What is Culture For?

by The School Of Life

  Mel Gibson,

  Braveheart, 1995

  The notion that art plays a crucial role in rebalancing us emotionally can answer the vexed question of why people differ so much in their aesthetic tastes. Why are some people drawn to minimalist architecture and others to the baroque? Why are some people excited by bare concrete walls and others by floral patterns? Why do some like quiet films about relationships and others war epics? Our tastes will depend on what spectrum of our emotional makeup lies in shadow and is hence in need of stimulation and emphasis. Every work of art is imbued with a particular psychological and moral atmosphere – serene or restless, courageous or careful, modest or confident, masculine or feminine, bourgeois or aristocratic – and our preferences for one kind over another reflects our varied psychological gaps. We hunger for artworks that will compensate for our inner fragilities and help to return us to a viable mean.

  Life might be a frantic whirl of demands, deadlines, appointments and meetings; by the end of every day we’re worn out and on edge; we’ve been on constant high alert for what feels like forever; there’s scarcely a moment to think, to define our own priorities or to take stock of where we are in our lives. It wouldn’t be at all surprising if, in such a state, we looked with longing at a serene, emphatically quiet interior as the much-needed ideal home to which we need to find our way for a period of respite.

  Of course, the character of our individual lives varies enormously. So the balancing agents that instinctively appeal to us will be equally diverse. We might have a life too heavily impressed by routine: the tasks of one day are essentially the same as all the rest; we can predict from week to week what time we’ll get home; perhaps a relationship has settled into an over-familiar groove; without maybe fully acknowledging it to ourselves we feel that life has become a bit stale. In that case, we’re not at all likely to feel the allure of Pawson’s deeply calm and minimalist architecture. Instead we will perhaps feel strangely but powerfully attracted to the drama of a facade by the Roman Baroque architect Francesco Borromini – a work with the power to rouse our slumbering souls.

  Art to counter our agitation

  John Pawson: The Life House, Wales,

  2011–16

  Art to rouse our sluggish passions

  Francesco Borromini: San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane, Rome, 1638–41

  Art to rebalance oneself after too many mistresses, too much gold and too many decadent parties

  Jacques-Louis David, The Oath of the Horatii, 1784

  Art to rebalance oneself after too many railways, factories and readings of Darwin

  Edmund Leighton, The End of the Song, 1902

  Whole nations can manifest longings for balance and will use art to help them achieve it. After too much aristocratic decadence, many in late-eighteenth-century France felt the need to get back in touch with martial solemnity and spartan simplicity and so found refuge in the pared-down works of Jacques-Louis David.

  By the later part of the nineteenth century in England, the materialism, scientific obsession and capitalist rationality of the age drove many to long for more faithful, mystical days, and so to locate ‘beauty’ in images such as Edmund Leighton’s The End of the Song (1902), inspired by the literature and history of the Middle Ages.

  What we call ‘beautiful’ is any work of art that supplies a missing dose of a much-needed psychological component, while what we dismiss as ‘ugly’ is that which forces on us moods or motifs that we feel threatened or already overwhelmed by. Our contact with art holds out the promise of inner wholeness

  Compassion

  One of the things that makes us fear failure the most is the way we imagine we’d be seen by others. We’d not merely fail, we’d be called losers, burdened by the additional – and in some ways more ghastly – prospect of being figures of ridicule and contempt in the eyes of most people.

  Our fear isn’t unfounded. Generally, failure and personal disaster are treated very severely in social life. We can imagine how a mean-spirited group of people after work or at a party would make fun of the world’s most august failures – the central characters of tragic novels and plays: Oedipus, Hamlet, Raskolnikov or Jay Gatsby. The media would be even crueller, coming up with lurid summations like a classic headline version of the ancient Greek story: SEX WITH MUM WAS BLINDING. They might state the fate of Hamlet as: BOOZY FOREIGN ARISTO DIES IN FIGHT AFTER KILLING SPREE; Crime and Punishment would be: CALL-GIRL MAKES PSYCHO KILLER CONFESS and The Great Gatsby would be reduced to: FAKE GENT SHOT IN DELUX POOL BY WRONG LOVE-RIVAL.

  These headlines come across as cheap and mean only because the stories behind them have been so powerfully elaborated by novelists and dramatists. Without Sophocles, Shakespeare, Dostoyevsky or Scott Fitzgerald, we’d never think of the complex, moving personal histories of individuals that lie behind these harsh summaries. Figures like these strike us as fascinating and worthy of sympathy only because we’ve been taught by the best teachers to see them through the prism of artistic sympathy and compassion.

  The idea of rescuing failure from unjust contempt lies behind one of the world’s oldest and most impressive theories of art. The idea of Tragedy was developed by the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle in his Poetics (384–22 BC). In the book, Aristotle wasn’t at all pretending that individual responsibility doesn’t matter. His goal was to show that even perfectly decent people can end up in horrific situations and that therefore they deserve to be regarded with tender pity rather than disgust. It’s not that it isn’t in some way their fault. These people are not merely unlucky. But the thing in their nature that leads to their downfall isn’t in itself all that different from our own failings. To capture this crucial point, Aristotle defined their failings as harmatia or ‘flaws’ – someone is a bit impetuous, they sometimes lose their temper; they let ambition get in the way of caution; they don’t properly listen to what another person is saying. These are imperfections, but they are very common. And sometimes these flaws have terrible consequences. We might lose our temper at the worst possible moment and shout at someone who turns out to have the power to wreck our lives; a hasty decision might lead to financial ruin; or we might brush aside someone who is trying to tell us something that turns out to be really important. These are the staple moves of Greek Tragedy as analysed by Aristotle. And his point is this: those who end up in horrendous trouble haven’t necessarily got any deeper flaws in their characters than we do in our own.

  It’s the polar opposite of an attitude that suggests that failure is always the sign of something being very wrong with someone (the attitude implied by media headlines). These headlines hint that their victims, caught up in grotesque events, are not at all like us; we don’t have to feel for them because they belong almost to a different species. It could never happen to us. The whole thrust of Aristotle’s Poetics is that tragedy is a vehicle of education. It teaches us to feel pity, rather than contempt, for those whose lives turn out very badly.

  To drive this point home Aristotle makes a particular recommendation to people writing plays: make sure, he says, that the person to whom the bad things happen is ‘like us, or only slightly better than us.’ When we first meet the character, says Aristotle, they have to be likeable, even a touch impressive. We have to be invited to warmly identify with them or admire them. And then, he continues, their disasters have to unfold in a short span of time, so that our original liking for this person is still fresh in our minds. In life we often have weeks or months in which to forget that someone to whom disaster comes is really rather nice. We have time to detach emotionally from them before we start to see them simply as losers. By speeding up the process Aristotle’s hope is that we don’t have time to forget; we can see that these awful things are happening to someone as nice as or slightly nicer than us and only for faults that are similar to or no worse than our own.

  An attitude of mockery and contempt is driven by the background thesis that the ‘loser’ is fundamentally unlike us. This is what gives o
ur severe attitudes free rein. We simply refuse to imagine that this kind of misfortune might come our way. We’d never end up there, we imagine. We’d never be on the receiving end of fate, so we have no motive to moderate our condemnations. We’re prone to mocking a politician who freezes in an interview; a married father of three children who gets caught with his mistress; someone who puts their life savings into a business venture that doesn’t work out.... And the reason is that we don’t have in mind the small steps which could take a perfectly ordinary person to these places. And this is where Aristotle comes up with a crucial idea. In a great tragic story it is necessary to make the plot ‘probable’ – that is, we need to feel that what went wrong for this person happened little by little; they couldn’t see at the time that it was all heading for disaster. Gradually, they got in deeper. Being able to imagine this kind of story is crucial to sympathy because it is the account of how we too might, without quite realising it, get caught up in a dreadful situation. We’re often tempted to say ‘I can’t imagine how a sensible person could have done that.’ Aristotle is proposing art as a way of making us more accurately imaginative.

  In January 1872, a thirty-five-year-old woman called Anna Pirogova committed suicide by throwing herself under a train at the recently opened railway station at Yasenki, a modest provincial town about 200 kilometres south of Moscow. It turned out she was the housekeeper of a local landowner whose wife had died some time before; they’d been having an affair and she’d been expecting to marry him. But he’d just told her that he was instead planning to marry the more alluring German governess who looked after his son. The inquest would have been a routine affair had it not been for the presence of Russia’s most distinguished novelist, Leo Tolstoy, who had recently achieved huge success with the publication of War and Peace. It was his local station, his family estate lay just beyond the town, and his wife was in fact distantly related to Anna Pirogova. The event made a deep impression on Tolstoy. It was obvious to him that many people would have limited sympathy for this woman. He could imagine how her suicide would be chatted about in the social circles of Moscow and St Petersburg. She’d already lost all right to pity when she had an affair; she had been angling to catch her boss; she was ditched for a more attractive rival – what did she expect? She was stupid, unprincipled and hysterical; it was all her own fault. The tabloid headline might read: STATION SUICIDE OF SOCIAL CLIMBING ADULTERESS.

  Tolstoy’s reaction was entirely different. He used the grim death of Anna Pirogova as a model for the climax of his next great novel, Anna Karenina, of which the first instalment was published the following year. At the end of the long novel, the heroine (also called Anna) commits suicide by throwing herself under a train, after being rejected by the man with whom she was having an illicit affair. But this only happens in the closing pages. Much of the rest of the long novel can be seen as an attempt to understand, as sympathetically as possible, how someone could end up doing this. In his novel, he ups the stakes. The Anna of the book is, when we first meet her, a deeply engaging person: she has a warm, generous nature, she’s elegant and charming, she’s cultivated and clever, and she’s married, with a child, to a leading official in the government.

  Tolstoy then traces the unfortunate factors, the slight mistakes, the little steps that gradually bring this obviously lovely person to a horrific end. Anna Karenina has an awkward marriage, but it’s not her fault. She was married off at a young age by her family; and she’s tried very hard to be loyal to her husband. Quite by chance she meets a deeply fascinating man; she dances with him at a ball and then decides never to see him again. But he happens to be immensely persistent. He trails after her around the country, he gets himself invited to parties that she has to attend with her husband. Eventually, slowly, he seduces her. It’s not a meaningless fling, he’s genuinely in love with her, totally sincere, talented and sophisticated. Anna pleads for a divorce. But her husband rejects the idea for purely tactical reasons; he doesn’t care about Anna personally but it would be inconvenient to go through divorce proceedings when he’s so busy with work.

  Eventually Anna elopes with her lover – but the price is that she can never again see her son. Her husband coldly refuses access, and this breaks her heart. They have to live in the country, because they would be rejected in the city; her lover has to give up his career, he grows restless. Increasingly desperate, Anna turns to drugs to calm herself. Her lover becomes more and more frustrated and brusque, frequently spending time away from Anna. They row constantly and Anna becomes convinced that he no longer loves her. She has destroyed everything she had for him and now she feels that it’s been all for nothing. She takes a carriage to the station and throws herself under the wheels of an oncoming train.

  Anna Karenina’s story is not precisely the same as that of Anna Pirogova – the housekeeper whose suicide was an inspiration for the novel. Yet the difference between the novel and the gossip lies primarily in the way the story is told. Tolstoy’s narrative is an unflinching but deeply generous account of how a life can be utterly ruined and how a person who is (at the start) immensely charming, kind and intelligent can end up, by their own action, a mangled corpse on a railway track. It is, in essence, the story as seen through the eyes of love, the opposite of the critical, dismissive, cold voice of gossip.

  The point of being repeatedly exposed to this loving, understanding voice is that ultimately, it becomes the voice in which we can start to tell our own story. We too are inept, flawed, messy creatures heading – at some point – for a fall. So it matters immensely that lodged in our minds we have a voice that isn’t just the punitive one of the public square, but one that can make some of the same moves as we witness in Sophocles, Shakespeare or Flaubert. It isn’t a case of writing up our lives as they would have done. It’s seeing that, in our failures, we deserve no less sympathy than the unfortunate victims of the world’s greatest tragedies. A world in which people properly imbibed the lessons implicit within tragic art would be one in which the consequences of failure would cease to weigh upon us so heavily, a world in which we had learnt how to extend a loving perspective upon ourselves, and on our fellow wretched humans.

  Knowledge

  One of the more frustrating, yet fundamental, things about being human is that we can’t understand ourselves very well. Either side of the mind frequently has no clear picture of what the other happens to be upset about, anxious of or looking forward to. We make a lot of mistakes due to a pervasive self-ignorance.

  Here too culture can help, because in many cases, it knows us better than we know ourselves and can provide us with an account (more accurate than any we might be capable of) of what is likely to be going on in our minds.

  Marcel Proust’s lengthy 1913 novel, In Search of Lost Time, is seemingly the story of a collection of aristocratic and high bourgeois characters living in early twentieth-century France. However, towards the end of the book, the writer makes a remarkable claim. His novel wasn’t really about these distinctly remote-sounding people, it was about someone closer to home, you:

  In reality, every reader is, while he is reading, the reader of his own self. The writer’s work is merely a kind of optical instrument which he offers to the reader to enable him to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have experienced in himself. And the recognition by the reader in his own self of what the book says is the proof of its veracity.

  In the great works of culture, we have an impression of coming across orphaned pieces of ourselves, evoked with rare crispness and tenacity. We might wonder how on earth the author could have known certain deeply personal things about us, ideas that normally fracture in our clumsy fingers, but that are here perfectly preserved and illuminated. Take, for example, the self-knowledge offered by one of Proust’s favourite writers, François VI, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, author of a slim volume of aphorisms known as the Maxims (1665–78):

  We all have strength enough to bear the misfortunes of others.

&nb
sp; It’s an idea closely followed by the equally penetrating:

  There are some people who would never have fallen in love, if they had not heard there was such a thing.

  And the no less accomplished:

  To say that one never flirts is in itself a form of flirtation.

  We are likely to smile in immediate recognition. We have been here ourselves. We just never knew how to condense our mental mulch into something this elegant.

  When Proust compares literature to ‘a kind of optical instrument’, what he means is that it performs the function of a high-tech machine, helping us to focus on what is really unfolding within ourselves and within others around us. Great authors turn vagueness into clarity. For example, if we have read Proust, and are then later abandoned by a lover who very kindly professes their need to spend ‘a little more time on their own’, we will benefit from having seen the dynamic clearly captured in Proust’s line from his 1923 work The Prisoner: ‘When two people part, it is the one who is not in love who makes the tender speeches.’ The clarity won’t make the lover return; but it will do the next best thing: help us to feel less confused by, and alone with, the misery of having been left.

  The more writers we read, the better our understanding of our own mind stands to be. Every great writer can be hailed as an explorer – no less extraordinary than Magellan or Cook – of new, hitherto mysterious corners of the self. Some explorers discover continents, others spend their lives perfectly mapping one or two small islands, or just a single river valley or cove. All deserve to be feted for correcting the ignorance in which we otherwise meander through our internal world. The Japanese poet Matsuo Basho clarifies our feelings of loneliness, Tolstoy explains our ambition to us, Kafka makes us conscious of our dread of authority, Camus guides us to our alienated and numb selves, and under Philip Roth’s guidance we become conscious of what happens to our sexuality in the shadow of mortality.