The Line (2004)

I have a problem with the line.  I refuse to draw it.  I’m not denying that fantasy and reality have separate existences, nor am I denying that it’s a good idea to have a solid grasp on the difference between the two.  I’m only expressing personal distaste for the line.  This distaste for defining fantasy and reality in strict terms will undoubtedly have profound effects on my real life.  Some of these effects might be – and probably already have been – quite negative.  But my feelings about the line have nothing to do with my real life.  It’s my concern for maintaining a healthy relationship with the arts that makes me suspicious toward the line.

I realize it defies logic to put art before life.  But the problem for me is that art does in fact draw from life.  If I formed definite boundaries in all my thoughts, including those in my real life, it would affect my writing in ways that I don’t want.  If I were to define my life in an exact way, it would make my art exact in a way that I don’t want, in a way that I don’t choose.  And after all, I’m not the only one who has a problem with the line.  There are always a great number of artistic sorts who are unwilling to draw it.  It’s a naturally occurring phenomenon.  Maybe it has something to do with maintaining a balanced ratio in the artistic pool.  Some draw the line way up here, others way down there, and some refuse to draw it anywhere at all.  Somewhere out of all of this comes an eloquent – if not always coherent - expression of the art forms in their various facets.

In Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert expresses his opinion that the line has got to be drawn somewhere.  There is fantasy; and there is reality.  The line needs to be drawn more firmly between the two.  If it is not drawn, the ramifications are dramatic.  Disaster will ensue.  A beautiful woman will have affairs, ruin her family, and take her own life.  In this view, Romanticism is out of control.  It consumes everyone and everything that it touches. Romantics have to be saved, says Flaubert.  They are a liability and burden to their families, a menace to society. 

And yet, Madame Bovary is fiction. Every story necessarily makes the line blurry to a greater or lesser degree. And like all things that are reacting against something, Madame Bovary over-reacts.  Flaubert was trying to make a point, so he chose a dramatic way to do it.  Emma Bovary is supposedly drawn from real life, and from these sorts of out-of-control feelings.  But is she really?  She’s as silly a fictional creation as any Romantic heroine.  Perhaps things were more dramatic and miserable than I realize in France in the 19th century, but Madame Bovary’s struggle with the line seems like a rather extreme case.  Not one in a million goes mad and commits suicide while grappling with the line, just as not one in a million people who play role-playing games go psychotic and chop up their friends with a battle ax, as some conservative groups would like people to believe.  Refusing to draw the line doesn’t necessarily create a cruel, superficial, reckless person.  Emma Bovary is just one portrayal of what could happen.  But her example – a fictional example, no less - is blown up so large, it’s made to seem like some kind of ultimate portrayal.

I think a more accurate description of the struggle with the line would be Thoreau’s “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.”  And the line, of course, isn’t so much of an actual line.  It’s probably more like a Dead Letter Office, as in Melville’s “Bartleby the Scrivener,” where many attempts are made to reach, without ever achieving the aim.  Quiet desperation is the result.

In one of my own stories, a character named Dobbs is trying to reach through music to find what lies beyond. As I wrote the story, I considered that I was just trying to describe what it feels like to listen to a Romantic composer, specifically Robert Schumann.  But one day while listening to Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos, I realized that Dobbs’s fevered attempts to reach into the voids of Schumann’s music are actually my own efforts.   Bach’s music – and Baroque music in general – has no such voids.  Instead, it’s driven by a dynamic tension – a kind of tension that I deeply admire.  This tension – this line – in Baroque music comes from man, feet firmly planted on the ground, reaching for the eternal.  There is a line there – man in the clay, God in the heavens - and it makes a beautiful tension.  Romantic music (and Romanticism in general), on the other hand, has something unhinged about it, something dangerous.  Romanticism didn’t merely dabble with the line a bit, but attempted to erase it altogether. The line is not drawn in Romanticism.  There is still the reaching for the eternal, but feet are no longer planted on the ground.  Instead, it’s like soaring at great heights. It’s dizzying. And the tension there is not a taut, dynamic tension as in the Baroque.  The tension comes from wondering how far you can reach into the void, wondering if you can go all the way, and what will happen to you if you do.  It’s not quite certain whether it’s very good or very bad. 

All of this poses an interesting dilemma for me on a personal level.  I deeply admire dynamic tension, but I refuse to draw the line.  Is there any way to have dynamic tension while at the same time refusing to draw the line?  Can I be pragmatic in one realm while reaching into a void in another? 

I think the answer might lie in irony, if irony is defined as more than one consciousness existing in the same space at the same time.  That’s a paradox, but most answers that have ever made any sense to me were paradoxes.  If two consciousnesses can exist at once – as happens in irony – then one consciousness could remain grounded, and one could reach eternally at the same time, in both art and life.  The dynamic tension is between these points. Rather than the ignorant consciousness/informed consciousness of irony, the tension is between a grounded consciousness/infinite consciousness, with no absolutely defined lines.  I think this kind of dynamic tension must underlie a lot of modern literature, including the fantasy genre, when the fantasy genre is actually good.  It’s a lot of what makes The Lord of the Rings work.   

I’ve always refused to draw the line.  I have always insisted that if I can imagine something, it can somehow exist.  It has nothing to do with logic.  I just insist.  My mother insists, with equal conviction, that there is only one possibility of existence – for example, that loneliness is the only possible state of being.  I argue with her not because I have any evidence to the contrary, but on the grounds that I refuse to accept any lines.  If something is impossible in the human condition, and yet I, in the confines of the human condition, can imagine it, then why shouldn’t I at least try to portray it?  If this dynamic tension between the imagined and the real exists in the most inward part of the human condition – within one’s mind — then it seems an outward portrayal of this tension is only logical and natural.   My earliest memories as a very young child are lying in my crib, playing with my feet, making up very simple stories, and imagining feelings and things that I couldn’t experience in reality.  To fail to convey the possibilities of those experiences onto the page would, to me, defy logic.  If the tension exists in the very inward-most condition, then the tension must exist on an outward level, too.  Different kinds of consciousness must exist at the same time, eliminating the need for an exact line, and forming a dynamic tension that drives creation. 

There’s nothing unnatural or silly about this tension and the desire for the imagined – that is the human condition.  Reality by itself is not the human condition, which is what makes Madame Bovary a silly representation.  Accepting fantasy may be too simplistic, but completely rejecting it is also too simplistic. Absolute fantasy may not exist, but neither does absolute reality – at least not in my experience.  Reality when married to the infinite is the human condition, and the resultant tension pervades everything. And though I have a firm grasp on the difference between reality and fantasy, I refuse to draw a line.