Grant Patrick - The letters of Vincent van Gogh : a critical study

THE LETTERS OF VINCENT VAN GOGH

CULTURAL DIALECTICS

Series editor: Raphael Foshay

The difference between subject and object slices through
subject as well as through object.
Theodor W. Adorno

Cultural Dialectics provides an open arena in which to debate questions of culture and dialectic their practices, their theoretical forms, and their relations to one another and to other spheres and modes of inquiry. Approaches that draw on any of the following are especially encouraged: continental philosophy, psychoanalysis, the Frankfurt and Birmingham schools of cultural theory, deconstruction, gender theory, postcoloniality, and interdisciplinarity.

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Imperfection

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The Letters of Vincent van Gogh: A Critical Study

Patrick Grant

A Critical Study

PATRICK GRANT

Copyright 2014 Patrick Grant
Published by AU Press, Athabasca University
1200, 10011 109 Street, Edmonton, AB T 5 J 3 S 8

A volume in Cultural Dialectics
1915-836X (print) 1915-8378 (electronic)
Cover and interior design by Natalie Olsen, Kisscut Design
Printed and bound in Canada by Marquis Book Printers
doi: 10.15215/aupress/9781927356746.01

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Grant, Patrick, author
The letters of Vincent van Gogh : a critical study / Patrick Grant.
(Cultural dialectics)
Includes bibliographical references.
Issued in print and electronic formats.
ISBN 978-1-927356-74-6 (pbk.). ISBN 978-1-927356-75-3 (pdf). ISBN 978-1-927356-76-0 (epub).
1. Gogh, Vincent van, 18531890 Correspondence History and criticism.
I. Title. II. Series: Cultural dialectics
ND 653.G7G83 2014759.9492 C2014-900937-2 C2014-900938-0

This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund (CBF) for our publishing activities.

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Please contact AU Press, Athabasca University at aupress@athabascau.ca for permissions and copyright information.

For Hans Luijten

I find such interesting things in Vincents letters and it would really be a remarkable book if one could see how much thinking he did and how he remained true to himself.
THEO VAN GOGH , 8 September 1890

Commentators frequently remark on the exceptional literary quality of Vincent van Goghs collected letters, but no one has yet produced an extended critical assessment of this aspect of his writing. In the present study, I offer such an assessment, focusing on key constellations of metaphors and ideas, as well as a variety of rhetorical strategies through which a compellingly imagined, powerfully humanizing vision emerges from the formidable complexity of Van Goghs collected correspondence.

In the following pages, I am, for the most part, not interested in the letters as biography or as a way of accessing the paintings, nor do I deal with Van Goghs many letter-sketches. I realize that the artist would probably be dismayed at the thought of his private correspondence being made public, never mind being subjected to the attentions of a reader bent on discovering a special literary distinction in the eclectic, tangled, and bristling variety of this daunting, often uneven body of writing. As I point out in the introduction, many problems do indeed attend the kind of critical exercise I have undertaken. Still, I am satisfied that the letters as a whole offer such a captivating and authentically imagined set of reflections on our shared human predicament that it is worthwhile attempting some assessment of how and why this is so.

My first encounter with Van Goghs letters occurred on a rainy winter day in Belfast, Northern Ireland, when I was sixteen. I had ducked into the Belfast Central Library to take refuge from the miserable weather, and I selected a book at random to pass the time. The book was a biography of Van Gogh I have no idea which one with extensive excerpts from the letters as well as reproductions of the paintings. Some two hours later, I left the library, still clutching the book, realizing that my personal kaleidoscope, as it were, had shifted: the world was not looking quite the same as before. When I finished the book some days later, I recall telling myself that by and by, I would return to Van Gogh and invest whatever effort I could in attempting to understand more adequately the extraordinary achievements of this unusual man.

As it happens, it took me almost exactly a half-century to return to the letters in earnest, half a world away from Belfast and at the end of an academic career during which I had written a good deal about literature and various allied topics and concerns. As a sort of recapitulation of that career, I considered writing a collection of essays to address matters I had been especially concerned about or held to be formative during the previous decades. I wanted one of these essays to be on Van Gogh, so I read The Complete Letters (2000), finding myself again as thoroughly engaged as I had been in the Belfast Central Library. This time, however, I also visited the Van Gogh Museum Library in Amsterdam to consult the secondary literature, and by and by, I fell into conversation with Hans Luijten, from whom I learned, among other things, that the magnificent 2009 edition of the complete correspondence would soon be published. The more I talked with Hans and the more I learned about the current state of scholarship on the letters, the more clearly I came to realize that despite repeated genuflections by commentators acknowledging the quality of Van Goghs writing, no one had attempted an extended critical account of the remarkable imaginative power of the correspondence as a whole. The coincidence of interests and opportunities was too persuasive to be resisted, so, after writing my collection of essays (one of them on Van Gogh, as planned), I set about the present project, returning to my early promise in a more thoroughgoing manner than I might ever have anticipated.

Because the following book is addressed primarily to those who will be reading Van Goghs correspondence in translation, I quote throughout from Vincent van Gogh: The Letters (2009). Like other distinguished renditions into English (Sir Thomas Hobys Courtyer, Popes Iliad, FitzGeralds Rubaiyat, MacKennas Enneads, among others), the 2009 translation is remarkable for its inherent interest and high quality. Certainly, in its own right it is captivating and powerful enough to sustain the kind of critical assessment that I offer in the following pages.