Living by Fiction

  This is the most dismal view—of art and of everything—I can imagine. It must be admitted that one idea in this book is consistent with this view, and even points to it: the suggestion that we already agree tacitly that human significance is the only significance. Although all the generations of people, ever since we can remember—artists, thinkers, cranks, and pagans of every stripe—have intensively sought and sometimes found meaning in the natural world, none of those meanings has “stuck.” Nowhere does any consensus agree upon any set of human meanings for the natural world, but only for the human world. Our dwelling places where we dwell, along continental coasts and inland river valleys, are the only sites where what we want and so fiercely imagine can be found, the brain’s own baby doll: purpose, significance, and harmony. In the fabrication of these things we are skilled because the skill feeds and preserves us, as the specially adapted tissues of benthic fishes or of dragonflies feed and preserve them. Our brains secrete bright ideas and forms of order; armored scale insects secrete wax from their backs. Thus Cro-Magnon man imagines a long process like dressing skins, like planting grains, like forming diversified societies; thus armored scale insects survive humped under their own goo.

  And here we all are. Let us cover this archaeological pit for the nonce and build a high tower. Do we discover reason and harmony in the universe, or do we invent it?

  Here is another answer to the question, and an entirely jolly one, from contemporary metaphysician Carl Curtis. By his cheering lights, truth is beauty and beauty truth. Harmony and substance are a spectrum, perhaps hooked in a relationship that can be expressed in words. Einstein’s formula may suffice. Curtis says: “Harmony is our one intellectual standard of truth-and-reality; substance (sensory lumpiness) is our felt criterion of worldly actuality…. Thesign of reality is, to the intellect, harmony; to the body, substantiality.” In other words, if it is firm and lumpy we know it is real; and if it is beautiful, we know it is true. (Harmony he defines, with F. H. Bradley, as a property of Absolute Reality concomitant with its coherence, noncontradiction, and pleasure.)

  We may wonder what such thinking would make of an excellent novel which shows the final reality to be incoherent, contradictory, painful, and meaningless. Is it true because it is consistent? I can answer for neither Curtis nor Bradley; I suggest, however, timidly and Platonically, that any coherent order is true insofar as it is order, as it partakes of universal order; and some orders are more comprehensive, and more true, than others. At any rate, it is a pity that this argument takes place at a level of abstraction which prevents its being so vivid, and therefore perhaps so convincing, as the gloomy one above.

  We have seen that art objects which refer to the world also interpret it, and that these interpretations may be both valid and useful outside the work of art itself. Such an object does something quite definite: it knows and understands, and presents its knowledge and understanding. It may be naive to ask what we can learn fromOthello , but it is decadent not to. In addition to referring to the world, however, art objects present internally coherent patterns, and some mule-headedness has led us to ask if these ordered patterns are discovered or invented, if they are actual in the great world or only imagined in the human world. After all, our eyes will perceive a tangle of strands in front of a light (such as a pine bough near a street lamp, or fiberglass “angel hair” on a shopping mall Christmas tree) as a perfect circle. But it is illusion. The pine needles and the fiberglass aren’t really arranged in perfect circles. It could be, then, that the order we fancy we perceive about us is just such a perceptual trick, a trick by which the mind perceives its own structures, just as a molecule of a certain compound is shaped in such a way that it may combine only with those complementary molecules which match it precisely. A jigsaw puzzle piece can “know” only its neighbors, and is in no position to comment upon the rest of the puzzle.

  Or it could be that the order we discern and create is actual. Either we bring it forth by creating it, and so, perhaps, add to the sum of the universe’s actual order; or we discern it with our minds and senses and art, generation by generation, discovering bits of the puzzle now here, now there. The art object, in this view, is a cognitive instrument which presents to us, in a stilled and enduring context, a model of previously unarticulated or unavailable relationships among ideas and materials. Insofar as we attend to these art objects, these epistemologically absurd and mysterious hot-air balloons, we deepen our understanding. The order which the artist devises for his fabrications is a chip off the universal order, and partakes of its being. We learn. If we may learn to know, may we not learn to understand? After all, our physical knowledge is, although partial, nevertheless not only adequate but also increasing. Our batting average is nothing short of magnificent; we have cleared the fences and hit the very moon. It could be, then, that our understanding has the capacity, at least, to grow and expand in its realm.

  Which shall it be? Do art’s complex and balanced relationships among all parts, its purpose, significance, and harmony, exist in nature? Is nature whole, like a completed thought? Is history purposeful? Is the universe of matter significant? I am sorry; I do not know.

  Source Notes

  David Sylvester,Magritte (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1969), pp. 2-3.

  Witold Gombrowicz,Ferdydurke/Pornografia/Cosmos , trans. Eric Mosbacher (New York: Grove Press, 1978), p. 49.

  Alain Robbe-Grillet,For a New Novel: Essays on Fiction , trans. Richard Howard (New York: Grove Press, 1965), p. 33.

  Arthur Stanley Eddington,The Nature of the Physical World (New York: Macmillan, 1933), p. 332.

  James Jeans,The Mysterious Universe (New York: Macmillan, 1931), p. 158.

  Marcel Proust,Swann’s Way , trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff (New York: Vintage Books, 1970), p. 63.

  Italo Calvino,Invisible Cities , trans. William Weaver (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972).

  Jorge Luis Borges, “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,”Ficciones , trans. Anthony Kerrigan (New York: Grove Press, 1962).

  James Joyce,Finnegans Wake (New York: Viking Press, 1939), p. 505.17.

  Robert Scholes,Fabulation and Metafiction (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1979), pp. 31-32.

  “Experience,”The Selected Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson , ed. Brooks Atkinson (New York: Random House, 1950), p. 359.

  Diane Johnson, “Death for Sale,”New York Review of Books , Dec. 29, 1979, p. 3.

  Lawrence Alloway, “Notes on Op Art,” inThe New Art , ed. Gregory Battcock (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1966), p. 85.

  Dore Ashton,The Unknown Shore: A View of Contemporary Art (Boston: Little, Brown, 1962), p. 10.

  John Ruskin, Preface to 2nd ed.,Modern Painters (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1906), p. xxvii.

  Selections from Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Stephen E. Whicher (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1960), p. 185.

  William Gass,In the Heart of the Heart of the Country and Other Stories (New York: Harper & Row, 1968), p. 196.

  Samuel Beckett,Molloy/Malone Dies/The Unnamable (New York: Grove Press, 1955), p. 139.

  Gombrowicz,Ferdydurke , p. 138.

  Ibid., p. 87.

  John Bákti, “the footnote as medium,”TriQuarterly 35-1 (Winter 1976), p. 22.

  Beckett,Transatlantic Review 13 (Summer 1963), pp. 6-7.

  William Burroughs, “a distant hand lifted,”Transatlantic Review 15 (Spring 1964), p. 57.

  Nik Cohn,Arfur (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1970), p. 25.

  Ibid., p. 63.

  Borges,A Personal Anthology , trans. Anthony Kerrigan (New York: Grove Press, 1967), p. 50.

  Two Novels by Robbe-Grillet, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Grove Press, 1965), p. 142.

  “Fathers and Sons,”The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1953), p. 491.

  Wright Morris,Love Affair—A Venetian Journal (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), p. 38.

  Morris,Fire Sermon (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), p. 55.

  Henry
Green,Living (London: Hogarth Press, 1964), pp. 160, 124, 222.

  Thirteen Stories by Eudora Welty, ed. Ruth M. Vande Kieft (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977), p. 147.

  Anthony Powell,At Lady Molly’s (London: Heinemann, 1971), p. 153.

  J. Henri Fabre,Souvenirs Entomologiques , cited in Augustin Fabre,The Life of J. Henri Fabre , trans. Bernard Miall (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1921), p. 337.

  The Variorum Walden, ed. Walter Harding (New York: Washington Square Press, 1953), p. 143.

  Robbe-Grillet,For a New Novel , p. 44.

  Octavio Paz,Marcel Duchamp , trans. Rachel Phillips and Donald Gardner (New York: Viking Press, 1978), p. 75.

  Jeffrey Mehlman,Revolution and Repetition: Marx, Hugo, Balzac (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977).

  Harold Bloom,The Anxiety of Influence (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), p. 95.

  Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, vol. 5 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1934), p. 157.

  Martin Gardner, “Mathematical Games,”Scientific American 242, 2 (Feb. 1980), 14.

  Hans Prinzhorn,Artistry of the Mentally Ill , trans. Eric von Brockdorff (New York: Springer-Verlag, 1972), p. 40.

  Adolph Wölfli, cited in Roger Cardinal,Outsider Art (New York: Praeger, 1972), p. 57.

  Roger Shattuck, “Painter to the Mind,”New York Times Book Review , Feb. 11, 1979, p. 13.

  Saul Bellow, “Leaving the Yellow House,”Mosby’s Memoirs and Other Stories (New York: Viking Press, 1957).

  James Joyce, “The Dead,”Dubliners (New York: Viking Press, 1967).

  Emile Zola, cited in Charles Child Walcutt, “The Naturalism of Vandover and the Brute,” inForms of Modern Fiction , ed. William Van O’Connor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1948), pp. 257-258.

  Guillaume Apollinaire, “The Cubist Painters,” inPaths to the Present: Aspects of European Thought from Romanticism to Existentialism , ed. Eugen Weber (New York: Dodd Mead, 1964), p. 233.

  William Gass,Fiction and the Figures of Life (New York: Knopf, 1970), p. 284.

  Carl Curtis, personal letter.

  F. H. Bradley,Appearance and Reality , 2d ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1902), chaps. XIII-XIV.

  Searchable Terms

  Abelove, Henry,

  Agee, James, “A Mother’s Tale,”

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  Apollinaire, Guillaume, “Cubist manifesto,”

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  Ficciones,

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  “Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote,”

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  Bradley, F. H.,

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  Diary of a Country Priest, The, George Bernanos,

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  “Four Quartets,”

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  The Counterfeiters,

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,

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