Authors: William H. Gass
… A completed past because we have to know the pedigree of the painting or it’s no contest. If it is the rosy nude who used to recline behind the bar in Harry’s, or just another mislaid entrant in the latest Biennale, then the conditions of the case are fatally altered and there is no real conflict of interest, though the blank space behind the bar at Harry’s will surely fill us with genuine sorrow each scotch-and-water hour. It is not between infant and image, then, that we are being asked to choose, but between some fully realized esthetic quality and a vaguely generalized human nature, even though it is a specific baby who could drown.
It is the moralists, of course, who like to imagine these lunatic choices. It is the moralists who want to bully and beat up on the artists, not the other way around. The error of the artists is indifference. Not since Plato’s day, when the politicians in their grab for public power defeated the priests, the poets, and the philosophers, have artists, except for an occasional Bronx cheer, molested a moralist. Authors do not gather to burn good deeds in public squares; laws are not passed by poets to put lying priests behind bars, nor do they usually suggest that the pursuit of goodness will lead you away from both beauty and truth, that it is the uphill road to ruin. Musicians do not hang moralizing lackeys from lampposts as though they were stringing their fiddles; moralizing lackeys do that.
On the other hand … We know what the other, the righteous hand is full of: slings and arrows, slanders and censorship, prisons, scaffolds, burnings and beatings. To what stake has Savonarola’s piety been bound by the painters he disgraced? Throughout history, goodness has done more harm than good, and over the years moralists have managed to give morality a thoroughly bad name. Although lots of bad names have been loaned them by the poets, if the poets roast, they roast no one on the coals, only upon their scorn, while moralists, to their reward, have dispatched who knows how many thousands of souls.
The choice, baby or Botticelli, is presented to us as an example of the conflict between Art and Ethics, but between Art and Ethics there is no conflict, nor is this an instance, for our quandary falls entirely within the ethical. The decision, if there is one to make, is moral.
The values that men prize have been variously classified. There may be said to be, crudely, five kinds. There are, first of all, those facts and theories we are inclined to call true, and which, we think, constitute our knowledge. Philosophy, history, science, presumably pursue them. Second, there are the values of duty and obligation—obedience and loyalty, righteousness and virtue—qualities that the state finds particularly desirable. Appreciative values of all kinds may be listed third, including the beauties of women, art, and nature, the various sublimes, and that pleasure which comes from the pure exercise of human faculties and skills. Fourth are the values of self-realization and its attendant pleasures—growth, well-being, and the like—frequently called happiness in deference to Aristotle. Finally, there are those that have to do with real or imagined redemption, with ultimate justice and immortality. Some would prefer to separate political values like justice or freedom from more narrowly moral ones, while others would do the same for social values like comfort, stability, security, conditions often labeled simply “peace.” But a complete and accurate classification, assuming it could be accomplished, is not important here. Roughly, we might call our goals, as tradition has, Truth, Goodness, Beauty, Happiness, and Salvation. (We can reach port, sometimes, even with a bad map.)
If we allow our classificatory impulse to run on a little longer, it will encourage us to list at least four customary attitudes that can be taken toward the relationship of these value areas to one another. First, one can deny the legitimacy or reality of a particular value group. Reckless pragmatists and some sophists deny the objective existence of all values except utility, while positivists prefer to elevate empirical truth (which they don’t capitalize, only underscore) to that eminence. It is, of course, truth thinned to the thickness of a wire, which is fine if you want to cut cheese. The values
that remain are rejected as attitudes, moods, or emotions—subjective states of various sorts like wishing, hoping, willing, which suggest external objects without being able to establish them. I happen to regard salvation values as illusory or mythological, since I deny any significance to the assumptions on which they are grounded, but other people may pick out different victims.
Second, we might accept the values of a certain sphere as real enough, but argue that some or all of them are reducible to others, even eventually to one. Reductionism is characteristic of Plato’s famous argument that virtue is knowledge; of Keats’s fatuous little motto, Beauty is Truth; of materialists and idealists equally. Rather than reduce moral values to those of happiness, Aristotle simply ignored them.
Third, we can try to make some values subordinate to others. This is not the same as reduction. One might argue that artistic and moral values are mutually exclusive, or unique, and yet support the superiority of one over the other. There are, however, two kinds of subordination. One asserts that X is more important than Y, so that when one has to choose between them (baby or Botticelli), one must always choose the baby. When designing buildings, for instance, beauty regularly runs afoul of function and economy. The other sort of subordination insists not only that X is more important, or “higher” in value, than Y, but that Y should serve or be a means to X: the baby is a model for the baby in the Botticelli. The slogan Form follows function is sometimes so understood. I take crude Marxism to require this kind of sacrifice from the artist.
Fourth, it is possible to argue, as I do, that these various value areas are significantly different. They are not only different; they are not reducible, but are independent of one another. Furthermore, no one value area is more important, abstractly considered, than any other. In short, these various values are different, independent, and equal.
This does not imply that in particular instances you should not choose one over the other and have good reasons for doing so; it is simply that what is chosen in any instance cannot be dictated in
advance. Obviously, if you are starving, whether your food is served with grace and eaten with manners is less than essential. Should you skip dinner or lick the spilled beans from the floor? Should you choose to safeguard a painting or the well-being of its model? Should you bomb Monte Cassino?
That attachment to human life which demands that it be chosen over everything else is mostly humbug. It can be reasonably, if not decisively, argued that the world is already suffering from a surfeit of such animals; that most human beings rarely deserve the esteem some philosophers have for them; that historically humans have treated their pets better than they have treated one another; that no one is so essential he or she cannot be replaced a thousand times over; that death is inevitable anyhow; that it is our sense of community and our own identity which lead us to persist in our parochial overestimation; that it is rather a wish of philosophers than a fact that man be more important than anything else that’s mortal, since nature remains mum and scarcely supports the idea, nor do the actions of man himself. Man makes a worse god than God, and when God was alive, he knew it.
Baby or Botticelli is a clear enough if artificial choice, but it places the problem entirely in the moral sphere, where the differences involved can be conveniently overlooked. What differences?
The writing of a book (the painting of a painting, the creation of a score) is generally such an exacting and total process that it is not simply okay if it has many motives; it is essential. The difference between one of Flaubert’s broken amatory promises to Louise Colet and his writing of
Madame Bovary
(both considered immoral acts in some circles) is greater even than Lenin’s willingness to board a train and his intended overthrow of the czar. Most promises are kept by actions each one of which fall into a simple series; that is, I meet you at the Golden Egg by getting up from my desk, putting on my coat, and getting into my car: a set of actions each one of which can be serially performed and readily seen as part of “going to lunch.” I may have many reasons for keeping our date, but having promised becomes the moral one.
However, when I create a work of art, I have entered into no contract of any kind with the public, unless the work has been commissioned. In this sense, most esthetic acts are unbidden, uncalled-for, even unexpected. They are gratuitous. And unlike Lenin’s intention to overthrow an empire (which can scarcely be an intention of the same kind as mine to meet you for lunch, involving, as it does, several years, thousands of folks, and millions of rubles), my writing will, all along, be mine alone, and I will not normally parcel out the adjectives to subordinates and the sex scenes to specialists, or contract out the punctuation.
I have many reasons for going to the Golden Egg, then: I am hungry; you are pretty; we have business; it is a good place to be seen; I need a change from the atmosphere of the office; you are paying, and I am broke—oh, yes … and I promised. All these interests are easily satisfied by our having lunch. There is no need to order them; they are not unruly or at odds.
So why am I writing this book? Why, to make money, to become famous, to earn the love of many women, to alter the world’s perception of itself, to put my rivals’ noses out of joint, to satisfy my narcissism, to display my talents, to justify my existence to my deceased father, to avoid cleaning the house; but if I wish to make money, I shall have to write trash, and if I wish to be famous, I had better hit home runs, and if I wish to earn the love of many women, I shall have more luck going to work in a bank. In short, these intentions do conflict; they must be ordered; none of them is particularly “good” in the goodie sense; and none is esthetic in any way.
But there is so much energy in the baser motives, and so little in the grander, that I need hate’s heat to warm my art; I must have my malice to keep me going. For I must go, and go on, regardless. Because making a work of art (writing a book, being Botticelli) requires an extended kind of action, an ordered group of actions. Yet these actions are not the sort that result, like a battle, in many effects, helter-skelter: in broken bodies, fugitive glories, lasting pains, conquered territories, power, ruin, ill will; rather, as a funnel forms the sand and sends it all in the same direction, the many acts of the artist aim at one end, one result.
We are fully aware, of course, that while I am meeting you for lunch, admiring your bodice, buying office equipment, I am not doing the laundry, keeping the books, dieting, or being faithful in my heart; and when I am painting, writing, singing scales, I am not cooking, cleaning house, fixing flats. The hours, the days, the years, of commitment to my work must necessarily withdraw me from other things, from my duties as a husband, a soldier, a citizen.
So the actions of the artist include both what he does and, therefore, what he doesn’t do; what he does directly and on purpose, and what he does incidentally and quite by the way. In addition, there are things done, or not done, or done incidentally, that are quite essential to the completion and character of the work, but whose effects do not show themselves in the ultimate object or performance. As necessary as any other element, they disappear in the conclusion like a middle term in an argument. A deleted scene, for instance, may nonetheless lead to the final one. Every line is therefore many lines: words rubbed out, thoughts turned aside, concepts canceled. The eventual sentence lies there quietly, “Kill the king,” with no one but the writer aware that it once read, “Kiss the king,” and before that “Kiss the queen.” For moralists, only too often, writing a book is little different from robbing a bank, but actions of the latter sort are not readily subject to revisions.
The writer forms words on a page. This defaces the page, of course, and in this sense it is like throwing a brick through a window; but it is not like throwing a brick through a window in any other way. And if writing is an immense ruckus made of many minor noises, some shutting down as soon as they are voiced, then reading is similarly a series of acts, better ordered than many, to be sure, but just as privately performed, and also open to choice, which may have many motives too, the way the writing had. Paintings and performances (buildings even more so) are public in a fashion that reading and writing never are, although the moralist likes to make lump sums of everything and look at each art as if it were nothing but a billboard or a sound truck in the street.
If we rather tepidly observe that a building stands on its street quite differently from a book in its rack, must we not also notice
how infrequently architects are jailed for committing spatial hanky-panky or putting up obscene façades? Composers may have their compositions hooted from the hall, an outraged patron may assault a nude, a church may be burned to get at the God believed to be inside, but more often than not it is the
littérateur
who is shot or sent to Siberia. Moralists are not especially sensitive to form. It is the message that turns their noses blue. It is the message they will murder you for. And messages that are passed as secretly as books pass, from privacy to privacy, make them intensely suspicious. Yet work which refuses such interpretations will not be pardoned either. Music which is twelve-toned, paintings which are abstract, writing which seems indifferent to its referents in the world—these attacks on messages themselves—they really raise the watchdog’s hackles.
In life, values do not sit in separate tents like harem wives; they mix and mingle rather like sunlight in a room or pollution in the air. A dinner party, for example, will affect the diners’ waists, delight or dismay their palates, put a piece of change in the grocer’s pocket, bring a gleam to the vintner’s eye. The guests may be entertained or stupefied by gossip, chat, debate, wit. I may lose a chance to make out, or happily see my seduction advance past hunt-and-peck. The host may get a leg up in the firm whose boss he’s entertaining; serious arguments may break out; new acquaintances may be warmly made. And if I, Rabbi Ben Ezra, find myself seated next to Hermann Göring, it may put me quite off the quail—quail that the
Reichsmarschall
shot by machine gun from a plane. There should be no questions concerning the rabbi’s qualms. It would be a serious misjudgment, however, if I imagined that the quail was badly cooked on account of who shot it, or believed that the field marshal’s presence had soured the wine, although it may have ruined the taste in my mouth. It might be appropriate to complain of one who enjoyed the meal and laughed at the fat boy’s jokes. Nevertheless, the meal will be well prepared or not, quite independently of the guests’ delightful or obnoxious presence, and it would be simpleminded to think that because
these values were realized in such close proximity, they therefore should be judged on other than their own terms—the terms, perhaps, of their pushier neighbors.