One aspect of our existential situation is that people are sometimes involved in their own histories and sometimes they are not. Sometimes we are actors in our lives and our circumstances as when we take on a new job or act as a Good Samaritan and sometimes we are bystanders, as when we experience technological unemployment or notice what is happening in a Presidential race. Sometimes we shift our focus, and so we are drafted into the Army because of Pearl Harbor and yet the story of ourselves as soldiers is so profound that the war is a story of all those G. I.’s. who make up the Greatest Generation, each one of them to be immortalized as the doers who brought World War II to its righteous conclusion. This alternative between being at the heart of a story or on the periphery of a story is such a fundamental feature of human existence that we are not aware of the importance and pervasiveness of the distinction even as it is a distinction that we cannot do without if we want to grasp what happens in life and what life itself consists of, just as we can not easily grasp what it would be to be a creature in heaven that had no physical being, just a spiritual being, and so not subject to respiration or the feel of the breeze on our cheeks. A good way to get some sense of this distinct characterization of every human being as caught up, somehow, in his or her history, is to treat it as a version of what can be more readily understood in art as the distinction between foreground and background, which is not just a convention of art but a characteristic of life recognized by art with perhaps greater accuracy than is true in literature or philosophy.
Begin with Brueghel’s revolutionary painting, “Icarus Falling Into the Sea”. The picture may seem to us today to portray a not very expensive irony: what seems the central action of the painting, its proper subject, drawn from mythology, is far offshore and small while the foreground is filled with a peasant going about his business and so the picture illustrates that even great events just become part of the quandidium. But that shift of perspective is immensely important if we think of it as a shift from Christian art where figures were arranged in triangular compositions, the most important of them at the apex of the triangle. There was no question about who or what was important. Here we see, instead, a reversal of foreground and background. The events surrounding Icarus are in the background while the peasant is in the foreground. That indicates that Brueghel is putting aside classical and Christian matters for the story of the peasant, a tale he will recount in so many of his paintings. It also indicates that if you look at the observer or, in this case, the non-observer, of an important event, that person is as worthy of interest as is the classical subject in the painting.
Now, move forward to an iconic photo of the not too distant past, Alfred Eisenstaedt’s of a sailor kissing a nurse on V-J Day. The two stand out from the background, as if they had been magnified, he gallantly cradling her head while she is kissed, her skirts billowing as if this were a painting from the nineteenth century or earlier. Then look at the crowd from which the two have been elevated into being the foreground of the photo. The people who observe the kiss are looking on with curiosity rather than shock, including the elderly woman whose features are very carefully recorded. It is amazing how Eisenstaedt was able to construct this composition in the seconds after he came across the scene. Its profound point is that any number of people could have come to the center of his photo, elevated to center stage while the rest of the crowd looked on. Each of those people or any couple could have had a story to tell though the one Eisenstaedt found was clearly galvanizing as well as classic: a couple kissing. And so, in this photo, the background makes the foreground possible because those in the crowd are the ones who point to, observe, stare at, the kissing couple, and they too may include any number of stories if they were interrogated correctly, and so be in the foreground themselves. And so the picture is about how a picture needs both foreground and background to do its work.
Now think of those album covers of Paul Whiteman and his Orchestra or of Artie Shaw and his Orchestra. There are all those people in their bandstand uniforms behind the maestro, Whiteman with his baton and Shaw with his clarinet. Or think of the equivalent, which are all those chorus girls and chorus boys standing behind Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire or Ruby Keeler and Dick Powell. They are not just now long dead, which I used to think was what accounted for the poignancy of those images-- young people in the prime of their health and beauty cut down by the Grim Reaper in the Epidemic of Death that has no survivors. They are also bit players or assistants at the stories told in the foreground by the stars. And so come to think of what would happen if those people had been moved to the foreground so that each of their own stories was the focus of the picture: their loves, their ambitions, the difficulties in the life of a dancer or musician.
It does not take a great deal of imagination to move people back and forth between foreground and background. It happens all the time and is just in the nature of things. Here is an example of that process. Arlene Dahl was a briefly flaming movie star at MGM in the late Forties and early Fifties (and not just because of her red hair). She appeared in only two or three movies that were any good and then faded from view. She got a lot of work playing in television series in the Fifties and Sixties and into the Seventies and so can be regarded as someone who now made her living acting rather than being a star. That changes our focus on her. Now that she is no longer in the foreground as a star, we can think of her as subject to all the vicissitudes of life, can build a biography for her that is made up of matters other than those included in press releases from the studio. She started businesses in cosmetics and astrology and was five times married. So when in the foreground, she was known for being a star, but when she was in the background, she had an independent life, which meant that she rather than her celebrity could be the primary thing to appreciate about her. Her being in the background was like the woman looking at the couple in Times Square in the Eisenstadt photo. She would go back to doing whatever she had been doing, living her own life, despite her having been there at the time of the photograph.
The same thing is true of the rest of us. We take up our own lives when we are freed from the constraints of being in the limelight. And, indeed, the great freedom provided by the novel is that it is a form which considers people who are not historically significant but lead their own lives, unknown to the public, except for the fact that they are being chronicled by the novelist, as if the story was a true history of someones life, the reason for recording it unexplained. And here we have crossed the line from visual art into something more abstract, which is the distinction between actor and observer. History, as a genre of writing, is when the foreground of public events crowds out the impact those events have on all the bystanders while the novel is what rescues family life to be worthy of recording, the historical events now in the background, intruding and intrusive upon the family, as happens in Herman Wouk’s “War and Remembrance”, where World War II, FDR, and the Holocaust keep intruding on the story of what is happening to Pug Henry and his wife, Pug relegated to being no more than a cruiser commander and then with various other responsibilities that allow him to be present at great events, the author not wanting him to be a major player in the war, just someone who once had dinner with FDR, because otherwise it would upset the balance, Pug not just the observer of great events, and so the reader’s guide through them, but instead the maker of events. Maybe only Tolstoy is able to give fair due to both family and historical events, that in “War and Peace”, where he intercuts the two realms, while he does not do that in “Anna Kerenina”, where the characters are buffeted about by agricultural reform (or the lack of it) and the arrival of the railroad, but not displaced by those events from their own lives.
So everything is divided into foreground and background and the best you can do is move from one to the other. But that is not the case. There is a limiting case where it is possible to be both at the same time, and that is the emotion or state of love, and the fact that it is a limiting case for this existential phenomenon may account for the fact that love is very high up there in the pantheon of emotions. A paradox of love is that it is both very selfish, in that it is an expression of a person’s yearning to in some sense “possess” the other person, as if they were an appendage or a piece of property, and yet at the same time to be “possessed” by that other person, to be their slave. A person is willing to give up everything for the person who is loved except for the proprietorship over the loved one, and that goes visa versa, even if some people, more cynical people, think that it is better if one party, whether the man or the woman, keeps some distance by loving a spouse a bit more or a bit less than the other party to the twosome. So the beloved is in the foreground while either the suitor or the pursued is in the background, one the actor and the other one the object, except that the perfected condition is that both are both pursued and pursued, both put the other in the foreground, as in O. Henry’s “The Gift of the Magi”, where the two lovers each give up their prize possession to get a satisfactory Christmas gift for the other. How is that possible, given what we have found out to be the nature of foreground and background? It is a mystery, a paradox, and yet many people sense themselves to think that love is the ultimate object of life, a breakthrough that most people can achieve in their lives, even if all they really manage is an approximation of that limiting condition, which is somewhat a tribute to the idea that, most of the time, we are, indeed, prisoners of the existential divide between being the actor and the one acted upon.