Musing on the Text of Whistler's Mother

Thinking about the 'text' of things, other than text, I recently saw a documentary James McNeill Whistler's "Arrangement in Gray and Black No. 1: Portrait of the Artist's Mother." More commonly known as "Whistler's Mother".

I can't, with any honesty say, that I was terribly attracted to this painting before watching the documentary, but after, I looked at it differently, and I found it much more intriguing. I had always imagined the work had been painted in the US, and it is only when I found out that it had been painted in London, did the context of the picture and its remarkable stark simplicity (compare it with the lush, Pre-raphaelite style of Dante Gabriel Rossetti who was a friend and contemporary of Whistler or the sentimentalism of Millais). The lack of colour, or props in the painting is in direct opposition to everything being painted by his contemporaries.

In a way, it's closer to the Problem Picture genre of the late Victorian period, although there is no obvious narrative, because it does present a puzzle. For a start, look at the title: the utter lack of sentimentality - he names his mother after he lists the colours. Then there is the total lack of engagement with the subject, who is painted in side-view, staring into the darkness at the left-hand side of the painting.

Barthes says that the author's life, and the events surrounding the making of the work don't matter but, if this painting is anything, it is proof that he is wrong. Because without the accompanying information, there is no understanding this piece of art.

Anna McNeill Whistler (his mother) was widow and a devoutly religious woman, puritanical and utterly self-reliant by all accounts (Norris). There's some evidence that she did not much approve of her son's decadent lifestyle in London. When she moved there, to escape the Civil War, she lived with her son, having control of his house in every aspect, other than his studio.

Her portrait was originally meant to be a standing one, but she was ill and couldn't support the pose after the first three days, so Whistler had her sit, her feet up on a footstool. She wrote a letter about the experience of sitting for the portrait and remarked that to pass the time, she prayed for her son. (Whistler).

This information caused me to see the painting as a sort of recursive, or mise en abyme piece. The artist's feelings for his mother were clearly problematic. He paints her, not in his world, but in her own - which brooks no extravagance and little decoration, which is entirely internal. And yet, he is in her mind constantly, throughout the painting.

Not an obvious, narrative puzzle, but an internal, human one of love and the boundaries of tolerance.

Not the End

I've really enjoyed the space and the time to take what I've been learning in this course and follow the threads of it along lines that intrigued me. I've tried, in my journal posts, to show some of the journeys it took me on.

I enjoyed having a blog journaling companion along the way. Zannie, a classmate, also used a blog as her tool for this assignment and I enjoyed the feeling that we were running a parallel course across the sea of learning.

I tried to justify why I felt that it was possible for a writer to go beyond the bounds of their own culture, if only a little, when writing about people and places in non-western environments.

I also explored, as truthfully as I could, why I write, and tried later to understand how that might bear on what I wrote, and how.

I met Derrida, who brought up the spectre of not only the unreliable narrator, but the unreliable writer, and most of all, the unreliable text. I found that there was a great potential for creativity in the gulf between what we hope to mean, and what is understood.

A quirk of fate took me all the way back to Plato, who inspired me with how much these dialectics are less a line than a circle. Only in my lifetime, more than two thousand years later can gay men sit around after a dinner and openly discuss the meaning of erotic love without fear of persecution. It's a good place we've landed, I think.

A link in the course prompted me to revisit a book I'd read many years ago, and see it in a new way. The long dark silence between us and Plato was not really dark. Umberto Eco introduced me to the bonfires of intellect in the intervening centuries, inspired me to be more of a model reader, and introduced me to the privileges I have, as a writer, to ask my reader to open their encyclopedia of understanding and add a few more entries. I'm on the lookout for my own strange unicorns and water-ducks now; more vigilant of the way I frame my own approach to the texts of others.

This led me to Foucault, and the proposition that names often get in the way of engagement with the text. It isn't always helpful to spend too long gazing at the well, it can interfere with drinking the water.

As a writer and a reader, as elusive and arbitrary as it might be, it is meaning that matters. The pursuit of it is at the core of the interchange between the players and the text.

And looking back on this journey of a journal, I think this has been a worthwhile exercise, and one I'm not sure I want to end, here, in week 10 of the course. So this blog will live on, and I'll continue to chart my journeys on it. Who knows? The ship might go down and someone might want to know why: beyond here be monsters.

What's in a Name?

Considering my recent reading, I think this is a relevant question. I've just finished Michel Foucault's essay on "What is an Author?" Much has been made of the portion of the essay that deals with what he calls "author-functions" and there is a reader's guide to this essay that is short and sweet and deals with this section nicely.

I've often gotten much enjoyment out of Foucault, being that he is usually so wonderful about backtracking to the origins of institutions, I was hoping really to get an over-view, and idea of the evolution of the authorial structure, but he only really gets into that at the end. First, though, he gets a little stuck on names. And this is what really interested me.

Like Barthes and Derrida, he rejects the writer's supremacy as the arbiter of the meaning over any particular piece of the writer's work, but he has a little snipe at them, suggesting this isn't as radical as it sounds; he calls it an "empty affirmation". He entertainingly attempts to crystallize what we mean when we talk about a "work" - not Nietzsche's laundry list, for instance. He questions why we feel that certain portions of an author's writings are 'work', and other bits are not. Although it turns out that, for Umberto Eco, laundry lists can be important (see "Foucault's Pendulum"), and he can clearly give as good as he gets (Eco says that there is no connection or reference, but you have to wonder).

What Foucault asks us to consider is the value we put on an author's name. Certain things can affect that value, others don't:

"If I discover that Shakespeare was not born in the house we visit today, this is a modification that, obviously, will not alter the functioning of the author's name. But if we proved that Shakespeare did not write those sonnets which pass for his, that would constitute a significant change and affect the manner in which the author's name functions."

This portion of the essay got me thinking about my name, or rather, the lack of it, really. It's not that I don't have a name, but I don't use it for my writing; I use a pseudonym. Moreover, I don't even use a proper name, like Mary Smith, or Catherine Le Blue. I use a descriptor - a word for a type of person, not an individual.

I can't claim any foresight in having done this. I started out using my pseudonym because I couldn't use my real name, and because I liked the idea of representing myself as what I was, rather than who I was.

The entity that is named as the writer of my works has lived on the net for about eight years now.

About 4,000 people a day read my stories and, for the most part, I don't think they think much about the author of them. The ones that do are free to make up any story they want about who the writer of these stories is, what she does, how she lives.

In the absence of any available information, I've noticed that they make stuff up. Certainly, from the comments and emails I get, it seems I'm a beautiful, mysterious, extremely vivacious, thoroughly over-sexed individual.I didn't really have to do much work crafting the entity I am online, people are happy to do it for me, after reading my stories. This leads me to believe that many readers assume that most fictional works are, unless it's completely unfeasible, autobiographical.

I've often wondered whether I should let them know that, in reality, I'm a frumpy, rather plump, middle-aged woman and that the only kink I get to witness on a regular basis is when my neutered cat tries to fuck the mango tree in my garden. But that would be unfair and mean, wouldn't it? After all, the author of my stories has become a story in itself, written by the readers. Do I have a right to tell them that they aren't writers and they don't get to invent fictions of their own? Barthes would counsel me not to. Not only does my life give no worthwhile insights into the text, but I don't have a right to close off possible meanings created by my readers, in the act of creating me, either (Lye). And to be totally honest, I like it this way.

In an earlier post, I tried to be honest about why I write. I suggested that it was egotism and a quest for immortality of a sort that drove me. What I wanted to be clear about here is that it isn't that I want to live forever, me, Madeleine Morris. It is the viral passing on of idea-material which is hybridized by the reader that I want to engage in.

Much of the discussion surrounding authorship, and authorial privilege is probably worth revisiting in the light of the Internet and the way writers on the internet are using this platform. If Foucault wasn't terribly impressed by the assertion that the author is dead, I'm not all that impressed by his assertion that the author's name is of questionable and arbitrary value.

References:

Foucault, Michel. "What is an author?." Generation Online. 1969. 5 May 2008 http://www.generation-online.org/p/fp_foucault12.htm

Lye, John. "The 'Death of the Author' as an instance of theory." Department of English Language & Literature. 2000. Brock Univerity. 5 May 2008 http://www.brocku.ca/english/courses/4F70/author.php.

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Revisiting the Rose

The Eco link in Module 9 of the course readings prompted me to re-read Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose. If you haven't read it, here's a link to a synopsis.

The first time I read the book, about twenty years ago, I loved it but knew nothing, really, about who Eco was or his work in the field of semiotics. I was interested, in light of the last year of study, to find out how the book would have changed for me since that time.

What struck me powerfully were the ways in which it had not changed for me: I still loved Adso's stubbornly concrete view of the world, and William's rational but compassionate lens. I still felt completely drawn in to the physical world of the Abbey and the shadowy half-world of the library. I still loved the murder mystery itself, having completely forgotten the solution to the riddle of the murders (I have a convenient sort of fictional forgetfulness that allows me to read books over and over and still be surprised).

When I first read the novel, I had not really thought of the way in which the culture of a time, a place, and a language dominates the thinking of the people in it. For this reason, the setting and characters in the novel seemed almost science-fictional at the time. I accepted this other world as I would accept a settlement on Mars and colonists long since exiled from the world I know.

This second reading was, in a way, a more anthropological one. I was listening to the language of the characters - associating it with the philosophy of the medieval scholastics and the doctrines of the Catholic Church at the time. I understood a lot better how intensely dangerous ideas that fell outside the bounds of accepted thought could be. The hesitations of the denizens of the Abbey and of both William and Adso ceased to be fantastical. And they led me to question how, now, we have different "heretical" thoughts that we also hide and disguise within fiction. Specifically, it led me to re-examine my reading of William Gibson's Pattern Recognition, with its logo-adverse heroine who is both a specialist and deeply allergic to corporate branding (for a fuller, more proficient synopsis, click here). Still, Eco himself would have it that my first reading isn't actually an erroneous one, if we accept his view that novels are "machines for making possible worlds" (Eriksson).

What also struck me were the ways in which I saw the book in a new light, and what deep admiration it engendered in me for anyone who researches their work so beautifully, so obsessively, as to populate an entire novel with meticulous clues to the origins of his ideas. This is something I probably did not see on first reading. Being a passive and greedy reader, I just let the thousands of references flutter down around me like confetti. But now, reading it again, I can see the mind that created this semiotic treasure-trove behind the story; that he is literally illustrating in fictional form the mnemonic arts ascribed to the monks at the Abbey (Newlon).

Many critics have, as Birgit Eriksson remarks, have read the novel "as being just a fictionalised version of his theoretical work". But I find it impossible to read this way because, as Eriksson points out, it not only illustrates his theory, it shows the limits of it. And it this way, it gave me a lot of insight into what relationship my own fictional writing and critical theory might have.

Although I'm not a theorist, I have been deeply impacted by many of the theories I've read about. I don't think it's possible to get through this degree and not, somehow, reflect that learning in my fictional work. However, I've been very concerned about how it might be affecting it, worried that it would warp my writing into something inauthentic and somehow "posed" for framing by one theory or another.

What is brilliant and inspirational to be about The Name of the Rose, is that it underscores the fact that, no matter how far theory can take us, it is a machine for describing worlds, not creating them.

References:

Eco, Umberto. The Name of the Rose. New York: Harcourt, Inc., 1980.

Eriksson, Birgit. A Novel Look at Theory: About Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose and Foucault's Pendulum. Centre for Cultural Research, University of Aarhus. 01 May 2000. 2 May 2008 http://www.hum.au.dk/ckulturf/pages/publications/be/novel.htm.

Gibson, William. Pattern Recognition. Paperback. New York: Berkley, 2005.

Newlon, Brendan. Beasts and Buildings: Religious Symbolism and Medieval Memory. The Modern Word. nd. 1 May 2008 http://www.themodernword.com/eco/eco_paper_newlon.pdf.

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