Nonfiction

Burning My Education: Rediscovering the Basics of Story

Dappled Things

Andrew J. Graff

I’ll call anything a story in which specific characters and events influence each other to form a meaningful narrative
—Flannery O’Connor

In February of 2014, while the snowdrifts packed themselves against the screen door of our walkout basement, and the Peshtigo River beyond our property line flowed black and silty beneath a foot of ice, I knelt by the wood stove on the basement floor and fed my education to the pine flames. From freshman studies through graduate school, I had collected and carted around every note I took in every class. I put them in grocery store potato boxes, stored them in closets. My unspoken hope was that they’d ferment, that their eyes would sprout, and I’d someday end up with a well-aged collection of hard-won, expensive knowledge.

Our home in Northern Wisconsin was the fourth or fifth to which I’d carted the boxes. We moved there for my first full-time teaching position, a heavy load of English Composition at a small college. The novel manuscript I’d worked on for seven years had been rejected that year, and with finality, too. Acquisition editors said in unison—I paraphrase here, but still have the emails—the writing is beautiful, the characters are real, but this is the most boring novel we have ever read. That novel comprised all of my eggs. The failure hurt. I cried in my pickup truck about it, told God how hard I worked, how unfair the cosmos was. But the editors were right. The novel was missing a dramatic conceit I didn’t know how to give it. And so after seven years of work and a period of mourning, I just stopped writing. I graded papers instead. I fished the river. I went canoeing with my young son and his sock monkey. In the winter, my wife and I skied on the frozen bays of Lake Michigan. I paid bills and looked at carpet samples and worried about being a dad and a husband. This was life now. Not writing. It was time to get rid of the potato boxes.

Over the course of a week, the snows buried us deep while I burned photocopied readings about Baudrillard’s deserts and Foucault’s panopticons. I burned Derrida, which truth be told didn’t bother me much. I burned notes from an Astronomy course I got a B in, moons and Kepler’s laws and Pluto’s banishment as a planet. I burned the notes I used to write a paper about Keats’s Endymion, a book-length poem he wrote before his death while engaged to be married. The poem, to my memory, was largely about a young shepherd unable to catch the moon he loved, and it wasn’t for want of effort. Poor Endymion. Poor Pluto. Poor Keats. I burned and filed, kept a handful of the papers I’d written, but then something miraculous emerged. Something important, something received. I pulled out a copy of an essay given to me in one of my first undergraduate writing classes. The professor was writer David McGlynn. The essay was a copy of Flannery O’Connor’s lecture, “The Nature and Aim of Fiction.” I didn’t recall its specific content, but I remembered David saying how much he loved it, how important it was. I’d been feeding the fire for some time, and nearly twisted the essay into a wick and stuffed it between the pine logs, but the memory of that class and that time—the way art and writing first came into view with such beauty and promise—made me set the essay aside. There was a couch down there in the basement. I’d get the fire going, read the essay again.

I remember reading and rereading this:

The fact is that the materials of the fiction writer are the humblest. Fiction is about everything human and we are made out of dust, and if you scorn getting yourself dusty, then you shouldn’t try to write fiction. It’s not a grand enough job for you. Now when the fiction writer finally gets this idea through his head and into his habits, he begins to realize what a job of heavy labor the writing of fiction is. A lady who writes, and whom I admire very much, wrote me that she had learned from Flaubert that it takes at least three activated sensuous strokes to make an object real; and she believes that this is connected with our having five senses. If you’re deprived of any of them, you’re in a bad way, but it you’re deprived of more than two at once, you almost aren’t present.

I finished reading the essay. I looked at the ceiling awhile. The line about three sensuous strokes intrigued me. I knew about the importance of physicality in writing, but hadn’t thought about it as a deliberate method before—three of the five senses, purposefully cooking in any given scene. I didn’t know it at that moment, but this passage of O’Connor given to me by McGlynn, concerning an anecdote about a woman who’d learned something by reading Flaubert, would become the spark that kept me writing.

I hadn’t written a line of fiction in over a year. To reenter a new project was too terrible to think about. It opened wounds. But this small spark I could do. Three strokes. That evening I opened one of those miniature notebooks you find next to the bubblegum and lighters in grocery stores and wrote just one scene with three senses. I wrote about two boys walking their bikes down a country road leading through a marsh. I wrote about the sound of gravel beneath bikes tires (first stroke). I wrote about the smell of ditch clover (second). I wrote about a red-winged blackbird landing and swaying on a dried cattail stalk (third). I didn’t know anything else about the two boys. I didn’t know names or destinations or origins. And I certainly didn’t know they would become, four years later, main characters in another novel manuscript. I only knew about gravel and clover and blackbirds, the dust we’re made of. But in some way a new point of reference had been fixed. A potato eye sprouted. I watched the fire a long time that night, the tenacity of the coals.

Years later, at another university, I open my fiction course with a single question and require an answer by the end of the term: As a Christian writer, what is your obligation to your reader and your art? The course is a quest for cornerstones, for universals, for big ways of holding writing in our minds. We read a lot of poetics—writers on writing—to learn how serious artists have navigated their art. I believe all writers have developed some sort of poetic, even if it’s unfashionable to admit. You can tell what preoccupies a writer—the givens they deem essential to storytelling—by the way they workshop, the aspects they consistently bring to light. And while I have no interest in anything remotely suggesting the “formulas for” or “steps of” of writing, I do believe universal attributes exist that help me hold the basics of story in my head while I write and workshop. Humans smell things to know things. I should make my reader smell things to help him know things. There’s a universal for you.

I have three. The first emerged that night by the fire.

First Universal: Story and Concrete Realization

If I can taste a story, I can live in it, because I taste in life. O’Connor writes about how the “least common denominator” in story is that it is concrete: “The beginning of knowledge is the senses, and the fiction writer begins where human perception begins.” If we want a reader to experience story as physically as he experiences life, then we must offer (and this is the humble, dusty work O’Connor speaks of) the raw material of sight, smell, tastes, textures, and sounds. This seems pithy and self-evident until we realize how often it is ignored. O’Connor writes that “most people know what a story is until they sit down to write one. Then they find themselves writing a sketch with an essay woven through it, or an essay with a sketch woven through it, or an editorial with a character in it, or a case history with a moral, or some other mongrel thing.” Our first task as storytellers, and it is not lofty, is to roll around in the dust, and invite our human readers to do the same, to offer them the skin of an apple, the heat of a stone, the sound of a carrot cut on the edge of a metal sink. Three strokes in any given scene.

The immersive quality of writing that has harnessed this power of raw sensory material has serious implications regarding our obligations to human readers. Concrete realization is powerful. Do with it what you will, but moral choices exist here. If we immerse our reader in a truly realized space, we immerse him in an experience as real as his tenth birthday. Immersive art becomes part of another human’s existence, his memory too. Just think of the scenes that have stuck, the way they sneak up on us even years later. To touch and taste and smell, even in the mind, is an act of incarnation, an abstraction made flesh which we experience with flesh. O’Connor writes:

All of my experience has been that of a writer who believes . . . in the “God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and not of the philosophers and scholars.” This is an unlimited God and one who has revealed himself specifically. It is one who became man and rose from the dead. It is one who confounds the senses and sensibilities, one known early as a stumbling block. There is no way to gloss over this specification to make it more acceptable to modern thought. This God is the object of ultimate concern and he has a name. (Emphasis added)

During a writing class, we paused on this passage and talked about how good writing, as writing, points to God. Even our acts of creation are part of creation. The best way to make our storytelling “known” and concrete is to do it the way God did it. I’m not saying anything spooky or irreverent here. I say all this in the same spirit in which a young child holds up a crayon portrait, asks for a fridge magnet. But God didn’t live among us as abstraction, or a thought, or an idea. Jesus was born, incarnate, as a living child, all blue and pink and wet. You could hear him and smell him before he ever preached a word. We can write this way, make things known the way humans are suited to knowing. Clover. Gravel. The hum of a cattail reed. Three strokes. It’s an alignment of art with nature, with dust, and it points to truth.

A young woman in my class set her pencil down.

“This is legit,” she said.

“Yes,” I said. “It is.”

Second Universal: Story and Dramatic Conceit

If we write concretely because we live concretely, then we should tell story the way humans desire story. In brief, we desire stories concerning moments of circumstantial significance. Any stories in any context—conversations on bus rides, around campfires, in cave paintings—concern themselves with an instance of drama, and if they are long stories, sustained drama. But the value of drama in many writing programs—the idea that even the quietest sort of literary fiction must deliberately concern itself with creating and sustaining drama—is often treated as a secondary concern, or worse yet, an artless one. Many MFA programs treat plot as if it is a dirty word, a thing beneath them. This is a great mistake. Editors rejected my manuscript because it bored them, straight up. It lacked drama and sustained drama. My education taught me to disparage the basic study of plot, and now my sock drawer carries an unpublished manuscript. I don’t wish to make the aim of my writing classes “commercial viability.” I wish to aim for obligations to art and audience. And our art is storytelling. And storytellers need readers.

O’Connor writes that a story should be “presented in a such a way that the reader has the sense that it is unfolding around him”—not only in a concrete sense, but in this dramatic sense also. She explains our obligation to provide drama and recommends providing a big, whopping dose of it. From her essay, “Novelist and Believer:”

[The novelist] renders his vision so that it can be transferred, as nearly whole as possible, to his reader. You can safely ignore the reader’s taste, but you can’t ignore his nature, you can’t ignore his limited patience. Your problem is going to be difficult in direct proportion as your beliefs depart from his.

When I write a novel in which the central action is a baptism, I am very well aware that for a majority of my readers, baptism is a meaningless rite, and so in my novel I have to see that this baptism carries enough awe and mystery to jar the reader into some kind of emotional recognition of its significance. To this end I have to bend the whole novel—its language, its structure, its action. I have to make the reader feel, in his bones if nowhere else, that something is going on here that counts. Distortion in this case is an instrument; exaggeration has a purpose, and the whole structure of the story or novel has been made what it is because of belief. This is not the kind of distortion that destroys; it is the kind that reveals, or should reveal.

This is the spirit of storytelling. Potent transference. Not mere mimesis. I try to tell this to my wife when she reminds me I tend to exaggerate.

“That’s not how it went,” she’ll say. “You were exaggerating again.”

“I was using hyperbole,” I’ll reply. “Jesus did it.” Pluck out your eyes! I know of no church that does this. The Church understands the spirit of transference. So can writers. That literary fiction became stuck in a rut of realism so stalwart that storytelling can no longer be “fictional” is limiting at best and missing out on much joy and potency at worst. I believe we can and should tell stories possessing drama beyond the register of daily life. And in doing so, we might again draw attention to the significance, beauty, and mystery within dailiness.

If I enter a story with these first two basics in mind—concrete realization and dramatic conceit—I will have a better chance of immersing my reader in something worthy of his attention. These are, again, how we live real life. We taste, touch, and smell (concretely), and then our attention is drawn toward circumstance (drama). Honoring these universals solves problems while writing, too. Many students have a hard time with the idea of exploring the direction of a story from within it, of being surprised by anything. Setting up a dramatic tension powerful enough to draw a character out of the garden or off the park bench is helpful. And when any particular thread of tension runs dry, we create another, or complicate the first, and the story again has a way to move forward. Dramatic conceit creates pressure. And because this is storytelling, it can be louder than life, which should make the process of creating and sustaining it enjoyable, raucous, creative.

Dramatic conceit is the stuff of old-fashioned discussions of plot, and inciting incidents, and book-length and chapter-length arcs, and external conflicts, action rising and falling and resolving—all the sort of lowbrow rot they won’t tell you about in a graduate program—but it is worthy of study and part of our obligation. We have permission to be loud and deliberate. Consider the loudness of the plot in O’Connor’s short story, “A Good Man is Hard to Find.” A man at breakfast reads an article about an escaped convict, gets lost while driving, and is killed by the convict he read about at breakfast. I imagine a workshop talking a person right out of writing a story as overtly dramatic as that.

Third Universal: Story and Emotional Significance

An interesting phenomenon occurs if a story bears the first two universals without this third. You find yourself with a highly immersive, action-packed, and completely inconsequential action flick.

It is the role of the storyteller to physically immerse. Yes. It is the role of the storyteller to introduce and sustain drama by crafting a conceit of significant circumstances. Yes. But there is a third point that need to be fixed in place, something as natural to humanity as tasting food or reacting to circumstance: the mind and heart. As humans navigate a concrete world and its dramas, they also think about it, worry about it, and change their minds as they go along. Nearly every writer in every freshman composition class is met by the powerful desire to write a short paragraph at the end of his narrative essay to sum the thing up: “And now I, the author, will list the lessons I learned baling hay with grandpa, which may not have been evident during the story I just told.” This is a natural impulse, a good one in fact, but a faulty manifestation if we’re telling story. Stories are not without meaning, but they do not transfer meaning with thesis statements supported by narrative evidence. The strength of story lies in its ability to transfer lived experience, not commentary about experience. In story, significance emerges, as we live.

O’Connor writes:

[Story] must carry its meaning inside of it. It means that any abstractly expressed compassion or piety or morality in a piece of fiction is only a statement added to it. It means that you can’t make an inadequate dramatic action complete by putting a statement at the end of it or in the middle of it or at the beginning of it. It means that when you write fiction you are speaking with character and action, not about character and action. The writer’s moral sense must coincide with his dramatic sense.

I think most writers want their stories to carry meaning, to arrive at something emotionally significant. The human desire to make sense of life and share our best attempts is good and natural. This desire may be increased for the Christian writer, who has found a beautiful answer and wishes to share it. However, I’ve written elsewhere how storytelling is the wrong medium for preaching sermons. Preaching is good. Sermons need to happen. But not in story. And when storytelling is mistaken as the appropriate medium for sermons, we end up with, as O’Connor warns, a thing good at being neither a story nor a sermon. Story becomes wounded and desperate when its characters and actions are spoken about rather than spoken with. But what is meant by speaking with character and action?

I think it means this, which again mirrors life: when a human goes through a trial, he thinks thoughts about it, and all the richness of his personal history and worldview and hopes and desires will shape the way he thinks those thoughts. A particular pitfall of resisting didacticism in art is to create a sort of objective mimesis of events, and not enter the rich tapestry and commentary of the human mind at all. But one of the hallmarks separating literary storytelling from action flicks is the tremendous attention paid to the interior life of the mind and heart. A recent reading of Marilynne Robinson’s novel, Home, reminded me of this permission to have characters think many thoughts while navigating concrete and dramatic circumstance. The dramatic conceit of Home is very quiet. Glory’s brother returns home, weeds a few garden beds, drinks. Glory bakes a couple of pies. A lot of prayer happens. I may be overstating my case, but Home is a quiet novel in terms of external conflict. The vast majority of lines in that novel are devoted to expressions of Glory’s worry for her prodigal brother and ailing father, and the interactions between her brother and father. Hundreds of pages of worry, blessing, and thought, all taking place in the mind. It’s a beautiful book, and a beautiful mode of storytelling, for it satisfies a writer’s desire to speak and think thoughts, and does so more effectively than any story-turned-sermon ever could. “It makes a great difference to [a writer’s] novel,” writes O’Connor, “whether he believes that we are created in God’s image, or whether he believes we create God in our own . . . whether he believes that our wills are free, or bound like those of the other animals.” The stuff of worldview comes through as we write with our characters, allowing them a genuine thoughtfulness as they navigate a concrete world filled with pressing circumstances. It’s about an author’s treatment of subject matter, in real time and in scene, not his commentary about it afterward.

This threefold cord of basics is not easily broken. It works for story because it honors human experience. And the best sort of news for a writer trying to write is that these three basics, once upheld, give a story an inherent inertia. My own process, if it is helpful at all, looks as follows. When I wrote those lines about gravel and clover and cattails, I had my three strokes. Flesh had been given. But what then? The two boys stared at their handlebars for a day or two. The blackbird swayed. Bees flew in circles. I put the idea away for a time. After all, I was a failed writer. I had snow to shovel. But I began thinking about the second universal. Drama must occur in the life of these characters, and according to O’Connor, it may as well be loud. For some reason or another—maybe it was shotgun season, echoes of muzzle-blasts alive in my northern forest—I decided one boy was going to shoot the abusive father of the other, and the boys would be forced to flee into the wild, down a river like the one just beyond my property line. Okay, rough draft territory. Write it. The story now had the first two universals. It was experiential, and it possessed a pressure that could carry it several pages. But it needed significance, heart and mind. And when I began thinking about the concretely realized world in which this drama was unfolding with the heart and mind and eye of the boy who shot a man to save his friend, inertia blossomed. I learned more about the boy, his history and disposition and shame and triumph. I noticed what he noticed, and described the way he described, and learned what he would do under the pressure. The story—at least the first few scenes—took on that wonderful quality writers entrenched in process describe as “a life of its own.” After a long winter spent burning my way back to basics, I had on my hands, in rough form a story in which specific characters [concrete] and events [drama] influence each other [significance] to form a meaningful narrative.

So a writer hopes.

Andrew J. Graff is the author of the novel Raft of Stars, forthcoming with Ecco, an imprint of Harper Collins. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Stolen Island, Image, and Dappled Things. In 2009, Andrew became an Iowa Arts Fellow and earned an MFA from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Since writing this essay, the beginnings of the story described have become a novel, RAFT OF STARS, forthcoming with Ecco Books in early spring of 2021. More about the book and its author can be found at www. andrewjgraff.com.

The Ends of the Novel

Dappled Things

Joshua Hren

In “The End of the Novel” Osip Mandelstam suggests that modern fiction has its origins in a “secular” response to both the religious lives and biographies of saints and the moralizing sketch, a transformation that included a shift from biography to greater emphasis on narrative and plot and “psychological motivation.” As Joseph Bottum makes evident in his new book The Decline of the Novel, the form asserts that “all human beings are interior selves.” This shift inward, into the psyches of the protagonists, typically teaches us to look down, to look within man, into her tangled motivations, measuring them, as Evelyn Birge Vitz would have it, against the ultimately unknowable depths which may or may not contain explanations for our actions. Contrast this to the narratives of saints, where the deepest mysteries are not within the self but up, outside man, in “the equally mysterious workings and will of God,” all of which affect individuals. Consider the searching inquiries of St. Augustine’s Confessions: ““Do heaven and earth contain you because you have filled them? Or do you fill them and overflow them because they do not contain you? Where do you put the overflow of yourself after heaven and earth are filled? . . . Why do I request you to come to me when, unless you were within me, I would have no being at all?” The transcendent God constantly interferes in and takes precedence over human intentions and acts. In much of modern literature, Vitz argues, the reader is lulled into losing the sense that our “selves” are necessarily formed by “transcendent forces,” whereas the lives of the saints constantly remind the reader that its personages, though impressively ardent and at times apparently untouchable “in the pursuit of their desires, are set in a reality that transcends and overarches them.”

Vitz’s account is superficially accurate, but it ignores Bottum’s argument that the novelistic form moves us beyond mere imitation of these interior beings into a description of “the crisis of those modern selves”; still more, at its “highest and most serious level,” the novel offers solutions to the crisis. This is why the novel’s decline matters. However, given that sacred mysteries are the highest realities, what promise can we find in a form that (for Bottum) only awkwardly fits a vision of things that swells beyond the modern self’s assured sovereignty?

Now, as James Wood notes, “the religious tendency remained strong in the novel throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.” By Joseph Bottum’s account, the novel “was wrapped in very Protestant clothing,” an argument he addresses at greater length in his essay “The Novel as Protestant Art.” Seen through the Protestant monocle, the self’s journey is “the deepest, truest thing in the universe, and the individual soul’s salvation is the great metaphysical drama played out on the world’s stage.” When this concern with the self is unhinged from salvation we may find ourselves, as in the finely-tuned, hyper-conscious novels of Virginia Woolf or Marcel Proust, stuck in a “relentless search inside the psyche, the endless dwelling on internal reality” to such a degree that thoughts and feelings about the self become “as important and interesting as actions and thoughts about the external universe.” Thus, Bottum concludes his provocative “The Novel as Protestant Art,” when a “Catholic-aiming” novel fails, it does so because it is “at war with its own form.” Bottum’s propositions merit much mulling; even where it seems to misfire or exaggerate, it is difficult to locate a dispensation that eliminates his diagnoses entirely.

First, witness the Catholic and Christian novelists who inherit the action of grace that is taken for granted in the lives of the saints and craft it into a form that has historically shed or demystified that transcendent. Dostoevsky for instance, who though not Catholic establishes a decidedly catholic core for his fiction through his character Zossima’s aphorism “Everyone is really responsible to all men for all men and for everything.” His mature works are marked by a profound synthesis of hagiography and the modern novel, mixing the mysteries of sanctity with increased interiority: this synthesis is most complete in Brothers Karamazov, but though the saint-apprentice Alyosha and Dmitri the romantic hero are sewn together into the same story, this conjunction does at times strain the unity of the novel.

Second, and more importantly, as René Girard has demonstrated in Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, it is precisely the “victory over self-centeredness,” the “renunciation of fascination and hatred,” which is the “crowning moment of novelistic creation,” and it can therefore be found in all great novelists. It is true that victory over the self is achieved through a suspended penetration of “the Self.” However, as Proust proclaims through The Past Recaptured, “self-centeredness is a barrier to novelistic creation.” Crippling self-absorption initially incites an imitation of others that manifests a desperate desire to “live outside ourselves,” and as novelists as different as Flaubert and Dostoevsky and Proust narrate, the self often ends up being torn apart before its autonomous arrogance is shed through a painful renunciation of pride. All novelistic conclusions, Girard insists, are conversions, and in these conversions the novelist “reaches the heights of Western literature; he merges with the great religious ethics and the most elevated forms of humanism.”

Bottum is not wrong, then, when he argues that in the novel “the inner life, self-consciousness and self-understanding, become the manifestation of virtue and the path for grasping salvation.” He errs, however, in assuming that because an author begins and builds the novelistic world upon an essentially modern, Protestant understanding of the self he ends with that same understanding. Many novels seem to defy it. Consider J.K. Huysman’s Against Nature, written just before his conversion to Catholicism occasioned a tetralogy of thickly Catholic novels chronicling the protagonist’s passage from the Satanism of the Parisian underworld to the oblation of the Benedictines. In Against Nature, the anti-hero Des Esseintes, driven by a professed “contempt for humanity,” retreats into a remote villa and escapes his painful self-centeredness by becoming a connoisseur of colors and tastes and smells; he tries to drown his own faults and failings in refined and decadent consumption—seeking solace, finally, in the sorrowful maxims of Schopenhauer and Pascal. But, finding that “the arguments of pessimism were powerless to comfort him,” that only the “impossible” belief in eternal life could do, he becomes filled with a “fit of rage” which rattles through his resignation and indifference. Des Esseintes epiphany is that nothing can be done, that men who have molded modernity according to their small-minded selves “were guzzling like picknickers from paper bags among the imposing ruins of the Church—ruins which had become . . . a pile of debris defiled by unspeakable jokes and scandalous jests.” Perhaps, he wonders, the “pale martyr of Golgatha” and the God of Genesis will rekindle the rain of fire that once consumed the cities of the plain. In the final lines of the novel this misanthrope prays for pity on the Christian who doubts and the unbeliever who believes. Petering out on the page, he conceives of himself as a “galley-slave of life who puts out to sea alone, in the night, beneath a firmament no longer lit by the consoling beacon fires of the ancient hope.”

Bottum terminates with a question that could have cropped up from the consciousness of Des Esseintes: “And as the atmosphere grows thinner and thinner in the West, as confidence fails, where shall we seek our future arts, our future selves?” Insofar as new novels themselves can answer this question, Catholic writers need to render the thinness of the atmosphere in the West. How? In two ways: following Huysmans, through rendering tenacious modern selves who, finding that the answers they seek so desperately could not, finally, come from further psychologizations and therapeutic self-actualizations, arrive at the threshold of the transcendent. Following Fyodor, through novels structured around families and cities and whole nations rather than sovereign selves. Novels inhabited by dependent rational creatures rather than autonomous desiring protagonists. Novels whose characters’ self-determined trajectories are interrupted by the transcending providence of God.

Paradigms of these fools’ errands do not abound—but they are to be found. Though the “protagonist” of Rumer Godden’s In This House of Brede is purportedly the novice Philippa Foot, a widow of high stature in government service who bets on the Benedictine option. Even if she is a protagonist, of sorts, she is, as Phyllis Tickle has written, more so novelistic “icon” of that “bright sadness which informs every Byzantine painting that has ever been hallowed, and every iconostasis that has ever been venerated.” Still more, once we are immersed in the interior of Brede Abbey, we find not descent into self but, on any given page, a profoundly communal form of narration: Godden moves us through the consciousness of Abbess Hester into the associated soul of Dame Clare, along with a whole host of sisters who possess a piercing admixture of humility and “the deadly knowledge of old family servants.” The disparate sufferings and sanctities of the sisters are woven into a pattern of their motto, which is “‘Pax,’ but the word was set in a circle of thorns.” From the other side of the rose window we have J.K. Huysman’s Saint Lydwine of Schiedam, which chronicles the victim soul in a manner discontent with mere hagiography. Huysmans criticizes Lydwine’s prior biographers for having constructed “women who are not women, heroines impeccable but false, beings who have nothing living, nothing human, about them. We must not impose upon Lydwine those badly made portraits who possess, as though from birth, “all the virtues without the trouble of acquiring them.” Huysmans, novelist at heart, gives us slow and painful repudiation of self that is analogous—though in an entirely different key—to those of any number of the novel’s haughty heroes of good will. Elizabeth Bennet, for instance. And then, as though waiting in the narthex, a welcome replacement to kitschy pamphlets, we find Evelyn Waugh’s Helena, the author’s own favorite. When the poet John Betjeman confessed to being confused over the fact that the novel’s Helena “doesn’t seem like a saint,” the great satirist responded that he

liked Helena’s sanctity because it is in contrast with all the moderns think of as sanctity. She wasn’t thrown to the lions, she wasn’t a contemplative, she didn’t look like an El Greco. She just discovered what it was that God wanted her to do and did it. And she snubbed Aldous Huxley, with his perennial fog, by going straight to the essential physical historical fact of the redemption.

In taking his heroine through the discovery of the true cross, Waugh took himself there too. As George Weigel has noted, in his later years the novelist undertook a purgative “spiritual quest for compassion and contrition. As for many of us, the contrition likely came easier than the compassion.” Helena, Weigel maintains, was a piece of Waugh crucible; though the protagonist lacks the hagiographer’s aureoles, focusing on her namesake helped the author move away from the raw meanness displayed in some of his farce, and into, “for all its chiaroscuro shadings, a divine comedy indeed.” Still, there is something apparently unsettling about the writer who makes claims to locate the stirrings of sanctity—in novelists as in their characters. Who are we to imagine we can imagine God’s visitation to us his wayward bride, and, still worse, to do so through fiction’s supposedly noble lies?

Enter Fear and Trembling dressed like Don Quixote. It would seem that those who narrate providence are transgressing the limits of imitation: how can grace, the precise workings of which none of us can pinpoint, be shown? Christic imaginers would, at first glance, seem to be committing a crass immoderation, feigning a kind of “mastery of God” and His work by deciphering His workings too surely. “We may be able to grasp,” says Josef Pieper, “in faith the actuality and the ultimate meaning of God’s working in history. But no man can presume on his own to point to any providential happening of the here and now, and to say: ‘God has manifested His intention in this or that reward or punishment, confirmation or rejection.’”

There is a major difference between our presuming to pinpoint the providential happenings in history, or the composer of the lives of the saints specifying the workings of grace in a particular soul, and the fiction writer fitting divine things to his form. In the former case the writer is saying what God did, whereas the fictionist is showing us, to paraphrase Aristotle’s Poetics, “the kind of thing that God would do.” Importantly, in the latter case we are dealing with hypothetical probabilities, with plausibility, which, as James Wood says, “involves the defense of the credible imagination against the incredible. This is surely why Aristotle writers that a convincing impossibility in mimesis is always preferable to an unconvincing possibility.” The Catholic novelist does not deal in slavish “realistic” imitation but with mimetic persuasion. Let him test the novel’s conventions and constraints, meld mystery—in a measured manner—into a literature hell-bent on secularity and individuality. Let him convince us this end could come, that the impossible could happen, has happened, will happen in saecula saeculorum, Amen.

Joshua Hren is co-founder and assistant director of the Honors College at Belmont Abbey. He is founder and editor-in-chief of Wiseblood Books. His first collection of short stories, This Our Exile, was published by Angelico Press in 2018. His first academic book, Middle-earth and the Return of the Common Good: J.R.R. Tolkien and Political Philosophy came out through Cascade Books in the same year.

“A Fast That Is Pleasing to the Eyes:” Searching for the End of Art, Part II

Dappled Things

Brian Prugh

This essay hangs on a danger, a worry, a possibility that confronts each of us every day, but that is of particular concern to artists in their making life—a pitfall summed up in the thought that “maybe to perfect a thing is to destroy it.”* It’s the idea that I can lose my way as an artist even as I grow in my ability to make more perfect objects, to move with more perfect ease in the world, or to more perfectly execute a task or performance, because in perfecting some piece of my art, or of my life, I can perfect the wrong thing, and lose my art or my life in the process. It’s not hard to come up with examples: an elite artist whose meticulously crafted works for some inexplicable reason fall flat, lifeless, or a successful person whose impeccable exterior is a husk around a vacuum.

I have my own ideas for examples of each, but they are contentious, so I’m going to withhold them for now, favoring a more abstract treatment. I do this because pointing out the foibles of the self-assured and famous can be falsely empowering. What I really wanted to do in the first part of the essay was to make sensible the force of the questions: have I perfected the wrong thing? Have the artists I admire perfected the wrong thing? Am I actively cultivating perfection of the wrong thing in my work?

I want these questions to feel like hitting a bump in an airplane—stomach leaping into the throat, momentary pause of the heart—because indeed it is possible to devote one’s life to perfecting the wrong thing. It might even be common. And to say that this particular artist that I don’t like has perfected the wrong thing makes it possible for me to merely react, to apply the question only to other people. It turns art criticism to gossip, to mockery, to high-minded derision, and away from the direction it ought to be facing: oneself, in a spirit of self-critique or the “self-worry” which the French call souçi de soi.

So on the one side there is the wrong thing, this chasm, this possibility of failure, a genuinely treacherous drop without a guardrail that could claim my life if I make one false step or if a rock that I thought stable enough to support me should break loose and crumble under my feet. But of course, on the other side is the right thing, and that is what I will consider in this part of the essay. Following the mountain imagery, I might call this side Parnassus, that sheer face of rock that is the path of the artist and the source of poetry. And if I’m going to get anywhere here, I’m going to have to stay on the mountain, and I’m going to have to know where I’m going.

That’s why I’m searching for the end of art, the telos of art—so that I know which way is up, and so that I can discern what is a part of the mountain and a sure foothold, and what are the accretions sitting upon it that are likely to fall off. Mountain climbers, as they ascend, adjust their paths with an eye on the summit, and they don’t trust every rock; experience guides them as they fix their ropes to secure points along the way. So as I try to articulate the character of the right thing, the proper end of the work of art, I have to rely on my experiences to suggest the trustworthy places to fix me to the mountain.

And I suppose I have the good fortune to have had one experience in my life that was like a lightning bolt, when I saw something in a work of art in a flash—everything was illuminated—and it burned me, burned itself into me, and nothing was the same again. I had to change my life. That wasn’t the only significant experience I’ve had with a work of art, but it was dramatic and paradigmatic, and my other genuine encounters with works of art participate in the same conceptual categories opened up in that critical experience—only partially, perhaps, or in a slower, quieter way, but nonetheless active in the same space within my interior life.

I was nineteen, and it was my first time in a giant cosmopolitan city in a foreign country. It was also my first time in one of the “Big Five” international art museums. It was the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, Russia, and I was walking through a world that I had no idea even existed. Stepping on impossibly intricate wooden floors with elaborate alabaster nudes that held aloft improbably ornamented rafters looking down on me, I was dragging my jaw along the floor through rooms that boasted one masterpiece of western art after another. Here a room with probably fifty paintings by Cézanne. Paintings by Rembrandt and Raphael. Sculpture by Michelangelo. An absurdity of visual riches. I don’t think I can overstate my level of visual overstimulation when I walked by Matisse’s massive two-part mural, The Dance (II) and The Music. And at that moment, the lightning bolt hit. I was standing in front of The Dance, and I wasn’t looking at a painting anymore—I was looking into the heart of the heart of reality—I knew it because I could see the thing that I had always felt about the world, that I had always seen in it but that I could never put my finger on, a thing that seemed to separate me from the people around me to the degree that I began to think that I might be crazy, that this deeper dimension to life that I had long sensed might be my own psychological construction and that I probably just needed a little psychological repair to rid myself of. I could see it because Matisse could see it, and he put it into the painting. I could see it because Matisse had been able to make his vision visible for me to look through, to see that invisible reality hidden by the visible one—but not to be alone in seeing it, to see it with him, to see it together.

At the risk of an odd simile, it was like the independent verification of a scientific experiment demonstrating the existence of a long-theorized particle with definitive physical data. It was like a tight and beautiful proof of a long-suspected mathematical hunch. Or it was like the boat floating off the straps of the lift when it’s set into the water after fixing a hole in the bottom. This swirling uncertain sense about things that I had on the inside was suddenly and immediately visible on the outside.

I could see it: reality, the deep truth. Now, I couldn’t hold on to it, but the experience was hugely formative for me—I knew it was there. No one could take that away from me. And it set me on a journey to find the thing that I had glimpsed, and I knew almost immediately that I would have to find words to articulate what happened in front of that painting. It’s been twenty years, and I’m just starting to see it clearly. But I’m going to stop here, at the outside of this experience, as it were, and say only that this moment is a place where I will fix my rope. I will say that this is an example of a work of art that has perfected the right thing. And that I can tell this because that flash, that illumination, that vision into the depths of reality, and the concomitant imperative to change my life in the wake of it—these must be the fruits of an art that has perfected the right thing.

I have described this experience from the outside, and I have identified two prominent characteristics of an encounter with what I believe to be a work of art that has perfected the right thing—the sudden deep vision and the need to change my life. I have presented them intertwined because that is how I experienced them. I don’t think this is accidental, and it has shaped my sense of what the right kind of “thing” I am looking for is going to be. So what I am holding on to right now, experientially, is an account of a genuine, true, good—and surely also beautiful—work of art as it lives in communion with a viewer. It is an intimation of an end to which any work of art could aspire.

To ask the question “What is the right thing?” is to ask after the proper end for the work of art, an end intimated by my experience with The Dance. It is to search for the end of art just as Aristotle or St. Thomas Aquinas searched philosophically and theologically for the end of man. What should the work of art do? It isn’t a question about what art can do—because art can do many things, just like I can do many things—and many of these things are not what art, or I, should do. Contained within that question, and any account that will answer it, is an account of the good art, of an art that does what it should,of an art that is perfected in the right way. To me, this is the only question about art that ultimately matters at all. I want to know the good art, and I want to make the good art, just like I want to know and live the good life.

Unfortunately, most discussions (in philosophy and art theory) that I looked to for a conceptual grounding that would address these questions didn’t approach art with the kinds of categories I would need to make sense of my experiences, or the sense I had for what these paintings that so powerfully shaped my world were doing. Throughout my searching, I’ve encountered many poetic and pregnant descriptions, aphorisms, and unfinished thoughts that seemed right, if underdeveloped—as well as much confident, clear prose that I felt missed the mark or only charted one piece of the territory. I never intended to begin an attempt to articulate this thing afresh, because obviously there has been a great deal of thinking in the past that bears on this question. My problem is just that the particular spot where I have found myself stranded happens to be a spot where most of the better-worn paths I am aware of don’t pass by.

So I find that I need to begin again, and that the natural place to begin is with the end of art. As I am beginning at the end, I should acknowledge that this is the place Jacques Maritain begins in Art and Scholasticism, and that he develops in multiple essays and books, including Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry. Maritain is able to solve a variety of thorny conceptual problems by arguing that the end of the work of art, the telos of it, is the work itself. And this makes a certain amount of sense: there’s an obvious way in which, for example, it is the painting itself that absorbs all of the painter’s thoughts and movements, the canvas stretching and the color mixing and the brushing, the wiping and the scumbling, the cleaning of the brushes to get those pure, clear hues. All of this activity ends in the painting in a very important way. But I’ve long been struck by a simple observation that Richard Wollheim makes in Painting as an Art, namely that all of that work on the painting is meant to be looked at, and that even if the painting never makes it out of the studio, the painter looks at it, and it’s not really complete without that looking. Which is just to say that whatever work goes into making the physical object doesn’t make any sense without it being looked at, that the work isn’t really completed without the looking.

However powerful and helpful Maritain’s thinking about the end of art might be, it stops just short of the space between the work and the viewer, the space where the work finds its fulfillment. For good and for bad, this means that his analysis stops just short of the place where things get really messy, in the space between the work and the life—just short of the place where the work enters into the world of human affairs.

This gives him tremendous conceptual leverage, because the work is a far more stable fulcrum than the unstable spaces between the life of the artist, the work, and the life of the viewer, reader, or audience. I fear that Maritain’s idea of the work as end, despite its incredible clarity and power, and despite the fact that it has been greatly influential for my own thinking, too easily encourages the perfection of the wrong thing, and that a truer analysis, an analysis that would lay hold on the right thing, must push the work of art out into the life of the viewer, into a space where the work and the viewer meet, with all of the messiness that this entails. It might be still truer to say that Maritain has latched on to an activity that is nested within the broader production and meaning of the work of art. If we accept this, we can affirm with Maritain the value of the well-made thing, but we are still left to conduct our own search for a robust account of what happens between the work and the viewer. Early on in my life as an artist and a thinker about art, I had a hunch that some understanding of what I valued in my experiences with art and what I was reaching after in my own work, my sense for the proper end of art, for the right thing, had gone missing in contemporary conversation. I had the feeling that it was one of those things that “has been lost and found and lost again and again,” to use a phrase from Eliot’s Four Quartets, and that is currently somewhere we can’t seem to locate. I just knew that somewhere there must be remnants of a lost history, a lost theory, that held the answers to my questions. So I went looking for it. I moved to New York with the hope of uncovering a lost sense of what painting was that had been preserved in artists’ studios even as it had been erased in the critical literature. I continued to search philosophy, and eventually I turned to art history, looking for the lost key, a cultural understanding of art as the thing that I knew it could be. I found myself studying the birth of Christian art in late antiquity. I had a hunch that the monumental shift in cultural self-understanding occasioned by the widespread adoption of Christianity might shake something loose. And it did: in one of the foundational primary texts of the era, St. Paulinus of Nola describes his intention for a cycle of paintings that maps almost perfectly onto my sense for the proper end of art, that evoked something of the substance of my experiences. The art of this time and the thinking surrounding it was faced with the urgent need to impress the felt truth of the new faith on the masses of unbelievers or new believers, many of whom were highly educated. These conditions created a kind of intellectual and artistic crucible for a new art for a new vision of reality that would be judged or tried against the most exacting of intellectual standards. It was an art with no momentum, so it had to be real, it had to be true, in order to be effective. Only the good art could do what art needed to do at that point in time, which is why, I think, there was a working concept of the good art in the air that had been internalized by the patrons and artists of this incredibly fertile time in art history—and so it should perhaps be no surprise that it is in this context that this working concept pushed its way out into the world in the form of a letter by a poet-saint.

I’d like to take a closer look at the passage and tease out the understanding of art that I think is there, making the case than an understanding of the end of art that I am searching for has been there since the beginning of the Christian artistic tradition—and even before, amongst the deepest foundations of western culture. Here’s St. Paulinus in a letter to the Bishop of Nicetus about the paintings to adorn the pilgrimage church of St. Felix:

…it seemed to us useful work gaily to embellish Felix’ houses all over with sacred paintings in order to see whether the spirit of the peasants would not be surprised by this spectacle and undergo the influence of the colored sketches which are explained by inscriptions over them, so that the script may make clear what the hand has exhibited. Maybe that, when they all in turn show and reread to each other what has been painted, their thoughts will turn more slowly to eating, while they saturate themselves with a fast that is pleasing to the eyes, and perhaps a better habit will thus take root in them, because of the painting artfully diverting their thoughts from their hunger. When one reads the saintly histories of chaste works, virtue induced by pious examples steals upon one; he who thirsts is quenched with sobriety, the result being a forgetting of the desire for too much wine. And while they pass the day by looking, most of the time the beakers are less frequently filled, because now that the time has been spent with all these wonderful things, but few hours are left for a meal.

It’s important to remember that this was written in the late fourth century, before the flowering of medieval art and the Renaissance, and long before the Romantics got it into their heads that an encounter with a work of art could be a world-changing experience. So it should be a little surprising that Paulinus’ story about what will happen in front of his paintings sound so much like my own recounting of my experience in front of the painting by Matisse or that high-water mark for the life-changing potential of art encapsulated in Rilke’s famous poem, “The Archaic Torso of Apollo.” There, Rilke latches onto that thing like a fire burning inside the sculpture that, if it was not there,

would not, from all the borders of itself,

burst like a star: for here there is no place

that does not see you. You must change your life.”

Rilke’s poetic description of a luminous fire bursting forth from the sculpture—a firethat sees you and that demands change from you, in you—is perhaps more compressed than Paulinus’ story of the pilgrim transformed by the paintings. But Paulinus’ extended thought maps pretty tightly onto Rilke’s revelatory moment, which in turn encapsulates an experience much like my own in front of the painting by Matisse.

Paulinus hopes that his pilgrims will be “surprised” by the spectacle (that it will, like Rilke’s torso, “dazzle” them), that they will become so absorbed in the paintings that they lose all sense of hunger (“their thoughts turn more slowly to eating”), thirst (“their beakers are less frequently filled”), and even time (“they pass the day by looking”), and that they change. And the change is not superficial, but very deep, occurring as it does at the level of habit (“a better habit will take root in them,” “virtue induced by pious examples steals upon one”). These paintings, if they fulfill their telos, will become a critical hinge in the life of the pilgrims—a turning, a twisting, a step on a truer path. God willing, the pilgrims will accept the imperative Paulinus presupposes to be contained in the paintings: “You must change your life.”

The suspension of bodily desires enumerated by Paulinus is indicative of how the work pulls them outside of the ebb and flow of day-to-day existence, holds them at an essential distance from life, a necessary distance, one that makes possible a certain kind of vision. Rilke’s poem is set within the same space of this distanced perception, within the seeing of the work. Because Rilke’s poem is almost entirely contained within a conditional, it takes place outside of time; it hangs on an elaboration upon what is possible—since the head of the torso has been lost to history, the only entrance of the poetic voice into time is the imperative, “You must change your life.” So there is present in the grammar of the poem the kind of remove that Paulinus enumerates from the outside, as if looking upon the pilgrims from a distance, watching them step out of time for a moment, only to be returned from the encounter a little different, oriented in a slightly different direction.

The torso holds Rilke’s attention, The Dance held mine, and so, too, Paulinus’ paintings hold the attention of the pilgrims (“they all in turn show and reread to each other what has been written there”). All of this sustained attention, the held gazes, the reading and rereading, the forgotten appetite, the ignored thirst, the lost sense of time, all of these are marks of something particular in human life and experience. And what describes this attitude—a moment in time and out of time, a moment when desire falls away, when, from the outside, you must look like you are doing nothing—better than Aristotle’s concept of contemplation? Here is Aristotle’s negative definition from the Nichomachean Ethics: “Now if you take away from a living being action, and still more production, what is left but contemplation?” It surely must not have been far from Paulinus’ mind when he penned the passage, conceptualizing the experience of his pilgrims as exiting the everyday practical sphere of action and production and entering into contemplation, bidden by the works of art, and held there in a kind of attention, through the paintings, to the higher things.

So here, at a critical moment in the history of western art, we have an articulation of the end of the work of art by an important patron—who is also a poet and a saint—in the language of Aristotelian contemplation, drawing out of a classical past a vision for an art fitting for a future of Christian expression.

Paulinus has described the work or art, if indirectly, as a handmaiden to contemplation: a call to contemplation, an occasion for contemplation, a vehicle for contemplation, perhaps a material trace of a “moment” of shared contemplation between the artist and the viewer, the writer and the reader, the musician and the audience (remembering of course that the artist is almost always the first viewer, the first reader, the first audience, and therefore the work remains a trace of the artist’s own contemplation even if the works are never seen or known). And as a servant to contemplation, the work of art is directly tied to man’s highest end as defined by Aristotle and refined by the Scholastics, understood to be the essential character of the beatific vision—what is left for humans in death, when all physical needs fall away. This fixes, philosophically, the proper location of the end of the work of art in service to the highest human end—and this is not a position articulated by a Rilke or even a hopeless romantic like me. Rather, it’s contained in the thinking of a fourth-century poet and saint, a sensitive artist and true devotee to the burgeoning Christian faith.

And this means that the account of the proper end of the work of art, the right thing that it should seek to perfect, is articulated right there at the beginning of the Christian artistic tradition, tied naturally in Paulinus to the classical tradition that long predates this moment, and indicates the axis around which the work of art can and should turn: contemplation.

For Rilke, the contemplation is of the light like a lamp that burst forth from the stone of the torso. For me, it is contemplation of the “really real” that I saw through the surface of Matisse’s painting. Paulinus himself has this wonderfully quirky phrase right in the middle of his account that is indicative of the particular contemplative space that he imagines to be opening, a space I’d like to attend to for a moment. He says of the pilgrims, “they saturate themselves with a fast that is pleasing to the eyes.” What could that mean, “a fast that is pleasing to the eyes?” And to “saturate” oneself in it? Fasts, by their nature, aren’t really much to look at—they are a lack, something missing, given up. The opposite of a feast pleasing to the eyes: there won’t be any grapes for the birds to peck at, like in Apelles’ famed pictures. No one likes to fast—it isn’t pleasant; that’s kind of the point. But it is efficacious—it bears spiritual (and many argue also physical) fruit. That’s the deeper truth about fasting, a truth that’s sometimes hard to perceive even while in the middle of a fast—when you’re hungry and constantly fighting the turning of one’s attention to food and drink. For a fast to be pleasing to the eyes, the spiritual side of it must become visible in some way. So whatever the painting is doing to make it happen, the viewer is receiving a vision of something normally hidden in the material world, where the goodness of a material nothing, of a lack, of a “giving up” is visible in some very real way that flows out of the painting like water that the pilgrims can “saturate themselves in.”

This is a fantastically interesting image, saturation. A dry thing takes a up a certain amount of space in the world, and then if it becomes saturated it takes up the same amount of space, except that all of the voids within it have been filled with water. It’s possible that it doesn’t even look different, but it’s fuller, denser, heavier than if it were dry. It’s a great image for the empty person who is suddenly filled with a spiritual insight and suddenly becomes more substantial. It’s a perfect image for what happened to me in front of The Dance.

The space Paulinus sketches is paradoxical: “he who thirsts is quenched by sobriety.” It’s a vision that digs under the skin of appearances, so that he who thirsts isn’t quenched by the apparent natural remedy (e.g., wine), but by the genuine deeper one (sobriety). So however it happens, and we don’t have the paintings to look at, what is seen in the paintings cuts deep into the heart of the heart of reality, it cuts deep like I maintain what I saw in The Dance cuts deep, deep enough to reveal the kind of fire Rilke perceives burning within the cold, stone torso. If I say I was looking into the heart of the heart of reality, if Rilke divines a living flame in the stone, and Paulinus can describe a saturation in what must needs be vision inflected by a high level of spiritual and intellectual consciousness, then at the heart of this kind of experience is a kind of vision of the real, the true—of contemplation in the presence of the work. This is what presses out of the work and into the space between the work and the viewer: contemplation, a contemplation purified in the vision of the artist and made visible in the work, visible to someone else looking at the work, visible in such a way that the viewer, too, enters into the contemplative space, the contemplative space that was the source of the work and the purifying force of the vision of the artist.

This is why we value works of art born out of a deep vision, that make visible wide wisdom. These works help us access the kind of deep human truth only visible to the wise—a truth that transforms, that makes visible the genuine value of things, that cuts through appearances to the true reality, the deep reality—a vision sharpened by wisdom, a vision that uncovers something that I must account for in my life. This is the work of art standing as a window onto the real, a portal into the true by which I organize my life, the really real that gives value to my actions.

What emerges out of all of this, out of Paulinus, out of Rilke, out of my own experience, is a picture of contemplation—contemplation occasioned by a work of art, contemplation facilitated by the work of art, made possible by the work of art, done through the work of art, and possible because the work of art is itself the product of contemplation. Contemplation is the thing, here: it is the beating heart of what is at stake in the good art. And so it is the thing that must be perfected if the work of art is to perfect the right thing.

Perfection of the right thing, then, is true contemplation made available in the work. Perfection of the right thing is perfection of human vision made visible in the work. Perfection of the right thing is the perfection of the self making the work and of the self encountering the work: of the person as creator and encountering creation. It is as much a glimpse of the beatific vision, of what is seen, as it is of the one seeing. The vision passes through the work from the artist to the viewer. The perfection of the vision is a perfection of the one seeing, in which he or she disappears in service of the vision.

And so even if there is one way that I can say that the end of the work of art is the painting, or the song, or the poem, this (to use a hackneyed metaphor) is just the tip of the iceberg, the thing that is visible on the surface of the great expanse below the surface, of that contemplation which only partially bursts into sight in the work, and which is enormous, and essential to see, and through which we can inhabit our true end, if only momentarily. This contemplation, which is the true end of man, is also the true and proper end of the work of art. And if this is right, it will surely place demands upon the work of art, upon what it can do and cannot do in order to reach its proper end. And this will allow us to search not only for the end of art, but for the means fitting to attain it as well. After I have identified the final end of my life, the next question to ask is how to live it. And so it is in this inquiry. The next question that presses upon me is this: how do I perfect the right thing? How do I make the good art?

* This phrase, from the novel Fortress of Solitude by Jonathan Lethem, stood as the title of a previous essay on this topic that appeared in the Candlemas 2020 issue of Dappled Things.

Brian Prugh studied philosophy at the University of Chicago, where he met his wife Kristin, and painting and art history at the University of Iowa. He has exhibited work nationally, and his work is in private collections across the country. He has published criticism in The Seen: Chicago’s International Journal of Contemporary Art, The Miami Rail, and Codex, published by the Digital Press at the University of North Dakota, and he has started two small critical journals. He has received numerous awards and grants, including a Jacob K. Javits Fellowship, a Mildred Pelzer Lynch Fellowship Award, and a grant from the Efroymson Family Foundation.

Durer’s Hare

Dappled Things

David Mohan

For a time, Albrecht leaves aside woodcuts and oils, saints and angels, and the body of the Christ. Fleeing plague in Nuremberg, the closed ghettoes, the cold Northern towns, a dour winter, he treks to Italy. Here is raw subject matter, he decides, the sort that exists outside the limits prescribed by patrons. And here the air is sultry, and the heat is sensual. What is matters here as much as what will be.

Crossing the Alps with a knapsack containing essentials—food, a notebook, parchment paper, his watercolour paints—Albrecht is astounded at what can be discovered outside a studio. Such vistas, such forests and lakes. Incandescent sunsets. Such blazing light.

He sketches as he walks, thinks as he sketches, his notes in ink and paint recording a greater range of the material world than he’d previously thought possible. There are the varieties of grass, weeds on the roadside, wild flowers, shrubs and trees accustomed to a warmer atmosphere. Altogether, without the eyes of the church spying over his shoulder, it feels as though he has been returned to how it was when he was a child, sketching on the run, anything, everything, the smallest seed, a fern curl, a pine cone, tree bark.

Later, after an apprenticeship in Venice, the rank scent of the canals in summer, the discipline of dry point, the inspiration of Bellini, the end of plague, he comes home, North, the fever of the south in his eye and brain and heart. This time, he begins commission work, the sort with pay attached, with respectability: a piece entitled Lamentation of Christ. The mountains he has travelled won’t be easily forgotten, the earth he tramped across is still stuck in his fingernails. The peasants and burghers of towns he has passed by crowd around his Gothic-pale mourners, his corpse-white Christ.

And indeed, it is like struggling with a corpse for three years, on and off. The sense of deprivation is magnified by the sense of having lost the scope and measure of distance and out-rolling land, the mesh and lace of grass rubbed between his fingers, the scent of the sun on the spongy earth. Instead, studio-bound, his days and nights are akin to the eye-splitting work of the artisan carpenter, etching wood after midnight to build the most elaborate coffin.

Sometimes he leaves off, takes to the forests, the open fields. He is like Orpheus or St. John the Baptist when he dozes under the trees. The birds and animals peep out, break cover, pose. He grows tired of crosses, robes, stigmata, the crown of thorns. His mind turns to the blue roll of sky, the knotted thickets of trees, the grass itself.

When he is outdoors he sketches to feel free again, and to rediscover ordinary things. A clod of earth, for instance. This, he decides, is something material, something that can be picked up and examined. It is as worthy of attention as anything else that might be painted.

He lugs the clod home, enjoys hefting the weight of it into his studio, not to mention the fact he dug it up himself. All flesh is grass. Studying it, paints laid alongside, he sees that this random clod may be the same as any other piece of earth, in any other place and any other time, but it will never come again, not quite like this one. And never with this particular intermingling of wild flowers, these clots of seed, this arrangement of grass stems, and never again with this subtle fibrous root system, and flaking, frangible species of soil.

When he turns to this, or later to his mythic rhinoceros, or to anything that is not mankind in his pain and his terror and his sadness, he is not thinking of himself, he is not thinking of anything except the shape and line and form of things as they are.

One morning in the woods, he is dozing, not thinking, not searching, content to just glide along in rhythm with the passing clouds above. A breeze blows through the trees, carrying the scent of wild things, of moss and bark and forest water. It chills him, but it also stirs his senses. He is content to be nowhere, see nothing.

But then it happens, his revelation, his Annunciation, call it what you like.

A slim-bodied hare emerges out of the underbrush and stops still. It looks young, almost a leveret. Its body is as delicate as rabbit.

He watches it, its stillness almost as good as a deliberate pose. Who would ever presume to describe such a thing? To draw it, to paint it? To render its flesh into a testimony. There is no way of explaining how light colours the filaments of the fur on its body. He recites the colours in a broken hymn—this hare is badious, castaneous, fuscous, melichous, burnet, luteous. This hare is white.

Each hair shaft would need to carry an under-colour of slate, a sense of dapple-grey, a wash of amber beneath the grey. He wonders if it is heresy to believe this, if it is ungodly, or worse still, the devil tempting him away from his true vocation: The Lamentation.

All the while, the creature stays still for him, whether paralysed by some trepidation, or docile and dazed, he cannot speculate. He sketches, attempting to capture some facsimile of its weight and texture, its hareness.

Soon, the air shifts, the hare stirs, scents the breeze, scurries off.

Albrecht walks back to the town as a blue, Northern dusk comes down. He will fold his sketch away, so out-of-fashion, so unsuitable for any possible commission. Who will buy this image of nothing unusual, nothing sacred? It is as commonplace and ordinary as any clod of earth you might tread upon. There will be a place someday for paintings displaying carcasses on banquet tables—swan and doe and duck and leveret will recline, the lustre of their eyes not dissimilar to the lustre of a glass decanter or silver tankard or porcelain bowl.

His sketch is too much a sketch, and too little a painting, to be a part of that just yet.

But in the midst of work for Maximilian, for Cardinals, for assorted patricians, of Triumphal Arches, of St Jerome, of the Crucifixion, the artist in Durer will tire and yawn and take out his sketch mentally, touchstone for quiet moments, created for no one else besides himself.

For it is something to see a hare just born out of the moment it was painted in.

From time to time, he lays his sketch of the hare out in front of him, as fresh as the day it was first seen, its whiskers almost twitching, as living as the breath that stirred them.

David Mohan has been published in PANK, Necessary Fiction, Word Riot, SmokeLong Quarterly, Matchbook, The Seneca Review, and The Chattahoochee Review. He has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize.