‘The artist is the man who has nothing to say’
I don’t know exactly what this is. I ran across it on YouTube a few months ago, and occasionally I go look at it again. I often watch it a second time.
It’s a short film based on “The Lives of Girls and Women” by Alice Munro, though there is no actual story. It’s all images, music, and some disembodied lines from the book. It’s an impressionistic picture, I suppose, of what the filmmaker felt, reading Munro’s work.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lfvRf-yz6no
I’m not sure what made me want to post this this week. I spent last week spoiling for a fight with David Shields, the literary gadfly who likes to take dismissive shots at the modern novel, and who exhibits a disdain for Munro that drives me crazy. His most recent work — a collage of a “manifesto,” Reality Hunger, shaped with pieces of quotation and/or appropriation from a lifetime of reading — is a fascinating project. I haven’t read it, though I plan to, and I’m responding here more to what he has said in interviews. He often gets the most attention simply for his dislike of the novel.
It’s OK with me to not like novels. To be bored with them. But it is hubristic to decide that because you don’t like novels, the form is bankrupt. It’s not as if Shields has some fundamental affinity for the novel, but feels novelists have lost their way, or something. He doesn’t like novels at all. Finds them boring. Dislikes all the things that make a novel a novel.
The novel is failing David Shields, as far as I can tell, by not being something completely different. It’s like criticizing horses for not being cows.
I was scouring an interview at The Millions with Shields, looking for fodder, and came across an interview with John Banville. (Here’s a Willow Springs interview with Shields, and an excerpt from Reality Hunger).
I like Banville. Loved “The Sea.” He’s a graceful writer, a literary stylist, the kind of guy Shields likely has no use for. It reminded me that this whole argument is one of taste, preference, and nothing more.
Both Banville and Shields spoke to the the subject of “ideas” in writing. First, Shields:
I’m interested in ideas. I love the first chapter of The Great Gatsby, because Nick Carraway is thinking really well about things for 20 pages. The rest of the book is a snooze, because it’s just a bunch of sops to the lazy reader, otherwise known as not particularly revelatory plot developments. I wake up a little for the last 2 pages. So, too, I adore the introduction toSlaughterhouse-Five. The best 30 pages Vonnegut ever wrote. That’s the entire book, compressed to thought, to consciousness. What separates us is not what happens to us. Pretty much the same things happen to us: birth, love, death. What I want is to gain access to how you think.
Here’s Banville:
I constantly say one of my absolute mottos is from Kafka, where he says the artist is the man who has nothing to say. I have nothing to say. I have no opinions about anything. I don’t care about physical, moral, social issues of the day. I just want to recreate the sense of what life feels like, what it tastes like, what it smells like. That’s what art should do. I feel it should be absolutely gloriously useless.
Hear, hear. Which brings me back to that video. Ironically, a collage. Gloriously useless. I have no idea what connection it is attempting to make with Munro, but as a mood, an atmosphere, an emotional terrain, an aesthetic thrill, it seems perfect. Not an “idea” in sight.
Banville’s line makes me think of Chekhov’s “My concern is to write, not to teach.” And Wilde:
“We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely.
All art is quite useless.”
i love that wilde line, and particularly so in this context…
Does it make me less of an artist to suggest they’re all crock full? I love ideas in my art. It’s the connections to other things, to life in general that I find beautiful. That said, I don’t see how the gentleman could possibly gain access to how anyone thinks if he’s not willing to travel the length. Maybe the same events happen to us, but the viewpoint of those events is not the same, and that matters in how people think. I want ideas and beauty and use; I guess I’m just a greedy reader.
No, there’s nothing wrong with ideas in art. There isn’t even anything wrong with idea-driven art. And you’re right that everyone has their own viewpoint.
But when the art is good, the idea invariably inspires some kind of exploration, instead of a speech. Writers who have something they want to say, instead of a character they want to follow or an idea they want to think about, end up turning everything in the narrative into support for their thesis, and poisoning whatever the art was going to be.
I don’t know that good art has ever had a practical use. Picasso’s Guernica didn’t end war. And useful writing, the kind that causes change, is along the lines of The Jungle or Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
Sure, good art isn’t a hammer and I know defining the word “practical” would be something we should do here but art captures the emotion of a time. There would be no lasting memory of the anguish of Spain’s Civil War if “Guernica” didn’t capture it. Sure there is video footage and pictures and texts but they just relay facts about an experience, sensory data, not the emotion behind it all. And if they do begin to relay the emotion they become art themselves. I think this ability that art has, to transport experience, makes it extremely useful.
It does have that ability, but the lasting memory of the anguish of the Spanish Civil War has had, if the rest of the century is any indication, no effect on human behavior. It’s useful for understanding, but it’s not useful in a way that’s applicable, which is what people who write polemics ARE trying to be.
I guess my point is that Picasso isn’t trying to make a statement about the war, or about anguish. He just feels anguish.
I agree with that but I think he not only feels emotion but tries to capture it as well. I think there is a difference there.
And when I say it is useful I mean it is as useful to us as a stick is to pre-tool using neanderthals.
But I think its use will be considered “applicable” one day.
Yes people who write polemics are trying to be applicable and that is why they fail, and why I agree with you on that, because in their search to be useful they trade emotional transport for informational transport. And then art fails to be art.
I lean heavily toward Banville, obviously, but would not go so far as to say I don’t want any ideas at all. I just want them embedded, not in the forefront. I want to experience them, not think them. if that makes any sense.
I think there is no such thing as idea-less writing. They will be there. They just might not be what you want them to be. So you can manipulate them to make your point (but if you’re doing that as a fiction or poetry writer, I’d rather have you write an essay.)
Zadie Smith wrote an interesting response to Shields’ book, but it has since been removed from the world wide web. Or at least I can’t find it.
I think Dan’s point that I agreed with was that there is ideas in art but they aren’t there to relay information or to incite some kind of strategy rather they are there to “inspire some kind of exploration.” And we were discussing whether that should be considered “useful.”
I’m going to steal your line “It’s like criticizing horses for not being cows.”
Great post Shawn and I love that video. I think I might often return to this post to see it again, because I’m too lazy to look it up on YouTube for myself. Does anybody know what piece of music that is?
[...] I really don’t have anything to say this week. Or maybe I’ve just been inspired by Shawn’s post. Regardless, all I have to share are the [...]
[...](is the) link of Glenn Danzig getting punched in the face [...]