I am looking at Thomas Hardy: The World of His Novels (2013, Frances Lincoln Limited) by J. B. Bullen, an English Professor at Royal Holloway University of London. Looking at much more than reading, since the book features many images, mostly Bullen’s own photos showing the correspondences between Hardy’s fantasy world and what for the sake of argument I will call the real world. For example, here is the real Cross-in-Hand pillar, “desolate and silent,” “the site of a miracle, or murder, or both” (Ch. 44), from a public photo, not Bullen’s. An essential book for planning your walking tour of Wessex. Don’t lose your boots.
Much of Tess of the d’Urbervilles chapter is spent on a different kind of image, as Bullen works through references to a number of J. M. W. Turner paintings; some are speculation, some are sure things. It is all tied into the sun theme. I knew it. I noticed the sun motif too late.
Tess is full of paintings. In a comment, Trednyas Days points to a good example:
Walking among the sleeping birds in the hedges, watching the skipping rabbits on a moonlit warren, or standing under a pheasant-laden bough, she looked upon herself as a figure of Guilt intruding into the haunts of Innocence. (Ch. 13)
Those are some calm pheasants. Hardy could be inventing the entire scene, but its explicitly allegorical nature makes me suspect he has a painting in mind. Perhaps something he saw in Belgium.
I noticed the narrator twice referring to Belgian painters, a surprising theme. In Chapter 16, he describes the Valley of the Dairies as “speckled as thickly with them [cows] as a canvas by Van Alsloot or Sallaert with burghers,” and in Chapter 39, in one of the oddest lines in the novel, the disillusionment of Angel Clare is described in terms of painting:
Nevertheless humanity stood before him no longer in the pensive sweetness of Italian art, but in the staring and ghastly attitudes of a Wiertz Museum, and with the leer of a study by Van Beers.
“Ghastly” is an interesting word to trace through Tess, but I’ll stick with the paintings. Antoine Wiertz, judging by his most famous painting, was the greatest painter of the 19th century, but do not be too hasty – he was more typically terrible. I have pulled a detail from the mammoth The Greeks and the Trojans Fighting over the Body of Patroclus which may be the kind of thing on Hardy’s mind. The harmless Jan van Beers (“a minor Belgian painter,” the Norton editor deadpans in a footnote) is more of a puzzle. Maybe this is a leer?
Angel Clare’s understanding of Italian art is pretty narrow, I’ll say that.
What puzzles me most about the explicit use (Turner is never named) of the Flemish and Belgian painters is what readers of Tess made of them. Were Van Alsloot and Van Beers commonly understood references? Did readers think “Oh, like Wiertz, what a shocking view of life”? I know that today’s readers, the ones who love Tess, have looked up these artists and can answer my questions about them. But how about the late Victorian readers? I need another book.
No author knows who'll read his books, so the best thing he can do as a writer, I think, is just write a book he's proud of, and let the readers worry about the reading. The idea of responsibility seems out of place when discussing art.
ReplyDeleteI can completely understand writing a book in this manner, assembling bits of landscape, and paintings, and writing my characters into paintings and writing the paintings into the backgrounds of scenes, and referring the sun to paintings not explicitly mentioned in the narrative, etc. I totally get this method of construction. Throw everything into a hydraulic press, flatten it and see what it looks like.
ReplyDeleteI see you haven't killed the threaded comment function.
I am worried I will break something if I kill "Reply." It will take some mental preparation to make the attempt.
ReplyDeleteYes, the method makes sense to me, too, and in Hardy's case appears to be - as is usual with Hardy - in places artful, deeply interesting, well worth exploring, and in places less so.
In a way, my question about the Belgian painters is something like "How private were these references"? I have no idea.
When I wrote my dissertation I had the responsibility to give my supervisor something that allowed him to sign a form saying the work met the requirements for a PhD. In art, though, I don't see how the idea of "responsibility" makes any sense. I don't understand what the term even means in this context. What should Dante have done differently?
Communication with whom? Allusions that are obscure to some are known to others.
ReplyDeleteNone of the writers you mention wrote only for themselves, in the sense that they published their work. All of them have communicated effectively with many readers. Haven't they?
Maybe you have another example in mind. Are you going after Emily Dickinson?
R.T. is hinting at some very interesting points. For example, the author of the Voynich manuscript wrote only for himself (and maybe a chosen few), as far as we know; Gongorist writers even named their poetry collections as "Paradises closed to the many, gardens open for the few".
ReplyDeleteBut why all this willed verbal complexity and opaque allusions? Perhaps the psalmist explained best the aims of this reaching beyond ordinary language: "The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims his handiwork. Day to day pours out meaning, and night to night reveals knowledge. There is no speech, nor are there words."
Zen practitioners will be very familiar with this concept of reaching beyond words and ordinary meaning via abstruse, erudite sentences. After all, doesn't all art constantly aspire towards the condition of music?
Yes, the answers to the first two "Can..." questions are obviously "Yes - can and do."
ReplyDeleteEvery field creates its own esotericism. The study of the history of the arts is a decoding of the cipher. Or perhaps a reading of the musical score. Maybe it is not art that aspires to the condition of music, but historians, critics.
I keep hearing that claim about the aspiration of art, but what exactly is the condition of music?
ReplyDeletePater means, roughly, abstraction, pure form. This is why he is a patron saint of the early 20th century visual art, when many artists - Kandinsky - said "Let's stop aspiring and do it."
ReplyDeleteYes, I guess some music is like that. And some isn't. If I understand Pater correctly, I suppose he's probably wrong about a lot of art/artists.
ReplyDeleteHe's wrong like Ruskin is wrong. A condition of wrongness to which I aspire.
ReplyDeleteOkay, that's entirely respectable. I've never read any Pater. He sounds like the right kind of wrong.
DeleteMy observation has been that art does many different things.
ReplyDeleteVisit any the contemporary wing of any art museum and you will see a great deal of communication of the obvious.
Mandatory Borges' quote:
ReplyDeleteMusic, feelings of happiness, mythology, faces worn by time, certain twilights and certain places, want to tell us something, or they told us something that we should not have missed, or they are about to tell us something; this imminence of a revelation that never actually happens is, perhaps, the essence of art.
Ah, more Pater, very nice.
ReplyDeleteA recent translation of "The Wall and the Books."
"La murilla y los libros."
RT - Of course we have different philosophies of art!
For a good discussion, I want to strongly suggest fewer questions and more direct statements. This is not the Socratic classroom. We are all peers. Just say what you are thinking. Drop the indirection.
Delete"present yourself," "the posture you have adopted" - now see that us just the sort of place where you should be as specific as possible lest you be misunderstood. I have no idea what you mean.
DeleteI see that the posts I wrote about my "rules for discussion of literature" are six years old. Maybe I should rewrite them. They are the same rules advocated by D. G. Myers:
"what is needed are more book bloggers for whom the stakes are high and for whom personal dignity and reputation take a back seat to the advancement of literature.
And this would require book bloggers who are committed to argument—who are sworn to defend the books they cherish from those who would make a hash of them..."
I love having coffee. I'm having coffee right now!
Regarding the contemporary Warholian and Jeff Koonsian wings of museums, a mandatory Kafka quote (from his conversations with Janouch):
ReplyDeletePhotographic images conceal more than they reveal. They do not reach the bottom of things in which all contradictions find their resolution. In their case the representation of an event is only a means of earning money. In this sense, [modern, ultra-realistic] drawings are more obvious and therefore less valuable than the primitive woodcuts of the old illustrated children books. At least, those still left some room for the imagination with which we could escape from inside of our own selves. But these paintings do not. They cut the wings of the imaginative capacity. The more graphic techniques improve, the weaker our eyes become. This machinery dulls the sensory organs. The same problem applies to optics, acoustics...
It feels like we have ideal conditions this year for the creation of the worst political art in American history. Don't let me down, artists of today!
ReplyDeleteIf I lived in the American Southeast, I would definitely roadtrip to Miami Basel in December, hint hint.
"It is the mistake of much popular criticism to regard poetry, music, and painting — all the various products of art — as but translations into different languages of one and the same fixed quantity of imaginative thought, supplemented by certain technical qualities of colour, in painting; of sound, in music; of rhythmical words, in poetry. In this way, the sensuous element in art, and with it almost everything in art that is essentially artistic, is made a matter of indifference; and a clear apprehension of the opposite principle — that the sensuous material of each art brings with it a special phase or quality of beauty, untranslatable into the forms of any other, an order of impressions distinct in kind — is the beginning of all true aesthetic criticism. For, as art addresses not pure sense, still less the pure intellect, but the "imaginative reason" through the senses, there are differences of kind in aesthetic beauty, corresponding to the differences in kind of the gifts of sense themselves. Each art, therefore, having its own peculiar and untranslatable sensuous charm, has its own special mode of reaching the imagination, its own special responsibilities to its material."
ReplyDeleteResponsibilities to the material. Yes, that sounds about right.
"The School of Giorgione" is quite a performance.
ReplyDeleteI have Marius the Epicurean at home. Maybe I'll actually read it now.
ReplyDeleteOne odd book.
ReplyDeleteI can no longer predict what allusions a reader will understand. A woman angrily accused me of alienating readers by making deliberately obscure references, because I mentioned Nostradamus in a column I wrote. She'd never heard of him, therefore he was obscure. I guess we have to stick to mentioning only movies and TV shows.
ReplyDeleteYes, those never go out of date. I pity the poor college professors my age (this is based on actual conversations), discovering that their carefully curated Simpsons and Seinfeld references have disintegrated in their hands, jokes now older than their students.
ReplyDeleteTo me, it is a Golden Age of allusion. I can spend half an hour looking at Jan van Beers paintings on the internet. Fun.
For many - most? - people, I fear you have correctly defined "obscure."