A Strange Necessity: Rebecca West, James Joyce & the artistic impulse

Why does Art matter? What is this strange necessity?

–Rebecca West

…the closer you try to approach the facts through history, the deeper you sink into fiction. The greater the care with which you explain a fact, the more nonsensical a fable you fish out of chaos. – Halldór Laxness, Under the Glacier

In her book-length essay The Strange Necessity, philosopher-writer Rebecca West observed how the creative act could be thought of as a completely holistic and natural force in the world. In the act of creating, the artist becomes a part of nature, fused and connected to the natural world. West’s metaphor of the natural artist is ; “determined and exclusive as the tree’s intention of becoming a tree, and by passing all his material through his imagination and there experiencing it, he achieves the same identity with what he makes as the growing tree does.”[i][1]

Strange Necessity claims the actions of an artist, in the process of creation, comes out of a biological necessity, an unstoppable urge bound up with natural primal desires. The artist is never in total control of the process of creating, but is only fulfilling a natural process bound up within life. The necessity that West explored can be simplified as the “spiritual impulse”, an intuitive connection and higher realm, beyond thought or emotion that resides in the creative act. West further identifies a fundamental unity between all art and experience. The creation of artwork is an engagement with life, a process that’s transcendent, connected with a spiritual purpose.

The Strange Necessity is a moving portrait on the motivations of an artist. In her concluding chapters, West shifts to the exaltation and spiritual function a work of art performs on the individual. It is a relationship to art that borders on the sexual: “I have…this crystalline concentration of glory, this deep and serene and intense emotion that I feel before the greatest works of art… It overflows the confines of the mind and becomes an important physical event…Is this exaltation the orgasm, as it were, of the artistic instinct, stimulated to its height by a work of art…”[ii] This spiritual and orgasmic manifestation of art is noted in the grandiose and sublime landscapes of Frederic Church and J.M.W. Turner, the floating abstraction of Kandinsky, in the mathematical genius of J.S. Bach and Mozart, or the poetry of Melville and Poe; all works that commune with the soul on a metaphysical landscape. This pull toward the spiritual, sublime and orgasmic was fundamental to the development of modernism. Inside Jazz, abstraction, visual art, poetry and fiction, were the release and attributes of a mind in exaltation of the orgasm.

West used the example of a single day of city life to investigate the novel as a creative act and the moving effect of art on her own life. An intensive study of Joyce’s Ulysses takes place inside a single day of West’s life within her home in the city of Paris. This doubling of art and life was itself at the very center of Ulysses, which also takes place in a single day in the life of James Joyce. This entwined process of art and life becomes like an image reflected in a hall of mirrors. Joyce never made public his notice of West’s criticism, however he wrote a scathing put-down of her and a parody of Strange Necessity within his novel Finnegan’s Wake. West takes the example of Joyce as a motivating pendulum in all the arts. The passage of a spiritual or natural transformation from one artist to the next often occurs between written and visual worlds. The simultaneous fractured time and cubism within Joyce is reflected in Picasso paintings, comic books, a Bach concerto and  jazz riffs.

The way art is expressed through society, the way it’s supported, taught, encouraged and rejected, is often based on the timorous relationship between artist and patron and the political mechanics of the time. During times of wealth and industry (the Renaissance is the most obvious example), this relationship can be developed fruitfully and become a concentrated force.

The relationship of funding and material support in the arts is illustrated in Ezra Pound’s comment that, “Great art does not depend on the support of riches, but without such aid it will be individual, separate, and spasmodic: it will not group and become a great period… a great age is brought about only with the aid of wealth, because a great age means the deliberate fostering of genius, the gathering-in and grouping and encouragement of artists.”[iii] This careful balance and support of the arts is often shaken and disposed of in times of great social upheaval and despair, yet this “strange necessity” is present in all eras, and should be viewed as a constant interior force.

Forces of spirit or metaphysics which effect and drive the artist, is a theme often overlooked and diminished. From the nineteenth century “art reform” to contemporary theorists, metaphysical and spiritual influences continue to be downplayed or ignored. The opening of early nineteenth century America to its vast resources and its “manifest destiny” has been a clear source of our nation’s spiritual tensions and troubles. The drive onward instead of inward creates uneasiness and an emphasis on earthbound desires. Conditions of genocide, war, racial divisions and destruction of land and resources can only be reconciled or balanced by spiritual solutions or the transformation of consciousness –conditions that are universal in the art process.

West declared America itself as part of a political necessity; a country of belief and action balanced on a life or death situation. America evolved into existence because of the necessity for freedom, an idea constantly tested and often betrayed by many of America’s leaders. It was once believed that America was founded on and contained the seeds of spiritual freedom, and served as a beacon for other nations. That noble idea of spiritual freedom has gradually been replaced by a slide into greed and selfishness.

The idea of spirituality as unbounded space, without restraint, serves the arts and the areas in which art flourishes. New York City once came close in the 1930s and 40s as a site where the arts could flourish without boundaries. During the development of the ashcan and abstract expressionist schools      modernism took root, at least a modernism outside of European influence. That heroic past has been documented closely and mythologized, yet, the story of cheap rents, artist garrets and a pioneering spirit is not exclusive and is one we return to again and again, in many sites around the globe.

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postscript:

Beauty in things exists merely in the mind which contemplates them. –David Hume, Essays Moral and Political, 1742

The Eighteenth century philosopher David Hume (1711-1776) remained unpopular and  mostly unread until the mid-twentieth century. His idea on beauty was that it existed as fragmented perceptions in the mind. That the mysteries and beauty we seek in art are always “impressions of the mind” –the thoughts and feelings we carry within us through comparisons of experience. Hume said, “power and necessity… are… qualities of perceptions, not of objects… felt by the soul and not perceived externally in bodies”[iv] That fragmented-self idea was later embraced and radicalized by Gilles Deluze and the poststructuralists. We are all parts of a greater whole and the process of art is nothing less then the universe being itself and seeing itself.

The eternal return is woven through the fragmented-mind and its removal of the object of our passion. The artist is on a feedback loop where art and the mind are always one.

[ii] The Strange Necessity, p. 210-211

[iii] Ezra Pound, Ezra Pound and the Visual Arts, Harriet Zinnes, Ed.,  (New Directions, 1980) p. 266

[iv] David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, (New York: Dover, 2003 edition), p. 168

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