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The Writer and Society: Coincidence of Opposites?
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11535 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
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10 / 1986 |
5,685 Words |
| Author
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Virgil Nemoianu
Virgil Nemoianu is professor of English and comparative
literature at the Catholic University of America. Among his
books are The Taming of Romanticism (Harvard, 1985) and A
Theory of the Secondary (Johns Hopkins, 1989). He and Robert
Royal have just edited a collection of essays, Canons at John
Benjamins (Amsterdam and Philadelphia).
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THE IMITATING ARTIST
We often hear complaints about the scandalous effects of literary and artistic activity in modern society. Such complaints are not new. Plato, as we all remember, put severe limitations on acceptable literary forms and themes and wanted to banish poets from the city in the name of progress toward and maintenance of the good society. For over two centuries the Puritans endeavored to defeat theatrical art in England, and they achieved a measure of success under Cromwell's Commonwealth. The early Christians disfigured ancient Greek statuary, placing the good in opposition to the beautiful. Non-religious literature found only grudging toleration in the Catholic Middle Ages, and Nikilai Gogol suppressed his last work on the advice of an Orthodox priest. Other religions dealt even more harshly with artistic creativity. Even in the liberal heyday of bourgeois society, Flaubert, Baudelairem, Oscar Wilde, and Daniel Defoe all ran afoul of established moral beliefs. The secular totalitarianisms of the French Revolution, of Nazi Germany, of communist Russia or Cuba where much more decisive in their bannings, burnings, and exterminations of inconvenient poetry and poets, artists, and art. In America Robert Penn Warren finds that poetry is "Subversive of the status quo" and expresses social alienation. What do al these cases have in common and in what way are they justified?
The answer to the first half of the question is not difficult to give. Any society and any regime confident of their justness and secure in their sense of the good will find literary and artistic creativity an irritant, even a skandalon. These are activities that do not fit in with human order. They partake of irrationality and randomness; surprise, rejection, and dispersion are part of their very essence. The answer to the second part of the question is not only difficult, but its very formulation is brutally wrenching: Are progress and art actually incompatible? Has art no function and value in human evolution? Is literature always reactionary? Is art barbarous and regressive? The answer to all these questions may be yes.
Although art and artists have often scandalized, the great authors of the twentieth century have usually expressed politically reactionary ideas and have placed themselves on the Right more than once: Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, W.B. Yeats, William Faulkner, Wyndham Lewis, D.H. Lawrence, Evelyn Waugh, Gottfried Benn, Thomas Mann, Paul Cluadel, and Luis Borges. Some preferred to reject the modern world wholesale so that their position is in effect even more radical: Kafka, Beckett, Ionesco, Robinson Jeffers,
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