JW: … When Virginia Woolf read Chekhov she said something like, “The emphasis falls on such unexpected places so that you hardly realize that it is an emphasis at all.” And that’s what I very much love about Chekhov is this extraordinary subtlety and unpredictability. That the sentimental moment is always avoided, just at the last second.
…
RB: In the 19th century, was there that kind of self-consciousness about the novel form?
JW: Well no, there wasn’t really. And that’s why James is interesting. There wasn’t anything like that self-consciousness, really until James and Conrad. And if you go back to [pause]—well that’s not quite true. The decisive thing was probably Flaubert, where there was a new kind of self-consciousness. Where in a way, for the first time you see art being turned into a religion but also into a stylistic agony—Flaubert at his best doing a hundred words a day. Agonizing over repetitions. Prose has become poetry at that point. And you can see in his letters, Flaubert is frankly envious of, as he sees it, the great writers who didn’t need to worry about that kind of thing. He says Cervantes, Moliere, and Shakespeare, they could just toss it off. Surely any writer that abundant, can just, they are not thinking. I [Flaubert] am, on the other hand, however am caught in this modern dilemma of agony, of artistic self-consciousness. And James met and corresponded with Flaubert and in some ways is an inheritor of that Flaubertian agony, too. Though it didn’t seem to stop his productivity.
Wood is perfect in quoting Virginia Woolf on Checkov’s brilliance. I’d like to do the same with my photos. Put the emphasis somewhere unexpected. So softly that it is hardly noticed. A disguised but studied avoidance of sentimentality. His bit about the self-reflexive nature of modern art ties in with what I was said in the essay published this week.
As an aside, hearing Woods talk it really bought home how rare it is to find criticism of photography that is as acute, human, and articulate. Szarkowski was of that type. Maybe it is typically more difficult to talk about something visual, but I need to find more of this nourishing writing. People like Aletti, Sante, Rubinfein are writing well now. I wonder who the others are. Szarkowski talks about some early writers on photography here.
Click the link in the title.
Posted 2 years ago
