Reconsider after Reading

I first attempted to make sense of James Wallenstein’s Fine By Me in Intro to Psych, sandwiched between a varsity beefcake and foreign cat-lady, one of those incongruous, elderly scholars that show up in my classes every so often. It was an uninspiring, inglorious setting and I am a green, relatively unread intern set to reflect on, in beefcake terms, “some really deep @*%t,” and I have no doubt the result can only be offensive, it probably already is. So let me issue a disclaimer of inadequacy, and apologize for the silly, maybe unhelpful way I would like to begin thinking about Wallenstein’s article, an eloquent and erudite piece about a brilliant mind, heady and likely to swallow me at any moment. During Psych lecture I had Geoff on the brain, and because this was Lecture Three: The Brain, I had Geoff’s brain on the brain. As Professor Knudson walked us through the anatomy of the nervous system, I began to think about the folded surface area of Geoff’s cortical lobes. I saw a swelling hippocampus, aggressively nudging the mysterious cerebellum. I saw the sensitive amygdala, especially nervous today and pulsing against the thalamus. I saw all these hyperactive and oddly personified cogs in the cranial confines that must be Dyer’s head, working together to pull at the fabric of time and space, pushing at the definitions of then and now, and reimagining the nature of art and artistic production.

Text is never separate from its context, and the historical moment of inception is every bit as important as the biography of its artist, and yet, Dyer’s writing does not just defy genre and category, it defies our standard notion of time in regards to artistic creation. In his article, Wallenstein explains Dyer’s conception of art as an act of creation reliant on previous artistic endeavor as its library, fodder and future all at once. I agree, art is always reacting to, critiquing and borrowing from its predecessors, but Dyer’s writing actively recognizes its part in this never-ending, universal dialectic, conscious of its self-reflexive relationship to what has come before it. An “organized synesthesia” and meta-layers of recognition within his writing itself lift art from our human timeline’s plotted sense of progression, as if his is a conversation between artists and art unaware of the passage of time. In many ways, Wallenstein references a sort of dissolution of temporality in Dyer’s work, works made possible by the relationship between the past and present but very good at leaving the distinction between the two blurry in its wake. Mark Twain once said about the ancient city of Varanasi, the languid destination for an ambiguous narrator in part two of Dyer’s newest novel, Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi, “Benares is older than history, older than tradition, older even than legend, and looks twice as old as all of them put together.” Dyer’s mystical setting, ancient but suspended in time, provides an appropriate stage for both his character and the story’s introspective treatment of art.

Wallenstein’s article and Dyer’s writing not only manipulate our notion of time and space but ask us to rethink human creativity, as does Malcolm Gladwell in his new book, “What the Dog Saw,” a collection of nonfiction essays. In his piece, “Something Borrowed,” Gladwell reconsiders plagiarism, but his exploration of the murky waters of intellectual property seeks to answer greater artistic questions, and finds “art-borrowing” to be anything but a black and white case of theft. Gladwell writes, “The final dishonesty of the plagiarism fundamentalists is to encourage us to pretend that these chains of influence and evolution do not exist, that a writer’s words have a virgin birth and an eternal life.” This statement helps to illuminate Wallenstein’s message for me, as does Gladwell’s assessment that “Creative property, Lesig reminds us, has many lives…we lose track of where they [ideas] came from, and we lose control of where they are going.” Creation, Gladwell and Wallenstein observe, is an inevitable form of reinvention and reinterpretation.

In response to a previous Footnote blogpost of mine a lady named Marina wrote, “Literature is not purely concerned with the work of art but with the author’s intention, her vision, her process, her hidden autobiography. This is not invasion of the life behind the art but a form of art itself: as Geoff Dyer quotes John Berger saying in a forthcoming BR article by James Wallenstein, the ‘best readings of art are art.’” Having read Wallenstein’s article, I find this to be an interesting application of Berger and Dyer’s dictum. The phrase is certainly relevant to the mechanics of craft and understanding the relationship between authorial persona, technique and creation, but it is also a wildly metaphysical and philosophical assertion that requires us to zoom out a little. Art reflects art before it by way of critique and imitation, determining and becoming subsequent art in the moment of its genesis. The fictional piece, photograph or jazz riff is at once its own precursor and destiny, and as Wallenstein so beautifully communicates, Dyer’s work recognizes itself as both these things, providing for a newly engaging and perhaps disorienting literary animal indeed.