Beth Harland’s Proust: Short Extract
Ian Heywood
This is part of work in progress on Beth Harland’s reading of Proust and what it may have contributed to her painting practice. The connection between painting and time was of special importance to Harland.1 Once thought about, however, it quickly becomes clear that each of these ideas can be approached in a large number of different ways. Here I explore in particular the notions of sensation and the inner life, both closely linked to memory and the experience of time –topics of obvious significance in Proust’s novel– and their importance to a poetics of painting that interested Harland.
Moyra Derby’s recently published article (Derby 2021) is perceptive and persuasive about important aspects of the painting practices of Jacqueline Humphries, Beth Harland and R.H. Quatyman. The issues discussed belong to what she sees as the contemporary conditions of painting practice, that is, aspects of the current historical period pertinent to painting. Derby identifies two main challenges painting must confront arising from this setting. These are a visual culture dominated by digital screen images and a troubled relationship with images in the history of painting.
It is entirely legitimate for Derby to concentrate on strategies developed by her painters in response to their times. Her interpretation of chosen quotations sheds valuable light on their ideas and methods. Offering a supplement to rather than criticism of Derby’s account I suggest that while elucidation of problem-solving strategies is important other aspects of painting practice also deserve attention.
Many who knew the late Beth Harland are aware she loved the writing of Marcel Proust. Thinking about her close reading and reflection on the work of Proust might help us understand her approach to critical and creative practice.2 In Search of Lost Time (À la recherche du temps perdu) and Contre Sainte-Beuve (published in English as Marcel Proust on Art and Literature) –often seen as an important preliminary to Proust’s great work– set out ideas about these other dimensions of artistic practice. Solitude, inwardness, desire, sensibility, the experience of passing time and memory play an important role in Harland’s painting and writing, and their presence and the critical and practical rigour she applied to them can be appreciated more clearly through an examination of what she found in Marcel Proust. I will also suggest that these topics –summarized under the headings of sensation and the inner life– are not simply optional concerns for painters but unavoidable.
Harland, like many others, probably enjoyed Proust’s writing for its obvious literary qualities. Yet when an artist repeatedly refers to a writer in reflections on her work we can suppose she has discovered something creatively useful. That is, despite different circumstances, it seems that Harland found in Search a world that resembled and illuminated her own, and that she was drawn to how Proust was not only responsible for this fiction but also how he responded to its claims on him as an artist and thinker.
Derby’s prefatory discussion of her three artists focuses on a connection between the contemporary image-regime and the commodity form. Like money, the virtual image lends itself to thoroughgoing abstraction, a restless, infinite succession of replacements, substitutions and transmissions of ‘value’ in which the politics of worth is negated by the force of radical hermeneutical corruption. The image, a group of marks and colours that resemble something or which possess meaningful coherence in their own right, has become under modern technological and social conditions conspicuous, prolific, highly mobile and replaceable, in other words images dissolve into a burgeoning, transactional image-process. The image cannot be itself, cannot unfold its own possibilities, but serves other purposes, specifically the dynamism of an image-process on the one hand and the interests of the digital commercial and political economy on the other.
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The practices of Humphries, Harland and Quatyman are treated by Derby as attempts to address the challenges posed by contemporary image culture and image history. It is important to note how the idea of a timely strategy depends on a notion, an interpretation, of our common historical situation. It is also relevant that Derby and her painters explicitly consider painterly sensations, perceptions and states of consciousness, but do so in the light of putative historical conditions for painting. In effect Derby’s reading offers a cogent rhetorical defence of painting, meaning by this a skilled effort to persuade the listener of the truth of a belief sincerely held by the speaker, not baseless eloquence or cynical manipulation. She does so by representing our times in such a way that views and actions of her painters show up as rational, reasonable or even necessary. This is not to say that Derby’s account of the times is idiosyncratic; Humphries, Harland and Quatyman themselves present aspects of what they think and do in just this way. In another context we might want to ask what circumstances have made this kind of historicist rhetorical apology necessary.
While the problem-response model is informative it is also partial, particularly so I want to suggest in the case of Harland. Put slightly differently, a consequence of treating practices primarily as oriented to solving specific problems raised by a structurally constraining social and cultural framework is diminished focus on other things artists might be trying to include in their work. I have in mind the impact and meaning of sensations, perceptions and feelings as they play out in the consciousness and lives of artists and their audiences, specifically about intentions with respect to the painterly significance of sensibility and the inner life, beauty and expression, and aspects of painting that serve these purposes.3 Sensibility and the inner life should not be thought to have significance only insofar as the subject cares about them; the sensations, desires and reflections of singular individuals gain substance through the awareness and response of others. They are important because they matter in themselves, and because their intrinsic value is related to the activity of making art. For example, the narrator of Contre states that becoming a writer requires the labour of solitude, not just the state of being alone but achieving creative density by rejecting second-hand thoughts and words, by ’stopping our ears against those phrases which belong to others.’ (Contre, 103) Even more starkly the act of writing is described as ‘the secretion of one’s innermost life, written in solitude and for oneself alone, that one gives to the public.’ (ibid, 104)4 For the artist and her audience this means paying scrupulous attention to the constituent features of inner life as they find shape in her work.
The psychological and social environment of Search as it appears to Proust’s protagonist Marcel is however, as many critics and analysts have pointed out, highly mutable, unstable, often misleading or ambiguous, making the possibility of reliable knowledge of self and other highly problematic. Marcel suffers disappointments and disillusionment when he confronts the reality of what he had imagined to be elevated social circles, artists and connoisseurs, and charismatic individuals. Additionally, the need to know what is really going on behind the lies, snobbery, subterfuges and evasions he uncovers or suspects is a core Proustian preoccupation, a major feature of Marcel’s experience of the novel’s major characters and in particular of his tortuous relationship with Albertine. Marcel’s problems with grasping the inner lives of others are also closely related to his difficulty understanding himself, and this relates in turn to his struggles to comprehend and regulate three aspects of himself: his intuition (faculté intuitive, sensibilité), intellect (intelligence, raison) and will (volonté). Arising from his sensibility in the form of a subjective truth, what he thinks he desires often turns out to be unwanted or tiresome when attained. He knows, however, that desires can rob his intellect of clarity. He also sees that while his reason is vital to the many judgments he cannot avoid making he also believes its impersonality is inimical to art. Finally he is aware that his will sometimes compels him to act independently of his instincts or reasoning. Things never stop moving,
changing in time in their appearance and meaning, in their emotional impact, in memory and anticipation. How time itself is experienced is unpredictably variable. In this context is a continuous, coherent self possible, let alone the growth of a writerly self? As Marcel puts it: ‘my life appeared to me as something utterly devoid of the support of an individual, identical and permanent self.’ (Proust 1992, The Fugitive, 802-3, quoted by Landy 2004, 102). Marcel thinks he is a writer but in these circumstances becoming what he is is anything but straightforward.
In sum, the events and characters of Search are of course fictional, and Marcel cannot be treated as straightforwardly voicing the views of Proust. Yet it is reasonable to believe that Proust’s world, which finds complex expression in the novel, is meant to be recognizable and credible, that some of its principal features form part of the experience of his readers. Through the figure of Marcel the novel asks how, in this setting, one could possibly go about becoming a writer. Even more broadly, it asks after the possibility and significance of art and the artist in such a world, and nearly every page makes it clear how much the inner lives and sensory consciousness of its characters matter, not only to the narrative but to what the novel, as a work of art, must attend to. My intention is to explore how Beth Harland may have responded to Proust’s fiction, the world it represents, and his thoughts about writing and art, each of which presents psychological, philosophical and aesthetic challenges but also new opportunities for painting practice. We might imagine Harland saying, having reached the closing words of Time Regained, ‘I know this uncertain world. While testing, it’s possible and exciting to work within it.’
References
Derby, Moyra (2021). ‘The Productive Inadequacy of Image for Contemporary Painting. Image Based Operations in the Work of Beth Harland, Jacqueline Humphries and R.H. Quaytman’, The Journal for the Philosophy of Language, Mind and the Arts, 2(1), 205-220.
Girard, René (1966) Deceit, Desire and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure, trans. Y. Freccero, Baltimore and London: John Hopkins University Press.
Harland, Beth and Ryan, David, ‘Painting and Time’, editorial, Journal of Contemporary Painting, Volume 4, Number 1, 1 April 2018.
Landy, Joshua (2004) Philosophy as Fiction: Self, Deception and Knowledge in Proust, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Proust, Marcel (1884) Contre-Sainte-Beauve: Marcel Proust on Art and Literature, trans. Sylvia Townsend Warner, London: Hogarth Press.
Proust, Marcel (1992) In Search of Lost Time, trans. C.K. Scott Moncrieff, Terrence Kilmartin, D.J. Enright, London: Chatto and Windus.
1 See Harland and Ryan (2018).
2 Also important were the writing and outlooks of Giles Deleuze, Roland Barthes, Michael Fried and W. G. Sebald.
3 See Gerard’s remark about the importance of ‘certain inoffensive words’ in Search, like ‘habit, sensation, idea or feelings’, forbidden to authors by the fashionable philosophy the 1960s.’ (Girard 1966, 230)
4 See also Joshua Landy’s (2004) view that the projection of a singular sensory style or perspective is not only the precondition for the formation of a ‘writerly self’ but also the hallmark of art.