Wiseman’s Old Woman at Play and the Structure of Enigmaby J.M. KertzerThe “structure of enigma” is a phrase used by Adele Wiseman near the end of Old Woman at Play1 to indicate the interplay of form and mystery that governs æsthetic perception. In this essay I wish to examine her striking, oxymoronic phrase and to show how its two opposed yet complementary terms illuminate the theory and practice of her own book. The terms “structure” and “enigma” are not necessarily antagonistic, but they resist each other. Structure suggests all that is regular, regulated, formed, composed, organized, determined: it is the orderliness of order. Enigma suggests all that provokes, entices, teases, but also baffles the orderly work of the intellect. An enigma is meaningful, but it is not clear exactly how it is “full” of meaning, that is, how it contains or permits the significance that it evokes. Wiseman’s phrase brings the two terms together in a playful way. It indicates the structural features of enigma — how an enigma is formed; yet it reminds us of the enigmatic qualities of structure — how forms, despite their rigour and discipline, remain mysterious. Through co-operation and rivalry, the two terms help Wiseman explore how we think about art æsthetic theory) and how art permits us to think about the world æsthetic cognition). Old Woman at Play not only discusses these issues, but displays them in the course of its argument, since the book is a work of art about the playfulness of art. The narrative appears to be a random compilation of memories and comments, but is really a carefully crafted fiction in its own right. Needless to say, it is a fiction not in the sense of being false, but of using literary resources to portray character, to dramatize ideas, and above all, to create a compelling “world” “with its own separate, coherent vitality, its own resonance” (119). For Wiseman, integrity and vitality are the marks of true art, the first reflecting its obedience to structure, the second its unruly, enigmatic life. I propose to examine the integrity and vitality of art by studying first the form and then the theory of Old Woman at Play, analyzing in each the interplay of structured enigma and enigmatic structure. The form of the book illustrates its theory, a neat confirmation of the dominance of structure. But as I hope to prove, the form also questions the theory, its neatness, its efficacy, and its power to subdue the unruly life of enigma. In effect, there are two theories at work in the book, one explicit, the other implicit but manifest as a persistent doubt, undermining the confidence of the artist. First, however, let me turn to Wiseman’s formal consideration of form in art. Form: memoir as epic romance It may seem odd to treat Old Woman at Play as an epic romance, since it is a brief meandering memoir about Wiseman’s mother, her mother’s dolls and the family history. Nevertheless, Wiseman has given a clue to her formal intentions when she describes the lecture that she gives about the dolls:
These comments illuminate Old Woman at Play, which begins by asking “Why do you make dolls, mama?” and then traces Wiseman’s erratic quest through her mother’s “world” in pursuit of tantalizingly incomplete answers to questions about the origins and ends of art. The book can be read as a female epic — short in length but expansive in argument — in which a daughter embarks on a voyage of discovery through Canada and Europe in search of her mother who, “Crafty as Ulysses” (137), has travelled from an enchanted past to a tedious present. As in traditional epics, we find heroic exploits and trials of courage; riddles, villains and fabulous creatures (the three-headed calf); concern with family, migration and lineage; epic catalogues of the mother’s “treasures” (37, 110); glimpses of hell (the holocaust); reverence for the artist as the “oracle of the very spirit of his culture” (131); and an obscure sense of destiny. In her quest, Wiseman is a daughter in two senses. She seeks her mother’s counsel not only because of actual kinship, but also as her imaginative offspring, that is, as a novelist. Both women are artists, and the girl must learn the secrets of her craft from the parent; she must return “in middle age, to kneel as a small child again, at my mother’s needles. . .” (3). The lessons learned through the meeting of generations illuminate Wiseman’s novels, which repeat this scene, but I do not intend to follow that line of argument. Instead, I wish to pursue the formal implications of filial affiliation, sustenance and obligation. These relations suggest the intricate literary / psychological / familial links discussed by Harold Bloom in The Anxiety of Influence and subsequent books, but with an interesting difference. Bloom’s theory is directed by a masculine ethic (or perhaps neurotic) according to which every “strong” poet must re-enact the Oedipal fight with the father by contesting origins in order to win originality, by winning his own position through a savage, futile yet liberating conflict with tradition. Poetry is “trespass” and “transgression” waged on a “psychic battlefield” and aiming at “creation-through-catastrophe.”3 In contrast, Old Woman at Play proposes a feminine ethic in which there is little struggle between generations, who co-operate rather than compete. There are epic catalogues, but they are of domestic, useful things. Mrs. Waisman is “crafty,” but only in her craft and in her care for family. We never lose sight of “female history . . . the experience of wet hands and working fingers and the incredible earthquakes of birth. . .” (40). The artist has female traits, and Wiseman illustrates emblematically the temperament she prefers:
Retiring yet outgoing, submissive yet active, strenuous yet patient — these are the female traits that Wiseman contrasts to epic male aggressiveness. In her interview with Roslyn Belkin, she again praises the modest, ephemeral nature of needlework in contrast to the “male world which has expressed a desire for permanence through their art, through their conquests, etc.”4 Instead of æsthetic aggression, she prefers æsthetic patience, which is rewarded by those “Baffling, pregnant correspondences which trace persistent tracks in the individual imagination, shape the constant questions and the uncertain answers” (53). Note again that art offers provisional answers rather than heroic certainty. From the fertile network of correspondences comes the unity that Wiseman treasures, that brings her as close as she gets to mystical experience, and that binds her to her mother, not as a rival, but as one: “She was simply a part of us, as much of her as we could get. . . . It was the fulness of this still-living experience which she offered her children in all its dimensions, open for our exploration, like an extension of our own living space. Because of it our lives have seemed to flow through each other” (30, 54). The daughter was drawn into the imagination of her mother, just as now the mother is being drawn into the artistry of her daughter. As described here, the artistic/female cast of mind and emotion com forts, heals and reconciles through the disclosure of kinship, which is a warmer name for relation and structure. Instead of masculine trespass and transgression, we find feminine forgiveness and transcendence. The form of Wiseman’s argument is dialectical in the sense of synthesizing unruly, rival forces in a common fate. As we shall see, dialectic too proves to be an enigmatic structure, but at this point it promises to recognize form in the midst of disorder, kinship in the midst of dispute. In the course of her quest, Wiseman continually discovers dramatic, conceptual and rhetorical dualities, which she proceeds to shape into a workable pattern. For example, she presents contrasting, often comical encounters between the two main characters, mother and daughter, each with a distinctive voice of her own. Mrs. Waisman’s style is further divided into “the beautiful, subtle perfection” (55) of her native Yiddish, and her broken but incisive English. The two languages unite at the climactic moment when she finally declares her beliefs, and speaks first in halting English, then with a sense of revelation in flowing Yiddish-rendered-as-English (123-24). Her experience too is fractured by a pattern of competing dualities that Wise-man eventually recognizes as the leitmotif of her mother’s life, the shape of her wisdom and the structure of her art. Two rivers, three towns, a two-headed infant and a series of “enigmas of duality and fragmentation” (127) run through her life as they recur in the book: “Again and again my mother has explored in her creations those mysteries of multiplicity, of fragmentation in unity, one-in-two and two-in-one, has tried to reconcile visually the implied frustrations of tied separate beings, of fragmented wholes” (129). Wiseman’s experience is fragmented, but her goal is unity. The dolls, assembled from worthless scraps into valuable works of art, express the desired vision of transcendent unity. What was “all-to-pieces” becomes “all of a piece” (115). Discord becomes discordia concors. Multiplicity is orchestrated, made integral and vital: “Nothing is wasted, nothing is cast aside to lead a used-up, fragmented, uncreated existence. Everything is suggestive; everything is potentially a part of something else” (36). At its limit, this view envisions a world of completely realized metaphor in which everything corresponds to and partakes in everything else. For Wiseman, the principle of unity is organic, and the spirit of its union is humane. The highest synthesis and deepest enigma she simply calls “life.” Her mother’s genius is in living and in sharing life. Old Woman at Play is an epic quest for life in this exalted sense. It is a dialogue about vitality — life in its creative aspect — between two women who display great vitality not only in their art, but as characters in the book. Consequently, when they search for the sources of creativity, they must also examine themselves; hence the autobiography that parallels the theory. It is worth stressing what an elegant and eloquent performance the book is. Wiseman focuses on her mother’s life and talent, and gradually grants them heroic stature by deflecting attention from herself even as she interrupts, interprets and pervades the text as a questioning, questing presence. The result is casual, almost rambling, an artless discussion of art. But its off-hand idiom (“Touché, old lady, here’s mischief in your eye,” 115) is all part of the show, and is matched by other styles that can be rhythmical and sensory (“the rattle of the sewing machines, the rasping snag of the big scissors, the sizzle of the steaming cloth. . .” 25); or lyrical (“Words spun about us; sometimes the very air was afog with words that purled like a fine mist about our ears. . .” 28); or ironic (“Wouldn’t you just know it?” 121). Mrs. Waisman is a superb work of fiction, comparable to the best characters in Wiseman’s novels. Through both her craft and the force of her per sonality, she shows her daughter that everyday life conceals a search for the secret of creativity, and “cracking mom’s code took on a quest-like urgency, as time passed” (9). Up to this point I have studied the epic progress of Wiseman’s argument toward revelation. At its limit her quest would disclose a perfect, vital unity, which would resolve all of her questions and bring her search to a glorious end. It would achieve the ultimate æsthetic and philosophical vision, permitting her to see and participate in life in all its fullness. Such an ideal is the triumph of form over enigma, since nothing would be left obscure, fragmentary or unexplained. But “mom’s code” proves hard to crack, because of the nature of its secrecy. To borrow Frank Kermode’s terms, secrets reveal by concealing: they offer a “radiant intimation” of truth, but only by remaining elusive, dark or mysterious. They continually promise a revelation that they continually withhold.5 Wiseman is well aware of the enigmatic character of her mission, and admits that she will find only half-answers, provisional truths, mysteries of multiplicity and intimations of kinship. She emphasizes the roles of secrecy, doubt and error in her quest by incorporating them in her narrative form, which is not only an epic but a romance. I have called Old Woman at Play an epic romance in order to stress the enigmatic qualities of its narrative, qualities which force a detour in its orderly progress. In Inescapable Romance, Patricia Parker contrasts epic with romance by noting how the first is traditionally associated with reason, paternity, linearity, telos and “a journey whose end has been promised” and so to some extent is felt to be assured; whereas romance is dominated by enchantment, inconclusive wandering (error as errare) and metamorphosis. Romance wavers at the threshold of revelation, where it is delayed by trials, dilation, pleasure, suspension and — Wiseman’s æsthetic virtue — patience. Parker calls the hero of Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso” an epic figure lost in the world of romance.”6 Wiseman shares this awkward position as she tries to pin down her mother’s ideas, only to be puzzled and led into digressions, memories and doubts whose secrecy strangely proves more illuminating than the precise definitions she wants. “Certainly, when I first set out to trace the creative process . . . I didn’t know how much I didn’t know” (3), she admits, realizing that she must explore the romantic shades of ignorance and error rather than attain epic knowledge. In her own terms, she cannot follow a “highway” along a straight line to truth; she requires a “runway” to mount to a more fanciful and dangerous vantage.7 To gain a higher view of her mother proves almost comically difficult, because in some ways Mrs. Waisman is so direct, open and down-to-earth, yet in others is so elusive. Wiseman’s solution is to imitate her mother, to weave a romantic tapestry of her own by braiding three strands or narrative lines: family history, descriptions of the dolls (in effect, practical criticism) and abstract theory. The texture of the book resembles Mrs. Waisman’s sewing: “She worked on both [dolls] simultaneously, making, alternately, a bit of one and a bit of the other, so that they actually grew into being together. . . when she is creating two together, the parts grope their way to their own interrelated whole” (99). Old Woman at Play gropes and grows in the same way, in bits and patches, in defiance of “unilinear reasoning” (130) and dialectical neatness, and in accordance with “a multi-dimensioned logic” (128) of the imagination. It wanders through a biographical and literary maze, a form consistent with the entrelacement of romance, but also prompting, as we shall see, some of the “errors” of romance. The goal of her quest is “creativity, the creative impulse and the creative process as I have perceived them in mother, her life and her work”; but the “interrelated whole” that she wishes to weave — her own work of art, her book — is even more ambitious. Its object is not just to argue but to reveal: “to re-create the reality from which the arguments spring, for arguments are judgments of and abstractions from the felt quality of experience” (22). Felt reality, the palpable immediacy of life, can only be conveyed by a work of fiction. She must recreate her mother’s character and life, capture her tone, “her particularity, her unique self within its unique world” (143). Art can only be revealed through art. In an essay on romance, Northrop Frye quotes a line by Pope which exists in two versions: “A mighty maze of walks without a plan,” and “A mighty maze, but not without a plan.” Frye then comments that romance is the genre “where we can see most clearly that the maze without a plan and the maze not without a plan are two aspects of the same thing.”8 In romance we find the interplay of form and enigma, plan and maze, that sustains all art. Wiseman uses the devious form of romance in Old Woman at Play because she seeks the same dual vision, and reveals it within the æsthetic theory that she gradually weaves, and to which I now turn. As a token of this double vision, her mother’s dolls often have eyes of different colours. Theory: Æsthetic and Moral Wiseman wants to interpret the dual vision of the dolls by tracking down the secret of her mother’s life and art, but she ends up telling a series of stories. This is hardly surprising, since she is a novelist and draws on the resources of fiction in this memoir. But using the devious romance form ensures that her argument will inevitably get entangled in the truths she seeks and the errors she encounters. Indeed, when I formulate an orderly æsthetic by assembling her scattered insights and observations, I do her a disservice, since abstract theory is precisely what she wants to avoid. She regards theory as a discursive “highway,” whereas her topic requires an inspired “runway.” These two perspectives provide two ways of surveying enigma and accounting for its structure. The highway should lead to a neat, formal system, while the runway launches her to a contemplative altitude from which she can survey the intricacies of art. Wiseman would probably find my analysis of her theory, with its three categories of moral, human and vital principles, far too pedestrian. In the final section of the essay, however, I hope to find an alternative to her “runway”. My first point, then, is that her æsthetic judgments are always tinged with social, emotional, psychological and, above all, moral shades. Whenever she talks about the nature or effect of art, she insists on the interdependence of these categories. For example, she says of the Spanish dancers:
Psychologically, the dolls soothe us by “harmlessly discharging related unresolved energies in the perceiver” (131). Socially, they link us in joy and suffering to the larger world of humanity. Intellectually, they sharpen our wits. Emotionally, they encourage self-confidence and sympathy. Morally, they instruct and improve us. In sum, art is consciousness refined by conscience, and conscience refined by consciousness. It enlarges and dignifies our powers of thought in ways which are intrinsically moral:
”Better,” protected by its cautious quotation marks, means refined and improved morally. “Augmented power” is the energy of the imagination as it surveys and interprets experience, and ultimately, art is indistinguishable from thought in its highest, ethical aspect. It is “a way of knowing” (126), a way to “make meaning manifest” (65). Accordingly, in her grandest moments Wiseman envisages an art that unites beauty and truth by offering a redeeming vision of life as focussed by the sympathetic imagination. Because beauty “can function as a great renewer of human innocence, a redeemer of human error” (47), it can show us “what it’s really like ’to be,’ “ and permit “a submission to, a reconciliation with, an acceptance and a celebration of being” (126). These fine sentiments reveal the second point in Wiseman’s æsthetic — its humanism. Artists live in the midst of life, not in an ivory tower. They are communicators with a duty to their community. In a familiar paradox, they are both exceptional and typical: intensely and uncommonly aware of the plight of common humanity. Mrs. Waisman’s dolls are distinguished by their faces, eyes, costumes and “tone” (65), in short by their expressions of humanity. Her purpose as artist is to render “the human shape” (7) — a key notion for Wiseman. It reappears when she pictures her mother’s life and art as a “human body spreadeagled, with. . . its human nature, binary, unified and bifurcated, held together, pulling apart, coming from all directions and flowing in all directions, concentrating life around itself” (129). This quotation indicates the vital forms that inspire the artist, but it also shows how, in their competing, condensing, diverting patterns, they combine maze and plan. “The human shape” is another structure of enigma. It means the forms our lives take, whether beautiful, ugly, comic or tragic; it means our postures, attitudes, positions, stances; and it means the rhetorical figures, symbols and rituals by which we express them. In art, human forms can retain their sensuous particularity even as they become “living myths” (63) and archetypes, that is, larger projections of our desires and needs. For example, one doll is both individual and universal, the shape of all conductors:
These too are familiar paradoxes and part of what I shall discuss as Wiseman’s romantic inheritance. Art reveals truth through fiction, the universal through the particular, the ideal through the real, and humanity as a whole through its individual shapes. When artists render the human shape, they urge us “with the ache of meaning” (65). Wiseman implies that discovering and asserting our humanity is difficult, that being human is painful and that art is a way of coping with pain by making it intelligible, bearable and even, in the case of tragedy, beautiful. As the book progresses, it unearths painful memories and secrets, and grows darker in tone. The complex tone expresses Wiseman’s Jewish heritage, which appears in her mother’s early life in the Ukraine, in the ethnic life of Winnipeg and in comments on anti-Semitism, but especially in a prevailing attitude toward the hardship of life, an attitude that she assumes rather than explains, and that she regards as Jewish. The Jewish tone is an important agent in Old Woman at Play; it is the medium through which she makes her comments more than a subject in its own right. She presents herself, not as resigned, vengeful, bitter or despairing, but as realistic if pessimistic, accepting if complaining, affirmative if cautiously practical. She illustrates this mixed attitude in her interview: “Judaism, the Judaism I know, the Judaism I was taught, is a Judaism which is life-oriented, which celebrates life, because it’s all we’ve got, because beyond life is somebody else’s responsibility. We have to do the best we can with life, after which no amount of whining or prayer will make very much difference.”9 “My mother’s face is turned toward life, always” (52). This orientation illustrates the third point in my summary: the prime term or point of departure for all her memories and comments is what, with deceptive simplicity, she calls “life.” The axiom of her argument is faith in vitality, “nature” as her mother calls it, or the ongoing process of being alive. Life is the elementary fact of our existence, but also the elementary value on which we base our judgments. Wiseman gradually equates “vitality” with “validity” (63), a strategic equation that allows her to seek a balance between æsthetics and ethics, beauty and truth. Her vitalist philosophy is represented by Mrs. Waisman’s picture formed from junk jewellery on black velvet: “The figures seem to come dancing out of the stars” (39). Out of the empty, cosmic presence of nature come human shapes, joyful rituals and figures of truth (including Wiseman’s Governor General’s Medal). The vital spark of life is simply energy or accident, an unknowable but “insistent vitality” (38) posited as the ground of being. Wiseman occasionally uses a religious vocabulary especially to express her mother’s views, but her own outlook remains stubbornly secular, and she treats vital energy as an existential condition rather than a divine gift:
The continuous process of life is also called creativity, which is the elusive but ever-present object of Wiseman’s quest. Human existence is not merely or blindly energetic; its energy can be directed and formed. It becomes productive when it produces, assesses, interprets and celebrates itself. “Creating is a way of growing” (130) and of knowing, and the growth of both nature and art is presented as female, as an endowing with life through the profuse fertility of the earth and the imagination: “Then suddenly her potholders began to grow faces, huge ears, hats, curious appendages, and another kind of doll was born — or mask reborn” (110). The value words that recur in Old Woman at Play — “vital”, “open”, “growth”, “expansive”, “spontaneous”, “play”, “new”, “renew” , “joy”, “strength”, “free” — all have a romantic resonance. They are associated with the creativity of life, and the terms gradually circle, confirm and justify each other: “Creativity is an expression of vitality which strives for the enhancement of vitality” (119). Art too is alive in the double sense that it is the creative spirit of man, and that a work of art “works” (119) or fashions its own vigorous life. It also plays by creating “analogous worlds” (121) comparable to nature and sharing natural exuberance. Chaia Waisman’s first name means “life” (55), and even when old she retains a spirit of youthful joy. Her art arises from her concern for children and is dedicated to them. She makes a “tree of life” (41), because in the imagery of the book she is herself the tree of life, “the fountain at the heart of creation” (23). But fertility implies mortality, and death as much as life is at the heart of Wiseman’s notion of structure. Life is painful because, even through its creativity, it is a process of dying. All art arises from and returns to the ceaseless interplay of life and death, but it proclaims life in the face of death: “So we celebrate every day, for life still flows strongly in fragile vessels” (138). Broken vessels, shards and fragments recur in Wiseman’s writing, notably in the Lurianic myth of creation-through-destruction (Shevirath Ha-Kelim, the Breaking of the Vessels) that opens Crackpot. The symbolism reappears in Old Woman at Play when the rubble from a pogrom sparks Mrs. Waisman’s imagination (“Such pretty bits of coloured glass,” 35), and then metaphorically provides the random, disorderly but precious materials for her art (37). In this way “private scars” are transformed into “public rainbows” (118) and death is made a partner to life. The theory summarized above subordinates enigma (mystery, misery, fragmentation, pain, death) to pattern (æsthetic order, dialectic, family, humanity). Before reversing the perspective, I wish to comment on the force of the subordination and on the nature of the transcendent perspective provided by Wiseman’s “runway”. Although the summary is my own, the system is hers. It is neatly formulated with a balance that is æsthetic as well as logical and moral, a balance that makes it attractive, persuasive, ennobling and thoroughly Jewish in Wiseman’s terms. Its neatness appears in the epic-romance narrative, which is sustained by recurring images (hands, eyes, multiple shapes, river, tree), which in turn suggest the binary terms (truth/beauty, consciousness/conscience, inward/outward, inevitable/bearable, fate/freedom, serious/frivolous) whose dialectical opposition must be sublimated through “harmony-in-contradiction” (15). The embracing harmony permits the same pattern of affirmation through suffering that we find in The Sacrifice and Crackpot, a comic pattern that Patricia Morley describes as: “Out of death, life; out of darkness, light; out of plague and deformity, wholeness; and out of suffering, joy.”10 The affirmative pattern that masters enigma is romantic. It is romantic in Parker’s sense of the word, but also in its fusion of æsthetic and moral values, in its cautious idealism, and especially in its preference for nature over culture. Wiseman’s æsthetic celebrates personal, organic, spontaneous forces in opposition to the deadening restrictions of society and of an education that stifles or “pinches off” (11) our natural creativity. It praises the wisdom and innocence of children. It favours intuition (“runway”) over discursive thought (“highway”) as an agent of freedom and truth. It insists on the critical and social responsibility of the artist. And it sponsors a philosophical dualism that opposes appearance with reality, the real with the ideal. The idealism is muted in Wiseman’s case and is countered by her earthiness, but it nevertheless persists in her vision of metaphoric unity, noted earlier, and in her conception of truth as an elusive, “seductively communicated essence” (81) enticingly half-hidden and half-revealed beyond mere fact. In a speech to the Royal Society of Canada, she confirms her idealist bias: “the essence of fiction is truth; the artist gives form to the gesture behind the dance, the real behind the actual. . . we must remember that art is concerned with another order of aspiration, beyond truth or lie, that it lays traps with greater or lesser success, for the irreducible and permanent realities of our existence.”11 Faith, however tenuous, in these permanent realities ensures the triumph of pattern over enigma, because it projects a higher order to regulate human confusion. This romantic optimism — always tempered by the scepticism, mistrust and irony taught by the hardships of working class Winnipeg — is not naive or mystical, but practical and, in its way, earthy. Wiseman’s treatment of transcendence is clarified by a writer to whom she alludes in only a tenuous way when she mentions attending an international crafts exhibition called “In Praise of Hands” (62). The Mexican poet and critic, Octavio Paz, contributed an essay to the exhibition in which he analyzes the presumptions and disappointments of modern art by contrasting them with the humbler aspirations of craft. Mrs. Waisman’s ever-expanding family could certainly include Paz, whose observations offer an unintended tribute to the modest yet inspired heroine of Old Woman at Play. In effect, he celebrates her “wet hands.” He uses craft to break out of the vicious circle of modernism, whereby art tries to serve holy needs in a desacralized society by becoming a substitute religion whose refined æsthetic experience promises a “meaning beyond meaning” that “dissolves into the sheer emanation of being.” In other words, art presumes to offer the truth of “being” — the purity of the object, the essence of the actual — in place of a transcendent God. Unfortunately, the “modern religion of art continually circles back upon itself without ever finding the path to salvation: it keeps shifting back and forth from the negation of meaning for the sake of the object to the negation of the object for the sake of meaning.” In contrast, craft more humbly remains rooted in the earth, and bears the artisan’s fingerprints, the shape of humanity. It mediates between art and technology, the beautiful and the useful, the utterly abstract and the merely concrete. It offers pleasure rather than æsthetic contemplation or utility. It submits to time and loss by embracing its own ephemeral nature. It is made to be shared. Because its “imagination is social” rather than individual, it “teaches us lessons in sociability.” Because its roots are in the native village, tribe or family, it preserves and respects differences.12 Old Woman at Play shares all of these points, including praise of hands, earthiness, neighbourliness, submission to time and ruin, respect for the “Other,” and a spirit of celebration — the “fiesta of the object.” Like Paz, Wiseman wants to renew reverence for the human in a spirit that is not religious in any doctrinal sense, but that shares religion’s faith in the wonder of the order of the earth. ”that vicious little doubt” In opposition to her orderly theory is a vicious little doubt, which Wiseman is too honest to conceal and which arises whenever she cautiously hopes to complete her quest by attaining the artistic revelation that it promises. Just when she is on the point of mastering confusion through her writing, or of tying up the strands of the past, or of disciplining reality through art, a curious doubt intrudes. It marks the resurgence of enigma in the midst of structure. The artist’s goal is to seize Proteus (121), the shapeless master of shapes, and from time to time she almost succeeds. The “ultimate form and matter of form and matter” appear to be in her grasp:
At moments of victory and dismay, when structure is triumphant or when it collapses, you get “that spooky feeling” that “you are both one who writes and who is being written with.” At such eerie moments, the writer becomes the agent of her work rather than its author. As we have seen, the glory of art is that it displays, examines and celebrates life by creating a vigorous life of its own; but now that independent, protean vitality seems strangely sinister, because it is uncontrollable and because it leads to unforeseen conclusions. The writer is overwhelmed by her writing and, like the sorcerer’s apprentice, falls victim to the magic that she has invoked but cannot control. She discovers that no artist, no matter how disciplined, can fully command her material, since art is perverse: “We think we want to say one thing but the very words we use and the way they suddenly come together out of our own mouths, can subvert our plans” (131). There is therefore a subversive line of argument in Old Woman at Play, which I now wish to examine, although “line,” with its suggestion of epic progress to an “ultimate” goal, is a misleading image. In contrast to what Wiseman calls the “out-lines” and “in-lines” of thought, both of which imply geometrical rigour, are the “within lines.” Out-lines and in-lines recall the perspectives of runway and highway, the first running straight through an argument, the second surveying it from above. But the hidden space within lines suggests a mysterious “private territory” of “inner being” (128). This third possibility corresponds to a nasty doubt lurking within thought, diverting it from illumination back into the shadows of enigma. The effect of this doubt is to question the thinking of art, by casting suspicion on how art appeals to conscience and consciousness. She embodies her doubt in another lively riddle: the drunken-precise, violent-courtly master-tailor, Naftuli Bagalfor. He is a comic Jewish Proteus, a “supremely fitting, supreme misfit,” who is scrupulous in his art only because he is unscrupulous in his life. He is at once “maker and destroyer, actualizer of the unbearable incoherence” (64), because he shows how the human shape, at the very point of perfection, strangely becomes misshapen. He reminds us that shapes in Old Woman at Play are always shadowed by deformities, incoherences, misfittings and deviants. Nature produces freaks that we prefer to think of as “unnatural”: thalidomide victims, a child with two heads, a calf with three heads, people distorted by ignorance, prejudice and fear. Because they too are children of nature, their effect is not just to make us clutch uneasily to humane ideals or to standards of normality, but more distressingly, to call into question what the “human shape” is, what is “normal” or “natural,” how far nature is benign, and how far we can trust its order. Natural creativity, like human imagination, leads to unforeseen and disturbing conclusions. Wiseman implicates her own creative powers in this difficulty when she reveals the silly but distressing family fear that she might be born in the shape of a monkey: “First thing . . . [her mother] asked the doctor, ’Is it normal?’ — I think, because she was too embarrassed to ask ’Is it human?’” (133). As a writer, Wiseman is as much concerned with the abnormal as the normal, with the misshapen forms of humanity and with what she calls elsewhere “the flawed nature of human beings.”13 She adopts the monkey as her totem, not just to link her to the earth, but to remind her that nature is flawed and is the source of flaws. I have argued that Wiseman’s æsthetic commits her to nature as the basis and standard of order. This is one of Mrs. Waisman’s lessons: “’Die Natoor’ is the touchstone of what is” (40). We understand the orderliness of order — what structure is, how it works, how it arises and articulates itself — by testing it against the organic process of natural order. Indeed from this point of view, the phrase “natural order” is redundant, since order is what nature provides. But whenever Wiseman investigates natural order, she discovers its freakishness, and the “key” to the secret of her mother’s art proves to be the doll of the thalidomide baby and the story of the child with two heads (122-25). This child is like the human-monkey, suddenly become actual. It is a shape so perversely natural and grotesquely human as to baffle even the talents of a Naftuli Bagalfor. What imaginative garment can we create to fit, protect and grace it? The doll strikes Wiseman rudely as a shocking, ambiguous epiphany. It reveals the enormous power of her mother’s compassion; it shows how art arises from horror as well as love; it indicates that natural forms are inherently and pitifully flawed; and it expresses a profound distress about nature and humanity. The doll is so enigmatic that finally Wiseman can interpret it only by offering more stories, riddles and dreams. In order to convey how it “changed the dimensions and the quality of. . . [her] knowing,” a quality that must be evoked rather than stated, she resorts to the eloquently inarticulate speech of her mother:
Here is the troublesome doubt that leads through equivocal insights to the “central fault.” Nature is the origin of all shapes, but Mrs. Waisman’s belief in its “divinity” quickly yields to her daughter’s fear that it is merely the field of an “existential struggle” (40) to which it offers no assistance or guidance. Natural creativity is not itself æsthetic, moral or even human. It is undirected, uninterpreted, amoral energy, expending itself to no purpose, like Thomas Hardy’s “Immanent Will.” Moreover, as the logical ground on which all perceptions and judgments are based, nature cannot be submitted to the categories that it permits. It cannot be judged, ascribed a purpose, praised, condemned or attributed human characteristics. It simply is. “For growth can be distorted,” Wiseman admits. “It is not necessarily moral or creative in itself’ (131). Nature makes Nazis as well as Jews (40), monsters as well as beauties. The problem is not just that creativity can be directed toward destructive or evil ends, but that more fundamentally, “in itself” natural growth cannot be moral, and creativity is nothing but the fact of its growing. As Wiseman pursues this problem, her doubt grows more vicious: “I do not even believe that creativity and morality are necessarily always harness mates, though for me this has been a bitter reality to have to accept” (139). This bitter admission threatens to subvert her entire quest for understanding, because it disrupts the rising line of argument summarized in the previous section. It fractures her dialectic, which has cautiously but resolutely risen from its “runway” to survey “harmony-in contradiction,” wholeness in deformity, and joy in suffering. Now she admits that beauty and truth are not necessarily allied, and that her grand synthesis of nature, art and morality has no foundation apart from psychological need. Her æsthetic expresses a grand desire for a viable structure that will fuse consciousness, conscience and reality, but as a theory it has no objective basis. It is wishful thinking, or in the terms of the book, it is merely “play” that never really “works.” One solution to this dilemma is to make a virtue of it by reinterpreting “play” as the free play of desire and of textuality. Such is the tactic of post-modernist criticism, which deconstructs structure and delights in enigma, uncanniness, “mise en abyme” and “aporia.” This tactic opens an avenue that I do not wish to explore, partly because Wiseman herself does not, but especially because she retains an engaged, moral concern — the Jewish “tone” noted earlier — that always colours her judgement and makes her seek ethical understanding through artistic pleasure. Art must be instructive, not in the didactic sense of providing advice, but in the æsthetic sense of refining conscience and consciousness. There may be some comfort in regarding art merely as play, but not enough to relieve her doubts. For all its fun, Old Woman at Play is also about work. It is about the exhausting life of a woman whose tedious, unselfish, enchanting labours have yielded insight into and solace for the strange and painful shapes of humanity. For this reason, I cannot quite accept Michael Greenstein’s view that the book celebrates the artist as homo ludens, a joyous worker who transforms labour into play so that “delight” triumphs over “instruction” in the “pleasure dome” of art.14 I believe this assessment underestimates the moral tone of the book, but even so, the “victory” of delight exacts a heavy price. As play, both art and the theory of art (another game played out in the text) can be joyous, serious, intelligent and enthralling, but they lack that earthiness that Paz praises in craft. The theory of homo ludens, as developed by Johan Huizinga, stresses play’s secluded, self-regulating character, which confines it to the “play-ground of the mind” where it trafficks in “illusions” (literally, “in-play”): “Play lies outside the antithesis of wisdom and folly, and equally outside those of truth and falsehood, good and evil. Although it is a non-material activity, it has no moral function. The valuations of vice and virtue do not apply here.”15 Wiseman finds such confinement a bitter fate, because she shares the lingering Jewish suspicion, described by Robert Alter,16 that the privileged autonomy of art, the independent power permitting it to create what she calls “analogous worlds,” effectively divorces it from reality by restricting it to playful analogy that is not availing, because it cannot sustain valid insights or judgements. She then finds herself trapped by the formalist puzzle: how can trafficking in illusions become a transaction with reality? If “structure” means only the rules of a game, then what good is it? How can the play of beauty affect the good work of truth? In the course of Old Woman at Play, Wiseman wrestles with this dilemma as it subverts her most exalted principles by disclosing faults where she had hoped for revelation, by discovering dishonesties and puzzles in the midst (“within lines”) of what she had hoped was a trustworthy structure. This enigma darkens her vision of totality, by which the scraps of existence are woven into a noble, human shape; instead, shapes are freakish, deformed, ignoble. It thwarts her desire for unity, expressed as a romantic fusion of æsthetic and moral values; instead, art cuts us off from reality, or dissolves it into illusions. It undermines her faith in a sympathetic community joined by the hand-clasp of craft; instead art becomes a private, mental game beyond wisdom and folly. And the enigma forces the book’s argument back on itself in a series of shifts and reversals that threaten to undo all that Wiseman has so carefully stitched together. I have already noted some of these shifts in the exchange of form and deformity, child and adult, creativity and destruction, play and work, life and death. Another curious reversal concerns the relation of art and craft. Wiseman insists that her mother’s dolls are craft, in Paz’s sense, not pretentious works of art to be idolized, analyzed and isolated in museums. But perversely, the effect of her own study is to make the reader see her mother as a subtle artist, creating masterpieces whose simplicity conceals a hidden complexity that invites criticism like this essay. Perhaps some day the dolls will be preserved in a museum. If so, Wiseman will have made her mother into just the sort of artist that she claims her mother is not. One way of assessing this dilemma without following the interpretative avenues of the post-modern labyrinth or the Huizingan playground, is to regard her vicious little doubt as a kind of moral vigilance directed at the processes of artistic thought and creativity. She retains her moral scrupulousness in the form of a caution that humbles the pride of dialectic. She questions our confidence that thought can successfully account for and assimilate its own ideas. And she challenges our ability to juggle with enigmas until they fall into a structure that will flatter the human shape. Interpreting her doubt in these terms has the advantage of keeping in view what is at stake for Wiseman when she assesses her own æsthetic. It also shows the kind of enigma with which she feels most comfortable and in which she finally finds hope. Up to this point, I have treated dialectic in the familiar Hegelian fashion as a system of thought based on polarities. It is the process by which reason conducts itself by discerning and surmounting contradictions. Such a system, however, also implies confidence that the dialectical model will be satisfactory. In the narrative terms used earlier, a logical argument aspires to be an epic form, whose triumphant progress will lead safely through confusion to truth, and will in fact use confusion — the conflict of thesis and antithesis — to arrive at truth. Wiseman has already undermined confidence in this form through her preference for the bewildering yet illuminating digressions of romance. Her caution has the same effect on dialectical thought. An argument begins with premises and axioms which are learned empirically but accepted on faith; it ends by presuming that the conflict of ideas, which thought both generates and requires to energize its progress, will ultimately yield to a higher synthesis. Speaking from the irreverent perspective of her scrupulous doubt, we might say that dialectic moves between faith and presumption. Wiseman asks us not to be so presumptuous. I do not mean to imply that she advocates a superior form of logic — intuition, imagination or the runway of thought — as an alternative to the highway of dialectical thinking. She casts doubt on all logic; her doubt is rigorous and vicious. True, she praises the “multi-dimensioned logic” (128) of art in contrast to “strictly linear thought” (23). But she finally shows that both multi-dimensional logic and the leap-frog of dialectic fail to satisfy the needs of ethical judgment. The two modes of thought that Wiseman mentions, highway and runway, recall our recurring contrast between epic and romantic forms, but their source is a commonplace of modernist poetics, expressed most influentially by T.S. Eliot. In his famous introduction to Anabase by St. Jean Perse, he distinguishes between discursive reason and “the logic of the imagination.” The former is logical, abstract, conceptual, successive, structured; the latter is rhetorical, concrete, visual, simultaneous, enigmatic. Modernist theory is full of accounts of imagina tive logic, and Wiseman is in good company.17 When she first appeals to multi-dimensional logic, she is confident that it is more supple than discursive thought, that it can be mastered, that it is benign and that it will eventually reveal correspondences demonstrating the larger unity of art and life. Her confidence still reflects the presumption of dialectic, but again the sorcerer’s apprentice loses control over her magic. She discovers that artful thought has an erratic life of its own:
This passage describes the flight into madness that occurs when minds are stunted because their needs are suppressed or oppressed. When creativity is blocked, it wildly seeks some outlet. The passage also illustrates how growth” or creativity becomes distorted when imagination loses control of its powers and fails to rule “the unbearable incoherence” (64) of both life and its own dynamic. Under normal conditions, imagination is a “flexible, vital analogical system” (128) which is not afflicted by the analogies it proposes. But as we have seen, Wiseman has already questioned what is normal in human behaviour, what is natural, shapely and fitting. How can we be sure that form will triumph over deformity or that multi-dimensional logic will not lose its way? How can we be sure that the imagination will expand conscience/consciousness, that it will promote sanity, that its analogies lead somewhere valuable rather than just in feverish circles? In her Royal Society speech, she displays the same faith beset by the same doubt when she asserts: “in the vast complexity of existence, art is the higher lie, and what we call fact is the lesser, for out of the scraps of the actual we build the lies of the moment, or of history, but in art we give form to the permanent aspirations, lies though they may ultimately be, of the human spirit.”18 Her assurance in a permanent, noble order — her idealism — is undermined by admitting that this order is illusory and that nobility too is a lie. She condemns herself as a writer to a choice of greater or lesser falsehoods. Wiseman’s solution to this dilemma is not to over-rule contradiction, since there is no rule that does not prove contradictory, no structure that does not prove misshapen. Her solution is to seek a painful comfort in the enigmas that have challenged her. In dramatic terms this means facing the impending death of her mother, who is dying of cancer. In psychological terms it means remaining loyal to the female, artistic temper, which is “at once actively seeking and actively submitting” (121). In moral terms, it means reasserting the values that her mother has taught her. In narrative terms it means retaining a faith in error and the romance of error, whose continual deviation from truth hints at the necessity, desirability and proximity of truth. Lies, errors and falsehoods arouse bitter doubts, but do not weaken her resolve that lies must be recognized as false and corrected, so that they can point ahead along a twisting path toward revelation. The comic pattern of affirmation observable in her æsthetic reflects a trust in “life” in the sense discussed, because ultimately the pattern expresses a fundamental faith in “form” itself, that is, a faith that the structures of thought and art can be productive. They generate something true and valuable; they lead somewhere meaningful; they are not aimless or self-deceptive games. Again and again in Old Woman at Play we are assured that the artist derives validity from vitality; significant, human order from natural disorder. Here faith in order extends to the form of her own work. As a memoir, it expresses a confidence in memory and its power of representation. Memory too is not aimless, but builds a coherent and true picture from the chaos of the past. As an epic romance, the narrative undertakes a quest for truth, and if it does not quite achieve its goal, at least approaches it. Romance proceeds by entangling itself in doubt, error and misrepresentation, because as Parker explains, romance is the genre of error as errare or wandering. As it wanders through digressions, enchanting fancies and false trails, lingers at thresholds and turns back on itself, romance continually postpones the goal of its quest: “its plenitude is endless error. . . The enchantment of romance is in the constant Ovidian metamorphosis which keeps its fiction going and defers, like the storytelling Scheherazade, the fateful moment of truth.”19 In telling her mother’s story Wiseman too proves to be a Scheherazade, who continually promises but delays the unveiling of truth. She discovers art only through art. Through her own narrative effort, she traces the structure of the enigma that she wishes to solve and acts out the truth that she can never quite find. She thus invites the reader to decipher her secret just as she has tried to crack her mother’s code. Appropriately, when she finally detects a key to the puzzle — the deformed doll — she reports it as a new, revealing enigma, thereby proving what she also discovers in her essay about China: “at the heart of revelation is mystery.”20 Similarly in Old Woman at Play she learns: “There are mysteries behind closed doors, and closed doors behind mysteries, behind which more mysteries lurk in prelude to more closed doors and further revelations” (119). She insists, however, that her devious process of discovery is more than a game, although it is playful, and it provides more than mystification. She has faith that a mystery is not a muddle:
Old Woman at Play presents an interplay of faith and doubt, form and mystery. It is a playful attempt to discover the meaning of play. It is a detective story that tracks down the secret of human creativity, only to find itself enlightened yet confounded by its own creative efforts, because the mystery it seeks to illuminate is present in its own operation as narrative, as fiction, as the tangle of romance. For this reason, the book continually reverses its perspective to question its own theory and to inspect its own image. For example, Wiseman records how she recited portions of the manuscript to her mother (135-36); in this way she draws truth into the web of fiction at yet another level. The book examines its image, not as a self-satisfied Narcissus (114), but as a stranger to itself, a self-doubting “Other.” Art has an alienating effect that permits us to see its familiar lineaments as enigmatic: “if you encounter a genuinely other world” — even when that world is an account of your own life — “which seems to be communicating at some disturbing level with your own, you must expect to be dislocated even while you are being relocated” (6). Enigma, therefore, is not mere confusion or mystification, but an act of imaginative relocation, whose “impeccable logic” probes an “ever-changing mystery” (18). Notes
“English Writing in Canada: The Future,” p. 47[back] Patricia A. Parker, pp. 37, 109.[back] Memoirs of a Book Molesting Childhood and Other Essays, p. 103.[back] |