Reclusive artists

Why do artists become recluses? In many cases, they are not recluses, but they manage to acquire the label. They have family and friends, but they choose to distance themselves from the media instead. They want to release their work and they want an audience, but they do not want to be public figures. Often their work is very rich, so they think that this suffices and that all public appearances are superfluous.

The novelist Thomas Pynchon is a good example of this. He produces mammoth novels which are stuffed with research into multiple disciplines, complex word play, allusions to other novels and unusual words. They have created a large devoted who analyse these texts and try to gauge what his personality is like. However, Pynchon thinks that the work should simply speak for itself. A possibly apocryphal story claims that when his debut novel V. was published, a journalist tracked his house down and Pynchon jumped out of the second window of his house and ran away. When he won the National Book Award for, he sent a spoof speaker who gave an absurd speech. 

There are also reclusive directors, which is quite surprising as their medium is collaborative and they are surrounded by recording equipment all the time. Stanley Kubrick also had family and friends, but avoided a public persona. Terrence Malick, like Pynchon, is averse to being photographed. There was a twenty year period when he never made a film and many people speculated that he became a hairdresser in Paris. Our understanding of Malick’s films is also coloured about the scant biographical information we have about him. We know that he did a doctorate in philosophy at Oxford and that he studied Heidegger. As such, there are many academic texts that try to analyse his films from this angle. 

Writing in particular is a solitary activity whilst cinema is more collaborative. However, they are both still public media. They are both discussed in public and they both shape our understanding of social, political and cultural events. In this sense, these artists are recluses in that they do not comment on public affairs and they do not grant interviews. However, their books still shape public discussion. A Pynchon book will generate a media frenzy in the same way that a Malick film will. In this sense, they are still engaging with public discussion. They also have families and a social life, so they are not ‘recluses’ in the familiar sense of the word.