The Hard Iron of Appearance
Oysters are dandy eaten with lemon juice or hot sauce on a butter cracker, but as a child I refused them, out of fear I would bite into a pearl and chip a tooth. In reality, a tooth is no great loss, particularly for a child, and a pearl is fine compensation. Children, though, being more sensitive than their parents, often detest the slimy, rotten muscle of an oyster or its brine (even lightened with lemon); however, at a certain point they may despise such childish tastes and will confabulate fears to coat them. It was not so with me, and the dental margaritaphobia deepened into a fear of pieces of hard iron or hard iron knives pressed between the teeth. The fear is not for the teeth themselves, but for the surrounding parts: the lips, the tongue, and the brain, which is not so far from these as one might think.
An oyster grows a pearl as a protective casing around an intruder, a parasite, a piece of grit. The pearl consists of layers of nacre, or mother of pearl, the same strong, iridescent material that lines their shells. In natural conditions, the event is very rare and substantial, well-formed natural pearl is still extremely valuable. However, this irritation can be induced and so cultured pearls manufactured. These are nearly identical to a natural pearl; an x-ray is required to discover the seed used to grow the pearl.
In certain poems, the initial grit is evident. An occasional poem might be titled after its inciting incident, an elegy after the dead, an ekphrasis after the corresponding painting. These are easy enough to seed; spend an afternoon at a gallery or, without leaving your desk, pick a random image, say, at the Web Gallery of Art. Unlike an oyster, though, the layering of lines about the infection point is no mechanical matter even when the transformation is simple.
To see this, compare William Carlos Williams’ “The Hunters in the Snow” with John Berryman’s “Winter Landscape,” both ekphrases of Peter Bruegel’s The Hunters in the Snow. Both begin with flat description of the most striking element of the painting: the titular hunters. Throughout, Williams’ descriptions are flat, straightforward while Berryman ornaments and details. The poets also differ in how their eye navigates the painting.
Berryman takes the line clearly laid out by Bruegel, moving diagonally upwards and to the right, past the hunters to the skaters, to the stark mountains beyond. Here Berryman embellishes, imagining the hunters lost in those peaks. With this ominous prophesy, Berryman returns, resetting to the hunters whose entrance now carries a doom about it. In this position, we are like the dark birds watching the hunters, which Berryman draws our attention to twice in the last two stanzas. Berryman seeks, it seems to erase the distance between us and the poem, to immerse us in it as a scene and to feel its inhospitable cold.
For Williams, the canvas is and remains a canvas. He refers to it as a “picture” in both the opening and closing lines. In between, Williams does not follow the same route through the picture. Berryman gives us the perfect first impression, following the line our gaze is clearly meant to follow. Williams instead provides a later viewing, when, out of familiarity with the general outline, our attention wanders to the smaller details. He focuses especially on the inn, emphasizing it as a place of refuge, women clustering about a huge bonfire, and even further a place of salvation: a stag with a crucifix painted on its sign. Though Williams does not call attention to this, we might also point out that the spear of the foremost hunter imposes itself on that of the hunter who has caught the lone fox to form the shape of a tilted crucifix.
Williams concludes by reminding us that all of this has been intentionally composed by Bruegel, who has chosen the bush in the foreground to “complete the picture.” Slyly, Williams has just drawn our attention to the aspect of the piece that it is hardest to account for, visually at least. For the space the bush occupies could easily have been left as negative space, its branches running inelegantly down, off the canvas. Forced to look at it more closely, we might notice that it is a thorned bush. Having seen the crucifix, we are primed to recognize in it the crown of thorns and thence to see the distant hill as Golgotha. In its apparent flatness and spare hints, Williams’ poem brings us to the a further foreboding than the one Berryman lavishly describes.
The most common seed for a cultured pearl is itself a bead or fragment of pearl. When I was in grad school, I was advised that the best way to settle on a topic, to find inspiration for a paper, was simply to keep reading until something bothered you. Sufficiently agitated, one thought until capable of articulating one’s discomfort, which one then purged by writing down. Pursued in this way, philosophy is therapeutic, if not in Wittgenstein’s sense. In my case, the method worked perhaps too well; I became so irritated as to drop out. Art requires grit not merely as a starting point but in the sense of stick-to-it-ness.
After all, it takes an oyster at least a year to grow a pearl of any size. The Hunters in the Snow appears also in Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris. Solaris, at least Stanisław Lem’s novel, is about the limits of observation. Kris Kelvin arrives on a research station orbiting the strange, oceanic planet Solaris. By the time of his arrival, something already has gone wrong. There is a Gothic atmosphere to the opening, Kelvin enters the station as if a derelict castle, complete with mad servants. The planet itself has a palpable, demonic presence, shining “with an oleaginous gleam, as though the waves secreted a reddish oil.” Upon taking his room, Kelvin discovers a set of melted and deformed measuring instruments.
Solaris is alive, though it has an uncanny, unnatural life: as a planet orbiting two suns, it should not have a climate stable enough to support life. The form this life has taken is itself monstrous, a single entity surrounding the entire planet, capable of effecting even the orbit of the planet (and who knows what else). This power is inexplicable even by the more advanced science of the novel, and the research station around Solaris has yielded nothing more than detailed observations of its surface.
In certain Gothic novels, like in Scooby Doo, all the spooky stuff has a natural explanation. In Ann Radcliffe’s Romance of the Forest, for example, the heroine is frightened by spirits speaking in the night. It is later revealed that the spirits were really just servants and all the terror came from her frayed nerves. Usually, though, the apparently supernatural really is just that. The ghost is your bog-standard Gothic supernatural being, and it turns out Solaris Station is haunted.
These beings are physical, rather than spectral. When Kelvin first comes across one of these ghosts, he encounters the epistemic conundrum at the core of Gothic fiction “whether I had really gone mad and was a helpless prey to the figments of my imagination, or whether, in spite of their ludicrous improbability, I had been experiencing real events.” Lem’s protagonist, however, has over the traditional Gothic protagonist scientific understanding. By cross-checking the station’s calculated and observed positions, he convinces himself that he is not merely dreaming or hallucinating.
I have previously discussed the uncanny. For our purposes here, we might identify the uncanny as the compresence of the deeply desired and the impossible. This is at least the sense in which the apparition of a loved is uncanny. Above Solaris, Kelvin’s late lover, dead some three years, appears to him. He reacts with both dread and desire. Nothing so good could be true. Nothing so terrible could be true. Such uncanniness is a partial breakthrough of a suppressed narcissism. Lem suggests that is such narcissism that underlies human inquiry itself.
We are only seeking Man. We have no need of other worlds. We need mirrors. We don’t know what to do with other worlds. A single world, our own, suffices us; but we can’t accept it for what it is. We are searching for an ideal image of our own world: we go in quest of a planet, of a civilization superior to our own but developed on the basis of a prototype of our primeval past. At the same time, there is something inside us which we don’t like to face up to, from which we try to protect ourselves, but which nevertheless remains, since we don’t leave Earth in a state of primal innocence. We arrive here as we are in reality, and when the page is turned and that reality is revealed to us—that part of our reality which we would prefer to pass over in silence—then we don’t like it any more.
Easter celebration obscures the terror of the event it commemorates. There is an aspect of horror throughout the death and resurrection of Christ, from the eerieness of Jesus’ confrontation with Judas in the Last Supper (“That thou doest, do quickly”) to the vanishing of Jesus’ body from his burial place. Like Kelvin cross-referencing the station’s position, Thomas will not believe the resurrection until he has felt the wounds. After all, belief in the resurrection of Christ is both wonderful and dreadful. It validates our primary narcissism: we shall, after all, not have to die. And yet it is not clear that we can abide this new reality, its strangeness and its new demands.
The doppelgängers that Solaris produces serve no clear function. Various hypotheses circulate: perhaps the imitative capacity of the planet is defensive, meant like a pearl to ensconce intruders; perhaps it is a disease, the planet’s hallucinatory recreations of its surroundings; or perhaps it is a form of artistic expression. We are all familiar with the old mimetic theory of art: art as the imitation of reality. Imitation, however, seems both overly constrictive and demeaning. Insofar as art imitates reality, it both selects and recombines. An artist’s work is both observation and hallucination — so to is proper engagement and criticism with art.
A landscape, howsoever beautiful, means nothing. The magpies are just birds; the bush, so many thorned branches. Only a maniac could think otherwise. A painting, even a painting of that very landscape, is an entirely different matter. Even if the painting is just an accurate recreation of the landscape — not so for The Hunters in the Snow; there are no such craggy mountains in Holland — that the artist chose to represent this landscape imbues every aspect with possible meaning. The question of intentionality must here be raised and I will sketch an answer, to be defended elsewhere. The interpretation of a work of art is, in fact, a search for the author’s creative intention. Criticism, however, is also a separate, if derivative, artwork, to be evaluated, therefore, not principally for its accuracy but by our ordinary aesthetic criteria. Just as is it is right for an artist to invest a bush with a significance never gave it, it is only fair that a critic can find in a few brush strokes what was never put there.
Buy a pearl from a jeweler, at least buy a pearl one can afford, and there is every chance that it will be an imitation pearl, manufactured entirely outside an oyster. Some imitation pearls are made with the same mother-of-pearl as a real pearl, assembled and sanded into a smooth ball, but most are just glass spheres with an iridescent coating. Rub with any pressure and the surface comes clean off.
In the world of content and media conglomerates with annual tentpole releases, the market gleams with imitation pearls. It is not mere snobbery to distinguish between worthwhile or true art and its pale copies, shifting around like Solaris’ early mimoids, which had human shapes but were capable only of automatic, repetitive movement. As Benjamin tells us in “Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” a reproduction of a work of art, a print of The Hunters in the Snow, loses the halo of its original: this Bruegel masterpiece is most commonly encountered adorning holiday greeting cards. How much more is lost, though, when not merely the art object but its design is mechanically reproduced, as when each new film is simply a slight reshuffling of an original with the serial numbers filed off. Such a landscape is too bleak to comment on, and yet there are those who, like Sherlock Holmes in “The Adventure of the Six Napoleons,” would bash in every mass-market sculpture in London for the sake of one Borgia pearl.
I am guilty of this myself, I see too many movies, most of them bad. But one’s belief is sometimes rewarded. I was not expecting to like last year’s The Green Knight nearly as much as I did. I was not expecting much of anything from it. The story is simple: Gawain, King Arthur’s nephew, is the failson of witch Morgan le Fay. His mother summons the Green Knight to Arthur’s court, who proposes the following game: one knight will attempt to strike him, and then a year later must seek him out to have the blow returned. Gawain beheads him, but the inhuman knight survives this.
A year passes. Gawain sets off, given a girdle by his mother that is supposed to protect him. Various strange encounters transpire, Gawain loses the girdle, and finds himself in a castle near the Green Knight’s chapel. Its Lord sets him another game: he will give Gawain whatever he catches on his hunt and in return Gawain shall give him whatever he catches in the castle. The Lady of the castle seduces Gawain, gives him a kiss and, uncannily, the girdle he has lost. When it is time for Gawain to make good on his agreement with the Lord, he reneges, yet the Lord grants him the fruit of his catch: a fox.
The film is shot through with weird doubles. The fox is perhaps a double of his mother. The Lady’s girdle is a double of his mother’s girdle. The Lady herself is a double of Gawain’s lover. And the Lord doubles as the Green Knight. Gawain’s quest therefore seems like a dream quest. Certainly, the stakes are much more internal. For with the girdle, Gawain is sure not to be killed by the Green Knight’s blow. Yet he comes to realize the stakes of surviving that blow by such magic will mean: he sees himself as the king, replacing Arthur, but as a corrupt king, having abandoned his lover and ruling over a beset kingdom. Rather than be brought so low, Gawain removes the girdle.
The Green Knight is based on a medieval poem, “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” by an unknown author. The Gawain of the film is a much less virtuous figure. Whatever direction his life has, it is imposed by others. His final change of heart is both an act of faith and an accepting of his freedom. By contrast, the poem’s Gawain is nearly the model of the Christian knight. He does not need to be prodded to accept the Knight’s terms and he is likewise much more faithful to the Lord’s game. He handles the Lady’s advances with chivalric tact, returning the kisses she gave him to the Lord. His only infraction is in keeping the girdle the Lady gave him. This slight the Green Knight, who is revealed to be the Lord, forgives him: Gawain is a worthy knight, but only human. Faith in the poem then is both more exacting, it asks real virtue of us, but also more clearly merciful.
The author of “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” is also thought to be the author of the long poem Pearl. The poem starts in grief. The speaker has lost his pearl, revealed to be his daughter. Upon a visit to her grave, he has a vision of her in heaven. The theme again is faith, and this faith is clearly something more than intellectual belief. The speaker is a Christian already, he believes that his daughter is in heaven, but this does nothing to stem his grief.
I playned [mourned] my perle that ther was penned [trapped]
Wyth fyrce skylles that faste faght. [With vehement arguments that contended fiercely.]
Thagh kynde [nature] of Kryst me comfort kenned [taught],
My wreched wylle in wo ay wraghte [struggled].– (Perle, l54–58)
His vision of his daughter is one of incomparable loveliness and value. She shines in a white linen wrought with pearls, in a crown of pearls, her very skin pearl-white, and with an incomparable pearl in her brooch. There is indeed something uncanny about this figure, both desired and dreadful. For she addresses him not as his daughter, but as an emissary of heaven, not comforting but chiding his lack of faith for needing comfort. The real pearl, after all, the pearl of great price, is not any human, not even one’s own daughter, but the kingdom of heaven. This strange mystery is indeed the central bargain of Christianity: we may have everything we ever wanted, but only if we renounce all that for the sake of faith. It is certainly impossible for us to fulfill our end of this game, but we might accept them comfort given to Gawain: if we are a good enough sport, the boon will be given us anyway.
I am not religious. I never have been. I see no reason to think that I ever will be. Despite this, I cannot help but admire faith, Christian faith, as an aesthetic object, a not-quite authored, not-quite work of art. It strikes me that it is easier for a nonbeliever to take the demands of faith seriously than it is for a Christian: the former is under no obligation to live up to them. Two examples.
First, consider the providential structure of the world. Given a wise and caring creator, surely the world is overburdened with meaning: the distinction between landscape and landscape painting coming to nothing. Our experience would be written in, as Bishop George Berkeley describes it, the language of nature, a divine script it must be our whole life’s work to decipher. And indeed the practicing Christian takes the odd event to be a sign from heaven. Yet it seems the conversation believers think they’re having with the Almighty is curiously mundane and curiously sporadic. Should I take this job? one prays and God answers with a funny coincidence or a vague, good feeling, then waits patiently at the other end of the line for the next query.
Then, of course, there’s the connected fact that not only one’s environment but one’s own existence is part of God’s plan. This can be acknowledged, at the lack of a sign you might conclude that your being an associate data entrist just is not part of God’s plan, despite the enticing benefits. But to the extent that this fact is thought it is thought of as a deeply empowering. Yet surely nothing could be more existentially disturbing. In just this way, Rheya’s double, created by the planet Solaris, regards her existence as a double as intolerable. She has been created to study the scientists, but this purposes is contrary to all of her desires. She contemplates suicide but, being immortal as God’s creatures are immortal, cannot escape her condition. We must imagine the Gawain poet’s pearl as being similarly aware of being an instrument. Can the blessed resent being part of the divine order? We are told an angel rebelled. The scientists found a cure for Rheya’s indestructibility and she destroyed herself.
For Freud, at least the Freud of The Future of an Illusion, religion is a childish projection. Nature is cruel, our hopes flounder, we suffer and die. So we imagine that someone somehow can free us from all this, can make things right, and, stupidly, we believe our own fantasies. Freud himself imagines, hopes for, an age that will have grown up, left such things behind. Lem, in the resolution of Solaris, imagines a different way for religion to mature. Having confronted Solaris and reached no understanding, having failed to communicate, Kris Kevin imagines an imperfect god — the only god he can imagine believing in — who is neither omniscient nor omnipotent nor omnibenevolent. This is not to be an evil god, there is no malice in its actions — the suffering Solaris has caused him is by every indication an accident — but instead it creates and sustains the world, never knowing exactly what it is doing, secreting a baroque pearl layer by layer.
This conceit is, by all rights, Gothic, romantic, even narcissistic. Artists not gods, resting neither in Olympus nor on Solaris. Creation is not half so painful as an ulcerous pearl sac, nor is the extraction of the work as fatal to its makers as the cultivation of pearls, nor can it be compared to the kingdom of heaven. And yet I can only report a certain mood, a special oceanic feeling, under the spell of which such things seem like they are or should be true. Out of a disappointment, perhaps, with the sensitivity of one’s instruments, one wants to imagine entering the canvas, being one of those magpies, and winging it to that impossible peak.