742: “Now we come . . .”
What a Piece of Work I Am, Chapter 47 concludes
“Now we come to Greg himself,” she said, and added her middle finger to the tally. “As I said, you’ll get no false modesty from me, so here is my immodest claim: next to myself, Greg Tschudin is my greatest creation.” With her right hand, keeping the three fingers extended, she made the motion of crossing her heart. “I love the way he looks in that story, don’t you? When he first appears, striding into Corinne’s, as lanky and handsome as the hero in an old Western, he’s the only animated figure in the scene—did you notice that? He’s the loner, the artist, the outlaw hero, vivid against a background of drones, Shane standing out against a lowering sky. And I think the dialogue between Greg and me at the bar is quite good. I’m proud of that. He seems so confident, confident even to the point of arrogance, but his confidence is forgivable, even laudable, since it’s the kind of monomaniacal self-assurance we admire in men— Enthusiastic crowd noise.
“—and in artists, and especially in artists who are men.”
Applause, the stamping of feet.
“We justify it—happily—by claiming that it’s the attitude one must have to do great things, to get great things done. Notice that while Greg seems strong and confident, I seem coquettish and playful, and I seem to be in over my head. Subtle, huh? Misdirection, the secret of sleight of hand. An especially good touch, I think, is my self-deprecating claim that I didn’t know what a cynosure was, when the truth is—”
She leaned toward the audience as if she were going to tell them the truth.
“—that when I was a little girl and people asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I would say—”
They all saw it coming, so they laughed in advance. Ariane put her knees together and shrugged her shoulders, twisted and squirmed like a little girl, and pouted attractively.
“—a sigh-no-shoo-uh.”
Laughter and applause.
She dropped the little-girl act and said, “The kind of simplicity I seem to display in that story can be very seductive. We all know this. We’ve all used it. Right, girls? Haven’t we? I’ve used it often, when it has suited me, and I’ve seen you respond to it—”
She singled out someone in the first row and pointed at him.
“—so I know it works.”
The man she pointed at reddened but applauded along with everyone else.
“That’s something else that I like: the fact that I included you, the audience. Did you notice? You’re there, in the bar, watching—you are those guys sitting at the bar, of course. But wait—what are you doing there, in an episode that is supposed to take place before the work began, in an episode outside the work, that is, before I went on display? Including you was my clue—not a big, clumsy, obvious one, but a little, graceful, subtle one—to the artistic treachery of it all. When I look at you in the mirror—in my story—and play to you, I’m introducing the worm that will eat the falsehood out of the center of the story and make it collapse. There I am, playing for an audience when I’m supposed to be entirely ingenuous, a petite naive.
“You say to yourself, ‘Something’s fishy. Something doesn’t ring true. That little lady knows more than she’s letting on.’
“Correct! Correct! Thanks for noticing. You are the audience I want! Please take a seat—one of the good ones, up close. I’m so glad to have you here. I need you. It’s impossible to have a real, honest-to-goodness work of art—”
She took a graceful, elaborate bow.
“—without audience participation. I threw in the acknowledgment that I knew you were there for our pleasure—yours and mine. We artists do this all the time—throw something in just to please ourselves and you—the best of you. We find a way to turn our work inside out, like a sock, and let you see how the knitting was done. We open the stage door and let you in to see the chaos behind those unforgettable onstage moments. And in my case, since I’m an artist of the self, I let you see me naked—”
An expectant shuffling.
“Well, of course. You’ve had ten years of that, haven’t you? But I mean truly naked, in those moments when I’ve let my shell go transparent for you and you can actually see me. I know that only the sharpest of you notice what I’m doing, but you’re the ones I work for—not the ones who glance and walk by, certainly not them, but you, the ones who stand up close, breathing all over the work, inspecting every dot and stipple. We need each other, you and I. Without you, I’m just a woman up here talking to herself, and without me, you’re only someone sitting in the dark. There’s a bond between us. We’re bound by tacit, reciprocal promises, exactly as if you had been hitchhiking and I stopped to pick you up. As soon as you hop into my car, as soon as you walk through the door of my little theater, you agree to let me take you for a ride, and I promise you—well—I promise you that the ride will be worth your while, more interesting than walking, that the little time you spend in my company will be less disappointing than it would have been if you’d spent it alone.”
[to be continued]
In Topical Guide 742, Mark Dorset considers Art: The Reciprocal Relationship Between the Artist and the Work; and Artist, Work, and Audience from this episode.
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