'A man, a god, a man-god, don't make an issue of it, Blanche, we're not in theology class. What does it do to a man with gifts to spend his life as uncreatively as your Joseph has done? His gifts may be limited, he may not be an artist properly speaking; still, might it not have been wiser to encourage him to expand his horizon a little?'
Blanche sets down her knife and fork. 'All right, let us face the criticism you make, let us face it in its most extreme form. Joseph is not an artist but he might perhaps have become one if we – if I – had encouraged him, years ago, to extend his range by visiting art galleries or at least other carvers to see what else was being done. Instead Joseph remained – Joseph was kept at the level of – a craftsman. He lived here at the mission, in total obscurity, doing the same carving over and over again in different sizes and different woods, until arthritis struck him and his working life was over. So Joseph was prevented from, as you put it, expanding his horizon. He was denied a fuller life, specifically an artist's life. Does that cover your charge?'
'More or less. Not necessarily an artist's life, I would not be so foolish as to recommend that, just a fuller life.'
'Right. If that is your charge, I will give you my reply. Joseph spent thirty years of his earthly existence representing, for the eyes of others certainly but principally for his own eyes, Our Saviour in his agony. Hour after hour, day after day, year after year, he imagined that agony and, with a fidelity you can behold for yourself, reproduced it, to the best of his ability, without varying it, without importing new fashions into it, without injecting into it any of his own personality. Which of us, I now ask, will Jesus be most gladdened to welcome into his kingdom: Joseph, with his wasted hands, or you, or me?'
She does not like it when her sister gets on her high horse and preaches. It happened during her speech in Johannesburg and it is happening again. All that is most intolerant in Blanche's character emerges at such times: intolerant and rigid and bullying.
'I think Jesus would be gladder still,' she says as drily as she is able, 'if he knew that Joseph had had some choice. That Joseph had not been dragooned into piety.'
'Go out. Go and ask Joseph. Ask him whether he has been dragooned into anything.' Blanche pauses. 'Do you think Joseph is just a puppet in my hands, Elizabeth? Do you think Joseph has no comprehension of how he has spent his life? Go and speak to him. Listen to what he has to say.'
'I will. But I have another question, one that Joseph cannot answer because it is a question to you. Why does the model you, or if not you then the institution you represent – why does the specific model you set before Joseph and tell him to copy, to imitate, have to be what I can only call Gothic? Why a Christ dying in contortions rather than a living Christ? A man in his prime, in his early thirties: what do you have against showing him alive, in all his living beauty? And, while I am about it, what do you have against the Greeks? The Greeks would never have made statues and paintings of a man in the extremes of agony, deformed, ugly, and then knelt before those statues and worshipped them. If you wonder why the humanists whom you wish us to sneer at looked beyond Christianity and the contempt that Christianity exhibits for the human body and therefore for man himself, surely that ought to give you a clue. You ought to know, you cannot have forgotten, that representations of Jesus in his agony are an idiosyncrasy of the Western Church. They were entirely foreign to Constantinople. The Eastern Church would have regarded them as indecent, and quite right too.
'Frankly Blanche, there is something about the entire crucifixional tradition that strikes me as mean, as backward, as medieval in the worst sense – unwashed monks, illiterate priests, cowed peasants. What are you up to, reproducing that most squalid, most stagnant phase of European history in Africa?'
'Holbein,' says Blanche.'Grünewald. If you want the human form
'I don't see what you are getting at.'
'Holbein and Grünewald were not artists of the Catholic Middle Ages. They belonged to the Reformation.'
'This is not a quarrel I am conducting with the historical Catholic Church, Blanche. I am asking what you, you yourself, have against beauty. Why should people not be able to look at a work of art and think to themselves,
'Hence the Greeks, I suppose you want to say. The Apollo Belvedere. The Venus of Milo.'
