Art Versus Life for the Heavyweight Title of the World

In an essay entitled “Examined Lives,” (The American Scholar, Autumn 2013) the prominent biographer Phyllis Rose makes the following statement: “The material does not make the work. The life does not make the art. Exactly the opposite. The work creates the material. The art creates the life…it’s the imagination that creates the life not vice versa.” As Rose points out, Proust argues a similar point in his essay Contre Sainte-Beuve which is condemnation of the biographical interpretation of literature as practiced by the Charles Augustine Sainte-Beuve, the l9th century critic who was a thorn in his side. It’s a stunning statement by someone who has devoted her life to the study of writers. In one sense, Rose starts her essay by closing the door on a whole area of understanding that involves following the footsteps of the author. But she soon makes a turn around. Citing the case of Paul de Man, an exemplar of the French school, who turned out to have written anti-semitic screeds, she concludes denying the validity of the writer’s life, as the American counterparts of the French school the text oriented new critics did, discountenances much valuable anecdotal material that can illuminate a writer’s work. Rose writes, “To take Edmund Wilson’s essay on Dickens in The Wound and the Bow as an example: he explored how Dickens’s childhood experience of being sentenced to what he saw as slave labor by his parents affected his future sympathies and themes.” So in the end what Rose is advocating is that the biographer must navigate a fine line between what Kierkegaard called the esthetic and the ethical view. Whether biography ever climbs to the most evolved of the categories Kierkegaard offers, the religious, might in the end depend on the equanimity with which the biographer is able to approach the two sides of a writer’s life. In any event, the study is of literature is for Rose as spiritual act. “We want to learn the secret of creativity, because it can be the secret to happiness,” Rose writes. “We  turn to all kinds of literature, biography and fiction both, to learn how to live, and in a way, all books are self-help books."

The Death of the Cyberflaneur

“The advent of street traffic made contemplative strolling dangerous. The arcades were soon replaced by larger, utilitarian department stores. Such rationalization of city life drove flaneurs underground, forcing some of them into a sort of ‘internal flanerie’ that reached its apogee in Marcel Proust’s self-imposed exile in his cork-lined room (situated, ironically, on Boulevard Haussmann),” wrote Evgeny Morozov, in a Times Op Ed piece called “The Death of the Cyberflaneur" (NYT, 2/4/12). Morozov points out the concept of the flaneur was a product of the sensibilities of a wide swath of l9th and 20^th century intellects from Baudelaire to Benjamin and presupposed a kind of urbanity that wasn’t so structured as to mitigate against the solitary intellect, the wanderer, the seeker who didn't know what he was looking for. Morozov goes onto compare the world of l9th century Paris with its arcades to the Internet of the ‘90’s whose early search engines like Internet Explorer were conduciveness to browsing. Carrying Morozov’s point further, can we say that Google and later Facebook did to the Internet what Robert Moses did to the New York Metropolitan area and before that Haussmann to Paris and that the modernity both bring is purchased at the cost of the indigenous life? Traffic speeds forward but many neighborhoods are marginalized along the way. “If today’s internet has a Baron Haussmann, it is Facebook,” Morozov remarks, “Everything that makes cyberflanerie possible—solitude and individuality, anonymity and opacity, mystery and ambivalence, curiosity and risk-taking—is under assault by that company.” Advances are always met with a nostalgia for an idealized past, but if the slower pace is so much preferred, why is the walker still urged to get a horse?

Bergman, Time and Einstein

There is no doubt that space is warped, that Shakespeare got most of his ideas from Ingmar Bergman, and that Bergman is the far greater artist, with Fanny and Alexander being one of the seminal works of any genre in the history of artistic production or thought. What more can be said about the creator of Winter Lights (besides the God thing, arguably the best essay on men’s true feelings about women’s menses), Through a Glass Darkly, The Silence, and Scenes From a Marriage? Lesser works like Autumn Sonata or The Seventh Seal (which was the subject of a famous Woody Allen parody) are still more profound than most Shakespeare plays. The incest scene in Through a Glass Darkly makes Lear look paltry. Rembrandt’s self-portrait and Homer’s Odysseus pale in comparison to the character portrayed by the great Gunnar Bjornstrand. Oedipus and Gloucester can walk around with their eyeballs plucked out, but it doesn’t compare to the kind of suffering and exorcism prefigured in the astonishing montage at the beginning of Persona. Is there anything in Dante’s Inferno that compares with Shame, in which the filmmaker presents us with corpses floating in his own vision of the river Styx? The Remembrance of Things Past is nice when it comes to memory, but can it really compare to Wild Strawberries, where Bergman really hits the nail of regret on the head? The worst that can be said about Smiles from a Summer Night was that A Little Night Music was based on it. Still, not bad for an early effort. Let’s not forget The Passion of Anna and Cries and Whispers, with its unforgettable equating of the color red to the emotions of its dying character. Every artist has something to learn from the master. One wonders if Gaspar Noe saw The Virgin Spring before filming the famous rape scene in Irreversible.

Paris Journal IX: A Moveable Feast

Hemingway called Paris “a moveable feast,” but it is hard to regard the Parisian salons presided over by the great cultural figures of the past—Breton, Picasso, Gertrude Stein, Hemingway himself, and numerous other denizens of Parisian cultural life—as feasts in the same sense as the collations that occurred in American and even English cultural life. For all the brilliance of French cuisine, one associates the great gatherings of Parisian intellectuals that occurred in the early part of the twentieth century at cafés like Les Deux Magots (which are now over priced tourist meccas) with buffets of conversation and ideas. In contrast, Truman Capote threw his famed Black and White Ball for Katharine Graham in the Grand Ballroom of the Plaza in l966. It would be hard to imagine a latter-day infant terrible and major French celebrity like Houellebecq throwing a comparable society bash for someone like Carla Bruni. Thus, though one reads about the social mores of the French upper classes in Remembrance of Things Past, it is really difficult to imagine the kind of literary cocktail parties and dinners one expects in New York occurring in Paris, where the spread of ideas has a more extemporaneous feel, fueled by the ongoing presence of a true café society on streets like the Rue Mortorgueil, which is to Paris today what the Boulevard St. Germain was a century ago.

Stand Up and Be Counted!

How many times have you picked up a book or gone to a movie and read about or watched a character and said, “That is me,” or better yet gone to a museum and looked at a portrait or a sculpture, say Michelangelo’s David or Rembrandt’s portrait of his son Titus, and said, “Yup, that’s me”? Are you Sinclair Lewis’s Babbit, are you Alyosha Karamazov, are you David Copperfield? Are you Sherman McCoy from Bonfire, are you Jamie from Bright Lights, Big City, are you Gatsby, or Dick Diver from Tender is the Night? Are you Yourcenar’s Hadrian, are you Bardamu from Celine’s Journey to the End of the Night, or better yet are you Robin Vote in Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood? OK, let’s get to the point, are you Jake Barnes or Brett Ashley from The Sun Also Rises, or a little of both? Are you Casaubon or Humbert Humbert, Ulrich from The Man Without Qualities, or Franz Biberkopf from Berlin Alexanderplatz? Are you Hans Castorp from Zauberberg or Leverkuhn from Doctor Faustus? Alas, are you Swann? Are you Vronsky or Levin from Anna Karenina? Come on, tell the truth. Are you Pierre or Andrei from War and Peace? Eventually you’re going to have to make a choice. Are you Molly, Leopold or Stephan from Ulysses, or Gabriel Conroy—yes everybody, man, woman or beast, has a little bit of Gabriel Conroy in them. Isn’t that Joyce’s achievement? Just like there is a little bit of Odysseus returning home unrecognized by all except his faithful Argos in all of us who have ever left and returned. Have you ever dreamt you were Kirk Douglas’s Spartacus, Antoine Doinel from The Four Hundred Blows, John Osborne’s Jimmy Porter, Natalie Wood in Splendor in the Grass, Marilyn Monroe in Some Like It Hot, Jill Clayburgh in An Unmarried Woman, or James Dean’s Cal in East of Eden (and even Health Ledger’s Joker if we’re being totally honest)? There’s a little bit of Clint Eastwood’s Harry Callahan in all of us (who hasn’t given some thought to holding a .357 magnum?), a touch of Meryl Streep’s Silkwood, and naturally we all want to stand up and be counted like Marlon Brandon in On the Waterfront. Or maybe you just want to accept the benign indifference of the universe like Estragon, who inaugurates Waiting for Godot with his famed pronunciamento, “Nothing to be done.”