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: 2020-01-29 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.