brave art

When an artist poses beside a technically impressive work, one few peers in their medium reflexively dismiss (as dribble, slop, unpracticed, etc), I’m just not that impressed. Technical achievement testifies to something, but that something is only circumstantially related to the process of art.

Compare Ted Chiang’s short stories with the novelettes of Cesar Aira.

Chiang’s every sentence feels like the beginning of a carefully tended thread, a thread Chiang babysits until it can tie into the end’s final knot. His stories are hermetic systems with as few elements as possible. No details do only soft “vibe” work; all of them participate in the causal chain. Reading his work sometimes feels less like reading fiction than reading a pruned mathematical proof. All of this is praise, by the way. Read the interview linked in his name above and you’ll realize that’s sort of what he’s going for.

Aira might respect this. His philosophy re art is, basically, that an artist’s work is irrelevant. Some of the greatest novelists, he’s said, never write any fiction at all. The real duty of an artist is to create a process. Executing the process is optional. Maybe the reason he writes so much (he’ll hit a hundred books by the time you read this, maybe) is just to collect data to iterate on his process. Or it could just be to reaffirm his commitment, as in prayer.

Aira’s process could not be further from Chiang’s. Chiang takes a decade to go from start to finish on a story. He takes notes in advance, and writes the end first. Then the beginning, the middle, and finally, the transitions. His process is an altar to the obsessive-neurotic Lacanian subtype. In contrast Aira only ever writes forward. The ways out of the corners he writes himself into are to be found in what he’s already written. Not revisions.

I first encountered something similar to Aira’s flight forward from Dean Wesley’s Write Into the Dark, but Aira is much more convincing for two reasons. First, Wesley’s process still allows for the possibility of moving backward and writing forward again from an earlier page in the draft if you write yourself into a corner. This leaves the potential for infinite loops and ten-year short story processes when implemented by certain personality types (among which you’d find mine). Second, Wesley’s prose is a persuasive counterpoint to his philosophy. Writing forward without revision sounded fantastic to me until I tried to finish the first page of one of his books. He resides in and evangelizes for a different region of the conceptual terrain of prose fiction than I want to live in or even really visit.

Meanwhile, Aira has the bravery to commit to absolutes (only forward) and his novelettes are some of the most memorable and inventive and immersive texts I’ve ever encountered. So it’s proof. It’s proof that if he can write in that way and produce beauty; the process is no limitation on the heights of artistic output. It remains to be known, however, what other ingredients in Aira’s person contribute to the “real” process. The process not as described or conceived of but as actually executed, which would necessarily in a thorough analysis be revealed to enlist into action factors from Aira’s mind and history of which even he is unconscious.

The thing that impresses me from an artist, the act I think I and society at large want and need them to do, even if we can’t articulate it as such most of the time, is to play psychonaut and go feel something and shed some light in some long-neglected corner of the psychic space so that we, who are afraid of the dark, can also go there. This may sound profound but my point is actually very mechanical and not profound at all except in that way boring things like sipping water can be intense and revelatory in the right mood (e.g. when very thirsty). This explanation applies just as well to those brave and generous online nobles who compile short clips of kittens being curious about kitchenware as it does to Proust. It takes a certain bravery, a certain fearlessness, to sit down and really get into cat videos, to understand the emotions they stir inside yourself, get a sense of which ones will land and make emotional contact with the viewer, and then package that emotional experience for others.

Always the question to the artist is posed: what do you feel? The better an artist can know this, the better an artist can associate stimuli to it, the more they can discover. But you can find artists who spend their whole lives shunning this idea, pursuing technical prowess as an end to itself and only coincidentally, serendipitously, if at all, engaging in the process of art.

But there’s a danger. Knowing what you feel means facing a choice of what to do with it. If on Tuesday while continuing to draft your novel you introduce a sudden shift in tone, because it felt right, because it felt like, for a reader with the right attitude, a reader for whom all that’s come before has landed, that was the right move to keep the experience interesting, will you, on Wednesday, delete it because of fear that people will think you did it by accident, like someone clumsy with the medium? Will difficult memories of harsh remarks from peers in your MFA writer’s workshop shy you away from violating convention? The important point isn’t whether to do the standard thing or the avante garde thing. Rather, it’s how that decision is made. If you’re committed to a process of creating airtight mathematical stories, and you delete it to stay airtight, you’re an artist. If you’re committed to moving forward and only forward, and you don’t delete it, you’re an artist. But if you make a decision out of fear and betray your process and the feelings it stirs and entrusts to you, you are a fraud.