Something About the Self

Consider broadly the painted portrait: A torso and face in oils on canvas. A grayish greeny black mixture of nothing-space for background. This is the classical portrait, the Rembrandt or Van Eyck, the Gilbert Stuart. The face floats without context in order to capture the portrayed person without bias.

Now consider broadly the photographic portrait: A whole body, perhaps. Perhaps nude, perhaps in context of daily environment, as Diane Arbus’ carnival photographs. Perhaps in studio, as Richard Avedon. Perhaps elaborately staged, as Annie Liebovitz. Perhaps Cindy Sherman’s brief beautiful fictions.

Lastly consider the written portrait: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, The Portrait of a Lady, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. A life captured between covers, or as quickly as in a sentence, between initial capitalization and full stop. Consider character sketch as portraiture. Consider “the man in the hat” portraiture. Consider description, portraiture.

I am simplifying things here, of course. Writing “broadly.” But doing it in the interest of giving you an idea of Édouard Levé’s Autoportrait, a beautiful and (at least to me) new kind of portrait (translated from the French by Paris Review editor Lorin Stein). I read it first on the flight back from AWP, and following so many conversations about writing and its purpose/manner/role/etcetera, it was refreshing to just sit and read an excellent book without having to talk about or defend it.

And yet, here I am.

Whereas the narrator of Levé’s brilliant Suicide told the story of a friend’s death (again, I speak “broadly”) here we get the story of a life, told in just over a hundred first-person pages of declarative sentences, strung together in vague overlap.

Levé begins with broad strokes. Life and death:

When I was young, I thought Life: A User’s Manual would teach me how to live and Suicide: A User’s Manual how to die. I have spent three years and three months abroad. I prefer to look to my left. I have a friend who gets off on betrayal. The end of a trip leaves me with a sad aftertaste, the same as the end of a novel. I forget things I don’t like. I may have spoken, without knowing it, to someone who killed someone. I look down dead-end streets. I am not afraid of what comes at the end of life.

What you first notice is how quickly Levé moves. His portrait is not linear, but is in motion with its audience. That’s the first difference between what occurs in Autoportraitversus a Gilbert Stuart or Cindy Sherman. In still portraiture, a snapshot provides the glimpse from which a life can be read (Sherman being the master of this).

As a photographer as well as writer, Levé uses his declarative sentences as a kind of series of photographic instances, one after another, without a strict narrative string. Some fifty pages later:

I see no point in holding on to my old toothbrushes. My favorite months are September and April, September for the resumption of social activity, April for the arrival of spring and the progressive denudification of women. I am not an expert in anything. I have subjects of conversation besides myself. I form very few hard and fast judgments about politics, the economy, and international affairs. I do not like bananas.

The result of this movement is an interactive portrait, drawn as much by the reader as the writer. Levé’s form demands the reader seek a common link between all these declarations and, beside their source, that commonality is that each declaration arrives in terms of some outside influence. Never does the declaration contain a subject and verb without an object, some necessary action-reaction. Even the simple “I am thin” (toward the end of the book) relies on the reader’s judgment of “thin.”

Later, when Levé’s physicality if further defined, it’s done according to a system of measurement we can only understand in relation to our own height. And that this slight description comes between calculations regarding age and preference is no accident, Levé already has us considering personal dualisms, further engaging with him:

I prefer the name to the taste of Darjeeling. I notice the length of a journey less if I already know the way. I have lived through 14,370 days. I have lived through 384,875 hours. I have lived through 20,640,000 minutes. I am one meter and eighty-six centimeters tall. My eye is not sated with seeing, nor is my ear with hearing. Déjà vu gives me more pleasure than a great wine.

Do I prefer Darjeeling’s name or taste? How do I notice the length of journeys? How long is 14,730 days? Am I taller than Levé?

A film might use narrative to carry the audience forward, as might most novels (even those “portrait” novels listed above). But Autoportrait forces the reader into movement with it. The closest we come to traditional narrative emerges as repetitive themes on those aspects of his life our narrator does not fully understand: that he may have a child somewhere he’s never met, that “today” may be the best day of his life, that he will die someday, and then what? These are unknowns nearly all readers can identify with, and their repetition requires our reconsideration. Our own consideration, not Levé’s, drives the novel to its inevitable, reassuring-yet-uncertain end:

I don’t know why I write. I prefer a ruin to a monument. I am calm during reunions. I have nothing against New Year’s Eve. Fifteen years old is the middle of my life, regardless of when I die. I believe there is an afterlife, but not an afterdeath. I do not ask “do you love me.” Only once can I say “I’m dying” without telling a lie. The best day of my life may already be behind me.

In Autoportrait, Levé gives us a Rembrandt missing head and torso, a Diane Arbus circus tent missing a freak, the portrait of an artist co-written by a moo-cow. If I were still at AWP, the Hilton bar with a drink in hand, I might say it was a mirror in the center of an elaborate background, uncovering glimpses of our selves within the portrait of another.

For now I’ll just say it was a damn good book, unlike any other I’ve read.

Read an excerpt of Autoportrait and view some of Levé’s photographs on The Paris Review.

A Portrait of a (Would-Be) Jersey Artist Reading A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

I was a sophomore in college when I read A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man all the way to the last line for the first time. I was about the same age as Joyce’s hero Stephen Dedalus, though not nearly so well educated. I had working-class New Jersey to thank for that. Joyce’s Stephen had his narrow Ireland, “the old sow that eats her farrow,” as Dedalus describes the country of his birth in his monumental colloquy with his friend Cranly in the penultimate section of the novel — Ireland with its strident priests, dour schoolmasters, inebriated fathers, and demanding God. But also with its classical curriculum.

My New Jersey was much less forthcoming with its lessons. We had no England bearing down on us, only Manhattan, twenty miles away and across the river. That was almostenough. City life set a standard for us on the west bank of the Hudson, and as soon as we were able we made foray after foray into Manhattan, at first by bus, or by ferry over to Tottenville on Staten Island, and then by rapid transit — the “rattletrap” — to the ferry to the tip of Manhattan. And then up the borough by subway — or, on glorious autumn or spring days, by foot.

Standing up on that jouncing train, I read Portrait for the first time. I had already tried some Faulkner and a high-school chemistry teacher had snatched a copy of The Sound and the Fury from my hand during study hall. “Seedy book,” he said, refusing to return it to me until the end of the day.

Portrait was worse than seedy. Some Catholic kids I knew told me it was listed together with Dubliners and Ulysses on the dreaded Index of books good Catholics shouldn’t read. That first time around I had no idea why Catholics might consider it worth banning. As far as I read I had found no obscenities or even euphemisms for obscenities as in the substitution of the coinage fug for fuck in my coveted copy of The Naked and the Dead.  (“Oh,” critic Diana Trilling is supposed to have said upon meeting Mailer at the publication party of his grand novel, “You’re the young man who doesn’t know how to spell fuck!”) The hellfire sermons seemed to me something Catholics were accustomed to. I just had no idea.

After my sophomoric reading of the book I finally understood why the book might have been “indexed.” The story of young Stephen’s progress from tormented but assiduous Catholic to budding aesthete stands against everything the church would have him believe, even as his serious Catholic education prepared him for arguing on behalf of his aesthetic. Without Aquinas and Augustine, Dedalus might have tarried longer in the chapel. But with Aristotle and the theologians as the wind at his back he moved faster and faster toward his vocation as a writer — that is, toward the point at which he could look back and write the story of his life and education.

The essential self-reflexiveness of this narrative education was lost on me that first time around. I read for the story, as all naïve readers do, and God save the naïve reader in us, I loved the opening pages, got lost in the family discussions, skimmed through the middle section until the retreat sequence and was mesmerized by the depictions of a hell no Jewish kid ever was raised to believe in — and then I settled in to the torpors of Dedalus’s sinfulness and his subsequent evolution into the aesthete of all aesthetes. I could not have imagined in what good stead the discussion of beauty and its component parts with his university friend would stand me over the years.

The long flowing pages of epiphanic wonder close to the end of the novel more than repaid the squint-eyed attention I gave to the more scholarly parts. The beautifully noticed details from the “eyes of girls among the leaves” to the louse crawling over the nape of our hero’s neck made up a world I might have felt but never could have imagined.

O Jersey boy! Or should I say, Oi! You there, standing before the gates of the 1960s, trembling book in trembling hand! What a connection to make! To feel more kinship with a fallen turn of the century Dublin Catholic aesthete than with one’s own family and friends!

My first reading, though exciting and stirring, was incomplete. Over the years I would return to it many times — the way this novel repays the returning reader makes it an exceptional invention. Other novels beckon, but none like Portrait, none has the same effect, none more instructive for the would-be writer about the pain of education, the struggle with family, the search for a vocation, the vision of a world more beautiful than one ever could have imagined if it weren’t for that vocation opening one’s eyes and allowing one to write about what one sees and feels and hears and touches and tastes — this dazzling novel, a first love that happens over and over again.

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Editor’s Note: “A Portrait of a (Would-Be) Jersey Artist Reading A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” is modified from a version that first appeared in the Autumn 2006 issue of The Sewanee Review.