What is the point of literature in 2010?

[mal4mac]

Living in modern Britain I have absorbed the assumptions of this (very) secular culture: we are here by accident- the end product of 4 billion years of brutal evolution. There is no God, and life is a meaningless affair, without purpose or goal. There are no other, better worlds or realities. This painful, grief-striken little existence is it. We live on a tiny ball of rock in a cold, vast universe which does not know we are here and does not care. When you die you rot and that is it. This is a pretty bleak picture I think you'll agree. So where does art and literature fit into it? Does literature have anything to offer in the way of consolation? Or can it do no more than reconcile us to our fate?

Many things offer consolation - bacon sandwiches, a game of scrabble, a robin at the window... the list goes on ... art and literature are just part of that list, not really any "higher", but they provide a consistent and ongoing pleasure that doesn't make you fatter, require other people, or fly away...

Why should literature reconcile you to your fate? You don't expect that of bacon sandwiches, so why require it of any old novel you might pick up? You might be better reading some stoic philosophy, even if it scores badly as literature, if you want reconciliation to fate. Then again, certain plays of Shakespeare, and many essays of Montaigne, will score highly as "reconcilers to fate" and "literature"!

I ask this because I have been reading a wonderful collection of essays by Jeanette Winterson called 'Art Objects'. She is a contemporary English-British novelist who argues passionately that the true artist is a visionary.

And none so more than Winterson

Winterson is contemptuous both of realism and of the idea that art exists to entertain. If you want no more than realism and entertainment (she argues) then watch TV or films.

Silly argument! Dickens is more entertaining than most TV and films

The artist should inspire, should take us out of ourselves and open our minds to other levels of reality - to other dimensions.

She's starting to sound like a string theorist. What's life like in the 7th dimension?

You can guess the writers she admires: Shakespeare, Dante, Blake, Wordsworth, Eliot's Four Quartets etc etc

Thankfully I have yet to find Shakespeare use the 'new age' speak that you put in Winterson's mouth. Did she actually indulge in such cliches as "take us out of ourselves and open our minds to other levels of reality - to other dimensions." From the quotes you give it appears that such phrasing is indeed hers. Shame - I quite liked "Oranges".

We live in a free society, not a consensus reality. Our satirists (Ian Hislop, Paul Merton...) continuously pour scorn on what our government gets up to. If you don't like the offerings of mass education and the mass media then read another book. The products of all the ages are there freely available for us to read. Winterson protests too much.

What we can touch and feel, see and hear *is* the sum of our reality...both physics and the best philosophy accepts this. (Try reading Kant and the swinging attacks on string theorists by proper physicists.)

Only a very few artists in Victorian England became suspect through their use of narcotics. Winterson's comment that their "relationship to different levels of reality is not authoritative but hallucinatory" is a good point. But Winterson's own relationship to different levels of reality is also not authoritative but hallucinatory.

I don't find the Materialism of Richard Dawkins depressing at all, quite the opposite. It's the guff produced by Winterson that I find depressing.

Of course there's a role for visionary artists like Blake! Dawkins has written in praise of such poets, and bemoans the fact that he can't write like them to produce a visionary account of evolution -- though I think he is overly modest. Dawkins is most certainly a prose artist.

Blake might have been deluded in believing his visions were reality, but that doesn't detract form his visions being great metaphors for the human condition.

Why look for more reality than what you get? Why seek higher dimensions? Aren't four enough? Winterson seems greedy for more spirituality, she might be happier & less batty if she realised that what we have is enough.

I'd love to see Falstaff tackle Winterson... Failing that John Carey does an excellent demolition job on her in "What good are the arts?" Does anyone have a link to these two arguing? I can imagine sparks flying....

http://www.321books.co.uk/reviews/ph...e-the-arts.htm

[MarkBastable]

I don't find the Materialism of Richard Dawkins depressing at all, quite the opposite. It's the guff produced by Winterson that I find depressing.

I'll go along with that. She really is a terrible downer.

[mal4mac]

Music to me is a hard one - nothing but pure genius to me can describe how Mozart was able to compose like that - but at the same time, many composers arrived at the work through hard effort rather than "hereditary means".

Don't back away from you hard work argument so quickly! His father had him slogging through his scales at a very early age...

[MANICHAEAN]

As Paulclem points out in his response to Wickes; the initial argument touches on such a diverse range of the many aspects of thinking, that its a bit daunting. But then lets touch upon them.

Realism & Vision:

Camus wrote that "No art can completely reject reality, and only reality with all its warmth and blood, its passion and its outcries. It simply adds something which transfigures reality." Thus one could argue that from the other side, realists must call up their own brand of idealism. Dress themselves, as it were, in a loud coat with pockets rattling with the fools gold of these idealistic illusions. Appearance after all in today's world, providing it is a successful imposture is an important feature of human politics. Change the appearance of things and you are a long way to changing the reality.

The point of literature:

So where does the writer fit in? I cannot help but reflect on George Bernard Shaw who appears to have translated the facts of his life into a spiritual autobiography. His thesis and antithesis of fact and fantasy became a formula for absorbing his own needs into a universal pattern. Creative evolution had the potential for replacing his lonely sense of being a sojourner on this planet rather than a native of it. It gave his talent a use and his writing career a sense of purpose. This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; the being thoroughly worn out before you end up in "the nursing home as a footnote to a footnote" as expressed by Jozanny. Live in contact with dreams and you will get something of their charm: live in contact with facts and you will get something of their brutality.

Genius or Application:

The jury is still out. Take your choice:
"Genius does what it must, and talent does what it can"
"Unless one is a genius, it is best to aim at being intelligible."
"If a man is going to behave like a bast--d, he'd better be a genius."
Interpretation of what is genius and what is talent is not an absolute value but must be evaluated. The effusions of the interpretation of art today poisens our sensibilities. In a culture whose already classic dilemma is the hypertrophy of the intellect at the expense of sensuality. interpretation is sometimes the revenge of the intellect upon art.

[Kevets]

Give Alan Watts' The Book a read. He presents a less dreary view of existence. In sum, art and audience are two sides of the same thing.

[mortalterror]

Of course it can be suggested that some kind of genius helps - or at least being smarter than the rest - but even so, I don't think having a 200 IQ is the right formula, much less do I think being some sort of character archetype, or "visionary" is the formula. When somebody finds said formula, let me know, as of now, quite simply I think artists come about through hard work and circumstance - that's about it.

Malcolm Gladwell has some interesting insights into this subject. For instance, he claims that an IQ beyond about 120 is superfluous, and that the brain is molded by thousands of hours of practice. But what implants that drive to practice so much beyond the normal? I can't see Leopardi or Pope being anything other than alienated hunchbacks. Again, I can't envision a world where a monumental work like The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire could be produced by anyone other than an Edward Gibbon. His example, a life of failed romance and personal deformity, is a devout lesson to all men what can be accomplished if you'd just re-channel the effort that goes into chasing tail. Why'd they create such impressive bodies of work? Because they had to. They didn't have anything else going for them and they wanted to justify their existence.

[prendrelemick]

I think the Genius or Application debate is a red herring here. Winterson said artists were Visionaries rather than Geniuses, they are not quite the same thing.

[mortalterror]

I think the Genius or Application debate is a red herring here. Winterson said artists were Visionaries rather than Geniuses, they are not quite the same thing.

If "oranges are not the only fruit," as Winterson suggests, then surely there are also forms of visionary besides the ecstatic. That Blake/Rumi mystical poet channeling the voice of god kind of stuff smacks of the Orphic mystery religions, and the sort of climate that Christianity itself grew out of. Why turn from one excited, babbling, pseudo-enlightened guru to another? We would do well to recognize that there are other types of sublimity, other categories of heightened thought, other poetic traditions available to us.

[prendrelemick]

I think you may be a little quick to link the word "visionary" with the Orphic and the mystical. It can simply mean, " having or marked by foresight and imagination." I don't pretend to know Ms Winterson's mind, but I think that is the more likely context here.

[Jeremydav]

I think literature, if anything, serves to remind us that we are all members of the human race. Learning your own culture through literature and studying other cultures similarly can root one in their literary tradition, which in my opinion is a stronger bond than any type of nationhood. Whether we all die and rot or float around mystically in the clouds, literature is an important analysis and representation of us as we live.

[JBI]

If "oranges are not the only fruit," as Winterson suggests, then surely there are also forms of visionary besides the ecstatic. That Blake/Rumi mystical poet channeling the voice of god kind of stuff smacks of the Orphic mystery religions, and the sort of climate that Christianity itself grew out of. Why turn from one excited, babbling, pseudo-enlightened guru to another? We would do well to recognize that there are other types of sublimity, other categories of heightened thought, other poetic traditions available to us.

No, it is more just a Western fixation that comes from said Orphic tradition - as mentioned earlier, Du Fu, for instance, is writing out of a failed life and an education system molded on poetry. Li Bai would seem the visionary poet, but even he seems more influenced by wine than anything else.

When we think visionary, we almost by necessity gesture to Greek conceptions of poetic identity, and artistic identity. Beowulf though is not less artistic for being composed as a collective effort and being anonymous. We like to think of Homer as the blind visionary, or Blake as a seer, by really, when you get to manuscript, you see interesting things - namely that for all the vision, there are quite a few edits and rewrites going on in the background.

As for IQ over 120 being superfluous, well, I never got my IQ tested and never will - I think I am better off not knowing, as I don't support such testing as determinant of anything. But the idea would make sense - how much of art is determined by one's capacity for solving geometric problems, for instance, or storing knowledge - we like to think of art as the conveying of feeling, but even that is too limited and contradicted a view.

Art itself to me just seems something that happens - as I put before, it just fills what Benjamin deemed "cold, empty time" that is, there is no longer a widely held belief that the world is going to end any second with the coming of Jesus Christ or whomever, so people just need something to create a sort of identity around. Benedict Anderson would argue on literature as creating a national identity, to create shared communities and identities amongst people who don't actually know each other - to me that would make sense. What is implied with everybody reading Dickens at the same time every week when the new installment came out in periodical is something of a feeling of meaning and purpose in a world where, on a philosophical level, life is meaningless, and everything is weighed equally (life is as equal as death, good as equal as bad, everything is just existence without actual purpose).

[stlukesguild]

As I have stated before - hard work is the backbone - most artists are somewhat hard working - Shelley for instance used to read for hours upon hours each day, Dante too was very well read, and is very informed by what he read, to the point where he cannot be seen if not through his writing. The actual visionary role seems a bit too comfortable to assign.

I don't think any artist would disagree with the premise that hard work is the backbone of art. Certainly I will even agree with the supposition that most artists... at least most artists of any real merit are hard-working. Most artists that I know can work the average person under the table. I'm not questioning the importance of hard work. I am questioning whether the hard work alone is enough to push the artist into the realm of what we deem artistic genius. Certainly, as has been noted, Mozart (and Picasso like him) had the advantage of a father pushing him as a child. But so did all of Bach's children... like their father before them... and while several became talented composers in their own right... especially C.P.E. Bach... none of them came close to Mozart... or the level of their father.

There is also the question as to whether "genius" alone is adequate (or even "genius" combined with hard labor). Certainly some artists are undoubtedly geniuses in nearly any sense of the word. Milton was unquestionably so. Surely Goethe, Dante, Borges and Leonardo no less. But was Cervantes a genius? Certainly Don Quixote is a work of genius, but can we imagine Cervantes fully cognizant of all that was entailed in that work in the same way that we are almost certainly that Milton is fully aware of what he has created?

Gardiner's research on the human brain and multiple intelligences suggest that someone may work incredibly hard toward the goal of artistic creation, and one may even be blessed with a genius of some form or another... but unless this genius is properly aligned, there is no guarantee of artistic brilliance. In other words... one may have the genius for the sort of thought demanded of the literary critic or academic... but one may not have the genius for literary/artistic creativity... no matter how much effort one puts toward this end.

Edward Hirsch wrote a lovely little book upon the mystery of artistic creation and inspiration entitled The Demon and the Angel. Hirsch's book was inspired by essays and lectures of Federico Garcia-Lorca dealing with the concept of what he called the "duende". Garcia-Lorca's concept of the "duende" relates to the concepts of external inspiration be it through the "spirit", the daimon (δαίμων), the muse, God, the subconscious, etc... Yeats, Garcia-Lorca, Blake, Emerson, and endless other artists speak of artistic inspiration as tapping into something external. On the most pedestrian level most artists will speak of being "in the zone"... something akin to the "runner's high" where one can seemingly do no wrong... where ideas come from who knows where. Emerson declares "The one thing which we seek with insatiable desire is to forget ourselves, to be surprised out of our propriety, to lose our sempiternal memory, and to do something without knowing how or why..." Garcia-Lorca admits, "If you ask me why I wrote 'a thousand glass tambourines,' I will tell you that I saw them, in the hands of angels and trees, but I will not be able to say more." Most artists, indeed, are nearly incapable of telling you why and where the most brilliant aspects of their art came from... perhaps because they don't fully comprehend it themselves.

This brings us to the instance in which an artist creates a single work or body of undisputed genius... and then seemingly runs dry. What happens to Wordsworth? Rimbaud? Ralph Ellison? Allen Ginsberg spent much of his adult life in attempting to reach the "duende" that he proclaims inspired Howl through a disordering of the senses ala Rimbaud through sex, drugs, etc... all to no avail. The writer Elizabeth Gilbert speaking at the TED talks proposes an intriguing view of the visionary/mystical/Orphic/Dionysian interpretation of "Genius" as opposed to the common Western ego-centric notion of "genius":

http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/el...on_genius.html

[mortalterror]

The writer Elizabeth Gilbert speaking at the TED talks proposes an intriguing view of the visionary/mystical/Orphic/Dionysian interpretation of "Genius" as opposed to the common Western ego-centric notion of "genius"

By all means, take your cue from the Coyote Ugly chick.

[Lumiere]

I think it's a bit silly to presume that all literature must be visionary. That's only one of hundreds of adjectives that different books might appropriately fall under. God help us if Twilight is visionary. Then again, God help us if Twilight is considered literature. But if it entertains some, then so be it! Some books are merely for entertainment, and that's alright. To each his own. It's entirely different from movies and TV. Reading is a personal experience, and it exercises that wondrous organ known as the imagination. That's what makes people cry out passionately: "The movie wasn't HALF as good as the book!" It's a separate experience all together.

[Jozanny]

Yes, but even popular culture lends itself to apocryphal readings Lumiere, including the poor little rich girl, Rowling. Sometimes I engage in feeling sorry for myself for my congenital condition, so much so that all types of housewives yelled at me in the past, and while I may not have grown out of my self-pity, I have moved past the anxiety and outrage implicit in existentialism. We are here, survived nearly being wiped out in Africa until we emerged out of the bottleneck to rule the globe in less than a 100k--use what we have and shut up already. Literature is one of our creations, provides ways of seeing, methods of escape, delight and distress, but we cannot place demands on it, or any of the arts, beyond what they are.