With many books I've liked, there's a moment, often early on, that makes me certain I'm going to like it a lot - a passage, scene or image that arrives with a sense of opening up, both in its own right and as an indication of the kind of depths the book contains. (That's true of tv series too -
e.g. - which suggests an interesting parallel given that's the only other form to which this applies.)
Alfred de Dreux - "Deer Hunt" (unknown date; 19th century)
Optic Nerve I enjoyed from the get-go, and I could tell that its layered, oblique disclosures and inter-connections had plenty going on, but
that moment arrived just shy of halfway through, in the chapterlette (neither 'chapter' nor 'story' feels quite right for the shortish sections in which the book's organised) about Gustave Courbet, his "The Stormy Sea", the narrator's periodic visits to an old stone house in the coastal city of Mar Del Plata, and the narrator's older cousin who walks the house's hallways at night. It's a section that could have come from
A Field Guide to Getting Lost, even before its last paragraph: "
My cousin was also called Maria. And only recently has it come to me that our name has the sea in it - mar
- embedded like a lure, like a foretelling."
(1869)
The way those four main elements are woven together through just 13 widely spaced pages reflects the approach of
Optic Nerve as a whole - the life of an artist and a particular work (often one held in the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Buenos Aires) in conversation with an aspect of the narrator's own life and her experience of the world, which is 'in character' given how important a role art plays in her life. The book is full of moments of recognition in the face of art, only once (I think) made fully explicit, when her eye is caught by a painting that recalls her own 11 year old self. As she says early on, you write one thing in order to talk about something else.
Augusto Schiavoni, "The girl sitting" (1929)
There's some great writing about art here - about individual pieces, and about the powerful subjective experience of encountering art. How's this, for example: "
But when Rothko felt anxious, he became talkative - overly so. And this in turn led him to overlook the fact that often the most powerful aspect of any work of art is its silence, and that - as they say - style is a medium in itself, its own means of emphasis. Perhaps there is something spiritual in the experience of looking at a Rothko, but it's the kind of spiritual that resists description: like seeing a glacier, or crossing a desert. Rarely do the inadequacies of language become so patently obvious." In the Rothko 'chapter' (or what have you), the narrator visits a doctor's surgery after "several days' of a constant vibration in my right eye", sees a Rothko poster, and slips abruptly in its final section via "My husband fell ill twice" into a densely reverberant passage wrapping in life, death, eros, class, humanity (via her encounter with a prostitute who walks the wards at night), the spiritual, red, and black.
(1955-57)
Also great is the closing bit on El Greco, a painter who's come into my life in a couple of ways lately. As she says, his "View of Toledo" is "easily expressionistic enough to belong to the twentieth century". Looking at it now, it's genuinely amazing to think it was painted somewhere at the end of sixteenth century instead. And her description of his "Christ in the Olive Grove" is even more descriptively intriguing, as well as revealing a great deal about the narrator herself, in the context in which it appears (at its most surface level - in a museum during a visit to her estranged brother who has chosen to remain outside): "
A piece I have a weakness for. Not its theme - in fact I have little idea what the scene is supposed to signify - but rather the way in which everything in it seems suspended in the air. In it, gravity functions in reverse: something draw the figures skywards, sucking them in the direction of the clouds, like the lava lamps of my adolescence. The correct way to look at it, I thought, would be while doing a handstand; forget about the figuration and simply appreciate the scandalous sensuality of the brushstrokes strewing the oils this way and that across the canvas. Aldous Huxley must have been thinking similarly when he claimed that El Greco was such a visceral painter that, had he lived to see ninety, he would have ended up producing abstracts. Such were my thoughts as I looked up at the sky in the painting. A portentous sky, the kind beneath which only terrible or solemn events may occur, like a family member leaving home, or the erection of a cross."
(1596-1600)
(1600-1607)
The writing about art is pleasurable in itself, but much more so is the effect of its interweaving with character and theme. When I started
Optic Nerve, the first reference point that came to mind was Rachel Cusk, in the way much of the external action occurs through the narrators' interactions with others and what we learn about those others, combined by razor sharp observations of those same other people. But we learn far more about the narrator here - Maria - than we ever do about the
Outline trilogy's Faye, and while the reader needs to work to put the pieces together, the picture of a character and a life, situated in her particular familial, social and historical context, emerges clearly, both through the mediation of (her thoughts on) art and otherwise. And the rewards from the light it sheds on what it is to live - today, and earlier - are greater still.
(Discovered via its deep run in this year's
Tournament of Books)
