Vol. 1, Number 4	Winter 1998 issue

 

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At a time when plays like Art parody the inflated world of expression, it's hard to see art as a threat. After all, isn't high art passé, the avant garde a joke, and the the museum an anachronism? Howard Norman's new novel, The Museum Guard, set in pre-World War II Canada, would have us believe otherwise. The novel is an intricate tale of the way art works upon lives—not those of its creators, but those of its caretakers. Their troubles demonstrate that art has the ability, not only to create its own reality, but to distort ours.

In the world of The Museum Guard, the power of art to affect a person's reality depends not so much on the art as on the person. The characters within the museum community fall neatly into two camps: the educated, such as the museum curator, and the laborers, including the stolid guard DeFoe and his lover, Imogen. DeFoe's only access to art comes from his long days in the third-rate museum, which houses dependable Canadian landscapes and Dutch still lifes.

Imogen is also a caretaker, not of paintings, but of the graves in a Jewish cemetery. She is the least plausible of Norman's characters, although she is at the center of the plot. Her constant, depressive sulking is unconvincing, even as the concepts behind her emotional troubles fascinate. Imogen wishes for "a dictionary's worth of words" in which to express her muddled sense of identity, and for an ennobling cause to clarify it. She envies those like Connaught, the museum's longtime curator, who is cultivated, aging, and slightly pompus. He dictates where all the paintings are hung, though you get the feeling that he no longer sees the art within the frames.

Ironically, it is the educated, like Connaught, who are numbed to art, while it gets under the skin of the workers. As DeFoe puts it, in the lovely, spare prose of the novel, "there are a number of ways a paintings can be ruined for a guard. Ways a guard can come to hate a painting; come to beg another guard to switch rooms. Beholden, until he asks you in turn to switch." Although he is affected by art, he does not feel qualified to understand it, and this discomfort permeates his narrative voice. Unhappy in the role of the narrator, DeFoe continuously reminds the reader of his discomfort with textual stutters and throat clearings. At first awkward and stilted, his voice becomes increasingly convincing in its mannerisms and insecurities.

While DeFoe is troubled and intrigued by the art in his charge, Imogen is destroyed by it. She mistakes book learning for enlightenment and connoisseurship for nobility; lacking these, she seeks refinement and personal insight in the fierce perusal of one of DeFoe's charges, the painting Jewess on a Street in Amsterdam. Her study of this painting quickly becomes a fixation. The once-consiencious DeFoe finds himself first abetting Imogen in midnight visits to the painting, then stealing it for her.

As her obsession grows, Imogen comes to believe that she is the woman in the painting, causing her to abandon both her former identity and DeFoe. She attempts to return to her "homeland" in Amsterdam, a suicidal trip because, having taken on the dress, manner and Jewish persona of the woman in the painting, she is heading into territory soon to be enveloped by German armies.

In the last portion of the novel, DeFoe surrenders the narrator's role to the curator, who is acting as an inept chaperone for Imogen on her journey. His letters from an Amsterdam paralyzed by imminent war are vividly unlike DeFoe's careful, riveting prose. The narrative is clunky and artificial, the plot almost mechanical. As he describes it, in an apt example of his artless voice, "there was no possible way I could have foreseen how utterly peculiar an experience this all would prove." Imogen's further decline and eventual disappearance are obscured by this prose, distorting a narrative that up to this point has been absolutely convincing. This contrived technical failure calls attention to the novel's ability to create or uncreate a world—a technique so intriguingly self-conscious that it makes up for the dull prose.

The stylistic flat tire at the end of the novel also illustrates one of the dangers of art that the novel seeks to demonstrate. The refined curator is unable to convey the pathos of Imogen's delusion or the horror of oncoming war; all his cultivation leaves him unable to communicate. Imogen can certainly communicate, but in her sensitivity to art she has sacrificed the ability to perceive reality. DeFoe, with whom one feels a painful empathy, is the middle ground between the dangers of insularity and insanity. He retains both sensitivity and sanity in the face of art and with the understanding of Imogen's defection and probable death. With these examples, sometimes tragic, sometimes ludicrous, the novel seeks a vindication of art. It warns us to avoid, not only the extremes of fascination, but the sterility of the over-refinement. Engaging even in its weak moments, this book is proof of its own theory, that art is neither impotent, nor irrelevant.