Marcel Schwob bel
onged to the same fin de siècle generation as Henry James and Robert Louis Stevenson, his colleagues on the other side of the channel, and Jules Renard and Felix Feneon, the great art critic and anarchist terrorist. He, like RLS, and his friend Renard, was not destined for the long life on the pedestal – which makes it appropriate that one of his best known works, Imaginary Lives, is full of praise of John Aubrey’s Brief Lives.
It is hard for me to
read the introduction of Imaginary Lives and not think of Borges, who, like
Schwob, separated the paradox from the apology. In the Western tradition, or at
least the high church version of it, paradox has an essential and divine place:
to believe in an absurdity is a surrender wreathed in cosmic drama. But if the
absurdity does not induce belief, what we are left with is paradox itself, as
an aesthetic and ethical object and ploy. Schwob’s paradox, in the Imaginary
Lives, is that biography stumbles aesthetically when it attaches the figure to
the world event – when biography is taken not as art, but as history. To get to
this argument, Schwob uses Aubrey and
Diogenes Laertes Lives of the Philosophers, inserting an elegant, emblematic reading of a story
about the Japanese artist, Hokusaī:
« The painter Hokusaï
hoped to arrive, when he got to his one hundred and tenth year, at the ideal of
his art. At this moment, he said, every point, every line traced by his brush
would be living. By living, read individual. Nothing is more similar than
points and lines: geometry is grounded in this postulate. The perfect art of Hokusaï
demanded that nothing be more different. Thus the ideal of the biography would be
to infinitely differentiate the aspect of two philosophers who had invented
nearly the same metaphysics.”
We have something near
this idea in geometry itself – the fractal. That self similarity that creates a
difference. This, of course, is not what Schwob was thinking about – rather,
Schwob was thinking about the way art ideologies, theories, schools, tend to
want the lines to be similar. They want realism, or symbolism, modernism or
post-modernism. They want the lines to be lines and the characters to be
characters, because life is short. But if life is long, if you achieve the one
hundred and ten years, you will perhaps stumble upon a line that is not like
any other line, and a point that is not like any other point. At the end of The
Man who Was Thursday, Chesterton summons up the same paradox, but as a nightmare.
The poet-detective, Syme, pitting himself against an anarchist gang, pauses in
his breakneck quest and reflects:
“Sometimes he saw for
an instant that these notions were subjective, that he was only looking at
ordinary men, one of whom was old, another nervous, another short-sighted. The
sense of an unnatural symbolism always settled back on him again. Each figure
seemed to be, somehow, on the borderland of things, just as their theory was on
the borderland of thought. He knew that each one of these men stood at the
extreme end, so to speak, of some wild road of reasoning. He could only fancy,
as in some old-world fable, that if a man went westward to the end of the world
he would find something--say a tree--that was more or less than a tree, a tree
possessed by a spirit; and that if he went east to the end of the world he
would find something else that was not wholly itself--a tower, perhaps, of
which the very shape was wicked. So these figures seemed to stand up, violent
and unaccountable, against an ultimate horizon, visions from the verge. The
ends of the earth were closing in.”
Chesterton had an
ultimately comfortable idea that the Church was the answer to all that. But if
the Church is just an ordinary institution, then the unnatural symbolism becomes
a haunt in a world without ghosts. And this, even for spirit seekers – or especially
them, with their middle class desire that “science” prove the paranormal – is too
much uniqueness. And who can bear too much uniqueness? It is hard to be the
geniuses that we all are.
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