Of art and society

That which we find words for is something already dead in our hearts. There is always a kind of contempt in the act of speaking.

Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

Nowadays, one cannot write like Shakespeare. There is no reason why one cannot write as well as Shakespeare (with immense luck and super-Herculean effort), but to write in a style remotely comparable to Shakespeare’s would be considered hopelessly old-fashioned. In itself, there is nothing odd in this, for the least we expect of artists is that they create something new.

But let us think about this a little more. When we say, “to write in a style remotely comparable to Shakespeare’s”, what do we mean? This is by no means self-evident. We do not mean using words that are now antiquated, such as “thee” and “thou”, or including fools in our tragedies, or even having characters that utter soliloquies. We don’t even mean those things that are completely unique to Shakespeare, such as his particular mode of characterisation. We do mean, for instance, his use of blank verse. Blank verse is not unique to the bard, of course, but if it were employed in a modern play, this use would very likely be self-conscious, almost a unique selling point, and not something arising out of artistic necessity. Some modern plays do use verse, such as Michael Frayn’s Afterlife, but these are rare exceptions and are seen as oddities. The point here is that a culture that values verse so highly that it is commonplace to use it in plays is one whose values are simply different to one which does not.

The fact that Shakespeare’s style, and Shakespeare in general, was more acceptable in his time than ours[1] suggests a difference in the characteristics of the age. It is partly that certain ideas naturally occurred to Shakespeare in the first place that may not have otherwise occurred to him, but also it is that the audiences and theatre managers and queens and kings of his day were more open to those sorts of ideas.

We often assume that great works of art can appear in any age. On further reflection, however, this is far from a safe assumption. Take the Rococo. Not only did it not produce a painting of comparable quality to the best of the High Renaissance, but I would argue that it could not do so. Sure, this seems an impossible counterfactual, but the deeper point is that some periods may just have more of the cultural factors that are conducive to great art than others. The period of the medieval mystery and morality plays was dramatically poor in comparison with the period of the great Attic drama. The plays of the former period had very specific religious and moral aims, and these were necessarily confining. The culture of Athens in the latter period also had considerably more confidence in itself—it was not in the shadows of great overwhelming ideas of the past, it was an originator of those great ideas.

In any age, the artist is in a curious position, and his art’s development is comparable to the development of a person in general; his cultural inheritance is comparable to genetic inheritance. Each new generation feels the need to define itself, and partly it must do so in opposition to its parents; but it cannot separate itself entirely from its parents. Maturity seems to be, in part, a balance between the impulse to individuation and the need to belong, and one of the most effective ways to feel this belonging is to consider oneself part of a tradition.

This inseparability from the tradition that precedes the artist is, I think, the heart of the problem. For how are the ideas and sentiments that reach us all from civilization’s dawn substantially different than the genes that reach us from the dawn of man? If genes are unavoidable limiting factors, so that no amount of effort will make me the fastest man in the world, then why are those “cultural genes” not also limiting? You may protest that an individual can simply adopt an idea and that’s that—after all, there will be no biological reaction to it. But this is not true on a societal level: we constantly hear about society not “being ready” for a particular idea or work of art. Beethoven’s Grosse Fuge was largely dismissed by contemporary critics, one of whom called it “incomprehensible, like Chinese”. Nowadays, even if it is still difficult, it is much admired and loved by many classical composers.

“To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric,” said Theodor Adorno in “Cultural criticism and society”, arguing that the same values that produced the Nazis also produced poetry, so that to engage in poetry was to deny its causal link to barbarity. Though he later softened his stance, it is a harsh embodiment of a view generally held, namely that art does not exist in a vacuum, and that it must bear some relation with the time. Indeed, it could not but strike us as odd—worse than odd—for someone to write a Wordsworthian ode to a tulip immediately after the Second World War. If an artist should transcend their experience, they should not avoid it altogether.

But this view has surely been taken to an extreme. One needs only look at contemporary British theatre. “Like our predecessors at the Royal Court in the late 1950s,” writes David Edgar (a playwright) in the New Statesman, “those of us who started out in the 1970s thought theatre’s main business should be presenting new plays about public subjects set in the modern-day world. We’re a lot closer to achieving that ambition now.” Setting aside the almost conspiratorial, world-dominational tone here, what strikes one is the combination of arrogance and vacuity—theatre’s main business! Expansion of the mind and heart be damned, for playwrights must only be concerned with Afghanistan and unemployment.

I mentioned above that movements are in part a genuine rebellion or reaction against what went before, but never a complete overturning, since one needs to feel themselves part of a tradition. This rebellion, as it is a manifestation of the instinct to individuation, very often approximates some real and eternal aspect of human nature. If Romanticism was partly a return to nature and a rebellion against Classicism and pure reason, there is nothing about this that is obviously unique to the 19^th century. That is to say, it was not invented then, and it did not end with the end of Romanticism. To be sure, a conformist of any age will find the ideas of other ages alien, but equally it does not take a genius to have some Romantic element in you now—nor did it take a genius in the millennia before Romanticism.

An artistic movement is only a rediscovery of a suppressed aspect of ourselves, an aspect which was not created by man, nor ended by him. At all times, we have had and will have elements of Classicism, Romanticism, Modernism, Postmodernism— what you will—within us. Movements in art, then, have both the virtue of freeing one aspect of ourselves and the vice of locking away another.

But once a new movement locks away a part of ourselves expressed in the prior movement, is it then locked away forever? My answer to that is not borne of reason, but of pure optimism. If the resurgence of classical ideas in the Renaissance shows us anything, it is that ideas that are thousands of years old are not dead. As they stand, perhaps, nothing much can be added to them. But if one seed of brilliance is taken from them, and this seed is sown in some new way, we will be furnished with something genuinely new—and who can complain of the Renaissance that it wasn’t new at the time?

Truly timeless art captures the human spirit, which is of no time but for all time; truly timeless art will be considered great no matter what the situation of society. Some people criticise Mozart for being too “sugary”. That judgement is a question of taste, and not one to be dismissed out of hand. But the real test of it is if someone can come out of Auschwitz and, when they are ready to experience art again, they can hear Mozart and not think, “this is too sugary” but instead think that its sweetness embodies life and humanity, the very things the Nazis tried to take away from him and did not succeed in taking. It is only a theoretical, top-down understanding of art that could say that poetry has suddenly become barbaric—though it is completely understandable that poets should try to find new forms for the extreme barbarity they had witnessed.

Which brings me back to Nietzsche’s words at the beginning of this essay. Culture at large appears to adopt an apparently paradoxical view of art. On the one hand, we constantly read old novels and poems, listen to old music, and so on, under the correct impression that there is still much to be gained from them—in other words, that they find words for what is not dead in our hearts. Yet we must also think that they express what is dead in our hearts, because we tend to think that what is formally new is most likely to be true, and that adopting elements of an older style, even if done conscientiously and with originality, is stale, traditional, and valueless, that it is mere repetition. Where, then, does this leave the artist who concludes that his age is artistically weak, who sees that the only way forward must be a step backward? This need not be a defeatist position. After all, when Beethoven wrote the Grosse Fuge, “intellectual” forms like fugues were out of fashion. Beethoven did not “just” write a fugue in an academic way. He used it as a stepping stone.