“No lists of things to be done. The day providential to itself. The hour. There is no later. This is later.” — Cormac McCarthy (The Road)
When last month I presented a short work in progress to my fellow artists in residence for a feedback session, the work was described as dystopian. Most agreed they saw that element as focalizing in the “narrative” of the piece.
From Wikipedia: A dystopia (from the Ancient Greek δυσ-: bad-, ill- and τόπος: place, landscape) is a vision of an often futuristic society, which has developed into a negative version of Utopia. A dystopia is often characterized by an authoritarian or totalitarian form of government. It often features different kinds of repressive social control systems, a lack or total absence of individual freedoms and expressions and a state of constant warfare or violence.
As much as this aspect intrigued me, I couldn’t immediately quite recognize it as part of what I was doing. Under recommendation I picked up “The Road” by Cormac McCarthy and read it in a couple of days. The novel describes a post-apocalyptic world in which all matter of wildlife is practically extinct and the human race is slowly starving to death. The past is irremediably gone, the future is a dark hopeless place and the present is a timeless moment in between nothing. Wasn’t that what I was after, what I saw in those Hopper paintings? Something crucial has just happened and we find ourselves suspended in that “in between” moment. Except I didn’t quite see the desperation of that moment.
I went back to Hopper and to little surprise discovered that in many of his paintings he used linear perspective to draw the eye, not just into a third dimension, but into a region of darkness and implied fear. Pictures like “Approaching a City” or “Automat” are clear examples: the dark tunnel into which the railroad is leading us; the two rows of light reflected in the back window in “Automat”, leading into a vanishing point in the darkness; the only one way out a staircase leading downward. Despair is evident.
Has she? Will she? Should she? Now that she has, what next?
“Approaching a City”
“Automat”
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