Artistic convention

Contemporary novels about novelists (which fall under the heading of künstlerroman) have a strange habit of undermining the supposed reason for their existence.   The habit in question: what could be called, variously, "the transcription theory of art," or, perhaps, "the artist as photocopier."  I've recently grumped about this convention here and here.  Usually, the author posits something along the following lines:

• All fiction is untransformed autobiography (and, therefore, "informational").   There's a one-to-one correspondence between experience and representation.  Along those lines...
• The representation's "real" significance is autobiographical.  And...
• Even those elements most characteristic of a novelist's style (a particular mode of characterization, a strategy for using metaphor, etc.) exist in the "real world"--so much so that other characters in the novel's "real world" use and observe them.  In other words, although the novel we're reading doesn't say so explicitly...
• There's nothing individual about individual style.  

This is much more of an issue in novels about actual novelists (or poets, for that matter), where intertextuality becomes part of the marketing ploy, than it is in novels where the novelist is him-/herself a fiction.  But the very thing that makes the novel sellable--it's about Dickens, it's about one of the Brontes, whatever--winds up being demolished by the novel's own premises.  If virtually everything that makes a Dickens novel a Dickens novel is outside of Dickens, then...the author is not just dead, but unnecessary. 

I was reminded of this bugbear of mine by Patrick White's  künstlerroman, The Vivisector (1970).  The novel adheres to another familiar set of conventions for representing artists: as J. M. Coetzee observes in his introduction to the new Penguin edition, the painter Hurtle Duffield "is a genius of the archetypal Romantic type: a loner, driven to create by an inner demon, a maker of his own morality, who will sacrifice everything and everyone to his art" (xv).  Now, this "archetype" is itself inflated enough for puncturing, as Kate Christensen demonstrates in The Great Man--but, at least, it has the virtue of suggesting that there is no distinctive work of art without the artist's distinctive craft, insight, and subjectivity.   When Hurtle briefly glimpses Rhoda, his stepsister, bathing--a moment that haunts him for years--he cannot help "try[ing] her out in his mind in several different attitudes and lights" (125).  He is frequently inspired by moments that, to the reader, seem entirely ephemeral or meaningless.  Moreover, his audiences are frequently shocked and repulsed by Hurtle's paintings: Hero Pavloussi, who falls in love with him, likens an early painting of Rhoda to "an octopus" (311), and later attempts suicide (359) after she sees how Hurtle has painted her.  (Hurtle's response to her horror--"'Don't you at least find it formally acceptable?'" [357]--is darkly hilarious.)   But the paintings reveal nothing in particular about Hurtle, let alone about their origins; as the evil-minded gossip at Hurtle's retrospective exhibition suggests, autobiographical speculation is not just beside the point, but actively misses the point.  The painter is everywhere, and yet nowhere that can be articulated in any simple way.  

Comments

[Deb]

On the other hand, I strongly recommend Colm Toibin's novel, The Master, a fictionalized account of the life of Henry James. I expected it would be slow going, but I was pleasantly surprised at how accessible it was. Toibin was especially good at showing how incidents and anecdotes in James's life planted seeds that yielded fruit years later--and I felt that I understood James's emotional paralysis, his inability to act on signals sent out by others, and his simultaneous desires for solitude and human companionship. At no point did I feel that I was actually reading an account of Toibin's life (although, admittedly, I don't know much about Toibin). If you haven't already read it, you might enjoy this far more than something like Charlotte Bronte's Diaries (blech!)

[Miriam]

I liked Toibin's novel quite a bit--in part because he doesn't fall prey to this particular convention.