The Artist at War with Official Society

Surveying the state of crisis America was in, amid economic calamity, war and much else in 2010, and the "entirely inadequate, statistically almost insignificant" artistic response to them David Walsh asked "'Where is the artist today at total war with official society? . . . the artist who says: 'I despise all this, patriotism, nationalism, war, the military, religion, the government, parliament, business, profits?'"

Of course, Walsh's question is rhetorical--Walsh himself having lengthily and well explained the matter, and in the piece in question proceeded to reference much of his explanatory work again. As he remarked, not only is it the case that practical realities incentivize the artist to play it safe (you can't be an artist for long if you can't live from your work), but they are also not the instinctive revolutionaries people seem to think they are--outraging the bourgeoisie with their predilection for "Bohemian" living, "edgy" creations and so forth, but often little interested in or conventional or even reactionary on the great questions of the day (a Nietzsche far more attractive to them than a Marx, so to speak). When they become otherwise they are often reacting rather than anticipating, following rather than leading, a point Walsh himself makes again in his recent book Art and the Influence of Revolution. And as Walsh himself constantly points out this has been a particularly lousy time for an artist to try and "be a rebel," the more in as the state of our social and political life at the supposed "end of history" has not exactly been great inspiration to those artists potentially capable of making us see reality in a more critical way.

Yet, while all this most certainly bears repeating because it is not only true, but criminally underappreciated, my real interest is in another side of the matter, what the state of feeling oneself at war, really feeling that way, means for how and what an artist produces. And particularly of what Ilya Ehrenburg--who knew a little something about the interaction of war and the artistic sensibility--had to say about the matter, particularly that war is conducive only to poetry and "reportage." To, I suppose Sinclair would say, the "art of beauty" rather than the "art of power," where what the artist has to say counts for more than how they say it, content taking priority over form, with this again having significant political consequences. As Sinclair noted in the same study of art, the "art of beauty" which is first and foremost about form and the beautification of life is the art of the established and comfortable elite content with things as they are and intent on keeping them as they are, and thus the specialty of the "ruling-class artists"; the "art of power" that is above all about the Message is the art of those challenging things as they are, the "hero artists"; with the former exalted and the latter scorned by the professional tastemakers, the kept critics of the ruling elite who gatekeep culture. Certainly in our time they have inclined to the view that form is everything and content nothing, and the art of power not really art at all, as indeed they reserve special scorn for "reportage"--actually dismissing plain realist fiction more concerned with content than form with the word "journalism." (Those desirous of specific example may consult that classic, art of beauty-championing, art of power-scorning essay "Technique as Discovery" by Mark Schorer, whose career highlights include inflicting severe damage on the reputation of H.G. Wells with his assault on Wells' most acclaimed realist work in that very essay, and with his "cultural Cold War" hatchet job of a biography wrecking the standing of American Nobel Laureate Sinclair Lewis in a way from which it has never recovered.)

The case of that novelist Walsh esteems as America's greatest, Theodore Dreiser, would seem exemplary. Here was a writer who could and did feel himself at war with official society. He didn't want to be at war with official society, because it isn't very pleasant to be at war with official society--official society makes damned sure of that--the more in as one feels themselves fighting alone or nearly so, and has very little to fall back on in the face of official society's hostility. (How Dreiser would have preferred to be Frank Cowperwood rather than Forbes Gurney!) But at war he found himself, and fight that war he did, producing, above all in the novel on which his reputation ultimately stands, An American Tragedy, a novel of extraordinary power, one that for all its prejudices the Modern Library still had to recognize with a place on its list of the 100 Best Novels published in the English language in the twentieth century (#16, as it happened), but nonetheless despised during his lifetime and ever after by the gatekeepers as a writer of mere "journalism." I, for one, would say that American and world literature are better off for his "journalism," the gatekeepers be damned. But to recognize that what the gatekeepers may sneer at as "journalism" may well be Great Literature is not to deny the constraints under which the novelist at war toils.