Trivial Pursuits

Browsing a bookshop at the age of 16, I once picked up a copy of The Riddle of The Sands by Erskine Childers and scanned the blurb. I’d heard of the author in history class, but hadn’t until then known he was a writer. The blurb told me that the book was notable for the accuracy of its prediction of the coming of World War I. The accuracy of the novel’s prophesy was not enough to make me want to read it, and the blurb hadn’t remembered to tell me whether it was also notable for being any good. I remained unsold, and presumably left the bookshop with a Discworld novel, as usual. Though it was yet a year or two before I would study literature in college, and though I hadn’t yet done any thinking about “Art” with a capital A, I was, in returning The Riddle of The Sands to its shelf, making a judgement about art, and what makes it last.

I pondered this question again recently, having listened to a documentary on the great French film-maker Jacques Tati. In the introduction, I heard him lauded as a man who dared to look ahead, to foresee the effects of modern technology on daily life, a man but for whom the French New Wave may not have happened. I heard a critic suggest that “Playtime is an important film, because he sees what we’re living now, 40 years in advance???.

Well, yes. The struggle of humanity, and in particular the humanity of La France Profonde, against the encroachment of modernism, was Tati’s great theme. But is that really what makes Playtime important? I had thought that what made it important was the way M. Hulot’s squeaky shoes make me laugh, the way the shape of the streetlight mirrors that of the flower M. Hulot gives to the American tourist he’s been flirting with, the way the traffic-jammed roundabout turns into a fairground carousel. If his predictions had not been accurate, would the film be a waste of time? Playtime is a subtle, ingenious, soulful work of art, not Old Moore’s Almanack.

Of course, any artist with serious ambitions wants his work to live beyond his lifetime. But nothing is more dated than a botched prophesy, or a once-influential work now fallen out of favour. The work that outlives its time is the work with something at its core that is timeless. A work of this kind is a creation in the truest sense. It has a life of its own, an internal energy that does not depend on real life turning out this way or that. In fact, for as long as you are absorbed in the work, the life it describes, no matter how distant, is real life.

That critics so often focus on matters outside the inherent life of a work of art is unfortunate, but not surprising. 400 years later, “Isn’t Shakepeare Brilliant!!??? just won’t cut it as a topic for a Ph.D thesis, so the scholar is forced instead to devote years of research to the font in which the first folio was printed, or to the mysteries surrounding his private life. With all due respect to the scholars, who need to pay the bills somehow, who cares? Is not this by-passing of genius in favour of gossip a colossal missing of the point?

Is, in fact, all of the paraphernalia of the “Arts??? world not a distraction, a smattering of fake erudition slapped on to make up for the fact that you haven’t done the reading? Alan Bennett caught this well in The History Boys when Rudge, the sporty, least smart of the eponymous Oxbridge candidates is somewhat at sea in a mock interview. Grasping at straws, he makes the entirely untrue claim that Sartre was a good golfer. “Really???? his teachers ask, genuinely excited. “How interesting!???

Similarly, one of the better jokes in the film of Bridget Jones’ Diary was the title of the book being launched by Bridget’s publisher employer. “Kafka’s Motorbike??? was a nicely absurd parody of some of the books doing the rounds at the time like Pushkin’s Button and Wittgenstein’s Poker, or more recently Rousseau’s Dog. I have read Wittgenstein’s Poker and can tell you that I knew as little about Wittgenstein’s philosophy, the reason we remember his name at all, after finishing the book as I did before commencing it. It was another philosopher, Heidegger, who said, when asked about the salient details of Aristotle’s life “He was born, he thought and he died. All the rest is anecdote.??? Had Heidegger been a publisher, one feels he would not have been quite so dismissive.

Meanwhile the “Arts??? world continues to prefer Sartre’s handicap to his philosophy, Pushkin’s button to his poetry. This, the world of the arts pages, the arts festivals, the arts programmes, delights in centenaries, biographies and shortlists. People annually travel from all over the world to be in Dublin for Bloomsday. I am not being deliberately obtuse when I say I cannot understand why a person would feel the need to do this. If it’s just tourism, then well and good, it’s just a more highbrow version of the Rocky Horror Picture Show. But many Joyce aficionados will tell you that a trip in the footsteps of Bloom and Dedalus helps them to better understand and appreciate the novel. We have come here to a mirror image of Lonely Planet, where the city is a guide to the book. But the point of Ulysses is that you don’t have to travel to Dublin, because it, in all its glory comes to you. The huge imaginative achievement of creating an entire world inside the reader’s head seems rather cheapened when the reader hops on a plane to make sure you weren’t fibbing. A great work of art needs no external reference in order to live. Even if Joyce had got all the details wrong, and put Dun Laoghaire on the north side and Ormond Quay on the south, so long as his imagined city had an internal coherence, it would remain real.

I have never visited either the birthplace or the grave of an artist whose work I love. Nor have I sought out the place where the canvass was painted, the poem written, the album recorded. Call me old-fashioned, but I prefer to just look at the painting, read the poem, listen to the album. After all, that’s what they’re for.