How Every Writer Writes Herself [from the Archives]
Short sayings like "Every Painter Paints Himself" often generate shallow interpretations. On first hearing that phrase I doubt anyone would recognize a whole philosophy. I didn’t and still haven’t plumbed its full depth and meaning. It grows and grows. You need time - and lots of it. Don't make a judgement on reading a few explanations. As with all subjects worth learning about, you must see and read as much as possible and perservere. EPPH, this website, can whet your appetite but not fully satisfy you.
Over the weekend I devoured with pleasure Marguerite Yourcenar's Memoirs of Hadrian (1951). The Nobel Laureate expresses in masterful prose the thoughts of a Roman emperor nearly 2,000 years ago. Yet Hadrian's imagined musings to his young successor, Marcus Aurelius, are relevant in any age, suggesting that Hadrian's "creator" is not just describing an historical character but all of us. In addition, many passages seem to imply that Hadrian with his love of literature is the writer herself. Yet in an appendix written to explain her compositional method, Yourcenar bristles at the idea.
"The utter fatuity of those who say to you, "By 'Hadrian' you mean yourself!" Almost as unsubtle as those who wonder why one should choose a subject so remote in time and in space."
Yet a few lines further on she writes: "Every being who has gone through the adversity of living is myself." [Her italics.] And then on recommending that other novelists assiduously revise and re-make their text, she cites the poet Yeats: "It is myself that I remake."
What's going on here? Is she or is she not painting herself? Yourcenar's rejection of Hadrian as her alter ego is the reaction of a deep thinker to a simplistic thought. She does not say "I do not paint myself" but rejects its singular focus. Hadrian represents an element or process in herself ("It is myself that I remake") that is common to all humanity thereby making her content universal. She must paint herself because, like all of us, she has no other experience but her own. The first quotation above does not reject self-representation as senseless but expresses irritation at the questioner's failure to recognize the far more subtle unity in creation's diversity and Hadrian's relevance to us all.
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