Shortcuts
As if on cue: a novel whose unnamed protagonist perseverates on her own artistic freedom. The narrator of Emily Hall’s The Longcut begins as she means to go on:
I was always asking myself what my work was, I thought as I walked to the gallery. … It being acceptable as it was for an artist in my time to make art from anything, with anything, about anything, the world constituting the art world in my time being undelimited in a liberating or terrifying manner, still I could not stop asking myself what my work was, even as I told myself I really should already know the answer.
Examples of her “work” include: photographs of an egg-shaped stone taken, or contemplated, at various locations in the office of her day job; footage of a crane through a window from a temporary desk dubbed “the spatiotemporal unknown”; and a hacked-up eraser compared, half-heartedly, to Descartes’ melted wax in the Meditations. The aim is to produce “philosophical objects”; failure is “merely philosophy.”
The novel has no palpable characterization and is almost wholly devoid of plot. The narrator walks to a meeting at a gallery, her obsessive inner monologue consumed by variations on a single question—what is her work?—without a single question mark.
Could I figure out what my work was … by hurling or aiming myself like a projectile at the work of others.
Was I an artist of any kind or was I person with an office job looking at her life with a sort of slant.
An irony here is that her office job is equally mysterious: what is her work? It consists, we are told, “of moving items into the ‘completed’ column” under the surprisingly benign, attentive eye of a nameless boss.
The bit about completion functions as the feed line to a meta-textual joke: the gallerist has no trouble whatsoever defining the artist’s work—
Your mathematics approach, she said. Making sense of x, she said, or solving for x, although slyly, sometimes pointing away from x altogether.
—and as soon it has been defined, the artist’s vocation collapses:
And then in that immediate moment the world of course went flat, x being solved causing the world to go flat. Even as I suspected that it already had gone, that it had long gone flat. The world had disappeared into the “completed” column…
The meta-joke is that, if art dies when it has a definable thesis, and that is the definable thesis of this novel, then the novel foretells its own death. The triumphant ending—solving for x—is a suicide note:
I saw that the way past death was to do anything I could to unfind the answer to the question of what my work was, to unaccept the fact of the knowing the answer, to unknow, uncomplete, unaccept, unclose. I would unsolve for x, I would deny that there was an x to be solved.
Definite resolution is the enemy of art, this work of art declaims: that is my definite resolution.
I enjoy irony as much as the next guy—maybe more—but at the nth level, it feels less like art than like a puzzle to be solved: mere philosophy, not a philosophical object. What happens when
a thing [comes] fully into its meaning, the lit-up feeling of endless connection staggering to the edge and then plummeting away
—when a novel has an argument you could state in six hundred words and save yourself the trouble of reading more, when it puts itself into the column marked “completed,” when it auto-annihilates?
A process achieved by shortcut was not in fact a process at all, could not be called a process, I thought then and subsequently, I recalled as I walked. I was not mad keen for shortcuts, I did not care for them at all.