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Around a hundred years ago, nerdy and pretentious little
James Joyce read Aquinas and Aristotle then penned some of the most intriguing
definitions for what art should be, and I think it’s worth remembering a few of
his key points.
Static vs. Kinetic:
Joyce asserts that pornographic art moves the reader in a kinetic fashion by
pushing only one emotion or idea the way that porn has a single clear reaction
in mind. On the other hand static art,
the finer art, pulls the reader in several directions so that he is tethered
from so many places he cannot move. The dark and the light. The joy and the pain.
The humor and the sadness. The infinitely brilliant and the infinitely stupid.
While writers are constantly encouraged to make an audience FEEL, the best
writers don’t limit that feeling to a single emotion. Is your work only a fun
work? Sad work? What could you do to tease out other sentiments?
Great art has Aquinas’s
principles: Wholeness, harmony, and radiance.
Wholeness: “The
work should be selfbounded and selfcontained upon the immeasurable background
of space or time which it is not.” Essentially, are you writing to a trend?
Could the work stand alone or does it require a movement to support it?
Harmony: “You
apprehend it as a complex, multiple, divisible, separable, made up of its
parts, the result of their parts and their sum, harmonious.” Does your work
have subplots/smaller character arcs working individually whose rhythms/peaks
are timed to enhance the key driving force? Does the setting work both individually
and enhance the tenor of the piece? Do all of those pieces feel cohesive?
Radiance: “You
see that thing which it is and no other thing. The radiance is the scholastic
quidditas, the whatness of a thing.” This one is by far the toughest. Is your
work really unique? Could it have been written by anyone else? And, more
importantly, does that shine? I have no other questions to ask for this one,
but as Malcolm Gladwell suggests in his book Outliers that it will take about
ten thousand hours of practice to create what Joyce might call “radiance.”
Ah, the art of writing. So much time and effort goes into the words and then shaping them into a story. Not so sure writing is as lucky as art - art is timeless, but writing is often shaped more by the time in which it was written.
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