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From left to right: Czech novelist Milan Kudera, Pygmalion and Galatea by Jean-Léon Gérôme, Mexican poet Octavio Paz.
In my lovesick throes, the two books offered two much needed views of love, desire, and their role in art. Now, as we consider the history of the artist-muse relationship we began here, these two works allow us to see the Muse in a more positive light. I object to the romanticization of the artist-muse relationship as a façade, obscuring an unstable power dynamic in which a (typically) male artist draws “inspiration” from a (typically) female muse, and, in doing so, marginalizes her identity in any context other than in support of his work. While Paz does not address this issue directly, his work does lead us to an alternate perspective.
In the essay collection The Double Flame, Octavio Paz examines, not the role of the muse, but the role of eroticism in the development both of art and human relationships. Paz argues that the roots of art lie deeply in the realm of sex and human sexuality. “Eroticism,” he writes, “is a poetry of the body and [poetry] an eroticism of language. They are in complimentary opposition.”1 This is to say that both the human body and human language are crude instruments, and in seeking beauty, we eroticize both. In eroticism, we take the crude and make it beautiful.
Paz goes on to emphasize that eroticism alone does not suffice. He writes, “Sex is the root, eroticism is the stem, and love is the flower. And the fruit? The fruits of love are intangible. And this is one of love’s mysteries.”2 Therefore any quest for inspiration or beauty must be built on loving relationships, not the sort of exploitative one-sided relationships I object to above. Such relationships must be built on a foundation of love, Paz explains in an interview, meaning a relationship built on a pure reciprocity of feeling, in which the object of love becomes a subject that loves. “This has nothing to do with sexuality,” Paz says, “This doesn’t happen in eroticism. We only find it in love. But like all important things, it happens little.”3
In Paz’s view, a loving relationship is characterized by reciprocity and therefore an artist-muse dynamic, as long as it exists in the context of love, cannot be an exploitative or unbalanced relationship. But many of us would likely agree with Paz that true love is rare, so what do we make of relationships that do not claim to be built on true love? Is an artist-muse relationship built on anything less necessarily still exploitative? Czech novelist Milan Kundera might argue that it is not.
If we consider The Unbearable Lightness of Being with our current context, Kundera offers an explanation for why we fall in love, fall out of love, commit infidelities, remain in unhappy relationships, find meaning in casual flings, and construct identities as lovers all the while posing an implicit question, “what are lovers for?” In answering this question, Kundera expands the model of an artist-muse relationship in which the artist takes inspiration from his muse and marginalizes her by implying that this is what happens in all relationships. We all do this, artist or otherwise, Kundera suggests, in order to complete what he calls the “musical compositions” of our lives. And since any two lovers will do this, relationships can be seen as bidirectional flows of inspiration.
Kundera’s key character in this imagining is, herself, an artist. Sabina pursues casual relationships two men – the recently married lothario Tomas, and a bookish long-married Franz. Sabina and Tomas cultivate an aesthetic quality to their relationship, as if they are performing or creating art. “I want to make love to you in my studio,” she says to him, “It will be like a stage surrounded by people. The audience won't be allowed up close, but they won't be able to take their eyes off us.”4 Subsequently, Tomas and Sabina’s intercourse adopts a performative quality, and as they participate in the shared performance of their relationship, they lift and borrow aspects of one another with which they compose the symphonies of their own lives. In Sabina’s studio, Tomas finds a bowler hat that belonged to her father and grandfather. Kundera writes:
The bowler hat was a motif in the musical composition that was Sabina's life. It returned again and again, each time with a different meaning, and all the meanings flowed through the bowler hat like water through a riverbed…each time the same object would give rise to a new meaning, though all former meanings would resonate (like an echo, like a parade of echoes) together with the new one. Each new experience would resound, each time enriching the harmony.5
Kundera suggests that a meaningful relationship is one in which lovers mutually exchange motifs, one in which the performance of a relationship enriches the symphonies of the lives involved. A poor relationship, on the other hand, is one in which the exchange of motifs is hampered, one-sided, or nonexistent. Such is Sabina’s relationship with Franz. Unlike Tomas, Franz is uninterested in the symbolic value of Sabina’s hat, and is therefore uninterested in the motifs she has to offer him. He “listened eagerly to the story of her life and she was equally eager to hear the story of his, but although they had a clear understanding of the logical meaning of the words they exchanged, they failed to hear the semantic susurrus of the river flowing through them.”6 Franz and Sabina’s affair ultimately fails, and Franz finds another, younger mistress who is more receptive to the motifs he has to offer, as “the musical composition of her life had scarcely been outlined.”7
Because all lovers are artists creating the musical compositions of their own lives, and because meaningful relationships involve lovers taking motifs from one another and incorporating them into their own lives, an ideal relationship can be seen as two-way artist-muse relationships. A life of love can therefore be a collaborative masterwork. If you are not at artist, this perspective encourages you to construct your love life like a poem, an eroticism and elevation of crude existence. And if you are the kind of artist who finds the artist-muse relationship aesthetically alluring, consider if your idealized relationship is based on idealizing your muse or in engaging creatively with another autonomous individual.
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Notes:
1: The Double Flame (1996) by Octavio Paz, 38.
2: Paz, 2.
4: The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984) by Milan Kundera, 9.
5: Kundera, 44.
6: Kundera, 44.
7: Kundera, 66.
Love the connection between Paz and Kundera. Nicely put!
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