The Aristos

by John Fowles

  53 Our society requires the artist to live like this, and to present an image like this, just as by its tedium and its conformity it obliges him to create ‘black’ art and entertainment. From the point of view of society, the artist thus dictated to and obeying the dictate is fulfilling a useful function. But my belief is that such a function is not the function of art.

  54 The true primary function of art is not to remedy the faults and deficiencies of society, to provide salt for the ordinary; but in conjunction with science to occupy the cestral position in human existence.

  55 Because in general we approach the arts and entertainment from outside, because we go to art, we regard it as external to the main part of our life. We go to the theatre, to the cinema, the opera, the ballet; to museums; to sports fields (for a part of all great games is as much art as theatre or ballet). Even our reading is outside the main occupations of our day; and even the art that is piped into our homes we feel comes from outside. This holding at a distance of art, this constant spectatoring, is thoroughly evil.

  56 Another factor, the now ubiquitous availability of reproductions of art, aggravates matters; less and less do ordinary people have any direct contact with either artists or their creations. Records and radio usurp the experience of live music, ‘replicas’ and magazine articles the experience of the actual painting. It may seem that literature at least cannot be experienced at a remove in this way; but increasingly people prefer to absorb novels in the form of television plays or film s – and the same goes for theatre plays. Only the poem seems of its nature sacrosanct; and we may wonder if this is not precisely why poetry has become such a minority art in our time.

  57 If we consign art to the leisure outprovinces of our lives, and even there experience it mostly in some indirect form, it becomes a mere aspect of good living – that is, a matter of facts, not feeling; of placing, of showing off cultural knowledge; of identifying and collecting. In short, it produces a total inability to see things in themselves, but an obsessional need to place them in a social, snobbish or voguish context. The vogue (that is, the new style) becomes an aspect of the general social-economic need for quick expendability.

  58 This too, and perhaps most strikingly, corrupts the artist. And it has brought about the highly rococo atmosphere in which the contemporary arts now languish. The great eighteenth-century rococo arts were the visual and aural ones; the style was characterized by great facility, a desire to charm the bored and jaded palate, to amuse by decoration rather than by content – indeed serious content was eschewed. We see all these old tricks writ new in our modern arts, with their brilliantly pointless dialogues, their vivid descriptions of things not worth describing, their elegant vacuity, their fascination with the synthetic and their distaste for the natural.

  59 The modern world and modern sensibilities are increasingly complex; but it is not the function of the artist to complicate the complexities; if anything, it should be to unravel them. For many nowadays what is taken as a criterion is not the meaning, but a skill in hinting at meanings. Any good computer will beat man at this.

  THE GENIUS AND THE CRAFTSMAN

  60 The concept of the genius arose, as we might expect, with the Romantic Movement; since that movement was above all a revolt of the individual against the machine in all its forms (including reason), it was inevitable that the super-individual – the Napoleon, the Beethoven, the Goethe – should be adulated.

  61 The artefacts of a genius are distinguished by rich human content, for which he forges new images and new techniques, creates new styles. He sees himself as a unique eruption in the desert of the banal. He feels himself mysteriously inspired or possessed. The craftsman, on the other hand, is content to use the traditional materials and techniques. The more self-possessed he is, the better craftsman he will be. What pleases him is skill of execution. He is very concerned with his contemporary success, his market value. If a certain kind of social or political commitment is fashionable, he may be committed; but out of fashion, not conviction. The genius, of course, is largely indifferent to contemporary success; and his commitment to his ideals, both artistic and political, is profoundly, Byronically, indifferent to their contemporary popularity.

  62 We can all see that being a genius constitutes a very good recipe for defeating the sense of nemo; and that is why the vast majority of modern artists want tacitly to be geniuses rather than craftsmen. It may be clear to the discriminating critic, it may even be clear to them themselves, that they are not geniuses; but the public in general is very inclined to take artists at their own valuation. We thus arrive at a situation in which all experiment is considered admirable (and the discovery of new techniques and materials is an act of genius in itself, regardless of the fact that all true genius has been driven to such discoveries by the need to express some new content) and all craftmanship ‘academic’ and more or less despicable.

  63 Of course our real geniuses are indispensable to us and to our arts; but we may doubt whether the obsession with being a genius is of any value to the lesser artist. If the only race he will enter for is the Grand Genius Stakes, then we are obliged to grant some justice to the phihstines’ constant complaint about the selfish obscurity and technical poverty of modern art. But in any case a completely new factor is about to complicate this problem.

  64 The cybernetic revolution is going to give us much more leisure; and one of the ways in which we shall have to fill that leisure must be in the practice of the arts. It is obvious that we cannot all pretend to be geniuses; and as obvious that we must give up our present contempt for the craft aspect of art. It is as much craftmanship as ‘genius’ that will fill in the abysses and oceans of leisure in the world to come; that will educate and analyse the self; that will console it. Here and there the craftsman will border on, even become the genius. For there are no frontiers here; no one can say before the journey where the one ends and the other begins; they may be eternity apart, they may be a second – that second in which the real poet has the line, the painter the inner sight, the composer the sound; that instantaneous force that through the green fuse drives the flower.

  THE STYLE IS NOT THE MAN

  66 Our obsession with the idea of genius has led us into another fallacy: that the style is the man. But just as in physics we begin to realize the extent of our knowledge – what we can know and what we can never know – so in art we have reached the extremes in techniques. We have used words in all the extreme ways, sounds in all the extreme ways, shapes and colours in all the extreme ways; all that remains is to use them within the bounds of the extreme ways already developed. We have reached the end of our field. Now we must come back, and discover other occupations than reaching the end of fields.

  67 What will matter finally is intention; not instrumentation. It will be skill in expressing one’s meaning with styles, not just in one style carefully selected and developed to signal one’s individuality rather than to satisfy the requirements of the subject-matter. This is not to remove the individual from art or to turn artistic creation into a morass of pastiche; if the artist has any genuine originality it will pierce through all its disguises. The whole meaning and commitment of the person who creates will permeate his creations, however varied their outward form.

  68 We see this polystylism already in two of the greatest, and certainly the two most characteristic, geniuses of our age; Picasso and Stravinsky. And if two such artists, authentic masters, have discovered new freedoms by sacrificing the nemo-induced ‘security’ of a single style, then surely the craft-artists of the new leisure societies may wisely follow suit.

  69 We pay far too much heed to recognizability: the artist’s ability to make all his work typical of his style. It pleases the would-be connoisseur in us. Now it is true that every style and technique has to be explored; and a rapid migration through style after style, as every art student knows, is not the best method of producing satisfying work. But there is a balance to be struck.

  POETRY AND HU
MANITY

  70 I do not believe, as it is fashionable in this democratic age to believe, that the great arts are equal; though, like human beings, they have every claim to equal rights in society. Literature, in particular poetry, is the most essential and the most valuable. In what follows, by ‘poetry’ I mean whatever is memorably expressed in words: principally but not necessarily what is ordinarily meant by poetry.

  71 The ‘languages’ of the other arts are all languages of the mind minus words. Music is the language of aural sensation; painting, of visual; sculpture, of plastic-visual. They are all language substitutes of one kind or another, though in certain fields and situations these language substitutes are far more effective in communicating than verbal language proper. Visual art can convey appearance better than words, but as soon as it tries to convey what lies behind visual appearance, words are increasingly likely to be of more use and value. Similarly music can convey sound, and very often generalized emotion, better than words; but with the same disadvantage when we try to go beyond the surface of the sound or the emotions it evokes.

  72 The language of music can convey natural sound and can create sound which is pleasurable purely as sound; but we think chiefly of it as an evoker of emotion. It reproduces natural sounds far better than words, which have only the clumsy technique of onomatopoeia; it creates pure sound as words can only if they are largely deprived of meaning, and then only within the narrow range of the human voice. But it evokes emotion in a characteristically imprecise way, unless descriptive words (as in a programme title or a libretto) or historical convention link the emotion verbally to some precise situation.*

  73 Visual art has to deal with the mask; the artist may know what lies behind the appearance of what he paints or draws or sculpts, and we say of some visual artefacts, such as good portraits, that they ‘tell’ us about the subject. They may do this because, as Lavater believed of all human physiognomy, the appearance happens to reveal what lies behind; but they are more likely to do so because the artist translates his verbal knowledge of what lies behind the appearance into distortions or special emphases of the mask of appearance that reveal the ‘secret’ behind – a process that ends in caricature.

  74 This distortion process has an advantage; it allows some, perhaps most, of the ‘secret’ behind, of the real character behind the appearance, to be grasped at a glance. If I am adequately to explain in words the sadness of this Rembrandt self-portrait, I must study his entire work and his biography. The iconographic entry into the reality of his life takes, for any except the professional critic, only a few minutes; the verbal-biographic will take at least several hours, and perhaps much longer.

  75 There is the same comparative immediacy of effect, of communication, in music; in, say, the welling sadness of the adagio from Mozart’s G minor quintet. But the disadvantage of this immediacy is that, without verbal knowledge of the circumstances of Rembrandt’s or Mozart’s life, I have only a very imprecise knowledge of the true nature of their sadness. I know its intensity, but not its cause. I am once again faced with a mask, which may be very beautiful and moving, but behind which I can really penetrate only with words. In short, both the visual and the aural arts sacrifice accuracy of information to speed and convenience of communication.

  76 This both justifies and evaluates them. Being human is wanting to do and to know and to feel and to understand many things in a short span; and any way of making that knowing, feeling and understanding more available to the many is justifiable. But the quality of knowing and understanding, and ultimately of feeling, must be inferior in the visual and aural arts to that in poetry. All the achievements of visual art beyond direct representation of appearance are in a sense the triumphs of a deaf-mute over his deaf-muteness, just as in music the triumphs are those of a blind mute over his mute blindness.

  77 The stock reply in this often-used analogy is that literature is both blind and deaf: not being mute is its specific grace. But the incontrovertible fact is that there is no artefact in the other arts that could not be more or less precisely defined by words, while there are countless artefacts and situations in literature that cannot even in the vaguest way be defined by the ‘languages’ of the other arts. We have neither the time nor the vocabulary nor the desire to describe the great majority of aural and visual artefacts in words, but they are all ultimately describable; and the converse is not so.

  78 The word is inherent in every artistic situation, if for no other reason than that we can analyse our feelings about the other arts only in words. This is because the word is man’s most precise and inclusive tool; and poetry is the using of this most precise and inclusive tool memorably.

  79 Some scientists say that man’s most precise tool is the mathematical symbol; semantically some equations and theorems appear to have a very austere and genuine poetry. But their precision is a precision in a special domain abstracted, for perfectly good practical reasons, from the complexity of reality. Poetry does not make this abstraction of a special domain in order to be more precise. Science is, legitimately, precision at all cost; and poetry, legitimately, inclusion at all cost.

  80 Science is always in parenthesis; poetry is not.

  81 Some technological philosophers and scientists dismiss memorable poetic statements as no more than brilliant generalizations or statements of emotional attitude, whose only significant value is as historical data or bits of biographical description of the poet. To these bigots, all statements not statistically or logically verifiable are supposedly tinsel, pretty carnival gew-gaws remote from the sobriety of the allegedly most real reality: their notion of science.

  82 If he had been such a scientist, Shakespeare would have begun Hamlet’s famous soliloquy with some properly applicable statement, such as ‘The situation in which I find myself is one where I must carefully examine the arguments for and against suicide, never forgetting that the statements I shall make are merely emotional verbal statements about myself and my own present situation and must not be taken to constitute any statement about any other person or situation or to constitute anything more than biographical data’.

  83 Nobis cum semel occidit brevis lux, nox est perpetua una dormienda. When once our short life has burnt away, death is an unending sleep. This is a totally unverifiable statement, but it is a proof that other standards exist besides verifiability. Why else has it been countlessly remembered for two thousand years?

  84 The ‘brilliant generalizations’ of great poetry are not pseudo-equations or pseudo-definitions, because the things and emotions they summarize and define exist, yet cannot be summarized or defined in any other way. The situation about which most poetic statements are made is so complex that only such a statement can make it. Just as the equation may be proved useless because of errors about the data its symbols are based on, so may the poetic statement be ‘disproved’ because it is not sufficiently memorable – not semantically perceptive enough or, non-semantically, not well enough expressed. The better poet disproves the worse.

  85 I think of two poets whose poetry I have a special love for: Catullus and Emily Dickinson. If their poetry were not to exist, no amount of historical and biographical information about them, no amount of music or painting they might have made, no quantity even (were such a thing possible) of interviewing and meeting them, could compensate me for the loss of the precise knowledge of their deepest reality, their most real reality, that their poems give. I wish there was a head of Catullus, I wish there was more than one miserable daguerreotype of Emily Dickinson, and a recording of her voice: but these are trivial lacks beside the irreplaceability the absence of their poetries would represent.

  86 Poetry is under attack from every side; it is under attack from science, more than the other arts are, because like science it deals in meaning, though generally it is not meaning in the same situations or with the same purposes as technological science. It is under attack from the other arts, though this is indirectly rather than directly; and it is under att
ack from the historical situation.

  87 Poetry is often despised because it is not an art with an ‘international language’ like music and painting. It pays the penalty for having the precisest tool. But it is this tool that makes it the most open art, the least exploitable and the least tyrannizable.

  88 Many people maintain that the poets have only themselves to blame for the unhappy state their art is in. Certainly they are guilty – and have been guilty since the Symbolist Movement – of a dangerous confusion between the language’ of music and language proper. A note has no meaning in itself, but gains whatever meaning it has by being put in a series of other notes, and even then, in a harmonic group or melodic series, its meaning will vary with the temperament, race and musical experience of the listener. Music is a ‘language’ whose chief beauty is multiple meaning, and even then, nonlinguistic multiple meaning; in short, music is not a language, so the metaphor is false. But poetry uses a language which must have meaning; most of the so-called ‘musical’ devices in poetry alliteration, euphony, assonance, rhyme – are in fact rhythmical devices, adjuncts of metre. The true sister of poetry is dancing, which preceded music in the history of man. It is from this historic confusion between music and poetry that some of the uncontrolled spread of complex imagery and ambiguity in the postsymbolist arts has come. Mallarme and his followers tried to effect a shotgun marriage between music and poetry. They tried to put the shiftingness, the changing flow, the shimmering essence of Wagnerian and Debussyan music into their words, but the words could not bear the burden; and so, since the word sounds would not sufficiently shimmer, the word meanings had to. I am not belittling the courage or the beauty of Mallarme’s work; but the practical modern result in all the arts of this confusion is this: it is cleverness with symbols, ability to shift them about, to establish and dissolve patterns, to be oblique, to proceed by a semantic differential calculus when a simple addition would be enough, that is alleged to be specifically ‘modern’ and creatively most valid. Of course it can be modern and valid; it is the specifically and the most that we should take less for granted.*