I’m digressing from my randomised list for the first time. Yesterday, I was lying in bed, quite ill, and a short Texture game seemed perfect. I replayed it today, now that I’m feeling better, and so here is a review of
The Sculptor by Yakoub Mousli
The best moment in The Sculptor is the description of the final statue. This is a hard moment for any artist. When you’re writing about a fictional masterwork, you need to describe a masterwork in terms that make it believable for the reader – but of course, without having to actually make that masterwork yourself. Here’s what Yakoub gives us: an old nude man, wrestling down a falcon that attempts to peck his heart, raising a scythe with which to kill the falcon; meanwhile, the old man is being strangled by his own beard, and water flows around his feet, washing the shame away.
What I love about this is how it audaciously combines several motifs from European art into a single vision. The man is, clearly, Old Man Time, or Death, with his scythe. But he’s also Saint Michael fighting the dragon, as well as Prometheus, his innards being pecked at by a bird. And being strangled by his own beard, well, this cannot help but remind one of Laocoön being strangled by the snakes. As for the water, I heard these lines of Elliot in my mind:
A painter of the Umbrian school
Designed upon a gesso ground
The nimbus of the Baptized God.
The wilderness is cracked and browned
But through the water pale and thin
Still shine the unoffending feet
And there above the painter set
The Father and the Paraclete.
Which would make the man also Christ. Death, the angel, Prometheus, Laocoön and Christ, all rolled into one – yes, that makes sense as the masterwork that this sculptor has wanted to make, and we accept on faith that the statue does justice to the idea.
To be fair, much of The Sculptor doesn’t quite live up to this standard. The basic idea and setting are fine: it’s an interesting protagonist, this very old artist in dire financial circumstances with one last chance of achieving his ambitions. The thematic development is more problematic. Other reviewers (Mike Russo, Brad Buchanan) have already pointed out that the game’s final choice, between destroying your work of art to keep it pure and selling it even though this sullies you, is simplistic. I’d go further and say that it comes close to a fundamental misunderstanding of art. There’s nothing pure about keeping your art for yourself. Something isn’t art if it doesn’t aspire, at least in principle if not in practice, to universal recognition; a work of art is a bond between humans. Destroying it so others cannot see it not l’art pour l’art, but the anti-artistic gesture par excellence. Perhaps the point is that the sculptor is too embittered to embrace art himself, but if so, the point doesn’t come out clearly.
The writing, while it has it moment, is also frequently marred by errors (“they certainly knows your name”; “She in informs you”; a choice labelled “Sand” that I think should have been “Stand”; people who want to buy your “sculptor” when “sculpture” is meant). And it sometimes loses itself in a language that’s a bit too flowery for its own good. Or maybe not flowery; I suppose the problem is that it sometimes becomes imprecise, exactly at the moments when it tries to be metaphorical, which are the moments when precision becomes most crucial. An example:
On the marble’s waves ran the memories of your lost days.
And through them shimmered back the reflection of tears, now held up by your thirsty, wrinkled lids.
I’m not totally sold on the memoires running on the waves, though I guess it might be possible to express oneself that way. But then the word ‘them’ generates instant confusion. Who’s the them? The waves, the memories, or the lost days? It’s something through which the reflection of tears shimmers back. Hmm… if it’s a reflection, then it’s probably not going through something? And my thirsty lids, are they drinking the tears? That’s weird. Also, if the tears are held up, how can they shimmer back? Lots of questions, and the point is, I shouldn’t have any questions. I should be surprised and possibly delighted by the metaphor. But for that, it needs to be made more precise. This would work a lot better for me:
On the marble’s waves danced the memories of lost days, shimmering and distorted as one, two, three tears squeezed past your wrinkled lids.
And of course there are a million other ways to rewrite it.
The Sculptor didn’t quite convince me, then, but there’s some real artistic vision going on here, and a desire to talk about stuff that matters. I’m here for the author’s next game.