Quotations
Nov 14th, 2021 by JGB
A Miscellany of Interesting Observations On Writing, Literature, & The Fantastic
Authority and freedom are the lifeblood of the arts. Whether reading a novel, looking at a painting, or listening to music, we are feeling the push and pull of these two forces as they shape the creator’s work. Authority is the ordering impulse. Freedom is the love of experiment and play. They coexist. They compete. Even a child, setting out to write a story, recognizes the authority of certain conventions, if only the need for a beginning, a middle, and an end. To love to look at paintings is to love, almost before anything else, the certainty of the rectangle, the delimiting shape. But why not feel free to do something different? Why must a story have a beginning, a middle, an end? Why must a painting be on a rectangle? One way of acknowledging authority is by opposing it-by writing, for instance, a story that ends inconclusively, open-endedly. The authority of art functions almost simultaneously as an inhibition and an incitement. The limitations sharpen the fantasy, clarify the feeling-they precipitate freedom.
— Jed Perl, Authority and Freedom: A Defense of the Arts
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What I look for in a work of art is something that might be called an expansion of being, a sense of mysterious exhilaration, and this has little to do with the quality of darkness in a work, but rather with the arrangement of elements, the elaboration of a significant design. The darkness is surely there, but it’s in the service of something else, which I think of as celebratory.
Interviewer: Would you care to try and define this mysterious “something else?”
I see you won’t let me get away with anything! I intended nothing mystical or mystifying here. I meant only that art is connected in my mind—in my body—with a sense of enhancement, of radical pleasure, of affirmation, of revelry. Darkness is the element against which this deeper force asserts itself. It may even be that this force deliberately seeks out darkness, in order to assert itself more radically.
— Steven Millhauser, Interview by Marc Chénetier in Transatlantica (1, 2003)
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Beauty plus pity—that is the closest we can get to a definition of art. Where there is beauty there is pity for the simple reason that beauty must die: beauty always dies, the manner dies with the matter, the world dies with the individual.
— Vladimir Nabokov, “Franz Kafka: The Metamorphosis” in Lectures on Literature
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Every monster comes with its own spiritual meaning.
— Umberto Eco, On the Shoulders of Giants
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Disruption is at the center of many of my stories—and what is disruption if not the sudden emergence of strangeness from the ordinary?
— Steven Millhauser, Interview by Étienne Février in Transatlantica (1, 2011)
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Sometimes my monstrous architectural images are meant to express only America’s love of vastness—vast bridges, vast buildings, vast works of art to embody the vastness of the land. Sometimes they’re meant to suggest an aggressive human desire to create larger and larger structures, as if, once begun, the urge to immensity can’t be stopped. And sometimes it’s the sheer pleasure of invention that drives me to dream up impossible forms of architecture, which then haunt me with meanings I can’t entirely fathom.
— Steven Millhauser, Interview in Transatlantica (1, 2011)
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…revelation, by which I mean something like a secular version of religious vision, feels crucial to my sense of art. I would even argue that the end of all art is revelation. But because there is no final truth to be revealed, no godhead hidden behind the forms of Nature, the revelation can at best shadow forth an intimation of something that can be shown in no other way—or perhaps..it might be said that revelation, far from dispersing the shadowy sides of the real, reveals precisely those shadowy sides.
— Steven Millhauser, Interview by Étienne Février in Transatlantica (1, 2011)
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I always thought of writing as holy. I still do. It’s not something to be approached casually.
— Deborah Eisenberg, Interview in The Paris Review (Spring 2013)
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Art, itself, is inherently subversive. It’s destabilizing. It undermines, rather than reinforces, what you already know and what you already think. It is the opposite of propaganda. It ventures into distant ambiguities, it dismantles the received in your brain and expands and refines what you can experience.
— Deborah Eisenberg, Interview in The Paris Review (Spring 2013)
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