435
All of these instances are not just in extreme, but daily life facing a plight
plausibly described by Diane Johnson, when she contemplates, “The artist writing
his memoir is in double jeopardy; first he must lead the risky life worth reading,
must come through it and face in retrospect the awful disparity between what it
meant and what he had intended. Then he must make a fiction of it… Autobiography,
that is, requires some strategy of self-dramatization.”
18
We see the ad hoc mingling
of irrepressible self-consciousness that was born of the image of self, liberated into
a fiction that counters verisimilitude with a new level of advanced age confession in
Goethe’s Aus meinem Leben. Dichtung und Wahrheit (“From My Life: poetry and
truth” [1811]). And we all, painfully, mysteriously, regard Rembrandt Harmenszoon
van Rijn’s some 80 known self-portraits with any number of considerations. The
fulfillment of that “Romantic orientation toward autobiography” which Boris
Tomasevskij wrote about, namely, the engendering of a “futurism” taken “to its
ultimate conclusions. The author really [becomes] the hero of his works.”
19
Or some
other kind of Rembrandt altogether. Nothing heroic other than the brilliance and
courage of his lustrous if sometimes brutish reveals, one after the other, throughout
his life. Through sheer wonderment? The harsh, undeniable exhilaration and exhaustion of growing old? The pity we feel for ourself? For all those others condemned to
this existence with us? Despite our inner, undeviating youth? Of course, we don’t
know, particularly at the end of his life, what Rembrandt sought implicitly to
achieve. The National Gallery in London has Rembrandt’s final (or presumably one
of the final) self-portraits. Rembrandt was 63 years old, just a few months before his
death. The date is 1669. The painting—86 × 70.5 cm—has been hanging in the
Gallery since 1851, now in room 22 (NG221). Commentary by the gallery is ambivalent: The artist is focused on the “blemishes,” “blotches,” “the sagging fold beneath
his right eye,” “intense, unflinching, existential honesty.”
Or, “…in the seventeenth century people had different ideas about self-analysis
and how the mind works than we do now. Rembrandt’s motives may have been
more straightforward – driven less by soul-searching, and more by a professional
fascination with the challenges of his art.”
20
Describing a self-portrait done exactly 10 years before (1659, BR 51 at the
National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.), Clifford S. Ackley writes, “The only
truly luminous area of the image is the flesh of the artist’s face… with its vivid
record of life experience and of the effects of the relentless pull of gravity, is a thoroughly lived-in one…the dignified, and stoical gaze of the large eyes in the setting
of fleshy folds…that makes indelibly visible the stresses and strains of a life….”
21
18 See Diane Johnson, “Ghosts,” New York Review of Books, 3 February, 1977.
19 See Boris Tomasevskij, Readings in Russian Poetics: Formalist and Structuralist Views, ed.
Ladislav Matejka and Krystyna Pomorska, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1971, pp. 54–55. See
“On Thinking about Oneself,” by Michael Tobias, The Kenyon Review, New Series, Vol. 4, No. 1,
Winter 1982, Kenyon College, pp 9–25, https://www.jstor.org/stable/4335248.
20 https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/rembrandt-self-portrait-at-the-age-of-63=.
21 “Later Self-Portraits,” in Rembrandt’s Journey – Painter-Draftsman-Etcher, by Clifford
S. Ackley, In Collaboration With Ronni Baer, Thomas E. Rassieur, And William W. Robinson,
MFA Publications, A Division Of The Museum Of Fine Arts, Boston, 2003, p. 308.
47.3 Interpretations of the Enlightened Self
All of these instances are not just in extreme, but daily life facing a plight
plausibly described by Diane Johnson, when she contemplates, “The artist writing
his memoir is in double jeopardy; first he must lead the risky life worth reading,
must come through it and face in retrospect the awful disparity between what it
meant and what he had intended. Then he must make a fiction of it… Autobiography,
that is, requires some strategy of self-dramatization.”
18
We see the ad hoc mingling
of irrepressible self-consciousness that was born of the image of self, liberated into
a fiction that counters verisimilitude with a new level of advanced age confession in
Goethe’s Aus meinem Leben. Dichtung und Wahrheit (“From My Life: poetry and
truth” [1811]). And we all, painfully, mysteriously, regard Rembrandt Harmenszoon
van Rijn’s some 80 known self-portraits with any number of considerations. The
fulfillment of that “Romantic orientation toward autobiography” which Boris
Tomasevskij wrote about, namely, the engendering of a “futurism” taken “to its
ultimate conclusions. The author really [becomes] the hero of his works.”
19
Or some
other kind of Rembrandt altogether. Nothing heroic other than the brilliance and
courage of his lustrous if sometimes brutish reveals, one after the other, throughout
his life. Through sheer wonderment? The harsh, undeniable exhilaration and exhaustion of growing old? The pity we feel for ourself? For all those others condemned to
this existence with us? Despite our inner, undeviating youth? Of course, we don’t
know, particularly at the end of his life, what Rembrandt sought implicitly to
achieve. The National Gallery in London has Rembrandt’s final (or presumably one
of the final) self-portraits. Rembrandt was 63 years old, just a few months before his
death. The date is 1669. The painting—86 × 70.5 cm—has been hanging in the
Gallery since 1851, now in room 22 (NG221). Commentary by the gallery is ambivalent: The artist is focused on the “blemishes,” “blotches,” “the sagging fold beneath
his right eye,” “intense, unflinching, existential honesty.”
Or, “…in the seventeenth century people had different ideas about self-analysis
and how the mind works than we do now. Rembrandt’s motives may have been
more straightforward – driven less by soul-searching, and more by a professional
fascination with the challenges of his art.”
20
Describing a self-portrait done exactly 10 years before (1659, BR 51 at the
National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.), Clifford S. Ackley writes, “The only
truly luminous area of the image is the flesh of the artist’s face… with its vivid
record of life experience and of the effects of the relentless pull of gravity, is a thoroughly lived-in one…the dignified, and stoical gaze of the large eyes in the setting
of fleshy folds…that makes indelibly visible the stresses and strains of a life….”
21
18 See Diane Johnson, “Ghosts,” New York Review of Books, 3 February, 1977.
19 See Boris Tomasevskij, Readings in Russian Poetics: Formalist and Structuralist Views, ed.
Ladislav Matejka and Krystyna Pomorska, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1971, pp. 54–55. See
“On Thinking about Oneself,” by Michael Tobias, The Kenyon Review, New Series, Vol. 4, No. 1,
Winter 1982, Kenyon College, pp 9–25, https://www.jstor.org/stable/4335248.
20 https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/rembrandt-self-portrait-at-the-age-of-63=.
21 “Later Self-Portraits,” in Rembrandt’s Journey – Painter-Draftsman-Etcher, by Clifford
S. Ackley, In Collaboration With Ronni Baer, Thomas E. Rassieur, And William W. Robinson,
MFA Publications, A Division Of The Museum Of Fine Arts, Boston, 2003, p. 308.
47.3 Interpretations of the Enlightened Self