Julian Barnes Archives | Numéro Cinq

Here’s a Julian Barnes essay on memoirs by Joyce Carol Oates and Joan Didion, both widows mourning the loss of a partner. They are a study in contrasts, and the contrasts illuminate the art of the memoir and personal tragedy.

“Yet Oates’s A Widow’s Story and Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking could not be more different. Though Didion’s opening lines (the fourth of which is “The question of self-pity”) were jotted down a day or two after Dunne’s death, she waited eight months before beginning to write. Oates’s book is largely based on diary entries, most from the earliest part of her year: so in a 415-page book, we find that by page 125 we have covered just a week of her widowhood, and by page 325 are still only at week eight. While both books are autobiographies, Didion is essayistic and concise, seeking external points of comparison, trying to set her case in some wider context. Oates is novelistic and expansive, switching between first and third persons, seeking (not with unfailing success) to objectify herself as “the widow”; and though she occasionally reaches for the handholds of Pascal, Nietzsche, Emily Dickinson, Richard Crashaw, and William Carlos Williams, she is mainly focused on the dark interiors, the psycho-chaos of grief. Each writer, in other words, is playing to her strengths.”

via ‘For Sorrow There Is No Remedy’ by Julian Barnes | The New York Review of Books.

Jacques Callot's "The Seven Deadly Sins:Envy"

1. “When Writers Hate”

Morrissey is right, we hate it when our friends become successful. Gore Vidal is even more honest, confessing, “Whenever a friend succeeds, a little something in me dies.” Near the end of the film Sideways, the rivalrous friendship of Jack and Miles is echoed by the novel Miles has assigned one of his young pupils to read aloud, John Knowle’s 1959 A Separate Peace, a tale of envy, perhaps even murderous envy, between schoolboy friends. Shakespeare’s Iago is envy on two legs. Adrift in a life before talking cures, support groups or good yoga, Cain walked alone with envy.

A fifteenth-century image of Cain and Abel

In life and art, friendship often oscillates between admiration and envy. Two recent shows at New York’s Museum of Modern Art showcased the reciprocal rivalry between Picasso and Matisse, as well as Cézanne and Pissarro. The 2004 documentary DiG!, chronicles the not-so-friendly rivalry between the bands The Brian Jonestown Massacre and The Dandy Warhols. When envy worms its way into writing, particularly into the novel, subject and medium collide. Writing is envy’s preferred medium.

Hiroshighe's "Great Bridge, Sudden Shower at Atake" and Van Gogh's (Later) "The Bridge in the Rain""

Writing slides someone else’s thoughts through our brain, and those thoughts come through the public medium of language. In the incomplete neuroscience of thought, writers and visual artists can admire and envy each other: humans may think more quickly through images, but, some contend, we think more specifically through language. And when we do think visually, we don’t necessarily see another artist’s brushstrokes, another photographer’s composition. When we think verbally, however, we think through the shared property of words and the evolving codes of language. Words are only made by humans, whereas the stuff of visual art—color, texture, scale, shape, line, etc.—partially pre-exist in the world. When this latent alterity of language is combined with the novel, which many regard as the ideal genre of the self, we hold in our laps the perfect testing ground for one of life’s dirty little secrets. We hate it when our friends become successful. We do, at least a little.