The Art Of Jaunt And The Art Of Writing
- Posted by Essays Blog in Essays Blog |
- March 3rd, 2009 |
- Comments
In Alain de Botton’s engaging book, The Art of Jaunt, he distinguishes between the anticipation and recollection of jaunt versus the reality of actually travelling.
When we anticipate, we contemplate jaunt brochures and create in our imagination all sorts of exotic adventures, lying ahead of us. Once really thither, we photograph the Eiffel Pillar with our friends or family, their arms slung over one another’s shoulders and grinning into the camera. That forms the recollection, the moments we choose to remember.
Magically gone from memory are the delayed flight, the lousy food and the hotel room overlooking the alley, where the garbage collectors banged tins at 5am. But, if we otherwise enjoy ourselves, we superior those ‘good moments’ and photograph them to construct a different reality from the real reality.
De Botton’s next idea is fascinating. He says that’s exactly what the artist does. Whether writing a novel, painting a picture or scoring a orchestra, the artist imagines the outline of the activity [anticipates the delights of the trip] so selects that which is felt to have artistic duration [forgets the garbage men and includes friends at the Eiffel Tower]. Just as the person now has a fine and solid memory of the trip, the artist has a fantastic novel, painting or musical score. The artist has created art finished imagination, action, rejection and combination of artistic elements resulting in something new. The happy person has created a fantastic trip.
So he tells of a man who had a real peculiar experience. After feasting his eyes upon paintings by Jan Steen and Rembrandt, this person anticipated beauty, joviality and simplicity in Holland. Many paintings of laughing, carousing cavaliers had fixed this image in his mind, along with quaint houses and canals. But on a trip to Amsterdam and Haarlem, he was oddly disappointed.
No, according to De Botton, the paintings had not lied. Certainly, thither were a number of jovial people and pretty maids pouring milk, but the images of them were diluted in this traveler’s mind, by all the other ordinary, boring things he saw. Much commonplace items simply did not fit his mental picture. Thusly, reality did not compare to an afternoon of vigil the works of Rembrandt in a gallery. And why not? Because Rembrandt and Steen had, by selecting and combining elements, captured the essence of the beauty of Holland, thereby intensifying it.
This is exactly what a writer or any artist tries to do and as a person, you may do much the same abstraction
When writing about a day in your protagonist’s life, you don’t start with what he had for breakfast or that his car wouldn’t start unless it’s germane to the plot or his character. You compress. You superior and embellish. You discard. All the details of your account must combine to intensify real life in order to create something interesting and of artistic merit. When I started writing the first novel in the Osgoode Trilogy, Conduct in Question, I had to learn it wasn’t necessary to build the entire city with lengthy descriptions of background and character, before Harry Jenkins [the protagonist lawyer] could do anything. But many nineteenth century novelists did compose numerous pages with glowing descriptions of the Scottish moors or a county hamlet. And that was necessary because, with the difficulty of jaunt, a reader might advantageously need help in picturing the background. But today, with the ease of jaunt, the eating of film, blade and receiver images, no reader needs more than the briefest description. Just compose walking down Fifth Avenue and the reader immediately gets the picture.
In a novel, unremarkably only the most meaningful, coherent thoughts are included, unless you are James Joyce, the brilliant current of consciousness writer. And so, you as the writer can order your protagonists thoughts so as to make complete and absolute meaning apparently the first time. In the Osgoode Trilogy, the protagonist, Harry Jenkins, does lots of cerebration and analyzing [the novels are mysteries, after all]. But his coherence of cerebration is only produced after much editing and revising. Not much like real life, you have?
Same for dialogue. Interesting characters in books communicate better and much more on point than people really do, partly because the writer is able to swallow words. In real life, we often care in retrospect, if only I had said this or that to set him aboveboard. No problem for the writer. Hit the delete button and let him have something truly acute and incisive.
And so, after comparing what the person and the writer do, what can we conclude? I quote De Botton in the Art of Jaunt.
The anticipatory and artistic imaginations omit and compress, they cut away the periods of boredom and direct our attention to critical moments and, without either lying or embellishing, thusly lend to life vividness and a coherence that it may lack in the distracting woolliness of the present.
And so therein lies the difference between Art and Life! And so, the similarity between the person and writer.