One natural response to this problem is to try, through writing, to see our world with fresh eyes, to instill some beauty, some vividness into it—or to try to wring those things from it.
I don’t read much contemporary fiction, but every once in a while a book falls open in front of me and I have no choice but to read a few pages. This happened to me a few days ago with a novel from 2014. In an opening scene, the narrator (who, one suspects, closely resembles the writer) is sitting on a plane. Interactions with a man seated next to her are interspersed with descriptions of generic airplane goings-on. In the passage below, I have excerpted the former and kept only the latter:
On the tarmac at Heathrow the planeful of people waited silently to be taken into the air. The air hostess stood in the aisle and mimed with her props as the recording played. We were strapped into our seats, a field of strangers, in a silence like the silence of a congregation while the liturgy is read. She showed us the life jacket with its little pipe, the emergency exits, the oxygen mask dangling from a length of clear tubing. She led us through the possibility of death and disaster, as the priest leads the congregation through the details of purgatory and hell; and no one jumped up to escape while there was still time. Instead we listened or half-listened, thinking about other things, as though some special hardness had been bestowed on us by this coupling of formality and doom. […]
[…] Outside, the turgid summer afternoon lay stalled on the runway; little airport vehicles raced unconstrained across the flat distances, skating and turning circles like toys, and further away still was the silver thread of the morotrway that ran and glinted like a brook bounded by the monotonous fields. The plane began to move, trundling forward so that the vista appeared to unfreeze into motion, flowing past the windows first slowly and then faster, until there was the feeling of effortful, half-resistant lifting as it detached itself from the earth. There was a moment in which it seemed impossible that this could happen. But then it did.
[…] In the juddering cabin the lights flickered fitfully on; there was the sound of doors opening and slamming, and tremendous clattering noises, and people were stirring, talking, standing up. A man’s voice was talking over the intercom; there was a smell of coffee and food; the air hostesses stalked purposefully up and down the narrow carpeted aisle and their nylon stockings made a rasping sound as they passed.
One sees right away that this is a skillful writer. She is good with words and syntax. But she is squeezing these images too hard. The metaphor of the priest and the congregation is clearly overblown, but so is the simile of the glinting brook. Even the rasping of the nylon stockings seems gratuitous. Yes, the atmosphere of an airplane springs to mind—but why is it so gussied up?
My point is not to throw shade on a book I haven’t actually read and which more than one person has recommended to me, but to try to bring out what I find tragic in this. The writer is doing what she must do: she is looking for poetry in her world. Only it isn’t there. What I mean is not that planes and airports are so ugly (even if they are) but that the writer is clearly desperate to make of them something beautiful, something that will hold her attention and ours, will make us feel that these passing moments have some meaning, that we are not falling through a void. If I have been able to guess what is happening in the writer’s soul, it is only because the same thing has happened many times in mine.
4 comments:
I respectfully disagree with you appraisal of Rachel Cusk’s work. She is disillusioned, even revolted, by the world and doesn’t fool herself that there is poetry to be found there- instead she feeds her soul (and mine) through the act of writing. The act is the beauty she finds.
It's not that I think Cusk is under any illusions. I think she too feels that the world she's writing about is ugly and she's trying to do something with it, trying to make it worth depicting, ugly as it is. I am completely in sympathy with this recognition and this effort, but I do find the result depressing-- in the same way that I sometimes find my own efforts depressing, desperate, forced. In the sections I quoted I do think she's squeezing those images and thoughts awfully hard to make them worth reading about.
It's usually considered polite at a moment like this to say something like, "But of course everyone has their own reactions to literature, their own judgment of beauty," and while there is some obvious truth in a statement like that, (a) I don't really find it polite, because it is as much as to say, there's no further hope in talking, our views are irresolvable, and (b) it's too easy. There really is something bizarre about aesthetic disagreements. How is it possible that you find those passages beautiful and nourishing to your soul while I find them cold, dreary, and self-conscious? (To say nothing of all the thousands of other readers with their various opinions.) There is a notion out there, implicit in "polite" statements like the one above, that aesthetic judgment is cut off from other forms of judgment, that it emerges inexplicably from a person's eyes, ears, brain, and nothing further can be said about it. But I think we all know that our response to beauty is deeply connected to other kinds of responses: our feeling of what is right and true in the world, of what matters, of where meaning lies, of who we are and what we long for. So to disagree about beauty is to disagree about something fundamental, something personal not in the small sense of "There's no accounting for taste" but in the deep sense that it's bound up in who we are, in, as you put it, our souls.
i push Cusk on everybody. but i see your pov. you look close. you read and grapple word by word and i gulp her down just amazed and envious. maybe the argument above has nothing to do with beauty but how we ingest and perceive. thanks for all of this. steph the unknown
I did know you were a fan of Cusk and was wondering how you'd react to this crumb.
Looking back at it, though, I feel I did a lousy job of articulating what it is that bothers me about the passage from Cusk. I think, when I wrote this crumb, I felt my own reaction so strongly that I thought it hardly needed much explanation, that the passage would make my point for me. But that's obviously false. Maybe I'll try to rewrite this at some point.
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