The Paradox

I am engrossed in a novel this summer.  I take it with me to the studio and when I am in a moment of pause on a painting commission, I read. The Goldfinch is Donna Tartt's very thick contemporary coming of age story (a 771 page turner) about a fictional character, Theo, growing painfully into manhood and a real life painting from the Frick Collection by Carel Fabritius, painted in 1654. I find the painting, an oil on panel, to be a strange, disturbing, yet masterful portrait of a bird.  To my mind, a heartbreaking image as the bird appears to be chained by one leg to a small box-like container mounted onto a plaster wall.  It has been suggested that the thin chain might not be attached to the bird but to a thimble for dipping water, but I don't view it that way.  Life giving or restricting, the question of the chain remains a mystery.  The red-faced goldfinch looks out at the viewer from just above our eye level so we can never be quite certain of the truth. The story of the painting becomes metaphorical in the novel: Theo, caught in a horrific scene during an explosion in a museum, takes the painting out with him.  Then throughout the unfolding chapters, he, much like the little goldfinch, is chained to it, to addiction, deceit, fantasy.  As Theo says of his looting, "Mine, mine.  Fear, idolatry, hoarding. The delight and terror of the fetishist."  

In the same year that The Goldfinch was painted- in Delft, mid -17th century- an explosion in an ammunitions factory next to the artist Fabritius's studio took his life and destroyed most of his work. Somehow, the Goldfinch painting survived, traveled from the Hague to New York where it was purchased by the Frick Museum in 1896. Donna Tartt was so inspired by the allegorical piece that she wrote her novel with the painting as the central object, a secondary protagonist, albeit always hidden from view. Just after the explosion, the painting in the novel much like it might have been after the explosion in Delft, is covered in dust. Later, Theo hides it under his bed, wrapped in layers of paper and packing tape, later still after moving it from New York to Las Vegas and back again in a backpack, he puts it into a storage locker, out of sight for years. Always concealed, it becomes a talisman of his journey through the loss of his parents, an unlucky charm that he can't bring himself to let go of in spite of the ever looming dire consequences of the theft.

In an essay on How the Novel Made the Modern World, William Deresiewicz wrote "[t]here is a reason that we call them novels."  From the Italian Novella meaning "new story", Deresiewicz writes that the novel has always had, more than any other artform, "more room" to be real. And so true to form, The Goldfinch, the painting and the story it inspired is based on fact and fiction, there is a sharp realism to both.  Each a masterpiece of trompe l'oeil illusion, each a precise mixture of deception and truth.   On the final pages, at the end of the story, Theo says," ...as much as I'd like to believe there's a truth beyond illusion, I've come to believe that there's no truth beyond illusion.  Because, between 'reality' on the one hand, and the point where the mind strikes reality, there's a middle zone, a rainbow edge where beauty comes into being, where two very different surfaces mingle and blur to provide what life does not: and this is the space where all art exists, and all magic."

It's an interesting thought, I love the idea of the "rainbow edge", but I believe that truth is something else, not one individual's 'reality' or that of another's. Truth is relative. Truth is beyond the dancing molecules that make up our existences. Truth is beyond the mundane, though it is within that too. That's the paradox.  Just as some truth exists in a certain light within the painting by Carel Fabritius and the novel by Donna Tartt, whether we are chained to something or the illusion of it, I believe our short time here is just a part of all that is. To be real is to be grounded in the moment and not in the fantasy. And truthfully, when art comes through us, when beauty abides, it is beyond this human frailty to understand.