May 16, 2008
LRB: Foster on Serra; Eagleton on anonymity; Kopelson's diary
The new issue of the London Review of Books has a number of goodies. Highlights include Hal Foster's blow-by-blow recount of the decision-making process that led to Richard Serra's sculpture now at the Grand Palais in Paris, Terry Eagleton's review of Anonymity: A Secret History of English Literature (arriving on US bookstore shelves in August), and the diary of academic literary critic Kevin Kopelson, author of the engaging small book Neatness Counts: Essays on the Writer's Desk (which I first blogged about on March 15, 2006).
From the Foster text (which is decidedly not a review):
Serra decided on plates 17 metres high and four metres wide; absolutely vertical, they are anchored only shallowly in the ground, and nothing supports them at the surface. This size turned out to be an excellent match of technical necessity – the plates are about the largest that can now be milled – and aesthetic scale: at just under half the height of the nave, they hold their own against the architecture but do not overwhelm the viewer (only about 15 centimetres thick, they appear almost elegant). Yet this resolution of size still left the questions of number and placement, and there could be no trial run. Serra calculated that 100 feet might be the right interval to create a rhythm that would at once articulate the architecture and motivate the viewer; more plates might interfere with the former and/or intimidate the latter, while fewer might make the ground feel a little arid. This formula makes for five plates over the 200 metres of the nave, with one placed directly under the cupola, and this is what Promenade consists in.
The particulars of placement remained, however, and here Serra was cued by the axis of the nave, to which all the plates are strictly perpendicular. To scatter the plates would be to lose the power of this strong line; to overlap them would be to destroy the centre in another way. So Serra decided to set the plates at a very slight angle (1.69 degrees) from the axis: some are positioned on the central line at the bottom and 20 inches away at the top, while others are 20 inches off the central line at the bottom and plumb at the top. These deviations create, with simple means, a great tension; one feels drawn through the piece as through a slalom course. Yet this energy might feel forced if the rhythm were only one of alternation, so here again Serra mixed things up: from the Champs Elysées side to the Seine side, the pattern of lean vis-à-vis the centre is in-in-away-away-in.
Eagleton begins his piece thusly:
All literary works are anonymous, but some are more anonymous than others. It is in the nature of a piece of writing that it is able to stand free of its begetter, and can dispense with his or her physical presence. In this sense, writing is more like an adolescent than a toddler. I might pass you a note at a meeting, but a note is only a note if it can function in my absence. Writing, unlike speech, is meaning that has come adrift from its source. Some bits of writing – theatre tickets or notes to the milkman, for example – are more closely tied to their original contexts than Paradise Lost or War and Peace. Fiction (since it is imaginary) has no real-life original context at all, and hermeneutically speaking can therefore circulate a lot more freely than a shopping list or a bus ticket. Literary works are peculiarly portable. They can be lifted from one interpretative situation to another, and may change their meaning in the course of this migration. Waiting for Godot as performed in San Quentin prison is not quite the same play as Peter Hall’s first London production. We cannot simply put Auschwitz out of our minds while watching The Merchant of Venice. Writerly meaning does not always trump readerly meaning.
Kopelson's playful ramble ends up by asking, "Have I become, then, Grover Cleveland?"