Artistic Resurrection
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The older I become, the more I begin to miss old-fashioned descriptions, the kinds that are found in Tolstoy, Proust or Flaubert. I miss their arduousness, their solidity. In part, this is probably a self-defence reflex against the ubiquitous tag lines that are replacing description in our culture.
Description - communicating with words what the camera registers with an image - is becoming ever rarer in these times of computer games, news sound bites and cable TV. Today, the world is either shown or it is named. Fewer people can describe an object (or a person) than can name them. As a result, writing (literature) has become almost a rebellious act against the technological machinery of clichés and lies we are asked to accept every day. In our time, to be a descriptive writer demands not only faith in oneself, but also faith in Literature in defiance of contemporary "civilization".
Great writers deal mainly in raw material - feelings, impressions, experiences - but rarely attempt to explain them. Their method of prolonging the pre-conceptual moment before the formation of rational interpretations, frees their readers from the ideological concepts and theories that stand between them and a clear vision of Reality.
Marcel Proust, for example, presents us with a series of meticulously observed sensations and impressions in the exact order of their occurrence, uncorrected by the interruption of the intellect. In his search for “The Truth”, he portrays rather than explains. His starting point is the observer’s illusions about others, their actions seen from varying perspectives. Part of his technique is to show that all moments of a character’s life are connected and indivisible. It is only the intelligence with its passion for analysis, (for establishing artificial distinctions and diversions) that prevents us from seeing the reality clearly before us.
Proust and Flaubert also discovered that emotion and memory attach themselves mysteriously to the apparently trivial and peripheral experiences of our lives. These experiences are “trivial”, however, only to autistic Reason. For the soul, they resonate in the memory eliciting other imagined or previously experienced sensations, enabling us to enjoy one thing through the medium of another. Metaphor, the principal vehicle for transporting meaning from one frame of reference to another, becomes a catalyst for illumination and revelation. Present reality becomes enlivened and illuminated as a result.
Literature, as I understand it, is a supreme effort for human liberation and transcendence. Its function is to translate “dead facts” into a form amenable to the “soul”: i.e., the realm of meanings. What the soul attempts to do through literature (and through all great Art in general) is to reach out and embrace ordinary everyday reality in order to create from it an environment in which it can truly feel “at home”: a home in which objects are no longer opaque and sterile in their materiality, but transparent with symbolism. The world of 'hard reality' (the world of matter) remains no less real than before, but its meaning (belonging to a world which is not material) now carries more value for us as persons. Everyday reality becomes resurrected, resulting in a deeper enrichment of meaning.
For the novelist, everything can become the raw material for transformation by the imagination. This is the meaning of Artistic Resurrection: the soul delivered from the gross inertia of dead “material facts”.
© Ryszard Antolak
(Picture: Mina Mokhtarzadeh)
The older I become, the more I begin to miss old-fashioned descriptions, the kinds that are found in Tolstoy, Proust or Flaubert. I miss their arduousness, their solidity. In part, this is probably a self-defence reflex against the ubiquitous tag lines that are replacing description in our culture. Description - communicating with words what the camera registers with an image - is becoming ever rarer in these times of computer games, news sound bites and cable TV. Today, the world is either shown or it is named. Fewer people can describe an object (or a person) than can name them. As a result, writing (literature) has become almost a rebellious act against the technological machinery of clichés and lies we are asked to accept every day. In our time, to be a descriptive writer demands not only faith in oneself, but also faith in Literature in defiance of contemporary "civilization".
Great writers deal mainly in raw material - feelings, impressions, experiences - but rarely attempt to explain them. Their method of prolonging the pre-conceptual moment before the formation of rational interpretations, frees their readers from the ideological concepts and theories that stand between them and a clear vision of Reality.
Marcel Proust, for example, presents us with a series of meticulously observed sensations and impressions in the exact order of their occurrence, uncorrected by the interruption of the intellect. In his search for “The Truth”, he portrays rather than explains. His starting point is the observer’s illusions about others, their actions seen from varying perspectives. Part of his technique is to show that all moments of a character’s life are connected and indivisible. It is only the intelligence with its passion for analysis, (for establishing artificial distinctions and diversions) that prevents us from seeing the reality clearly before us.
Proust and Flaubert also discovered that emotion and memory attach themselves mysteriously to the apparently trivial and peripheral experiences of our lives. These experiences are “trivial”, however, only to autistic Reason. For the soul, they resonate in the memory eliciting other imagined or previously experienced sensations, enabling us to enjoy one thing through the medium of another. Metaphor, the principal vehicle for transporting meaning from one frame of reference to another, becomes a catalyst for illumination and revelation. Present reality becomes enlivened and illuminated as a result.
Literature, as I understand it, is a supreme effort for human liberation and transcendence. Its function is to translate “dead facts” into a form amenable to the “soul”: i.e., the realm of meanings. What the soul attempts to do through literature (and through all great Art in general) is to reach out and embrace ordinary everyday reality in order to create from it an environment in which it can truly feel “at home”: a home in which objects are no longer opaque and sterile in their materiality, but transparent with symbolism. The world of 'hard reality' (the world of matter) remains no less real than before, but its meaning (belonging to a world which is not material) now carries more value for us as persons. Everyday reality becomes resurrected, resulting in a deeper enrichment of meaning.
For the novelist, everything can become the raw material for transformation by the imagination. This is the meaning of Artistic Resurrection: the soul delivered from the gross inertia of dead “material facts”.
© Ryszard Antolak
(Picture: Mina Mokhtarzadeh)
posted by Ryszard Antolak @ 11/13/2005 03:30:00 PM
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