Relentless

We could and should violate the

orderly logic and discipline of the story, but we must never ever violate what

constitutes the exclusive and essential character of a person,

that is, his personality, his way of being, his own, unmistakable nature.

This is from José Saramago’s novel

The Cave. One meaning it has for me

is that art is relentless. Every artwork develops (in the course of its

creation) its own exclusive and essential character, its own personality, its own

way of being, its own, unmistakable nature. If it

doesn’t have that, what’s the point?

The artist then must be true to everything that’s in the

work of art. If someone in a novel — a character the readers like (and whom the

novelist may like as well) — has to die, then that character must die. If a

composer hoped a piece of music would be pretty, and

suddenly it isn’t, (because of how its inner nature suddenly developed), then

the music won’t be pretty. Novelists often describe what this is like by saying

that their characters develop lives of their own, but it’s true for every art,

music most definitely not excepted.

Weak art either doesn’t have its own, unmistakable nature,

or else isn’t true to the essential character it starts with. A small example: the

movie version of The Devil Wears

class=SpellE>Prada, a film so disarming, so entertaining, that it

hardly needs criticism. But at the end, it tries to have its cake and also eat

it, to be realistic about something not exactly pleasant, but also show a

happier alternative. The world of fashion, depicted in the film, is a

class=SpellE>snakepit. The naïve heroine succeeds in that world,

discovers that she’s lost her soul, quits, and then finds her truer self by

working for a newspaper.

But that won’t work. The newspaper, the “New York Mirror,”

is of course a major metropolitan daily. In real life, a place like that might

be just as much a snakepit as any major fashion magazine.

So a fully artful movie would have shown the woman tested once again. Art (as

opposed to fairy tales, which also have their place) should

be relentless. Happy endings should be realistic, earned, and just a bit

provisional.