The artist is plagued in a way that the audience is not. It's relatively easy to be satisfied as a reader, a listener, a passive observer. The effort we put in is minimal, so whatever reward we gain is sufficient.
Yet some works go beyond the expected perimeters of artistic gratification -- and often go beyond the audience almost completely. Or do they? What I find so wondrous about these works is that they are so real. They have the capacity to touch people in the bases of their souls, to knock their asses off stools and send them sprawling on the floor. They lack majesty, by nature unconcerned with bullshit so they can reach for and dig at the roots of humanity.
I don't mean to sound like a snob; we don't have to be well-educated to find beauty or the sublime in art. And I don't mean to restrict this sensation to only the "fine arts" familiar to us. What I find equally inspiring and stunning is that people have found ways to communicate what cannot be articulated in everyday speech.
Which is what brings me back to literature. The only medium fiction writers work in is everyday speech, but they employ other tools to create something embedded with much more than can be implied through intonation or suggested with gesture. For whatever reason, people accept metaphor, for example, much more readily when its presented in fiction than in quotidian life. This is evidence that there are certain expectations that come with art, which separate it from "real life." We allow the artist to experiment (in fact, we expect him to) and are ready to forgive him if he fails to produce the desired effect. Why is this, why do we hold art in such high regard, even more so than our own lives? How is it that people view the mission so admirable, but don't attempt it themselves? (In contrast, upon learning the story of the self-made millionaire, we certainly don't lack the cowardice to try following in his footsteps.)
The only place I'm going with all this is right here. Today I finished Julio Cortázar's "The Pursuer" ("El Perseguidor"), which is going down as one of my favorite stories of all time. Until it's all been absorbed and forgotten, I don't want to read anything else. Not even the last story in his collection. "The Pursuer" is a tribute to all great artists. The narrator, Bruno, is a jazz critic, as well as the friend and personal biographer of saxophonist Johnny Carter (in reality, Charlie Parker). The story itself is a criticism -- of jazz, of Carter, of Bruno, of critics. By critiquing jazz, he inherently critiques Carter and vice versa. By critiquing himself, he critiques all criticism. . . . It's easy to see how it gets messy. But what I found most compelling was how Cortázar, or Bruno, described man's pursuit of some greater truth through these two voices, one of the said rational critic, the other a wholly self-absorbed artist who rambles schizophrenic daydreams to anyone who'll listen. And even more so, his skepticism of one being better off than the other.
