Aidan McNellis
pages 444-446
This section begins with the narrator reflecting over the visits which Bergotte had been so inclined to taking recently in the book in the pretext of his grandmother’s illness, with thoughts which were to me rather surprising.
“The visits which he now began to pay us came for me several years too late, for I no longer had the same admiration for him as of old.”
What so surprised me here was that Bergotte, whom the narrator had at one time been so obsessed with to the point of what seemed like him constantly reading and re-reading his novels, has fallen out of the narrator’s favor. This is not due to the author’s rise to renown, as the narrator himself clearly states, but rather due to something I feel has to do with what is high art and what is not, and how it’s completely relative to the time in which one lives and the ideas that also lived within that time. The narrator didn’t enjoy Bergotte less due to the writer’s works being any less than they once were, but due to them ceasing to convey a new and fresh way of seeing the world that any art ascending to that which I think can be called “high art” is necessarily needed to do. To explain what I see as being high art, I’ll use Kandinsky’s metaphor of the triangle. Imagine a triangle, in the very top of the triangle is the one or few artists whose vision exceeds the current capacities of others, and they are often hailed as mad before they are hailed as genius. In every other segment of the triangle are artists also, whichever ones being able to see and understand the segment above them being prophetic and helping the whole to move along. The higher, and smaller, sections are the avant garde. The larger the segment of triangle, or lower on the triangle the segment is, the more people understand the artist’s vision. This triangle is constantly moving upwards, being pulled along by those who can see ahead.
“And I was led to wonder whether there was any truth in the distinction which we are always making between art, which is no more advanced now than in Homer’s day, and science with its continuous progress. Perhaps, on the contrary, art was in this respect like science; each new original writer seemed to me to have advanced beyond the stage of his immediate predecessor; and who was to say whether in twenty years’ time, when I should be able to accompany without strain or effort the newcomer of today, another might not emerge in the face of whom the present one would go the way of Bergotte?”
I agree with the narrator in that art is not at all stagnant, it clearly advances. Paradigms shift in science just as they do in art, and they are both always moving forward. The narrator realizes that what good artists and writers are doing is not copying what good artists have done before them, but rather continuing the conversation with them, progressing it forward. Every new art piece or literary work is in conversation with everything that has come before it, the narrator sees how new original writers build upon their predecessors work while being able to see farther ahead than they did.
The way that I see high art, but by no means is the definitive answer as to what high art is, is that which facilitates us in seeing the world in a new way, corresponding to the changing times we live in, good artists noticing the changes before we do ourselves and reacting to these said changes through their art. Artists see more clearly the state of society, how different modern ideas and technologies of their times are affecting life. When they discard forms and conventions that are seen as indispensable to art of the time, it is not because they do not know very well these forms, but rather because the discarding of them is exactly what is needed for art to progress. Once the public’s view has caught up to that of the artist, is when he starts to be of renown and seen as prophetic.
“A man’s work seldom becomes completely understood and successful before that of another writer, still obscure, has begun, among a few more exigent spirits, to substitute a fresh cult for the one that has almost ceased to command observance.”
When an original artist first puts his works out, the language he uses (not necessarily literal language, art is comprised of aesthetic and symbolic languages in itself) is too different from their current known languages to understand it. It is only once other art has gradually caught up to that art which was at one time not understood at all, that it is finally understood and enjoyed, that it’s language can be appreciated. In talking about the new writer that has replaced Bergotte in the narrator’s mind,
“Only I felt that it was not the sentence that was badly constructed but I myself that lacked the strength and agility necessary to reach the end.”
The narrator doesn’t fully understand the author or the language, or to be more precisely the associations, he is using; but instead of crying out that it was a badly constructed book or bad author as many would be wont of doing at this point, he instead places the blame of not understanding on himself, and from there striving to understand the structures of understanding and new way of seeing the writer had, which I found interesting. It was the same sort of feeling I myself had when I encountered Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons, and even though I understood the individual words perfectly well, I did not understand very well at all the way in which the words were put together and spent hours trying to make sense of them, to some success.
New forms, in writing or in art, have to be explored to better show ideas of their times. Different mediums are better able to portray different types, or patterns, of thoughts or ideas. The form shapes the content as much as the content chooses the form. The impressionist styles of the time the narrator is then living through, was brought about the altered ideas of time and space that came about with new technologies then. With the train, and along with it global standardized time, so too came altered ways of seeing. Things seemed blurrier, less distinct line wise, so it made sense that artists were focusing more on the impression gotten from things, what with the tempo of people’s lives starting to speed up then, you just had enough time or attention to get the impressions of things. Also, since the advent of photography, it made sense to move away from more realistic art, since photography could take clear depictions of things, for painting to remain so valued it almost had to go beyond what photography could do, and one way it did this was in portraying not just a scene or person but an impression of that scene or person, to a quite beautiful effect.
“I reflected that it was not so many years since a renewal of the world similar to that which I now expected his successor to produce had been wrought for me by Bergotte himself.”
The narrator, parallel to the culture in which he lives, in getting older, has perhaps progressed beyond the form in which the ideas of his yesteryears were so well suited. He seems to see farther ahead and be higher up the triangle than the general people in that they are only coming to this point where they are fascinated by Bergotte now, while he has already gone past it and is looking ahead. He acknowledges that although he likes this author now, there will doubtlessly be a successor to him that will propel writing even farther ahead which will make him abandon this current author of his.