In a message dated 6/6/10 12:16:30 PM, [email protected] writes:
> In the world of art and art writing, it's often heard that X's new show
> was a
> disappointment because he/she still seems to be doing the same thing since
> the
> previous big show three years earlier. Redundancy and its sidekick,
> derivation, are held up as defects, flaws, or shortcomings in the artist's
> insight or conception. Mere variation--the result of the simple fact that
> one
> cannot easily repeat the same work over and over without a bit of orbital
> drift and change--is not sufficient. It has to be significant and *new*.
>
> As to the truly groundbreaking works, they rarely have any progeny. Joyce
> wrote Ulysses and followed it with Finnegan's Wake, his last novel (of a
> total
> of 5 he wrote), and as far as I know, there have been very few successors
> to
> them of any great note.
>
High on my list of fuzzy words are 'same' and 'new'. Gottlob Frege is often
said to have given birth to "philosophy of language" with his 1892 paper,
'Uber Sinn and Bedeutung', acceptably translated as 'Sense and Reference'.
It's a profoundly confused piece that misled a legion of philosophers after
him. My point in mentioning it: It began with his assertion that he intended
in that essay to tackle the deeply puzzling notion of "the same".
He was right to be puzzled. Not only is there there no "THE meaning of"
'same', but notions it occasions have always been muddled.
Still, maybe we could agree to say that, though every succeeding play by
Shakespeare was "new", none was "new" in the sense that Joyce's succeeding
works were. I'm among those who feel that FINNEGANS WAKE's "newness" was a
horrific fall-off -- not nearly so gratifying for me to read as his earlier
works were. Shakespeare's "sameness" was exactly what I was hoping for as I
went
from one play to the next.
I was James Herriot's publisher. The "jacket slogan" I put on the front
cover of his first book (ALL CREATURES GREAT AND SMALL) was "The warm and
joyful memoirs of an animal doctor." It was an immense bestseller. As we were
preparing to release the next volume by Herriot (ALL THINGS BRIGHT AND
BEAUTIFUL"), another publisher heard that I planned to put on it the slogan,
"The
warm and joyful sequel to ALL CREATURES GREAT AND SMALL". He called to warn me
off. "Sequels are death!" he told me. I said I believed exactly opposite
was true in Herriot's case. "His readers want want more of the same," I
claimed.
We published five volumes of memoirs by that Yorkshire veterinarian. Each
volume sold more than the one before, and he ended up as the most widely-read
English-language memoirist/storyteller of the 20th century. James could
have come up with something "new", but the "new thing" would have had to have
an appeal that equaled his memoirs, and there was no way he could find that.
Joyce died deeply deeply disappointed by the reception to FINNEGANS WAKE.
That, I think, is the only excuse/triumph in an artist's abandoning his
"same" and going to a "new". Shakespeare, Bach, Beethoven, Dickinson, Austen,
Dickens, Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, et al could find no "new" to match the
appeal of their "same", and, assuming they enjoyed creating more of the
"same", they were right to stick to it. ("Oh, but Shakespeare never wrote the
same play twice. Austen never wrote the same novel twice!" "Same"? What do
you have in mind when you say 'same'?)
