The short explanatory note before Cather's "From The Novel Demeuble" introduces the essay well without skipping a beat. The whole time I read this excerpt, I felt like I was looking at a Mondrian painting from 1940, that painted and outlined the meaning of Modernism.
Cather is clearly a modernist writer in the way that she argues "the higher processes of art." She utilizes Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter as an example of what happens when creativity is taken out of literary art. She argues that it tells you who and what, but it does not allow you to imagine, and it certainly does not allow you to feel.
She says that "whatever is felt upon the page without being specifically named there--that, one might say, is created." She compares novels like these that are more focused on entertaining large quantities to cheap soap, cheap perfume and cheap furniture. This, again, is a perfect example of the Modernist movement.
But if this is the case, and true art is nothing more than this vague "surrounding in the dusk" that leaves the reader to decide whether it falls into the category of creative or not, then everything is relative and subjective. There would no longer be ways to measure and critique art in any way. At what point can you decide a piece of literature is garbage (or rubbish) if you are living on the standard of relativity.
Call me conservative, but I feel as if Cather is sliding too much in the direction of art becoming nothing more than what the next person on the street defines it as, and as a result, it loses its stamina, its skill and eventually its creativity. Art should not be so limited to where there is no room for flying cars or talking lions, but it should not be so relative that there is no formal way to study it and be able to argue its worth.
No offense to Cather, but I think I'll keep my furniture.
Cather made some interesting statements in this piece. One of the main things she brings up and that Brynne pointed out is that "fine quality" in writing is not going to be as popular. Writing intended to entertain may have a large crowd of people reading it, but it may not necessarily be "quality work."
ReplyDeleteBut just because something is entertaining does not necessarily mean that it has no value in a formal sense of looking at the piece of writing. I think there can be a healthy balance of both, which is in agreeance with Brynne's last argument.
I'd suggest going back and having another look at Cather. She writes in a condensed style that requires you to discern tonal elements of irony and contempt. Hawthorne, for instance, she suggests produces the kind of "unfurnished" novel she wants more of - "unfurnished" because there is little concern with description of place and things. I think she's more concerned with the proliferation of "easy," "popular" novels than with the subjectivity of art.
ReplyDeleteInteresting points here, Brynne. I liked your comparison of the essay to a Modernist painting. I also found Cather's comment "If the novel is a form of imaginative art, it cannot at the same time a vivid and brilliant form of journalism" intriguing. Another way to think about novels, I guess.
ReplyDeleteIt is interesting the spectrum of values that go in and out of vogue continually throughout all of the different forms of art, literature included. It is often when popularity swings dramatically to one end of the spectrum that there is backlash more toward middle ground and even the other far end. This is likely what happened with Cather, as we discussed in class. Descriptive realist novels had become excessive to the point of ruining the original beauty of that form. Thus, in Cather's mind the solution was likely to move as far from that end of the spectrum as possible and remove the furniture.
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ReplyDeleteI think I see what Brynne is trying to say, but I also think that Cather is taking more of a specifically technical line with this essay and it's really a position I agree with... in fact, I might go so far as to say that minimalism in writing makes it more likely for it to one day be held up as great art. It's one thing that took me a while to learn: the less you say, the more the audience has to fill in, and so long as you don't alienate them while doing this you force them to fill in the gaps - it makes the story an interactive experience. If a reader can invest themselves in a piece of work, I think, then we have something closer to what art in its purest form is supposed to look like.
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ReplyDeleteagree with you Lyle. For me, the stronger novels that I've read don't elaborately lay out all the details or spell out the plot of the story. Obviously, I think detail can be good, but too much can be detrimental. No two minds are alike either, and the way one person sees and describes an object or concept is relative to his own perceptions. In this way, trying to fit your own description of something into someone else's mind can create an attempt to, so to speak, put a square where a circle belongs. I think that literature(and really writing in general) benefits greatly from showing rather than telling.
ReplyDeleteI do agree with you Brynne in that relativism can become destructive, but I think that it isn't quite as destructive in the world of literature. If you think about how we've gone about analyzing poetry and prose even in this class, you'll see that we have to delve into each part of each piece to try and understand the whole. And our opinions usually end up differing quite a bit (or, at least, we don't all see the story in the same way). I think that good literature does not always have to be clear or have one obvious interpretation; if it were then it wouldn't provoke thought. I'm not sure if this was quite where you were going with your post, but those are my thoughts anyway :)