Yeats claimed it was possible to achieve perfection in art or in life, but not in both. We know that art can be messy and that artists’ private lives may reflect this. We also know that great artists rarely double as bank managers or stock brokers. Yeats may have been echoing Auden’s famous comment that art makes nothing happen.
The reverse belief can be disastrous: German leaders during the last world war exploited the theories of the great composer of opera, Richard Wagner. A century before, Wagner mixed art with politics. He urged the youthful King Leopold to believe that Germans could be inspired by a combination of saga and gloriously emotive music to win wars, thereby gaining power and prestige for their native land. Nowadays however, art and life are kept at a distance from one another.
Yet writers muse. Since art was once seen as holding up the mirror to life, what is the connection between art and life, if any? A mirror reflects what comes before it, with one difference: the mirror-image is a reversal of the reality it reflects: it is, in fact, back to front.
Reading Joanna Trollope’s recent novel “Daughters in Law”, we see a messy world upon which the middle class seek to impose comfortable order, and generally fail to do so, resulting in family mess rather than outright catastrophe. A main character is Anthony, artist and family man, who befriends a female art student, teaching her the difference between subjective artistic interpretation and the reality it represents; how aspiring to “correctness” can inhibit artists; the importance of abandoning an eraser. When the student girl later marries into Anthony’s family, difficulties arise in reconciling artistic concepts with domestic peace, and erasure becomes a necessity in the form of tolerating ambiguity, turning a blind eye, forgiving and forgetting.
Reading, on the other hand, Terry Pratchett’s “Wyrd Sisters”, what we see is a world that is indeed back to front, based on fantasy. In a shadowy Shakespearean context, brother slays brother for a kingdom, a forest comes alive, time stands still and witches struggle to restore to power the rightful heir. But these witches have a problem. Magic can “suture” wounds inflicted by random reality, much as art can. But neither can actually change reality, since to do so would be to corrupt both magic and art to the extent that they would cease to be themselves.
What to do? How to make art survive and enable magic to happen?
The witches hit upon an answer to this age old problem. The answer is the power of words. Words become even more powerful than reality, eventually stretching so far as to create reality. The pen proves mightier than the sword. Thus contemporary post-modernism meets up with “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”, a novel which, it is popularly claimed, did more to end the practice of slavery in America than the events of the Civil War.
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