I’d like to tell you the story of a friend of mine, let’s call him Billy; well he’s not really even a friend, just someone I know. Last year at 'Everything...' I told the story of how Billy tries to get what it is that he really wants. This year I’d like to tell you about Billy’s self-doubt about whether or not he is an artist; or not.
It often struck Billy as odd that he was supposed to know what he actually felt, let alone what he wanted. People would ask Billy, ‘How do you feel Billy?’ or even simply ‘How are you Billy?’ and Billy would think - oh God, don’t ask me that, please don’t ask me that because I don’t know do I; do I? - while replying ‘Fine thanks’. As a child Billy would dizzy himself, his ‘I’ arguing with his ‘me’, trying to understand what it was he actually felt about something. Now, as an adult, lying awake at night desperately wanting to believe in something, he pours over the day in minute detail, still dizzying himself to the point of nausea in an attempt to understand what it is that he actually feels.
Given that he couldn’t make out what it was that he was feeling, it should come as no surprise to us that he didn’t really know what it was that he did either. But whereas he could at least reply to people who asked ‘How are you Billy?’ with the nicety ‘Fine thanks’ even while thinking - oh God, don’t ask me that, please don’t ask me that because I don’t know do I; do I? - it was less easy (that is more difficult) to reply to the question ‘What do you do Billy?’ with such an nicely turned nicety as ‘Fine thanks’.
You see the thing is, Billy was an artist, or at least sometimes he was an artist - a Live Artist - (“What, as opposed to a dead one? Haa ha ha ha heeee heee heee haaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!”) and that wasn’t always the easiest thing to say when people asked ‘What do you do Billy?’ not least because he wasn’t too sure what a Live Artist was himself.
Before he could determine whether or not he was an artist, Billy had to work out what an artist was. What is an artist?
Billy didn’t recognise himself or ‘what he did’ in those people who most confidently asserted that they were artists. Neither did he recognise himself or ‘what he did’ in the work of those people who most confidently asserted that they were artists. Nor did Billy recognise himself or ‘what he did’ in what most people commonly called art.
For example: paintings; of landmarks; sold at major tourist attractions around the world.
Another problem Billy encountered was that if he was going to say that he was an ‘artist’ then he was going to have to make art. But when he made art, people (that is people who weren’t going through the same problems about whether or not they were artists) would say to Billy ‘but is it art?’.
How can I be an artist, Billy thought, if what I do engages the question ‘but is it art?’. (He might have missed a trick here! Perhaps someone should have told him that if people bothered asking the question, then it probably was.)
But was it art that Billy made? And where is the border between art and not art?
(At first when people said to Billy ‘but is it art?’, Billy would get a bit upset and would reply ‘not if you don’t think it is!’).
Then, when people asked Billy ‘but is it art?’ Billy didn’t really know what to say. Yes he thought it a stupid question - and he was continually amazed by the persistence of people’s need to fix through some kind of labelling rather than to experience things for what they were, although he didn’t deny that something identified as art would make it different than what it would be if it wasn’t contextualised and understood as art, so he did ultimately think that it was important to state that is was art, and also to point out that this problem of ‘being’ (art or not) was more than likely part of the strategy of the art itself. So when people would ask Billy ‘but is it art?’ he would invert the question.
BUT IS IT ART?
would become…
ART IT IS BUT…
‘But what?’ people would respond. ‘Indeed’, Billy would say, ‘But what?’. (Which wasn’t always very helpful of Billy but at least it stopped people from asking questions because somehow they thought they had an answer, which in a way they did, because the ‘but what?’ was perhaps where the artwork was functioning, that is between something that was understood as art and something that wasn’t quite understood.).
To forget all these conflicting ideas that were torturing his poor mind, Billy accepted an invitation to a Christmas drinks party from the neighbours across they way. Billy had only experienced these neighbours thus far through the Hitchcock ‘Rear Window’ affect of peering across the communal courtyard. He was excited about the possibility of seeing the inside of the flat that he had only ever glimpsed through a distant window and even more excited about the possibility of seeing his own flat from the outside through a distant window as a distant window. This seeing the outside from another inside is perhaps emblematic of the problem Billy faced in trying to determine how he was perceived by others in the world. (Maybe that’s over doing it. It was after all only an invitation for a drink with a neighbour.) Billy arrived at the party and noticed that people were quite, well, posh. A bit older than him. A bit taller than him. More smartly dressed than him. And he suddenly became very anxious indeed when he realised that of course everyone there was a complete stranger to him, including the host, and that they were all going to ask him ‘what do you do Billy?’. The panic which occurred at this realisation was multiplied one-hundred fold when the host volunteered the assembled crowd for a game of what she called: ‘guess what I do for a living’. (I know it sounds unbelievable but it’s true. Billy was horrified at the prospect of this game given his fear of the question that lay at its premise but couldn’t help seeing how perfectly poetic the whole thing was. It was almost as if the whole world had engineered a turn towards him, that his neurosis had become the centre of the universe, and he pretty much abandoned himself with a perverse schadenfreude to become a malicious specator of his own fate.) As the game got going (“OK Justin, you guess what people do round in a circle, and when you get somebody’s job correct, they take over, but you have to keep going until you get someone right.”) Billy realised that actually this might not be too too bad because, well, it was really up to someone else to say what it was that he did and he would hopefully only have to explain it once, and that if Justin, or whoever it was, happened to say ‘artist’ then at least, if Billy replied “yes”, he wouldn’t have to say that word: “artist”, which always sounded so constipated on his tongue; as if all there was to come out was shit and not even that would come out.
Justin went round the circle. He thought the first woman was “probably a mum” but his guess was denied, so he went on to the next person. The next person, Billy had already established before the game was announced, was a dentist. “I think you work in the City,” Justin said, “a banker, or trader.” His guess was denied. He wasn’t doing very well so far. In fact Justin didn’t guess anyone correctly and Billy noted that he had a very limited imagination for thinking of jobs. Women were by and large ‘mums’ and men worked in the City; which as it turned out later in the evening, merely described Justin’s own situation. When he got to Billy, Billy could actually hardly wait, I wonder if he will think that I work in the City too, Billy thought, (or be a mum). “Well you’re in the media,” Justin said. Although Billy recognised that there was a kind of a grain of truth in this statement he enjoyed responding with a firm “No!”. “Well it’s something like that anyway, something arty,” Justin said dismissively, looking Billy up and down. At this point the host, fearing her game was not really going according to plan, and wishing she had not chosen Justin to go first, she decided to abort the game. “We’re going to have to stop this now or no-one will ever have an opportunity for proper conversation, so why don’t we all just say what we do once and get it over with. So Billy, if you’re not in the media, what do you do?” [Long Pause] “I’m in Criminal Law,” Billy replied with perfect diction. Everyone seemed to perk up. “Oh!” said the host, “how fascinating! Any interesting cases at the moment?”, “Well yes actually,” Billy replied, “at the moment I am working on rather a nasty alleged murder of a boss by a disgruntled city employee; but I’m afraid I can’t talk about it in any detail.” Etiquette provided a perfect excuse and the host moved on to the next person in the circle.
If there was one thing that Billy couldn’t stand, it was lying. He didn’t like it when other people lied to him (and he could often tell that they were) and he never felt it acceptable in himself either. But he had to admit to himself that he loved telling these complete strangers that he was “in Criminal Law” and loved noting the change in the way that they viewed him once they had been told. Billy decided in this case that it wasn’t so much that he had lied but rather that he told a kind of behind the scenes truth. His performance of ‘being’ a Criminal Lawyer betrayed his artistic strategy; that in responding to the presumption that he did something ‘arty’ with the statement that he was “in Criminal Law”, Billy had problematised the common sense assumptions and stereotypes that people who go round for drinks have and that this is what it meant to be a Live Artist and that it didn’t therefore matter that he wasn’t ‘in fact’ a Criminal Lawyer, in any way except in the twisted world of his own lying words.
Erm, well, that is what Billy told himself anyway.
All this was going round and round, back and forth, in Billy’s head, but after just a couple more minutes he put his drink down as if to use the lavatory and slipped out of the party, back across the courtyard to his own flat, where he had to keep the lights off for the rest of the evening, so that the host wouldn’t see that he had in fact just left. He hadn’t even remembered to look at his own flat from the outside through a distant window as a distant window as he had hoped. His predicament still lay unresolved.
Lying awake that night wondering what to believe in and what it was that he was, what his friend called his ‘true north’ (which actually Billy thought was quite a confusing and problematic term) Billy remembered A la recherche du temps perdu, the great work of fiction by Marcel Proust which follows the long apprenticeship of a writer, writing towards the moment of writing. Much of the gargantuan seven volume work is occupied with the protagonists problem of working out what he is and what he does, if he is a writer and if writing itself is of any use anyway.
A la recherche du temps perdu traces the writer-narrator’s movement towards writing. This movement is configured as a narrative journey towards the commencement of writing. His longing to be a writer; his lack of qualification and self doubt in his writing ability; a doubt in literature itself and its transformative potential; delay and deferral from writing; the feeling that time is wasted and time is running out to do the work that has to be done. It all sounded quite familiar to Billy.
The narrator longs ‘someday to become a writer’[1], for a ‘literary career’[2], in the hope of becoming a ‘famous author’[3]. This ambition is obstructed from the start by his father ‘refusing even to dignify it with the title career’[4]. The narrator is wracked by doubt, thinking that he has a ‘lack of qualification’[5], that he would ‘never have any talent’[6], that his ‘imagination and sensibility had weakened’[7], that he had a ‘lack of talent for literature’[8], that he ‘had no gift for literature’[9]. He says, ‘If ever I thought of myself as a poet, I know now that I am not one,’[10] and even more dramatically, ‘I possessed the proof that I was useless’[11]. Oh yes, Billy could identify with this guy. Paradoxically, Billy realised, such enunciations of self-doubt increase towards the end of this multi-volume work; the narrator articulates his uselessness as a writer only two-hundred-and-fifty pages before the end of a three-thousand page work of writing!
Coupled with this self-doubt, is a doubt of literature: ‘Until now, I had concluded only that I had no gift for writing; now M. de Norpois took away from me even the desire to write.’[12] This is a world in which ‘literature […] had no very profound truths to reveal’[13] and in which the narrator not only chastises himself but also raises ‘objections against literature’[14] itself. He remarks on ‘the vanity, the falsehood of literature’[15], and convinces himself ‘that literature could no longer give [him] any joy whatever’[16].
This doubt in his own ability and doubt in the power of literature, manifests itself in a delay in the process or act of writing. The narrator records that ‘scarcely had I sat down at my desk than I would get up’[17]; he records his intention ‘to enjoy working, as soon as I was well’[18], declaring his frustration, after one-thousand-three-hundred pages of the work: ‘If only I had been able to start writing!’[19]. This deferral is a consistent theme of the A la recherche du temps perdu: ‘I promised Albertine that, if I did not go out with her, I would settle down to work. But…’[20]. The ‘but’ says it all. Billy had his ‘but’ too.
The narrator’s memory of the frustration at his incapability to start writing is matched by his memory of the ‘wasted years’[21] through which he is yet to pass in the course of his narrative. He is pressed by the urgency that time is running out:
'When I reflected that [the] trees - pear-trees, apple-trees, tamarisks - would outlive me, I seemed to be receiving from them a silent counsel to set myself to work at last, before the hour of eternal rest had yet struck.'[22]
It is only two-thousand-seven-hundred-and-fifty pages into A la recherche du temps perdu, as the work builds towards its climactic end (and thus the commencement of writing) that the narrator can finally disregard these concerns. Tripping up on a paving-stone on the way to dine with the Duchesse de Guermantes, he finally gets a grip of what his intellectual subject is:
'Just as at the moment when I tasted the Madeleine, all anxiety about the future, all intellectual doubts had disappeared, so now those that a few seconds ago had assailed me on the subject of the reality of my literary gifts, the reality even of literature, were removed as if by magic.'[23]
Billy was eager to note that the discovery which makes ‘death a matter of indifference’[24] to the narrator is that of involuntary memory, the essential past as captured in the present moment.
'And I understood that all these materials for a work of literature were simply my past life. […] And thus my whole life up to the present day might and yet might not have been summed up under the title: A Vocation.'[25]
The possibility of becoming a writer of doing the job of finding a vocation is presented as a precarious future to which the road is tortuous, thought Billy. And yet the beauty of A la recherche du temps perdu is that already at the beginning, when the narrator is an adolescent within the context of the narrative, he has shown through the writing how he will become a writer, in the future.
But this was not just a literary conceit. Even Proust himself, Billy Friday had to recognise, even Marcel Proust, who wrote the magnum opus A la recherche du temps perdu, widely acclaimed as possibly the greatest work of literature ever written, even Proust, didn’t know what it was that he was. Like his narrator, Proust works towards the moment of writing. In the 1908 ‘carnets’, Proust’s surviving notebooks, which have been published in facsimile, a scribble reads:
'Peut’être dois-je bénir | ma mauvaise santé, qui m’ | a appris, par le lest de la | fatigue, l’immobilité, le | silence, la possibilite de | travailler. Les avertisse | ments de mort. Bientot tu || ne pourras plus dire tout cela. | La paresse ou le doute ou | l’impuissance se refugiant | dans l’incertitude sur la forme | d’art. Faut-il en faire | un roman, une étude philosophi | que, suis-je romancier?'
…which roughly translates as:
'Perhaps I should bless my ill health, which has given me, through the weight of tiredness, immobility, silence, the possibility of working. The warning signs of death. Soon you won’t be able to say all this. Laziness or doubt or helplessness hide the uncertainty of the form the artwork will take. Should one make of it a novel, a philosophical essay, am I a novelist?'[26]
It is clear then that even as late as 1908, and only just before Proust embarked upon the writing of one of the most important works of literature that has ever been written, he didn’t really know what he was! Am I a novelist? he asks. Billy thought that if Marcel Proust couldn’t work out what he was, how was he, Billy Friday ever going to work it out. But then Billy thought that if not even Marcel Proust knew what he was then maybe he, Billy Friday, shouldn’t worry too much. Maybe this ‘what am I?’ is what it is that made Billy Friday an artist after all.
Billy tried to remember the words of the important German artist Joseph Beuys: ‘Jeder Mensch ein Künstler' - ‘Everyone is an artist’. While he knew that Beuys didn’t really mean that everyone was an artist that made artworks in the conventional sense of fabricating objects, happenings or performances, and that Joseph Beuys really meant simply that everyone had the capacity to see the world with the same hungry eyes (or ears or mouth or nose or touch) that an artist has, nevertheless, Billy knew that Joseph Beuys wouldn’t have batted an eyelid before asserting that Billy Friday was, indeed, an artist.
But while he may have worked out what he is, Billy Friday still doesn’t know what he feels.
[1] Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time Vols 1-6 trans. by C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D. J. Enright (London: Vintage, 1996) Vol.1 p.207
[2] Ibid. p.213
[3] Ibid.
[4] Ibid. Vol.2 p.11
[5] Ibid. Vol.1 p.213
[6] Ibid. p.12
[7] Ibid. Vol.6 p.2
[8] Ibid. p.22
[9] Ibid. p.39
[10] Ibid. p.202
[11] Ibid. p.216
[12] Ibid. Vol.2 p.26
[13] Ibid. Vol.6 p.22
[14] Ibid. p.33
[15] Ibid. p.202
[16] Ibid. p.216
[17] Ibid. Vol.2 p.178
[18] Ibid. p.449
[19] Ibid. Vol.3 p.166
[20] Ibid. Vol.4 p.85
[21] Ibid. Vol.3 p.459
[22] Ibid. Vol.4 p.476
[23] Ibid. Vol.6 p.217
[24] Ibid.
[25] Ibid. p.258
[26] Marcel Proust, Le carnet de 1908 établie et présenté par Philip Kolb (Paris: Gallimard, 1976) 10 vo / 11 p.60-61. I am grateful to Caroline Bergvall for pointing out this note to me and also for her translation of the French.