INSPIRATION

 

Portrait of Hurd Hatfield as Dorian Gray, 1943. Painting by Henrique Medina.

PART I:

Here’s what’s happening: 

Summer is here and I have time to write but I’m having trouble getting started. 

The word that comes to mind in “uninspired” but that doesn’t quite describe the feeling. I don’t feel like I’m lacking anything; rather, I’m filled with a semi-contented stillness. It's as if there are no more questions to be answered, no more pressing topics on my intellectual to-do list. This is not true, of course, but that’s the feeling. And, as a feeling, it makes me think about the point of writing at all.

I have a hazy memory of being in a writing classroom and hearing a student respond to a question, “why do we write?” with a half-hearted mumble about “expressing myself.” And I remember being quite struck with how tired and hollow the cliche sounded.

What does it even mean to “express yourself”? Especially in the context of fiction?

I can guess what he—or anyone who uses the expression—might mean. The sensibilities of a fictional world will convey much about its creator's values and temperament. There is always a worldview—a political point-of-view even—undergirding the story logic of any piece of fiction. Undoubtedly, as readers, we’ve all experienced walking away from a short story collection thinking we’ve come to know the author in some real way through reading. Certainly this counts as an expression of self.

So why was I so perturbed?

On one level, I’m perhaps more confused. I, personally, would never seek out an avenue to merely “express myself” or feel the singular desire to do so, largely because I’m a straight white male. I can express myself by literally and metaphorically walking down the street. And I can find a pretty receptive audience when I do.

On another level, I think this phrasing irks me because it suggests that fiction is a conversation with an audience first. Which is true, I guess. But I’m thinking right now—as I’m mulling my missing inspiration—that fiction actually always starts as a conversation with the self. Those first drafts are less of a message to the masses and more of a private gnawing away at something, working through a deeply personal mystery. And while some questions deserve the direct approach of nonfiction, other questions are only illuminated by some intricate emotional trickery. That’s fiction—a waking dream, emotional cosplay, a thing that can feel like life but is not at all like life. Fiction is a time to let yourself be entranced by a story, play around in some made-up drama, so that you can rehearse what it might feel like to do the same IRL.

But most times it’s not even a question. The start of a story is often merely a mood. And the only reason you need to write towards that mood is so that you can hold something in your hand, so to speak, that contains, or describes, or simulates, or builds up, or breaks down, or does something definitive with that mood.

So, here’s the writing challenge that this entry has pushed me towards. If you type the words “Random Mood Generator” into the internet you get many versions of exactly that. I’m going to ask it for some moods and then be inspired to write something from the results.

PART II:

So, this is fun: 

The three mood words (Dread, Anguish, Pride) got me thinking about a work of art that could introduce the idea of anguish to a story, as my short fiction doesn’t usually deal with emotions that direct and extreme. I was looking at artwork, because I love a good text-within-a-text gimmick, and when you search for “famous artwork Chicago Art Institute dread anguish” you get Ivan Albright’s “Picture of Dorian Gray” pretty quick. 

I know this painting from the Institute and I like it even though I don’t think I consider it high art. It is a fun painting, mostly because it’s from a movie, the 1945 adaptation of the novel, and has this great comic book horror vibe to it. It’s garish and grotesque, a great thing to stumble upon in the Art Institute’s otherwise subtle collection. 

 In the painting, a mimic of Portuguese artist Henrique Medina’s “before” portrait of the character, Dorian Gray is a walking corpse, with blistered, putrefying flesh. The room around him is also rotting, looking like a fresh bruise if a fresh bruise could somehow be lit on fire and left out in the desert sun for a week.    

Albright, Ivan. Picture of Dorian Gray. 1943-44.

The Picture of Dorian Gray is one of those books I know I’ve attempted but I do not know if I’ve ever finished. And so, ever in the pursuit of inspiration, I was delighted to be reminded, when I looked up the text online, that it has a weird little preface about the purpose of art:

The artist is the creator of beautiful things.

To reveal art and conceal the artist is art’s aim. The critic is he who can translate into another manner or a new material his impression of beautiful things.

The highest as the lowest form of criticism is a mode of autobiography.

Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault.

Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only beauty.

There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.

The nineteenth century dislike of realism is the rage of Caliban seeing his own face in a glass.

The nineteenth century dislike of romanticism is the rage of Caliban not seeing his own face in a glass.

The moral life of man forms part of the subject-matter of the artist, but the morality of art consists in the perfect use of an imperfect medium.

No artist desires to prove anything. Even things that are true can be proved.

No artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style.

No artist is ever morbid. The artist can express everything.

Thought and language are to the artist instruments of an art.

Vice and virtue are to the artist materials for an art.

From the point of view of form, the type of all the arts is the art of the musician. From the point of view of feeling, the actor’s craft is the type.

All art is at once surface and symbol.

Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril.

Those who read the symbol do so at their peril.

It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors.

Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex, and vital.

When critics disagree, the artist is in accord with himself.

We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely.

All art is quite useless.

Now, I’m cool with Oscar Wilde, but I remember reading this in the past and rolling my eyes. Even now, Wilde’s koan-like musings try my patience. It’s a short walk, I want to tell old Oscar, from clever to insufferable. But the muse brought us here for a reason. What could it be?

In a 2012 issue of The Wildean—everyone’s favorite literary journal—Eric Pudney offers some context to Wilde's groan-worthy little screed. The novella The Picture of Dorian Gray was first published in a Philadelphia literary magazine called Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine. When the story hit the streets in July of 1890, reviewers were outraged and panned the work as "immoral." Wilde wrote witty letters to his harshest critics that included lots of witticisms. Then, after making several meaningful changes to the text, he published a revised version of the story a year later. When he did, he added a preface that was a series of twenty-three aphorisms that were taken from those witty letters to his critics. Now, while the preface was created in response to criticism, it also deals with the themes of the story, a story that, in this newly expanded and revised 1891 version, was a proper novel. 

Pudney suggests that we should not read Wilde’s preface as Wilde’s actual beliefs. Rather, they are a type of intellectual antepasto to the hearty meal that follows. The contradictions in the preface get our head in the right space to journey into this fictional world. It inspires us to ask the right questions: should we use our understanding of the artist to understand the art? Is the purpose of beauty only to be beautiful? Can an artist be immoral? Can an artist be useful? 

These questions have a context as well: Wilde’s allegiance to Aestheticism. And, like any art movement, Aestheticism has its own context: moralizing Victorian Britain. I can get behind the urge towards Aestheticism's “art for art's sake” vibe, especially in a stodgy 19th Century Britain where art is overwhelmingly didactic and moralistic. It’s the same urge that caused a Larry David to strive for “no hugging, no learning” in response to the vapid schmaltz of 1990s sitcom television. But the idea that art’s only job is to be beautiful seems to me a meaningless maxim. Alright, fine, I say. So what’s beauty? Is understanding truths about humanity and existence beautiful? Can’t learning be beautiful? Can’t morality be beautiful? Can’t tragedy be beautiful? Then what about pain, misery, ugliness? Why can’t it all be beautiful in it’s own way, with a good enough artist?

Of course, Oscar would probably say, yes, dummy, it’s all beautiful. Or maybe he would say, what is beautiful is a decision you have to make as a participant in the art and, well, that’s my whole fucking point. You need to ask questions as an artist and sit with those questions as an audience. I don't give you answers. I give you cryptic riddles and daring images. Do with it what you want.

Maybe that’s what rubs me the wrong way about wanting to “express yourself” with story. If you are merely expressing yourself, it is a one-way message. “Here I am. Read this and you’ll understand who I am.” But the math of that exchange is all wrong. That version of art is a transmission model of an understanding from one person to another. "I am the artist; I transmit meaning to you, the viewer; now you have understanding." Narrative art, when it’s good, is just a collection of story elements that are hiding a bunch of questions. And the questions multiply, exponentially, in the mind of the reader. When it's good, the reader should be left with so much more intellectual product than the writer put into the work.

In other words, I don’t write to express myself because self is a mystery. I write to find the borders of myself and to remember there are no borders.

I tell stories to remember that my concept of myself is a story.

And it’s a story of questions, not answers.

...

Okay.

That's it.

That's exactly what my very recently former self who felt like all questions had been answered was looking for.

We did it, Oscar.

We got there.

⚘     ⚘     ⚘

Albright, Ivan. Picture of Dorian Gray. 1943-44. The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago. https://www.artic.edu/artworks/93798/picture-of-dorian-gray. Accessed 17 June 2024.

Medina, Henrique. "Portrait of Hurd Hatfield as Dorian Gray, 1943." The Collection of Robert Hatfield Ellsworth Part V, Christie’s. https://www.christies.com/en/lot/lot-5875468. Accessed 17 June 2024.

Pudney, Eric. “Paradox and the Preface to ‘Dorian Gray.’” The Wildean, no. 41, 2012, pp. 118–23. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/45270321. Accessed 17 June 2024.

Wilde, Oscar. The Picture of Dorian Gray. E-book, Project Gutenberg, 1994. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/174/174-h/174-h.htm.