I've been trying to finish Audrey Neffenegger's The Time Traveler's Wife for quite a while now. It's taking me so long, not because it isn't an interesting book, but because there are so many pages to it. Which isn't meant to imply they aren't interesting pages -- I just don't understand why the author, editor, and publisher all thought some of the incidents were organic to the wholeness of the book. At any rate, that isn't what I want to consider right now.Because I have such a faulty memory, whenever a reading presents me with something I don't want to forget, I have to write it down. One of the things I made note of in this novel was a character reminiscing about a famous singer, "... she could express her soul with that voice, whenever I listened to her I felt my life meant more than mere biology ..." Provoked by that thought, I scribbled a note to myself: "Art transcends mere biology. That's why pornography isn't art." To which I might add, "And why art isn't pornography" -- Michelangelo's David and Botticelli's Birth of Venus being prime examples which present nudity as inspiring emotions higher than lust.
Don't get me wrong. I like pornography. The mainstream of it, anyway, not bondage or mutilation or degradation; I mean the joy of biology. Which, in my opinion, is exactly the distinction Niffenegger is making. We live our lives in these cartons of flesh, so whatever raises our consciousness out of the rut of rutting, lifts us out of our animal selves. That transcendence is the object of art: not simply the depiction of a body which inspires lust, but the play of light, the beauty of color, the weight of composition. That is how art transcends biology.
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