An earlier artist’s work comes to mind: Michelangelo Antonioni’s movie Blow-Up. In it, the photographer becomes a private detective. That transformation — and metaphor — influenced a generation of artmakers. Like Mr. Antonioni’s photographer, they wanted to enlarge the event, to get closer to the scene. Goldin investigates intimacy, her large-scale photographs even blow it up. Her work asks if an ineffable feeling or experience can be visualized, and, when it’s photographed, if it is available to others. Do we feel it, too? What do we see?
In these photographs, the artist/detective Goldin searches for secret, buried meanings, to find what is beneath the surface of a look that a photograph acknowledges but can’t explain. Here, mystery, enigma and sadness shadow the beauty of individuals, couples, children, rooms. Something’s missing, something’s wrong. Remember: the collection is called The Devil’s Playground. St. Augustine contended that evil was the absence of good, since God wouldn’t create or make evil. The Devil was absence, pure nothing. Maybe what’s not here, what’s left out or lost, is as significant as what is.
H is for Harry
A Conversation with Harry Mathews
“Everything that happens in these books — the least details of their vicissitudes, their erudite digressions, their langoureux vertiges — are nothing more than the ghostly, frail delineations of the legendary wrestling match in which from the beginning of time we have been engaged with the world of words, signs, meanings, and dreams, in which we call fiction.”
— Avez-Vous Lu Harry Mathews by Georges Perec
Lynne Tillman: I’m intrigued by your idea that “reading is an act of creation for which the writer provides the means.” I wonder how this directly affects your writing.
Harry Mathews: I don’t really know that it does affect it, except in some mysterious way that comes out of my experience as a reader. I know, as a reader, that language really doesn’t work representationally. And that it’s very hard to get away from the idea that it is some kind of representation. I think that probably I only can make use of ideas like that once I’m in the rewriting stage.
LT: An active reader allows a writer.
HM: It gets a writer off the hook of subject matter. Many writers think they’re not being significant or important unless they’re writing about things which are that week or year supposed to be significant. One decade it’ll be politics, the next, something else. We have a tendency to feel that the subject matter ought to be big, and often a “big” subject may not be appropriate for a particular writer. The point is that you can write wonderfully about anything. It’s very hard, unless one takes a lot of time as I did in that essay, to show how that works. But, for instance, right now we’re talking about a particular subject, and I seem to be communicating to you about that subject. By the end of this conversation you may notice that something has happened that has nothing to do with the subject. Probably what really will have happened is some kind of alteration or transformation in the relation between us. We seem to have been having this discussion where I’ve been talking about my writing or whatever you choose to ask me about, but in fact something else has been going on. I think it’s the same in books. Writers should go with what subject matter appeals to them, with what tickles them because that probably will be the kind of subject matter that will give them most access to the process of discovery; of what they are, or the world is, or language is. You must have had that experience as a writer yourself. As you rewrite something, nothing in substance is changed and yet it’s not just that you’re making it neater or more elegant. It’s become something totally different in the third draft. And, in fact, that’s what you wanted to say. Even though all the material was there in the first draft, and you got it all down, it wasn’t doing what you wanted it to do. Rewriting is so extraordinary, it’s where writing, not always, but very often, takes place. That’s when the writer becomes the first reader. Becomes a creator. If the reader is the only creator, the writer gets to share and in fact participates in that act of creation in the stage of rewriting. That’s when the writer can play creator, too. The old idea is hard to get rid of, that the writers have something to say and the readers are there to get it. I don’t think things work that way at all.
LT: In that sense, the author has always been dead.
HM: That’s right. There’s never been any authors. There have only been readers. The authors are first readers.
LT: Your most recent novel Cigarettes seems formally very different from, let’s say, your first novel The Conversions, although it seemed to me that Cigarettes reworks some of The Conversions’ themes.
HM: The earlier works were misread by a great many readers because they always thought I must be doing something else than what was actually there. And so they kept looking past what was right in front of them. One doesn’t have to look for symbols, one doesn’t have to look for explanations. You don’t need to explain those early books either. I think they are very up front. And one way that they’re up front is in the terrific unspoken or apparently unspoken drama that goes on in the life of the narrator, one which is barely indicated but always present. The narrator makes only two or three remarks in the course of The Conversions—about his wife divorcing him, for instance — but they’re enough to suggest all the things that he’s not saying that he should be saying. You can’t help being aware, even if you don’t know why, that the narrator has been reduced to a point of total fearfulness.
LT: His pursuit of the inheritance, which sets him chasing fragments of an esoteric puzzle that, in fact, doesn’t exist, has all sorts of meanings. He’s on a quest, a journey. Is he worthy, is he smart enough? A lot of anxiety there.
HM: John Ashbery was one reader who understood this straight off. Many people thought I was being too clever by miles, that I was playing games or just showing off or I don’t know what, indulging in a display of erudition. And that really isn’t the point at all. All the erudition gets blown up; it all turns out to have no significance whatsoever. In The Conversions there’s really only one character; the drama you get of one character who can’t or doesn’t dare tell about himself. I myself find this drama all the more moving by being so painfully, so inadequately expressed.
LT: Which is where your work reminds me of Jane Bowles’ Two Serious Ladies. In fact, Phoebe, the troubled young woman in Cigarettes, asks her father to read to her from Two Serious Ladies. I know that people talk about your work mostly in relation to Roussel.
HM: I’m delighted to hear it. I read Two Serious Ladies three times and I don’t know how she did it. She achieves miracles by just putting one ordinary sentence after the other and she never indicates the way you’re supposed to feel about it. That’s something which I certainly hold as a model in my writing, but I got that more from Roussel than I did from her.