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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.
Sunday, October 05, 2008
George Szirtes writes on the mutability of signifier and signified alike:"Writers rely on the precarious stability of language. It's like an artist not trusting fugitive colours. I think of Blake on Reynolds:
When Sir Joshua Reynolds died
All Nature was degraded;
The King dropp'd a tear into the Queen's ear,
And all his pictures faded.
Reynolds experimented with Lake colours that decayed far too quickly - in his own lifetime.
Writers depend on stable reference. Signifier should bear some reasonably constant relationship to signified. It has often been said that part of a poet's function is celebration: the preservation of fleeting phenomena in a medium that is, ideally, less fleeting. That is why all kinds of people write verses on weddings, birthdays, funerals. They are attempts to carve something into the language. You can't carve into that which is fugitive. Even the writing down of events in diaries in the plainest of prose is an attempt at carving.
There is an implication here that, by extension, the referents themselves should remain stable. This would include social circumstances, cultural practices, ideas, values, desires and even dreams: it seems to demand an ossified world of stable meanings. Márai's novelist tells us that his values, his compass, his entire craft depends on a vanishing social framework. He is working down a mine where the coal is all but exhausted. The colours are fading even as he writes.
We could regard him as a hidebound reactionary and indeed, in some ways he is. But that is not all he is. His whole aesthetic is based on the knowledge that the seam has been almost, if not quite, worked out, that the colours are fading. This, he tells us, is the nature of things. He is an elegist by nature, meaning that he gazes upon things dying and is not wholly consoled by a glance at things new born."
The likes of Sandor Marai and Joseph Roth (or Ford Maddox Ford to take an English example) are seeking to document the collapse of an entire form of social order (in this immediate example, the destruction of the Austro Hungarian Empire). In that sense, they have more in common with nineteenth century writers like Balzac, Scott that documented the near past with a suspicious eye on the present, than they do with many of their modernist contemporaries. While a preoccupation with social change is not necessarily mutually exclusive with the modernist fascination with the instability of language (Woolf or Broch for instance) the two have a rather fraught relationship. One particularly good example of this is Andrei Biely's St Petersburg, a novel that is ostensibly concerned with the acts of terrorism in Tadrist Russia that were leading to the Russian revolution. The theme is misleading as the narrative tends to approach events symbolically rather than through the lens of historical realism. Instead of social tensions, events are depicted through a set of chiastic oppositions; reason and unreason, occidental and oriental (at times it reads more like Sax Rohmer than Conrad's The Secret Agent). St Petersburg is at once a real city with places that can be found on the map and also a Escheresque labyrinth made unreal by mists ("he wondered as in a dream about the relation of appearance to reality"); the geometry of the enlightenment reverts to the swamp that lies beneath it. Unsurprisingly, the mutability of language emerges as a recurrent theme; "my words get entangled... a modernist would call it the sensation of the abyss and search for an image."Labels: Literature
posted by Richard 8:22 pm
