Fame’s inflection point
she-Shakespeare, monsters, and the artist’s magic image
Between Elizabeth Winkler’s Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies and Claire Dederer’s Monsters, I’m tempted to call this (in tight thematic relation to the work of hot second-novel summer) the summer of “the riddle of the artist.”
Both of these books are top-notch: erudite and meticulously researched, thoughtfully argued and beautifully written. Winkler leans more scholarly, while Dederer further into memoir, but they similarly probe into the relationship between great art and problematic—immoral, irreconcilable, exaggerated, missing—biography.
In their respective explorations into the verboten “Shakespeare authorship question” and what “we” (carefully defined) should do with great art by bad men, Winkler and Dederer alight on a phenomenon that has fascinated me since college: the propensity for artists’ biographies to veer toward certain archetypes, mimetically coalescing into legends and myths with remarkably durable magical properties. This is the explicit subject of another book I love, the genesis of my fascination, a relatively obscure text from the 1930s: Legend, Myth, and Magic in the Image of the Artist by the German scholars Ernst Kris and Otto Kurz. It’s a slim book with tightly guarded parameters, focusing on graphic artists—painters, sculptors, architects—which is perhaps another reason why neither Winkler nor Dederer mention it, the former being concerned with literature, the latter the gamut, but with disproportionate emphasis on narrative mediums—novels, film.
Still, Legend, Myth, and Magic is beyond germane. From the first two paragraphs, Kris and Kurz have Winkler and Dederer’s numbers:
The “riddle of the artist,” the mystery surrounding him, and the magic emanating from him, can be viewed from two perspectives. One can investigate the nature of the man capable of creating works of art of the kind we admire—that is the psychological approach. Or one can ask how such a man, whose works are readily accorded a particular value, is himself evaluated by his contemporaries—the sociological approach.
Both approaches presuppose that there is a riddle—that certain special, and as yet ill-defined, traits and dispositions are required for artistic creation, and that certain periods and cultures have been prepared to accord a special, if ambiguous, place to the creator of a work of art.
Winkler takes the psychological approach, Dederer the sociological. Kris and Kurz are primarily concerned with the presupposition itself, with defining legendary artistic traits and dispositions—predominantly a sociological project, with limited psychological forays.
Our thesis is that from the moment when the artist made his appearance in historical records, certain stereotyped notions were linked with his work and person—preconceptions that have never entirely lost their significance and that still influence our view of what an artist is today.
That Winkler and Dederer (and I) are all still grappling with a certain word here they leave unexplored—his—only speaks to the recalcitrance of these preconceptions and the enduring relevance of Kris and Kurz’s work. Meanwhile, two of the recurring motifs they identify off the cuff, precocity and the deceptive imitation of nature, literally comprise the foundation of the Stratfordian “biographies” Winkler questions:
They begin like a folktale or the legend of a saint, deep in the heart of England, wrapped in wildflowers and rolling green hills. See, for instance Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare, the 2004 New York Times best seller by the Harvard scholar Stephen Greenblatt. “Let us imagine that Shakespeare found himself from boyhood fascinated by language, obsessed with the magic of words,” Greenblatt begins.
Let us imagine.
It’s alluring, inviting, and entirely make believe.
It’s also basically identical to the boyhood stories of the Greek sculptor Lysippus, painters Zeuxis and Parrhasios, Giotto, and many others. Kris and Kurz call these “artist anecdotes.”
As a rule the anecdote deals with a prominent person or hero—or it substitutes a particular social type—who is brought closer to our understanding, so that we can identify with him more easily.
[. . .]
What we have done is to extract these anecdotes from the descriptions of the lives of various artists. We regard the hero of these typical anecdotes as depicting the typical artist—as the image of the artist which the historian has in mind. The question whether statements contained in an anecdote in this or that particular case are true then becomes irrelevant. The only significant factor is that an anecdote recurs, that it is recounted so frequently as to warrant the conclusion that it represents the typical image of the artist.
Again this sheds light on the related nature and urgency of Winkler and Dederer’s subjects—and also, perhaps, why two such excellent works of nonfiction released less than a month apart with so much in common haven’t been discussed together (that I can find). Winkler is challenging the hegemonic imposition of traditional mythic—that is, fictive—“artist anecdotes” onto the biography of the most revered figure in English literature, of whom we know too little. Dederer is grappling with how to manage as consumers of art without such anecdotes; when our entrenched image of the artist has been “stained.” When we know too much.
Winkler provides a number of compelling reasons as to why her inquiry and the “Shakespeare authorship question” is so heretical—its secular religiosity, academic incentives, confirmation bias—but I’d argue Dederer’s “fan’s dilemma” is big one. The Stratfordian narrative is unstained. (K&K: “all moral taint is removed from the hero’s origin.”) Not to say Roman Polanski and Woody Allen aren’t great artists—Annie Hall is probably my favorite film of the 20th century—but imagine if we had to grapple with a pedophilic Shakespeare? The Stratfordian mythology is like a moral plastic sofa cover, protecting the bard from the sort of damn spot you can’t get out.
Moreover, as Winkler notes, the traditional “heroization of the artist in biography” is immensely alluring. Here’s Pliny the Elder on Lysippus, as quoted in Legend, Myth, and Magic:
It is reported that Lysippus had no teacher. Starting out as a coppersmith, he decided to become an artist only when he heard his countryman, the Sicyonian painter Eupompos, answer a question (from a third man?) as to which of his predecessors he followed. Pointing to a motley assortment of people, Eupompus said, “All of these”—that is to say: Nature, and not the manner of some other artist, is alone worthy of imitation.
Kris and Kurz break this down into its elements:
Lysippus turned himself from a coppersmith into a great artist.
He had no teacher.
He happened to overhear a remark made by Eupompus and this accidental circumstance was decisive for his choice of profession.
This remark was to the effect that Nature, and not some old master, was alone worthy of imitation.
It fits the Stratfordian narrative to a T. We might easily adapt the structure to say:
Shakespeare turned himself from a provincial businessman into a great artist.
He might have attended a local grammar school, but had no university education.
(Conspicuous absence.)
Choose a Nature quote from the many Winkler compiles:
“Shakespeare was nurtured by Nature and his own tongue,” one eighteenth-century scholar wrote. “His studies were most demonstratively confined to Nature and his own language.” Nineteenth-century scholars agreed: “He was Nature’s own child—her favorite son—her beloved offspring,” wrote one. “She guided every idea, warmed and perfected every description, and fired every effusion and passion.”
We might also summarize narratively, thematically as:
Rags to riches (K&K: “references to the artist’s rise in social standing recur as a typical biographical motif”; Winkler: “The cognitive scientist George Lakoff calls the rags-to-riches structure one of our ‘deep narratives,’ recurring again and again in our cultural and political life.”)
Autodidacism (K&K: “we know of a number of artists of antiquity whom it is reported, in almost exactly the same words, that they grew up without a teacher.”)
“Let us imagine” (K&K: “There can be no doubt whatsoever that Duris’s account [of Eupompus’s answer] was not dictated by known facts; rather, we are dealing here with an anecdote whose shape was determined by the conscious intentions of its author. Textual research has even gone so far as to doubt, on the basis of dating, whether a meeting between Lysippus and Eupompos was even possible”; Winkler: “The biographies are riddled with speculation: Shakespeare ‘could have,’ ‘might have,’ ‘must have,’ ‘probably,’ ‘surely,’ ‘undoubtedly,’ they muse, conjuring baseless scenes and elaborating tenuous theories in an attempt to connect the man to the works.”)
Imitation of nature (K&K: “Nature replaces the legacy of earlier artists as the model.”)
The dissection is helpful in connecting seemingly disparate artist anecdotes with a historical veneer that have actually just been combined and recombined over and over from the same mythic raw materials—explicitly not in service of actual biography. These fictional anecdotes, the “movable scenery inserted in the biographer’s workshop” (K&K) are, however, clearly in service of something. They are too persistent and pervasive not to be.
That something is genius—“a spectral, sacred word,” Dederer writes, “yet it lands with the thud of fact.”
Rags to riches, autodidacism, nature—all provide direct biographical claims to genius. Winkler notes, for example: “The weirdly pagan invocation of ‘Nature’—the inverse of learning and knowledge—was meant to explain the genius of Shakespeare’s works, which poured forth from him like holy texts from God’s appointed prophets.” Hence why, as Kris and Kurz explain, we sometimes find thematic tensions across artist anecdotes—between autodidacism and elite tutorial lineage, bootstrapping social ascension and lucky chance. The details, they reiterate, are almost universally fictional, and never the point. The point is asserting genius, and as air-tightly as possible.
The sanctity of genius traces its roots back to the mirror concepts Kris and Kurz discuss at length of Deus artifex—God as craftsman—and divino artista—divine artist, both of which facilitate “the elevation of human endeavors to divine rank.” We’re in spitting distance from the problem of immortality here; it’s getting clearer and clearer why the stakes of passing off such fictions as fact are so high. Connected, too, is the idea Winkler explores of Shakespeare’s secular replacement for the Christian God, of English Departments for churches, of scholars for high priests. The secular replacement for divinity is genius. As Dederer puts it: “Genius is the name we give our love when we don’t want to argue about it; when we want our opinion to become fact. When we want to push our obsession onto the next guy.” Sounds awfully like conversion. Here are Kris and Kurz:
As Plato indicated in his Phaedrus, the idea of the divine possession of the poet sprang from religious practice; it is an offshoot of the belief that the predictions and auguries of priestesses and prophetesses are fulfilled by “divine madness.”
[. . .]
The new image of the artist which evolved in the sixteenth century found its clearest expression in the opinion that “wonderful and divine thoughts” come into being only when ecstasy complements the operation of the intellect (Vasari, 2:204). This is at the same time a reminder which leaves no doubt that artistic creation rests upon inner vision, upon inspiration. Thus, inevitably, there emerged an image of the artist who creates his work driven by an irrepressible urge, in “a mixture of fury and madness,” akin to intoxication. This idea has roots, as we have attempted to indicate, in Plato’s theory of art; but it was not until the Renaissance that painters and sculptors were credited with possessing genuine ecstasy. Thus transformed into “the stylus of god,” the artist himself was honored as a divine being. The “religion” among whose saints he is counted is the modern-day worship of genius.
Genius comes with a pretty premium benefits package even beyond artistic apotheosis. Dederer describes this well:
A genius has special power, and with that special power comes special dispensation. Genius gets a hall pass. We count ourselves lucky he walks among us; who are we to say he must also behave himself?
[. . .]
When it comes to balancing the greatness of the work against the badness of the deed, the word “genius” simply breaks the calculator. It’s a glittering absolute set into a dreary dutiful system of relative worth. And that’s to the advantage of the genius.
It’s also, per Winkler, to the advantage of the priest—the scholar—who, by proxy, is imbued with a little bit of artist-magic, and due a reverse-sunset sort of reflective worship:
Will and the World, Greenblatt’s best seller, was censured by a colleague in the London Review of Books as “biographical fiction.” But it was beautifully written and vividly imagined, and so, in spite of its liberties, it became a finalist for the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize.
This is another reason “The heroization of the artist has become the aim of his biographers” (K&K). Crassly, it’s a circle-jerk—whether or not the artist (or the scholar) is actually a jerk.
This brings me, finally, to the hypothesis I’ve been developing for a while, core to the new novel I’m working on, that our worship of godlike genius, our enduring commitment to its biographical fictions, our fascination with “the riddle of the artist” itself—it’s all in service not of some general, indiscriminate desire for status, power, fame, and fortune, but a very specific one: to pass the threshold that I’m going to call fame’s inflection point. This being the point at which the value of a person’s art in the absolute broadest sense—everything they make, say, do, capture, etc.—no longer primarily derives its power from what, but who. Not from the artifact, but the artist.
Passing fame’s inflection point is distinct from absolute fame. You might think of it like the difference between a balance sheet and an income statement, to build on Dederer’s calculator metaphor. An example might help. The Gorilla Glue hair lady—remember her? She was the most famous person on the internet for a few days, but she never came close to passing fame’s inflection point. We cared about her because of what she did—not who she was. If a different lady had done the same thing, our fixation would have shifted its object, too. Compare this to Shakespeare. The discovery of even the tiniest shred of new work by William of Stratford would be newsworthy—even if it totally, completely sucked. Because Shakespeare has long since passed fame’s inflection point. His magical artist-genius properties auto-extend to anything he touches and anything that touches him.
The idea of clearing fame’s inflection point is so deeply seductive that, in keeping with the tradition of artist anecdotes and biographical fiction, our culture is positively fixated on finding shortcuts to it. The most successful tactic here has been—sorry—recursive. This is the Kim Kardashian route: passing fame’s inflection point for being famous itself—now the mimetic model for every influencer. Its litmus test is conspicuous crap, the idea that led me to the idea of fame’s inflection point in the first place. And as we’re increasingly incentivized to give more and more of our attention to who-based minutia, the less mental real estate we have for under-biographed art/ content we’d theoretically find far more worthwhile. Even on Substack—the “good” social platform—there is immense pressure to specialize in order to gain a following, to build up your subscriber balance sheet with the express goal of passing fame’s inflection point, to be read regardless of what you write because you wrote it.
Genius and fame’s inflection point are clearly related, but present a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem. On the one hand, assertions of genius, artist anecdotes, etc., function to propel a figure past the inflection point. On the other, having passed it seems a plausible sociological definition of genius itself. Is Kim Kardashian a genius? I’m not sure. Is she a marketing genius? Honestly? Probably.
I’m less invested in the specific answer than in how “the riddle of the artist” continues to evolve; in how our technologies and business models seem, simultaneously, to augment the power of ancient narrative threads even as they shatter them. In the depth of such seemingly superficial questions.
As more and more people desperately try—and succeed—to pass fame’s inflection point, doing so seems to become both more existential and meaningless than ever. This is the labyrinth I’m currently stuck in, trying to build some wings.
Thanks for reading,
ANJ
The arguments on Shakespeare are really giving me something to think about I must say
Clever. Thank you.