Before The Fictional Artist Inevitably Burns Out He's Always Fading Away

December 21, 2021 2:17 PM

That writing fiction may finally be incompatible with adequately describing a work of art is the worry that shadows many of these novels. But, like Bergotte’s dying realization, they also suggest that the knowledge of this shortcoming is what makes writing worthwhile. From The Lives and Deaths of Fictional Artists by Sam Thorne
posted by chavenet (4 comments total)

Nice. This is directly relevant to my interests. Kind of odd that he mentions Aster, but not his wife, Siri Hustvedt, who's The Blazing World is a perfect example. I would probably also consider Carole Shields' The Stone Diaries as well, but it is a little less tightly focused on the artist qua artist. Anyway, thanks for posting, this is a great read.
posted by Literaryhero at 3:22 PM on December 21, 2021 [2 favorites]

"All writing about images can be read as a commentary upon the nature of the encounter between the verbal and the visual, in that it must start from some form of ekphrasis (the evocation of a painting or sculpture by the written word). But writing about fictional art only resembles ekphrasis, for the simple reason that the art work under consideration has never existed; unlike criticism, these novels don’t depend on the aesthetic imagination and artistic production of another."

from the article. What a chunk, ya. A great point about those novels dependence on the "other" though Pound wrote:
"Don’t be “viewy”—leave that to the writers of pretty little philosophic essays. Don’t be descriptive; remember that the painter can describe a landscape much better than you can, and that he has to know a deal more about it."
posted by clavdivs at 3:49 PM on December 21, 2021 [3 favorites]

Currently reading Great Circle by Maggie Shipstead which has (all fictional) two painters, a novelist, several filmmakers, and their works and I may have forgotten some minor artists and I'm still reading it. The essay also mentions fictional music, and the composer in Madeleine Thien's Do Not Say We Have Nothing and his most famous work are described in such haunting and vivid detail that like many other readers I could not stop myself from googling to see if they actually existed.
posted by blue shadows at 9:07 PM on December 21, 2021 [2 favorites]

But writing about fictional art only resembles ekphrasis, for the simple reason that the art work under consideration has never existed

So yeah, but to accept this we would have to invalidate almost everything written about ekphrasis back to Laocoon because it removes the most well known example, Homer's Shield of Achilles. Doubly so for more contemporary work because it also rejects Keats' Grecian Urn. I am on team concrete (to coin a phrase?) myself, but to get to that point we have to rely on the theory of Lessing and Krieger, who don't make the distinction between art that exists and art that doesn't.

I'm a little drunk right now, but if I recall there is a variety of (classical) Greek art criticism where the critics were talking about art that they had never even seen. Not sure where that falls on this discussion but it seems relevant.
posted by Literaryhero at 3:13 AM on December 22, 2021 [1 favorite]