Final

Truth, Expectations and Art in between

My inhabitation of Paris over the past five months, infused by the study of walking literature and the genre of the Lost Generation, has been a tread between the lines of quotidian reality and surreal beauty. The parallels I drew between text and personal experience are numerous. The most striking is the confrontation of expectation and reality. The writers of the Lost Generation created an expectation of Paris for their readers. Within their penned worlds, they flirt with appearance and reality. On the other hand, walkers such as Thoreau seek truth through nature and equate beauty to nature while Sinclair challenges our visualization of truth by rearranging our perception of space. The walks set a pendulum to their exploration of truth, and many of them involve the walks mental and physical engagement with the external world. In the case of this essay, beauty is defined as the expectations that humans hold as the ideal. Art then becomes the mediator of truth and beauty. It manifests in the forms of literature, visual artworks, social etiquette and more. In this account, I will examine the attempts of Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, Henry James, Ian Sinclair and William Thoreau as well as myself to conflate truth and beauty.

We begin with Hemingway, who strives to stay true to reality in his memoir, A Moveable Feast. The text, a work of art, is faithful to the Modernist tradition of realism as Hemingway adheres to minimalistic techniques in his narration. Feast is entrenched in personal emotions that do not try to exaggerate or downplay Hemingway’s fondness for Paris. He “remember[s] the Rhône, narrow and grey and full of snow water…The Stoicalper was really clear that day and the Rhône was still murky”. This seeming frankness appeals to the reader as a sign of sincerity. We can infer that such embellished writing represent falsity to the Modernist writers, as we see F. Scott Fitzgerald’s use of it to create an illusionary world that is out of touch with the cruelties his protagonist faced in Babylon Revisited. At the same time, both writers use conversations to ground their texts in reality. For instance, Hemingway weaves in delightful conversations of the everyday with Hadley to give his nostalgic memories some concrete evidence to stand on.

In comparison, Dos Passos, a peer of Hemingway’s, also interjects his narrations in A Spring Month In Paris and Three Soldiers with conversations for an element of reality. We can observe the differences in interpretations of the same place. Due to the journalistic nature of their text, Feast and Paris features conversations with real-life friends and family while Soldiers features conversations between Andrews and his Parisian acquaintances and Andrews and his military counterparts. The latter is differentiated by tone and language. Between Andrews and his Parisian friends, we see lapses into French within the Parisian circle, and we can sense envy in Andrews as he listens. In the camp, the written colloquial army slang disrupts reading and seemed to be abrasive to listen to for the Harvard-educated Andrews.

Goin' to move soon, tell me.... Army o' Occupation. But Ah hadn't ought to have told you that.... Don't tell any of the fellers." "Where's the outfit quartered?" "Ye won't know it; we've got fifteen new men. No account all of 'em. Second draft men." "Civilians in the town?" "You bet.... Come with me, Andy, an Ah'll tell 'em to give you some grub at the cookshack. No... wait a minute an' you'll miss the hike.... Hikes every day since the goddam armistice. They sent out a general order telling 'em to double up on the drill. 

Andrews persists in using standard English despite his fellow corporate’s “Ah”s and “Ye’s”, revealing an insistence on his identity as an educated man and distinction from the typical, uncouth “soldier”. This allows the reader to resonate with Andrews’s feelings and builds up to the idealization of Paris as a refined place.

That ideal exists in Hemingway’s world, whereby he provides a positive and microscopic view of life in Paris. For him, regardless of how financially constrained he was, “did not think ever of [him and his wife] as poor”. While he was aware that poverty was more “hard on” Hadley, for she was not “doing…work and getting satisfaction from it”, Hemingway and Hadley somehow “ate well and cheaply and drank well and cheaply and slept well and warm together and loved each other.” This optimism of Feast is understandable. Hemingway is reminiscing his “old days” in Paris; he was young, happily married, making new friends and enjoying life in a beautiful city. It is this portrayal of Paris that created its myth in Americans. The Modernist arts sphere of the 1920s was much more favorable than say, the harsh 1910s and looming late 1930s in which Dos Passos was in, or for instance, the Paris that the second Lost Generation of African-American writers such as James Baldwin and Langston Hughes had to encounter due to their ethnicity.

On the other hand, James reveals the gap between truth and beauty, or in other words, reality and appearance. He depicts hyperbolic portrayals of his protagonist’s impressions of the woman of his dreams.

If she was Olympian--as in her rich and regular young beauty, that of some divine Greek mask over-painted say by Titian, she more and more appeared to him--this offered air was that of the gods themselves: she might have been, with her long rustle across the room, Artemis decorated, hung with pearls, for her worshippers, yet disconcerting them by having, under an impulse just faintly fierce, snatched the cup of gold from Hebe. It was to him, John Berridge, she thus publicly offered it; and it was his over-topping confrere of shortly before who was the worshipper most disconcerted. 

The use of Greek mythological references here advances the idealisation of the Princess and Berridge’s fantasy becomes more unrealistic when he is determined that the Princess is equally romantically interested in him. The Princess indulges Berridge by flirting with him to win his favour. The collapse of illusion comes in the final part of the story when it is revealed that the Princess was using her charm to procure something pragmatic — a preface for her book — from Berridge in order to increase its market profile in America. This disillusionment is once again exaggerated by Berridge’s response. He is humiliated and ashamed for the Princess as his imagined reality disintegrates by the crudeness of true reality.

Similarly, Thoreau points out how human intervention is not always perceived as good by defining urbanization as “encroachments of the city”. Perhaps paradoxically, he as a human being produced literature, a human interpretation, to pay tribute to what he believes as a beautiful truth — nature.

I wish to speak a word for Nature, for absolute freedom and wildness, as contrasted with a freedom and culture merely civil—to regard man as an inhabitant, or a part and parcel of Nature, rather than a member of society. I wish to make an extreme statement, if so I may make an emphatic one, for there are enough champions of civilization: the minister and the school committee and every one of you will take care of that.  

The opening paragraph of his essay, On Walking, directly addresses his perspective on the relationship between Man and Nature.  Thoreau communicates his strong feelings about the greatness of Nature and Man’s increasing disrespect for it through his firm, assertive tone.

Thoreau suggests that the disrespect stems from ignorance as nature is a truth that is not necessarily understood easily.
The wildest dreams of wild men, even, are not the less true, though they may not recommend themselves to the sense which is most common among Englishmen and Americans today. It is not every truth that recommends itself to the Common sense.
The comprehension of this truth, Thoreau implies, is of order beyond the Common sense. In my walks that attempted to experience the falsity of artificial nature, I found myself understanding what Thoreau meant.

With the setting as a park, I began to see the manipulation of truth by Man to conceive a perceptively better reality to live in. A park is mankind's thesis of nature — we want to sculpt nature to accommodate us. If we consider nature as truth like Thoreau, let us question: what is nature then? How can we distinguish between natural and unnatural? Is human behavior unnatural? If urbanization is part of evolution, and our tendency to make things, to make use of nature is instinctive, how is it unnatural? Are we not part of nature too? This is probably a matter of semantics.

Indeed, the reality called “society” we invented is merely a fragment of nature. However, we are so absorbed by our constructed world that we mistake it for a true representation of the world. And so, I diverted my thoughts towards another representation of the world by Man – art.

As the history of art illustrates, the art world is constantly being redefined. Sinclair attacks the contemporary notion of art in urban graffiti as he takes us on rhythmic British walks in prose in his narrative, Skating on Thin Eyes.

The notion was to cut a crude V into the sprawl of the city, to vandalise dormant energies by an act of ambulant signmaking. To walk out from Hackney to Greenwich Hill, and back along the River Lea to Chingford Mount, recording and retrieving the messages on walls, lampposts, doorjambs: the spites and spasms of an increasingly deranged populace. 

Firstly, the style of Sinclair’s text is extremely prominent in terms of rhythm. The bluntness of the tone alludes to the pounding of one’s footsteps when walking in a determined fashion. In doing so, our conventional spatial perception of a location is cordially rearranged by our dominant narrator. However, Sinclair notes to explain the logic behind his configuration

(I had developed this curious conceit while working on my novel Radon Daughters: that the physical movements of the characters across their territory might spell out the letters of a secret alphabet. Dynamic shapes, with ambitions to achieve a life of their own, quite independent of their supposed author. Railway to pub to hospital: trace the line on the map. These botched runes, burnt into the script in the heat of creation, offer an alternative reading — a subterranean, preconscious text capable of divination and prophecy. A sorcerer's grimoire that would function as a curse or a blessing.) 

This in turn helps us further comprehend the psychology behind his non-fiction constructed world.

Urban graffiti is all too often a signature without a document, an anonymous autograph. The tag is everything, as jealously defended as the Coke or Disney decals. Tags are the marginalia of corporate tribalism. Their offence is to parody the most visible aspect of high capitalist black magic. Spraycan bandits, like monks labouring on a Book of Hours, hold to their own patch, refining their art by infinite acts of repetition. The name, unnoticed except by fellow taggers, is a gesture, an assertion: it stands in place of the individual artist who, in giving up his freedom, becomes free
…
Serial composition: the city is the subject, a fiction that anyone can lay claim to. "We are all artists," they used to cry in the Sixties. Now, for the price of an aerosol, it's true. Pick your view and sign it.  

His attitude towards graffiti is directly reflected in his unforgiving use of language such as “Coke or Disney decals”, “corporate tribalism” and  “Spraycan bandits”. More importantly, he makes a statement about the perpetrators of graffiti by acknowledging them as artists, despite being able to claim the title “for the price of an aerosol”. In doing so, he provokes the question of what is an artist and what is art.

In my attempt to replicate Sinclair’s style to document a walk, I noticed the gravity of art in the Parisian sphere. The arrondissement of Le Marais is laced with rows of galleries, so many that each of their names only had a fleeting presence in my memory.

You know how when there are too many things, regardless of how unique they are, they all appeared to be the same to you? This is why I prefer everything in small quantities, so I can appreciate the qualities of them all.
The ‘gallerinas’ are intended to intimidate. Galleries are usually almost empty except for the their respective gallerinas. Walk in and the air of judgment stifles you. You have entered to scrutinize art works, only to feel scrutinized by the person watching over them. It is the same when you walk into a high-end boutique. The absence of price tags cultivates a fear: enter at your own risk. But this is entirely psychological. The high brow thrives on such airs to maintain their public image.
The articles in these galleries are private. They breathe air-conditioned, divorced from their fellow manifestations of “art” outside subject to weather and other elements. You wonder who decides what goes inside and what stays out.
You wonder if the perpetrators of the vandalism outside have hopes getting in. Who doesn’t? You get to make money off things without crass price tags. 

To borrow the words of an economist, Adam Smith, there appears to be an “invisible hand” which determines what is and is not art. In that, I question what is the purpose of art. I sought to comprehend the meaning and role of art in society since art does not exist in the natural world. As such, art is never suspended in truth. What we consider as art is merely our considerations. They may be our interpretations of truth and of beauty. Hence, I perceive art to be the mediator between the two, in which beauty is our expectation and truth, truth.

In light of this, I begin to explore how we maintain façades of expectations, of beauty, through art. The expatriates’ Paris was kept alive by the literature produced and stories passed down. The illusion remained with the foreigners’ circle as the Lost Generation embraced the divide between the locals and themselves. They did not attempt, nor did they want, to fuse with the native French. Instead they chose to coexist in separate worlds on the same land. The French reciprocated this. They did not reject the Americans, but they did not engulf them into their own sphere either. In French propriety, they interact with the expatriates at a social distance they deemed appropriate. Within the Parisian community, other efforts were sought out to ensure the balance between appearance and expectation.

Paris had an obsession with beauty. The most luxurious embodiment of it is the sixteenth arrondissement, where the old money resided. It is where Haussmann architecture proliferated. My walk in that district is remembered in a faint golden hue, as the literary flair of Balzac had specked the 16th with fairy dust. Parisian Green served as the detail accent of Maison de Balzac and its neighbors. This shade of green is particular to Paris, reminiscent of the many bronze statues that scattered around the city.

It should be pointed out that De Balzac had a family history that deviates from the regular household of the 16th. The Balzac family did not descend from generations of wealth. Balzac’s father, born Bernard-Francois Balssa, came from a poor family in the south of France. His ambition to elevate his social status was achieved in after 16 years of struggle in Paris when he finally became Secretary to the King’s Council and a Freemason. In the French tradition where appearances are everything, he changed ‘Balssa' to a more noble-sounding ‘de Balzac’.

The nosy hearsay I picked up in Paris inform me that even today, households whose wealth decayed with the basic principle of imperialism, capitalism, globalization etc. — greed — try their best to keep their estate, utilizing three to four rooms of the thirty-odd in the mansion. In my walk, I looked out for lifeless windows, suspicious of the financial situation of the family behind it. It brought back memories of walks in the Upper East Side, and Cate Blanchett in Blue Jasmine. Manhattan, with her menacing bankruptcy laws and coercing property prices, is much more unforgiving towards those who had fallen out of grace and tumbled down from riches. The lengths that one would go to facilitate their public image — one that to them is ideal or beautiful or expected — is remarkable and often, hypocritical. I believe this phenomenon is prevalent across different societies but it simply manifests in different ways. There are far too many classic novels that fall under the genre of social commentary and satire across cultures, such as Dickens and Dostoyevsky, that attests to this.

A collective effort in upholding beauty is found in the passages of Paris which exude high-end luxury. Despite being public space, it had autonomy over its opening hours and the price points of its tenants became a filter of clientele.

On a bustling Saturday, I thought of Tokyo when I walked through the passages in the second and ninth arrondissement, location scouting for a shoot. The atmosphere and flow of human traffic buzzed with life.

Galerie Vivienne. The name reminded me of an ex, Vivian. The area was interlaced with antique stores and art galleries. Nothing that I can really afford without starving for days or that my studio apartment can accommodate (it also hoards a fair amount of photography equipment). 

The space was rather narrow (reminded me of Palais Royal's walkways which I encountered earlier in the morning on my way here), and it had a hue of Verona orange. The passage was like a high end flea market rearranged. Old leather-bound books, handicrafts, vintage porcelain tableware and silverware (I wonder who actually uses those rusty things) were exhibited in shop window after shop window. I stopped to look at the books in boxes on the floor and noticed volumes of “Historia de Lord Byron”, 1-5. 3 was missing. All the beautiful books were in French, so my wallet had no chance to shine (a part of me heaved a sigh of relief). They would make very good props for a shoot though.  

My memory of the passage was labeled with the adjective “splendor”. The splendidly colored floor tiles refuted Thoreau’s claim that human constructs were insults to true beauty.

When the architecture of this kind attains the general consensus of beauty and luxury, it evokes the question of how the public agrees to it. How does a society decide on what is beautiful? Often, we associate such beauty to notions of glamour, luxury and prestige. We decide what is beautiful, in other words, what embodies our expectations of the ideal, expensive. Or sometimes, we decide what is expensive, beautiful. Objects are expensives because of the manufacturing process or their materials. In the latter’s case, the price is typically related to the supply of the materials — how rare or difficult to extract they are. It comes to no surprise that Galerie Vivienne is well decorated with marble tiles, probably from an Italian quarry.

However, the notion of beauty has evolved over time. It changed so much some of us no longer call it “beauty”. Nonetheless, whatever we call it, it remains the standard society holds to be the ideal. One example is contemporary art. I recall my pseudo-planned walk to Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain. It occurred on my exploration of the Montparnasse district and I had a craving for contemporary interpretations of beauty. And no, I am not confused; I believe that true art, regardless of its aesthetic qualities, can allow us to experience beauty. Not beauty in the common sense, but beauty in a spiritual sense — an ineffable experience that one will contaminate with words like how good humor can be ruined with explanation.

The first artwork I encountered was an empty glass hall with a small automatic vacuum-like robot in the centre and eclectic sounds playing. There was no “beauty” in the conventional sense. I don’t remember wanting to read about it either. I am inclined to phenomenal autonomy, evaluating the world on my own terms.

The next phase was subterranean. In dimmer lighting, it set the darker mood for the pieces. There awaited a sound installation in a red room with Patti Smith’s voice over. The red was discomforting. Titled Have you ever seen your father beat a mouse to death?, the work was engineered to evoke psychological distress. I was not a fan of the piece, but from an objective point of view, the phenomenon offered beauty in the form of a facet of human nature. It met the expectations of disturbance of an individual.

In retrospect, perhaps my favorite of the underground Inhabitants (name of the exhibition) is Vija Clemins’s Night Sky series. Oil on canvas, the paintings intended to capture what ordinary cameras cannot — stars. Clemins portrayed the stars based on a subjective experience that cannot be made known to another individual. The term for it is qualia in philosophy. His vision of the stars belongs to him entirely. No scientific, “objective” apparatus can verify its veracity. I found this attribute of his work strikingly parallel to the non-fiction accounts of the writers we have been reading in this class.

Indeed, Hemingway’s memories of Paris, Dos Passos’s narrative of Spring, Sinclair’s walk of London, Thoreau’s reverence for Nature and my personal accounts are all ontologically subjective interpretations of their physical experience. These interpretations are works of art that strive to represent that experience, which are true and meaningful to the writers. James accentuates the distance between truth and expectations with a distinctive style of annotated psychology in his literary art. At heart, I do not think that we should place a moral judgment on having expectations because they are inevitable in thought. Moreover, the creativity that the confrontation of truth and expectation inspires is undeniably valuable in our cultural spheres.

 
Bibliography

Dos Passos, John. "Rust." In Three Soldiers. New York, New York: Modern Library, 1932.

Fitzgerald, F. Scott. "Babylon Revisited." In Babylon Revisited. London: Penguin, 2011.

Hemingway, Ernest, Sean Hemingway, and Patrick Hemingway. A Moveable Feast: The Restored Edition. New York, NY: Simon and Schuster, 2009.

James, Henry. "The Velvet Glove." In The Complete Tales of Henry James, 123. Vol. 12 of 12. London: Hart-Davis, 1963.

Sinclair, Ian. "Chapter One: Lights Out for the Territory 9 Excursions in the Secret History of London." The New York Times. 1997. Accessed May 8, 2015.

Tang, Jialei. "INHABIT.”: THREE WALKING. February 14, 2015. Accessed May 19, 2015.

Tang, Jialei. "INHABIT.”: SEVEN WALKING. March 15, 2015. Accessed May 8, 2015.

Thoreau, Henry. "Walking." The Atlantic. June 1, 1862. Accessed May 8, 2015.