I should say that the ‘meaning’ I am speaking of, in relation to art, is a certain kind of meaning, an impersonal meaning that is nonetheless sublime in a way that ordinary meaning is not. An artwork that fails to obtain to the level of art might still have meaning of a sentimental kind, even if it lacks this larger, impersonal meaning. A mother can love the ‘art’ that her five year-old child creates while at the same time recognizing that the work is not in fact art.
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Another way of saying this is that the content of an artwork does not function except in concert with the form through which that content is rendered. Which I suppose is obvious, as a fact, but which in action is so subtle that we might sometimes fail to recognize how it occurs.
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Which might amount to the same thing, these two facts, I don’t know.
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Even the antiheroes who appear from time to time in literature, for example, and who seem to communicate a philosophy of life that finds meaning nowhere (characters like Meursault from The Stranger, and Raskolnikov from Crime and Punishment, and Patrick Bateman from American Psycho), exist within an artifact (the novel itself) that is beholden to, or in possession of, meaning. This is owing partly to the fact that a novel’s author is distinct from its narrator, and partly to the fact that the form in which a novel is articulated influences that very articulation.
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Which isn’t to say that everything that has meaning is art, or even aspires to be art. But that art is one of the many human endeavors that result in meaning.
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The paradox in these instances (when an artist tries to capture meaninglessness) is that the subsequent artwork, because of its order and its form, will be meaningful in effect. For there is no such thing as a ‘meaningless’ artwork. An artwork has meaning when it obtains to the level of art; if it has no meaning it isn’t art.
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I describe this meaningless as “apparent” because I don’t think reality, or everyday life, is in fact meaningless. But because we sometimes experience the everyday as meaningless, we sometimes wish to render it that way (or see it rendered that way) in art.
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Though I should add, I think, that the reductive nature of art can be a challenge to an artist, and something of an obstacle, insofar as it must, to an extent, exclude from the artist’s domain that complexity of causation by which reality operates, and through which the apparent meaningless that we recognize as ‘everyday life’ often asserts itself.
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One might even say that the concern of that novel is the impossibility of beginning any endeavor, philosophically speaking. All art (but especially narrative art) reveals its artificiality and ‘falseness’ when it reaches for, or observes, in the imaginative landscape, some cause that might initiate a dramatic arc, or set such an arc in motion. Which, of course, it has to do. I say this as a lover of art, and as a practitioner of it myself. The nobility of art is not undone by its basis in illusion, nor by its reductive nature.
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I think of the novel Tristram Shandy, for example. Its opening pages are remarkable, to me at least, for the narrator’s inability to ‘begin’ his story. And yet the story is underway from the get-go, when you think about it, and in fact is brilliantly conveyed; it is the story of not knowing how to begin a story, or of beginning a story by constantly revising or qualifying that beginning.
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I have always been drawn to ambling, aimless narratives. And to the potential of narrative to resist its own logic and momentum.
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He lingers near the fridge, for instance, drinks a beer, is told by the woman with whom he lives that he ought to go for a walk. And, indeed, he does go for a walk, eventually. And encounters and observes, in the neighborhoods outside his home, the situations and conditions he would’ve expected to encounter and observe. Meaning, nothing extraordinary happens to Finnegan, at least not for a while. So that the story must find its ground (if it has one) in the very absence of a story.
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That he can find no other way to pass the time is part of the story (inasmuch as there is a ‘story’), though of course time continues to pass regardless, and he ends up doing something anyway, even if that something has the appearance of nothing, or amounts (at first) to what one might say is nothing of consequence.
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The main character in the graphic novel I’ve been working on is a writer, though this character (his name is Finnegan) isn’t engaged in the act of writing when the story begins, but in fact has found that he is unable to write (or anyway that he has lost the ‘mojo’ or sense of purpose that till then had led him to write), and so has gotten up from the desk at which he usually sits, in the apartment where he lives, and has wandered away, into another room, to see if he can pass the time in some other way.
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Meaning, he seems to always be writing about the situation of the soul, always seeking a way to render it, or dramatize it, without necessarily mentioning it, or attempting to describe it directly.
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I’ve been reading a novel by Murakami, whose interest in the soul seems to manifest consistently, if elliptically.
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Wisely, I think, London does not attempt to answer those questions. He does not even go any further, in the fiction, in articulating the statement that gives rise to those questions in the reader. Instead, he remains in contact with the plot, its material conditions, its action, and its reality; he does not float away into abstractions, which would interrupt the ‘dream’ that is the story, but continues to produce that dream’s phenomena, and the consequences that belong to it.
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Moreover, if there is a division between ‘he’ and ‘himself,’ what is the nature of that division? Who is the ‘he’ that is now distinct from ‘himself’?
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For till then he has been very practically minded, very certain of the unity of his own person, and of his separateness from other things. And if he does not belong with himself at that point, then with whom, or with what, does he belong?
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Which is a very strange circumstance for the man to be in. Or, anyway, is remarkable, given what we know of him, to that point.