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I tolerate this century, but I don't enjoy it.
All of the ephemera that is far too trivial to be bothered with elsewhere on this site or, depending on your point of view, a meta-commentary on it. This ephemera includes, but is not limited to art, music and literature. Most of the content here will be discussed in terms that are as abstract as possible, reality being a singularly overrated concept.
Saturday, August 06, 2005
Sometime ago, I came across an unually interesting meme. Based on an idea from the Vienna circle whereby each of the propositions in Wittgenstein's Tractatus was declared to be either true or false, it suggested doing the same to Alain Badiou's Fifteen Theses on Contemporary Art. On the whole, I don't think that the idea that statements can be verified in this manner is worth spending too much time and certainly not in the case of Badiou, many of whose theses reflect a very specfic policitical worldview. However, I was struck by one of the propositions:"Every art develops from an impure form, and the progressive purification of this impurity shapes the history both of a particular artistic truth and of its exhaustion."
It's not an obviously flawed idea, but I'd still have to answer false. Clearly, influence will inevitably work to alter and even refine what has preceded it but the thesis still asumes that purity in art is necessarily a welcome concept. The most extreme example here is Shakespeare, who seemed to me best described by Camille's Paglia's comment that she was alwasy struck by the implacable density and hostility of Shakespeare's writing, its resistance to all interpretation. While much of Shakespeare seems to be all pattern and symmetry, it is equally true to say that it is all shifting perspectives and lacunae. When Eliot bemoaned the absence of an objective correlative in Hamlet he had identified the source of its power; interpretation runs off it like water from a duck's feathers, ensuring that it can always be renewed and reinterpreted.
At the same extreme are modern writers like Kafka and Coetzee. The protagonists of The Trial and The Castle have no key to the events that unfold around them and neither does the reader, with political, relgious and even Freudian interpretations seeming equally applicable and inapplicable. Coetzee's characters are equally denied access to self-knowledge; Elizabeth Costello speaks of how her beliefs are only provisional, Michael K simply has no lexicon to explain himself. In spite of the humour in Kafka and Shakespeare there's is nonetheless something hostile about both of them a certain glacial quality that comes from never being able to get close to any of their works, to penetrate to the heart of what they are about.
By contrast, I always liked John Bayley's The Uses of Division for its argument that the imperfections in a work were what brought it to life, what made it appraochable were Shakespeare and Kafka are forbidding and impersonal. Another theorist, Mikhail Bakhtin argued that the novel in particular would always thwart aesthetic purity; its different registers and voices would always create something characterised by different perspectives, something polyphonic. Ambiguities and uncertainties remain but appear more human. I think of how DH Lawrence's anxieties over his sexuality created fractures in his visions of new modes of being, of how George Eliot's sense of empathy for the lost meant that she could never quite depict sacrificeand sympathy in the way her system demanded, of how Hardy's social convictions could never be quite brought to tally with his pessimistic Schophenhauerian worldview. There's something endlessly fascinating about these imperfections, largely because they are so immediately apparent to us.Labels: Hermeneutics, Interpretation, Literature
posted by Richard 6:12 pm
