The South
'Poetry is no less mysterious than the other elements of the orb. A lucky line here and there should not make us think any higher of ourselves, for such lines are the gift of Chance or the Spirit; only the errors are our own.' - JL Borges
'People in their right minds never take pride in their talents.' - Miss Maudie, To Kill a Mockingbird
I always loved that quote from To Kill a Mockingbird, mostly because I had no idea what it meant. What can you take pride in if not your talents? Wealth, birth, or connections? No, that's 500 times more retarded. I think as I get older, I'm starting to understand what it might mean, the foolishness of that vanity. There's something to be said about that divine element (as flimsy as it is in a strictly rational debate) which both Borges and Harper Lee seem to attribute to the thing loosely called "talent." If you abstract or replace "talent" for another virtue that is equally unearned - say, intelligence (or IQ) or good looks - it's very obvious that only an idiot would go around acting better than everyone else on that merit alone. And if talent really is a God-given thing, it's true that we have no right to take pride in them.
But mysticism aside, there's another perfectly good reason why people should not take pride in their talents: often, people are dead wrong about what their talents are, and perhaps their very pride in them blinds them from seeing what needs to be fixed. This is where the Borges quote is illuminating. In artistic endeavors, I have time and time again been completely nonplussed by the auteur's assesment of his or her own work. I think I've written about it before (like when Francis Ford Coppola thinks that "Life without Zoe" is an acceptable thing to spawn upon the world). It's almost like the worst pieces of garbage end up closest to the hearts of their otherwise genius creators.
Borges would say that it's because only are errors are our own.
I also recall a Woody Allen documentary I saw last year (which I may or may not have written about), that must have been made shortly after Hollywood Ending, and before Match Point or Scoop (which I consider a renaissance and a recovery from the stinky depths). Hollywood Ending is easily the WORST Woody Allen movie I've every seen. But in the documentary, Allen modestly talks about how he starts every screenplay thinking that it's going to be brilliant, the next Citizen Kane! - and somehow things take a wrong turn and he ends up somewhat disappointed with the final product. The one exception, he goes on to say, is his latest, Hollywood Ending; that movie translated pretty accurately the vision he had for it, and the jokes worked as he had planned.
!!!
If Woody Allen isn't bullshitting me with this claim, he'd better get on his knees in prayer, and sacrifice a bull in thanks that all his movies DO manage to get fucked up from the original idea.
Anyways. I think what Borges says about poetry is very insightful, and it's interesting to think of his quote in light of his own claim about what his best work is. In the foreword to his collection Artifices, Borges writes that the story called The South is the best in the bunch. To Borges' credit, the story isn't heinous. But it's not superbly remarkable either; it comes out more or less like the other stories in the collection. I was a little puzzled trying to see what it was that he loved so much about it. I didn't think that there was something big I wasn't getting, it just seemed that his ideas in a lot of other stories were far more interesting and novel, and not badly executed.
I did a sparse google search to see if anyone else could figure out why The South was the author's favorite. There's not much out there, but on the strength of what I read, I'm going to venture that Borges loved The South because of it's (faithful?) execution, rather than the concept. One article mentioned something about Borges' personal aesthetic:
'This theory [outlined in "Narrative Art and Magic"] demands symmetries in the storytelling; what Borges calls "inlaid" details ot the text correspond to other details and therefore, in a certain sense, predict or predetermine subsequent events—just as in Voodoo, as Borges says, a pin inserted into a doll in one location kills a person in another. Such plotting eliminates the vagaries of psychology, which Borges has always tried to suppress in his fiction, and calls into relief the premeditated quality of the fiction, emphasizing the author's patterning of events and objects. '
To me this theory says a lot about the basic idea of structure/formalism in the arts. The "vagaries of psychology" is a great way to describe the kind of things that go wrong when an artistic venture tries to escape altogether from the strictures of convention. Conventions are there for a reason; life is random (and meaningless), so art should not be. That doesn't mean that one shouldn't experiment with conventions, but it seems like it's a disastrous act of foolishness to think that one is too good to make use of them.
I think that that is one of the things that is severely wrong with my own creative work: I try to effect too much freedom. My stories (and blog) often do end up becoming this weird, solipsistic, arbitrary psychology warp, and that surely fails to speak to universal concerns. Note to self: less psychology.
'People in their right minds never take pride in their talents.' - Miss Maudie, To Kill a Mockingbird
I always loved that quote from To Kill a Mockingbird, mostly because I had no idea what it meant. What can you take pride in if not your talents? Wealth, birth, or connections? No, that's 500 times more retarded. I think as I get older, I'm starting to understand what it might mean, the foolishness of that vanity. There's something to be said about that divine element (as flimsy as it is in a strictly rational debate) which both Borges and Harper Lee seem to attribute to the thing loosely called "talent." If you abstract or replace "talent" for another virtue that is equally unearned - say, intelligence (or IQ) or good looks - it's very obvious that only an idiot would go around acting better than everyone else on that merit alone. And if talent really is a God-given thing, it's true that we have no right to take pride in them.
But mysticism aside, there's another perfectly good reason why people should not take pride in their talents: often, people are dead wrong about what their talents are, and perhaps their very pride in them blinds them from seeing what needs to be fixed. This is where the Borges quote is illuminating. In artistic endeavors, I have time and time again been completely nonplussed by the auteur's assesment of his or her own work. I think I've written about it before (like when Francis Ford Coppola thinks that "Life without Zoe" is an acceptable thing to spawn upon the world). It's almost like the worst pieces of garbage end up closest to the hearts of their otherwise genius creators.
Borges would say that it's because only are errors are our own.
I also recall a Woody Allen documentary I saw last year (which I may or may not have written about), that must have been made shortly after Hollywood Ending, and before Match Point or Scoop (which I consider a renaissance and a recovery from the stinky depths). Hollywood Ending is easily the WORST Woody Allen movie I've every seen. But in the documentary, Allen modestly talks about how he starts every screenplay thinking that it's going to be brilliant, the next Citizen Kane! - and somehow things take a wrong turn and he ends up somewhat disappointed with the final product. The one exception, he goes on to say, is his latest, Hollywood Ending; that movie translated pretty accurately the vision he had for it, and the jokes worked as he had planned.
!!!
If Woody Allen isn't bullshitting me with this claim, he'd better get on his knees in prayer, and sacrifice a bull in thanks that all his movies DO manage to get fucked up from the original idea.
Anyways. I think what Borges says about poetry is very insightful, and it's interesting to think of his quote in light of his own claim about what his best work is. In the foreword to his collection Artifices, Borges writes that the story called The South is the best in the bunch. To Borges' credit, the story isn't heinous. But it's not superbly remarkable either; it comes out more or less like the other stories in the collection. I was a little puzzled trying to see what it was that he loved so much about it. I didn't think that there was something big I wasn't getting, it just seemed that his ideas in a lot of other stories were far more interesting and novel, and not badly executed.
I did a sparse google search to see if anyone else could figure out why The South was the author's favorite. There's not much out there, but on the strength of what I read, I'm going to venture that Borges loved The South because of it's (faithful?) execution, rather than the concept. One article mentioned something about Borges' personal aesthetic:
'This theory [outlined in "Narrative Art and Magic"] demands symmetries in the storytelling; what Borges calls "inlaid" details ot the text correspond to other details and therefore, in a certain sense, predict or predetermine subsequent events—just as in Voodoo, as Borges says, a pin inserted into a doll in one location kills a person in another. Such plotting eliminates the vagaries of psychology, which Borges has always tried to suppress in his fiction, and calls into relief the premeditated quality of the fiction, emphasizing the author's patterning of events and objects. '
To me this theory says a lot about the basic idea of structure/formalism in the arts. The "vagaries of psychology" is a great way to describe the kind of things that go wrong when an artistic venture tries to escape altogether from the strictures of convention. Conventions are there for a reason; life is random (and meaningless), so art should not be. That doesn't mean that one shouldn't experiment with conventions, but it seems like it's a disastrous act of foolishness to think that one is too good to make use of them.
I think that that is one of the things that is severely wrong with my own creative work: I try to effect too much freedom. My stories (and blog) often do end up becoming this weird, solipsistic, arbitrary psychology warp, and that surely fails to speak to universal concerns. Note to self: less psychology.
posted by Rex at 5:03 PM
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