Waiting for some great sign. Minor Black Figures

Brandon Taylor's new novel

Brandon Taylor’s new novel, Minor Black Figures, is a historical novel about the present. When I spoke to Taylor last year, he told me he wanted to bring back all that a novel can do. He is now “allowing characters in my work to have ideologies and to argue about those ideologies.” This is the result, perhaps, of his long study of György Lukács and the nineteenth century realists. (And one can profitably read this novel alongside Zola’s The Masterpiece.) It is also a way for Taylor to argue with the world and about the world. Minor Black Figures might be inspired by older ideas, but it is very much a novel about our times.

Taylor recently wrote, of Glass Century, Ross Barkan’s new historical novel: “the contemporary historical novel is more akin to a chamber drama whose elucidations are merely descriptive.” Historical novels, he said, (or Glass Century, at least), have lost their sense of history, of the “development of the social process through character conflict”. Minor Black Figures isn’t strictly a historical novel. It is set in the present. And the plot is in fact a sort of chamber drama. But it very much is an attempt to illustrate the development of social processes. It is also about art: what it is, ought to be, and has become. For the first time in his fiction, Taylor is writing explicitly about ideas, often ideas against the mediocrity of so much fiction and painting.

This all means that Minor Black Figures is different in form, mode, and style from Taylor’s previous work.

The opening is a clear pastiche of A Tale of Two Cities, but whereas Dickens relies on the abstract non-referential “it”, Taylor chose “they”. “They” is still indefinite, but it puts the emphasis less on “the times” and more on “the people in those times”.¹

That summer, they threw bombs and made signs for peace.

They went into the streets and the parks and the squares, the same as they had done two years before, and three years before that, and six years before that, and three years before that, which of course meant they had never really left the streets and the parks and the squares in the first place.

All novels are novels of ideas, but while A Tale of Two Cities is merely infused with a Carlylean sense of history which creates the conditions for a great sentimental drama, Taylor is trying to enlarge the scope of his novel so that his minor black figures are seen in their history, are illustrating that history. Dickens closes his opening with descriptions of crime in Britain (“In England, there was scarcely an amount of order and protection to justify much national boasting”) before dropping the scene into “the Dover road …in November.” Taylor talks about social inanity, before leading us into an artist’s studio.

Now Taylor picks up Dickens’ abstract non-referential “it”…

The lesser among them, the timorous, the doubtful, and the wavering, stood back, watching, waiting for some great sign, savoring their doubts.

It was a hollow time. It was a dull time. It was summer, and Manhattan steamed between two rivers.

Downtown, in his studio at the corner of White and Cortland…

Alert readers will be wondering if a priest is destined to appear, someone who is professionally or vocationally involved with waiting for some great sign. And indeed, Minor Black Figures is a story about a black artist and a white former-priest having an affair over the summer in Manhattan. But the story is more than that.

Like Sally Rooney in Beautiful World, Taylor has written a novel that calls its readers (some of who, perhaps, will identify themselves with the opening descriptions) away from the hollow times of modern politics towards the real work of their lives.

This is the challenge that Wyeth, the artist, faces with his work. “You make thought experiments, not paintings”, his friend tells him. This strand of the novel is the most intellectually engaging part of Taylor’s body of work so far; until now, ideas have been diffused into his novels; in Minor Black Figures, readers are given open disagreement, authorial intervention, and the direct engagement of idle platitudes.

“I don’t like the part where they talk shit about Sargent,” Wyeth said.

“Oh yeah, Painting has long been a tool of the elite inoculating the elite, look at Sargent, what an asshole.”

“You can only say that if you haven’t actually looked at Sargent—look at Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose and tell me he’s a rich asshole.”

“That one’s not great,” Bernard said.

Wyeth sat up sharply.

“I mean, it’s a little dentist officey.”

“But have you actually seen it, in person?” Wyeth asked. “Have you stood in front of it?”

“I’ll give you that.”

“Totally different in the room. What he’s done in that painting is… it’s not look at my rich friends. It’s something really… I don’t know. He’s taken a moment from life, taken something real and articulated it. In the shadow and the color and the light, and the idea that it’s facile bullshit. It’s like, if that’s shit painting, then what am I doing? What are any of us doing?”

I first saw Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose at a large Sargent exhibition in London. I turned the corner out of the first room and there it was at the end of a long corridor, glowing, almost, drawing all attention to itself, not just as a work of accomplished painting, but, like the best works of Rembrandt, because it gave one, for a moment, the feeling that here was something real, strangely real no doubt, as if a window into some other part of life were opened, just now, just here, just for us. Rembrandt’s confrontational realism is often unsettling, whereas Sargent charms. It is the sort of painting, which, on first encounter, one struggles to leave, knowing that this brief magic will never quite return. There have been many other moments like this in my life, to be sure. I once stood in the drizzle in a garden of an Oxford college, performing a scene as the Fool from King Lear. Twenty feet away was a door in a wall, through which King Charles I was said to have passed in a moment of escape during the Civil War. I have heard Uchida play Schubert. Indeed, I have my own children, and have occasionally turned round to see real-life moments like Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose. And I have, yes, gone out of my way to see that painting again.

Taylor had a very specific, personal reason for including this scene. It stands out as seminal to the purpose of the novel for good reason. Taylor said:

This novel was largely inspired by my hatred of a contemporary painter’s work. Whenever I complained about this guy’s work, my friend Garth would ask me if I had actually seen it in the room. So I went out of my way to see it so that I could speak at great length about why I hate his work so much.

But it wasn’t enough. I needed to write a whole novel about why I hate it. HATE IT. And also to get revenge for his having said something mean about Sargent in a profile.

Anyway, I put that scene in there as an inside-joke with myself, lol.

I say all this because fiction is an exercise in which readers attempt to meet the novelist in the middle ground of the characters. This “meeting in the middle” has long been theorized, though it ought to be a more dominant critical mode. The best moments of reading literature are those in which we recognize so well what it is that the author is telling us that something we knew tacitly becomes clear. Ah yes, we think, I have known the truth of this scene. It is through the accumulation of such familiar scenes that the power of art to draw us into the unfamiliar can be established. We need footholds to climb new heights.

Art represents: it is, to borrow the title of a Houellebecq novel that was surely an influence on Taylor (both with its interest in the idea that art is valuable in and of itself as an imperfect map of the world, but also in the way it presents life as a series of phases and stages which we must adapt to) a map of the territory. But that representation can begin to close the gap between representation and reality by enabling us to meet with the author in the middle ground of the fiction. One thinks, again, of Dickens’s description of human unknowability in A Tale of Two Cities.

A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other. A solemn consideration, when I enter a great city by night, that every one of those darkly clustered houses encloses its own secret; that every room in every one of them encloses its own secret; that every beating heart in the hundreds of thousands of breasts there, is, in some of its imaginings, a secret to the heart nearest it!²

That inscrutability is what fiction seeks to overcome, or at least to map. Sargent charms us into feeling the truth of childhood innocence, female beauty, the brilliance of civilized living, the sort of joy that only exists when art becomes a style of living. Taylor relies on character, an old fashioned approach, perhaps, for a novelist in these days of consciousness and auto-fiction, but it has traditionally been character that makes the meeting ground of reader and writer (as Dickens well knew, contra his paragraph above) and there is perhaps a sign of where Taylor’s work will be going in future as he seeks to unify the direct combative expression of ideas with fully realized characters,—the sort of people we used to meet in Iris Murdoch novels. To continue the Rooney comparison, one thing that most readers agree on is that her characters compel. Character draws attention, just like Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose.

The challenge for fiction now, as it makes its way back from the seclusions of the small, unfictional treatment of ideas that someone like Rachel Cusk has managed to persuade too many readers is worth a novel, is to represent ideas without being pulled under by the current of the hollow times, the dull times. This is explicitly Wyeth’s challenge.

Wyeth had this idea that he wanted to paint. Which probably meant it was something he should have stayed away from. Better to start with a gesture. Better to stay away from ideology. But he’d been working on something in his sketchbook, and he wanted very much to try, to see if he could bring it off. He didn’t know if he could, but he was tired of being a hater and that being the only creative function he had, for the ever-crueler descriptions of work he didn’t care for. It wasn’t that he aspired to be positive. No. Never that. But he wanted to create something more than a regime of evaluation. He wanted to do more than discourse about a thing. He wanted to make art. Something that could come out of his own peculiar feeling about certain ideas he had been given about his own life and how he was meant to feel about it.

Each of Taylor’s novels has been in some sort of opposition to some of the dominant aesthetics of our time, but Minor Black Figures is the most fully argued and the most fully developed fiction that he has written. There is a scene where Wyeth’s liberal friends realise he is dating a priest. “A white pro-lifer? Oh my God. Lost cause.” This is not just a familiar social attitude but an artistic one. Wyeth tries to explain that his painting of this man is trying to “make the viewer think they had figured it out. But then. You know, it turns. You realize, people are always more complicated.”

“Are they though? “Chloe asked. “Is it ever more complicated than, Do you believe in human rights? She was smiling, but her eyes were clear and dark. She was not joking.

For the reader, as for Wyeth, this is a climactic moment. Are we readers because we believe in the aesthetic mode of thought, in the narrative ambivalence that can show us a person not just a set of beliefs, a character not just a set of signs held up in the familiar parks and squares and streets? This is not everything that fiction can or should be capable of, but it has been in retreat in the age of discourse fiction. Wyeth stops discussing this topic and thinks to himself, “He couldn’t make everyone move and shift according to his moral code. He could only live in the world and bear witness.”³

Taylor has claimed not to be a liberal, and I do not doubt him. But just as Rooney claims to be a Marxist and writes distinctly non-Marxist novels, Taylor is too committed to the liberal form of the novel to write something less ambivalent. It allows him to make his case more strongly than essays or ideologies ever could.

“What I mean,” said Wyeth, “is that sometimes we have to choose our happiness and be content in that choice.”

1. Let’s compare. First, Dickens.

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way—in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

Now, Taylor.

That summer, they threw bombs and made signs for peace.

They went into the streets and the parks and the squares, the same as they had done two years before, and three years before that, and six years before that, and three years before that, which of course meant they had never really left the streets and the parks and the squares in the first place.

Dickens slips into “we”, satirizing the tendency of commentators and the opinionated to generalize about society in the “superlative degree of comparison only”, just as Taylor relies on the insistent “they” to maintain his satire against those who make signs for peace.

It was not an extraordinary year in a remarkable time. Disgusted, not surprised was the slogan of their era.

Still, they went into the streets and the parks and the squares. They lifted their signs. They shouted. They marched. They organized. They sued. They settled. Some wondered if the streets and the parks and the squares were themselves other settings for the unfolding of a vast play. But was this cynicism merely an excuse for a lack of resolve? They had to believe in the possibility of change. The very possibility of freedom was freedom itself.

At this point, Taylor is pulling away from Dickens, who maintains a careful distance from too many openly expressed ideas.

2. Here’s the full quotation

A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other. A solemn consideration, when I enter a great city by night, that every one of those darkly clustered houses encloses its own secret; that every room in every one of them encloses its own secret; that every beating heart in the hundreds of thousands of breasts there, is, in some of its imaginings, a secret to the heart nearest it! Something of the awfulness, even of Death itself, is referable to this. No more can I turn the leaves of this dear book that I loved, and vainly hope in time to read it all. No more can I look into the depths of this unfathomable water, wherein, as momentary lights glanced into it, I have had glimpses of buried treasure and other things submerged. It was appointed that the book should shut with a spring, for ever and for ever, when I had read but a page. It was appointed that the water should be locked in an eternal frost, when the light was playing on its surface, and I stood in ignorance on the shore. My friend is dead, my neighbour is dead, my love, the darling of my soul, is dead; it is the inexorable consolidation and perpetuation of the secret that was always in that individuality, and which I shall carry in mine to my life’s end. In any of the burial-places of this city through which I pass, is there a sleeper more inscrutable than its busy inhabitants are, in their innermost personality, to me, or than I am to them?

3. This is a line of fictional reasoning that we can trace back to Adam Smith’s man of systems, via George Eliot’s careful working out of her fictional moral system, and many dozens of others. See this, from Felix Holt, which was derived from The Theory of Moral Sentiments.

Fancy what a game of chess would be if all the chessmen had passions and intellects, more or less small and cunning; if you were not only uncertain about your adversary’s men, but a little uncertain also about your own; if your knight could shuffle himself on to a new square by the sly; if your bishop, at your castling, could wheedle your pawns out of their places; and if your pawns, hating you because they are pawns, could make away from their appointed posts that you might get checkmate on a sudden. You might be the longest-headed of deductive reasoners, and yet you might be beaten by your own pawns. You would be especially likely to be beaten, if you depended arrogantly on your mathematical imagination, and regarded your passionate pieces with contempt. Yet this imaginary chess is easy compared with the game a man has to play against his fellow-men with other fellow-men for his instruments.