In 2000, I went to the Guggenheim in Bilbao and saw a show called, "Degas to Picasso: Painters, Sculptors and the Camera." The show charted the use of photography by fourteen artists at the turn of the twentieth century. Looking back on descriptions of the show, I gather that the artists on exhibit made various uses of photographs; but what I remember, what particularly impressed me, was the idea that a core of two or three images or concepts could and did nourish these (or some of these) artists through their entire careers. Degas' horses and ballerinas, Gaugin's Tahitian women and (although they weren't in the show) John Singer Sargent's society ladies, James Rosenquist's spaghetti and Philip Guston's cartoon Klansmen, light bulbs and shoe souls all seem to be examples of this phenomenon.For the past nine years I've been thinking about that argument and wondering: are two or three concepts really enough for a lifetime?
My musings received more fodder when I read the following passage in Colm Toíbín's The Master:
[Henry James] did not realize then and did not, in fact, grasp for many years how these few weeks in North Conway - the endlessly conversing group of them gathered under the rustling pines - would be enough for him, would be in, in effect, all he needed to know in his life. In all his years as a writer he was to draw on the scenes he lived and witnessed at that time, the two ambitious, patrician New Englanders [Oliver Wendell Holmes and John Gray], already alert to the eminence which awaited them, and the American girls, led by Minny [Temple], fresh and open to life, so inquisitive, so imbued with a boundless curiosity and charm and intelligence.(p. 102.)
Of course, novelists often rework familiar territory. Marilyn Robinson's Home is a retelling from another perspective of her novel Gilead. Philip Roth's The Plot Against America gives us a Jewish family from Newark recognizable from his other novels. Joyce Carol Oates fictionalizes lurid news stories. What's Milan Kundera without Communism or Jane Austin without Britain's class system?
Still, despite the evidence, I'm not convinced. Two or three ideas seems like fuel for a decade, not a lifetime . . . unless you're defended or restricted from, or uninterested in, the wider world.
Granted, most adults are not continually open to world throughout their lives. As Toíbín's Henry James explains in The Master, referring to Isabel Archer,
decisions [about] matters of duty and resignation were often more easily made than . . . . "leaps in the dark. Making such leaps requires us to be brave and determined, but doing so also may freeze any other possibilities. It is easier to renounce bravery rather than to be brave over and over. . . . The will and never needed for such actions do not come to us often."(p. 324-325.)
The "two or three concepts for a lifetime" theory strikes me as a byproduct of stasis, laziness, oppression or other barriers to making "leaps in the dark," those terrifying risks that reinvigorate one's supply of motivating ideas.
On the other hand, maybe "two or three concepts" represents an intrinsic limit in human capacities, a reflection of the human penchant for imposing familiar, convenient and appealing constructs on the external world - the likelihood that, having leaped into the dark, you'll find there a variation of what you thought you were leaving behind.
For myself, if two or three concepts are animating my work, I'm not seeing them yet. Certainly, I could identify common themes for my novels, but I think doing so would be a process of post-hoc rationalization. If I've had my North Conway experience - if I've stumbled upon the well to which I will return year after year, novel after novel - I don't know it.
Perhaps I haven't found or can't recognize my life-long subjects yet. Or potentially I'm outside the "two or three concepts" paradigm. Or, maybe, rather than leaping in the dark, I'm free-falling.
(James Rosenquist's F111 from Aasavina)
