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Tag: Jean-Paul Sartre

Arthoughts

…I am thinking of one artist. Like him, I am not interested in goblins and airy castles. Certainly, there is certain beauty in all this, but I need real people. And it is them whom I want to write about. 

Schnittke was prepared to break his neck but to find the fusion of classical and popular music. “A Paganini” sounds even more Paganini than the latter’s work. 
 
Mario Vargas Llosa writes cinematic novels. Kurt Vonnegut was the master of telegraphic style. Peter Greenaway makes films like a painter. 
 
“Art is a lie”. “All art is quite useless”. “Culture neither saves, nor justifies anyone”. “This illusion is the only reality”. 
 
In reverse order, these phrases belong to Maugham, Sartre, Wilde, and Picasso. But art and culture is the mirror in which the man looks. It is the portrait of Dorian Gray that grows older, while its sitter remains youthful. Mankind constantly rejuvenates itself, every day it becomes younger; meanwhile the paintings perish and statues lose body parts in fires, floods, and bombings. We admiringly gaze at the heads without noses and armless torsos. Is there any wonder that Death exists not only because its mystery is unfathomable but because it remains unnoticed?  
 
Original Russian text
Я вспоминаю одного художника. Как и ему, мне не интересны гоблины и воздушные замки. Безусловно, во всем этом есть своя прелесть, но мне нужны живые люди. И писать я хочу о них же. 
 
Шнитке собирался свернуть шею, но найти-таки способ соединять классическую и популярную музыку. “К Паганини” звучит еще более как Паганини, чем все произведения последнего. 
 
Марио Варгас Льоса пишет кинематографичные романы. Курт Воннегут – мастер телеграфного стиля. Гринуэй снимает кино, как живописец. 
 
“Искусство – ложь”. “Все искусство практически не нужно”. “Культура никого ни от чего не спасает, да и не оправдывает”. “Вот эта-то иллюзия и есть единственная реальность”. 
 
Это сказали, в обратном порядке, Моэм, Сартр, Уайльд, Пикассо. Но культура и искусство – это зеркало, в которое глядится человек. Это портрет Дориана Грэя, стареющий по мере того, как сохраняет молодость модель. Человечество все время обновляется, каждый день оно становится моложе; а в это же время в пожарах, наводнениях и бомбежках погибают картины и теряют части тела статуи. Мы восхищаемся, глядя на головы без носов и безрукие торсы. Стоит ли удивляться, что Смерть существует не только потому, что ее тайна непостижима, но и потому, что ее не замечают?
 
Image credit: Wikimedia

Jean-Paul Sartre on Poetry

Poetry is a case of the loser winning. And the genuine poet chooses to lose, even if he has to go so far as to die, in order to win. … Thus, if one absolutely wishes to speak of the commitment of the poet, let us say that he is the man who commits himself to lose. This is the deeper meaning of that tough-luck, of that curse with which he always claims kinship and which he always attributes to an intervention from without; whereas it is his deepest choice, the source, and not the consequence of his poetry. He is certain of the total defeat of the human enterprise and arranges to fail in his own life in order to bear witness, by his individual defeat, to human defeat in general. Thus, he challenges, as we shall see, which is what the prose-writer does too. But the challenge of prose is carried on in the name of a great success; and that of poetry, in the name of the hidden defeat which every victory conceals. 

It goes without saying that in all poetry a certain form of prose, that is of success, is present; and, vice versa, the driest prose always contains a bit of poetry, that is, a certain form of defeat; no prose-writer is quite capable of expressing what he wants to say; he says too much or not enough; each phrase is a wager, a risk assumed; the more cautious one is, the more attention the word attracts; as Valery has shown, no one can understand a word to its very bottom. Thus, each word is used simultaneously for its clear and social meaning and for certain obscure resonances – let me say, almost for its physiognomy. The reader, too, is sensitive to this. At once we are no longer on the level of concerted communication, but on that of grace and chance; the silences of prose are poetic because they mark its limits, and it is for the purposes of greater clarity that I have been considering the extreme cases of pure prose and pure poetry. However, it need not be concluded that we can pass from poetry to prose by a continuous series of intermediate forms. If the prose-writer is too eager to fondle his words, the eidos of ‘prose’ is shattered and we fall into highfalutin nonsense. If the poet relates, explains, or teaches, the poetry complex becomes prosaic; he has lost the game. It is a matter of structures, impure, but well-defined.

From What Is Literature (translated by Bernard Frechtman, with introduction by David Caute; Routledge Classics, 2003, p. 26)

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