{"id":23714,"date":"2017-10-31T11:00:18","date_gmt":"2017-10-31T15:00:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.michiganquarterlyreview.com\/?p=23714"},"modified":"2018-10-15T20:27:31","modified_gmt":"2018-10-16T00:27:31","slug":"from-the-archive-in-praise-of-the-small-by-natania-rosenfeld","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.lsa.umich.edu\/mqr\/2017\/10\/from-the-archive-in-praise-of-the-small-by-natania-rosenfeld\/","title":{"rendered":"“In Praise of the Small,” by Natania Rosenfeld"},"content":{"rendered":"

“In Praise of the Small,”<\/a>\u00a0nonfiction by Natania Rosenfeld, appeared in the Fall 2006 issue of MQR.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

\n

Two female painters of my acquaintance have been told that their paintings are too small, and that the combination \u2014 female, small \u2014 is fatal for their careers. One of these friends committed suicide in her mid-fifties. I won\u2019t say it was because of being told that, but I also won\u2019t say that it wasn\u2019t.<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

I am going to write in praise of the small. Not the miniature, which is an inverse of the monumental and thus, in its own way, monumental. The miniature has its own celebrants, in awe of the capacity to paint acorn-sized portraits with a one-haired brush, or sculpt turtles the size of a thumbnail with a knife like a needle. I am not talking about such virtuosity, which is just grandiosity writ tiny. I am simply talking about the small.<\/p>\n

The common assumption is that if you make something small, it\u2019s because you couldn’t<\/em> make something large; that the small is only an embryonic version of the grown up, the fully adult. (In the Hebrew language, \u201cto grow up\u201d is synonymous with \u201cto become a man.\u201d) This is literal minded and assumes that the two things are easily distinguishable. Suppose your large is my small, and vice versa? Or suppose your large thing \u2014 like Kafka\u2019s\u00a0The Castle<\/em>\u00a0<\/span>\u2014 is unfinished, and your small thing \u2014 like \u201cThe Judgment\u201d \u2014 complete?<\/p>\n

I find a completed large thing somewhat frightening. I want large things to be open ended. The large thing that is closed and finished is a juggernaut, a dictatorship, a system with a capital\u00a0S<\/span><\/em>. It swallows you alive.<\/p>\n

I may feel this way in part because of the limitations of my attention. I can\u2019t concentrate on symphonies, and I\u2019m thankful for the natural subdivision of operas into arias, choruses, and so on. The detail commands me, at the expense of the whole; what\u2019s good about this is that the whole, for me, is never completed, because each time I hear or see it, I concentrate on a different detail.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m reading Proust right now and have been for the past six months. I am not sure what category Proust fits into. On the one hand,\u00a0In Search of Lost Time<\/span><\/em>\u00a0is made up of six volumes of seven hundred plus pages each; on the other, the work is simply a series of set pieces in which each detail is lavishly described. Yet there is an unfinished feeling about the whole. I have been thinking a good deal, incidentally or not, about Proust\u2019s self-hatred. Jews and homosexuals get a bad rap in Proust, although Marcel\u2019s ambivalence is obvious: he loves the very thing he hates, and hates himself for loving it. This may be what makes him a grandiose miniaturist, not small at all.<\/p>\n

Perhaps what I am talking about is minorness, as in Deleuze and Guattari\u2019s definition of Kafka\u2019s work as both minor and minority writing. As a member of at least two minorities \u2014 Jews, women (we are the smaller sex, after all, and the less respected) \u2014 I have never felt in command of my surroundings or firmly planted in any territory. I cast about me for something definite and have trouble finding it.<\/p>\n

As noted, I also have an attention problem. This very moment, there are five documents open on my computer; I have been switching among them all evening. Kafka did better than that: he completed \u201cThe Judgment\u201d in a night; I don\u2019t think he was switching among documents. During the day, he worked for the insurance company, concerned with workers\u2019 accidents. I think he sometimes doodled in the margins of his legal briefs. I myself doodle obsessively during committee and faculty meetings; afterwards, I think, \u201cThese are pretty good; what if I inflated some of them to ten times their size and painted them in color?\u201d Somehow, I never get around to it.<\/p>\n

Wayne Koestenbaum points out the etymological similarity of\u00a0doodle<\/span><\/em>\u00a0and\u00a0doodoo<\/span><\/em>\u00a0in his discussion of drawing as a minor art. My husband once wrote an article about that so-called children\u2019s drama, Alfred Jarry\u2019s\u00a0Ubu Roi<\/span><\/em>; he discussed the post-infancy prohibition on playing with one\u2019s excrement. Which ties back in to homosexuality. When Proust describes the amazing encounter between the Baron de Charlus and the tailor Jupien, he devotes a distinct attention to the process of washing up that follows anal sex. A biographer of Roger Casement, the Irish rebel who attempted to draw the world\u2019s attention to slavery and genocide in the Congo \u2014 Joseph Conrad met him there and deemed him handsome, clever, and weak \u2014 says that Casement was uniquely in touch with his anus. It is fear of the receiving end, some argue, that creates imperialists. Casement was executed by the British.<\/p>\n

Koestenbaum: \u201cDrawing\u2019s liability to be mere doodle allies it to the excremental as well as to the incomplete, the incomprehensible, the non-citizen, the accident, the throwaway \u2014 any entity nobly outside nomenclature, consciousness, responsibility, and marketplace.\u201d James Joyce wrote\u00a0Ulysses<\/span><\/em>\u00a0on little pieces of paper he secreted in his clothes; the book is about secretions, as well as what Koestenbaum calls \u201cthrowaways.\u201d That very word occurs in\u00a0Ulysses<\/em>\u00a0<\/span>as a paradigm for the small thing that one person considers unimportant, another, world-shattering. In an encounter on the street, Leopold Bloom refers to the racing sheet he is about to discard as a \u201cthrowaway\u201d: his interlocutor dashes off to the nearest bookmaker\u2019s to bet on a horse he thinks is called Throwaway.<\/p>\n

Proust was a great admirer of Chardin\u2019s still lifes, a painting genre long considered minor. In\u00a0Still Life with Oysters and Lemons<\/span><\/em>, his little book inspired by a Chardin at the Met (a small thing inside a huge one), the poet Mark Doty quotes Gaston Bachelard: \u201cIntimacy . . . is the highest value.\u201d In big paintings, I look at the impasto: the scribble. \u201cDamned mob of scribbling women,\u201d Hawthorne infamously wrote; yet, what does anyone ever do\u00a0but<\/span><\/em>\u00a0scribble? Or scrabble, like a chipmunk or a squirrel? The world is enormous, life and death are incomprehensible, and we are damned small in proportion to it all. The heroine of Kafka\u2019s world is a singing mouse. The brushstroke builds the painting, and the brushstroke can only be as big as the painter\u2019s own gesture. Is this what it comes down to: that men have bigger\u00a0arms<\/span>?<\/em> Superior upper body strength: the oft-cited basis of patriarchy.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t buy it. Of course, I may just be making excuses for my own little version of A.D.D. My default genre is poetry, most likely because I lose patience or velocity after writing more than a few lines. Next is the essay, because it allows me to meander. This one has already exhausted me, and I\u2019m only on page three.<\/p>\n

My friend who committed suicide gave me two still lifes of hers, one of bottles and vases, one of yellow star fruit in a brown bowl. What\u2019s curious about still life is that, though small, the objects in it can be larger than their real-life counterparts. A star fruit that large would be overgrown. Who\u2019s to say what\u2019s big, what\u2019s small? My husband and I went to see the horses at the expensive women\u2019s college the other day. Their heads were larger than our torsos, but the little lasses can mount and control the great creatures. My own theory is that horses, like dogs, who could so easily tear us limb from limb, deign to be controlled by us out of an angelic graciousness \u2014 and stupidity. We are small, and yet they consent to our will, God help them.<\/p>\n

According to some critics, Kafka\u2019s Josephine the mouse soprano is a Jewish heroine. He describes her song as mere \u201cpiping\u201d; it hardly compares with true singing, just as Yiddish could not compare with German or the other \u201creal\u201d languages of Europe. In fact, there is a great literature of Yiddish, mostly in smaller forms like poetry and short stories, as well as a large number of plays. In Proust\u2019s literary world, homosexuals have a language of gesture only they can understand. Thus, they are permanent exiles, like Dreyfusards among virile conservatives. Back we come again to virility. Virility is an overlooking of the detail, a contempt of the small. The small is in exile in this world of Humvees and jumbo jets and their museum versions. Probably the small will always be in exile.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t say that large is bad; if I seem to have said that, I\u2019ve been misunderstood \u2014 as is often the case with us minorities, us scrabblers and pipers and lovers of the immediate and fleeting. Blink, and you miss us. Keep your eyes open, and you might see something.<\/p>\n

\n

Image: Chardin, Jean-Baptiste Sim\u00e9on. “A Bowl of Plums.” 1728. Oil on canvas. The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I am going to write in praise of the small. Not the miniature, which is an inverse of the monumental and thus, in its own way, monumental.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2118,"featured_media":23794,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_uag_custom_page_level_css":"","site-sidebar-layout":"default","site-content-layout":"","ast-site-content-layout":"default","site-content-style":"default","site-sidebar-style":"default","ast-global-header-display":"","ast-banner-title-visibility":"","ast-main-header-display":"","ast-hfb-above-header-display":"","ast-hfb-below-header-display":"","ast-hfb-mobile-header-display":"","site-post-title":"","ast-breadcrumbs-content":"","ast-featured-img":"","footer-sml-layout":"","ast-disable-related-posts":"","theme-transparent-header-meta":"","adv-header-id-meta":"","stick-header-meta":"","header-above-stick-meta":"","header-main-stick-meta":"","header-below-stick-meta":"","astra-migrate-meta-layouts":"default","ast-page-background-enabled":"default","ast-page-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-4)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"ast-content-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"\"The small is in exile in this world of Humvees and jumbo jets and their museum versions. 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