Arrogance

Joanna Scott's Arrogance, a fictionalized biography of the artist Egon Schiele, starts with two Biblical images which are hard to ignore: the invocation of King Nebuchadnezzar and the plucking of the apple from the Tree of Knowledge. The folly of mankind, the arrogance if you will, to think oneself the master of ones own destiny and to willingly take part in a life of sin are evoked both metaphorically and literally over the arc of this artists brief life.

Schiele is both the deluded king in this story and the tempting snake. Focusing on his brief imprisonment for the corruption of minors, his incestuous and possessive relationship with his sister Gerti, his long-time lover Vallie Neuzil, and an unnamed young female admirer of Scheiles, Scott depicts them in all their corruptible humanity, cascading from sin to redemption and to death.

Egon Schiele is fascinating enough as a person to be the sole subject of this book. His complicated sexuality, his earnestness and ego, and his overwhelming sense of his own destiny and both his responsibility to the world and its responsibility to him are enough fodder for hundreds of pages. We get all of these things through Scott's narrative and her use of excerpts from his journal. We see him growing up and fostering a talent that is controversial, eccentric, and admired from its onset. We see his talent for disruption in early classroom scenes and in the subtle disturbances he causes in the town of Neulengbrach before his arrest, his brief time in prison and his rapid demise at the hand of the Great Flu Pandemic of 1918- throughout it all his charisma and his talents of seduction paint our perception of him. But all of this would merely be history if we weren't shown the effects of his behaviour on his parents, his lover, his wife, his sister, and the children of Neulengbrach. Companioned with bawdy descriptions of the world in Vienna at the time of Schiele's emergence onto the art scene, a more complete world is presented.

Criss-crossing the point of view between all of these characters, Scott achieves a message that is common in both visual art and in literature: the lack of any single truth in a work of art. Other modern writers have expressed how an audience's perception of a work of art often tells more about the audience than it does about the art - Philip Roth in The Counterlife or John Irving in The World According to Garp for instance. In Arrogance, Scott reveals this through her scattered narrative which jumps from character to character. It is this which most sets Scott apart from her contemporaries. By examining what the artist thinks, what the viewer thinks, what we the reader are thinking about all of these things, we are brought to the ignoble truth of all art: subjectivity. By showing not just the painter's life, but his lovers, and not just his lovers life, but his sisters, and not just his sisters, but his patrons, and so on, a more distinct and complicated picture is presented which, through the freedom of the fictionalized conceit, gives us what is likely to be a truer picture of the artist and his world than an ordinary biographer would ever be able to achieve. Like a good painting this is not one story, but many.

Vallie Neuzil's side of the story is almost as prevalent as Egon's and is just as interesting. A penchant for sweets and a "determination to enjoy herself" make her extremely vulnerable to Schiele and his own similarly decadent and bohemian lifestyle. Having been a former model and lover of Gustav Klimt's (Schieles predecessor and mentor), she quickly latches on to Schiele, playing the part of Eve to his Snake, and sticks with him through his arrest and his various affairs with other men and women, even up to the point where he is about to marry another woman. Her dedication and devotion to something which is clearly providing a kind of sinful and masochistic pleasure for her is arguably the clearest reflection we have for ourselves as the reader within the world of the book, and her ultimate rejection of him and growth into a stronger person provides a wonderful anticlimax for her character.