The migrant muse: roots and airplants
1998; Volume: 72; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
0025-9373
Autores Tópico(s)Walter Benjamin Studies Compilation
ResumoIt is generally agreed that an artist who has deep roots in a landscape or in a culture, particularly a regional culture with well-defined values and traditions, has an advantage. Cezanne could paint a masterpiece at the Lake of Annecy, but his relationship with the environs of Aix, and with Mont Ste. Victoire in particular, was nurtured from birth through his entire life and surely gave a special authority to his work. Hardy's intimate knowledge of the group of English southwestern counties he called, collectively, Wessex-a knowledge of architectural detail, agricultural customs (which in his day still differed subtly from one county to another), dialect variations, the appearance of lanes and hedgerows, woods, heaths and vales peculiar to that part of the country--was not merely a backdrop for the tales he told but gave his work its palette, its or (to switch to musical analogies) the keys in which he wrote and the orchestration that gave his work its unmistakable Hardy-ness. When folk elements are incorporated in a composer's work feel, I think, a difference between those who appropriate exotic elements and those for whom the same motifs are not exotic but are part of their inheritance. William Carlos Williams dug into his native and lifelong New Jersey, demonstrating his own dictum about finding the universal in the local; yet he could never be dismissed as a regional writer in the restricted sense. A major artist like him finds in the local a firm ground on which to stand and from which to leap and fly. Wendell Berry's deep roots in rural Kentucky inform his poetry, his fiction and his essays and have an inseparable relationship to the values he articulates. A probably minor, but charming and still young fiction writer like Allegra Goodman in The Family Mankowitz gets the Jewish-American tone just right; her exactitude is in itself a pleasure. But she has psychological wisdom and perceptiveness which makes me feel she could, if she wished, write convincingly about quite different people and places. Her rootedness is a potential springboard. The down side of belonging so definitely to a place and a culture--I should say a place or a culture, because of course many cultures persist in diaspora, independently of geography--is that it can be restrictive. Perhaps the most obvious problem (in the past more than recently) is the writer's decision to use dialect; and this is not because of the grammar and usage of dialect but because the attempts to convey its sounds by spellings which are supposed to approximate them often only present an insurmountable barrier to the reader. Now and again a writer will with real skill overcome whatever difficulty dialect itself may present. Robert Morgan in The Truest Pleasure, for instance, has a narrator who is a North Carolina hill farm woman and a holy roller at the turn of the century; he uses no transliteration of sounds, but she does say we was, not we were, and she and her family think of molasses as a plural. Although at times she rises to heights of eloquence, her voice is perfectly credible throughout. I recommend this small masterpiece to anyone who has not come across it. John Edgar Wideman often uses Black English but without any funny spelling, and he can move with complete smoothness from dialect to standard English. The reader thus is enabled to make swift, almost unconscious adjustments. But often the use of dialect is problematical--restrictive to the writer and uninviting to the reader. There is also the matter of provinciality--of a narrow outlook, or rather, of an outlook not only lacking in a broad experience of other ways and places but unaware that it is narrow; an outlook lacking not only curiosity about what lies beyond its experience but in respect for it when encountered. Such provinciality is not a primitive innocence but the philistine enemy of art, and indeed of personal growth. Hideous sentimental greeting cards and calendars and other religious goods purveyed both by the organs of the fundamentalist right wing churches and those of a certain conservative segment of the Catholic church demonstrate the link between this kind of provinciality and aesthetic atrophy. …
Referência(s)