Like Tristram Shandy, I can’t write fast enough to keep up with all the things swirling in my head. So much is going in—all the reading I am doing plus the daily gleanings from the web—that I have lots that feels like it needs to go out. I keep falling behind.
However, it is not the futility of my getting it all down or despair over time’s finitude (and its resultant cruelty) that is my topic today. The topic is contemporary art.
Nick and I had our second zoom conversation about John Dewey’s Art As Experience on Monday. Dewey argues (both in that book and in a chapter entitled “Qualitative Thought” in Philosophy and Civilization) that humans intuitively grasp situations in their “qualitative unity” before proceeding to any kind of analysis of the components of the situation. He also (it seems to me, but Nick would disagree) appears to claim that situations actually possess that qualitative unity. We have satisfactory or fulfilling experiences when we are best aligned with what the situation affords, or when we can work on what it affords to shape it to better suit our needs. Art is important because it models this fulfilling alignment; it offers instances of creative interaction that brings “form” to the interaction, crafting the situation’s elements into “equilibrium” or “harmony.”
There are features of this view of what art does which, in fact, I find helpful to my ongoing desire to consider the connection between art and meaning. But I am going to leave that aside for the moment in order to address a different point here—basically the observation that Dewey’s picture of art as stated in the previous paragraph seems utterly antithetical to much artistic practice since 1910. (On or around 1910, Virginia Woolf told us, human nature changed.)
Much art—and most “high” or “serious” art—of the past 100 years has displayed the futility of all attempts to apprehend or craft “unity.” “These fragments I have shored against my ruin” can be written over the portals of modern (and postmodern) art—an updated version of “abandon all hope, ye who enter here.” Dewey looks old-fashioned and naïve with his talk of unity and harmony. Of course, that Dewey is old-fashioned and naïve is a standard critique. Like Whitman, he lacks any idea of evil.
Many modern paintings are cluttered. They are not “composed,” but scattered, with no clear pathway for the eye to follow, no “form” that brings all the elements into order.
But, for my primary example, I will take the contemporary “serious” novel. Experimental fiction is pretty much dead, but those avant-garde narratives are all about fragmentation. The same goes for avant-garde poetry.
More “realistic” fiction, it seems to me, comes in primarily two forms. There are the domestic novels (think Julia Glass, Rachel Cusk, Tessa Hadley, Jonathan Franzen), rooted in upper middle-class life and its romantic and family problems. Updated Updike and Cheever.
And there are the novels about social injustice. These novels (interestingly enough) are, more often, than not “historical”—and tell the tale of how the downtrodden are trodden down, with the rich and powerful escaping scot free. Colson Whitehead (I have pasted at the end of this post the relevant passages from a recent interview with him) sums it up: “the guilty escape punishment, the innocent suffer.” This glum conclusion fits any number of novels by Toni Morrison, Sebastian Barry, James Welch, Edward P. Jones, Viet Thanh Nguyen, and others; these victim tales appear to confirm Whitehead’s glum conclusion about “human nature” and the inevitable (?) “tendency” of the “powerful . . . to tyrannise and bully the weak.” These novels are committed to witnessing, to telling the tales that the powerful would rather remain untold. They can hardly be faulted for the desire to bring injustice to the light. But they have nothing to offer beyond witness, beyond indignation. They don’t imagine (because, it seems, they don’t believe in) any way to move beyond injustice. Injustice is an old story that is bound to occur again and again.
I think these novels of despair come close to Nietzschean nihilism. Nietzsche wants to enlist art in the difficult effort to “affirm” this life, even with all its imperfections. Finding the grounds for affirmation is hardly easy, but giving into despair is, for Nietszche as much as for Christian orthodoxy, the ultimate sin. For Nietzsche, the solution was the masochistic embrace of suffering, his amor fati. But James Baldwin offers a different path; his story “Sonny’s Blues” displays his hope (his reliance) on love (a recurrent term in Baldwin) and on art to allow us to endure, perhaps even rise above, the inevitable suffering that life is going to deal out to us.
When talking about my frustration with these novels, Nick reminds me I am just repeating my desire for “liberal comedies.” I want plots that move us toward more just, more humane societies. Plots that imagine reform, melioration, in the right direction. Steps toward a better world—an idea that fits not only with William James’ “meliorism,” but also with Dewey’s concrete account of adjustments to a situation. The problem with despair is that it is too abstract; it insists that only a global transformation of the whole system (of “human nature”?) can do the job—and then hasn’t a clue about what steps might even be taken to get you closer to such a transformation. It’s magical thinking, tied to an all or nothing vision. Either we are living in hell or in heaven—and since it’s obvious we ain’t in heaven, we are clearly in the other place.
Among the non-realistic novelists the same despair is prevalent. Salman Rushdie and J. M. Coetzee have an equally bleak view of human nature and certainly don’t offer any vision of more just or desirable social arrangements. In speculative fiction (David Mitchell, Margaret Atwood), some grand catastrophe does bring about the kind of complete transformation more realistic fictions don’t dare to imagine. But those transformations only deliver a world even worse than the contemporary one. When it comes to imagining an alternative society, it seems variants of the one offered by The Lord of the Flies is the best we can do. Ursula LeGuin’s work offers a welcome exception to this generalization about imagined post-catastrophe futures.
There have been some “serious” realistic novels that have attempted to locate their characters in contemporary political/economic context (unlike the domestic novels I mentioned above). Sebastian Faulks, A Week in December; Jonathan Lethem, Dissident Gardens; John Lanchester, Capital; Joseph O’Neill, Netherland. The first three are “ensemble” novels, tracking a variety of characters. And those characters end up with a variety of outcomes—which does avoid the powerful/victim dichotomy of the witness novels. These novels seem less driven by a need to indignantly call out injustice and more focused on the multiple ways people survive or fail to survive contemporary conditions.
O’Neill’s novel is interesting because it combines the domestic novels focus on family relations with the more sociological interests that drive its portrait of post-9/11 New York City. Liberal comedy (from Shakespeare to Anthony Trollope to 1930s screwball films and beyond) often rests on a homology between the central couple whose endangered love relationship is the focus of the plot and a reformed society. If the couple can successfully consummate their love that is because the society which thwarted them has been reformed in the course of the play/novel/film. (This is basic C. L. Barber and Northrop Frye on the theory of comedy.)
From the start (as recognized by Walter Scott in his commentary on his own novel Waverly), the great problem faced by the “historical novel” (or by any novel attempting to portray individualized fictional characters caught up in events of historical significance) was to make the connection between the character’s eventual fate and what those events wrought. That Prince Andrei dies in War and Peace is fitting; to be in the Napoleonic Wars would very likely lead one to death. That was the impact those wars had on individuals. But the novelist can hardly just march all his characters off to death.
How, then to align the fate of the characters who survive with the state that society reaches after the events of the novel? The happy marriage of Pierre and Natasha is discontinuous with the reactionary course followed by the Russian state after 1815. They escape into a separate peace—and that kind of escape (also enjoyed by Waverly in Scott’s novel) becomes the norm in most realistic novels, even the ones that import historical events and historical figures into their plots. The battle of Culloden destroys Scottish Highland society, but Waverly gives the battle a miss and his life is not destroyed. In O’Neill’s Netherland, the protagonist saves his marriage precisely by renouncing the public world of New York City’s financial industry. He can have one or the other, but not both. The corruption of the financial world makes a genuine and sustainable romantic relationship impossible. The primary character who remains behind in that world after the protagonist abandons it is doomed.
One way, then, to describe the lack of unity that prevails in “modern” art is precisely the ever-widening gulf between public and private. We live utterly fragmented lives. Domestic comedy abounds; we can imagine the joys and tribulations of family life and friendship. We can even imagine the joys and tribulations of the workplace (Parks and Rec; Thirty Rock; The Office), but we can’t translate the comraderies, the necessary tolerances of how others annoy us, the ability to shrug off (even enjoy) differences and eccentricities, into the public sphere.
We can’t connect, as E. M. Forster urged us to do in Howard’s End. Forster at least had the country house—a domestic space that carries a larger social import—for his effort to bridge the gap between public and private. We have no apparent bridges of any sort. We stand dismayed by the nastiness of our politics and the brutalities of our economic order, even as we carve out loves and friendships we can affirm. No wonder our art is all about disconnection.
Nick’s way of describing modern art’s lack of unity was very different from mine. He attributed it to art’s becoming more and more entangled in, focused on, its own institutions. Going that route also highlights disconnection—but now the alienation of art from the “lifeworld” (to resurrect Habermas’ way of talking about this issue). The idea in Habermas was that modernity tended to segregate various activities (the scientific/technical; the aesthetic; the economic; the scholarly) into relatively autonomous spheres (we could call them “professions,” although he does not) which end up mostly speaking to themselves—and hence divorced from the “lifeworld” (understood as the daily life of social intercourse and domestic relations). Certainly, Dewey is all about re-integrating the aesthetic back into the ordinary; he wants the aesthetic and the ordinary to be continuous, even though (the topic for a future post) he still wants the aesthetic to be distinctive.
So what Nick is pointing out is that artists speak more and more only to other artists, other insiders. The practice of art is increasingly self-referential in the sense that works are best understood in dialogue with previous works, with prevailing discussions in the field. This self-enclosure is mirrored by the creation of institutions specific to the practice, and to a primary desire to impress (communicate with) those positioned within the field.
This development of specific institutions and a set of recognized practitioners fragments art in two ways: one, no work can be a self-sufficient unity because it refers to, stands in relation to, other works. (Dewey actually seems to accept this fact since he is adamant that the present always stands in relation to the past; but that acceptance does seem a problem for his insistence on the “qualitative unity” of a situation.)
Two, more crucially, the more any pursuit becomes closed off from the comprehension of outsiders (the less it engages in fruitful interchanges with different pursuits), the less likely we are to find bridges across the divides between pursuits—and the divide from the lifeworld. We get here another version of the old Lukacs and Jameson diagnosis: we (and the fate of the novel since Tolstoy and George Eliot is one symptom of this fact) are less and less able to comprehend totality—where “comprehend” means not just “to understand,” but also to capture or contain within any aesthetic or intellectual form. Fragmentation is the order of the day because unity is now, quite simply, beyond our capabilities.
I have a bit more to say on this topic. But will stop here for today.
Here is the interview with Colson Whitehead. I have given you about half of it—but pretty much all the substantive parts. But here’s the link to the whole thing.
“It is a story,” says Whitehead, “about how powerful people get away with abusing the powerless and are never called to account.”
He uses the term “human nature” more than once and one senses that the writing of his past couple of books has reinforced his essential belief that, as he says at one point, “people are terrible – we invent all sorts of different reasons to hate people. We always have and we always will.” Does he really believe that? “Well, in terms of human nature, the powerful tend to tyrannise and bully the weak. I really don’t think that will change very much. In fact, I think we will continue to treat each other pretty horribly in the way I described in The Nickel Boys for all eternity.”
For all that, The Nickel Boys, despite passages of dark, almost gothic horror, is a tentatively redemptive fiction, a survivor’s story. I wondered if the creation of the wounded characters in his most recent novel and the tracing of their traumatised lives took a psychological toll on Whitehead.
He tells me that, throughout the writing of the book, he would open a file on his computer every morning and see a note he had posted there when he began. It read: “The guilty escape punishment. The innocent suffer.” He had put it there to remind him what the story he was telling was really about. “And yet,” he says, “the last third of the book is really about all the other stuff that is not in those two lines: what do you do with that? How do you live with that knowledge? And, how do you make a life?”
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