Monday, March 20, 2023

the living line, the unbearable genius of the self

 

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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