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| "The cowboys loved him, and he loved the cowboys." -D. Hopes |
In De Profundis, Oscar Wilde writes, “Suffering
is one very long moment.” That moment, is life. All of life is contained in
Time, and all of our time is contained in Death. Carrying the burden of knowing
what is to come – eternal nothingness – while among the mass chaos of life:
love, friendship, emotion, passion, existence;
we must understand the intrinsic suffering that is to be experienced, and more
importantly, to create the aim, the projection, the perfection of that suffering: Art.
In Samuel Beckett’s
criticism of Marcel Proust, he writes, “Suffering – that opens a window on the real
and is the main condition of the artistic experience, and Boredom…” (Selected Works, Vol. IV 520). Of
Proust’s, À la recherche du temps
perdu, Beckett brings attention to the importance of suffering and
its role in creating and understanding art. He details the toils of the
narrator’s life as loved ones die and lovers leave until finally Beckett
writes,
“So now in the
exaltation of his brief eternity, having emerged from the darkness of time and
habit and passion and intelligence, he understands the necessity of art. For in
the brightness of art alone can be deciphered the baffled ecstasy that he had
known before the inscrutable superficies of a cloud, a triangle, a spire, a
flower, a pebble, when the mystery, the essence, the Idea, imprisoned in
matter, had solicited the bounty of a subject passing by within the shell of
his impurity, and tendered, like Dante his song to the 'ingegni storti e
loschi,' at least an incorruptible beauty: 'Ponete mente almen com’io son bella.' [At least bear in mind how beautiful I
am.]” (544).
Only after suffering can the narrator
truly recognize the beauty and importance of art, transcending the realm of everyday existence; suffering – which Wilde
attributes to being “the type and test of all great art.”
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| (Proust in the Official Pose of Suffering) |
Wilde
himself had to go through much suffering in life. He was imprisoned for “gross
indecencies with other men,” or for carrying out homosexual acts. De Profundis, his prison memoirs, detail
his thoughts as he reflects on his transition from a lavish life of excessive
indulgences into the cold and barren life of prison. He notes that he had made
good art before prison, but after his sufferings he can now produce great art
and would hope to go on and do so. Wilde would then create his last work after
prison, “The Ballad of Reading Gaol,” which (all academic critics aside) I find
to be the most moving of all of his pieces. For me, Wilde serves as a testament
to the belief that great art comes from great suffering.
I
believe that Beckett was getting at the idea that within Proust’s works there
is great suffering, and from great suffering comes beautiful art. Proust himself had to suffer in order to produce his masterpiece as well. If we
think about all great art, we will often find many of the artists encountered
great suffering: Wilde, Baudelaire, Van Gogh, Dali, Nietzsche, Christ – the
list goes on. Perhaps there is some truth to Goethe’s words:
“Who never ate
his bread in sorrow,
Who never spent
the midnight hours
Weeping and
waiting for the morrow, -
He knows you
not, ye heavenly powers.”
Proust and suffering according to Steve Carell
