Edith Wharton's semiotics - they all lived in a kind of hieroglyphic world

In reality they all lived in a kind of hieroglyphic world, where the real thing was never said or done or even thought, but only represented by a set of arbitrary signs…  (Ch. 6)

This line is not from an essay on semiotics, but from The Age of Innocence (1920), so in a sense, yes, from an essay on semiotics, but ahead of its time is what I am saying.

Newland Archer is the smartest and most sophisticated member of the tiny social elite of New York circa 187-, but that does not stop him from getting into a little bit of trouble with an interesting and exotic woman.  It almost stops him, and the behind-the-scenes scheming of that society, his family and fiancée and a number of others, including the interesting woman, does stop him.

This is a classic 20th century story, used in many novels.  The smart guy is not as smart as he thinks he is, and the dumb people around him are not as dumb as he thinks they are.  The point of view stays very close to Newland, allowing me to share and enjoy his surprise and defeats.

This is all a representation of Wharton’s world, but she would have been in her teens at the time.

Newland’s sophistication is shown, again and again, by his interest in poetry.  There is quite a lot of signification of taste in The Age of Innocence.  Just a few lines after the “hieroglyphic” quotation, Wharton shows us Newland training his fiancée in the proper understanding of Tennyson:

(She was advanced far enough to join him in ridiculing the Idyls of the King, but not to feel the beauty of Ulysses and the Lotus Eaters.)

This is how Wharton undermines sympathy in Newland, with whom I, the reader, am stuck.  His taste is perfect, correct, but geez.  “His boyhood had been saturated with Ruskin, and he had read all the latest books” (Ch. 9).  Or how about this, an unboxing video, without the video: “That evening he unpacked his books from London,” finding Herbert Spencer, Alphonse Daudet, “and a novel called ‘Middlemarch,’ as to which there had lately been interesting things said in the reviews” (Ch. 15).

One of the novellas, thankfully only one (“False Dawn”), in Old New York (1924) is entirely about the arbitrary signifiers of taste.  A young American does his Grand Tour with a big budget for paintings, but he has the misfortune of encountering, in Switzerland, the young John Ruskin, who corrupts his tastes and leads him to blow his money on obscure antique painters like Giotto and Fra Angelico rather than Guido Reni and Salvator Rosa, which poisons his relationship with his father – poisons his father – “it was the affair of the pictures that head killed him” (Ch. 7) – and eventually his life.

The giant, crashing irony is that although it would not be so bad to own (and sell) a Rosa, Ruskin and his pre-Raphaelite pals had led the young sap to the “right” paintings, worth a fortune in 1924 (and still today).  This irony is rubbed in on the last page, but you, educated and sophisticated in art history, will have gotten it long before that.

I do not know if “False Dawn” Is good, exactly, but it was fascinating to see Wharton deal with Ruskin and the arbitrary signifiers so directly.  It was clearly on her mind for some reason.

Why conceptual art? - against "a kind of inhuman hyperprofessionalism"

How did we get here?  Meaning, in this week’s context, how did we get to a point where Alvin Lucier’s recording of a mechanically distorted bit of speech can be credibly placed among the most important pieces of music of the 20th century.  Why does anyone worry about, while writing a novel, the alphabeticization of the words, like Walter Abish did?   How on earth did we get to – to – to – this:

If that image does not immediately appear at the website of Jeff Koons, click on “Inflatables” – or better yet, do not.  That place is a chamber of horrors.

More to the point, why are these works so prestigious and important.  No, that is easy.  They are pres. & imp. because certain other people believe they are p. & i., but I have just moved the target of the Why? and added a Who?

I don’t know the answers.  I am always looking for evidence.  Part of my pursuit of Austrian literature was a search for clues.  I found plenty.  A lot changed around 1900 – or 1910, Virginia Woolf says everything changed in 1910.  Maybe so.

I am so glad Rise pointed me to César Aira’s essay on conceptual art.  It is worth revisiting.  Aira has a good one-word explanation: professionalization.  This is what he means:

Once a professional novelist is established, he has two equally melancholy alternatives: to keep writing the ‘old’ novels in updated settings; or to heroically attempt to take one or two more steps forward.  This last possibility turned out to be a dead end within a few years: while Balzac wrote fifty novels, and still had time to live, Flaubert wrote five, shedding blood in the process.  Joyce wrote two, and Proust a single novel, and it was a work that took over his life, absorbing it, a kind of inhuman hyperprofessionalism. The fact is that being able to make a living from literature was a momentary and precarious state which could only happen at a determined moment in history.

The avant garde, a focus on concept and process rather than content, is Aira’s way to break the impasse, “an attempt to recuperate the amateur gesture” rather than trying to outdo Proust.  Note Aira’s strong sense of progress in the arts.  One could quibble with some of Aira’s evidence.

Now, lots of people write and far more read lightly updated versions of the old novels, Flaubert and Proust for our time (or Austen and Dickens), and they can find readers, and receive awards and critical praise.  This is the big difference between literature and classical music or fine art.  The audience for new work in fiction is much larger, and the avant gardists have not captured whatever mechanism is it that distributes prestige.  Sometimes I think they have captured poetry, other times I am not so sure.  But fiction is too big. Too – no, I don’t know what.

I thought about writing this post as a series of questions.  What is innovation in fiction?  How does originality differ from innovation?  Is there a taste for innovation?  And once I answer these questions, if I can, I have to historicize them – would the answers be the same in Shakespeare’s time, or Johnson’s, or even Dickens’s?  No – so what changed, and why?  I don’t know, I don’t know.

To return to my first paragraph, since I feel bad about lumping them together for illustrative purposes – Lucier is narrow and brilliant, Abish is narrow and interesting, Koons is a con man.

Image Blogger Appreciation Day

Welcome to Image Blog Appreciation Day!  My favorites:

Will Schofield’s 50 Watts is the reconfiguration of the legendary Journey Round My Skull, a repository for the most penetrating, surprising, and perplexing images he can find, and he has a good eye.  I could look  - or, really, stare - at those 19th century Danish puppet theaters all day.  The site has become an archive of book covers, textbook illustrations, children’s books, and miscellaneous weirdness that I now find overwhelming.  He does have a Greatest Hits page.  I want to emphasize, though, the literariness of the site, the sense that the images featured on 50 Watts are collaborating with the texts I wrestle with, that Victor Hugo’s paintings or Pataphysical artifacts or French sequels to Pinocchio are part of whatever story I am trying to tell, too, if I only understood them better.

50 Watts is my most frequent source for the images I steal for my internet avatar, including my current head of wheat.  Although 50 Watts is significantly less bloggish than Journey Round My Skull, I still designate it the Greatest Blog Ever.

Jane Librizzi, proprietor of The Blue Lantern, is also a storyteller – all of these bloggers are.  Librizzi is a master of pairing text and image, whether the text is a famous poem or her own essay.  This piece on Mariana Griswold von Rensselaer is a good example.  She also understands how literature and images interpenetrate – see this expert review of Theodor Fontane  and this little biography of Djuna Barnes.

Neil Philips, of Adventures in the Print Trade, has contributed valuable comments to Wuthering Expectations now and then.  His own blog would be dangerous if I lived in England, because it is part of his shop, and if he cannot sell you the image he features, I bet he can find something just as nice.

I have borrowed an amazing linocut by Norbertine Bresslern-Roth to showcase Neil, but I want to feature a recent post titled “Keeping Impressionism at bay” in which Neil uses an illustrated book of poems to deftly summarize and challenge the standard art history narrative.  Now that is too big a subject, the useful and frustrating contrasts between literary history, art history, music history, and so on, the way the field’s tell their own stories.  Some other time.  Neil’s post is a sort of primer on the subject.

Philip Wilkinson’s English Buildings is not exactly an image blog, but in the end it functions similarly.  He helps his readers see buildings carefully, to really look at them.  Then, after looking, to learn something about the period and history of the building.  Then to look again.  Wilkinson is a widely published specialist on English architecture, and he uses the blog to explore some areas that the standard architectural histories do not emphasize.

Every blog I have listed has this in common:  they know their field, and the story people in the field tell, how this movement led to that one, and this artist influenced the other, but they understand how inadequate and limiting that story is, and they push back against it in all sorts of fascinating ways.

I would feel bad if I omitted Steerforth and The Age of Uncertainty, another great scrounger of old images.  Steerforth is opening a bookstore – best wishes!

I would feel worse if I did not mention that all of these bloggers are unusually good writers – clear in their arguments, thoughtful in their choices.  When I visit their sites, what I mostly do is look, which is right.  But I also read with real pleasure.