[Note to readers: if you find this page without its context, please have a look at What is Interesting Writing in Art History?, which will make sense of the context. Much of this particular essay is about Don DeLillo's Point Omega. I have written a brief essay on the philosophy in Point Omega here.]
Artworks in Fiction
—Art history: “the most evil business there is”
(Thomas Bernhard, Old Masters)
What does the land ahead look like? In the summer 2013 issue of Frieze, the novelist Ben Lerner speculated on the relation between novels and visual art. He mentions Thomas Bernhard's Old Masters, Javier Marías's A Heart so White, Proust's passage on the yellow wall in Vermeer's View of Delft, John Ashbery's Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, and Tim Clark's Sight of Death, which he says "has as much in common with novels as it does with most conventional art criticism." (That is an unsatisfying thing to say without qualification, because it could mean Clark's book is like a novel, or that it's unlike either novels or criticism.) All of Lerner's examples, except Clark, are fiction or poetry that address actual works of visual art. His own book 10:04, which appeared in 2014, briefly mentions several actual artworks. I'll discuss several of the books Lerner mentions, including his own, in the next part of this project.
Lerner then concludes that even though "Clark is rigorously involved with two real canvases,"
the novel is a space wherein such an experiment in art writing can take place before the existence of the art itself, where an encounter can be staged between individuals and/or art works that are not or cannot be made actual. Fiction that describes encounters with artificial objects that don't yet or can't yet exist is usually called "science fiction"… but we could also organize a genre of "speculative fiction" around virtual arts; Keatsian music; a painting that never dries. (p. 155)This conflates two possibilities that I think it's important to separate.
On the one hand, fiction can address works of art that don't exist, and on the other, fiction can address works that do exist, or have existed, but it can propose "staged" encounters and narratives around those works. Let me number these in order to keep track of some ramifying possibilities.
(1) There are relatively few works in the first category; one is Balzac's "Unknown Masterpiece," about historical artists and an invented artwork. (Thanks to Joachim Sprung for reminding me of this.)
(2) The second category is what happens in every one of Lerner's examples (again excluding Clark, because that book doesn't present itself as fiction). It is also what happens, Lerner says, in his own forthcoming book 10:04, which mentions Judd sculptures and Jules Bastien-Lepage's Joan of Arc. (It's a strange article, because in the Frieze essay Lerner is advocating a possibility he hasn't practiced.)
Within the second category, fiction that stages encounters about actual artworks, there is an apparently small but important distinction to be made between (2a) writing that can be said to address a work of art, like Ashbery's poem, and (2b) fiction that happens to include art among many other interests.
In category (2a), a central part of the writer's purpose is to say something about specific artworks, and that brings it, distantly but distinctly, into the domain of this project. This category includes any number of ekphrases from ancient examples to the present. Writing poems about artworks has been a tradition in European writing since the Renaissance. (See Rensellaer Lee's Ut pictura poesis.) Ashbery, Auden, and many poets have written novels, stories, and poems that address artworks. The critic Raphael Rubenstein curated poems on contemporary artworks in the summer 2013 Art in America, and he has written some himself. Several important works of modernist fiction treat actual artworks extensively, such as Peter Weiss's Aesthetics of Resistance, and there are also contemporary and popular fictions that turn on real artworks, from Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch to Dan Brown's books.
On the other hand, Proust's novel is certainly in category (2b), because it's only in the world of art history that his reference to the "yellow wall" in Vermeer's View of Delft looms so large. When a long novel like Proust's stops briefly to evoke a painting, then the novel isn't about the painting: the painting is a vanishingly small point, a moment of the Real, in a larger fiction. (A lovely book that inadvertently demonstrates this is Eric Karpeles's Paintings in Proust.)
At the risk of being overly analytic, I think it's a good idea to distinguish those two possibilities, (2a) and (2b), from another: (2c), books that are said to have been inspired by images—if not artworks—even though those images aren't mentioned. Don DeLillo has said that Falling Man was inspired by the well-known photo taken on 9/11, and it has been said that inspiration at that remove might be more promising than attempting to write ekphrases of individual images that are not reproduced. (See for example this New Yorker blog.)
But (2a) remains an interesting possibility. There are works of fiction in which some measurable part of the author's purpose is the evocation of artworks that readers know, or could go and see. It is tempting, in the context of this project, to see what happens if such texts are read as if they are "experimental writing on art": as if fiction was partly, or even principally, a strategy to say more about the art than would be possible in the constraints of nonfiction.
I'll consider two examples: the first, a novel by Don DeLillo, goes to show how hard it can be to say exactly what's gained by descriptions of artworks in fiction. The second, Proust's In Search of Lost Time, indicates the complexity of trying to unweave descriptions of artworks from their fictional meshes.
Artworks in fiction: Don DeLillo's Point Omega
DeLillo's novel begins and ends with descriptions of what it's like to see Douglas Gordon's 24 Hour Psycho, a version of Hitchcock's movie slowed down so it takes a full day. At that rate, individual frames (usually invisible at 24 frames per second) appear as softly blurred individual images. Several excerpts on Youtube demonstrate that. It would be perverse to read Point Omega as an attempt to say things about 24 Hour Psycho that cannot be accommodated by art history, theory, or criticism, but if I was to read it that way, I might be able to distinguish descriptions that might occur in nonfiction from other passages that could only take place in fiction.
(Incidentally: there are several screening configurations of Gordon's piece. In the original show, the one DeLillo saw, there was one screen:
Later Gordon showed a version with two screens, one running backwards, so that they met in the middle with a single synchronized image (not shown here):
Apparently Gagosian also showed 24-Hour Psycho along with other Gordon videos in the same space. None of this has to do with DeLillo's book, but I want to mention it in case some readers have seen other versions. In light of the book, each different installation could lead to a different fiction.)
So, to distinguish descriptions that could be done in nonfiction from descirptions that require fiction: for example, the book opens with a straightforward account of the screening at MoMA in 2006, told by a third-person narrator. (Most of the book uses a first-person narrator, but this character is different; he is effectively first-person, but is given in focalized third-person to distinguish him from the book's principal narrator.) DeLillo tells us about the screen, the guard, and the ways people move around the room. That sort of introductory material can be found in art criticism. After a few pages, the narrator's descriptions become more exact, and some of his observations wouldn't be out of place in a film theory essay. He notes, for example, that "Anthony Perkins turns his head in five incremental movements," and the shower rings vibrate up and down in the famous scene where Janet Leigh's character is murdered (pp. 5, 9).
But then the third-person narrator notices things he doesn't analyze, and he even notices that he's not understanding:
He stood and looked. In the time it took for Anthony Perkins to turn his head, there seemed to flow an array of ideas involving science and philosophy and nameless other things, or maybe he was seeing too much. [p. 5]
The narrator misidentifies two visitors to MoMA as film theorists, and he watches them,
the academics, adepts of film, of film theory, film syntax, film and myth, the dialectics of film, the metaphysics of film, as Janet Leigh began to undress for the blood-soaked shower to come. [p. 9]
These passages wouldn't happen in academic film theory, criticism, or history, if only because they report on theories that are not themselves explained: they're about an awareness of theories, but they don't serve to articulate those theories. (In other words, they aren't philosophy or argument.) This is a simple and clear example of a way to talk about 24 Hour Psycho that would not be available in nonfiction.
When the two visitors whom the narrator mistakes as as academics leave, he thinks:
They went past the guard and were gone. They had to think in words. This was their problem. The action moved too slowly to accommodate their vocabulary of film. He [the narrator] didn't know if this [idea] made the slightest sense. They could not feel the heartbeat of images projected at this speed. Their vocabulary of film, he thought, could not be adapted to curtain rods and curtain rings and eyelets. [p. 10]This is even more obviously not plausibly a part of academic writing, because it is a critique of such writing. The ideas DeLillo's narrator gives voice to could be analyzed, and then they might well appear in an academic context (a little like this one!), but the passage itself is a criticism, in a voice that's incrementally close to the author's.
The opening and closing chapters of Point Omega are the only ones devoted to describing the experience of viewing 24 Hour Psycho. But the body of the novel is full of parallels to the film, and each can be understood, in the perverse reading I am entertaining here, as a way of saying something about Gordon's film that could not be said either in nonfiction or in the straightforward descriptions in the opening and closing chapters.
First, there are several films mentioned in Point Omega: some real, like Sokurov's Russian Ark, and others invented, like the first-person narrator's own film about Jerry Lewis (pp. 22, 25-7). There are also echoes of specific scenes in Hitchcock's film, for example a memory one character has of a janitor who walked down stairs backwards, which echoes the detective's fall down the stairs in Hitchcock's film (pp. 32, 37, and compare the escalator described on p. 41):
Or I drove into box canyons, over hard dry cracked earth, car swimming in heat, and I thought of my apartment, two small rooms, the rent, the bills, the unanswered calls, the wife no longer there, the separated wife, the crackhead janitor, theelderly woman who walked down the stairs backwards, slowly, eternally, four flights, backwards, and I never asked her why.
(Here's a still from that scene in Psycho.)
Those parallels exhibit a freedom not available to writers who write only nonfiction, but it isn't obvious exactly what they contribute—and part of the reason is that I am constrained by my reading to search for passages that enrich our understanding of Gordon's film, rather than passages that contribute to the novel's themes of eternity and the "omega point." If you're interested in Point Omega, you might say that the passage about the elderly woman is made more sinister by the echo of Arbogast's slow-motion murder, that we're all going backwards and down through life. If you're interested in experimental writing on art, however—so that the passage contributes to an understanding of 24-Hour Psycho—then you might say DeLillo's sentence enriches the artwork by introducing a different kind of slowness, the careful steps of the elderly woman, and by suggesting that Detective Arbogast's tumble, when slowed down, is like a person carefully walking backward. Im not sure where that would get you, but Point Omega permits it, passively. You would also, I think, be omitting most of the sentence, and you'd be unable to account for what its other images might contribute.
More interesting are the extended parallels between 24 Hour Psycho and the dilated time the narrator, his host, and his host's daughter spend in a small house in the desert, the setting for the main part of the book. The narrator's host, Elster, has ideas about eternity and infinity that work as hyperbolic extensions of the twenty-four hours of Gordon's film. He contrasts time in the desert, and especially the suspended time that he experiences after his daughter vanishes, against the time of cities, "dimwit time, inferior time, people checking watches and other devices" (p. 45). Elster visited the installation of Gordon's film in MoMA, and it reminded him of even vaster time scales. "We're the last billionth of a second in the evolution of matter," he says. For him, the film was "like watching the universe die over a period of about seven billion years" (pp. 50, 47). Point Omega is about "deep time, epochal time," and Teilhard de Chardin's concept of the "omega point," the convergence of all creation onto unity, which Elster interprets in a secular sense as the time when time will slow to a stop and people will become material: stone, desert, sky (pp. 52, 72, 98).
Things get complex from there, because even though DeLillo's theme is clear (he has Elster say it several different times, and the book's penultimate chapter, when Elster's daughter has gone, plays out the timelessness of "point omega"), the novel's many partial parallels and slant rhymes with 24 Hour Psycho make it difficult to say how the meaning of that film might be enriched by the novel, except in the trivial sense that the film elicited or crystallized the author's thoughts about deep time. I'll just give one example of that fairly unencompassable complexity.
Elster's daughter tells the narrator how she and a friend spent a day walking around the Chelsea gallery district: first they visited all the galleries, but then they went back again, street by street, and deliberately stayed out of the galleries. "It was like the idea of their lifetimes," and it "deepened the experience" (pp. 67-8). DeLillo describes the women going up and down the streets in a way that is reminiscent of his description of the people wandering in the screening room in MoMA, setting up a comparative analogy, something like this:
seeing Chelsea galleries : skipping them : : Hitchcock's film : Gordon's film
It's a complex analogy, and I can't quite put into words how, or even if, it contributes to my appreciation of 24 Hour Psycho. So at this point it might be best to give up my speculative reading, but the question remains: fiction definitely does sometimes add to our understanding of artworks, but as far as I know the mechanisms by which that happens, and the special resources fiction may provide, remain untheorized.
Proust
Proust makes many sorts of references to visual experience, visual memories, and artworks real and invented. Because there are no images in the novel, it is outside the current project: but it remains a central instance of the representation of the visual in modernist fiction. The principal question here is what counts as the visual in Proust, both in relation to his theories of memory, and more literally in relation to his interest in a actual paintings and architecture. I think on the whole Proust is far less accessible than he has been taken to be by critics who imagine he describes artworks.
I will consider the place of the visual in the novel from two perspectives: first, the question of what sort of visual references tie the novel to actual artworks; and second, the curious problem regarding what, in Proust's mind, works as evocation of the visual.
The novel's sense of visual artworks
The intensely visual description of the Combray church has traditionally been regarded as a subjective recollection of the church in the actual town of Illiers (I. 80). But as Germaine Brée argued in 1967, it seems likely Proust was looking at a reproduction of Vermeer's View of Delft. His striking line about "des ecailles et des egouttements gommeux de soleil," "flakes and gum-like driblets of sun," seems especially painterly. ("Proust's Combray Church: Illiers or Vermeer?," Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 112, 1968, pp. 5-7.) This possibility makes the memory that much more complex, especially if it is read alongside Benjamin Binstock's plausible suggestion that Proust was not looking carefully at the painting (or rather, a reproduction of it) when he came to actually describe it later in the novel.
The place of the visual in narrative
Another aspect of the visual is what counts, in the novel, as a visual experience or description. It is crucial that the madeleine episode is prefaced by an inventory of the house in Combray (I. 58-9). The narrator's recall is incomplete ("as if all Combray had consisted of but two floors joined by a slender staircase") but precise; and as soon as he completes his inventory he unveils the theory of "voluntary memory, the memory of the intellect" and goes on to describe the madeleine. In that fashion intensive, purely visual memories are left behind, at least so we're told, in favor of involuntary memories sparked, in this case, by taste. He isn't consistent in this, however, and by I.66 he is recounting in great voluntary detail the smells of the house. It seems that voluntary memory is linked to visual memory, and even voluntary recall of smells, tastes, and sounds can function as if they were involuntary. A characteristic use of the visual is in I.252, where the narrator says he would stand "motionless, looking, breathing," trying to "penetrate with my mind beyond the thing seen or smelt." He sees three steeples, two in Martinville and in Vieuxvicq, and tries to perceive "what lay hidden beneath them." The visual world is therefore an incomplete prompt for more inward and genuine experiences. (This is from a painting by Corot of Martinville; Corot is mentioned in the book.)
Often, however, the hidden meaning isn't a childhood experience or other instance of "lost time," but the expression of the search itself in writing. The entire interest of the visual in the novel can even be imagined, without much distortion of the narrator's intent, as a problem in writing. In I.256 for example, Proust's narrator resolves the deeper meaning of the three steeples not by discovering something new, but by writing about them; and the passage he presents us, which he says was written on the spot, hardly offers anything different from the initial description that precedes it in the novel.
It's possible to put this even more strongly, or literally. Visual memories are of interest often, and perhaps ultimately, because they can be enchained, linked in clauses and sentences to thoughts that Proust's narrator calls "philosophic," and which often involve other senses. An example among many is I.238, where a sharply visual description of a lily, pushed back and forth by the current of the Vivonne river, reminds the narrator of "certain victims of neurasthenia" who exhibit what we would call repetition compulsion, and then of "those wretches" in the Inferno who repeat their torments indefinitely. The point on which this sentence rests—and the point of the sentence—is the unexpected turn, at the end, where the thought of Virgil hurrying Dante past the damned reminds the narrator that his parents want him to catch up to them on their walk. The purpose of visual description, here and in general in the book, is to facilitate, introduce, or initially ground and focus enchained ruminations that move away from the visual and on into other senses, metaphors, allusions, and finally into unexpected insights. The visual is reimagined as writing.
(I owe more than the usual passing thanks to Kayla Risko, who pointed me to most of the passages I mention here. There is more on Proust and ekphrasis in Visual Worlds, co-authored with Erna Fiorentini.)
In the absence of conclusions
I hope these two inadequate analyses suggest how much more there is to be said. I don't disbelieve in the perverse attempt to read a novel, like DeLillo's, to see what it might be saying about an artwork: but I can't see how to proceed with the analysis. And I don't think Proust's special kind of imbricated complexities of memory and invention are a model for other people's fictions about actual artworks: but I am not sure how Proust's novel differs from others fictions in that regard. It's a fascinating topic, one that is not well served by the simple observation that novels sometimes contribute to our sense of the complexity of actual artworks.
It's possible to put this even more strongly, or literally. Visual memories are of interest often, and perhaps ultimately, because they can be enchained, linked in clauses and sentences to thoughts that Proust's narrator calls "philosophic," and which often involve other senses. An example among many is I.238, where a sharply visual description of a lily, pushed back and forth by the current of the Vivonne river, reminds the narrator of "certain victims of neurasthenia" who exhibit what we would call repetition compulsion, and then of "those wretches" in the Inferno who repeat their torments indefinitely. The point on which this sentence rests—and the point of the sentence—is the unexpected turn, at the end, where the thought of Virgil hurrying Dante past the damned reminds the narrator that his parents want him to catch up to them on their walk. The purpose of visual description, here and in general in the book, is to facilitate, introduce, or initially ground and focus enchained ruminations that move away from the visual and on into other senses, metaphors, allusions, and finally into unexpected insights. The visual is reimagined as writing.
(I owe more than the usual passing thanks to Kayla Risko, who pointed me to most of the passages I mention here. There is more on Proust and ekphrasis in Visual Worlds, co-authored with Erna Fiorentini.)
In the absence of conclusions
I hope these two inadequate analyses suggest how much more there is to be said. I don't disbelieve in the perverse attempt to read a novel, like DeLillo's, to see what it might be saying about an artwork: but I can't see how to proceed with the analysis. And I don't think Proust's special kind of imbricated complexities of memory and invention are a model for other people's fictions about actual artworks: but I am not sure how Proust's novel differs from others fictions in that regard. It's a fascinating topic, one that is not well served by the simple observation that novels sometimes contribute to our sense of the complexity of actual artworks.
Revised April 2024
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