Final Answers

A la mémoire de Simone Vauthier

Just before she died, Gertrude Stein asked, “What is the answer?” No answer came. She laughed and said, “In that case, what is the ques­tion?” Then she died. 

—Donald Sutherland, Gertrude Stein

On April 19, 1616, the day after hav­ing been given the extreme unc­tion, Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra penned a ded­i­ca­tion (to Don Pedro Fernández de Castro, Count of Lemos) for his last book, The Labours of Persiles and Segismunda—a novel that in his opin­ion “dares to com­pete with Heliodorus.” Heliodorus was a Greek nov­el­ist, once famous and now for­got­ten, whose Aethiopica Cervantes much admired. Three or four days later (his­to­ri­ans remain unde­cided), Cervantes died, leav­ing his widow in charge of pub­lish­ing the Persiles.

His Quixote, if we can credit at least in part the mod­est dis­claimer placed at the begin­ning of the first vol­ume, was for Cervantes lam­en­ta­bly minor. “What could this bar­ren and ill-cultivated spirit of mine pro­duce but the story of a dry, wiz­ened son, whim­si­cal and full of all man­ner of notions never before con­ceived?” he asks the reader. On his deathbed, intent on judg­ing his own labours, Cervantes con­cludes that the Persiles, or per­haps his long poetic unfin­ished Galatea, is to be his lit­er­ary tes­ta­ment. Readers have decided oth­er­wise: it is Don Quixote that lives on as our con­tem­po­rary, and the rest of Cervantes’ work has largely become fod­der for schol­ars. Don Quixote now stands for the whole of Cervantes’ work, and per­haps for Cervantes himself.

Like Cervantes, we are mostly unaware of our des­tiny. Cursed with con­scious­ness, we under­stand that we are on this earth on a jour­ney that, like all jour­neys, must have had a begin­ning and will no doubt have an end, but when was the first step taken, and which will be the last; where are we meant to be trav­el­ling to, and why, and in expec­ta­tion of what results? These ques­tions remain unan­swered. We can con­sole our­selves, like Don Quixote him­self, with the con­vic­tion that our good­will and noble suf­fer­ing mys­te­ri­ously jus­tify our being alive, and that through our actions we play a role that holds the secret uni­verse together. But con­so­la­tion is not reassurance.

Jews believe that thirty-six right­eous men, the Lamed Wufniks, jus­tify the world before God. None of them knows that he is a Lamed Wufnik and nei­ther does he know the iden­tity of the other thirty-five men, but for rea­sons clear only to God, each man’s exis­tence pre­vents this world from crum­bling into dust. Perhaps there is no act, how­ever minus­cule or trite, that does not serve a sim­i­lar pur­pose. Perhaps each of our lives (and that of every insect, every tree, every cloud) stands like a let­ter in a text whose mean­ing depends on a cer­tain sequence of appear­ing and dis­ap­pear­ing let­ters, in a story whose begin­ning we ignore and whose end we will not read. If the let­ter L in this para­graph had con­scious­ness, it might then ask itself the same ques­tions and, unable to fol­low the page on which it is writ­ten, equally receive no answers.

Not know­ing what they are meant to do but feel­ing they must know when they have done it: this para­dox has haunted artists since the begin­ning of time. Artists have always been aware that they engage in (or have been recruited for) a task whose ulti­mate pur­port must escape them. They may real­ize, some­times, that they have achieved some­thing with­out under­stand­ing exactly what or how, or they may guess that they are on the verge of achiev­ing some­thing that will how­ever escape them, or that they have been assigned a task defined by the very impos­si­bil­ity of being achieved. Countless unfin­ished mon­u­ments, paint­ings, sym­phonies and nov­els tes­tify to their artis­tic hubris; a few oth­ers bravely pro­claim that accom­plish­ment is (though rarely) also within the human scope.

Somewhere halfway through La Prisonnière, Proust learns that the writer Bergotte has died after a visit to the museum to see Vermeer’s View of Delft. A critic has com­mented on “a small patch of yel­low wall” so per­fectly painted that, when seen on its own, it appeared to pos­sess “a self-sufficient beauty.” Bergotte, who thinks he knows the paint­ing well, painfully under­takes the jour­ney to fix his gaze on the lit­tle patch, in spite of his doctor’s orders to stay in bed. “This is how I should have writ­ten,” he laments, before col­laps­ing. Bergotte has rec­og­nized in a tiny sec­tion of one of Vermeer’s paint­ings an achieve­ment such as he him­self has never attained and, with this atro­cious real­iza­tion, dies. The scene depicted by Proust is cau­tion­ary. The con­tem­pla­tion of a suc­cess, of a work of art that in and of itself suf­fices, offers a ref­er­ence against which an artist can mea­sure his own work and learn his own fate — not in absolute terms, but in the par­tic­u­lar sit­u­a­tion in which that other work has affected him. Now he knows what he means by reach­ing (or not reach­ing) a sort of per­fec­tion, and whether to con­tinue or to stop.

In this sense, not all inter­rup­tion is lack of suc­cess. When Kafka aban­dons his Castle before the for­mal con­clu­sion of the story, when Gaudi dies before com­plet­ing the Church of the Sagrada Familia, when Mahler jots down only the first parts of his Tenth Symphony, when Michelangelo refuses to work fur­ther on his Florence Pietà, it is we, the audi­ence — not the artist — who might con­sider the labours half-done. For the cre­ator the result might be sketchy indeed: trun­cated, yes, but not insuf­fi­cient, like Vermeer’s lit­tle patch of yel­low iso­lated in the viewer’s eye.

Rimbaud inter­rupted his poetic career at the age of nine­teen; J. D. Salinger wrote no more sto­ries after 1963; the Argentine poet Enrique Banchs brought out his last book in 1911 and then lived for another fifty-seven years with­out pub­lish­ing a sin­gle new verse. We don’t know whether any of these artists felt, at a cer­tain moment, the epiphany that he had achieved what he was meant to achieve, and could there­fore retire from the scene on which he felt he had no fur­ther busi­ness. Certainly, from our dis­tance as read­ers, their work seems self-sufficient, mature, per­fect. But did the artists see it as such?

Few are the artists who rec­og­nize their own genius with­out hyper­bole or con­strict­ing mod­esty. The par­a­digm is Dante, who, in writ­ing his great poem, knows that it is great and tells the reader it is so. For most oth­ers, how­ever, the learn­ing of the craft never ceases and no result­ing work is fully achieved. Witness the fol­low­ing con­fes­sion: “From the age of six I felt the com­pul­sion to draw the shape of things. In my fifties, I showed a col­lec­tion of draw­ings but noth­ing accom­plished before I turned sev­enty sat­is­fies me. Only at seventy-three was I able to intuit, even approx­i­mately, the true form and nature of birds, fish and plants. Therefore, by the age of eighty I will have made great progress; at ninety I will have pen­e­trated the essence of all things; at a hun­dred, I will no doubt have ascended to a higher state, inde­scrib­able; and if I live to be one hun­dred and ten years old, every­thing, every dot and every line, will live. I invite those who will live as long as I to hold me to my promise. Written in my seventy-fifth year by myself, for­merly known as Hokusai, now called Huakivo-Royi, the old man mad­dened by drawing.”

Whether the artist has aban­doned his cre­ative career or pur­sued it until his last breath has been drawn, whether he feels that some­thing of what he has done will sur­vive his dust and ashes, or whether he is cer­tain that his work is, as Ecclesiastes warns us, noth­ing but “van­ity and vex­a­tion of spirit,” it is we, the audi­ence, who con­tinue to seek in what has been cre­ated and set before us a cer­tain order of merit, an aes­thetic, moral or philo­soph­i­cal hier­ar­chy. We think we know better.

Our arro­gance, how­ever, makes an assump­tion that is per­haps not ten­able: that there is one among the works of Corot, of Shakespeare, of Verdi, that sub­li­mates all oth­ers, a work for which all the rest must seem as prepa­ra­tions or drafts, a cul­mi­nat­ing work, a crown­ing achieve­ment. In one of his short sto­ries, Henry James put for­ward the notion that there is indeed a theme, a sub­ject, a sig­na­ture that runs through any artist’s work like the repeated and yet hid­den fig­ure in a car­pet. The notion of a “tes­ta­men­tary” work that encap­su­lates the artist’s sum­ma­tion and legacy is like James’s “fig­ure in the car­pet,” but with­out the carpet.

Because our knowl­edge of the world is frag­men­tary, we believe the world to be frag­men­tary. We assume that the bits and pieces we encounter and col­lect (of expe­ri­ence, plea­sure, sor­row, rev­e­la­tion) exist in splen­did iso­la­tion like each of the motes in a cloud of star­dust. We for­get the all-encompassing cloud, we for­get that in the begin­ning there was a star. Don Quixote and Hamlet might be the tes­ta­men­tary works of Cervantes and of Shakespeare; Picasso could have put away his brushes after Guernica and Rembrandt after The Night Watch; Mozart could have died hap­pily hav­ing com­posed The Magic Flute and Verdi after Falstaff; but we would be miss­ing some­thing. We would be miss­ing the approx­i­ma­tions, the ten­ta­tive ver­sions, the vari­a­tions, the changes of tone and per­spec­tive, the cir­cuitous itin­er­aries, the cir­cum­ven­tions, the deal­ings in the shad­ows, the rest of their cre­ative uni­verse. We would be miss­ing the errors, the still­births, the cen­sored snap­shots, the trim­mings, the lesser inspired creations.

Since we are not immor­tal, we have to con­tent our­selves with a sam­pling, and there­fore the choice of tes­ta­men­tary works is fully jus­ti­fied — as long as we remem­ber that under the pomp and cir­cum­stance, there is a rus­tle and a stir­ring, a vast, dark, rich for­est full of fallen or dis­carded leaves.