I’ve just finished re-reading Iris Murdoch’s novel The Bell. As I usually do on such occasions, having read the novel itself I turned to the introduction. It’s a kind of principle, I suppose, that I don’t want to be told what to think before I’ve read the book. It was an instructive experience that has made me think.
The introduction, on this occasion, was written by Murdoch’s fellow novelist Antonia Byatt. I was struck by the perceptiveness, erudition and subtlety of her observations. She writes with an easy fluency and an evident familiarity with critical discourse. But of course, why wouldn’t she? Literature is also her life. I, on the other hand, whereas I certainly had ideas and opinions having read the novel, found myself struggling to give intelligibility to them let alone clarity. That set me thinking.
So often I have found myself getting quite intolerant about the apparent inability of the general public to appreciate art …. art in general, let alone my art. I’m sure this is a response that would be shared by a large number of fellow artists. Then I find myself reflecting on the similarity between the situation of the average gallery-visitor and my own situation reading a good novel. I’ve enjoyed the experience, sure enough, but I have to work quite hard in order to convey any idea of why that should be the case …or, for that matter, what I thought might be wrong with it.
I was led to think along these lines today by the experience of my weekly Italian language class. Today we had to listen to a video of two people discussing the adaptation of various novels for the cinema. Here too I was impressed by their easy fluency with concepts and ways of looking at the material that were unfamiliar to me. But that would be the case, wouldn’t it? That is their life. That is what they do.
Although it is almost certainly the case that we have some kind of innate ability to respond to the arts (as I was made to see very clearly when my small grandson was taken on a visit to the Yorkshire Sculpture Park some time ago) this does not mean that we can translate those responses easily and readily into the medium of words. We require to be taught these things. We need to learn to see, and to make discriminations between our responses that might in many ways be quite close to each other. Our emotions do not come to us automatically with names for them.
Maybe I should be a little more tolerant when I’m in a gallery next time, and the visitor in front of me is able to say no more than, “I like that!” Until I disciplined myself fairly strenuously I was not in a much better place after contemplating Iris Murdoch’s novel.