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A Higher Purpose for Art
There is an attitude among some that an artist must not explain his work—res ipsa loquitor—the work speaks for itself. Artists are permitted (if asked) to explain their general motives, their inspiration, their philosophy about art, but they are told in different ways that they must keep silent on any explanation of a particular work itself. They must remove themselves, as artists, from the work, and are told that ars est celare artem (art consists of concealing art); any deep analysis of a work is for art critics and commentators, and yet, the only individual present and actively involved in the creation of the work is the artist, not those critics or commentators. As a novelist, short story writer, essayist, and poet, I am intimately aware of my intentions when I write a novel, short story, essay, or poem. A critic or commentator may be able to give me some notion of whether or not I have achieved that goal, but I sometimes wonder if the reason I feel I have not done so, upon reading a review of something I have written, is that the critic or commentator is not as concerned with my purpose as I am, and therefore less likely to discuss the elements of my work that I most hold dear. And so, I shall now take what might be perceived as an exaggerated estimate of my importance by those who would rather assign themselves the role as the interpreters of my motives as an artist: I shall explain some of the motives behind several of the works that are most meaningful to me as their creator. Since I will have to break the res ipsa rule in order to do this, I ask your indulgence. My consolation to myself is that at least I have not presumed to explain the motives or purpose of others' work. As expressed in The Meaning and Consequence of Poetic Genius, I feel strongly that the artist is the "guardian of creative consequence to those around [him]." The artist must strive towards contribution, and I believe this is achieved most effectively, in the case of the writer, through the distillation and presentation of enlightenment on some universal level. As discussed by Epstein, (see references) in this age of art, "One of the principal goals of art ... is to provide insights or an analysis regarding the nature of reality and truth, thereby helping the reader or viewer to develop his or her own understanding about the meaning of life." If I write a poem about how I feel, I must ask myself if my feeling has a broad application to the human condition, rather than merely to myself. This is the primary reason I am unlikely to produce a poem that begins with the statement: "When I smell bacon, I think of my cat," unless I then somehow tie this together in a way that is meaningful to someone other than myself. It might sound mysterious and poetic by virtue of its obscurity, but without some connection to something more consequential than bacon and my cat, and the link I make between the two, it is poetic onanism. For this reason, I write poems such as Gödel to a Lover instead of "My Cat Loves Bacon." To understand a poem such as "Gödel" at the level of my intent, it certainly helps to have an understanding of Gödel's most consequential theorems, granted, but there are many who do have that understanding, whereas to understand about my smelling bacon and thinking of my cat, you probably had to be there the day my cat jumped onto the kitchen counter and tore open a package of bacon strips. Moreover, my cat and his habits tell you nothing of any particular consequence, whereas "Gödel to a Lover" expresses a certain frustration with communication between two souls that many individuals experience. Your cat may love bacon, too, but even if everyone's cat did, that would not make "My Cat Loves Bacon" a universal poem. Universalism not only applies to everyone, it speaks of everyone's deepest desires, motivations, and psyche. To offer enlightenment in these areas is to speak beyond the mediocre. I feel I must expand my reach as an artist beyond the personal and into the universally personal. To be universally personal is to dig into my own soul, relive and translate my own pain and folly, and ask myself who else might be living in that place and what I can offer in terms of knowledge they might gain in themselves from my observations about a shared anguish. For instance, in my poem Outlier I speak of isolation in a context specific to myself, but applicable to anyone who cares to take the time and effort needed to read the poem. My personal experience with reading Goscinny and Uderzo's Asterix comics is my own, but my perception, interpretation, and presentation of that personal experience can transform it into something that speaks towards the ends of the poem as a whole. Consider the stanza to which I am referring:
At first glance, the allusion to my personal experience with Asterix may not be clear, until one considers the connections to "menhirs," "marked by an asterisk," "comic protrusions," "dogmatic," "get their fix," "not having the gall," "seizers," "august moons," "under seige," "imbibe," "strength," and the Druidic "Samhuin." Asterix readers will recall that Obelix is on a constant quest to make menhirs, Asterix's dog is named "Dogmatix," the town Druid is named "Getafix," and this last town of Galls is under seige by Julius Caesar's hapless Roman army. Asterix gains strength by drinking a magic potion, prepared by the town druid. All of this is not simply an attempt on my part at clever word play: it translates my understanding of the Asterix series of comics into something meaningful to those who suffer from a feeling of isolation in the face of overwhelming odds. Anyone who is socially isolated will be able to relate to this feeling of being surrounded by "kings in kingless conquered lands," even if they have never once read an Asterix comic. It is my role as a poet, I feel, to not only talk about how I feel, but to present it in a way that requires some work to fully understand, so that, by striving at understanding, the reader works towards sharing whatever insight I intend to present. In "Outlier," the final stanza of them poem offers what I feel is the solution to this isolation—to drink deeply from the fountain of self-knowledge:
In poems such as my Cycle published in Ubiquity, Vol. 2 No. 2, I take a piece of what appears to "personal advice to a friend" and universalize it in a way that applies to everyone who feels that they are prone to being taken advantage of by others. The cycle begins with a clear misstatement (since the poem is, after all, presented for all to read):
By stating that the poem is for "no one else," I have attempted to bring the reader into an intimate space: to prepare them for a personal bit of advice. This sets the tone of the sobriety of the observations that follow, since they are not lighthearted, as seen in the closing of the introductory sonnet of the cycle:
This is a bold statement to make, and is obvious hyperbole. Certainly not everyone is a lying, tongue wagging moron. The point is not that everyone is, but that the intimate listener is in a deep place in her heart where she feels as if she has been deceived by the world. I have not, in "Cycle," attempted to convince her otherwise, but instead go on to outline in some detail many of the ways she may fall into destructive relationships. For this particular cycle, it is not for me, as poet, to say, "Cheer up, you will find someone who will make you whole," since the final sonnet of the cycle offers a more appropriate message:
The intention of "Cycle" is to help the reader understand that she must seek self-acceptance before she begins to seek outward signs of acceptance by others. One must not fear life, or love, or pain, but embrace living fully, partaking of one's right to happiness. By seeking such self-acceptance, one is more likely able to weather external negativity. Had I attempted to convince her that she would find the perfect match for her, I would have denied her her right to happiness without addiction to others' acceptance. "She" and "her"—of course—refer to anyone in such a dark state regarding the nature of how others treat them, and not to any particular reader. Enlightenment, however, is not just about doling out advice. I make my share of mistakes in life, and am no man's superior when it comes to prudence. Sometimes, enlightenment for others comes at the cost of self-revelation about my own flaws. When I do write a poem such as "Lambda Tongue" I try not only to reveal my flaws, but also to show how those flaws have altered my path in life. So, when I admit: I am undone — I must also be honest and explain the consequences of my haste to speak:
That is to say: it is not enough for me to admit merely to my flaw of sometimes not holding my tongue when I should; I must examine the outcome. By exposing my worst, I hope to gain some connection to others with my flaws. By exposing the consequences to this condition, I attempt to offer some consolation to those who may be able to apply this to their own situation. Of course not every observation on something as immense as the human condition can be made through poetry. In these instances, I use the short story as the vehicle of exploration. In my story It Ain't Never Gonna Happen, I fictionalize an incident that happened to me when I was an aspiring teen-aged novelist (more or less as portrayed, with some license for dramatic effect). When I tell people that a dog once urinated on a handwritten manuscript, they often laugh, and indeed, I often laugh at the telling myself. This "tragedy" of youth has a deeper meaning than simply loss, when presented in the story, however. The protagonist of "Never Gonna" has conflicting personal needs: his need for acceptance by his step-father, and his need to honor and protect his mother. I felt it necessary to state thematically that the need to get out of oneself should be greater than the need for personal recognition. By honoring his mother's wish to not tell her husband that a dog was staying in the house (which the stepfather forbids), the protagonist is putting her honor before his own. In a sense, the protagonist takes on the role of the protector of family harmony by doing so, and it is no mistake that the story begins and ends with palindromic parallelism that symbolizes this assumption of this role in the family:
A casual read of this story may incline the reader to think that Mark has, by covering his head, assumed a passive, defeatist position in relation to his stepfather, when, in fact, it was my intention, by using this parallelism, to show that Mark is acting out of strength rather than weakness. Indeed, he has a black eye from his brother-in-law, and indeed, he appears to defer to his stepfather in the final statements he makes, but the reader knows that he is doing so only because his mother has begged him not to disrupt the harmony between her and her husband. So, when Mark pulls the sheet over his face "like a newspaper," in the same fashion that the stepfather pulled his newspaper over his face, Mark is becoming a provider of stability in the family, just as the stepfather has been. His altruistic lie for the "best" in the family at this point in its family dynamic requires him to place the greater good ahead of his personal pride. This may not be a popular message to anyone who would have preferred a direct, confrontational approach, but I believe that sometimes family harmony comes before personal pride; compromise and sacrifice are often necessary. The observations made in my short story, "In the Shadow of Clay Pigeons," are somewhat darker in their implications. Unlike with "Never Gonna," this story examines an incident in the same protagonist's life when the group defends an individual, even though, by doing so, the individual escapes personal responsibility. A younger Mark, because of his cock-sureness, severely injures one of his friends by launching a bullet casing from a clay pigeon launcher. The group of children decide to not tell the adults of the camp who was personally responsible for the injury of the other child, even though the child is probably brain-damaged for life. This was a particularly painful story to write because, except for a few details added for thematic effect, it relates an incident that actually occurred in the group of boys I played with when I was ten years old. The statement I intended to make most loudly in "Clay Pigeons" was that group absolution does not compensate for personal guilt; our hearts know what we have done, or, to use the symbolism of the story:
Just like Pontius Pilate and Lady MacBeth before him, young Mark attempts to wash the blood from his hands, but cannot wash the blood from his conscience. Again, in parallel to the crucifixion of Christ, the "crowd" (that is, the group of Mark's friends) agrees to hold no individual responsible for the crime, but this does not make the incident any less damaging. There is no conscience by consensus. The turmoil and damage that are possible at human hands are not always as clearly defined in my stories. In Stand-In for instance, a young man who is pining for a past relationship introduces himself to a woman who could be her twin by appearance. Because this young man so desires to have the whole in his psyche filled by this "stand-in," he fails to ask her if she is available for a relationship before he makes the first step to becoming personally invested in her. Once he finds himself somewhat attracted to her on her own merits, he is jarred back to reality by her admission that she is married. The mistake here, unlike in the previously discussed two short stories, is one of carelessness about others when submerged in one's own sorrow. Some stories speak not only of life, but also of my views on art and how they alter the course of life. "Paladin" is such a story. The protagonist, a roguish novelist named Cohen Benjamin, finds himself attracted to the wife of his friend, and the two end up sleeping together. In the course of this story, Cohen and Salomeh discuss several paintings by Gustav Klimt, and Cohen expresses his views on the role of the artist and the audience as these pertain to the completion of art. The closing passages of the story show how Cohen's analysis of the purpose of art do not serve him very well when he analyzes himself; he has failed to assimilate his own esthetic and cannot judge himself sufficiently to behave in an ethical way. In my story The Play, I endeavor to show how a refusal to ask others for what we need can lead to self-imposed isolation. Having recently recovered from pneumonia, a young Aurelian finds himself in a situation where he has every possibility of becoming romantically involved with an older woman who is obviously enchanted with him. He resists fully offering himself to her, however, even though she is offering herself to him, and ends up alone by the end of the story. Unable to ask for what he needs, Aurelian cannot enter the lives of those who may be most able to fulfill his emotional needs. Some themes can only be properly explored in longer works. In my novel Abadoun, I wished to show how one person could base a critical decision on misinformation and misunderstanding of others. The fate of a small town rests squarely upon one man's shoulders, and whether or not he will alert the town officials as to an impending gas attack by an Iraqi jet. The protagonist will not be in the small town for long, since he is on his way to Teheran to rescue a political prisoner. In his mind, he weighs the villagers' lives against the one life he has been told to rescue in the capital city. The novel is told in alternating points of view. Odd numbered chapters tell the reader what the protagonist is thinking, whereas each even numbered chapter exposes the truth about what the protagonist has earlier assumed. The man assumed to be the least caring in the village, Mullah Aziz, is seen to be a compassionate family man who does not at all enjoy his position of harsh authority in the village. A cruel old man who beats a boy badly for stealing a single tomato is seen to have beat the boy in an attempt to reclaim his lost youth and vigor, so that a young woman he has been fantasizing about will notice him, even in his old age. A pregnant woman who has married an outsider is seen to be completely absorbed with her attempts to escape the rural life of the village. The boy who stole the tomato, it turns out, has noble blood flowing through his veins, and is willing to take such a severe beating due to his ancestral pride. No one is who they appear to be, not because of deception, but because people are not always inside how we perceive them through our own understanding of the world. Ultimately, the protagonist's misunderstanding of the people of the village results in his decision that the one political prisoner in Teheran is more important than the rural villagers. He does not know that rebellion and fire are in the blood of all the villagers, and assumes that only this "political prisoner" has what it takes to start a counter-revolution. In weighing one life's consequence against another, one can never know enough to make a proper accounting. My second novel, The Succubus Sea, tells the story of a painter in his fifties who has arrived at a blocked period of creativity. My intention in writing this novel was to examine how unaddressed guilt for one's past actions can build to a point in one's life that it becomes unbearable, even to the point where one settles for less than one has proven oneself to be capable. The painter, Cyrus Drake, becomes isolated from others and from himself, and only when his father dies and brings him to thinking of his past is he able to begin to slow process of facing his childhood. A relationship begins to form between Drake and a young dancer who has family ties that go back to Drake's youth, and finally, when he is comfortable enough with the meaningful bonds that are forming with Salomeh, he becomes comfortable enough to return to Iran to face the truth. Having discovered his mother's affair with a family friend, young Drake forced the man out of town on a gentleman's wager. The next day, Drake's mother appeared to have committed suicide by walking into the Caspian. Since it is young Drake who forced his mother's lover to leave, he carries with him, for forty years, the belief that he caused his own mother's death. Upon returning to Iran forty years later, to face his mother's former lover, Drake discovers that Nousin Drake had been murdered by her brothers and father when she confessed her adultery to her family. Her lover, the poet Suleiman Hajj, witnessed this murder, and fled to Turkey. Only once the murderers had all died did Hajj return to Iran. When Drake discovers that he did not cause his mother so much despair that she killed herself, he is released from years of guilt, and again feels confident in his ability to create art. Drake does not become freed of all responsibility for his actions, but faces his true role in the events that resulted in her death. Perhaps my most ambitious attempt to unravel the twine of the human condition comes in my third novel, Janus Incubus. Since this novel was developed from many of my short stories, such as "The Play," "Stand-In," "It Ain't Never Gonna Happen," "Paladin," and others, it contains within it many sub-themes. As a complete work, however, it examines the conflicting effects of extreme giftedness and Borderline Personality Disorder. As with all tragic figures, the protagonist is great, but for his hamartia. Whereas it was Hamlet's indecision and MacBeth's ambition that were their fatal flaws, Mark's ultimate demise in Janus Incubus is his persistent need to seek identity from outside rather than inside himself. Thematically, the novel centers on an issue raised by Rainer Maria Rilke:
This need for others to complete him drives Mark from one destructive relationship to the next. Because he is handsome, intelligent, talented, and charming, Mark has convenient access to relationships, but because of his temper, sensitivity, and lack of a healthy self-image, he is unable to pursue relationships that are healthy for all concerned. Mark also makes the mistake of believing that abandoning himself in the identity of another will allow him to shed his human need to feel pain. This manifests in a dramatic fashion when Mark assumes the identity of his friend Cohen Benjamin after Cohen dies in the hills of Northwestern India, ultimately as a result of saving Mark from a suicide attempt earlier that year. Although Mark manages to distance himself from his feelings somewhat in this conscious effort to abandon his past identity, he also abandons the scrupulous ethical foundations. Although this permits him to achieve some degree of success as an author, he continues to pursue unhealthy relationships. It is only when Mark goes too far beyond acceptable sexual behavior, by sleeping with a friend's wife during a trip to New York City, that Mark is chastised back to his senses enough for him to seek to pursue a meaningful relationship with a woman who has finally become truly available to him as a partner. He is ultimately unable to resist his drive to assert his place in the world, however, and it is this need to assert his identity that leads to his death at the hands of the Montreal police. Even though I have taken great liberties for fiction's sake, Janus Incubus has many elements of autobiography, in that much of the early life of Mark is drawn from personal experience. Much of what happens to Mark after his assumption of Cohen Benjamin's identity is my attempt to theorize how my own life may have gone had I not developed enough in maturity to avoid going down that path. I was forced to ask myself, many times during its writing and revision, "How would I have dealt with this, were it not for ...?" By asking myself such questions, and accepting the sometimes ugly answers that resulted from introspection, I believe I have brought the work together as a unified whole. When an artist explains his work not only in a general, but specific way, he risks exposing himself not only to literary, but also to personal criticism. Those who have labeled him a prophet, upon seeing that he is no such creature, may feel their estimation of him has been deflated. Those who have labeled him a hack, upon seeing that he did, indeed, have grander expectations than were manifested by his weak craft, may feel that he is reaching for stars he may never have the ability to touch. Those of the sanctum sanctorum of artists who believe that artists must never expound upon such things, for fear that some of the mystery of the process will become sullied in the attempt, will possibly shun the artist. Still others may find the artist too pretentious, precious, or self-important. It is my hope that I have come across as none of this by revealing my motives, intentions, and desires for my own work, but rather, that I have impressed upon the reader that I truly believe there can be a higher purpose for art, and that purpose is the enlightenment and personal and emotional growth of both of the reader and of the artist himself. Since vita brevis, ars longa (life is brief and art is long), it is my responsibility as an artist, I feel, to seek an effect that will persist and be relevant beyond my allotted time. ReferencesWorks without author listed are by Quinn Tyler Jackson. "The Meaning and Consequence of Poetic Genius," Apotheosis, No. 11, September 1999. Epstein, Brett Jocelyn, Framing Reality: A Metafictional Analysis of Kafka and Cortázar, bachelor's thesis (Bryn Mawr College, PA) published in Inner Sanctum, Vol. 1 No. 3, April 2001. "Gödel to a Lover," Apotheosis, No. 14, April 2000. "Outlier," Noesis-E, Vol. 1, No. 4, August 2001. "Cycle," Ubiquity, Vol. 2, No. 2, Spring-Summer, 2001. "Lambda Tongue," Drop the Buddha, December 2000. "It Ain't Never Gonna Happen," The Kudzu Monthly, March 2002. "In the Shadow of Clay Pigeons," Ubiquity, Vol. 3 No. 3, Apr. 2002. "Stand-In," Ubiquity, Vol. 2 No. 3, July 2001. "Paladin," The Kudzu Monthly, May 2002. "The Play," Ubiquity, Vol. 2 No. 2, Spring-Summer, 2001. Abadoun, PlaneTree Press, July 2000. The Succubus Sea, PlaneTree Press, April 2001. Janus Incubus, PlaneTree Press, Spring 2002. (Upcoming.) Copyright © 2002 Quinn Tyler Jackson |
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Quinn Tyler Jackson has been a popular contributor to Kudzu Monthly almost from its inception. Often, he has been instrumental in helping this publication uphold the "literary" aspect of its mission by providing well-crafted, entertaining short stories. We believe that that the technical ability to assemble words into coherent patterns is an acquired skill. Going beyond the technical, but commonplace, ability to merely write correctly all the way to the grand exemplar of creating thoughtful, meaningful fiction and poetry, however, we consider a form of art. We at Kudzu Monthly are thankful for having been entrusted with the publication of this extraordinary and unexpected look inside the mind of an artist, and we invite you to respond to this essay. |
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