death, it feels as if it is his destiny to die in his quest.
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| Thursday, November 22nd, 2001
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5:33 pm - Thoughts on "The Bishop Orders His Tomb" by Robert Browning
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Browning's glimpse into the late Renaissance is quite different from Pater's representation of the time. Browning represents the motivations behind the commissions for works of art. The artists may have created out of a love of art and beauty, but the men who commissioned were after a legacy. They may have appreciated art, though not for the art in itself, but for how it reflected their own greatness. John Ruskin admired "The Bishop Orders His Tomb," writing that it captured "the Renaissance spirit--its wordliness, inconsistency, pride, hypocrisy, ignorance of itself, love of art, of luxury, and of good Latin."
What I find most striking in that list is "ignorance of itself," for, indeed, Browning represents the ignorance of the age through the Bishop's ignorance of his inconsistency, pride, and hypocrisy. There lies the Bishop on his deathbed, surrounded by his sons, proof of his sin, reminiscing about their mother, "so fair she was!" (5). And even after the Bishop acknowledges the transitory nature of this world, the illusion of life--"the world's a dream" (9), he lays out his plans for leaving a monument to himself after he is dead. Part of the illusion, perhaps, but he reveals that it is an illusion that he cares to impress, even if he is not going to be around to enjoy the benefits.
And his tomb is full of inconsistencies--"Pans and Nymphs" (57) cavorting near "The Savior at his sermon on the Mount," Pans seducing nymphs next to "Moses with the tables" (62).
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| Tuesday, November 20th, 2001
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5:32 pm - Thoughts on Robert Browning
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Browning seems to have been universally admired among aesthetic writers--Wilde and D. Rossetti most notably. Browning's ability to completely separate narrator from self-- his uncanny mastery of the dramatic monologue--is something neither Rossetti nor Wilde ever mastered themselves, Rossetti especially. Wilde's Gilbert has much to say about Browning in The Critic as Artist:
"work is marred by struggle, violence, and effort, and he passed not from emotion to form, but from thought to chaos. Still, he was great. He has been called a thinker, and was certainly a man who was always thinking, and always thinking aloud; but it was not thought that fascinated him, but rather the processes by which thought moves."
"Yes, Browning was great. And as what will he be remembered? As a poet? Ah, not as a poet! He will be remembered as a writer of fiction, as the most supreme writer of fiction, it may be, that we have ever had. His sense of dramatic situation was unrivalled, and, if he could not answer his own problems, he could at least put problems forth, and what more should an artist do? Considered from the point of view of a creator of character he ranks next to him who made Hamlet. Had he been articulate, he might have sat beside him."
"Browning might have given us a Hamlet who would have realised his mission by thought. Incident and event were to him unreal or unmeaning. He made the soul the protagonist of life's tragedy, and looked on action as the one undramatic element of a play."
So what does all this say about Browning's relationship to the aesthetics? He was an inspiration to Wilde in his devotion to presenting the intricacies of thought--there leads the path to Woolf and Joyce--and I think it is significant that Browning's dramatic monologue possess characteristics that other Victorian's work in the same genre do not. For one, his narrators are naļve in some way--that is, they are unable to recognize what the reader recognizes about them. For another, as Wilde wrote, Browning presents problems but does not provide solutions. His narrators are quite different from Tennyson's Ulysses, who is "strong in will," who sees his problem, commits himself to a solution, and carries it out. There's a certain pity one feels for the narrators of Browning's dramatic monologues; they are men who cannot clearly see themselves.
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| Tuesday, November 13th, 2001
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5:30 pm - Thoughts on Emily Bronte's Poetry
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Emily Brontė's poetry possesses a strange, archaic feeling, as if living in the Moors of Yorkshire, living in her fantasy world of Gondal, completely separated her from the rest of the world. The archaism is intentional, but not in the studied manner of Tennyson or Browning.
Her range is wide--there are dirges and laments in her poetry, dark ballads and light raptures, and meditative lyrics tinged with realizations of impermanence and transience. "The Prisoner (A Fragment)" is a distinctive story-telling poem. There is an innocent in evil surroundings--a beautiful young woman in a dungeon. The young woman's account of leaving her senses follows a sequence of highs to crashes, to calm steadiness. Desire comes to her first--"visions rise, and change, that kill me with desire. // Desire for nothing known in my maturer years / When Joy grew mad with awe at counting future tears." And then peace pervades her--suddenly. Why does the desire have to precede the peace? I'm not sure. I only know that it's interesting that it does. But for a moment she transcends her body, until the sensation of living comes back to her again, and she longs for death. So, here is the grotesque--as Wolfgang Kayser wrote in The Grotesque in Art and Literature, "The grotesque instills fear of life rather than death" (150).
The melancholy in the poems pervades even scenes of springtime--and Brontė contrasts them consciously in "A Day Dream"--"In sooth, I did not know/Why I had brought a clouded eye/To great the general glow." The source of her melancholy?--the impermanence of springtime. Impermanence--one of the themes of aesthetic literature.
I wish I could spend more time on Emily Brontė, but I have to move on to the actual aesthetic movement.
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| Thursday, November 1st, 2001
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9:18 pm - Continued Thoughts on The Critic as Artist, Part Two
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If the critic is an artist, we must know not only makes an ideal critic, but what makes an ideal artist in general. And Gilbert tells us: "the real artist is he who proceeds, not from feeling to form, but from form to thought and passion." And what is the most important element of art? Form. "Form is everything. It is the secret of life." "It is form that creates not merely the critical temperament, but also the aesthetic instinct, that unerring instinct that reveals to one all things under their conditions of beauty. " (1050)
Now, as for the subject I brought up in the last post--how art and the criticism of art improves humanity. "It is only by the cultivation of the habit of intellectual criticism that we shall be able to rise superior to race-prejudices." Seriously. The premise is simple: we cultivate our intellect by experiencing and contemplating as many types of art as we can, art created by people from all over the world. In this way, our minds will connect to the minds of those artists; we will contemplate what they contemplate. "Criticism will annihilate race-prejudices, by insisting upon the unity of the human mind in the variety of its forms. . . . It will give us the peace that springs from understanding." (1057) Wilde focuses on the relationship between European countries, but I imagine how it could be extended to include what constitutes the world now. It was a much narrower place in Wilde's time. It as if humanity has existed in huge corridors with thick walls, and all the time we chip away at those walls, widening our view, our corridors even merging with others at time. We don't understand the Arabic world, now for example, for how many of us have studied Arabic literature? There is the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, of course, but we only read Edward Fitzgerald's translation from our Anglo-American perspective.
And this broadening of our outlooks, the willingness to constantly revise our beliefs is another defining characteristic of the critical artist. "It is Criticism that, recognizing no position as final, and refusing to bind itself by the shall shibboleths of any sect or school, creates that serene philosophic temper which loves truth for its own sake, and loves it not the less because it knows it to be unattainable" (1057).
It seems a contradiction to say first that art criticism will annihilate race prejudice and then say, "Aesthetics are higher than ethics," but it is not. It is not the goal of art to annihilate race prejudice. The goal of art is to "discern the beauty of a thing." But a result of producing and contemplating art with this goal is that our minds become broader. I would suspect that art that is created with the goal of annihilating racial prejudice will be perceived as forced and clumsy, and won't accomplish what it has set out to do. Art that sets out to be only beautiful, however, touches our emotions and our intellects; it speaks to us as a living thing, and makes us see the living being behind it. That is the value of art for art's sake. It is beautiful and pleasurable, and it speaks to what makes us human.
Ah, only nine o'clock and I'm exhausted. I wish I could go to Covent Garden and look at the roses. I am tired of thought.
current mood:  exhausted
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| Monday, October 29th, 2001
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9:14 pm - Continued Thoughts on The Critic as Artist, Part Two
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Stanley Fish (and thank the good gods for acerbic, ironic Stanley Fish, for after reading Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man, I was ready to decide that I had no business trying to understand postscructuralist criticism) says that it is impossible to be a literary critic and not interpret literature. In "What Makes an Interpretation Acceptable" he writes that those critics who claim to just be describing a work are deluding themselves: "description can occur only within a stipulative understanding of what there is to be described, an understanding that will produce the object of its attention" (412). Our boy Gilbert, however, says that the critic is only an interpreter "if he chooses" (1032). Of course, Gilbert's definition of "interpret" is "explain," so there is a bit of a difference in the definitions of our terminology here. Still, if critics "seek rather to deepen its mystery, to raise round it, and round its maker, that mist of wonder that is dear to both gods and worshippers alike," he is still asserting some kind of interpretation--in his interpretation the work of art is something mysterious.
And even if Gilbert tries to hedge away from being an interpreter, he eventually admits it: "The critic will certainly be an interpreter, but he will not treat Art as a riddling Sphinx, whose shallow secret may be guessed and revealed by one whose feet are wounded and knows not his name." And it seems Wilde would agree with Fish that criticism is not so much revealing the text, but revealing the interpreter, only Wilde places a value on this practice, while Fish says it is merely so: "it is only by intensifying his own personality that the critic can interpret the personality and work of others, and the more strongly this personality enters into the interpretation, the more real the interpretation becomes. . . ." (1033)
Yeesh, as I keep going over what I made notes on in this half of the essay, I can imagine Stanley Fish and Oscar Wilde being two parts of the same god. Fish is the dude who makes everything, and Wilde is the guy who looks upon it and proclaims it good. I know that's backwards in a chronological point of view, as Stanley Fish is still living (a recent NY Times literary supplement carried the bold headline "Milton vs. Fish" to Brian's and my great amusement), and Oscar Wilde died 100 years ago, but we can do away with that kind of temporal fussiness for the sake of being fanciful.
Gilbert continues along the lines of the critic creating the text, with a dash of the mimetic just to keep things from getting cut-and-dried: "there is no such thing as Shakespeare's Hamlet. If Hamlet has something of the definiteness of a work of art, he has also all the obscurity that belongs to life. There are as many Hamlets as there are melancholies."
Wilde's opinion on historical and intertextual criticism becomes pretty clear as Gilbert says, "he who desires to understand Shakespeare truly must understand the relations in which Shakespeare stood to the Renaissance and the Reformation, to the age of Elizabeth and the age of James. [. . .] In a word, he must be able to bind Elizabethan London to the Athens of Pericles, and to learn Shakespeare's true position in the history of European drama and the drama of the world" (1033).
It all seems so life-and-history-and-"reality" confirming, but this is Aestheticism, and it can't stay like that for long, dammit! Art isn't like life. Art is like art. It can't be like life because "life is terribly deficient in form. Its catastrophes happen in the wrong way and to the wrong people. There is a grotesque"--ah, there's a word!--"horror about its comedies, and its tragedies seem to culminate in farce" (1034). It all culminates in the ultimate fin-de-siecle Aesthetic view of life: "when one looks back upon the life that was so vivid in its emotional intensity, and filled with such fervent moments of ecstasy or joy, it all seems to be a dream and an illusion. [. . .] life cheats us with shadows, like a puppet-master" (1034-1035).
current mood:  pleased
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| Sunday, October 28th, 2001
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6:34 pm - Real Journal Stuff
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For some reason I feel as if today has been an Utterly Bad Day. Maybe it's because I napped too much and didn't get enough lit crit read, and because I've been thinking about I'm not writing enough fiction, and because I'm so behind on my reading journal and I don't feel like working on it. Or maybe it's because Brian is upset at me because I left the room to do something and didn't hear him calling me for some reason. Or because I've just realized that I have a mere two weeks to prepare a half-hour presentation on a story from Dubliners, and an essay on Stanley Fish's article due in a week, and a crapload of stuff to do when I get to work on Monday. Sometimes, when I briefly talk to the creators on the phone, I want to scream, "I'm a creative person, too, you know! I'm not just someone who answers the phone at your publisher's office and gets paid very little to do a whole bunch! I have my stuff, too! I AM IMPORTANT, DAMMIT!" And then I think, well, I'm not very important, am I? But then, I'm not any less important than someone who happens to sound snooty on the phone and who can draw.
The room is stuffy, the time change has made it go dark at five o' clock, the weather's turned gray, I need to do laundry, and I'm going into a "I wear black on the outside because black is how I feel on the inside mood." I have three-quarters of a mind to crawl under the table and not come out.
Damn, I hate it when that happens. Prozac. I must remember that I am on medication for a reason. I must remember that "Wow-I-feel-better-guess-I-don't-need-them-drugs" is a stupid, stupid thing to think.
You know, at this very moment, I'm thinking that it would be just absolutely marvelous if the rest of the world would just freeze for a while and let me have the time to get ready to face it again. I don't want to go back into the bedroom to Brian and his "Why have you left me alone in here for so long?" I don't want to admit that maybe I'm inconsiderate and say, "I'm sorry" a dozen times because I concentrate so much on what I'm doing that I tend to tune out the rest of the world--even if what I'm doing is just going into a room to get a stamp and put the letters out front so I remember to mail them.
I guess there's something wrong when you don't hear people when they're talking to you, especially when the person you don't hear most often is someone who should be assured of your interest and attention. But, honestly, I'm tired of giving other people attention right now. I'm in the mood to be selfish and to be unhealthily self-contemplative, to sit and sit, and maybe eat some pan de leche.
But, I'm going to click on "Update Journal," then I'm going to get that pan de leche, and maybe a doughnut, too, but then I'm going to go into the bedroom, and face my upset husband who angrily asked me just an hour ago, "What's wrong with you?" and it all isn't going to end well for me. Maybe for other people, but not for me.
Or maybe not for anyone at all. The world's not about making things end well.
current mood:  depressed
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6:22 pm - Continued Thoughts on The Critic As Artist, Part Two
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It is an outstanding feature of poetry, Gilbert tells us, that it allows you to experience what you have never really experienced, and you will be able to experience that every time you read the poem, or think of it merely--quite reminiscent of Wordsworth and all his remembrances of natural scenes while he was in the city, but this is the remembrance of sorrow, not of joy. "[Y]ou will become for a moment what he was who wrote it; nay not for a moment only, but for many barren moonlit nights and sunless sterile days will a despair that is not your own make its dwelling within you, and the misery of another gnaw your heart away" (1037). And not just of sorrow, but of disease and death, of sin and obsession. Besides our own lives, through literature we live "the lives of the dead, and the soul that dwells within us is no single spiritual entity, making us personal and individual, created for our service, and entering into us for our joy. It is something that has dwelt in fearful places [. . .]. It is sick with many maladies, and has memories of curious sins. It is wiser than we are, and its wisdom is bitter. It fills us with impossible desires, and makes us follow what we know we cannot gain" (1041).
What I find very fascinating about this essay is the assertion that while art itself is not didactic (and, indeed, it should not be), the understanding of art makes one more understanding of the world as a whole. This argument is so very . . . orthodox, in a way. It echoes Matthew Arnold at times (and quotes him outright further down the page): "[Art] can teach us how to escape from our experience, and to realize the experiences of those who are greater than we are" (1041). (This is one place where Wilde and I part company, for I detest the idea of escapist literature. Plegh!) The means isn't straight through art, though, as Matthew Arnold would have it, but round about. Art was all about portraying "noble action" in Arnold's view, but Wilde asserts that not action, but thought is where true value lies. "Browning might have given us a Hamlet who would have realised his mission by thought. Incident and event to him were unreal or unmeaning. He made the soul the protagonist of life's tragedy, and looked on action as the one undramatic element of a play" (1042).
Wilde's argument as it applies to society in The Critic As Artist seems to me classically libertarian--but libertarian on a non-political scale, and on a non-ethical scale too. This is purely intellectual and emotional ground. "[T]he development of the race depends on the development of the individual" (1043).
Back to the role of the critic--Gilbert lays out some requirements for that. First, "the critic should be able to recognise that the sphere of Art and the sphere of Ethics are absolutely distinct and separate" (1048). Why? Because "Art is out of the reach of morals, for her eyes are fixed upon things beautiful and immortal and ever-changing" (1048). The critic must also possess "a temperament exquisitely susceptible to beauty, and to the various impressions that beauty gives us" (1049).
I'm afraid I don't have any unified thoughts right now, just random notes on bits I've highlighted in the text. The role of the aesthete becomes more clearly defined here. The aesthete's role is to be perfectly contemptuous of anything that purports to be art and is not art. And then to destroy it. Not literally, of course, though wouldn't that be an interesting story?--but to destroy it by pointing out that it is bad. Easy enough. Still, "it is always more difficult to destroy than it is to create, and when what one has to destroy is vulgarity and stupidity, the task of destruction needs not merely courage but contempt." And even clearer: "the mission of the aesthetic movement is to lure people to contemplate, not to lead them to create" (1050).
current mood:  gloomy
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12:57 am - Thoughts on The Critic As Artist, Part Two by Oscar Wilde
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Stanley Fish (and thank the good gods for acerbic, ironic Stanley Fish, for after reading Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man, I was ready to decide that I had no business trying to understand postscructuralist criticism) says that it is impossible to be a literary critic and not interpret literature. In "What Makes an Interpretation Acceptable" he writes that those critics who claim to just be describing a work are deluding themselves: "description can occur only within a stipulative understanding of what there is to be described, an understanding that will produce the object of its attention" (412). Our boy Gilbert, however, says that the critic is only an interpreter "if he chooses" (1032). Of course, Gilbert's definition of "interpret" is "explain," so there is a bit of a difference in the definitions of our terminology here. Still, if critics "seek rather to deepen its mystery, to raise round it, and round its maker, that mist of wonder that is dear to both gods and worshippers alike," he is still asserting some kind of interpretation--in his interpretation the work of art is something mysterious.
And even if Gilbert tries to hedge away from being an interpreter, he eventually admits it: "The critic will certainly be an interpreter, but he will not treat Art as a riddling Sphinx, whose shallow secret may be guessed and revealed by one whose feet are wounded and knows not his name." And it seems Wilde would agree with Fish that criticism is not so much revealing the text, but revealing the interpreter, only Wilde places a value on this practice, while Fish says it is merely so: "it is only by intensifying his own personality that the critic can interpret the personality and work of others, and the more strongly this personality enters into the interpretation, the more real the interpretation becomes. . . ." (1033)
Yeesh, as I keep going over what I made notes on in this half of the essay, I can imagine Stanley Fish and Oscar Wilde being two parts of the same god. Fish is the dude who makes everything, and Wilde is the guy who looks upon it and proclaims it good. I know that's backwards in a chronological point of view, as Stanley Fish is still living (a recent NY Times literary supplement carried the bold headline "Milton vs. Fish" to Brian's and my great amusement), and Oscar Wilde died 100 years ago, but we can do away with that kind of temporal fussiness for the sake of being fanciful.
Gilbert continues along the lines of the critic creating the text, with a dash of the mimetic just to keep things from getting cut-and-dried: "there is no such thing as Shakespeare's Hamlet. If Hamlet has something of the definiteness of a work of art, he has also all the obscurity that belongs to life. There are as many Hamlets as there are melancholies."
Wilde's opinion on historical and intertextual criticism becomes pretty clear as Gilbert says, "he who desires to understand Shakespeare truly must understand the relations in which Shakespeare stood to the Renaissance and the Reformation, to the age of Elizabeth and the age of James. [. . .] In a word, he must be able to bind Elizabethan London to the Athens of Pericles, and to learn Shakespeare's true position in the history of European drama and the drama of the world" (1033).
It all seems so life-and-history-and-"reality" confirming, but this is Aestheticism, and it can't stay like that for long, dammit! Art isn't like life. Art is like art. It can't be like life because "life is terribly deficient in form. Its catastrophes happen in the wrong way and to the wrong people. There is a grotesque"--ah, there's a word!--"horror about its comedies, and its tragedies seem to culminate in farce" (1034). It all culminates in the ultimate fin-de-siecle Aesthetic view of life: "when one looks back upon the life that was so vivid in its emotional intensity, and filled with such fervent moments of ecstasy or joy, it all seems to be a dream and an illusion. [. . .] life cheats us with shadows, like a puppet-master" (1034-1035).
current mood:  giddy
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| Saturday, October 27th, 2001
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11:41 pm - This Is Maradydd's Fault
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I have no idea what this means, but I took the Robot Test. Here's my result.
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| Saturday, October 20th, 2001
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12:03 am - Thoughts on The Critic as Artist, Part One by Oscar Wilde
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The way in which Wilde presents his criticism is very attractive. A conversation between leisurely young men, the instructor feigning dislike for serious instruction. I suppose I must have been caught up in reading, for I didn't highlight any passages until the tenth page: "Whatever, in fact, is modern in our life we owe to the Greeks. Whatever is an anachronism is due to medięvalism" (1019). To skip ahead in my reading (for I'm much further along in my reading than in my journals), I find this interesting, as the thoroughly medieval William Morris is considered by some to be a very modern artist--Bernard Shaw, specifically, called him "ultra-modern--not merely up-to-date, but far ahead of it," he added that all his works "have the twentieth century in every touch of them." (That makes me think of two rather disparate people--Jack the Ripper who claimed that people would say that he "ushered in the twentieth century," and Oscar Wilde, who was called "the first modern man" in the promotions for the movie Wilde.)
In The Nature of Gothic, Ruskin claims that the medieval Gothic architecture's greatness lies in its savageness, but also in the fact that it is imperfect, and that it is imperfect because it is not the work of slaves. Of course, Wilde isn't referring to architecture, but to art-criticism, to literature. "Words have not merely music as sweet as that of viol and lute, colour as rich and vivid as any that makes lovely for us the canvas of the Venetian or the Spaniard, and plastic form no less sure and certain than that which reveals itself in marble or in bronze, but thought and passion and spirituality are theirs also are theirs indeed alone" (1019).
Art criticism, being writing, is full of thought and passion and spirituality, but it also possesses another quality: self-consciousness. Art is necessarily artificial, according Wilde, even if it makes a show of verisimilitude. And, as such, art doesn't spontaneously spring fully-formed from the head of the creator. "All fine imaginative work is self-conscious and deliberate. No poet sings because he must sing. At least, no great poet does. A great poet sings because he chooses to sing" (1020).
Imagination, then, is not a matter of inspiration from a divine force--no "heav'nly muse" here--but of will. That which is divine is quite thrust out of the picture, and that which is moral. Gilbert (the fellow doing most of the talking in the dialogue of The Critic as Artist) states that all art is immoral, but I think it would be more accurate to say that it is amoral, for in the end, Gilbert does not believe that virtues and sins have any meaning. "Each little thing that we do passes into the great machine of life which may grind our virtues to powder and make them worthless, or transform our sins into elements of a new civilisation, more marvellous and more splendid than any that has gone before. . . . What is termed Sin is an essential element of progress. Without it the world would stagnate, or grow old, or become colorless. By its curiosity Sin increases the experience of the race." Ah-ha! There is Pater! "Through its intensified assertion of individualism it saves us from monotony of type. In its rejection of the current notions about morality, it is one with the higher ethics" (1023-1024).
This is, of course, ethical relativism, something I imagine Ruskin would swoon at. Ethical relativism leads to chaos, the moralists say, and indeed it does. But chaos, the physicist might say, is only the appearance of disorder--it is order on such a large scale that one cannot perceive it--as ethical relativism perhaps is morality on such a large scale that conventional moralists cannot perceive it as being anything but madness. Gilbert tells Ernest that "life is chaos . . . that its martyrdoms are mean and its heroisms ignoble; and that it is the function of Literature to create, from the rough material of actual existence, a new world that will be more marvelous, more enduring, and more true than the world that common eyes look upon" (1026).
Here is the neo-Platonic view: art as the representation of the "true" object. And the best works of art do not imitate life, but other works of art. Gilbert calls "criticism a creation within creation. For just as the great artists, from Homer and Ęschylus, down to Shakespeare and Keats, did not go directly to life for their subject-matter, but sought for it in myth, and legend, and ancient tale, so the critic deals with materials that others have, as it were, purified for him" (1027).
Now, criticism, being an impression of these purified materials, is in essence purifying the purified, making it "the purest form of personal impression"--not expression--and "more creative than creation, as it has least reference to any standard external to itself, and is, in fact its own reason for existing"--art for art's sake. And, here, very important because of its contrast to Ruskin: "Certainly, it is never tramelled by any shackles of verisimilitude. No ignoble considerations to probability, that cowardly concession to the tedious repetitions of domestic or public life, effect it ever" (1027). (And Lao Tzu wrote, "Everybody says my way is great, but improbable. All greatness is improbable. What's probable is tedious and petty." Tao Te Ching, chapter 67, transliteration by Ursula K. LeGuin.)
And here, Wilde precedes Woolf in his devotion to life's interior, rather than creating something outwardly logical--no "series of gig-lamps, symmetrically arranged." Wilde refers to criticism, but Woolf extended this premise to fiction--the difference being that while criticism is "the record of one's own soul," fiction is the attempt to accurately chronicle the souls of fictional characters. The record of the soul is "more fascinating than history, as it is concerned simply with oneself. It is more delightful than philosophy, as its subject is concrete and not abstract, real not vague. . . . [It deals] not with life's physical accidents of deed or circumstance, but with the spiritual moods and imaginative passions of the mind" (1027).
So if life is chaos, then art is what shows us order. It is truer than real life in that it is "less vulgar than reality" (1028). Ruskin calls art depicting "the facts of the case" in art, and Arnold calls criticism seeing the object "as in itself it really is," but Wilde calls both art and criticism (which are one) a subjective act, something that is pure impression. And as Pater turned Arnold's dictum on criticism on its head, Wilde turns Ruskin's. "Who cares," says Gilbert, "whether Ruskin's views on Turner are sound or not? What does it matter?" The prose that Ruskin uses to describe Turner's works are beautiful in themselves--"fervid and fiery colored in its noble eloquence . . . at least as great a work of art as any of those wonderful sunsets that bleach or rot on their corrupted canvases in England's Gallery" (1028). And so it is with Pater's famous description of La Giaconda--"the picture becomes more wonderful to us than it really is, and reveals to us a secret of which, in truth, it knows nothing, and the music of the mystical prose is as sweet in our ears as was that flue-player's music that lent to the lips of La Gioconda those subtle and poisonous curves." And for the very reason that Leonardo himself could not have imagined anything like what Pater describes being in his painting aesthetic criticism "is criticism of the highest kind. It treats the work simply as a starting-point for a new creation." This sort of criticism acknowledges that "the meaning of any beautiful created thing is, at least, as much in the soul of him who looks at it as it was in the his soul who wrought it. Nay, it is rather the beholder who lends to the beautiful thing its myriad meanings, and makes it marvellous for us, and sets it in some new relation to the age. . . ." (1029).
That is the wonder of Beauty, according to Wilde, what prompted Keats to write "Beauty is truth; truth, beauty"--it "whispers of a thousand different things which were not present in the mind of him who carved the statue or painted the panel or graved the gem" (1030). Beauty in art, too, is in incompleteness, in the inability to be completely mimetic--and this incompleteness is welcome, for through it artists "are able to avoid too definite a presentation of the Real, which would be a mere imitation, and too definite a realisation of the Ideal, which would be too purely intellectual. It is through this very incompleteness that Art becomes complete in beauty, and so addresses itself, not to the faculty of recognition, nor to the faculty of reason, but to the ęsthetic sense alone, which while accepting both reason and recognition in stages of apprehension, subordinates them both to a pure synthetic impression of the work of art as a whole, and, taking whatever alien emotional elements the work may possess, uses their very complexity as a means by which a richer unity may be added to the ultimate impression itself" (again, pre-echoes of Virginia Woolf) (1031).
And here is what it comes down to--the rejection of the purely didactic--"these obvious modes of art that have but one message to deliver, and having delivered it becomes dumb and sterile." The aesthetic critic "seeks rather for such modes as suggest reverie and mood, and by their imaginative beauty make all interpretations true, and no interpretation final" (1031).
current mood:  artistic
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| Sunday, October 14th, 2001
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11:47 pm - More Thoughts on John Ruskin
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"On the Pathetic Fallacy"
John Ruskin does not like the words "objective" and "subjective." He is of the belief that if a tree falls in the woods and there is no one there to here it, it does indeed make a sound. A gentian is blue whether or not anyone is there to see it. "Blue does not mean the sensation cause by a gentian on the human eye; but it means the power of producing that sensation: and this power is always there, in the thing, whether we are there to experience it or not" (63). But Ruskin is quite wrong, as far as modern psychology is concerned. My psychology textbook, Psychology by Lester A. Lefton, says, "Hue is a psychological term, because objects themselves do not possess color. Rather, a person's perception of color is determined by how the eyes and brain interpret reflected wavelengths" (85). Ruskin dismisses this point of view as the opinion of "certain philosophers" (62), but this isn't philosophy; it is science.
Poor John Ruskin. I am very hard on him. And it is all because he disagrees with Pater, whom I go into raptures over. I am judging him very subjectively.
Oh, the evil in me!
Anyhow, once Ruskin finishes "putting these tiresome and absurd words quite out of our way" (63-64), he turns to "the point in question,--namely the difference between the ordinary, proper and true appearances of things to us; and the extraordinary, or false appearances, when we are under the influence of emotion, or contemplative fancy" (64). This difference seems to me the difference between a person who is merely looking at something and a person who is experiencing something. Which person is in a better state to criticize art, or create art? I would say the latter, surely.
But Ruskin asserts that "[violent feelings] produce in us a falseness in all our impressions of external things, which I would generally characterize as the 'pathetic fallacy'" (65). Of course, the deconstructionalist would say that all language has a certain falseness to it, because all language is metaphor, only the poetical does not attempt to hide that it lies.
Of course, some lies are better than others. This, at least, John Ruskin recognizes. If the lie doesn't correspond to the emotion, then the personification is not a pathetic fallacy at all; it's just bad writing.
This is not to say that even when the lie corresponds to the emotion that Ruskin does not hold it in disdain. He goes so far as to attack the personality of anyone who would use a pathetic fallacy: "The temperament which admits the pathetic fallacy is [. . .] that of a mind and body in some sort too weak to deal fully with what is before them or upon them" (67). Ruskin himself, however, characterizes Gothic architecture as "savage." Hmm. But perhaps he wouldn't deny that his mind and body are too weak to deal fully with what is before him. To act as the psychological critic for a moment, I might assert that Ruskin was uncomfortable with his own emotions, perhaps even afraid of them. He would have good reason to be--modern psychological examination of his personality suggests that he was bi-polar, manic-depressive.
Emotions are a grand part of the human condition: "it is in general a sign of higher capacity and stand in the ranks of being, that the emotions should be strong enough to vanquish, partly the intellect, and make it believe what they choose" (67). But the intellect is something grander. It is not Ruskin's view, as it is Pater's, that all begins with the emotions, that intellectual pursuits are the examination of the emotions. Ruskin believes that the intellect exists not to examine the emotions, but to suppress them: "it is still a grander condition when the intellect also rises, till it is strong enough o assert its rule against, or together with, the utmost efforts of the passions" (67).
So here is the rank of people: (ugh! I hate ranking things!)
3. "The man who perceives rightly, because he does not feel."
2. "The man who perceives wrongly, because he feels.
1. "The man who perceives rightly, in spite of his feelings."
But, really, Ruskin isn't so stringent as I've made him seem. I am quite unfair to him. He does admit the great attraction of the pathetic fallacy: "so long as we see that the feeling is true, we pardon are even pleased, for instance with those lines of Kingsley's above quoted, not because they fallaciously describe foam, but because they faithfully describe sorrow" (68). (The lines were "They rowed her in across the rolling foam--/The cruel, crawling foam.")
And, really, what is the function of poetry? To accurately describe objects, or to describe feelings? "Life is not a series of gig-lamps symmetrically arranged," Virginia Woolf wrote; "Life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end." And it is the writer's task to portray consciousness, "this varying, this unknown and uncircumscribed spirit, whatever aberration or complexity it may display, with as little mixture of the alien and external as possible."
If our thoughts are the origin of language, and if all language is metaphor, then we must use metaphor to accurately convey our thoughts to others. There is nothing intrinsic about the word "table" that makes it mean table--it is only our association that makes it so. So is it with everything. Poetry can describe objects, but really it describes our perception of objects. So Kingsley's lines do accurately describe foam as he perceives it. It is inevitable that humans will describe objects as they perceive them.
And Ruskin writes, "a poet is great, first in proportion to the strength of his passion, and then, that strength being granted, in proportion to his government to it; there being, however, always a point beyond which it would be inhuman and monstrous if he pushed this government, and, therefore, a point at which all feverish and wild fancy becomes just and true" (69-70).
So, Ruskin, once again, has used very strict language only to loosen that strictness to allow that what he decries is sometimes allowable, and even "noble"--so long as it conforms to corresponding with real feeling: "how much this feeling is noble when it is justified by the strength of its cause, by so much it is ignoble when there is not cause for it; and beyond all other ignobleness is the mere affectation of it, in hardness of heart" (70).
But the hope for redeeming oneself even if one does use the pathetic fallacy dissolves with Ruskin's closing sentence--"the main point I insist upon respecting the pathetic fallacy,--that so far as it is a fallacy, it is always the sign of a morbid state of mind, and comparatively of a weak one" (72).
Of course, Oscar Wilde wrote, "The artist is never morbid," and so on to Oscar Wilde we go.
current mood:  contemplative
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| Sunday, October 7th, 2001
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9:32 pm - More Thoughts on John Ruskin
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"Of the Pathetic Fallacy"
While I agree with Ruskin's dislike of awkward personifications, I never liked that he characterizes even a good use of personification as being "always the sign of a morbid state of mind, and comparatively of a weak one" (72). He is concerned, of course, of presenting things as they are, as I read in "Of the Naturalistic Ideal," and personification, of course, asserts that something is what it is not.
Defense of the pathetic fallacy, Ruskin asserts, leads to "a farther opinion, that it does not much matter what things are in themselves, but only what they are to us" (62)--there is Pater! But Ruskin is adamant against any such opinion--it full of "egotism, selfishness, shallowness, and impertinence" (62). To which Wilde would respond, I imagine, "Of course it is, and that is why such an opinion is correct." (Or something much wittier than that. Or something not at all like that.) But Ruskin rails against the slippery slope towards solipsism ("a philosopher may easily go so far as to believe, and say, that everything in the world depends upon his seeing or thinking of it, and that nothing, therefore, exists, but what he sees or thinks of" (62)--O the horror!).
Ruskin boils his argument against the pathetic fallacy to taking Matthew Arnold's side in the question of how one approaches art. The question is one to determine "the difference between the ordinary, proper, and true appearances of things to us; and the extraordinary, or false appearances, when we are under the influence of emotion, or contemplative fancy" (can there be any question of which perspective Ruskin favors with such an objective--and he wouldn't like me using such a word, but who cares--summing up of the two sides as that? Good lord, Ruskin makes me feel sarcastic!); furthermore, "false appearances, I say, as being entirely unconnected with any real power or character in the object, and only imputed to it by us" (64).
I find it hard to believe that Ruskin would have it that the power of Michelangelo's Pieta is in the cold form marble itself, and not in the emotions Michelangelo imbued that marble with so well that they affect us. The Pieta is nothing without a person to look at it, I say, though Ruskin would bring down all his adjectives upon my head. That one believes such a thing doesn't mean that the artist has no say in the matter--if he used his material and tools well, he moves us in a way of his choosing; and if he used his materials and tools very well, he moves in ways he could not have imagined, for he has creating something that resonates, something that contains myriads of meanings that the artist could not have imagined, being confined in his own narrow time and place.
I think I should return to Ruskin when I am feeling a bit less contrary to his point of view.
current mood:  bitchy
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| Tuesday, October 2nd, 2001
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9:28 pm - Thoughts on John Ruskin
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My first thought: John Ruskin is overwhelming. So much to read. So much. And this book I have is only a fraction of his writing. What to do? I looked at the titles of the essays, and found some that seem to fit my line of study. There is far more that fit than what I've been able to read so far, but in the interest of time, it seems I'll have to move on to the poetry and fiction.
"Of the Naturalist Ideal"
For Ruskin, the "central and highest branch of ideal art [. . .] concerns itself simply with things as they are, and accepts, in all of them, alike the evil and the good" (55). That he chooses to make the distinction between evil and good is interesting to me--they are moral categories, something that Aesthetes like Pater and Wilde don't often deal in, at least not directly. The question Ruskin poses after this definition is exactly what makes this definition most interesting--How can something that portrays evil as well as good be ideal at all?
Well, because the ideal is in verisimilitude (a mimetic perspective)--"all the nobleness of the beautiful depends upon its being just as probable and natural as the ugly one, and having in itself, occasionally or partially, both faults and familiarities" (56). An ideal thing is a "real thing," and the artist or writer comes to this reality through a picture--whether in their mind or in the exterior world--that is "in its own kind and degree always a true vision or Apocalypse, and invariably accompanied in their hearts by a feeling correspondent to the words,--'Write the things which thou has seen, and the things which are" (57).
I like the feeling that corresponds to words, for I have been discussing, mostly with myself, the idea that intellect arises out of emotion--that is, examining, contemplating, and understanding one's emotions and the causes of them is an intellectual process, and that all intellectual thought having to do with art should arise from emotion. It's an idea with holes in it, of course. (What did I feel when I read Charlie's story "Footnotes," for example? The novelty of the form excited me, but in the words themselves, and in the story, there was nothing that appealed to the emotions. The form did, however, make me look at the way I perceive the world--how I fill in missing information to form a whole, and that was a revelation. So--there. The intellectual value of "Footnotes" arose out of some kind of self-discovery, which is sort of an emotion, I suppose. Well, onward to Ruskin.)
Ruskin, it seems, was using the words "good" and "evil" for the sake of giving what he calls the "pseudo-idealists" some terms to grasp hold of, for when he goes on to write of the true idealists, he notes that "they do not know or care whether the things they saw are vulgarities or not. They saw them; they are the facts of the case" (58). (This makes me think of Wilde's epigram--"No crime is vulgar, but vulgarity is always a crime.") So, "There is never vulgarity in a whole truth, however commonplace. It may be unimportant or painful. It cannot be vulgar. Vulgarity is only in concealment of truth, or in affectation" (59). (This, now, makes me think of Pater's assertion that the principles of art should extend to one's way of life, and of Wilde's promotion of "artificiality." There is a certain earnestness in Ruskin's work that is--of course!--not present in the later aesthetic critic's work. Perhaps I can trace the development of this cynicism as I read the work. I've made a start here, I think.)
Ruskin also possesses the Victorian's acute sense of their Victorian-ness, and he possesses it in the way that Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh--who characterized the Victorian age as "this live, throbbing age," as vital as any other era--does, not in the despairing way that other Victorians, notably Matthew Arnold and, perhaps, Thomas Carlyle, did. As far as Ruskin can observe, "it is a constant law that the greatest men, whether poets or historians, live entirely in their own age, and that the greatest fruits of their work are gathered out of their own age" (61).
current mood:  rushed
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| Wednesday, September 26th, 2001
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9:17 pm - More Thoughts on The Renaissance
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"Leonardo da Vinci"
Pater describes da Vinci's sketches before he describes his paintings, before the famous flight of fancy on the Mona Lisa. "Legions of grotesques sweep under his hand; for has not nature to her grotesques--the rent rock, the distorting light of evening on lonely roads, the unveiled structure of man in the embryo, or the skeleton?" (105). Here I see perhaps part of the fascination the aesthetic movement held for the grotesque--much is probably also to be found in Ruskin's work, such as Stones of Venice. It seems that the aesthetic movement is an embracing of all things that produce emotion in us--emotion being something to savor and enjoy, even if it is repulsion. The corpse can be beautiful because of the sensations it produces in the viewer. Leonardo paints the head of Medusa "as the head of a corpse, exercising its powers through all circumstances of death. What may be called the fascination of corruption penetrates in every touch its exquisitely finished beauty" (106, my emphasis).
There is more on fleeting moments of import. The landscaped background of his portraits and paintings of the Madonna and Child are "the landscape, not of dreams or of fancy, but of places far withdrawn, and hours elected from a thousand with a miracle of finesse. Through Leonardo's strange veil of sight things reach him so; in no ordinary night or day, but as in faint light of eclipse, or in some brief interval of falling rain at daybreak, or through deep water" (111). And everything seems to hinge on moments for Pater: "Leonardo will never work till the happy moment comes--that moment of bien-źtre, which to imaginative men is a moment of invention. On this moment he waits; other moments are but a preparation, or after-taste of it: (113-114). Pater believes that genius and inspiration are not constant things--they are transitory and fickle; one must wait for them, anticipating their arrival so that they will not flit by, a mere breeze across the skin, unnoticed.
We see also, a projection of Pater onto Leonardo--or perhaps Pater projected what he believed about Leonardo onto himself: "this solitary culture of beauty seems to have hung upon a kind of self-love, and a carelessness in the work of art of all but art itself" (117). This is understandable. I cannot conceive of creating such beautiful works of art as Leonard da Vinci did, and such wonderful imaginative works of science, without loving the creation intensely. And to do what one loves, is to succumb to the love of self that some call selfishness. But, really, where would we be if great men like da Vinci did not indulge themselves? All great harm in the world seems to me to have been caused by those not wishing only to satisfy themselves, but trying to force others to be satisfied as well.
What I find very interesting in Pater's description of the Mona Lisa is that he applauds that "no crude symbolism disturbs the effect of its subdued and graceful mystery" (123). La Gioconda is not a puzzle to solve; no sleuth can study her lines and shades and come out with an answer. She is a work of pure impression, understandable at a glance, and enigmatic upon examination. She is humanity itself, according to Pater, full of the conflict of human existence--"the unfathomable smile, always with a touch of something sinister in it" (124) is something within all of us, something we all recognize when we look at her. What are human souls made of?--"of strange thoughts and fantastic reveries and exquisite passions" (125).
"The School of Georgione"
This essay I found not so much helpful in its treatment of the school of Georgione, but in Pater's excursions into commentary on poetry and art in general. Here I find the oft-repeated assertion that "All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music. For while in all other works of art it is possible to distinguish the matter from the form, and the understanding can always make this distinction, yet it is the constant effort of art to obliterate it" (135). This reminds me of Pater's directions to the aesthetic critic in his introduction: What we need is not a definition of beauty for the intellect, but the ability to feel how we react to beauty. Art is something we should feel, not understand. What was it Wilde said? "Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember that those things most worth knowing cannot be taught"? I'm not inclined to go look up the exact quote right now--the meaning will do.
Ha! The meaning will do. Of course, the words are exactly as they should be to produce the desired effect (if we are to trust Wilde in his wordsmithing), and to change them would be an act of separating matter from form. "Just as many notes as are necessary, Majesty."
Under this definition of art's aspiration, "lyrical poetry, precisely because in it we are least able to detach the matter from the form, without a deduction of something from that matter itself, is [. . .] the highest and most complete form of poetry. And the very perfection of such poetry often seems to depend, in part, on a certain suppression or vagueness of mere subject, so that the meaning reaches us through ways not distinctly traceable by the understanding" (137). Well! This means I will have some trouble formally explicating any lyrical poetry if I am to approach it like an aesthetic critic. If art is "always striving to be independent of the mere intelligence, to become a matter of pure perception, to get rid of its responsibilities to its subject or material" (138), it might seem that my education perhaps has led me in the wrong direction. But I think this isn't so. Love for literature has always been my prime motivator. Tennyson's heart may have stood up and said, "I have felt," but feeling wasn't quite enough, was it? Not if the metered and rhymed stanzas of In Memoriam are any indication.
A unity of sensibility and intellect. I believe in the Taoist concept of wei wu wei. We may come to understanding without striving for understanding if our way of looking at the world is unfettered by overwrought effort, which only leaves deep grooves along our path as we drag it behind us, obliterating everything we have felt.
current mood: peaceful
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| Wednesday, September 19th, 2001
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9:14 pm - Continued Thoughts on The Renaissance
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"Luca della Robbia" and "The Poetry of Michelangelo"
Della Robbia was as much a craftsman as an artisan, so it is intriguing to find how an aesthetic critic goes about the task of admiring what is useful. ("One can forgive a man for making a useful thing, so long as he does not admire it," Wilde wrote in the preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray.) What Pater seems to admire most in Robbia's earthenware work, in the palely painted fruit and the blue-and-white painted terra cotta, is "the seal on a man's work of what is most inward and peculiar in his moods, and manner of express: it is what we call expression, carried to its highest intensity of degree" (71-72). So what he values isn't the usefulness of the object, but the expression present in that useful object. Hmm. . .
Before all this, however, Pater describes 15th century Tuscan bas-relief--probably what Michelangelo emulated in his early work, like the Madonna of the Stairs (which actually is 15th century Tuscan bas relief, but late 15th century). Bas-relief doesn't appeal to me--it seems too faint for sculpture, too timid.
But perhaps I might look at it differently. Pater calls low relief a means of impressing upon stone "the wasting and etherealisation of death" (64). It's a means to convey fleeting expression in stone, a medium usually given to "a hard realism" (65). The preservation of transitory moments is important to the Aesthete, or so I've read, and this is evidence towards confirming that assertion.
How can one preserve a moment without making it look lifeless and frozen? According to Pater, one needs "to purge from the individual all that belongs only to him"--which seems incongruous with his admiration for the personal expression in Robbia's useful items--to strive for "detachment from the conditions of a particular place of people" (66). The Greeks did this, Pater writes, but at the expense of expression; the Renaissance, however, inherited a "spirit of inwardness and introspection" (67) from the Middle Ages.
So comes Michelangelo to sculpture: He avoids hard realism in form so as not to detract from expression; he infuses his sculpture with spiritual life by leaving the physical form in a state of "incompleteness" (68). A combination of strangeness and charm is necessary in art, asserts Pater: We have seen it in Botticelli's paintings; and it is present in Michelangelo's work--in his sculpture, his painting, and his poetry.
What separates medieval art from classical art is "the presence of a convulsive energy" (73), which is "felt, even in its most graceful products, as a subdued quaintness or grotesque" (74). And, it seems, convulsive energy is something that is entirely human--for Michelangelo, "the world of natural things has almost no existence" (74). So it is in his sculpture and painting, and so it is in his poetry: "Beneath the Platonic calm of the sonnets there is latent a deep delight in carnal form and colour" (81). And yet--"Michelangelo is always pressing forward from the outward beauty [...] to apprehend the unseen beauty [...]--that abstract of beauty about which the Platonists reason" (87).
This description of Michelangelo's speaks to something of the aesthetes: "He is much occupied with thoughts of the grave, and his true mistress is death; death at first as the worst of all sorrows and disgraces, with a clod of the field for its brain; afterwards, death in its high distinction, its detachment form vulgar needs, the angry stains of life and action escaping fast" (88).
So is this how we might reconcile Pater's assertion that Michelangelo's poetry has a Platonic calm, with the assertion that beneath its surface is a delight in carnality? Is death the connection for Pater? Struggle against death, defiance of death, is delighting in the carnal--indulging in life; acceptance of death is contemplating beauty that is subtler than carnal pleasures. And there is no reason that they cannot exist at once. Perhaps?
More contemplation of Platonism, death and of fleeting moments: "After death [...] the traces of slighter and more superficial dispositions disappear; [...] only the abstract lines remain, in a great indifference, and the Florentine artists of the Renaissance "came to see death in its distinction, [...] dwelling for a moment on the point where all that transitory dignity must break up, and discerning it with no clearness a new body, they paused just in time, and abstained, with a sentiment of profound pity" (93-94; my italics). Abstained, that is, from preoccupying themselves with death, from creating something that is "merely morbid or grotesque" (93).
What is epiphany to Pater--how does he describe it?--"a dream that lingers a moment, retreating in the dawn, incomplete, aimless, helpless; a thing with faint hearing, faint memory, faith power of touch; a breath, a flame in the doorway, a feather in the wind" (96).
There is an interesting flow of understanding in Pater's criticism--Michelangelo's combination of "sweetness and strength" (97) can be found in work that followed him--the work of William Blake and Victor Hugo--and their work helps us understand him, while his work interprets and justifies them. What is in Michelangelo's future, then, is key to understanding him, while what is in Blake and Hugo's past is key to understanding them.
I've finished The Renaissance, but I am much behind in my journals. There is so much to think about.
current mood: contemplative
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