Wednesday, September 13th, 2006...2:33 pm
Week 2 with Patrick White
September’s The Monthly features an article by academic Judith Brett on writing her new book (with Anthony Moran) “Ordinary People’s Politics”. In it she says:
“Intellectuals’ autobiographies are full of stories about how ill at ease they felt with the people among whom they were born, the trials of solitude and how they never feel quite at home in the world. Sometimes, the tale is one where the intellectual or artist does eventually find people with whom to feel at home, socially or geographically far away from the place of their birth. Sometimes, the restlessness and alienation is endemic. Much twentieth-centrury intellectual history was driven by a critical and avant-gardist energy which pushed many intellectuals to explore the margins of social worlds and the dark side of human existence,and to expose the costs and repressions of particular socieites and moral systems.”
And what with it being September, and the month for reading The Vivisector with the Patrick White Reading Group, my mind immediately leapt to consider Mr Hurtle Duffield/Courtney and his aloneness. It’s come up in several discussions (check Laura’s round-up and in particular her post about Hurtle’s “self-enfoldness” – and isn’t that just a beautiful phrase?).
At first I thought of the obvious example of the Germaine Greer/Clive James/Barry Humphries expatriate crowd who had to leave Australia to live the lives they needed too. But I was also reminded of the the sense of self observation that people learning Buddhist meditation techniques are encouraged to develop.
I don’t think Hurtle’s manner is at it’s heart cruelty, as some have suggested. Rather, I see it as a lack of sentimentality and attachment. I think the perception of cruelty can arise when people around us are unsentimental and detached, because those modes of interacting are not socially or personally reassuring. We are supposed to be attached to our families.
It’s possible too, that his manner of dealing with his families is based in anxiety rather than rejection. He wants to write to father Courtney “and tell him he loved and understood him, better even than before his fall from omnipotence”. But doesn’t. Or can’t. And why, after Rhoda writes to tell him that his father is dead does he carry around for days a piece of paper, a pen that won’t work and a pencil (which he breaks) – unable to write a word, but able to overcome his muteness with a drawing. [SPOILER, I THINK, AS I HAVE LOST TRACK SOMEWHAT, BEG PARDON] Why does he later rip up his letters – every letter – immediately?[/SPOILER]
Hurtle doesn’t have enough energy to properly play the social games that ease our lives and to be an artist. And in one sense, it’s understandable – the child was sold, for money. And that kind of real social grace is in itself an accomplishment.
It’s easy to forget that while his manner is difficult for those around him, the art part is hard work for him. Artists first have to be able to look, and it’s hard to turn off that critical scrutiny. And poor Hurtle cannot function without an avenue of creative expression:
“Occasionally he made drawings, little more than notes, which couldn’t relieve his cynicism, nor his rage for physical exertion. He belched sour, and often wondered what had ever persuaded him he might become a painter. Later on he realised he had been expressing himself in his house: a wood-carving of necessity.”
It’s a necessity not only to have somewhere to live, but to be making.
And going a bit meta here, one thing I’ve found a bit tricky is whether we’re supposed to have read or be reading the nominated section at the time we’re discussing it (not that there’s some hard and fast rule). I’ve tried to get a bit ahead, and I think it makes things slightly awkward, although the additional context does make reading everyone’s comments more interesting. Next time, I think I’ll try and wing it a bit more.
14 Comments
September 14th, 2006 at 1:41 pm
Without participating in the PWRG…the Tall Poppy syndrome stuff is no doubt a heightened, particular Australian version of the marginalisation of intellectuals, which is something I suspect might happen almost ‘naturally’ (if I can use that word) in many instances, but be particularly, well, heightened in Australia, for various reasons to do with its short settlement history.
I had a conversation recently with a friend on a kinda similar subject to the first part of your post in which we agreed that all the truly brilliant people we’d known (I don’t just mean smart) were also barking mad (and were often challenged in some way in the social skills dept). We hypothesised that the reason was that they were so bright, they’d always felt misunderstood and on the outside of things, etc. Then I read an article in a lifestyle supplement on gifted children, which said that one sign that you had a talented child was that they were socially well-adjusted, and thought ‘Ha, bollocks to that!’
But then, I suspect Paddy White was in the brilliant but barking mad category himself.
I also think that intellectual people are often just a lot more comfortable operating in a rational modality, so they don’t develop more touchy, feely dimensions to approaching life (some of which can seem irrational to a more logically minded person). And isn’t the buddhist detachment thing a kind of warm, beaming, enlightened detachment rather than a cold, aloof, observational western detachment — if that makes sense?
September 14th, 2006 at 1:52 pm
I agree elsewhere – the people that I know who are “severely gifted” (did you know the terminology for gifted people uses the same gradations as for people with disabilities?) aren’t the happiest sparks, either. Did you see “Broadcast News”, where someone trying to be mean to Holly Hunter’s character says “It must be wonderful to always be the smartest person in the room.” – she looks anguished and says “No! It’s terrible!”
As for the rationality – many years ago a severely gifted friend used to “save up” her feelings from the day to have in bed just before going to sleep. Which was utterly bewildering to a generally overemotional ENFP cancer such as myself!
I don’t know if I agree about a buddhist attachment being “warmer”; although I think the temperamental and social consequences of that kind of attachment are certainly warmer. The coupling of “aloof” with “observational” was what I was really trying to get at – how much an artist’s scrutiny takes you out from amongst the world.
September 14th, 2006 at 4:18 pm
Yes, but in that apparent detachment from the world, it doesn’t mean that you might not be feeling things as intensely as other people, just that you’re clamping down on expressing what you might feel (she says, starting to argue things from the opposite direction).
As a stresshead Virgoan INTJ, I’m afraid I’ve developed an emotional shelving system where I often go ‘I’m not going to think about that till after work — or till next week — or whatever, or I’ll just get too worked up about it and I won’t be able to do what I have to do now.’ It’s a form of compartmentalisation I suspect is rather male in style (and is often about conflict-avoidance).
Hey, where did that fascinating shrouded gravatar come from?
September 14th, 2006 at 4:29 pm
Would you believe my partner is a Virgo? And my boss? And my mother in law? And my last boss? I don’t know what that says about me ; )
The burqa is the default gravatar. You can free yourself by registering one at gravatar.com – it then will pop up on gravatar enabled sites when you enter your email. And you can buy one on eBay.
On the detachment – I think you’re right that the intensity isn’t different, it’s how the person (buddhist practitioner, artist, whoever) integrates it. Hmmm. Must think more about this.
(And going meta again, I haven’t written about a book for so long that I felt weirdly undergraduate and embarrassed doing so.)
September 15th, 2006 at 2:57 pm
Oh my, I’ve got that Friday afternoon feeling. Here’s a post I blogskipped to from BibliOdyssey on the horrible process of making art.
September 15th, 2006 at 3:04 pm
Zoe, are you an academic?
If so, what is your field of expertise.
I find the avatars interesting: confronting but somehow exotic.
September 15th, 2006 at 3:33 pm
No, but I work for one.
September 15th, 2006 at 3:42 pm
There’s nothing for spicing up your day like outlandish headgear, Darlene.
September 18th, 2006 at 5:45 am
[...] Zoe at Crazybrave makes some very useful observations about the much-discussed subject of Hurtle’s supposed “cruelty”: she thinks it is better described as “a lack of sentimentality and attachment.”: I think the perception of cruelty can arise when people around us are unsentimental and detached, because those modes of interacting are not socially or personally reassuring. We are supposed to be attached to our families. [...]
September 19th, 2006 at 11:37 am
Good thoughts Zoe. I finished the book on my flight back from Brisbane on Sunday night and found myself thinking about it all night in my keyed-up post-travelling state.
I agree about Hurtle’s aloofness and his self-enfoldedness; but what I find repellent about his character is his incredible lack of empathy. And not in a ‘ooh you poor thing’ kind of way, but rather, his almost autistic inability to see others around him as fully complete human beings. He is the only human being he recognises. Like someone who performs operations on animals and doesn’t recognise that they feel pain, he cannot grasp that those around him might be as fully-realised as people as he is. So yes, barking mad genius, and possibly autistic savant as well.
September 20th, 2006 at 3:17 pm
I wonder Kate whether he doesn’t register that they are fully human, or whether that is irrelevant to how he acts?
September 20th, 2006 at 4:12 pm
The one interesting fact that I took away from my entire BEd. degree was that the further you are to either end of the intelligence bell curve, the more diffuculty you have relating to other people, unless they are like you. So supersmart people can only relate to other supersmart people cause no one else can understand how they think, and they can’t relate to people who ‘just don’t get’ things that to them are really simple, like quantum physics.
September 20th, 2006 at 8:01 pm
Not sure Zoe — seems to me to be both. Even when he has empathy for others he can’t bring himself to do anything about it, but mostly he seems to view other people from a long, long way away. Note when I say repellant, it’s not that I’m not enjoying The Vivisector, just the reaction I have to Hurtle’s character.
September 21st, 2006 at 10:13 am
Yeah, I see what you mean. I’m busting to finish to make it easier to talk about!
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