Discipline + Blank Canvas

[recognito]

Discipline, Pham - I've been in a prose reading rut lately and checked out a few recently published books for some light reading. Discipline is a novel about Christine, a former painter, who writes a novel heavily inspired about her romantic and sexual relationship with her male mentor. She abandoned painting after her experiences at her MFA and "disappears" into her persona as a writer. While on tour for her novel, the mentor contacts her and invites her to his cabin in Maine. She goes, seeking—revenge? Closure? Affirmation? All of the above?

Naturally, this made me think of Blank Canvas: My So-Called Artist Journey, an autobiographical künstlerroman manga by Akiko Higashimura, a prolific shoujo manga artist most famous in the anglosphere for Princess Jellyfish. Higashimura details her childhood ambition to be a manga artist and her relationship with Hidaka, the man who ran an art school/cram school in her hometown. The mentor-mentee relationship is totally different here, along with the perspective, tone, and genre; on the other hand, it's hard to think of another work that's similarly preoccupied with painting, talent, fine arts, and not becoming the artist you thought you'd be despite your mentor's expectations. Putting these two works together really made me think about some of my dissatisfaction with contemporary novels from an aesthetic perspective…
 

 

I do think it's a bit unfair to pit Pham against Higashimura, who published Blank Canvas ten plus years into her career as an artist, at a point where she, like many manga artists, has a small studio of assistants to help her produce dozens of pages of manga a month, while Discipline is Pham's first novel and has the typical problems with a first novel: odd pacing, over-determined thematic passages that feel wonkily integrated, and a meandering plot hyperfocused on interiority combined with a suffocating atmosphere that makes it hard to really enjoy it. Blank Canvas comes to us after Higashimura's a known and celebrated master of her craft, while Pham is still getting her footing.

This discrepancy in their mastery of their genre is heightened by both of them being of similar ages at the time of publication: Higashimura at 36, Pham (by my rough calculations) in her early 30s, and both of them with fine arts degrees in studio painting. For Higashimura, fine arts were something she did almost accidentally: she had a secret ambition to become a manga artist but wound up attending a fine arts cram school, which led her to a painting degree. By Higashimura's admission, she did not have a successful painting career in school; she spent her whole time cavorting with friends, playing in the snow, and drinking. She's crushed by the expectations around painting and fine arts, despite her skill and talent. At the end of the final volume, Higashimura shows a photograph of her university self working on a painting… the canvas is huge???? no comment on the quality aside from "looked cool to me, a dude who's not a painter." Higashimura today is a highly productive artist, whose training in the fine arts led not necessarily to a heightened artistic ability (her early editor is like, "your comic skills are quite bad!") but the capacity to work without tiring—a valuable skill for a manga artist who must put out 50+ pages of comics each month.

It's odd because I do think that Higashimura's life in the manga is actually way more "unrelatable" than Christine's life is in Discipline—I think because Higashimura's life includes people who are disappointed in her, people who like her; it's a world of her peers, friends, family, coworkers, underlings, editors, and art, while Christine's life, as depicted in Discipline, is basically consumed by the bitterness over her inability to paint.

The protagonist, Christine, has just finished her first novel and is doing the publicity tour, which, true to life, consists of going to readings in different states and sleeping on people's couches and/or housesitting to save on expenses. Her book tour leads her to one-on-one encounters that consist of high level conversation about replication, real life versus art, painting, and the reinvention of the self, combined with flashbacks and exposition of back story that detail Christine's past as a painter and how she flamed out of her studio painting MFA program after a sexual encounter with her advisor. The conversations Christine has at each stop on the tour varies wildly in quality and interest. The first two conversations, unfortunately, are excruciating to read: Christine's conversation partners are both academics, one in biology and one in gender studies. They describe the subjects of their research in a way that sign posts the thematic significance (Wow! Life Dictates Art But Not Exactly! It's Not Perfect Symmetry! + the importance of online roleplaying. in queer communities……..) but without a sense that Christine has any kind of interest in the topic—it does remind me of a trick that Rachel Cusk uses to stage her Outline novels, but, well, less successfully… the conversations with Christine's friends are more interesting, thankfully.

I'll be honest here, the depiction of her life in the literary world is not particularly enlivening to read—you have the feeling that she's basically entombed by her failure to paint and has used this failure to move onto an even less interesting world of art than the painting. Like many contemporary novels, Discipline wants to demonstrate knowledge by reciting procedures, but the real experience of work is not in explaining cell signalling pathways or preparing canvases; it's sitting around being bored, wasting time, wanting to be distracted, neglecting your life, neglecting your art, calling your mom, arguing with your dad, checking your coworker's LinkedIn, haggling for more PTO, and so on.

These endless descriptions of workplace procedure and process end halfway through the novel. The back half of Discipline details Christine staying with her former MFA advisor's house in Maine to confront him about their past, where they talk at length with each other about life, death, the past, legacy, and so on. The advisor, Richard, is dying of cancer; he's shut himself away so he can paint and try to make amends? Try to correct the record? It's hard to tell what his motives are. I don't mind ambiguity, but the actual action and plot feel like they're treading water until the dramatic final scenes, which are not particularly good…

I do feel like an impulse some writers have is, "This scenario wouldn't play out like that. It'd play out like this!" but the scenario in question is a direct riff on #MeToo and sexual abuse scandals in the art world, in a time where it's hard to tell just what fine arts play in wider culture. Today, fine arts and academia go hand-in-hand, and in both worlds, there's the sense that money, relevance, and popular appeal are bleeding out of them. Like, who are these novels for? Who are these paintings for? If Higashimura finds herself applying her fine arts discipline and art skills to an audience of young women who literally read and then throw away her work each month, then the end point of these fine arts canvases is what? To be viewed and then critiqued by a group of fellow artists?

One of Christine's classmates from undergrad, Frances, has continued to paint. Frances is an ambivalent figure, heroic for her commitment to her artistic vision and style and technique, yet critiqued for producing work that's ultimately commercial that doesn't "push" outside the boundaries of conventional subjects. It feels like an odd statement for a novel that itself plays on a commercially appealing topic without making a big departure from familiar forms and figures. I also feel like Pham's prose here is not doing much for me. A representative paragraph from the first half of the novel:

I wasn't even sure I liked this iteration of him, the one who had learned how to package his previous suffering into neat narrative. I felt guilty for missing the person he had been when he was in a bad way. It wasn't, I thought, that badness made you interesting, or that pain was what proved us to be human. I wasn't upset he was doing well. But he had lost the edges of his personality, the oppositions, the nooks and crannies I used to be able to dig a finger into and tug at to pull him closer to me. Or—I considered this—perhaps he still had those edges, but they were different now, and I had lost my referents, and could only see the pristine, immaculate self he had been smoothing and shaping for years, as if trimming pottery on a wheel. There was a stage that clay got to, I knew, before it was fired in the kiln, where it had lost some of its moisture and arrived at something called leather hardness. It was still a little flexible then, dark in color, not brittle or powdery, and it could be trimmed with a sharp tool. The walls could be thinned, the curvature of an undulating knob or the lip of a jar more clearly defined.

I wanted to push him, to test whether this new self had really become this hardened, and I kept looking for any scent of that wickedness in him I had loved. …

At first glance, these paragraphs are inoffensive, but I'm not thrilled by the alliteration early in the first paragraph, a gesture to a poetic styling that then gives way to "in a bad way" or "proved us to be human" or "nooks and crannies," all inelegant stock phrases… then we get to "referents" to describe a personality (okay) that's then combined with the pottery metaphor, which feels a bit misplaced—a referent connects a literary/verbal sign to the concrete, while personalities are abstract and pottery is visual and concrete... so Christine has lost her familiar references, not referents...???? The metaphor goes on too long for me and doesn't build nicely: like, why "push" in the second paragraph when the previous paragraph ends with a knife? What do you mean you're looking for a scent??? The whole book is full of these infelicities, and in a book that's doing so much to convince us that the protagonist could have been, might still become, one of the greats of the fine arts world, and tries to style the protagonist as a writer, I do expect… I don't know, prose that doesn't make me mutter, "You need more than alliteration to make it sound good" to myself.

My basic feelings of the book is that it's an all right first novel, but I'd never think to reread or recommend it to like, anyone………… it does make me interested in Pham's art criticism—she does a great job with describing the texture and thickness of paint on the canvas, and I had a good time googling painters while reading. So lmao maybe I will read her nonfiction and report back.

I do really strongly recommend Higashimura's Blank Canvas, though... it's nakedly sentimental and uh if your mom's ever unloaded on you about her regrets, it may remind you of that. But in a much more fun and enjoyable package. My sense of what art is and how to make it is really tied up in this tension between the discipline to produce work and the fact that living your life feels like you're wasting time even when your life is also part of the material you're using for writing/motivation, so I think Higashimura's sensibilities are more aligned with mine in that respect... in any case, I'm really, really, truly, truly going to finish my Ikoku Nikki review any minute now. for real!!!!!!

Comments

[mellific]

My sense of what art is and how to make it is really tied up in this tension between the discipline to produce work and the fact that living your life feels like you're wasting time even when your life is also part of the material you're using for writing/motivation [...]

great sentence. sucks to be an artist KSLDFJ no uh. rip. handshake????