Discussion → Old School
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The following quote was taken from a letter by the American painter Charles Willson Peale to Thomas Jefferson: "I love the Art of Painting, but the greatest merit of execution on subjects that have not a virtuous tendency, loose [sic] all their value in my estimation." There is something dated about Peale's mixing of virtue and art. Is there any contemporary relevance to his argument?
Here is one of his paintings, a portrait of the freed slave Yarrow Mamout: http://bit.ly/ciNdiO
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This is a fantastic quote (and the painting is really something--I'd never seen it before). In some old-fashioned way, I have sympathy for Peale's stance. The concept of public or civic virtue--which was so important to the writers, artists, and philosophers of the early American republic--only echoes dimly today. We are all formalists, now. Execution of a particularly distinctive vision (David Lynch, Jackson Pollock, Louise Gluck; some random examples) serve to verify aesthetic authenticity and value. I think Peale was using the word virtuous in its Enlightenment meaning: that art should somehow lead the people, the polis, to something higher and nobler. But that thinking was a product of a historical moment, when the fledging nation needed to create an identity, a sense of nationhood that distinguished it from Europe, etc. Is there an equivalent of civic virtue in art and literature today?
Rambling, sorry. I think the question that Edward asks is worth asking, and important, and something we tend to shy away from in our post-postmodern era. I'd love to hear other thoughts on this.
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Edward and Nicholas,
An interesting question for sure.
Regarding a modern need for "virtuous" art (lit, painting, etc.), I believe that all of mankind, regardless of time or space, lives on the cusp of revolution. The only variable is in degrees. This revolution comes everyday on the level of the individual. Styles and philosophies wax and wan from post-modern to a reawakening ok Plato or the Islamic Golden Age.
If art in general and fiction writing in particular is suppose to reflect life and no piece holds a reader unless there is some threat/realization of change, then I would argue that it is important to adopt these notions of virtue in our craft. There is always a price for our characters. Is my goal worth the actions I must take? It doesn't become moralistic, but a simple equation of cause and effect, revolution and failure. We don't require some grandoise historic event for writing to become vituous, just an individual, striving for something/someplace different from where the story began.
Damn, sorry, I rambled too.
Andrew
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Two "old school" virtues that continue to call to me, and that I try to embrace in my own writing are justice (distributive justice) and courage.
Both are sadly lacking on our world, today. They have always gone wanting, I suspect.
Distributive justice, in this sense:
Social goods and social power are unequally (unfairly) distributed. We know this. The call of Justice (which leads to the well being of the polis/the community) requires that social goods and social power (yes, this includes money) be relinqshied & shared by those who have too much in the direction of those who have too little.
This requires courage, the second virtue that calls to me (how meagre is my response, sadly).
Plato, of course, champions Justice in the Republic, but his sense of Justice is absolute not distributive (the ruling elite hoards power, social goods/services and those who possess them are fixed, the image is of the pyramid, with power centralized at the top, and slaves, who were not accorded any social status, at the bottom--though the Athenian deomocract rested on the backs of slave labor; even tragedy, in the classic sense of antiwuity could not happen to a slave, by definition in that world, for they were not regarded as persons).
In short, when shit is worth money the poor won't have assholes.
The serious writer may be called upon--Justice may lay claim to her!--to write about this.
Take heart.
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relinquished
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antiquity
(is accurate typing a virtue?) no, it is a skill (technique)LOL
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I agree, our virtue is as formalists. We're too well innoculated against the idea that a subject is virtuous outside of our treatment of it.
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All excellent points, and as reflective of the current ideals of contemporary society as art in all forms seeks to employ. We go as far as the public demands to serve its needs, then go a bit farther in our own creative drive to rise above and beyond, to explore.
It is only when we use bold colors--whether streaks of paint or edgy language--for its shock value alone that I fail to find virtue as value--or value as virtue--within the art.
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Isn't this a bit like what John Gardner was trying to get at some 30 years ago in his <i>On Moral Fiction</i>?
Been a very long since I read it, but my recollection is that he set up his notion of what "moral" fiction was—fiction should be a vivid and continuous dream, fiction should do this, that, and something else as well—and that which does not do these things was found wanting. By moral, I think he was saying essentially the same thing as Peale was in "virtuous." He was (I think) reacting to post-modernism, or post-post-modernism, or just being a dick. I also think that he was trying to be a taste accountant.
I can't remember all of those that Gardner pissed off, or took to task. Seems to me that there was no correlation between his "moral" and the Moral Majority's "moral," but he was remarkably tone deaf in not making the assumption that he would be read that way.
I don't remember if anyone came to his defense. Some of his former students, perhaps. But he angered many of his contemporaries by declaring their fiction wanting, and therefore "not moral." I remember seeing him and John Barth reading together at the University of Richmond shortly after OMF was published. He had recently remarried, and Barth quipped that he wished Gardner and his wife "no moral friction."
There's sort of a line in the sand drawn in this kind taste accounting. All the stuff that's over here is stuff I like and feel comfortable with, and it's therefore virtuous/moral. It meets some kind of personal litmus test that makes this work worth my time and this work not.
I think that because such things are so hugely subjective, there's a real risk of outing yourself as a Philistine when you go making such declarations. There's also the political to consider in this. (As if this were not what we were talking about.)
The Nazis declared lots of art degenerate when it didn't fall under their notion of virtuous. There was the Piss Christ "controversy" here (and countless others), which seem to me often the means for the Philistines to rally the troops. I'm old enough to remember the shock and outrage at the design of the Vietnam War Memorial when it was first selected, and the insistence at adding the heroic figure statue nearby. The latter is largely ignored, it seems to me, while the wall in all its cold stoicism draws people in in such vivid intimacy.
I remember a student once who became outraged at Gary Snyder's poem "The Bath," because where she came from families did not bathe together and if something that disgusting happened they certainly wouldn't have talked about it. Well, my family didn't bathe together, either, but I happen to find that poem sublime and beautiful. She was not about to stand back and wonder what it was about the poem that was affecting her (or what it might have told her about herself). For her, it was degenerate. Another student in that class was entirely offended by an Allen Ginsberg poem suggesting that Christ was gay. He, conversely, was willing to put his own notions/prejudices aside in evaluating the poem, how it might have been manipulating him. Seems to me in my own little subjective reality that there was real virtue in that, the willingness or even desire to look at the point of view of the other. Which is, I think, what most of us try to do in fiction.
I love what Andrew said about revolution happening moment by moment. Yes, it does. It only seems momentous after the fact.
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Steve, you are right on target about gardner--he was taking the old tolstoy line (tolstoy pissed ppl off too) in omf---and the person who was his immediate target at the time was bill gass---
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A D Jameson recently wrote about the Gass/Gardner conversation at Big Other: http://bit.ly/bztX7j
Below is a quote that Jameson included. Describing why certain works of art (to which Gardner objected) are socially important, Gass said:
"Not for the messages they may contain, not because they expose slavery or cry hurrah for the worker, although such messages in their place and time might be important, but because they insist more than most on their own reality; because of the absolute way in which they exist."
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Stephen and Edward, I'll have to check out the Gardner/Gass conversation. I was thinking more about this last night, and find it sort of interesting that in the early American republic, the "novel" (as a genre) was considered a dangerous and threatening form, for several reasons. But one of the most profound was because it perceived--by many parents, clergy, and politicians--to threaten and erode civic virtue. The novel--the argument went--was fundamentally different from previous genres of writing because it encouraged close identification with characters who spoke in the vernacular, and whose stories unfolded generally in real time.
In other words, it made reading a private experience, detaching readers from the polis, the larger community. It encouraged a sort of individual interpretation that was beyond the policing of the cultural authorities. (Cathy Davidson has a great book that explores this called Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America.)
Anyway, it's interesting that, with the web and our new era of connectivity (this site is a good example) we seem, on one level, to be returning to or reinventing the concept of the public sphere of letters. Is reading becoming less intensely private, when there are so many ways to distribute texts and discuss them, often with complete strangers?
A newly emerging civic sphere?
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I have been struggling through a read of 'On the Origin of Stories, Evolution, Cognition and Fiction' by Brian Boyd. Struggling in part because of the academic Australian syntax, in part because my reading glasses do not accommodate my astigmatism and so reading in the evening tends to put me to sleep, and in part from the density of the material presented. But essentially Boyd's thesis is that art/story is a necessary human activity that is connected to our neur-biologic roots, and that as a highly social organism it is difficult for us human primates to have art/story without social worth, or as in this case to use the phrase 'virtue'.
For me the aesthetic equivalent of 'virtue' is if art/story gives us a sense of heightened energy when we encounter it. The opposite of virtue being all those experiences that drain our energy. In this respect I see the 'virtue' as highly personal, subjective, and relative to the perception of the viewer/reader. A snuff film of dubious social virtue may depress one viewer, wherein it may bolster up the spirit of another. Not that I am in to snuff films. Nor am I into politically pedantic expressions of art with a message (aka Gardner/Tolstoy). If something makes me feel like shit then I tend to presume for me at least in the subjective that it is not very good art, in which case I would not take the time to point anyone that I care to relate with to experience it (though I may certainly be anti-social at times and tell people that I do not like where they can go to go look). In some cases the lack of virtue may only be a little bit of a bad feeling, but it is that work that makes me feel really good and often as being able to perceive/touch something larger than myself, the proverbial 'other' that is ourselves and not also -- it is that work that I tend to point others to share. I see the accumulation of many people pointing as the definitive act of validation of the social virtue, as opposed to the purely individual and personal culture.
I do see all aesthetic activity as political though I see it on a range from the most public of art activities to the most private and secluded. The reclusive hermit sitting in a cave who carves very short poems on stones and leaves them laying about for no particular reason has as much validation for the virtue of their art as does the best selling literary author. Thinking in terms of cutting letters on boulders, I like to think of how Keith Haring used to put scrawls in the NY subway system and my wandering around before he became famous wondering who the hell was leaving this stuff around in the public space. If you ever get an opportunity to see the bathroom he decorated at the Lesbian & Gay Community Services Center in the Village then go for it... not exactly open for public viewing but well worth the virtue of the viewing.
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I thought a while on Peale's painting of the freed slave and it struck me how much nuance existed in the work. By nuance, of course, I mean detail...and in detail--though performed by a perfectionist--I mean imperfections. It caught me off gaurd, the realization of how the appearently random nature of the universe, down to the flight path of a gnat, is so painfully odd to us, evidenced by the fact that creating art that depicts this randomness is a practice and debate that fills our lives today.
It was the flipped collar of the guy. It was "placed" there, purposely, by an imperfect being trying to create something real and therefore imperfect, perfectly.
What does this have to do with virtue? No damn clue. But I tried to imagine perfection, and all I could conjure was the idea of God. The kicker here is that God, according to some legends, as a perfect being created an imperfect cosmos of chaos...destroyed it a few times, and allowed chaos again. Now, how as artists are we so different in our struggle to create (is it not said we are in God's "image")? As imperfect beings, we strive to perfect our interpretation of life to the canvas or page; we strive to capture--to perfect--imperfection.
The dualality here strikes me. And the virtue, yes, involves Man's struggle to create as he himself was created (by God or galactic chaos) and will always fall short. We claw and rip ourselves with agony, generation after generation of artists, to reach this zeneith, this apotheosis. Because if we can create one piece, just one piece of universal, authentic life by way of purposeful expression, then physics be damned, because we become God and all reality will freeze.
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Reading and writing have often been private activities joined with public discussion. Book groups, anyone? Half of the reason I watch sports and television shows like True Blood is so I can participate in cultural discussion. I do think the Internet is advancing the forums of discussion and thus the quantity of discussion, but I don't think it's revolutionizing it (yet).
I also believe that the Internet is increasing the public's desire for serial stories (as opposed to case-of-the-week stories), but that's a different topic.
As for virtue, morality--I have sympathy for Peale's stance, and while "virtuous characters" still exist in today's culture, they are fewer and farther between. Characters like Luke Skywalker and Harry Potter jump out at me immediately as "pure good" characters--selfless, noble, sacrificing. As a note, I should point out that Peale was talking about subjects with a "virtuous tendency," perhaps acknowledging that they needn't always be perfect, but merely tend to morality?
And while Potter's and Skywalker's stories are exciting and vindicating for the audience ("They're Good-with-a-capital-G, thus I can be Good, too"), I think for our purposes of art as society's mirror, their stories are not truthful, nor do they hold much substance. Grey characters hold substance.
There's a growing obsession with veracity in our culture. The increase has been mirrored by the progress of technology, but I am not smart enough to know whether that is cause or effect. People want to see the world as it really is; in part because it is so difficult to see the world as it really is, and in part to gain context for their own situation.
Or perhaps the audience desires grey characters that tend to virtue, such that the greyness is only a reason for their redemption, for the eventual revelation that the character is truly Good. And thus, so are we all, each and every one of us, despite our faults, despite our mistakes.
We can be redeemed. Art told us so.
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Reading and writing have often been private activities joined with public discussion. Book groups, anyone? Half of the reason I watch sports and television shows like True Blood is so I can participate in cultural discussion. I do think the Internet is advancing the forums of discussion and thus the quantity of discussion, but I don't think it's revolutionizing it (yet).
I also believe that the Internet is increasing the public's desire for serial stories (as opposed to case-of-the-week stories), but that's a different topic.
As for virtue, morality--I have sympathy for Peale's stance, and while "virtuous characters" still exist in today's culture, they are fewer and farther between. Characters like Luke Skywalker and Harry Potter jump out at me immediately as "pure good" characters--selfless, noble, sacrificing. As a note, I should point out that Peale was talking about subjects with a "virtuous tendency," perhaps acknowledging that they needn't always be perfect, but merely tend to morality?
And while Potter's and Skywalker's stories are exciting and vindicating for the audience ("They're Good-with-a-capital-G, thus I can be Good, too"), I think for our purposes of art as society's mirror, their stories are not truthful, nor do they hold much substance. Grey characters hold substance.
There's a growing obsession with veracity in our culture. The increase has been mirrored by the progress of technology, but I am not smart enough to know whether that is cause or effect. People want to see the world as it really is; in part because it is so difficult to see the world as it really is, and in part to gain context for their own situation.
Or perhaps the audience desires grey characters that tend to virtue, such that the greyness is only a reason for their redemption, for the eventual revelation that the character is truly Good. And thus, so are we all, each and every one of us, despite our faults, despite our mistakes.
We can be redeemed. Art told us so.
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if only there was a way to delete double posts....
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Be it a flawed proposition, or elitist, I think most of us believe an educated public makes for a better republic. And we all probably also recognize the inherent value of art.
For those of us who didn't live through it, it's hard to imagine such animosity between writers, and we live at a time when we no longer have to choose sides. There is art that doesn't break the "fictive dream," and art that comments on itself - as artists we can do both, and appreciate both.
What I take away from folks who disagree with each other so strongly is that they probably had enormous egos. Without disregarding the merit of these philosophies of fiction, I mostly take away a lesson on how to behave.
Ben Marcus tried to pick a similar fight with Jonathan Frantzen over a perceived slight in Frantzen's book reviews, this time the terms were "difficult" and "easy" fiction.
A writer who writes differently than I do, and who I don't enjoy reading, is not my enemy.
I want to be Barthelme Gass Gardner Tolstoy Marcus Frantzen. On Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday. Know them, love them, emulate them, steal from them. And by the end of the week I get to put my own name on whatever is written. Me and half a million other writers who aren't so easily categorized.
To get signed to a record deal, you have to have "a sound." No one is offering us record deals. It's probably wise not to get down about this, since we can't change it, but to see it as liberating. You don't have to be a sound, but be a musician. I don't have to have "a sound" as a writer, and twenty years from now, when I'm still writing, I won't be expected to sound like myself. Hopefully, the writings will be judged individually on their own merits, moral or otherwise.
The value, as I see it, is that uninterrupted works make us "feel," and self-conscious works reveal the mechanations and assumptions of "the real." These are different values, both valuable, and not mutually exclusive. Audiences can understand and consume works of both types. Though I'm probably most impressed by works that can do both, make me think AND feel, and that is maybe what is so earth-shattering for me about the work of Donald Barthelme. And this quality of his work is maybe what so many young formalists are trying to emulate out there on the Internets. And yes, sometimes they are doing it too.
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Well, I can say with certainty that my writing practice has kept me off the streets and made me a more compassionate feeler, broader thinker, and all around better person than if I had never put pen to paper (keyboard to monitor?). And if that isn't a form of virtue then the Jonas Brothers aren't the reincarnation of The Monkees (or is it just me?).
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Dan: Thanks for the laugh. The Monkees had better songwriters. I have no idea if writing has made me a better person, or just more of the same. I do know that without verbalizing things, I tend not to understand them—what psychologists call the rationalization of experience.
Which goes to what Gabriel said: "art/story is a necessary human activity that is connected to our neuro-biologic roots, and that as a highly social organism it is difficult for us human primates to have art/story without social worth, or as in this case to use the phrase 'virtue'."
It was pointed out to me by my son that the ability to create a collective narrative is peculiar to predatory species. His theory (maybe from Animal Planet). You cannot hunt in a pack without a narrative of the pack, and the ability to plan. We will hunt, flush out an animal, and then chase it down, kill it, eat it. This cannot be done without some ability to predict the future, or predict a future. If the prey runs this way, this pack member will do X while another does Y.
As perhaps the best predators the planet has ever known, we have these capabilities in spades.
There has also been interesting study in the area of supposed altruism. The study I heard about had to do with birds, and the way they might react to the intrusion of a predator. They work together to (ultimately) preserve the genetic pool of the flock. So one or two or more will (in effect) offer themselves up as sacrifices. It's altruism (virtue) as an evolved means of preserving the genetic pool of the flock.
It's strange to think that so many things that are warm and tender, heroic and virtuous, are things that have evolved over time to preserve the species. Those of us who have those kinds of feelings and impulses are the ones whose genetic lines have survived.
So to what Gabriel said. If the origins of story are in the creation of society and also in predation, then that's the happy result of our evolution. I think we all have or ideas of what is virtuous and what is moral. I thought Ben Marcus, as much as I admire some of his fictions, made a complete ass of himself in that essay, even if Cynthia Ozick came hotly to his defense. But Harpers likes to do that every few years. Find someone, Madison Bell, Tom Wolfe, Ben Marcus, Jonathan Franzen, not just to set up the straw man, but in some ways be the straw man. I imagine it's hard to resist that kind of temptation to make an ass of yourself. Jonathan Franzen himself has kind of made a specialty in his essays of the I-am-such-an-ass, look-at-this-stupid-thing-I-am-about-to-admit.
I like his fiction a lot. And a lot of his essays. He's such a fluent writer. But it's also easy to see why another writer might want to set fire to the straw man he makes of himself.
This might well be an altruistic gesture—both of these, actually. Entirely virtuous.
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