Recently reviewing and more generally discussing Upton Sinclair's Mammonart and Money Writes! I have found myself particularly attentive to what Sinclair had to say about how artists work, and what it means for them and their work in societal life--not just the extent to which "money writes," but to which artists' "impressionability" leaves them following rather than leading, and serving power very willingly, the "ruling-class artist" the norm and the "hero artist" the rarity, especially when we consider those who ever had the chance to make an impact on the world.
I cannot say that these ideas were new to me--but I do not think I ever spent so much time considering them as I have since turning my attention to Sinclair's books the way I have this year, and certainly never felt the weight of those ideas so much as I do now. Perhaps it is because ever since I looked to literature for more than entertainment it has been the hero artists--whom, I might add, have tended to be more than conveyors of "impressions"--that I have found worthiest of my interest and my time, all as, frankly, I have been still more attentive to them since I stopped bothering with books just because they are canonical. (Perhaps, too, that I have spent so much time on science fiction, and especially its more cerebral writers, matters in this.)
Now having done so I find it awfully depressing given the conventional view of the artist as a sort of latterday seer, and of the artist as, in Graham Greene's "The Virtue of Disloyalty," a champion of the downtrodden. Yet there is no denying that this explains much we see in the past, and the present--however unhappily--with illusions about what artists can do for us better set aside than sustained, demanding of art everything that it can give us but not expecting from it what it cannot.
Tuesday, November 5, 2024
Reflections on the Third Season of Game of Thrones
As I think I remarked some years ago I pretty much gave up on Game of Thrones after season three.
This was, I think, because the ways in which the adaptation of the books fell short kept adding up for me, and totaling higher than what the adaptation was getting right--all as my experience of the books was that their interest pretty much goes downhill after number three, the more in as the comparative slog of the fourth and fifth volumes was as yet unredeemed by the "winds of winter" whose coming seemed no certainty.
I was also annoyed with the way the producers lamely split the third book into two seasons, dragging out the best part of the series (thus far) as if to stall us as they figured out what to do about what the much weaker later material.
However, it was also because of what they filled that third season with when they could have been advancing the plot instead.
George R.R. Martin's books depicted the quasi-Medieval world of Westeros as a brutal place, and anyone watching the TV series could hardly complain if it depicted that brutality. However, the makers of the show all too obviously wallowed in it, an impression I first had at the end of the third episode, "Walk of Punishment," when Jaime Lannister's captors cut off his sword hand. The scene is of course in the original book and an important part of his character arc, and the presentation of the incident as such unobjectionable. But the episode's cutting from the severing of the hand to the end credits with "The Bear and the Maiden Fair" blaring over them smacked of the cheap nihilism of the edgelord (and as if to confirm it, had the commensurate praises of the claqueurs!). Likewise I deeply disliked the way the show disposed of Rose, and the decision to very lengthily (and tastelessly) dramatize Theon Greyjoy's captivity and torture, and a good deal else (while it said to me an awful lot that few in the commentariat found anything at all objectionable about all this).
Of course, some go on watching shows in which they have lost interest. I certainly had done it in the past. But by this point I was outgrowing that bad habit, just walked away, and have not really bothered to look back since--all as, of course, The Winds of Winter remains an unkept promise over a decade on.
This was, I think, because the ways in which the adaptation of the books fell short kept adding up for me, and totaling higher than what the adaptation was getting right--all as my experience of the books was that their interest pretty much goes downhill after number three, the more in as the comparative slog of the fourth and fifth volumes was as yet unredeemed by the "winds of winter" whose coming seemed no certainty.
I was also annoyed with the way the producers lamely split the third book into two seasons, dragging out the best part of the series (thus far) as if to stall us as they figured out what to do about what the much weaker later material.
However, it was also because of what they filled that third season with when they could have been advancing the plot instead.
George R.R. Martin's books depicted the quasi-Medieval world of Westeros as a brutal place, and anyone watching the TV series could hardly complain if it depicted that brutality. However, the makers of the show all too obviously wallowed in it, an impression I first had at the end of the third episode, "Walk of Punishment," when Jaime Lannister's captors cut off his sword hand. The scene is of course in the original book and an important part of his character arc, and the presentation of the incident as such unobjectionable. But the episode's cutting from the severing of the hand to the end credits with "The Bear and the Maiden Fair" blaring over them smacked of the cheap nihilism of the edgelord (and as if to confirm it, had the commensurate praises of the claqueurs!). Likewise I deeply disliked the way the show disposed of Rose, and the decision to very lengthily (and tastelessly) dramatize Theon Greyjoy's captivity and torture, and a good deal else (while it said to me an awful lot that few in the commentariat found anything at all objectionable about all this).
Of course, some go on watching shows in which they have lost interest. I certainly had done it in the past. But by this point I was outgrowing that bad habit, just walked away, and have not really bothered to look back since--all as, of course, The Winds of Winter remains an unkept promise over a decade on.
Of Geniuses Without Money
In Balzac's Lost Illusions David Sechard remarked that "the world at large declines to believe in any man's superior intellect until he has achieved some signal success."
What does the world accept as such "signal success?" Most people, being of conventional mind, and the prevailing schema of values being thoroughly bourgeois, are unlikely to accept anything but the attainment of wealth, as they show through such vulgar and stupid aphorisms as "If you're so smart why ain't you rich?"
As they show, too, in the haste of people of conventional mind to declare anyone with a large sum of money a "genius"--a Ken Lay, a Bernie Madoff, a Jeffrey Epstein, a Sam Bankman-Fried.
This seems to me something to keep in mind when we consider the intellectual who feels aggrieved at being given less than his due by the world. The conventional response is to sneer at them as "self-pitying," "entitled" and worse for thinking they deserve better than the extreme disrespect that is the lot of all those lacking "some signal success" to their credit. Yet the reality is that the intelligent person whose intelligence is unrecognized and unrespected, perhaps ceaselessly insulted, really is being given less than their due in that way, and they do have something to feel badly about--especially if their intelligence is the only trait they have about which they can feel good. And I dare say that the state is not an uncommon one. The reality is that, even if superior intellect may be a comparative rarity in this world, the chances for "signal success" are still very, very few indeed relative to the number of superior intellects that do exist, especially insofar as society equates such success with riches.
What does the world accept as such "signal success?" Most people, being of conventional mind, and the prevailing schema of values being thoroughly bourgeois, are unlikely to accept anything but the attainment of wealth, as they show through such vulgar and stupid aphorisms as "If you're so smart why ain't you rich?"
As they show, too, in the haste of people of conventional mind to declare anyone with a large sum of money a "genius"--a Ken Lay, a Bernie Madoff, a Jeffrey Epstein, a Sam Bankman-Fried.
This seems to me something to keep in mind when we consider the intellectual who feels aggrieved at being given less than his due by the world. The conventional response is to sneer at them as "self-pitying," "entitled" and worse for thinking they deserve better than the extreme disrespect that is the lot of all those lacking "some signal success" to their credit. Yet the reality is that the intelligent person whose intelligence is unrecognized and unrespected, perhaps ceaselessly insulted, really is being given less than their due in that way, and they do have something to feel badly about--especially if their intelligence is the only trait they have about which they can feel good. And I dare say that the state is not an uncommon one. The reality is that, even if superior intellect may be a comparative rarity in this world, the chances for "signal success" are still very, very few indeed relative to the number of superior intellects that do exist, especially insofar as society equates such success with riches.
Balzac's Vautrin, the Making of Fortunes, and the Dream of Becoming a Celebrity
It was Thomas Piketty's discussion of the novels of Balzac in Capital in the Twenty-First Century that persuaded me his Human Comedy was worth my while--and having read through a fair portion of at least the more oft-cited of the books belonging to it I have only felt more and more with time that the impression was correct.
Perhaps the most striking part of Piketty's discussion of the works was his reference to the dialogue in Father Goriot between the arch-criminal Vautrin and law student Eugene de Rastignac regarding how one really acquires wealth in this profoundly unequal and profoundly unjust world. For all the pious bourgeois prattle the road to riches is not "hard work," even for a learned man of the professions such as de Rastignac is in school to become. For all the drudgery of the work and the indignities one must suffer year after year, decade after decade ("I would sooner turn pirate on the high seas than have my soul shrivel up inside me like that" Vautrin says of himself), even for the very few who rise high in it ("there are but twenty Procureurs Generaux . . . in all France," but "twenty thousand of you young men who aspire to that elevated position," such that they "must fight and devour one another like spiders in a pot"), the rewards of such a professional life are apt to be paltry by the standard of anything that could really be called luxury (Vautrin challenging Rastignac to find even "five advocates" in all of "Paris who by the time that they are fifty are making fifty thousand francs a year").
Balzac, and Vautrin, are prepared to allow that "brilliant genius" may stand a chance--but in the absence of that rather unlikely path "skilful corruption" is the only alternative, the more in as one hopes to make their fortune quickly, as Vautrin tells de Rastignac in softening him up for a thoroughly criminal "offer that no one would decline," in Vautrin's words.
Desperate as his circumstances may be de Rastignac does "decline" that offer, and it is off to jail for Vautrin--while de Rastignac ends up making his way to fortune and power and fame by other means no more flattering to conventional attitudes about work and wealth, confirming rather than refuting what Vautrin has to say.
Considering that--the way that the rewards of even a respectable professional career are a matter of long and painful effort, highly uncertain, and in the event that one does attain them, pretty paltry--I find myself thinking again of a different writer who was not at all friendly toward Balzac, Upton Sinclair, and what he had to say in Money Writes! about the quest after celebrity already recognizable in his day. The odds of actually attaining celebrity are not high--but all the same, for most people it looks likelier than a conventional "career" (and those who embark upon it at least hope to make a success this way without committing a crime).
Perhaps the most striking part of Piketty's discussion of the works was his reference to the dialogue in Father Goriot between the arch-criminal Vautrin and law student Eugene de Rastignac regarding how one really acquires wealth in this profoundly unequal and profoundly unjust world. For all the pious bourgeois prattle the road to riches is not "hard work," even for a learned man of the professions such as de Rastignac is in school to become. For all the drudgery of the work and the indignities one must suffer year after year, decade after decade ("I would sooner turn pirate on the high seas than have my soul shrivel up inside me like that" Vautrin says of himself), even for the very few who rise high in it ("there are but twenty Procureurs Generaux . . . in all France," but "twenty thousand of you young men who aspire to that elevated position," such that they "must fight and devour one another like spiders in a pot"), the rewards of such a professional life are apt to be paltry by the standard of anything that could really be called luxury (Vautrin challenging Rastignac to find even "five advocates" in all of "Paris who by the time that they are fifty are making fifty thousand francs a year").
Balzac, and Vautrin, are prepared to allow that "brilliant genius" may stand a chance--but in the absence of that rather unlikely path "skilful corruption" is the only alternative, the more in as one hopes to make their fortune quickly, as Vautrin tells de Rastignac in softening him up for a thoroughly criminal "offer that no one would decline," in Vautrin's words.
Desperate as his circumstances may be de Rastignac does "decline" that offer, and it is off to jail for Vautrin--while de Rastignac ends up making his way to fortune and power and fame by other means no more flattering to conventional attitudes about work and wealth, confirming rather than refuting what Vautrin has to say.
Considering that--the way that the rewards of even a respectable professional career are a matter of long and painful effort, highly uncertain, and in the event that one does attain them, pretty paltry--I find myself thinking again of a different writer who was not at all friendly toward Balzac, Upton Sinclair, and what he had to say in Money Writes! about the quest after celebrity already recognizable in his day. The odds of actually attaining celebrity are not high--but all the same, for most people it looks likelier than a conventional "career" (and those who embark upon it at least hope to make a success this way without committing a crime).
The Consideration of Poor People in F. Scott Fitzgerald's This Side of Paradise
In the final chapter of F. Scott Fitzgerald's rather autobiographical novel This Side of Paradise (1920) the protagonist of the story, Amory Blaine, who started out very privileged but at this point has been rather knocked about by life--by the Great War, by the fickleness of fortune in a capitalist society, by much else--he finds himself confronting social realities. "Never before in his life had Amory considered poor people," Fitzgerald tells us, but Amory was poor now, and "the numerous unpleasant aspects of city life without money occurred to him in threatening procession." He thinks of the subway ride--its "ghastly, stinking crush" with its "squalid phantasmagoria of breath, and old cloth on human bodies and the smells of the food men ate," amid which were "the car cards thrusting themselves out at one," the people who might be "leaning on you," the indignities and worse involved in the little selfishnesses toward which it pressed the riders ("the man deciding not to give his seat to a woman, hating her for it; the woman hating him for not doing it"). Blaine "pictured," too, "the rooms where these people lived," with their cheap and "blistered" wallpaper, and "tin bathtubs and gloomy hallways and verdureless, unnamable spaces in back of the buildings," while "even love dressed as seduction--a sordid murder around the corner, illicit motherhood in the flat above" and made of "birth and marriage and death . . . loathsome, secret things," as indeed everything seemed loathsome, not least the shame people felt at being "tired and poor," and the disgust that others who were tired and poor felt when they saw it in others. Such lives impressed Amory as "dirtier than any battle-field he had seen" as a veteran of the Great War, and "harder to contemplate than any actual hardship moulded of mire and sweat and danger."
Contrasting it with the stories of O. Henry it seemed to him that no, there was no romance or beauty in it, no matter what some said, just "coarseness, physical filth, and stupidity," and if his first reaction to it all was hatred for poor people, ultimately he found himself hating the System, though with what consequence we never see. The novel, after all, was about the disillusioning of a youth who "had grown up to a thousand books, a thousand lies" that made of him a "romantic egotist"--while now the egotist became a "personage," and it is there that the tale ends.
Contrasting it with the stories of O. Henry it seemed to him that no, there was no romance or beauty in it, no matter what some said, just "coarseness, physical filth, and stupidity," and if his first reaction to it all was hatred for poor people, ultimately he found himself hating the System, though with what consequence we never see. The novel, after all, was about the disillusioning of a youth who "had grown up to a thousand books, a thousand lies" that made of him a "romantic egotist"--while now the egotist became a "personage," and it is there that the tale ends.
Involuntary Celibacy in F. Scott Fitzgerald's This Side of Paradise
In the course of reading F. Scott Fitzgerald's This Side of Paradise I cannot say that the first nine chapters of the book made very much impression on me--but it all came together for me in the tenth, when we see what it all led up to, the disillusionment of a once romantic youth facing reality in a way he had never done before, even amid the horrors of the Western Front. It all comes to a head when he finds himself taking a long drive with the father of a friend of his from Princeton who, unlike Amory, did not come back from the killing fields of World War I.
In the course of that dialogue Amory declares that "I'm sick of a system where the richest man gets the most beautiful girl if he wants her," all as working men are "condemned either to celibacy or a furtive indulgence" for the larger part of their youth "to give some man's son an automobile."
It is a striking statement, certainly from the vantage point of a century on in which the terms of political discourse have changed so profoundly. These days what passes for the left (as with the status politics-defined pseudo-liberals) chastises such young men as Amory spoke of for feeling frustrated, for daring to speak of an inequality of chances in this area of life, even for thinking of such things at all. Meanwhile some on the right profess sympathy for their frustration--but tell them the causes are anything and everything but the socioeconomic inequalities of "the system," the defense of the inequalities of which, after all, have been the raison d'etre of the right from the start (with the same, frankly, going for what most Americans are prone to call "left").
Naturally I wonder what people make of the passage these days when they read it. But then that's just it--people don't read much these days, do they? And of those who do read, few are likely to read a book like this one all the way down to the end with the kind of alertness that would have them noticing the passage, and thinking about what it has to say.
In the course of that dialogue Amory declares that "I'm sick of a system where the richest man gets the most beautiful girl if he wants her," all as working men are "condemned either to celibacy or a furtive indulgence" for the larger part of their youth "to give some man's son an automobile."
It is a striking statement, certainly from the vantage point of a century on in which the terms of political discourse have changed so profoundly. These days what passes for the left (as with the status politics-defined pseudo-liberals) chastises such young men as Amory spoke of for feeling frustrated, for daring to speak of an inequality of chances in this area of life, even for thinking of such things at all. Meanwhile some on the right profess sympathy for their frustration--but tell them the causes are anything and everything but the socioeconomic inequalities of "the system," the defense of the inequalities of which, after all, have been the raison d'etre of the right from the start (with the same, frankly, going for what most Americans are prone to call "left").
Naturally I wonder what people make of the passage these days when they read it. But then that's just it--people don't read much these days, do they? And of those who do read, few are likely to read a book like this one all the way down to the end with the kind of alertness that would have them noticing the passage, and thinking about what it has to say.
The Saying That "Art is Never Finished, Only Abandoned" and the Agonies of the Self-Published Writer
Considering the artist's challenge of walking away from a project some have an easier time than others. This is partly a matter of temperament, but partly also circumstances.
Those who have been allowed to feel themselves genuine artists who have done worthy work in the past and thus given grounds to think that they at least can do so again probably have an easier time than those who, like Kilgore Trout, have never been allowed to think of themselves as artists.
Those who have support from those others, and don't have to rely so fully on their own judgment--as people only do when they have been allowed to think of themselves as artists--probably have an easier time than those who don't.
And those who have someone to take a work off their hands--as people only do when they have been allowed to think of themselves as artists--have especially valuable assistance here. The thing is off their hands--and even if they were tempted to go back and go on working on it the "abandoned" work has already been carried off, giving them that much more inducement to look ahead rather than back.
By contrast the self-published writer tends to be without all that. They are often not allowed to think of themselves as genuine artists, and unsure whether their work has been worthy. They often have no support from others. And what they produced remains on their hands, even after they have put it before the public. Their manuscript with the self-publishing service they used is just one login away--all as the temptation to go back and tinker or more is enormous.
Consider it yet another of the miseries of their lot.
Those who have been allowed to feel themselves genuine artists who have done worthy work in the past and thus given grounds to think that they at least can do so again probably have an easier time than those who, like Kilgore Trout, have never been allowed to think of themselves as artists.
Those who have support from those others, and don't have to rely so fully on their own judgment--as people only do when they have been allowed to think of themselves as artists--probably have an easier time than those who don't.
And those who have someone to take a work off their hands--as people only do when they have been allowed to think of themselves as artists--have especially valuable assistance here. The thing is off their hands--and even if they were tempted to go back and go on working on it the "abandoned" work has already been carried off, giving them that much more inducement to look ahead rather than back.
By contrast the self-published writer tends to be without all that. They are often not allowed to think of themselves as genuine artists, and unsure whether their work has been worthy. They often have no support from others. And what they produced remains on their hands, even after they have put it before the public. Their manuscript with the self-publishing service they used is just one login away--all as the temptation to go back and tinker or more is enormous.
Consider it yet another of the miseries of their lot.
"Art is Never Finished, Only Abandoned": A Few Thoughts
It is reputedly an old saying (the kind attributed on dubious evidence to a great many famous figures) that art is never finished, only abandoned--with this, I think, sayable of just about any comparable endeavor. One could always do more.
Of course, it is possible that the time really had arrived to walk away, that the artist doing more would just ruin what they had already accomplished. But one can never be really sure of that, anyone who really cares about what they are doing has some faculty for self-criticism--and often, some element of perfectionism in their makeup--all as they endlessly judge the Platonic ideal in their mind of what they set out to create and what they have realized in material reality and find the latter wanting.
There is, too, the sense of exhaustion that sets in after being deeply involved in something for a long stretch. "Am I thinking of walking away because it's really done," they wonder, "or am I just tired?"
And of course, tired of it--tired of what began as a toy and a plaything and became a monster (as Winston Churchill had it).
As if all that were not enough they live in a society with a brutalizing default mode, which assuming that people are all lazy and stupid endlessly exhorts them to "More, more, more!" rather than encouraging them to think good and hard about when to say "Enough!" The fact that there are always people ready to pounce vindictively on any failing, imagined as well as real, does not help, the bad reviews in which the courtiers and claqueurs of the media world display such delight in tearing apart some hapless authorized victim taking a far greater toll than those laughing along realize, not least by exacerbating every insecurity, every source of that self-doubt which so easily becomes crippling for an artist.
The result is that walking away is not such an easy thing as some imagine it to be--and the artist having a very hard time letting go, all as, I think, much of this can be said of any comparable endeavor.
Of course, it is possible that the time really had arrived to walk away, that the artist doing more would just ruin what they had already accomplished. But one can never be really sure of that, anyone who really cares about what they are doing has some faculty for self-criticism--and often, some element of perfectionism in their makeup--all as they endlessly judge the Platonic ideal in their mind of what they set out to create and what they have realized in material reality and find the latter wanting.
There is, too, the sense of exhaustion that sets in after being deeply involved in something for a long stretch. "Am I thinking of walking away because it's really done," they wonder, "or am I just tired?"
And of course, tired of it--tired of what began as a toy and a plaything and became a monster (as Winston Churchill had it).
As if all that were not enough they live in a society with a brutalizing default mode, which assuming that people are all lazy and stupid endlessly exhorts them to "More, more, more!" rather than encouraging them to think good and hard about when to say "Enough!" The fact that there are always people ready to pounce vindictively on any failing, imagined as well as real, does not help, the bad reviews in which the courtiers and claqueurs of the media world display such delight in tearing apart some hapless authorized victim taking a far greater toll than those laughing along realize, not least by exacerbating every insecurity, every source of that self-doubt which so easily becomes crippling for an artist.
The result is that walking away is not such an easy thing as some imagine it to be--and the artist having a very hard time letting go, all as, I think, much of this can be said of any comparable endeavor.
"Speaking Truth to Power": Reflections on a Phrase
The phrase "speaking truth to power" has long seemed to me one of those phrases that, like a good deal else in contemporary language, gives away the reality behind society's democratic pretenses--and indeed, shows how comfortable even ostensible progressives are with that very un-democratic way of thinking that prevails. In a democratic society, after all, power rests with the public--but the phrase "speaking truth to power" always denotes speaking truth to a power elite of the kind that those democratic pretenses say does not exist, while the speakers--journalists, for example--are cast in a particular relation to that elite, as their courtiers. Enjoined to "speak truth to power" it seems that they are being told not to act as something other than courtiers, but to be the good courtier who tells the potentate what they need to hear, however unpleasant the listener may find it, rather than what will simply advance them personally.
Surely those who purport to be progressives should set their sets a little higher than that for their media.
Surely those who purport to be progressives should set their sets a little higher than that for their media.
Form, Content--and Politics
As Upton Sinclair observes in Mammonart, "all art is propaganda." However, he also observes that there is an "Art of Beauty" and an "Art of Power," the former stressing form, the latter stressing content.
Why is that? If, as Sinclair says, all art is propaganda, why should not both lay equal stress on content over form?
For Sinclair the answer lies in who is producing the art. As he remarks, "[t]he Art of Beauty is produced by ruling classes when they are established and safe, and wish to be entertained," for it is an art of "pleasure in things as they actually exist," while the advanced technique involved in it shows that "the leisure-class artist has time to study technique, and knows what he wants to do."
By contrast those who are not established and safe and contented with things as they are, the "rising class" most obviously, when it has "risen" high enough to have its art, is more concerned with what it has to say rather than how, which is a big enough task with the creative process, reflecting the way in which that class is still thinking things out, "crude and instinctive, full of surging, half-expressed and half-realized emotion," and the artist, at any rate, unlikely to be leading the cushy life of the rich lord's well-cared-for favorite.
Once again, Sinclair seems to get a lot right with this explanation, but I still do not think he quite exhausts the issue. It also seems to me that the propagandist for those in power have an additional advantage connected with the fact that the message is clearer to them than for those struggling against the order of things, namely that it is clearer not just to the artist, but to their intended audience as well. The message is the same one that audience has been bombarded with all its life, and which that audience at least pretends to accept. One can be more creative with form when the audience already knows the substance of what you are going to say. Indeed, they may have to be so if they are to have any effect at all, because even an audience that accepts the message may have been subject to it so much for so long as to be desensitized to presentation of the idea as such. Subtlety can work, a hint will do when people know well what is being hinted at, and if they make it pleasing everyone will be impressed (all as, again, there is that premium on entertaining the comfortable).
By contrast those presenting a newer or at least less familiar or less worn-out idea face an audience which may not know the idea at all, and with which they will have to emphasize content to be understood at all--the more in as the artist struggling to be clear in their own mind about what they are saying, and beyond presenting the message, explain it, justify it, rather than repeat what is already accepted, so that subtleties are less likely to be plausible, even if they are practicable. Indeed, rather than a desensitized audience they have more occasion to worry about the intensity of the audience's reaction to the content itself, whether it might not bring on them persecution.
Turning from the artist to the art critics, who by and large are creatures of the established, it seems natural that for them the Art of Beauty sets the standard--such that they exalt form above content--with this also convenient in a rather cynical political way. If the Art of Beauty sets the standard, then it is Establishment Art which is worthy--whereas the Art of those challenging the Establishment can be dismissed as poor art, or not even art at all (as at least one critic who fought this battle in the literary arena in the twentieth century had it, journalism rather than literature), inducing those respectful of such critical opinion to ignore them or join in their denigration. Meanwhile, to the extent that those standards induce those for whom the Art of Power is the natural course to use the techniques of the Art of Beauty, that critical standard induces them to be a lot less effective in their propagandizing they might be, forgetting what they are trying to say as they worry about how to say it, and when they say anything at all saying it in such a way that no one cares what they were saying. Indeed, the artist in question may end up adapting their content to the forms they feel pressed to use--as E.L. Doctorow and Bill Moyers had it in their interview, painting in miniatures with very small strokes, rather than addressing "the big story" that is arguably the greatest and most consequential of the artist's concerns.
For those who desire that they not get the Message out there at all, this is the ultimate victory.
Why is that? If, as Sinclair says, all art is propaganda, why should not both lay equal stress on content over form?
For Sinclair the answer lies in who is producing the art. As he remarks, "[t]he Art of Beauty is produced by ruling classes when they are established and safe, and wish to be entertained," for it is an art of "pleasure in things as they actually exist," while the advanced technique involved in it shows that "the leisure-class artist has time to study technique, and knows what he wants to do."
By contrast those who are not established and safe and contented with things as they are, the "rising class" most obviously, when it has "risen" high enough to have its art, is more concerned with what it has to say rather than how, which is a big enough task with the creative process, reflecting the way in which that class is still thinking things out, "crude and instinctive, full of surging, half-expressed and half-realized emotion," and the artist, at any rate, unlikely to be leading the cushy life of the rich lord's well-cared-for favorite.
Once again, Sinclair seems to get a lot right with this explanation, but I still do not think he quite exhausts the issue. It also seems to me that the propagandist for those in power have an additional advantage connected with the fact that the message is clearer to them than for those struggling against the order of things, namely that it is clearer not just to the artist, but to their intended audience as well. The message is the same one that audience has been bombarded with all its life, and which that audience at least pretends to accept. One can be more creative with form when the audience already knows the substance of what you are going to say. Indeed, they may have to be so if they are to have any effect at all, because even an audience that accepts the message may have been subject to it so much for so long as to be desensitized to presentation of the idea as such. Subtlety can work, a hint will do when people know well what is being hinted at, and if they make it pleasing everyone will be impressed (all as, again, there is that premium on entertaining the comfortable).
By contrast those presenting a newer or at least less familiar or less worn-out idea face an audience which may not know the idea at all, and with which they will have to emphasize content to be understood at all--the more in as the artist struggling to be clear in their own mind about what they are saying, and beyond presenting the message, explain it, justify it, rather than repeat what is already accepted, so that subtleties are less likely to be plausible, even if they are practicable. Indeed, rather than a desensitized audience they have more occasion to worry about the intensity of the audience's reaction to the content itself, whether it might not bring on them persecution.
Turning from the artist to the art critics, who by and large are creatures of the established, it seems natural that for them the Art of Beauty sets the standard--such that they exalt form above content--with this also convenient in a rather cynical political way. If the Art of Beauty sets the standard, then it is Establishment Art which is worthy--whereas the Art of those challenging the Establishment can be dismissed as poor art, or not even art at all (as at least one critic who fought this battle in the literary arena in the twentieth century had it, journalism rather than literature), inducing those respectful of such critical opinion to ignore them or join in their denigration. Meanwhile, to the extent that those standards induce those for whom the Art of Power is the natural course to use the techniques of the Art of Beauty, that critical standard induces them to be a lot less effective in their propagandizing they might be, forgetting what they are trying to say as they worry about how to say it, and when they say anything at all saying it in such a way that no one cares what they were saying. Indeed, the artist in question may end up adapting their content to the forms they feel pressed to use--as E.L. Doctorow and Bill Moyers had it in their interview, painting in miniatures with very small strokes, rather than addressing "the big story" that is arguably the greatest and most consequential of the artist's concerns.
For those who desire that they not get the Message out there at all, this is the ultimate victory.
"Show, Don't Tell" and the Triumph of the Art of Beauty Over the Art of Power
Looking back at the birth of the modern novel in Western literature as discussed by Ian Watt it seems to me that one can see this distinctly "bourgeois" form passing over from an Art of Power to an Art of Beauty. Distinguished by the plainness and directness of its writing in the eighteenth century when the bourgeoisie was a rising class--consider, for instance, the writing of a Daniel Defoe--in the nineteenth century, when the bourgeoisie was established and safe and conservative one started to see the preoccupation with "style" in the ascendant, as reflected in that banality of the ill-trained and unimaginative writing instructor, "Show, don't tell." As James Wood (who sees the career of Gustave Flaubert as a watershed for the ascent of style) explained, "[s]tyle" turned fiction into "a vessel defined by what it could not hold"--all as reputable opinion required the writer to present their work within that vessel, or not present it as literature at all.
E.L. Doctorow's Talk With Bill Moyers: Some Thoughts
E.L. Doctorow is one author of whom I have only read a little over the years. (I did pick up Ragtime, long ago, and while it had its interest in its use of historical figures it did not seem to me to add up to very much.) Still, I did find some interest in Doctorow's remarks during his interview by journalist Bill Moyers back in 1988, because of the ways in which he broke with the tendency prevailing in literature and "respectable" intellectual life, rather than the ways in which he has been representative of it.
In that interview, at least, it was Doctorow's view that contemporary writers had become "Miniaturists," writing small stories about small things and ignoring "the big story"--"who we are, what we're trying to be, what our fate is, where we will stand in the moral universe when these things are reckoned." He also drew a comparison between the situation of the 1980s and that of the interwar period, when writers (he named Dreiser and Hemingway as examples) " whether they were on the Right or the Left . . . Marxists . . . [or] southern Agrarians . . . whether they believed in the past or the future," all seemed to be " vitally connected to [a] crisis which everyone recognized" as the crisis of the time, whereas "our crisis today" (which in America he thought a crisis of democracy) "is something that we recognize as writers or that we have any particular passion for." In explaining that situation he stressed what seemed to him a declining tolerance of political criticism in America (except when it was of other countries, especially those on the official Enemies List), and the fatuousness of the standard behind which proponents of the view hid that treated Dissent--the kind that as his interlocutor Bill Moyers put it "challenge[s] the underlying belief system of the rulers," what Doctorow called their "mythology"--as having no place in art, or anywhere else, such that anyone who does question it "is going to find himself in a very uncomfortable position," with "orthodox intellectuals . . . defending the prevailing myths" eagerly playing their part in that.
Of course, Doctorow was less than perfectly consistent in challenging those orthodoxies himself, expressing a characteristically centrist suspicion of "ideology" and pluralistic resistance to "truth claims" (in his talk of the "democratic mind"), and also a characteristically centrist, psychologism-touched pessimism about people (citing Wilhelm Reich's remark about "the average man's mind [being] structured for fascism"). Indeed, Doctorow shows himself a horseshoe theorist, speaking of Fascism and Communism as equivalents at one point as sources of "violence and evil." All this certainly carried over to his view of fiction. (The writer who "knows what's right and . . . wrong . . . good and . . . bad . . . is going to write worthless stuff" he declares, seeming to all but regard confusion and muddle as an artistic necessity!)
Still, the extent to which he did raise the matter of the evasions of authors and the shrinking space for dissent is undeniable, with something of this combination of views reflected in his stance toward the Cold War. He did not reject the "orthodox" view of the Cold War as necessary opposition to a threatening Communism, but he also did not hesitate to see the Cold War as having played a pernicious part in it, as having "cut into our democratic sense of ourself," citing the security state with its militarism, its "secrecy and deception and assassination and all sorts of un-American things . . . defending democracy by attacking people who ran the world who don't do it the way we want it done."
It seems to me that few of our major writers dared say that much in his time, and still fewer of them since, all as what he saw as troubling in society and in art has only come to dominate it the more completely.
In that interview, at least, it was Doctorow's view that contemporary writers had become "Miniaturists," writing small stories about small things and ignoring "the big story"--"who we are, what we're trying to be, what our fate is, where we will stand in the moral universe when these things are reckoned." He also drew a comparison between the situation of the 1980s and that of the interwar period, when writers (he named Dreiser and Hemingway as examples) " whether they were on the Right or the Left . . . Marxists . . . [or] southern Agrarians . . . whether they believed in the past or the future," all seemed to be " vitally connected to [a] crisis which everyone recognized" as the crisis of the time, whereas "our crisis today" (which in America he thought a crisis of democracy) "is something that we recognize as writers or that we have any particular passion for." In explaining that situation he stressed what seemed to him a declining tolerance of political criticism in America (except when it was of other countries, especially those on the official Enemies List), and the fatuousness of the standard behind which proponents of the view hid that treated Dissent--the kind that as his interlocutor Bill Moyers put it "challenge[s] the underlying belief system of the rulers," what Doctorow called their "mythology"--as having no place in art, or anywhere else, such that anyone who does question it "is going to find himself in a very uncomfortable position," with "orthodox intellectuals . . . defending the prevailing myths" eagerly playing their part in that.
Of course, Doctorow was less than perfectly consistent in challenging those orthodoxies himself, expressing a characteristically centrist suspicion of "ideology" and pluralistic resistance to "truth claims" (in his talk of the "democratic mind"), and also a characteristically centrist, psychologism-touched pessimism about people (citing Wilhelm Reich's remark about "the average man's mind [being] structured for fascism"). Indeed, Doctorow shows himself a horseshoe theorist, speaking of Fascism and Communism as equivalents at one point as sources of "violence and evil." All this certainly carried over to his view of fiction. (The writer who "knows what's right and . . . wrong . . . good and . . . bad . . . is going to write worthless stuff" he declares, seeming to all but regard confusion and muddle as an artistic necessity!)
Still, the extent to which he did raise the matter of the evasions of authors and the shrinking space for dissent is undeniable, with something of this combination of views reflected in his stance toward the Cold War. He did not reject the "orthodox" view of the Cold War as necessary opposition to a threatening Communism, but he also did not hesitate to see the Cold War as having played a pernicious part in it, as having "cut into our democratic sense of ourself," citing the security state with its militarism, its "secrecy and deception and assassination and all sorts of un-American things . . . defending democracy by attacking people who ran the world who don't do it the way we want it done."
It seems to me that few of our major writers dared say that much in his time, and still fewer of them since, all as what he saw as troubling in society and in art has only come to dominate it the more completely.
"Entrepreneurship" and Self-Made Millionairedom in H.G. Wells' Tono-Bungay
Reflecting upon the rise and fall of his uncle's pharmaceutical empire in H.G. Wells' Tono-Bungay (1909) George Ponderovo remarks "the supreme unreason of" the situation which saw his uncle Edward--who "created nothing . . . invented nothing . . . economised nothing," whose businesses never "added any real value to human life at all" and indeed "were unmitigated frauds by any honest standard, the giving of nothing coated in advertisements for money"-- was rewarded by the "community in which we live" "for sitting in a room and scheming and telling it lies" with "a controlling influence in the direction of nearly thirty millions" at his peak (the equivalent of a billionaire in today's terms).
The contrast between the understanding of such a figure in Wells' novel, and the tendency of American literature, is really extraordinary. After all, Wells here satirized not merely any rich man, but that figure so central to the "aspirationalist," Horatio Alger tale-addicted mythology dominating the American cultural, social and political imagination, the self-made rich man. Admittedly American orthodoxy does not demand unqualified admiration for all such persons. It allows that they may have personal failings--their perhaps not always being as gentle with others as they might be, for example. However, it brooks no questioning of the view that they did give something to the community, a lot more than they got in return no matter how many billions they have made out of it, and respect for them as the Atlas bearing up the sky on his shoulders as they can only be because they are "smarter" and more "hard-working" than everyone else (this means you), you, geniuses all, all as their fortunes are the glory of the social model which permits them to exist, while even excusing their failings as a necessary part of the package, their nastiest behavior "necessary" for "getting things done" given the worthlessness of the inferior human material with which the best have to work (and once again this means you). Granted, every now and then some figure comes along that even the most strident champion of this view cannot deny proved to be a fraud rather than some great creator of value--but they regard such as a regrettable but unavoidable, temporary, not very important error inevitably corrected by the Market on which they prefer not to linger, regarding it as unseemly, even calumnious to society's worthiest strata to give too much thought to the Ken Lays, the Sam Bankman-Frieds, the Elizabeth Holmeses and the rest as they ceaselessly sing tech billionaires they assume to be "the real deal."
In George's telling, however, the Edward Ponderovos are not a bug but a feature of the system, and indeed fundamentally characteristic of the "irrational muddle of a community" in which the Ponderovos lived, with its social system out of date and, in the very same perversity that rewards such frauds, stifling of anything that would bring real progress.
All that being the case it seems little surprise that Wells' book is little read in our times--and indeed, that Mark Schorer, doing his bit to persuade the student of literature that Wells is not worth their time, singled out Tono-Bungay for abuse in his landmark essay "Technique and Discovery," not incidentally a significant moment in the cultural Cold War in which Schorer was such an enthusiastic soldier. (After all, just ask Richard Lingeman who it was that destroyed Sinclair Lewis, and why.)
The contrast between the understanding of such a figure in Wells' novel, and the tendency of American literature, is really extraordinary. After all, Wells here satirized not merely any rich man, but that figure so central to the "aspirationalist," Horatio Alger tale-addicted mythology dominating the American cultural, social and political imagination, the self-made rich man. Admittedly American orthodoxy does not demand unqualified admiration for all such persons. It allows that they may have personal failings--their perhaps not always being as gentle with others as they might be, for example. However, it brooks no questioning of the view that they did give something to the community, a lot more than they got in return no matter how many billions they have made out of it, and respect for them as the Atlas bearing up the sky on his shoulders as they can only be because they are "smarter" and more "hard-working" than everyone else (this means you), you, geniuses all, all as their fortunes are the glory of the social model which permits them to exist, while even excusing their failings as a necessary part of the package, their nastiest behavior "necessary" for "getting things done" given the worthlessness of the inferior human material with which the best have to work (and once again this means you). Granted, every now and then some figure comes along that even the most strident champion of this view cannot deny proved to be a fraud rather than some great creator of value--but they regard such as a regrettable but unavoidable, temporary, not very important error inevitably corrected by the Market on which they prefer not to linger, regarding it as unseemly, even calumnious to society's worthiest strata to give too much thought to the Ken Lays, the Sam Bankman-Frieds, the Elizabeth Holmeses and the rest as they ceaselessly sing tech billionaires they assume to be "the real deal."
In George's telling, however, the Edward Ponderovos are not a bug but a feature of the system, and indeed fundamentally characteristic of the "irrational muddle of a community" in which the Ponderovos lived, with its social system out of date and, in the very same perversity that rewards such frauds, stifling of anything that would bring real progress.
All that being the case it seems little surprise that Wells' book is little read in our times--and indeed, that Mark Schorer, doing his bit to persuade the student of literature that Wells is not worth their time, singled out Tono-Bungay for abuse in his landmark essay "Technique and Discovery," not incidentally a significant moment in the cultural Cold War in which Schorer was such an enthusiastic soldier. (After all, just ask Richard Lingeman who it was that destroyed Sinclair Lewis, and why.)
"Why Do So Many People Want to be Writers?"
The answer to that question is that "so many people" are convinced that they have something to say, and find satisfaction in saying it. The human artistic impulse, for which the Market provides such wretchedly little outlet, should not be underrated. Ever.
Still, as Upton Sinclair observes in Money Writes!, it is also the case that being a writer, or at least one of the few who can be said to have really "made it" as a writer, looks like a very agreeable way of getting a paycheck compared to most of the jobs the world offers--an alternative to a life of quiet desperation. That the stodgy bourgeois sneers at such desires only affirms the fact--the more in as a stodgy bourgeois highly approves a life of quiet desperation for the many.
Still, as Upton Sinclair observes in Money Writes!, it is also the case that being a writer, or at least one of the few who can be said to have really "made it" as a writer, looks like a very agreeable way of getting a paycheck compared to most of the jobs the world offers--an alternative to a life of quiet desperation. That the stodgy bourgeois sneers at such desires only affirms the fact--the more in as a stodgy bourgeois highly approves a life of quiet desperation for the many.
How Film Viewers Respond to Tracy Flick
Alexander Payne's Election hit theaters a quarter of a century ago, and, I think, has lingered a bit more in pop cultural consciousness than most of its contemporaries. (Thus did A.O. Scott devote a piece to it a few years back, which is characteristically Scott and therefore not worth reading, but all the same, testimony to its presence.)
Particularly important in this has been the character of Tracy Flick, and the complicated feelings she seems to provoke in viewers. On paper she would seem to possess many of the qualities that people are supposed to admire--a measure of intelligence, a capacity for hard work, a readiness to learn, the ambition to improve her lot. However, they also find a lot about her off-putting, with this going beyond the aggressiveness of her demeanor, or her undeniable moral lapse in the course of the election.
My sense of this has always been that they are reacting against Tracy's being a raging ultra-conformist, a True Believer in the System and its aspirationalist propaganda ever pushing to heed its injunction to "Get ahead," who really thinks that those who have enjoyed "Success" have "The Secret," and looks down on those who have not been "Successful" (like her social studies teacher) with contempt. If someone deep down dislikes the whole success culture, with its insecurity and inequality and exploitativeness and brutality and pieties then they can hardly take a kind view of the Tracy Flicks of the world--and if in this society this is something few dare to express, perhaps something that few even know how to express because its expression violates American society's stronger taboo, the sentiment still comes out in their reactions to a figure like Flick.
Which, of course, is exactly the kind of idea that would never occur to a film "critic" such as Mr. Scott.
Particularly important in this has been the character of Tracy Flick, and the complicated feelings she seems to provoke in viewers. On paper she would seem to possess many of the qualities that people are supposed to admire--a measure of intelligence, a capacity for hard work, a readiness to learn, the ambition to improve her lot. However, they also find a lot about her off-putting, with this going beyond the aggressiveness of her demeanor, or her undeniable moral lapse in the course of the election.
My sense of this has always been that they are reacting against Tracy's being a raging ultra-conformist, a True Believer in the System and its aspirationalist propaganda ever pushing to heed its injunction to "Get ahead," who really thinks that those who have enjoyed "Success" have "The Secret," and looks down on those who have not been "Successful" (like her social studies teacher) with contempt. If someone deep down dislikes the whole success culture, with its insecurity and inequality and exploitativeness and brutality and pieties then they can hardly take a kind view of the Tracy Flicks of the world--and if in this society this is something few dare to express, perhaps something that few even know how to express because its expression violates American society's stronger taboo, the sentiment still comes out in their reactions to a figure like Flick.
Which, of course, is exactly the kind of idea that would never occur to a film "critic" such as Mr. Scott.
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