Frozen sea

July 21, 2006

The mind of the maker

Ernest Hemingway once hit out at critics who had analyzed his Nobel-prize winning The Old Man and the Sea:

“There isn’t any symbolism. The sea is the sea. The old man is an old man. The boy is a boy and the fish is a fish. The shark are all sharks no better and no worse. All the symbolism that people say is shit. What goes beyond is what you see beyond when you know.”

So was Papa right? After all, it can be argued, he wrote the novella. He is the maker, shouldn’t he know what he has put into his own writing? If he wanted the book to be loaded with symbols, he would have, correct? Who better to tell us what the text means?

And yet the insights of Freud and Lacan and others about how stuff in the unconscious can be manifested in unintended ways gives us pause. Some Freudian literary critics have tried viewing the text as the dream (the expression of the unconscious) and comparing it to the author’s biography (looking for links between the two).

When considering how what is in the mind of a writer is translated into the work, there are several layers. There is the personal experiences of the maker, everything that has happened and has been recorded by the mind, that may surface in different ways. Then there are the social and cultural images and ideas that have been implanted.

All of this ends up being transferred from the author to the page–whether or not the author is completely aware of what is happening.

The English author and mystery writer Dorothy Sayers has a marvelous little book, The Mind of the Maker, in which she compares the process of artistic creation with that of God’s relationship to man (through the Trinity). What is in God’s mind (the Word) is made real (in the Son) and is connected to man by the Holy Spirit. What is in the author’s mind (the Word) becomes real (the book or film) and is connected to the reader’s mind by the act of reading or watching.

So despite Hemingway’s protestations, it is very possible that there are deeper meanings in The Old Man and the Sea, some he intended (and is being disingenuous in denying) and others he did not intend.

And once released from the mind of the maker, and connected to the reader, the doctrine of free will suggests that the book takes on a life of its own.

Writing; Fiction; Ernest Hemingway; Dorothy Sayers

July 16, 2006

American voices, American exceptionalism

Is there a distinctly American artistic voice? What adjectives might begin to describe that voice? Open. Direct. Optimistic. Democratic. Enthusiastic. Conscious of the natural order. Impatient. Naive. Experimental. Religious. Business-like. Experential. Bluff.

This isn’t just American exceptionalism speaking. There is something different about the American experiment (“a shining city upon a hill”) that should naturally be reflected in its art and literature. Hear Louis Simpson in his poem, American Poetry:

Whatever it is, it must have
A stomach that can digest
Rubber, coal, uranium, moons, poems.

Wait, you may argue; are these qualities truly unique to American writers, poets, filmmakers? Aren’t they universal?

Perhaps. The proof is in the artistic pudding, however, and it isn’t hard to point to a number of recent American writers, poets and filmmakers whose voices are unmistakenly American. Cormac McCarthy. Tim O’Brien. Toni Morrison. Billy Collins. Rita Dove. Gary Snyder. Paul Mazursky. Steven Spielberg. Ron Howard.

You don’t have to be born in the United States to echo these characteristics: think of Bruce Beresford’s Tender Mercies or Peter Weir’s Witness, movies which fit this uniquely American category (or is it that these directors “get it” because the Australian experience mirrors the American one at some level?)

The point can be proved in another way. The Scandanavian film Insomnia, remade and set in Alaska (with Robert DeNiro replacing Stellan Skarsgård), never quites feels American; nor does The Birdcage, the 1996 remake of La Cage Aux Folles, even if Robin Williams and Gene Hackman are part of the Americanization.

Even a novel like Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain, which explicitly draws on the Odyssey for some of its themes and structure, is made authentically American by the depth of Frazier’s understanding of the hardscrabble life led by the Scots-Irish settlers of the Appalachians and the culture they established.

Yes, the film version of Cold Mountain features an English director, English and Australian leads, and a Canadian and an Irishman in key supporting parts, which perhaps suggests that as the world becomes flatter (to borrow Thomas Friedman’s metaphor), the appeal of a distinctly American voice will not be diminished.

Poetry;Fiction;Motion pictures

July 15, 2006

Considering the frozen sea

Frozen sea will consider fiction, poetry, film, and other art forms which have the power to “break up the frozen sea within us,” ( to quote Franz Kafka), more to praise and celebrate than to critique.

With so much wonderful writing, why spend a moment on that which does not “shine forth”?