Today far more visitors see Richard Hamilton's copy (made for the great English Duchamp exhibition of 1966, since the Large Glass could never be moved again) than ever see the original in Philadelphia. They think they are seeing it all, but of course they are not. The work they see is still very beautiful — but it is, somehow, dead. In Philadelphia, with its rainbow shatterings, it lives.
11. I Would Prefer Not To
When Bartleby is asked by his employer to do something, it will be remembered, he takes to answering: ‘I would prefer not to.’ In an interview with his dealer, Daniel-Henri Kahnweiler, Picasso recalled: ‘I well remember what I told [Braque and Gris] in the cubist room at the Indépendants, where there were some Gleizes and Metzingers: “I thought we'd enjoy ourselves a bit, but it's getting bloody boring again.”’ ‘The whole scaffolding of art bores me and gives me a headache’, remarks Thomas Mann's composer-hero, Adrian Leverkühn. And Beckett: ‘I speak of an art … weary of puny exploits, weary of pretending to be able, of being able, of doing a little better the same old thing, of going a little further along a dreary road.’ On a lighter note Salinger's Holden Caulfield begins his narrative:
If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born and what my lousy childhood was like and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth. In the first place, that stuff bores me.
In all these cases doing something other people seem to have no difficulty in doing becomes an intolerable imposition, not because it is fiendishly difficult but because it is so boring. And what makes a thing boring? That it is meaningless, and that therefore spending time on it feels as though it were robbing one of a portion of one's life. None of the other toilers in Wall Street appears to feel this, but Bartleby does. Picasso does. Leverkühn does. Beckett does. Holden Caulfield does. In the case of Picasso that is a sign that he must move on, find something less boring, more meaningful, to do, but the others don't seem to have that option. For them it seems to be a question of either boring themselves to death or giving up altogether. Kafka's Hunger Artist is their patron saint. He has lain dying of hunger in the straw of his circus cage for days before he is noticed.
They poked into the straw with sticks and found him in it. ‘Are you still fasting?’ asked the overseer, ‘when on earth do you mean to stop?’ ‘Forgive me, everybody’, whispered the hunger artist; only the overseer, who had his ear to the bars, understood him. ‘Of course’, said the overseer, and tapped his forehead with a finger to let the attendants know what state the man was in, ‘we forgive you.’ ‘I always wanted you to admire my fasting’, said the hunger artist. ‘We do admire it’, said the overseer, affably. ‘But you shouldn't admire it’, said the hunger artist. ‘Well then we don't admire it’, said the overseer, ‘but why shouldn't we admire it?’ ‘Because I have to fast, I can't help it’, said the hunger artist. ‘What a fellow you are’, said the overseer, ‘and why can't you help it?’ ‘Because’, said the hunger artist, lifting his head a little and speaking with his lips pursed, as if for a kiss, right into the overseer's ear, so that no syllable might be lost, ‘because I couldn't find the food I liked. If I had found it, believe me, I should have made no fuss and stuffed myself like you or anyone else.’ These were his last words, but in his dimming eyes remained the firm though no longer proud persuasion that he was still continuing to fast.
The young Kafka dreamed of becoming a writer in order to escape the meaninglessness of the life he saw around him, in the first instance the life of his parents. Like all artists, he dreamed also, no doubt, of fame and glory. As he watched that fame and glory settle effortlessly on the shoulders of his friends Franz Werfel and Max Brod, while his own writing passed, for the most part, into obscurity, he struggled to understand what was happening. He knew their work was meretricious, sentimental, littered with cliché — yet was his own any better? Could the public be that wrong? Was it not rather his own work, obscure, crabbed, incomprehensible sometimes even to himself, that was without merit? After all, Werfel and Brod at least gave pleasure to thousands while his writing hardly even gave pleasure to himself. All he could say, at the end of his life, when ‘The Hunger Artist’ was written, was that he had had no option. His very body shied away from following the path of Werfel and Brod. Had his body accepted it he would have gone willingly down that path, but it didn't. It couldn't process food like that and so he couldn't eat it, and if the alternative was starvation, so be it. He mostly took no pride in this, had no wish to boast that they were passé, old hat, while his was the way of the future, as would one day be acknowledged. All he knew was that he could not do it. He who had not been able to find nourishment in a job, in a prospective marriage, who had imagined that writing would provide it, had come to see at last that writing could not help him either. More than that, as his anguished 1922 letter to Brod, from which I quoted at the start, suggests, he felt, like the young Wordsworth in the nut wood, that by writing he was desecrating, polluting, God's earth. All he had been was a burden and a disappointment to his family and friends and the sooner he was dead the better.
‘Well, clear this out now!’ said the overseer, and they buried the hunger artist, straw and all. Into the cage they put a young panther. Even the most insensitive felt it refreshing to see this wild creature leaping around the cage that had so long been dreary … His noble body, furnished almost to bursting point with all that it needed, seemed to carry freedom around with it too; somewhere in his jaws it seemed to lurk; and the joy of life streamed with such ardent passion from his throat that for the onlookers it was not easy to stand the shock of it.
Clearly what we might call the threshold of boredom is different for different people. For Duchamp the very thought of painting became a horror. And when Stieglitz asked him in 1922 for his views on photography, no doubt expecting support from his new ally, Duchamp replied, in very Beckettian style: ‘Dear Stieglitz, Even a few words I don't feel like writing. You know exactly how I feel about photography. I would like to see it make people despise painting until something else will make photography unbearable. There we are. Affectueusement, Marcel Duchamp.’ For Jarry, Ionesco and Beckett, the idea of having people on a stage pretend to be ‘characters’ embroiled in a ‘plot’ is something they cannot countenance. They have to make it clear from the start that what they are doing is completely ridiculous, preposterous in fact, and they find different ways of doing so and then of filling up the length of time an audience expects to sit in a theatre. Jarry turns to Grand Guignol for his inspiration and starts his play with the one word nobody had ever thought to utter on stage: ‘Merde!’ (Ubu actually says ‘merdre’, which adds an element of wit to the scatological humour); Ionesco discovers that he can use a manual for learning English to determine the nature of the characters and what they say to each other; Beckett that he can fill the time by having two characterless characters talk about how they are filling in the time. Pinter and Bernhard, on the other hand, seem able to put on stage characters who are at least recognisable, even if extreme, and to abide by the conventions of realism even if they strain them at every turn. In fact seeing how far these artistic conventions (which mesh of course with the conventions by which bourgeois society lives) can be strained, becomes part of what drives their dramaturgy. In fiction Beckett again, from Molloy onwards, finds himself compelled to do away with most of the trappings of the novel, while Nabokov seems able and happy to work within them. In all these cases the borders of what they ‘prefer not to’ do are slightly different, and in every instance, one feels, it is not the mind that decides, but — one almost wants to say — the body.