Analysis: Writers have always found the lives of their artistic counterparts to be an exciting model, but contemporary novelists are putting a new spin on this
By Carlos Garrido Castellano, Carla Almanza-Gálvez and Beatriz Dantas Vieira, UCC
Since the 19th century, writers have invested time and effort in imagining how artists live and work. There is more than mere curiosity behind this: writers saw in artists an interesting example of individuals who were part of society but also managed to escape from the constraints and pressures that characterise the lives of most people. Research shows that writers found in the lives of their artistic counterparts an exciting model that allowed them to dream of breaking away from social norms and express themselves in freer and more autonomous ways.
The lives of artists soon became fashionable. Modern writers found "secular heroes" and aspirational points of reference in the fashionable lives of artists. In narrating the lives of artists (including musicians, poets, composers etc), novelists attempted to reconcile the conflict between the need to develop oneself and the expansion of a rhetoric of personal and social success.
This tradition quickly became so popular that it shaped narration and literature themselves. Some of the greatest novels out there, the texts that defined what we understand a novel to be—think of Goethe, Woolf, Mann, Balzac, Joyce—are about artists. In fact, the novel genre owes a lot to these stories full of hope, but also of despair that pitch an individual against their social environment.
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From RTE Radio 1's Arena, interview with Bridget Hourican, wife of the late journalist and historian Frank Callanan about his book James Joyce: A Political Life
Artist novels were not just useful for writers. By engaging with them, readers would also refashion themselves and the social relationships they established in creative and original ways, often without the need to leave the safe confines of their bourgeois homes.
This literary tradition championed individual autonomy but also established modes of social relationships based on individuality and personal development that ended up having a limiting effect on writers and readers. The artist novel was therefore simultaneously avant-gardist and conservative.
The artist novel now
Looking at the genre of the artist novel nowadays, we can realise that it was also elitist and Eurocentric, as the potential to become a creator was restricted to a few models that were made fashionable by a few writers (mostly male, middle-class and white). So why should we care about this?
A team of researchers from UCC have approached this question from the assumption that contemporary writers keep writing about creative processes because the same pressures that artists and writers experienced in the past have become widespread in our days. As an example, students often tell university teachers of an increasingly relentless pressure to be creative, original and resourceful as they move from one deadline to the next and from project to project. As the certainties of the 9-to-5 work culture vanish, it is possible to realise that we live like artists—and that is not necessarily a good thing.
Researchers have identified that creativity nowadays is being redefined and repurposed in exciting ways.
At the same time, the range of perspectives, voices and approaches present in the stories on artistic creativity has been significantly expanded and transformed. Contemporary writers are testing the potential of narration to speculate with and materialise alternative (art) worlds. Contemporary novels often provide communities around the world with a speculative, shared space where all the steps involved in the process of artistic creation are reimagined in light of the collapse of conventional ways of understanding what literature does and means. They are also exploring ways of coming to terms with change and creativity that do not necessarily mean reproducing the myth of the autonomous and successful individual.
In this context, artistic creativity is not an endless reservoir of ideas and potential limited to a few genius-like individuals. On the contrary, writers have already moved away from this way of thinking. Using a database to track and analyse around a thousand novels published in Spanish and Portuguese over the last two decades across 24 countries in the Americas, Africa and the Iberian Peninsula, ARTFICTIONS researchers have identified that creativity nowadays is being redefined and repurposed in exciting ways.
Forget Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code: contemporary stories on art speak of communities taking inspiration from nature to rebuild their environment, Black curators appropriating museum spaces, indigenous writers grappling with the problematic origin of art collections and artists joining forces with activists and community organisers.
From Die Büchereien Wien, novelist Trifonia Melibea Obono and comics artist Ramón Esono Ebalé during their Between Two Days art residency in Vienna, November 2021
Importantly, the relevance of these stories goes beyond choosing specific stories or narrating them in specific ways. It also involves changing the perspective of what doing research means. As a way of dealing with this challenge, ARTFICTIONS is devoting itself to listening to and chatting with writers; exploring how different people read differently; studying the role of utopian thought in contemporary creativity; problematising how the position that everyone occupies conditions the act of narrating and analysing the importance of intertextual interferences in the understanding of contemporary literary creativity.
The object we traditionally associate with literature—the book—is just the beginning of a set of long-lasting exchanges. In fact, many Latin American and African writers take an active part in materialising the kind of collaborations their novels speculate with.
Contemporary writers and artists behind these artistic stories are developing innovative ways of cooperating and generating community bonds
Social media is also crucial to understanding the reach of these stories and how they impact "real life". Moving away from narratives of success and uniqueness, contemporary writers and artists behind these artistic stories are developing innovative ways of cooperating and generating community bonds.
Art narratives are not just about well-known artists and museums. More and more people—especially young people—are joining this trend of narrating the possibilities and consequences of redefining what creativity means and what we can do with it. Our research will continue to explore this fascinating universe and keep the conversation going.
The ARTFICTIONS research is funded by Research Ireland under the IRC Laureate Consolidator Programme. This article was produced with the assistance of research team members Fernanda Barini Camargo and Flavia Pontes Espindola
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Dr Carlos Garrido Castellano is Head of the Department of Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Studies at UCC and Principal Investigator of the ARTFICTIONS project. He is a Research Ireland awardee. Dr Carla Almanza-Gálvez is a Research Assistant in the School of Languages, Literatures and Cultures at UCC and a member of the ARTFICTIONS research team. Beatriz Dantas Vieira is a PhD candidate in the Department of Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Studies at UCC and a member of the ARTFICTIONS research team.
The views expressed here are those of the author and do not represent or reflect the views of RTÉ
