Voile! The value of art

Art is escapism, right? It whisks you from your mundane or burdened world and plonks you into someone else's. You cringe at 'plonk', I'm guessing (I do), because it feels such a crude rendering of the sense of release you feel at your escape. (Escape?) Such a smooth, elegant, longed-for release. I'm out of adjectives to describe this sense and none of the ones I have used feel right.

Tell me, what are you - the specific you, reading this post, and not the general you of all readers - escaping from? The complications of modern life? Its mundaneness and routine? Or something more sinister?

There are the more fantastical escapes - sci-fi and fantasy, historical what-ifs - and then the escapes into the complications of other lives. Which do you prefer? Does it make a difference? What would you do face-to-face with a dragon or in another skin or faced with a perfect Prince or Princess Charming? (Can we know?)

Following on from the previous post, when I was about seven (young enough to be called innocent but able to read), my mother subscribed to a Reader's Digest series of hardcover books about legends and fairytales, on my behalf. Each new one would arrive every six months. The more... disturbing... she would hide, saying I could read them when I was older. Nothing stays hidden from a seven-year-old for long.

I adored the ones I wasn't supposed to read, probably because I wasn't supposed to read them, because the stories and illustrations were threaded with an illicit thrill, and because ala previous post, isn't that the intention? Both the stories and illustrations were violent, harsh, dark, possibly disturbing. But they were more 'real' to me than glittering fairies and happy endings.

They were an escape.

But... but... but... An escape is from, not to, the real; isn't that what I said, oh, 15 lines ago? So fickle is the blogger, such an hypocrite, abusing the impermanence of the online space.

No, wait! Why is George Orwell's 1984 one of The Great Novels? Why does it resonate when it is our world but not? Why do Terry Pratchett's novels have so much to say about the ethics of leadership? Because they are like telescopes: they cast a circular limit around a point and, with some fumbling, focus and magnify the point. They give us the distance to see ourselves.

For me, literature is about burrowing into myself - beyond the superficial landscape of the imagination - with a backpack of symbols, ready to inflict my magnifying glass on anything that latches onto one of the symbols, like an enzyme in my intestines.

Does this mean you can continue to judge a person by the books on their shelves? Perhaps; I confess I do. You won't know what that book represents to that other person, and chances are you won't get a satisfactory answer if you ask them bluntly. But maybe your judgement says something about you and your inner world, and perhaps that's enough.

In this vein, my favourites by a wide margin are Possession by AS Byatt and Seizure of Power by Czeslaw Milosz. Make of that what you will.

Describing trauma

Toni Morrison has said that the only way to depict a moment of trauma is not to. Trauma is the absence of words. It is the darkness of terror. She also uses symbols and time - think of Beloved or Song of Solomon. The act of killing one's newborn baby - slitting its throat - rather than allowing her to grow up a slave, tells the reader how traumatic the experience of being a slave must be as words never could.

Trauma, in this sense, is objectively traumatic - not the divorce of one's parents, the loss of one's home and other possessions, a break-up. This is violent trauma, unspeakable trauma. One person exerting power over another. Abuse. The kind of thing that pushes you to your knees, puts a gun in your mouth and explodes a hole in the back of your head.

Other authors choose other ways (and there are as many ways as there are means of trauma - I chose an imaginable terror, death (the true absence) and shock - an amateur tactic).

Czeslaw Milosz (whose book The Seizure of Power instantly took the field when I read it - see archived post) also chose absence - showing the movement of the troops and a brief moment when they crawl through besieged and ravaged Warsaw. He also uses another common tactic: bureaucracy and guilt. This last shook me because, as a regular reader will know, one of the main characters was me - his doubts were mine.

At the moment I am reading Where the Air is Clear by Carlos Fuentes. I am less than 50 pages in, but absorbed in the brutality of his prose. From the first pages, he shocks you with violence - violence of words and common, daily, urban traumas. Until you are carried along by them, expect them.

Then comes the musings of one of his characters, a preening fatcat who was once part of the revolutionary movement. The style of this monologue is immediately conspicuous. It begins simply and uses relatively (for Fuentes) subtle descriptions. Then... The things he describes, paragraph after paragraph, are unspeakable.

Yet, he says them.

This monologue is maddening - the nostalgia of this preening, fat, content man, whose brothers gave their lives in the most horrific ways. What is this but another approach to trauma?

I can't imagine what Fuentes has waiting for me next. But, like Milosz, I know my own sense of culpability - guilt and doubt - is about to be exploited until I experience the trauma of standing by while others suffer.

The Seizure of Power

A good author creates characters who sit beside you while you while are reading and walks beside you when you are not. Sometimes you identify with them, sometimes not; sometimes you empathise with them, sometimes sympathise, sometimes neither. A good author writes characters into life.

But have you ever encountered a character who is you? One who tricks you into believing you're not alone or crazy, until you remember that they're fictional. (Perhaps that is better - they will remain frozen in time, never disappoint you and never grow into someone you don't recognise.)

Peter Kwinto (Quinto) in The Seizure of Power by Czeslaw Milosz is my fictional doppelganger. He is an officer in the half-Russian, half-Polish army that is pushing back the German troops who have captured (and razed) Warsaw at the end of World War II. At the beginning of the novel, he is plagued by conflicting emotions, but is essentially idealistic, justifying the fear the army instills on communities already traumatised by war as part of the process of attaining freedom.

Despite having been exiled to the Urals and now implicated in the tragedies of war, he remains idealistic about life and human nature: "The bliss of being among the living... Peter lifted his hand and moved his fingers, overcome with wonder at the year, the month, the day and the hour."

As the war ends, Polish Socialists fight the influence of Russian Communists, who believe they have equal rights to the minds of the Polish people given that they made up half of the victorious army. Those minds are plagued by unexpressed doubts: about whether the Socialists can offer anything different to the Communists or the capitalists, about the future, about whether the war has really ended.

Peter is no different, except that these doubts coalesce into doubts about humanity, about the repetition of history, about the nature of time and existence. After he learns that his wife is dead, these doubts became increasingly, conflictingly hopeful and nihilistic. The death of his wife confirms what he has always known: that he is alone.

He comes to believe (hope?) that only a traumatic history can create a utopian future, through incremental changes in the collective consciousness. Thus he, stuck in this traumatic moment, can only hope for the absence of death or the absolution of escape.

Yet, in appearance, he bends to the requirements of society, acquiring a job in the government and even informing on another man. This leads to other doubts - about one's accountability for one's self, toward other people, within a community. Is this accountability or blame, and with whom does it rest?

Around him, people smooth over these doubts saying, "Everyone plays a part nowadays and nobody believes in anything."

Despite the absolute statements that he finds in doubt, Peter is essentially at the whim of his emotions. Towards the end of the novel, he cries, "Why? Why are you responsible for what you really are? Can anybody say: 'I am myself' when he worships in spite of himself, worships what he hates?"

The final line embodies Peter's quest: "...was it not better, instead, to ponder the only important question: how a man could preserve himself from the taint of sadness and indifference."

I wonder, how can one not come to the same conclusions, not be assailed by the same doubts and the same conflicting emotions, focus on the everyday when questions like these, seemingly only theoretical, form the foundations of this moment in time? Life is an eddy of trauma and joy and more, but these become blurred in the larger context of human history. There are really only two options in this moment: to escape or to find whatever joy one can in each day. Sometimes the two options are the same.

A Suicide, a War and a Shipwreck

Just as a piece of writing is threaded with symbols and themes from the writer's subconscious - it being the real writer, I would argue, and us just fingers pounding a keyboard like the hypothetical monkey - so that same piece of writing adopts the symbols and themes of the reader's subconscious, and is kneaded into a slightly different, still recognisable shape. Nothing revolutionary here: the author never died; he just joined hands with the reader, the text itself, the larger context and so on. Like a nursery rhyme. (What this means for the higher power that Nietzsche pronounced dead, who knows. Maybe he was always just a pretty rhyme.)

Everything I read is forced into conversation with everything else, into saying things they perhaps didn't mean to or didn't know they were going to say.

The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides references a scene from Mrs Dalloway and by extension, for me, The Waves both by Virginia Woolf and, of course, the movie The Hours. From postmodernism to modernism, from a novel in which the collective narrator points to us as fellow voyeurs, to a novel in which we are invited to watch. All of this ends in Ms Woolf walking into a river with a pocketful of rocks and nods to Sylvia Plath with her head in an oven. Giving the finger to a world that we are all forced to watch consume itself. By defiantly consuming one's self. Although Mr Eugenides might argue that this act is really desertion, leaving one's fellow soldiers to advance on the front-line alone.

Then there's A Single Man by Christopher Isherwood, the structure of which mimics that of Mrs Dalloway, but with only brief moments of her sympathy, which is demoted to sentimentality, as if to protect one's self against the fire from the front-line. And briefer moments of shining transcendence, which are even more self-consciously sentimental and ultimately held underwater until they stop shining.

And where has this extended metaphor of war come from? From The Seizure of Power by Czeslaw Milosz, where political allegiance is a bit of flotsam being hurried along the world's oceans. From here to the desecrated naivety of Three Farmers on their Way to a Dance by Richard Powers (both of the characters and the author) and a leap to A Place of Greater Safety by Hilary Mantel, in which the French Revolution is a soup of naivety, childhood traumas and survival mechanisms.

I could swim my way into science fiction, psychology texts, African literary fiction and South American magic realism in a few strokes, but I suspect you're already swimming in another direction or colliding against one of those pieces of flotsam - or perhaps clinging to it together with Pi's tiger from Life of Pi by Martel Yann.

The world is just another text or a library (an underwater one if we want to continue the metaphor) - gosh and here we escape into the corridors of Jorges Louis Borge's infinite library and his lottery.

If you want to see my soul, here it is, laid bare. (Prometheus and his liver.) It's as good a map as you're ever going to get, although there is no key except that of your own subconscious. (And ricochet back to A Single Man and on to Michel de Certeau's 'Walking in the City' and Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, Marco Polo....)