Amidst doom, gloom, rain and fog (in the South of France, yet), I thought I would put up a few cheery things of little consequence. Here is the first of a few cartoons I found when tidying up my study. I did them back in the Eighties, when I was writing a book on Elizabethan sonnet-sequences and reading a lot of French criticism and "theory". Anyone who went through that may recognize some old preoccupations.
Oh, those tree fellas....
ReplyDeleteThis is about one of your old LiveJournal posts (may they migrate successfully):
ReplyDeleteI have been thinking on and off about your posts on irony and came across your July 2012 post on spiritual nihilism (well, really it starts out explaining what’s wrong with religion-as-security-blanket antirationalism), and to celebrate my insomnia, I thought I’d respond.
Anyway, you assert that modern life is in some ways more immoral than pre-modern life, and you trace a representative strand of immoral modern art to a kind of ossified desire to protest against a hypocritical Victorian bourgeoisie that no longer exists. Well, hypocrisy will always be with us and in plentiful quantities among the more influential classes. That is why I relish Michael Moore asking senators if they’d mind sending their children to the war in Iraq. Of course, that’s politics being played for lowbrow laughs, and not the kind of art Duchamp had in mind. And that’s the point: skewering hypocrisy is a popular affair.
Regardless of the quality of the art on offer, some group or other (and it need not be bourgeois or an elite) will claim to get it, and somehow thereby to elevate its cachet, and thereby will be vulnerable to the artist working in bad faith. Think of the scorn Shakespeare and Middleton heaped on their audiences in Troilus and Cressida and The Revenger’s Tragedy, or Bob Dylan’s sneer when he performs Rainy Day Women: you’re a chump if you get the joke. Doesn’t Chaucer’s Pardoner’s tale trample decency and humanity under the foot of cruelty, worthlessness, and plain evil, all for our entertainment? Just as our own age has no corner on human cruelty, neither has its art on moral vacuity.
In the face of such moral uncertainty, you say, a certain brand of reflexive fundamentalism becomes attractive. And again I’d ask, hasn’t it always been thus? The old via media between fundamentalism and nihilism, honestum and utile, has always been the trickiest way to follow and the only sane one. It seems to me that it’s often more difficult to know the difference between prudence and mere expedience than between principled behavior and blind idealism. And where is art in all of this? It can be political and moral precisely because it has rules other than political and moral ones to follow. Aesthetics allows the mind off of the two-dimensional plane constructed on the axes of politics and moral.
Maybe theology also does that. I certainly agree with you that a religion does not reduce to an ethics, and moreover that there’s value in religious belief. It seems that you set the spiritual nihilist at the pole opposite from the fundamentalist in religious matters, and charge each with a different brand of avoiding serious spiritual reflection. Or maybe it’s just me who does. I’d like to posit a serious and worthwhile agnosticism, the kind that takes our inability to answer some questions as something very important.
Dear General, Sir,
DeleteBrilliant reply, for which many thanks. Just a couple of remarks to continue the discussion:
Yes, hypocrisy is as human as apple pie, and perhaps even as human as nuts, berries, and raw dinosaur meat. And there will always be those whose temperament impels them to spend valuable time skewering it wherever they find it. Evelyn Waugh was a fine example, as were Huxley and Orwell. What I was protesting against – and still protest against – is the turning (as milk turns when it goes sour) of healthy skewering into a nihilism that dare not speak its name.
Moreover, Chaucer did not only write the Pardoner’s Tale, he also and in the same work wrote the Knight’s Tale. Shakespeare not only wrote Troilus and Cressida, he also wrote As You Like It, the Winter’s Tale, and King Lear.
I’m saddened when a friend says enthusiastically, returning from seeing a new film, “It’s a great movie. Very tough. Takes no prisoners.”
I’m saddened when great writers like T.S. Eliot and Charles Morgan are criticized, and sometimes dismissed, as being altogether too damned serious, even solemn.
I’m saddened when I read a review of the umpteenth new Shakespeare production somewhere where the director has “boldly” set the play in a modern high-security prison and “adapted” the text.
And I’m saddened when I ponder the fact that all this may have made me into a curmudgeon, when in real life I am an incurable romantic.
“It seems to me that it’s often more difficult to know the difference between prudence and mere expedience than between principled behavior and blind idealism.” This comment of yours is exceedingly true, and most valuable. Sometimes it even holds true for the difference beteen prudence and principled behaviour: on Facebook today some of us exchanged views on modern parenting and its over-protectiveness, and I cited a former student who was severely taken to task by her friends for allowing her 9-year-old to walk to school alone.
Where is art in all this? Art in itself is probably immune, as artists vary and create, and thus create a variety of work. What is important is that the education of the public, and the human element in art’s diffusion, should not deny the serious and/or the positive. And finally, yes, a serious and worthwhile agnosticism is a good thing, because by its nature it engages with the questions rather than parody the answers.
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