A Reader on Reading

Somewhere halfway through Proust’s La Prisonnière, Marcel learns that the writer Bergotte has died after a visit to the museum to see Vermeer’s View of Delft. A critic had commented on “a small patch of yellow wall” so perfectly painted that, if seen on its own, it appeared to possess “a self-sufficient beauty.” Bergotte, who thinks he knows the painting well, painfully undertakes the journey to fix his gaze on the little patch, in spite of being told by his doctor to stay in bed. “This is how I should have written,” he laments, before collapsing. Bergotte has recognized in a tiny section of one of Vermeer’s paintings an achievement such as he himself has never attained and, with this atrocious realization, he dies. The scene depicted by Proust is cautionary. The contemplation of success, of a work of art that in and of itself suffices, offers a reference against which an artist can measure his own work and learn his own fate, not in absolute terms, of course, but in the particular situation in which that other work has affected him. Now he knows what he means by reaching (or not reaching) a sort of perfection, and whether to continue or to stop.

In this sense, not all interruption is lack of success. When Kafka abandons his Castle before the formal conclusion of the story, when Gaudi dies before completing the church of the Sagrada Familia, when Mahler jots down only the first parts of his Tenth Symphony, when Michelangelo refuses to work further on his Florence Pietà, it is we, the audience, not the artist, who might consider the labors half-done. For the creator the result might be sketchy indeed, truncated yes, but not insufficient, like Vermeer’s little patch of yellow isolated in the viewer’s eye.

Rimbaud interrupted his poetic career at the age of nineteen; J. D. Salinger wrote no more stories after 1963; the Argentinean poet Enrique Banchs brought out his last book in 1911 and then lived on for another fifty-seven years without publishing a single new collection of verse. We don’t know whether these artists felt, at a certain moment, the epiphany that they had achieved what they were meant to achieve and could therefore retire from the scene on which they felt they had no further business. Certainly from our distance as readers, their work seems self-sufficient, mature, perfect. But did the artists see it as such? Few are the artists who recognize their own genius without hyperbole or constricting modesty. The paradigm is Dante, who, in writing his great poem knows that it is great and tells the reader it is so. For most others, however, the learning of the craft never ceases, and no resulting work is fully achieved. Witness the following confession:

“From the age of six I felt the compulsion to draw the shape of things. In my fifties, I showed a collection of drawings, but nothing accomplished before I turned seventy satisfies me. Only at seventy-three was I able to intuit, even approximately, the true form and nature of birds, fish, and plants. Therefore, by the age of eighty I will have made great progress; at ninety I will have penetrated the essence of all things; at a hundred, I will no doubt have ascended to a higher state, indescribable, and if I live to be a hundred and ten years old, everything, every dot and every line, will live. I invite those who will live as long as I to hold me to my promise. Written in my seventy-fifth year by myself, formerly known as Hokusai, now called Huakivo-Royi, the old man maddened by drawing.”

Whether the artist has abandoned his creative career or pursued it until his last breath has been drawn, whether he feels that something of what he has done will survive his dust and ashes, or whether he is certain that his work is, as Ecclesiastes warns us, nothing but “vanity and vexation of spirit,” it is we, the audience, who continue to seek in what has been created and set before us a certain order of merit, an aesthetic, moral, or philosophical hierarchy. We think we know better.

Our arrogance, however, makes an assumption that is perhaps not tenable: that there is one among the works of Corot, of Shakespeare, of Verdi, that sublimates all others, a work for which all the rest must seem as preparations or drafts, a culminating work, a crowning achievement. In one of his short stories, Henry James put forward the notion that there is indeed a theme, a subject, a signature that runs through any artist’s work like the repeated yet hidden figure in a carpet. The notion of a “testamentary” work that encapsulates the artist’s summation and legacy is like James’s “figure in the carpet,” but without the carpet.