The Mouse and James Joyce on "Art" as an Art Form
[The following is an excerpt from chapter five of a book I wrote last year. I was led to blog this by an article the Fairhope Lady wrote yesterday, while I was out transforming mankind.]
Toward the end of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce – posing as his hero, Stephen Dedalus – asks himself a question: “If a man hacking in fury at a block of wood, make there an image of a cow, is that image a work of art?” The guy he was asking – a Mick by the name of Lynch – laughed and replied, “That has the true scholastic stink.” Specialists studying Joyce’s work have identified most of the real people Joyce gives fictitious names to, but even if there were somewhere in the world a flesh-and-blood counterpart of Joyce’s “fictitious cousin” Lynch, we would still have no reason to believe the exchange between Joyce and Lynch ever took place. We can assume that Joyce – as “Lynch” – reacted to his own question.
Joyce intended us to understand it that way. Reciting more “scholastic stink,” he has Dedalus explain how depersonalized emotions grow into artistic statements. If the artist does his work well, Joyce says, the person experiencing the art will feel as if he has been caught up in the tides of “a vital sea,” and the artist will no longer seem to exist. That is, Lynch and Dedalus will be real, and Joyce himself will not.
To this magical claim, Joyce causes Lynch to reply as follows: “What do you mean by prating about beauty and the imagination in this Godforsaken island? No wonder the artist retired within or behind his handiwork after having perpetrated this country.”
When we reach the end of Joyce’s self-analysis – thirty or so pages later in small print editions – Dedalus removes all doubt about the nature and identity of the block of wood blindly made into a cow. Joyce challenges himself – as Dedalus – with these purple words: “I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race....Old father, old artificer, bear me now and ever in good stead.” He’s telling himself that experience is encountered... (it is something we run into, or that runs into us, something forced upon us)...and that out of the collision we forge conscience...(we get to feel how we think about things). The soul is the artist’s work place...(and his product). We learn that Dedalus, Lynch (and Lynch’s hatred of Ireland), the wooden cow, and Joyce himself are one and the same.
But is it art? The cow, I mean. Of course it is, but Joyce left the obvious question unasked: who was the artisan swinging the axe? If we are made by the things that happen to us, by no effort of our own, if we are mere blocks of wood being chopped by blind fate, well, in that case, the axe man’s identity’s clear. We are made by an “old artificer” out there somewhere who eternally does his work so well the question of his actuality seldom arises. He has invisible hands. He has no intent to do good or evil. He has no conscience.
The artificer?...by His works ye shall know Him.
Joyce was not, however, wasting his breath on that prayer to his “old father, old artificer.” He was appealing (once more) only to himself. It was after all, the mythological Daedalus that Thomas Bullfinch describes as “a most skillful artificer.” Joyce implores of his burgeoning talent, that it produce, as a reality, the desire he expressed in his wish of “6 April, later” (in Portrait of the Artist), “...to press in my arms the loveliness which has not yet come into the world.” He knew that the embrace of ultimate beauty needs effort, and that unseen loveliness cannot come into the world but by imagination itself.
But is it art? Anything manufactured by human hands can pass for art – and be art – if imagination makes it so. I once took a plywood board, 3’ x 3’ square, spray-painted it light yellow in many, many layers, framed it with glossy black 1” x 1” rough oak stripping (did not even bevel the joints), stretched threads diagonally from the four corners to mark the center, cut a small template, meaning to stencil a glossy black 7/8” x 5/8” diamond directly there where the threads crossed, but the paint ran haphazardly (but not too far) beneath the cut-away, appending small “legs” upon the diamond, the effect reminding me of the Lunar Excursion Module – it was that time of history – so I named the thing Apollo and sold it at first sight. It was a yellow board with a smear of paint in the center. The black frame may have caused the LEM to seem to stand out 3-D-wise in front of its yellow vacuum, to be swallowed as it were in the immensity of space, but even in that magnificent accident, it was imagination that made it art – not mine alone, but the woman buyer’s too. I never asked her what she saw there. Her check cleared at first asking.
But was it art? The check, I mean.... No, no, no! I do not mean the check! At least, it was not my intention to mean the check. But in the time-space following the bold-faced question (and its mark), an image materialized of my friend Catherine’s blue pencil, slashing a circle ‘round the question and the sentence I would have composed as an answer (which for the moment I have forgotten) and scrawling a question of her own in the margin: “What ‘it’ do you mean? The check?” So it was written, The check, I mean – humor, teaspooned into a remembrance of Joyce’s near-sighted confession, as if enough were not already there.
“Do you, Franklin.,” (she always calls me by that freehold farmer’s name) “mean to suggest that a surrogate for money can be a work of art? And if not, why not, if art is always only in the beholder’s eye? If all is art, then why the word art?”
Well, we have words aplenty made for mere convenience. If we had not “art,” how could we tell the difference between the artist’s and the carpenter’s work? How justify the great cost of Sunflowers? I watched a man on the television the other night make cleverly arranged structures of ice, driftwood, basalt, and other perishable or movable objects, situating his arrangements in tidal waters just so the tides would shortly destroy them. Someone – not the man himself – called the doomed manufactures art. A blue-nosed critic might argue that, as a minimum, art must endure. But all things perish – sunflowers, Sunflowers, great castles, cloud castles, even the earth, the universe...well, maybe the universe. So it’s not their permanence that gives art objects their difference. All things that are, won’t be (even that sentence I intended to write instead of “The check, I mean” that so far I have not remembered). Art is what people call “art.” Perhaps no one would refer to a pile of shit as art, but one imagines that a perfectly rendered water color of it might be. I knew a man who painted animal anuses – I mean he painted paintings of animal ass holes, not that he actually painted the animals’ asses themselves (but why not?). I do not recall that he ever sold one or even got one hung on a wall, but is that what makes art art? That it also is a surrogate for money?
[After that, the chapter drivelled off deeper and deeper into incomprehensible inanity, concluding with a framed protrait of George Bush, pleasantly posed over an expensive desk, smilingly, and importantly, signing the paper that launched a thousand misguided missiles upon the flesh and blood of real mothers and their babies in a faraway land . . . and finally asking, "But was it art?" and answering as Joyce most certainly would have, "George's smile, you mean? Sure it was art. See, see, the caption in the catalog says it was."]
Toward the end of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce – posing as his hero, Stephen Dedalus – asks himself a question: “If a man hacking in fury at a block of wood, make there an image of a cow, is that image a work of art?” The guy he was asking – a Mick by the name of Lynch – laughed and replied, “That has the true scholastic stink.” Specialists studying Joyce’s work have identified most of the real people Joyce gives fictitious names to, but even if there were somewhere in the world a flesh-and-blood counterpart of Joyce’s “fictitious cousin” Lynch, we would still have no reason to believe the exchange between Joyce and Lynch ever took place. We can assume that Joyce – as “Lynch” – reacted to his own question.
Joyce intended us to understand it that way. Reciting more “scholastic stink,” he has Dedalus explain how depersonalized emotions grow into artistic statements. If the artist does his work well, Joyce says, the person experiencing the art will feel as if he has been caught up in the tides of “a vital sea,” and the artist will no longer seem to exist. That is, Lynch and Dedalus will be real, and Joyce himself will not.
To this magical claim, Joyce causes Lynch to reply as follows: “What do you mean by prating about beauty and the imagination in this Godforsaken island? No wonder the artist retired within or behind his handiwork after having perpetrated this country.”
When we reach the end of Joyce’s self-analysis – thirty or so pages later in small print editions – Dedalus removes all doubt about the nature and identity of the block of wood blindly made into a cow. Joyce challenges himself – as Dedalus – with these purple words: “I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race....Old father, old artificer, bear me now and ever in good stead.” He’s telling himself that experience is encountered... (it is something we run into, or that runs into us, something forced upon us)...and that out of the collision we forge conscience...(we get to feel how we think about things). The soul is the artist’s work place...(and his product). We learn that Dedalus, Lynch (and Lynch’s hatred of Ireland), the wooden cow, and Joyce himself are one and the same.
But is it art? The cow, I mean. Of course it is, but Joyce left the obvious question unasked: who was the artisan swinging the axe? If we are made by the things that happen to us, by no effort of our own, if we are mere blocks of wood being chopped by blind fate, well, in that case, the axe man’s identity’s clear. We are made by an “old artificer” out there somewhere who eternally does his work so well the question of his actuality seldom arises. He has invisible hands. He has no intent to do good or evil. He has no conscience.
The artificer?...by His works ye shall know Him.
Joyce was not, however, wasting his breath on that prayer to his “old father, old artificer.” He was appealing (once more) only to himself. It was after all, the mythological Daedalus that Thomas Bullfinch describes as “a most skillful artificer.” Joyce implores of his burgeoning talent, that it produce, as a reality, the desire he expressed in his wish of “6 April, later” (in Portrait of the Artist), “...to press in my arms the loveliness which has not yet come into the world.” He knew that the embrace of ultimate beauty needs effort, and that unseen loveliness cannot come into the world but by imagination itself.
But is it art? Anything manufactured by human hands can pass for art – and be art – if imagination makes it so. I once took a plywood board, 3’ x 3’ square, spray-painted it light yellow in many, many layers, framed it with glossy black 1” x 1” rough oak stripping (did not even bevel the joints), stretched threads diagonally from the four corners to mark the center, cut a small template, meaning to stencil a glossy black 7/8” x 5/8” diamond directly there where the threads crossed, but the paint ran haphazardly (but not too far) beneath the cut-away, appending small “legs” upon the diamond, the effect reminding me of the Lunar Excursion Module – it was that time of history – so I named the thing Apollo and sold it at first sight. It was a yellow board with a smear of paint in the center. The black frame may have caused the LEM to seem to stand out 3-D-wise in front of its yellow vacuum, to be swallowed as it were in the immensity of space, but even in that magnificent accident, it was imagination that made it art – not mine alone, but the woman buyer’s too. I never asked her what she saw there. Her check cleared at first asking.
But was it art? The check, I mean.... No, no, no! I do not mean the check! At least, it was not my intention to mean the check. But in the time-space following the bold-faced question (and its mark), an image materialized of my friend Catherine’s blue pencil, slashing a circle ‘round the question and the sentence I would have composed as an answer (which for the moment I have forgotten) and scrawling a question of her own in the margin: “What ‘it’ do you mean? The check?” So it was written, The check, I mean – humor, teaspooned into a remembrance of Joyce’s near-sighted confession, as if enough were not already there.
“Do you, Franklin.,” (she always calls me by that freehold farmer’s name) “mean to suggest that a surrogate for money can be a work of art? And if not, why not, if art is always only in the beholder’s eye? If all is art, then why the word art?”
Well, we have words aplenty made for mere convenience. If we had not “art,” how could we tell the difference between the artist’s and the carpenter’s work? How justify the great cost of Sunflowers? I watched a man on the television the other night make cleverly arranged structures of ice, driftwood, basalt, and other perishable or movable objects, situating his arrangements in tidal waters just so the tides would shortly destroy them. Someone – not the man himself – called the doomed manufactures art. A blue-nosed critic might argue that, as a minimum, art must endure. But all things perish – sunflowers, Sunflowers, great castles, cloud castles, even the earth, the universe...well, maybe the universe. So it’s not their permanence that gives art objects their difference. All things that are, won’t be (even that sentence I intended to write instead of “The check, I mean” that so far I have not remembered). Art is what people call “art.” Perhaps no one would refer to a pile of shit as art, but one imagines that a perfectly rendered water color of it might be. I knew a man who painted animal anuses – I mean he painted paintings of animal ass holes, not that he actually painted the animals’ asses themselves (but why not?). I do not recall that he ever sold one or even got one hung on a wall, but is that what makes art art? That it also is a surrogate for money?
[After that, the chapter drivelled off deeper and deeper into incomprehensible inanity, concluding with a framed protrait of George Bush, pleasantly posed over an expensive desk, smilingly, and importantly, signing the paper that launched a thousand misguided missiles upon the flesh and blood of real mothers and their babies in a faraway land . . . and finally asking, "But was it art?" and answering as Joyce most certainly would have, "George's smile, you mean? Sure it was art. See, see, the caption in the catalog says it was."]
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