Feb
15
“Just as Houellebecq is obsessed with what he considers art’s inability to help us transcend the empty materiality of our lives, Jeffrey is fascinated with the problem of what he calls “our inarticulacy” in the face of great art—the inability to express what exactly we find so compelling about a painting or work of literature. This aphasia, Jeffrey contends, can sap the work’s “transformational power”; it can make us feel unworthy or pretentious and force us to resort to baser pleasures, like sex. Like anything that exerts power over us, great art has the capacity to unsettle if we cannot satisfactorily account for it. This “is the fundamental reason why deep attachment to art can seem so stupid,” Jeffrey writes, “why it gets so frustrating to try to explain what the ‘real’ worth of art is, even to oneself.” The problem, then, is this: In order to adequately explain your love of Beckett’s The Unnamable, wouldn’t you have to be at least as good a writer as Beckett?”
from Scott Esposito’s review at BookForum.
