by Adrian D’Ambra
I’ve really only just begun wading into Hanya Yanagihara’s spiral-shaped constellation of a novel, A Little Life (Picador, 2015), and I’ve come across this most perfect of paragraphs: “No one was there, he realized. The room was his. He felt the creature inside him – which he pictured as slight and raggedy and lemur-like, quick-reflexed and ready to sprint, its dark wet eyes forever scanning the landscape for future dangers – relax and sag to the ground. It was at these moments that he found college most enjoyable: he was in a warm room, and the next day he would have three meals and eat as much as he wanted, and in between he would go to classes, and no one would try to hurt him or make him do anything he didn’t want to do. Somewhere nearby were his roommates – his friends – and he had survived another day without divulging any of his secrets, and placed another day between the person he once was and the person he was now. It seemed, always, an accomplishment worthy of sleep, and so he did, closing his eyes and readying himself for another day in the world.” (p. 99)
If you don’t believe me – and I don’t (please forgive me) see any reason why you shouldn’t! – try reading it aloud, weighing and measuring it for its rhythmic balance, its simultaneous counterbalance of EITHER this OR that, it’s capacity for revelation and withholding. Alongside the careful balancing of past and present, person and creature, it’s the circumspection of the content that I value so much. This is a paragraph about a fictional character named Jude St. Francis. As Yanagihara discloses a little something of his survival narrative in this paragraph, I find myself responding as though Jude is a living entity in front of me, a friend, an acquaintance, someone I’d like to get to know better: I want so much to know so much more about his background, his suffering, and yet I find myself simultaneously respecting his privacy, his right to silence or reveal his story as he sees fit. The accomplishment of miracles – food, shelter, school, sleep, friendship, especially friendship – is more than enough for one miraculous paragraph to share with us…
This is the surrender that you look for sometimes in your aesthetic appreciation of art, suspending momentarily not only your capacity for disbelief but your propensity to critical analysis. I found myself thinking about this the other night as I walked away from Frances O’Connor’s 2022 film Emily, an imaginative reconstruction of the life of Emily Brontë. Emma Mackey’s performance in the title role was emotionally overwhelming. In fact, it was just as vertiginous as that first experience of total immersion in one of the Brontë novels, the wrist slashing on the broken window pane, the girls freezing and dying of typhoid fever in their school dormitory, those dangerous encounters with Heathcliff or Rochester. These moments in art – the dizzying performance, the ecstatic prose, the visual beauty of Emily, the poise and counterpoise of Yanagihara’s paragraph – what these moments require of us is aesthetic surrender.
An Afterthought:
MATERIALIST: Should art facilitate the critical analysis of society?
AESTHETE: Yes, it should.
MATERIALIST: Should art educate the masses, raising their awareness of the world around them and their consciousness within it?
AESTHETE: Yes, why not?
MATERIALIST: Good, we’re in agreement then!
AESTHETE: Not quite total agreement.
MATERIALIST: Why not?
AESTHETE: Because you didn’t ask me the next question!
MATERIALIST: I don’t have a next question.
AESTHETE: But I do…
MATERIALIST: And what is it?
AESTHETE: Should art stimulate awe and wonder in the viewer?
MATERIALIST: That’s just bourgeois claptrap, the illusions of individualism. In fact, even in aesthetic terms, I’m sure Socrates put that one to bed in Plato’s Republic.
AESTHETE: Desire, love, passion? Hubris, anger, hurt, grief?
MATERIALIST: But consciousness and education count for so much more.
AESTHETE: Solidarity in the face of human experience and suffering – do you educate for that, is your mechanistic action-reaction, thesis-antithesis-synthesis enough to stimulate that solidarity? More importantly from the point of view of the artist and the viewer, why should you assume that there is only one way of stimulating it?
english literature teacher 