Dear Mark, Peter et. al.
I plead guilty to reversion to the mean in my "know it when I see it" comment, but it is at least consistent with my scepticism that golf course architecture can be considered to be an "art." I like the analogies to writing, but I think they prove my point. Of course, what is my point? Let me try to develop it a bit.
"Dubliners" is "accessible" because anybody with a high school education can read the stories and understand and enjoy them at least at the most obvious, human level. A more "sophisticated" reader can understand and enjoy the stories in more, often more complex ways, including but unlikely to be limited to:
--how the stories relate to each other, i.e. how "Dubliners" is more than just a sum of its parts (stories).
--the cultural and historical and biographical context, i.e. what the stories say about Ireland, it's past and Joyce himself (and he was "Himself").
--the use of language and its role in relating experiences and concepts.
--how the stories interact with the individual reading them and his or her beliefs and experiences and self-image.
In these senses, "Dubliners" is as good an analogy to golf course architecture as any work of art that I have known in that:
--both involve individual works (individual holes, stories), as well as a corporate work (the routing of the course, the book)
--each has a context, the more about which you know the more you can "access" the "art." In the case of golf, this would be the history of the course, the other works of its architect(s), the club's maintenance practices, etc.
--each has a relatively fixed form and structure--in one case the conventions of design (18 holes, "par"~72, hole length from 100-600 yards, etc.), in the other the language used (English), its vocabulary and its rules of syntax and grammar
--each is robust enough to offer very different experiences--within the context of the form and the capabilities of the "player"--to different people, and to the same individuals at different times in their lives.
A good analogy here would be NGLA, where the central focus was on the creation of a collection of individual golf holes, with less of a sense of a holistic relationship between the holes than other courses of similar quality.
What happens, however, when we move chronologically onto the rest of Joyce’s oeuvre? In “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” the language begins to be stretched, from the opening paragraph:
Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo...
In addition, the structure inherent in “Dubliners” is replaced by a continuous and open-ended narrative, dealing essentially with the same subject. The work is internalised by the author, creating doubt as to what is the art and what is the reality, and making the reader engage not only with what the story says, but also with what the author is experiencing as he writes the story.
This is probably more analogous to the works of the architects of today—testing the boundaries of the genre, but not radically. Trying to create a unique “voice” or signature that will define their work.
“Ulysses” continues to stretch the envelope regarding language, to the extent that it becomes increasingly “inaccessible” to all but the cognoscenti. It does, however, do this in a very rigid structure—building his story on the templates of the episodes of Homer’s Odyssey, and confining the story itself to just one specific day, in one city, focusing really on only the characters. While it might seem attractive to try to relate Joyce’s templates to those of CB Macdonald--or even to the “Old Macdonald” course-in-progress--this analogy breaks down under scrutiny. All golfing templates are rigidly tied to the conventions of design due to the rigidity of the medium in which they exist—the game of golf. Literary templates, on the other hand have the entirety of human experience to use as analogies. Golf architects have much less freedom because they must design to a very specific set of requirements, both real and expectational. If it were possible to build and successfully market a 23 hole course with holes ranging in length from 20 to 1000 yards and ending miles from where it began, or MLB could be persuaded that the principles of a Redan (or even bunkering) could be applied to a baseball diamond, then maybe architects could really spread their wings. However, since it is not so, those even trying (think Desmond Muirhead) are doomed to an Icarian death.
As for “Finnegan’s Wake,” as one of the relatively few people who have actually read more than the first page or two of that book, I can’t imagine any analogy with golf except that they both involve a 19th hole…..
…….and, now getting back to the point in question.
Based on the above, I do not think that golf course architecture is anywhere near as complex and rich as literature (just to take one of the arts). And yet, I also believe that golf courses are incredibly, maybe even effectively infinitely, complex. This is due to both their size and to how they are “accessed.” Whereas a book can be accessed in a few strictly constricted spaces (reading it within close eyesight/or through the fingertips, listening to somebody else read it in hearing range, watching a dramatic interpretation within eyesight and ear shot) golf is played over a canvas of acres and acres of land. This canvas is incredibly complex, changes over time and differs in character greatly due to the seasons and the weather of the day. A golfer NEVER gets exactly the same conditions for any golf shot on any golf course, whereas the words on a page are always the same, save for wear and tear and any notes you may write on them.
Paradoxically, however, this complexity of the game of golf makes the architecting of a course more trivial. This is for two reasons. Firstly, a designer has neither the time nor the skill to create more than a very small fraction of this complexity . Secondly, even if he or she were able to do so, no player could ever experience more than a very small fraction of this created complexity, even if he or she played the course every day in their life. I experience new shots and find new features on any golf course I play more than once, even (maybe even particularly) on those courses which are of just an average quality. This is as if I discovered a new adjective or punctuation mark not written by Joyce in one of my copies of “Dubliners” every time I read it, or to expand the analogy, a new chord in a Bach fugue or a new putto in the Sistine Chapel ceiling.
Golf is a protean form and activity, which means it never can be captured, either by the creator of the form (the architect) or the accessor of the form (the player). Because of this it is both completely inaccessible and infinitely accessible.
Rich
PS--This is both stream of consciousness and a work in progress……