The Matisse Stories, by A.S. Byatt
Jan. 28th, 2020 12:04 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
landingtreeSince I got a smartphone I've been surprised to find that the ability to take photos no matter where I am is like an extra pair of eyes to see through. Early in my time at my current flat -- which was before the smartphone -- we thought one of the cats had got out, so I was wandering up and down the street in the cool misty evening scanning the pavement and the neighbors' gardens, and realising that I'd barely taken notice of the street I lived on before, and that it was a lot of fun having an excuse to stare into gardens, calling 'Here, kitty kitty kitty' not as a summons to the cat but as a reassurance to residents that this staring stranger meant no harm. (Of course the cat had been waiting just outside the back door, and was discovered almost at once by my flatmate Angelo, who followed me down the street calling "We found him!") The ability to photograph has heightened my attentiveness as though I'm constantly looking for someone's cat. I expect it will wear off with familiarity, but I'm enjoying it for now: seeing that a building's facade has a strip of sky blue along the top of it, with upward-pointing blue arrow designs below, and experiencing that as the building saying, "Be of good cheer!" under a sky of the same colour and brightness.*
The tangential relationship of all this to The Matisse Stories is that I have more in my experience to compare A.S. Byatt's painters to than before I developed the habit of looking at a particularly vivid contrast and thinking, "My camera can't catch that. I wonder what I'd have to know about cameras before I'd know what could?" Byatt is good at artists in general and painters specifically, painters who care very much about solving colour problems, sometimes in ways that make sense to almost no one else.
There are three stories in this book, all of which involve one or another Matisse painting. The second, Art Work, is my favourite, a portrait of a household which begins with the black-and-white reproduction of a colour painting and all the colours which can be imagined to fill its forms, and goes on to Debbie, design writer, income earner, chief parent of her children, and to Mrs Brown, who cleans the house and knits wild patchworks, without whom Debbie could not cope but whose life and concerns are partly mysterious to her, and then to Robin, Debbie's husband, who would probably have expected to be introduced first, certainly before Mrs Brown, in terms of household importance; who paints, whose painting is an attempt to capture the experience of really seeing something colourful, and whose ignorance of the house in which he lives is partly self-protective and has been corroding Debbie and himself slowly for a long time. The story feels Margaret Mahy-ish in its depiction of domestic work, in its liking for patchwork and for varied aspirations and art forms, and in its sympathy for everybody involved.
The first story in the book is Medusa's Ankles, which I liked fairly well but which does not leave me with anything to say about it -- hair, the ageing of beauty, a hairdresser who "resembles a balletic Hamlet" and whose virtues do not include reliability.
And the third story is The Chinese Lobster. Two academics meet in a Chinese restaurant to discuss an accusation of sexual harassment made against one of them by a student with mental illness, and what kind of work -- less what kind of product, than what length and depth of attention -- should be accepted as worth a thesis; they discuss, too, Matisse as incompletely though not wrongly interpreted as a painter of male eroticism, but also as the great painter of the sort of relaxed pleasure whose ultimate opposite is suicide, a discussion which is ultimately of personal significance to each of them. The story's shadow is the fact that the accusation of sexual harassment is dismissed, and the student who made it is viewed as partly though not unsympathetically culpable, on the accused professor's word that he did not harass her and wouldn't have wanted to. Perhaps her accusation was false. But convincing charm is a survival trait in professors who sexually assault their students, and I'm not sure the story wants the professor to be doubted. If I read it as doing so, it becomes sharply cruel, but I'm more inclined to take the professor as innocent as he seems and says, in which case my liking for the story also has a shadow. But I do find it interesting.
Did I see any Matisse when I was overseas? Unsure. He didn't stick with me, if so. The reproductions on the cover of this book are more interesting to me the more I look at them, having started by finding them nothing in particular, though for me they've not yet grown into the images the stories in this book are structured around -- despite being those images.
*I have just read a Grant Morrison comic called Happy! in which an ex-policeman made cynical by long exposure to the world's vileness is enlisted by a small talking blue horse with wings to save the young girl who imagined it. Descending into/ascending through The Invisibles seems to have increased my affection for Grant Morrison. This is a self-contented and well-formed mini-series in which someone spends a lot of time say "fuck you" to a small talking blue horse with wings; what more could one want? Also, while we're on colour, I like that the villain is called Mr Blue, because blue is emotionally contronymical.
(While I'm tracking comics, I may as well add volumes two and three of Saga, which I really liked).
The tangential relationship of all this to The Matisse Stories is that I have more in my experience to compare A.S. Byatt's painters to than before I developed the habit of looking at a particularly vivid contrast and thinking, "My camera can't catch that. I wonder what I'd have to know about cameras before I'd know what could?" Byatt is good at artists in general and painters specifically, painters who care very much about solving colour problems, sometimes in ways that make sense to almost no one else.
There are three stories in this book, all of which involve one or another Matisse painting. The second, Art Work, is my favourite, a portrait of a household which begins with the black-and-white reproduction of a colour painting and all the colours which can be imagined to fill its forms, and goes on to Debbie, design writer, income earner, chief parent of her children, and to Mrs Brown, who cleans the house and knits wild patchworks, without whom Debbie could not cope but whose life and concerns are partly mysterious to her, and then to Robin, Debbie's husband, who would probably have expected to be introduced first, certainly before Mrs Brown, in terms of household importance; who paints, whose painting is an attempt to capture the experience of really seeing something colourful, and whose ignorance of the house in which he lives is partly self-protective and has been corroding Debbie and himself slowly for a long time. The story feels Margaret Mahy-ish in its depiction of domestic work, in its liking for patchwork and for varied aspirations and art forms, and in its sympathy for everybody involved.
The first story in the book is Medusa's Ankles, which I liked fairly well but which does not leave me with anything to say about it -- hair, the ageing of beauty, a hairdresser who "resembles a balletic Hamlet" and whose virtues do not include reliability.
And the third story is The Chinese Lobster. Two academics meet in a Chinese restaurant to discuss an accusation of sexual harassment made against one of them by a student with mental illness, and what kind of work -- less what kind of product, than what length and depth of attention -- should be accepted as worth a thesis; they discuss, too, Matisse as incompletely though not wrongly interpreted as a painter of male eroticism, but also as the great painter of the sort of relaxed pleasure whose ultimate opposite is suicide, a discussion which is ultimately of personal significance to each of them. The story's shadow is the fact that the accusation of sexual harassment is dismissed, and the student who made it is viewed as partly though not unsympathetically culpable, on the accused professor's word that he did not harass her and wouldn't have wanted to. Perhaps her accusation was false. But convincing charm is a survival trait in professors who sexually assault their students, and I'm not sure the story wants the professor to be doubted. If I read it as doing so, it becomes sharply cruel, but I'm more inclined to take the professor as innocent as he seems and says, in which case my liking for the story also has a shadow. But I do find it interesting.
Did I see any Matisse when I was overseas? Unsure. He didn't stick with me, if so. The reproductions on the cover of this book are more interesting to me the more I look at them, having started by finding them nothing in particular, though for me they've not yet grown into the images the stories in this book are structured around -- despite being those images.
*I have just read a Grant Morrison comic called Happy! in which an ex-policeman made cynical by long exposure to the world's vileness is enlisted by a small talking blue horse with wings to save the young girl who imagined it. Descending into/ascending through The Invisibles seems to have increased my affection for Grant Morrison. This is a self-contented and well-formed mini-series in which someone spends a lot of time say "fuck you" to a small talking blue horse with wings; what more could one want? Also, while we're on colour, I like that the villain is called Mr Blue, because blue is emotionally contronymical.
(While I'm tracking comics, I may as well add volumes two and three of Saga, which I really liked).
no subject
Date: 2020-01-28 02:49 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-01-29 12:58 am (UTC)That's right, about the student and the professors. And one of the professors at least seems to be thawed by their conversation, brought away from that longing -- or at least that was how I read it. Of all the things the story left me thinking about, it's a bit odd that what it was actually about mainly wasn't one of them. I got caught up on what the story left behind in coming to be about that. Shall reread.
I really like those lozenge-sized hardbacks! I don't have one for this book, but I have Elementals in that edition.
I mean to reread Possession. I remember liking it but finding it hard going, whereas I find all the rest of Byatt I've tried compulsively easy going.
no subject
Date: 2020-01-29 01:31 am (UTC)LOL that was the opposite for me re Byatt -- Possession was the gateway drug, since I was in grad school when it came out and HATING it, and I reread it I don't know how many times. My first paperback copy is worn soft as a pillow. I think later I read Angels & Insects (and one other pairing book?) and Biographer's Tale, and was not that impressed. I liked all of her short stories a lot -- I remember reading some in the New Yorker (on paper even). I chewed through the first two novels (Shadow of the Sun? Liked it a lot! The Game, WHUT) in 2009, and then went on to the Frederica Quartet, which was really fucking hard going but I wound up so glad I read it. Babel Tower was my favourite of that group. I bounced so hard off Children's Book in 2013 it was like it was a trampoline, to my sorrow. I think I tried rereading it once (unusual for me if I love an author!) and gave up. Then I think I reread the whole quartet again, but I still love Babel Tower best (it's heresy, but I think BT does the metafictional/ventriloquism pastiche thing even better than P).
I LOVED Ragnarok, tho. I thought her writing about Loki was superb. I always think of how she said re Lawrence, "whom I cannot escape and cannot love" -- she weirdly has the same defect to me as Lawrence does, a beautiful sharp eye for events which are realistic but also highly symbolic in the text but which is totally spoiled by the author being overly Philosophical in ways that are Just Wrong and the books get badly marred by didacticism. (Moral: no schoolteachers should write novels I suppose, lol.)
I studied Viclit and especially the pre-Raffs in grad school so that might be why I adored Possession, too. The pastiches were great! (altho everyone I knew hated them) I remember actually being tempted to look up whether or not Ash was a real poet, altho I knew of course he wasn't. I don't think certain parts of that book have aged v well (Roland and Val, Maude and Leonora, Leonora herself, &c &c) but it's still magical.
(And then it was adapted by NEIL LABUTE of all people, I never will understand how Hollywood works. At least Some Velvet Morning seemed to have killed his career, but this culture loves it some white dude comeback narratives.)
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Date: 2020-02-03 05:48 am (UTC)Her didacticism has yet to bother me, although I can see it starting to, possibly because at time of reading, I haven't tended to know much about whatever she's being didactic about, and so I'm fairly happy when the story pauses for educational monologues. (It will be interested to reread The Conjugal Angel having actually read some of In Memoriam and knowing that Swedenborgianism wasn't something she was making up.
I'll move Ragnarok onto my to-read list!
no subject
Date: 2020-01-28 07:22 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-01-29 01:03 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-01-29 02:34 am (UTC)Yeah, as a modern feminist reader I went into the story expecting the narrative/female author to be more or less on the side of the feminist prof and the girl making the complaint. And the artist prof type is certainly presented as a blowhard at first. But Byatt really fills him out and he obviously is speaking for art, and the pleasures both he and the woman prof take in the sensual world, and the woman prof pretty much agrees with him. In fact she admits what she's doing is giving him an unofficial heads-up, and almost certainly breaking official university policy about how to deal with these cases; she predicts doom if the complaint is brought, that he'll have to leave (but his career will probably still be fine). He's the one who has theories about Matisse, who has met Matisse, who is the official authority on Matisse, and Byatt doesn't make him just a stuffed target. By the same token the woman in this two-hander is ambiguous, too; she's written a monograph on Mantegna, a rather un-radical topic for a Dean of Women Students. She does rather weakly bring up a number of feminist arguments about established art, but Diss dimisses them all, and she doesn't defend them. That's not what she's there to do.
The political concerns of the young female student (the sexual harassment aspect is just blown off) are seen by Byatt as actual manifestations of a physical and psychological sickness, which the female prof talks about with great sensitivity, but it's still a "bitches be crazy" moment for me. I've seen analysis that argues Himmelblau (lit. "skyblue") feels sympathy, or is associated with, Peggi, but I really don't think that's true -- she's sympathetic to Diss (what a name, and names in Byatt's work always carry heavy symbolism) and at the end sees giving Peggi and her thesis to an openly feminist supervisor as a failure. They say they've both failed Peggi, given up on her, which I think is meant that they think they've failed to persuade her to their point of view, but they've also given up on actually helping her: they feel great empathy, in the end, for her illness, because they've both felt that self-destructive despair themselves, but she's never going to know that. The implication to me is if she gets a sympathetic advisor who will approve her degree, she'll drop the complaint, a quid pro quo (those words!). That is what Himmelblau is in fact there to get -- she says flat out she's not on either side, she is a Dean, and as such is on the side of the Department and the University: not art, and not protest. (It's never a good sign in a Byatt work when someone accepts being part of the academic establishment.)
The other part of the art world Byatt is of course talking about, without really talking about it, is the existence of women feminist artists who have indeed incorporated images of vulvas and vaginas (Georgia O'Keefe, anyone) and used their own bodily fluids as part of art installations -- as recently as 2015 the culture in general FREAKED OUT over a woman making art out of her own menstrual blood (I think I've seen at least 3 different art installations quietly existing in various modern museums which have a male artist's piss, semen or saliva in them. But anyway). Byatt clearly is not on this "side" either. But in a way, Peggi is the real artist in the story, the one both of them are contemplating -- even unwillingly: Peggi's clothing is a "statement," an aesthetic projection of her subjective feelings, even her complaint to the Dean is decorated and enhanced. Provoked by it (literally!), they share her suffering via her art: the immobile figure of pain in the room of ice, which is also its negative, the black body bag Peggi thinks she belongs in, and (connecting her with Matisse) the dark room Diss is shocked by when he visits his idol. The angry, embodied, desecrating feminist art is the other side of the calming, beautiful, blameless, apolitical canonized art, but they are both composed against the blinding blackness of suffering, torture, death.
The reason both of these very different people can share that subjective pain is because they are contemplating the artwork of an even more different person. It is the opposite of the failure of imagination described earlier -- the failure of the suicide to imagine the actual pain and suffering they will inflict in trying to ease their own; the failure of the survivors to imagine pain and suffering so great it could blot out their love, the effect of death on their own lives.
BUT then the two professors have kind of the opposite of the famous Joycean epiphany, the opening up and out of shared experience at the end of "The Dead," the personal becoming universal &c &c; they both look at the dying shellfish which have been made into an artwork for the pleasure of the diners and feel horrified, but also feel nothing. ~IRONICALLY the refrain "Luxe, calme et volupté" is from Baudelaire's Fleurs de Mal which is about as far away from Matisse as it is possible to get (and Matisse's painting has nothing in common with the poem really). The "Chinese lobster" of the title is an art installation which contains actual suffering and death, like Peggi's art. Although the Dean feels in herself the pain of the dying subjects, Diss's injunction to the Dean to "look after yourself" is met with "Oh, I will, I will." She will look after herself, and the department and the university, but not after Peggi. (Peggi's art also reminds me a great deal of Jude's obscene book on BT; but unlike Jude, Peggi will not get sympathy or a hearing; she will remain repellent, and repelled.) There's that chilling moment:
Gerda Himmelblau sees, in her mind's eye, the face of Peggi Nollet, potato-pale, peering out of a white box with cunning, angry eyes in the slit between puffed eyelids. She sees golden oranges, rosy limbs, a voluptuously curved dark blue violin, in a black room. One or the other must be betrayed. Whatever she does, the bright forms will go on shining in the dark.
(And this is going outside the text a bit, but for all her love of literature and art, Byatt is often very very clear -- strident even -- in her declaration that life matters much more. One reason why I bounced so hard off the Children's Book. And then there's the death of Byatt's own child, and she is open about how that influenced her life and work.)
no subject
Date: 2020-01-29 12:10 pm (UTC)Yeah, as a modern feminist reader I went into the story expecting the narrative/female author to be more or less on the side of the feminist prof and the girl making the complaint. And the artist prof type is certainly presented as a blowhard at first. But Byatt really fills him out and he obviously is speaking for art, and the pleasures both he and the woman prof take in the sensual world, and the woman prof pretty much agrees with him.
is, my reaction was shaped by my resistance to being moved either way on Professor Diss' innocence by his being filled out, having the idea that swathes of demonstrated good qualities don't rule out the possibility of also being a criminally sexist bastard. I got to the end of the story assuming Professor Diss' guilt, against the story's grain... and on the one hand the story stays intact if Diss is guilty, and their shared moment of not caring, yet caring, about the dying sea creatures breaks into two separate moments if he's thinking of them partly as a figure for Peggi whom he assaulted. But on the other hand no, I don't think that's what's there. Your reading of the story is truer to it.
no subject
Date: 2020-01-30 03:37 am (UTC)Oh that's interesting -- yeah, I think in the post-#metoo era (or before that, this story is nearly 30? years old) our instinct is to believe Peggi's accusations. Claims of harassment and assault have been denied and minimized for so long (he uses classic ugly defenses about it -- "How could you think I would want her," "She exaggerated everything," "She's sick") that those kinds of phrases are like alarm bells. Death of the author and all that, but I don't think Byatt intends for us to believe Peggi -- her descriptions of Peggi and her art are so off-putting, and in that last bit Peggi, herself, is deliberately opposed in a binary way to the beautiful artistic objects Matisse makes of daily life. In a way this story reminds me of Atwood -- the wry view of human nature, the vivid details and descriptions, the rather unsympathetic view of the feminist movement.
no subject
Date: 2020-01-29 02:47 am (UTC)tl;dr 2 I think in a way Byatt the artist is smarter, or at least more sympathetic, than the person. I found a writeup from 1995: https://www.sfgate.com/style/article/The-pleasure-principle-3147867.php
Byatt, who is outspokenly dismayed by contemporary academic mores in which art is required to prove its social and political usefulness, sides clearly with the aging colleagues. Matisse represents a choice both of them made in their own lives, to open themselves to the pleasure of existence despite its betrayals....
Students are increasingly anxious about literature, she said, "wanting it to relate to everything else. But literature is made of language which moves and sings and makes fictional worlds you have to look at. If you want to do sociology or feminist studies, that's what you should do, but they are not literature."
She elaborated during an interview the next day in her hotel room at the Huntington. "I come from a culture that feels pleasure is wrong and that writing ought to have some purpose other than giving people intense joy. That's what "The Chinese Lobster' is about. There are a lot of feminist attacks on Matisse for depicting women as objects of pleasure and desire. We've had this whole wave of the politicization of everything, and so you have this school of criticism that looks at 18th or 19th century landscapes and does not say, "Look at the beautiful structures of these rocks,' but rather, "There are no peasants in this picture.' Yet the painter might have had a geologist's interest, not a sociologist's. Constable, for instance, was interested in actually analyzing the movements and structures of cows. Any scientist would understand that, but social scientists don't seem to follow it at all."
"When anything happens, like your son getting killed," she says, "there is a longish period when you can count on one hand the things that really matter to you. One of them is Wallace Stevens and the other is Matisse, because they both see the world with total clarity. And that, I think, is the essence of being alive."
Which indeed sounds like she's not on Peggi's "side." But the story is more haunting and ambiguous and painful to me than all that; she feels Peggi's and the shellfish's pain, but observes "cruelly, imperfectly, voluptuously, clearly." Not at all a comforting ending.
The tableaux of living death also reminded me of Baudelaire's “Une Charogne (A Carcass)” where he remembers seeing the rotting bloated carcass of a dog with his girlfriend (poor thing), who was so revolted by the sight she nearly fainted, and he tells her "Etoile de mes yeux, soleil de ma nature," "Et pourtant vous serez semblable à cette ordure, À cette horrible infection" (again: poor thing). Life dies and rots; but art endures, literally his art, which he tells her to declaim to the worms that will eat her. "Que j'ai gardé la forme et l'essence divine"; the artwork will shine in the darkness.
no subject
Date: 2020-02-03 08:08 am (UTC)And I find this charming in its crafty combination of broad- and narrow-mindedness:
"[Iris Murdoch] won't have a television in her house because she regards it as an evil, modern implement that destroys reality," says Byatt. "And she's right. But when she puts it in her novels she gets it wrong because she has no idea how it destroys reality. You have to watch it to know."
I find everything she says sympathetic if I apply it to particular cases and lots of it unsympathetic if I apply it to the whole world. I mean, the evil that destroys reality definitely roosts in televisions, sometimes... And I like her attention to Constable's interest in cows right up to the point where she says that you can't examine it in more than one way at once. And that you can't use literature to look at something from two simultaneous angles.
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Date: 2020-01-29 03:19 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-02-03 08:09 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-01-28 07:27 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-01-28 08:50 am (UTC)