The Position of Spoons, page 9
If some of us are nasty and some of us are nice, mostly we are a mix of both, as in Sophia’s Friends (2017). The pretty pastel colours contrast with the fierce, secret, interior lives of these three girls, while the power relations between them are inflamed with Rego’s droll humour. The arm of the smallest girl, wearing a white dress, is being grasped by the older, mischievously sadistic girl, who warily looks out at us, as if she has been caught rough handling her friend. Yet it is the last of this trio, the girl with neat plaits who sits on the end of the prim, upholstered bench, who gives this composition its pathos. Her eyes are closed, maybe to zone out of the conflict and dream herself elsewhere.
As in the fairy tales and nursery rhymes that have long inspired her work, Rego has personified people as animals, or hybrids of both. Girl on a Large Armchair (2000) brings back the predatory dog that appears in much of her work.
It seems to have been summoned by the woman who is seated on an armchair, which also resembles a kind of throne. Her hands rest assertively on her thighs, muscular legs slightly apart, yet, as ever with Rego, it is also her thoughts that animate her body. Fading sunflowers peer over her left shoulder. Hiding under the chair is a girl, a child, and staring at her is the dog, straining on his hind legs as he lowers himself towards her. Paws outstretched, he lifts up the blanket under which she lies. The dog seems ravenous, the girl looks bemused. Some sort of protective creature lies with her under the blanket. It is as if the woman on the chair is thinking about her younger self, reminiscing about a moment of being seduced, pawed, eaten alive – or perhaps she will eat the dog herself.
This memory, or story, continues with Convulsion IV (2000), also embodied with wax crayon and watercolour, in which two realities take place simultaneously. The woman in the armchair is spitting blood while another woman, barefoot, lies flat out at her feet.
Rego’s pencil is very playful in She Doesn’t Want It (2007). A smiling young female protagonist, who looks a little like a fairy-tale princess, seems to be offering a limb to a seated scowling woman. We are not sure what it is she doesn’t want or what exactly is being offered. It is the refusal that captures our curiosity. If she is saying no to whatever it is she is supposed to want, it is not just refusal, it is protest. This is echoed in Sick of It All (2013), for which Rego returns to delicate watercolour. A moody older woman, wearing a sensual red dress, sits on a mass of purple that is vaguely intestinal – as if her insides are pouring out of her body. The ambience is both turbulent and serene. Like all good storytellers, the artist leaves it to the viewer to step into the image and improvise with its meanings.
There is a quote by Jacques Lacan that gets somewhere close to the experience of looking at a Rego drawing: ‘The reason we go to poetry is not for wisdom, but for the dismantling of wisdom.’ In this sense Rego dismantles the patriarchal story that has flattened girls and women everywhere, erasing their own desires to better serve those of everyone else, and replaces it with raw feeling. This is another kind of wisdom, always subversive, as in Nursing (2000), in which we gaze at the ambivalent feelings of a young woman nursing an elderly woman who lies prostrate on the armchair. The protagonist doing the caring has a flower in her hair. Life! Sexuality! She is resilient, enduring, her arms crossed, but what is transmitted is that she is both nursing and desiring at the same time. This is not easy to do, yet Rego’s sheer technical virtuosity manages, always, to convey the poetry and complexity of mixed feelings.
The Fisherman (2005) pulls us into the surreal world of a doll-like child and a giant octopus with its tactile white belly and orange blistered tentacles. It seems to float in the deep of an inky black carpet that is also the ocean. A benign monster, the fisherman, sits next to a reclining woman on a mattress, his rod outstretched in what is both interior space and a landscape of rocks, weeds and parched riverbeds. If Rego mythically brings to the surface some of what lurks in the depths, it is usually to do with perplexing human relations.
This benign monster appears again in Reading the Divine Tragedy by Dante (2005), in which the female protagonist wears a sleeveless green dress, her bare muscular right arm folded across her lap. Yet the fingers of her left hand seem both shocked and contemplative as they rest on the tweed jacket, the arm of the smartly dressed monstrous creature reading her a book. His head is mostly a mouth. Near her feet a cicada seems to be listening too. And there she is again, or someone like her, floating in the right-hand corner, sipping wine with the Dante-reading creature. Meanwhile, another woman is mopping the floor while a cherub reaches out to touch the mop. Outside the window is the beach, turquoise sea and yellow sand, where women attend to their children. This morphing of realism and surrealism gives equal status to the ordinary and the extraordinary, in which, as ever, the artist is also working with fragments of memory. Apparently, her father would read Dante to her when she was a child.
Rego has suggested she doesn’t like drawing self-portraits. For this reason, she has used her long-time model, Lila Nunes, as her alter ego. This in itself is a relationship to be noted for art history, a flip of the traditional male artist’s muse. To transmit oneself through someone else, and for this uncanny metamorphosis to transparently be the game, adds a unique, perhaps even a metafictional dimension to much of the work. However, when Rego had a fall and bruised her face, it became more interesting to her to draw it.
The Self-Portrait series (2017) is a rare and significant part of Rego’s archive, not least for its visceral sense of the artist staring piercingly at herself. We see an older woman, her mouth wide open to reveal a snarl of crooked lower teeth, a wedding ring (perhaps) on the finger of her left hand, a pastel stick held in her right hand. If she is stripped of the radiance of youth, she is nevertheless radiant with the force of her own taboo-breaking gaze. These valuable self-portraits have an affinity with Francis Bacon’s 1950s Screaming Pope series, about which Bacon commented: ‘I like, you may say, the glitter and colour that comes from the mouth, and I’ve always hoped in a sense to be able to paint the mouth like Monet painted a sunset.’ The mouth in Rego’s self-portraits is a whole landscape in itself, an abundance of life rendered in a few delicate lines. There is a sense of almost demonic possession in the one open eye that stares at herself. Perhaps it is the force of her desire to create art.
To encounter the 2007 series titled Depression is to understand that the full spectrum of female emotional life has been embodied for us by a uniquely fearless artist. This again is a note for art history, and not a footnote either. It is as if Rego acknowledges, yes, there is enchantment, desire, betrayal, fame, joy, imaginative flight, powerful sexuality, political purpose – most amplified in the Abortion series, Untitled (1999) – yes, there is magical thinking and love, yet there is this too.
Julia Kristeva evokes the heavy weight of depression in her sublime book on this subject, Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia (1992). Kristeva writes:
Where does this black sun come from? Out of what eerie galaxy do its invisible, lethargic rays reach me, pinning me down to the ground, to my bed, compelling me to silence, to renunciation?
This resonates with Rego’s reclining women in her Depression series, in that they seem pinned down by those invisible rays, thinking and breathing in a number of positions on a blazing yellow sofa. In the first drawing of this extraordinary series, a seated woman is encircled by the elaborate black frills and pleats of her almost Gothic dress. Its composition resembles the black sun of Kristeva’s title, except the woman is not so much listless, as alert. The folds of this all-consuming costume seem to personify her malaise; the dress does all the talking for her. These long-skirted women are somehow ageless, universal. They could be the Brontë sisters, or Elizabeth Barrett Browning, or Virginia Woolf, or ourselves, or our mothers, yet in Rego’s hands, as with all her girls and women, they are neither pathologized or shamed. This is the enduring legacy of one of the most skilled figurative artists in the world.
THE PSYCHOPATHOLOGY OF A WRITING LIFE
Fiction is a good home for the reach of the human mind.
It can give shelter to all the dimensions of consciousness, including the unconscious. If the writer is hospitable to this idea, and if the task interests us enough, we will find our own literary strategies to build our home. Consciousness in this regard does not mean streams of consciousness, but rather the consciousness of the entire composition of our story. This composition will have its own very particular writing behaviour, as Roland Barthes so beautifully told us.
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And is it true that when we write we are only as interesting as how we think and where we are looking or how we are looking or what it is we are feeling and how that feeling is connected to history (the personal and political past), or how we are breathing when we explain why we slammed a door? The human mind can go anywhere. This is a good thing in art. In life this is not always a good thing. We know that unwelcome thoughts can torment us and that we ingeniously find our own private magic to see them off.
In art there is a place for this kind of private magic.
I’m guessing we become boring when our minds are numb and closed and when we cannot tolerate doubt, or when we have no interest in the subjectivities of others, or when, for many understandable reasons, we cannot access the (apparently) unknowing parts of our minds. When we create characters or avatars to carry our ideas into the worlds of our fictions, it is desirable to want to access the unknowing parts of their minds, as well as their more conscious motivations.
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There is plenty of pressure to numb our minds. Corporate culture likes to reduce human experience to the many questionnaires we are invited to tick or cross. The questionnaire has implicitly written the story for us. We do not have to stutter and stumble and struggle for language or put to work the imaginative reach of our minds or put to work the skills a writer needs to hold many contradictory thoughts at the same time. With this in mind, it is important and exciting to say and think things we do not yet understand. If we are reaching for something that is there anyway, in ourselves, in the world, the struggle in the writing is to connect our thoughts and make visible something that is seemingly impossible to convey. When we pay too much attention to the commercial health and safety regulations for getting published, it is likely that our writing will become so hyper-intelligible that it tragically dies before it opens its eyes.
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If coherence is achieved at the expense of complexity, it is not really coherence. Perhaps it is just an opinion. Complexity and coherence are twins, always in secret conversation with each other. Any kind of coherence that flattens or sanitizes the world of our fictions or offers false consolations for the anxieties that make us interesting or resolves conflicts and restores moral order in unbelievable ways, or that dulls the awkward, fragile, illogical, incoherent parts of living a life, simply does not have enough dimensions. The point of life is to tune in to all its dimensions, including the ecology of the natural world.
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I started writing in the late twentieth century. My first novel was published in 1987, two years before the Berlin Wall came down and communist Eastern Europe started to unravel. I wrote my first story on a typewriter, there was no Internet and I made use of public libraries. Now I write on a MacBook Pro and a MacBook Air and a desktop Mac. I use the Pro to watch films, the Air to travel and write, and the desktop is in my writing shed, usually with my mobile phone on the desk.
For my novel Hot Milk, I made use of handwritten journals written in Almería, where the novel is set. I find that kind of writing useful because it’s a way of catching first thoughts before they are censored and finessed. I also used Google to research the following subjects: how a sandblaster works, the physiology of a sigh, immigrant tomato pickers in southern Spain, how a handkerchief is arranged in the jacket pocket of an old-fashioned gentleman’s suit. Facts. I really need them to tune the reality levels of my book so that I can do a deal with you, the reader, when I subvert the reality levels of my book. I can’t subvert a reality unless I create a reality. I am constantly transferring material from the Air to the Pro and back to headquarters in the dark, dusty shed. So quite literally the writing itself is migrating across various technologies.
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All the same, staring at the screen is not the same action as staring at the world. There is some contemporary confusion about this, and I argue my case in Hot Milk, through the character (or avatar for my arguments) of 25-year-old Sofia. She often gets lost staring at her screen and reckons she needs to risk coming down to earth where all the hard stuff happens. For a start, the screen does not stare back or love us or punch us in the face. It is not addicted to us, though we might be addicted to it. How we gaze at the world and how we negotiate the way it gazes back at us is at the core of all writing.
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There is the story and then there is everything else. If we are not interested in everything else, we are probably not interested in language. You will have your own ideas about what everything else might be. All narrative is a Trojan Horse. What is hiding in its belly and what is hiding in its mouth? It’s always a very good thing to put a few drawing pins under the self-righteous bullying butt of narrative – we have got to keep it alert and make it scream a little and make sure it does not settle into an armchair with a kitten on its lap. Narrative loves itself too much and wants you to adore it too. Sometimes narrative is so begging, it actually passes around the chocolates and chuckles as it warms its hands by a crackling fire. As Rilke told us, it’s never too late to attempt to truthfully and humbly describe a sorrow that can also make us laugh. It’s always a pleasure when words and sentences land with the cadence in the right place, or when the reveal and conceal of the story is in the right place, or when the balance between enigma and coherence is in the right place.
I know that things are going well when there is something about a character that I cannot fully comprehend. The more unknowable they seem, the more fascinating they become to me. Perhaps this is just a trick to keep me writing. Sometimes I strike on something I did not know. I hear the sound of that strike, it sparks, I can smell the smoke. That kind of strike changes everything.
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If I am an avant-garde writer and want my work to be appreciated for the beauty of its formal innovation, it would be an innovation to accelerate high emotion rather than avoid it completely for fear it will stain my shirt. If you are a sentimental writer, it would be an innovation to read some difficult theory and have no character feel anything at all until you figure out what is really being felt.
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It is a writing adventure to go in deep, then deeper, and then to play with surface so that we become experts at surface and depth. It is possible to have a preference for the shallows or a preference for the depths, but I reckon they coexist anyway. In life, no one I know is entirely stupid or entirely clever. What do you think? If you don’t enjoy thinking, I can’t see how you will enjoy writing.
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It’s exciting to lose as much fear as possible when it comes to writing, because that’s the only way to be open enough to make something new. There’s never any point in straining to make something new, but usually when we do, it’s because we have taken a risk. You will have your own ideas about what taking a risk means to you. So long as we do not pluck out the heart of our mystery (to misquote Shakespeare), there will always be something interesting to do with language.
TOO MUCH PAST
When the pandemic roared into the end of the second decade of our twenty-first century, the past become livelier in my mind. With the present and the future in flux, it was as if I had nowhere else to go. During the long days and nights of various lockdowns, I wondered if the past rudely visited me, ghostly, uninvited, or if I walked backwards, uninvited, to haunt it?
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The main soundtrack in my life at this time was the wailing sirens of ambulances taking Covid patients to hospital. Maybe it was because death was in the air that I found myself revisiting Chekhov’s great play The Three Sisters, first performed in 1901 at the Moscow Art Theatre. When I was a theatre student, aged nineteen, a famous female director came to our college to create a production of this play – I was cast as melancholy, rebellious Masha. I think the director thought my high cheekbones suited the role, but, alas, I had little acting talent. With hindsight (not my favourite sort of sight), maybe the director did not have much directing talent either.
These spirited sisters, Olga, Masha and Irina, all of them in their twenties, live on the edge of a small provincial Russian town. Their most fierce desire, it seems, after the death of their parents, is to return to cosmopolitan, cultured Moscow, which is where they were born. They love the past more than they love the present, and wish to return to it.
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On the night of the performance, I sat on the stage chaise-longue in full costume, staring blankly into space, while Olga, my stage sister, spoke the first line in the play: ‘It’s exactly a year ago today that Father died, the fifth of May.’ That this play begins on the anniversary of Masha, Olga and Irina’s father’s death did not mean very much to me at the age of nineteen. In fact, it seems to me now, aged sixty, that all of us young actors were trying to create an emotional mood we did not yet understand.
Why, I asked myself, as another ambulance rattled down the road, did the director not say to that cast of young people: ‘May I ask if any of you have experienced the death of a parent?’ And if just one of us had replied, ‘Yes, my mother died when I was twelve,’ the director would have been wise to ask if that student might share some of the thoughts and feelings that come out to play on the anniversary of a parent’s death. That way, I would not have been staring blankly into space on the first night of the performance.
