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Dinner with friends. All junior in age, all prolific readers. I come with bad news, and it isn’t humane to postpone or embroider these things.
Literature — I notify them — is a lesser art form. Next to music, certainly, and next to the visual arts too. Yeah, I have gone away and thought about it, lads. The reaction? Not just disagreement but something better characterised as hurt.
And look, this is as hard for me as it is for the next person. Literature is the art that can only really be consumed on your own, and so people bond with it. Books are likelier than paintings to have seen us through childhood traumas. Given the lack of materials involved, we are likelier to have tried writing — teenage doggerel and so on — than music. So why, as I age, do I see more, listen more and read less? If we did what the Renaissance Italians called the paragone, a comparison of art forms, what would be the case against literature?
For one thing, writers themselves give the game away. Lots have been obsessed with the act of painting (Oscar Wilde in The Picture of Dorian Gray) and composing (Thomas Mann in Doctor Faustus). That interest isn’t reciprocated. Readers will cite counterexamples but I could fill this whole column with writers — John Updike was an aspiring cartoonist, Kazuo Ishiguro was a songwriter first — who are smitten with mediums other than their own. In fact, to write well requires a sense of imagery and of the musicality of words. It is harder to say which literary powers are demanded in a visual or musical artist, unless we count the mental organisation of ideas.
“The most profound thought at the time wasn’t expressed in language, but in painting,” said Kenneth Clark of the Renaissance, in one of those almost papal asides of his. (The paragone didn’t even include literature, though versions of it elsewhere did.) He then says the same about the cultural awakening of the German-speaking lands in the next centuries. Even allowing for his bias towards the visual, how often, over the past 500 years, has the word been at the forefront of a big shift in creative expression? The Baroque? It was visual and musical first. Modernism? The key paintings came before the key books.
There might be something here about the order in which the brain evolved. Written language comes along quite late in the history of the species. And so a thought or feeling that is captured strikes us deeper than one that is described or set out. Even Proust, say, or a poet, is putting one word in front of another to convey information, which the conscious mind then has to interpret. Next to the sensual immediacy of an image or tune, a lot of processing has to go on. (When someone is a bit of a plodder in conversation, we say they are too “literal”.)
The painting I go back to most is Poussin’s “Landscape with the Ashes of Phocion”, even though its classical allusions are lost on me. Just the rendering of the woman, the serene indifference of the world behind her, is enough. Can a poem, novel or drama move an audience that doesn’t understand much of it?
There could, of course, be a simpler reason I am turning ever more to the image and the sound. I am getting older. At a certain age, your inner life consists to a great extent of memories, and memories tend to be non-verbal.
Whether one has had the average number of partners, or 100, most people have what I call Mount Rushmore: the special few. Looking back, I can’t even remember what I was reading during those periods. When I can, and pick the book up again, it evokes nothing. Whereas a piece of music, even the opening seconds of it — well, no one needs telling what that is like. Music wins my personal paragone on account of its one superpower: the storage and transmission of feeling across time. The visual arts come second, for being almost as immediate to the senses. The word, though it is home ground for a journalist, increasingly knows its place in my life.
Email Janan at janan.ganesh@ft.com
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