*
For more than a century now the bulk of talented artists, writers and creatives in general have been providing us with first rate soul-poison.
The reflection was forced upon me for the ten-thousandth time by browsing through a book of Mervyn Peake's illustrations. On the one hand they were superb drawings, on the other hand each and every one of them drained my vitality and filled me with despair.
*
In this respect, Peake is simply representative of most of the best workers in the arts for a long time.
And, like the others, the despair induced by Peake's work is not a means to some greater end, it leads us down into an abyss and leaves us there...
Peake's universe portrayed in the Gormenghast novel (depicted in words and visually, with tremendous skill and flair) is that good characters are weak and self-deceiving fools, while strong characters are selfish, sadistic nihilists - live is purposeless, meaningless and each of us is alone in it.
And this is the same for most of the most admired works in literature, drama, movies and representative art generally.
*
Look around you!
Never in history has so much human ability, hard work and creativity been devoted to convincing people that ability, hard work and creativity are futile.
Never has so much moralizing zeal been devoted to the destruction of morality.
Never has so much bold, uncompromizing realism been devoted to depicting the meaninglessness of truth.
Never has so much aesthetic judgment been devoted to the annihiliation of beauty.
*
11 comments:
I had just been thinking about Peake a moment before seeing your entry.
Having written thus, what do you think of C. S. Lewis's praise? He liked the (first two) Titus books enough to write the author a fan letter (something he also did when he read Charles Williams's The Place of the Lion, and after reading John Buchan's Witch Wood).
10 Feb. 1958: "what a profound impression your Titus Groan and Gormenghast are making on me... People now all seem to want 'a slice of life'.... To me those who merely comment on existence seem far less valuable than those who add to it, who make me experience what I never experienced before.
"I would not for anything have missed Gormenghast. It has the hallmark of a true myth: i.e. you hgave seen nothing like it before you read the book, but after that you see things like it everywhere. {If people object that the book is too slow, they are mistaken:] That endless, tragic, farcical, unnecessary, ineluctable sorrow can't be abridged."
You were referring, though, specifically to Peake's art. Lewis received a copy of Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner with Peake's art from Peake. On 20 June 1959 he writes to Peake: "I find the pictures very satisfactorily 'horrid' ... The Mariner himself (facing p. 6) has just the triple chord I have sometimes met in nightmares -- that disquieting blend of the venerable, the pitiable, and the frightful. ... you represent almost exclusively the terror -- what corresponds to S. T. C.'s 'brook in the leafy month of June' being done by your line. Thus while few things could be nastier (in what it represents) than the picture facing p. 70, the composition of it is a harmonious tranquillity. The very lines which make the Mariner a hideous and rigid man simultaneously make him a shape as charming as a beech-tree. Another beatiful example is that facing p. 24, to the imagination, all ruin, despair and monstrosity, but to the eye as relaxed and liquid and gentle as a willow hanging over a pool," etc.
Well, here is a rough list of the major Western literary works of the past century or so. They don't seem particularly worse on average than works of the past:
Luigi Pirandello
Naked Masks: Five Plays
Eugenio Montale
Collected Poems
Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
The Leopard
Italo Calvino
Invisible Cities
Federico Garcia Lorca
Collected Poems
Salvador Espríu
La Pell de Brau
Fernando Pessoa
Poems
The Book of Disquiet
Marcel Proust
In Search of Lost Time
Andre Gide
The Immoralist
Paul Valéry
Poetry and Criticism
Michel Houellebecq
Whatever
The Elementary Particles
William Butler Yeats
Collected Poems
Joseph Conrad
Lord Jim
The Secret Agent
Nostromo
Under Western Eyes
Thomas Hardy
The Woodlanders
The Return of the Native
The Mayor of Casterbridge
Far From the Madding Crowd
Tess of the D'Urbervilles
Jude the Obscure
Collected Poems
D. H. Lawrence
The Rainbow
Women in Love
Birds, Beasts, and Flowers
Last Poems
Virginia Woolf
To the Lighthouse
James Joyce
Dubliners
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Ulysses
Samuel Beckett
Three Novels: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnameable
Waiting for Godot
Endgame
Krapp's Last Tape
W. H. Auden
The English Auden
Collected Poems
The Dyer's Hand
William Empson
Milton's God
George Wilson Knight
The Wheel of Fire
Hugo von Hofmannsthal
Poems and Verse Plays
Selected Prose
Selected Plays and Libretti
Rainer Maria Rilke
Duino Elegies
The Sonnets to Orpheus
New Poems: First Part and Other Part
Hermann Broch
The Death of Virgil
Franz Kafka
Parables, Fragments, Aphorisms
Bertolt Brecht
Poems, 1913-1956
The Good Woman of Setzuan
Mother Courage and Her Children
Galileo
Thomas Mann
The Magic Mountain
Doctor Faustus
Death in Venice
Hermann Hesse
Narcissus and Goldmund
Robert Musil
The Man Without Qualities
Anna Akhmatova
Poems
Osip Mandelshtam
Selected Poems
Isaac Babel
Stories
Boris Pasternak
Doctor Zhivago
Selected Poems
Jaroslav Seifert
Selected Poetry
C. P. Cavafy
Collected Poems
Jorge Luis Borges
Ficciones
The Aleph and Other Stories
Pablo Neruda
Canto General
Residence on Earth
Alejo Carpentier
The Lost Steps
The Kingdom of This World
Octavio Paz
Collected Poems
Gabriel García Márquez
Love in the Time of Cholera
Derek Walcott
Another Life
J. M. Coetzee
Disgrace
Robertson Davies
The Deptford Trilogy
The Rebel Angels
Northrop Frye
Anatomy of Criticism
Anne Carson
The Beauty of the Husband
Les A. Murray
Collected Poems
Robert Frost
Poetry
Willa Cather
My Ántonia
The Professor's House
A Lost Lady
Wallace Stevens
Collected Poems
Marianne Moore
Complete Poems
T. S. Eliot
Complete Poems
Selected Essays
Hart Crane
Complete Poems
William Faulkner
As I Lay Dying
Light in August
Absalom, Absalom!
The Sound and the Fury
The Wild Palms
Nathanael West
Miss Lonelyhearts
Robert Penn Warren
All the King's Men
World Enough and Time
Collected Poems
Flannery O'Connor
Complete Stories
Cormac McCarthy
Blood Meridian
Philip Roth
Operation Shylock
Sabbath’s Theater
@Dale - Peake's work is of a very high level as Art. But I regard it as likely to be harmful, in tendency - even when not in actual effect.
Of course, some people (most people) are insensible to this kind of thing, and they would be unharmed (perhaps because being already too far gone in this direction for Art to make any difference); while others (like Lewis) are very strongly rooted thus immune; or of a type not vulnerable to this particular kind of depiction.
But my sense is that among those who respond strongly to Peake (just as an example) are those who wallow in the deadening horror of his perspective, who are encouraged in their existing tendency to see the world this way. That was the effect Gormenghast (and Peake's illustrations) have on me - and I think that is the effect they were intended to have (something that was natural to Peake).
*
If Art (including Literature) can do Good, then it must also be able to do evil, to subvert Good, in Net effect.
Artistic quality is orthogonal-to, uncorrelated with specifically 'artistic' quality - at least artistic quality is uncorrelated with The Good under moden conditions - when Art is 'not even trying' to be beautiful. To ask whether Peake was trying to create Beauty (that is also True and Virtuous) is to answer the question: obviously he was not.
Peake's work is a typical product of the detachment first of the Beautiful fron the Good (so that Art does not need to be true or virtuous); and at the second stage where pursuit of the Beautiful is abandoned in favour of a professionalized 'aesthetic' and/ or the ability to provoke strong emotions of almost any kind - including horror, guilt, revulsion and (especially) despair.
Why do we expose ourselves to this? In my case (during adolescence and early adulthood) it was a kind of de-sensitizing and hardening process, aimed at making myself 'unshockable'. In my case it was disturbingly-effective - and, looking around, it seems to have worked on lots of other people, too.
@Thursday - thanks for providing so much evidence in support of my point! ;-)
When the best artists produce works like these (overall, and in net effect)... well, it explains a lot about the self-loathing nihilism of our era.
Interesting discussion. C.S. Lewis' interest in Gormenghast is surprising, and perhaps I should give it another try. I attempted to read it years ago, thinking it would be similar to LOTR and the Narnian Chronicles and gave up in disgust at the bleakness of the thing.
Why don't you point out which of those books you have read and why they are so much worse than those of the past.
@Thursday - I can only read English - I have read some of the German stuff in translation but obviously that grossly underestimates them.
Of the English I know the following, although some I can't recall, and probably only skimmed:
William Butler Yeats
Collected Poems
Thomas Hardy
The Woodlanders
Collected Poems
D. H. Lawrence
The Rainbow
Women in Love
Last Poems
Virginia Woolf
To the Lighthouse (I think...)
James Joyce
Dubliners
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Ulysses
Samuel Beckett
Three Novels: Molloy, Malone Dies, Waiting for Godot
Endgame
Krapp's Last Tape
W. H. Auden
Collected Poems
William Empson
Milton's God (I think...)
Robertson Davies
The Deptford Trilogy
The Rebel Angels
Les A. Murray
Collected Poems
Robert Frost
Poetry
Wallace Stevens
Collected Poems
T. S. Eliot
Complete Poems
Selected Essays
*
I had a culture vulture phase which extended until I was about 30, but at some point I realized that this wasn't doing me good. Since my thirties I have read a lot more non-fiction than fiction.
Of the above, I would regard all of them as supporting my thesis with the exceptions of Robert Frost and The Rebel Angels.
Some - like Beckett, Joyce, Lawrence, Eliot's Waste Land... had a particularly pernicious effect on me.
Of course, the above list misses-out Lord of the Rings which I regard as incomparably the best work of fiction of... ever.
BGC, I'm somewhat sympathetic to what you are saying, but let me push this discussion a little more.
What do you think of gargoyles? Here's a bit on gargoyles from G. K. Chesterton:
---the only true origin of Realism. Realism is simply Romanticism that has lost its reason. This is so not merely in the sense of insanity but of suicide. It has lost its reason; that is its reason for existing. The Old Greeks summoned godlike things to worship their god. The medieval Christians summoned all things to worship theirs, dwarfs and pelicans, monkeys and madmen. The modern realists summon all these million creatures to worship their god; and then have no god for them to worship. Paganism was in art a pure beauty; that was the dawn. Christianity was a beauty created by controlling a million monsters of ugliness; and that in my belief was the zenith and the noon. Modern art and science practically mean having the million monsters and being unable to control them; and I will venture to call that the disruption and the decay. The finest lengths of the Elgin marbles consist of splendid horses going to the temple of a virgin. Christianity, with its gargoyles and grotesques, really amounted to saying this: that a donkey could go before all the horses of the world when it was really going to the temple. Romance means a holy donkey going to the temple. Realism means a lost donkey going nowhere.----
So far Chesterton.
Peake's art may be unwholesome as you say. On the other hand, imagine the art by him that is most disturbing to you placed next to some of Francis Bacon's art -- images of raw meat, or his screaming popes, etc. Obviously Bacon's art is shocking in a way that Peake's is not. Is there, though, some seed/germ in Peake's imagination whose natural flowering would be something of a Baconian ugliness?
Biographical allusions are of dubious value but I'll hazard one anyway. Of Peake, we know that he adored his wife's beauty, and that he loved to draw his little children. Conversely, one of the few things I remember about Bacon -- at this length of time perhaps I should say I think I remember it -- was something that I thought I read in the London Review of Books in the second half of the 1980s -- it was something like this, that on some occasion Bacon observed some dog shit and had what he regarded as in effect an epiphanic experience: that pile was apparently for him a "revelation" (but prompted by what spirit?) of the reality of existence. But Peake seems to me a life-affirmer. Ugliness in his art does not seem to me to express a hatred of life. If Bacon had any hope, I suppose it must have been in some gnostic transcendence -- perhaps, in his case, something "achieved" by rough homosexual activity.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Bacon_%28artist%29
But Peake seems to have loved this world, loved the human form, loved rocks and beasts. Here's something he wrote "To Maeve" (his wife):
You walk unaware
Of the slender gazelle
That moves as you move
And is one with the limbs
That you have.
You live unaware
Of the faint, the unearthly
Echo of hooves
That within your white streams
Of clear clay that I love
Are in flight as you turn,
As you stand, as you move,
As you sleep, for the slender
Gazelle never rests
In your ivory grove.
--To me that sounds like something akin to Solomon's Canticle.
@Dale - Well, one difference is that I consider Peake to be a superb illustrator (technically) and compulsively interesting - he therefore raises tough questions; while Bacon is merely sub-mediocre, and nothing is lost by ignoring him completely - as I have consistently done.
*
I read in a Saul Bellow essay that mass culure (since about 1955, I think he meant) is vulgarized Romanticism; this was confirmed (although with the opposite valuation) by Camille Paglia.
I see two problems here:
1. Low sample size.
2. Lack of a significant comparison group.
Now, if your looking for luridness, impiety, ugliness, disgust and cynicism then I'd nominate the following:
Euripides, Lucretius, Catullus, Ovid, Lucan, Petronius, Boccaccio, Ariosto, Spenser, Marlowe, Racine, Rousseau, Kleist, Laclos, Stendhal, Balzac, Flaubert, Foscolo, Leopardi, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Verlaine, Zola, Ibsen, Strindberg, aspects of Tennyson and the Pre-Raphaelites, Swinburne, Thackeray, Melville, to name only a few of the major writers out there, completely ignoring all the minor ones.
Even Shakespeare can be thrown into the mix. Othello is almost depraved, almost too painful to read. Falstaff preaches vice in the most appealing way possible.
I guess after reading all the above, I just wasn't all that shocked by a lot of 20th century literature. Faulkner or McCarthy aren't any worse than Melville. Joyce isn't any more cynical than Stendhal or Flaubert. Philip Roth isn't any more pornographic than Boccaccio. The truth is that the whole canon is filled a whole lot of pretty unpleasant stuff, much of which the authors are not merely depicting, but endorsing. I suppose one might argue that there is more of this kind of thing in the 20th century, but I wouldn't say by a whole lot.
@Thursday - I think I get it. You think the thrust of my point is that modern artists are worse in this respect than in the past.
Well, I do think that - in the sense that the modern mass media blankets us with this kind of thing; but it isn't the main point.
(For example, I perfectly agree that Shakespeare can be horribly cynical and life-denying - I have always disliked the Melancholy Jacques for that reason).
The main point is that the general run of 'art' IS like that, and that includes the best art.
Indeed I would go so far as to say that - as you imply - the assertion of nihilism is a major feature of the best literature (perhaps especially literature) through most of history.
But I do not think this fact excuses it. Despair is a sin, ugliness ought not to be encouraged; and that which is calculated to induce despair and subvert beauty is *particularly* damaging when done by first rate artists.
When is succeeds then it does direct harm, when it fails it does indirect harm by building insensitivity - so destruction of hope or beauty is only justificable (and *then* it is both justifiable and necessary) when en route to The Good.
Post a Comment