The evil that men do, in Shakespeare, is always a kind of excess. It has to do with the denial of limits, the willingness to cross any moral frontier. Goneril and Regan, Lady Macbeth, Iago: for them, the end justifies everything. By any means necessary. Whereas Hamlet is the opposite: a man so beset by moral qualms that it takes him an eternity to act. The great question of action and the frontiers of action—how far can we go? How far is too far, how far is not far enough?—is at the heart of Shakespeare’s world; also, now, of ours.
The problem of limits is made awkward for artists and writers, including myself, by our own adherence to, and insistence upon, a no-limits position in our own work. The frontierlessness of art has been and remains our heady ideology. The concept of transgressive art is so widely accepted—“if it isn’t transgressive, it isn’t underground”—as to constitute, in the eyes of conservative critics, a new orthodoxy. Once the new was shocking not because it set out to shock but because it set out to be new. Now, all too often, the shock is the new; and shock, in our jaded culture, wears off easily. Like the children in the Disney movie Monsters, Inc., we don’t scare as easily as we used to. So the artist who seeks to shock must try harder and harder, go further and further, and this escalation may now have become the worst kind of artistic self-indulgence. And now, in the aftermath of horror, of the iconoclastically transgressive image-making of the terrorists, do artists and writers still have the right to insist on the supreme, unfettered freedoms of art? Is it time, instead of endlessly pushing the envelope, stepping into forbidden territory, and generally causing trouble, to start discovering what frontiers might be necessary to art, rather than an affront to it?
The British writer (and lawyer) Anthony Julius addresses such questions in a new book, Transgressions: The Offences of Art. Dealing mainly, but not only, with the visual arts, he valuably reminds us of the word’s arrival in English in the sixteenth century, “freighted with negative scriptural overtones,” and its rapid acquisition of other layers of meaning: “rule-breaking, including the violation of principles, conventions, pieties, or taboos; the giving of serious offence; and the exceeding, erasing or disordering of physical or conceptual boundaries.” He examines the transgressive art of Edouard Manet in the 1860s; in Olympia, a picture of a whore to which Manet gave a name often used by the whores of the period, he visited the frontier between art and “pornography”—which literally means “whore-painting,” and is another new word hailing from the same epoch—crossing the boundaries between the nude (an aesthetic, unerotic idea) and the naked woman, gazing out of the picture with frankly erotic intent. In Dead Christ with Angels, Manet questioned the resurrection, and the painting caused great offense. Even Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe was accused of “transgressing the laws both of perspective and morality.” Now that time has installed Manet and his great contemporaries as the art world’s blue-chip masterworkers, we have one answer to those who would reimpose limits on art: which is, that one age’s pornography is another’s masterpiece. In 1857, after all, Madame Bovary so outraged conventional, decent people that Flaubert was prosecuted for writing it. Guardians of the frontiers of public morality should always beware, lest history make them look like fools.
Julius rightly credits the twentieth-century French writer Georges Bataille with the formulation of much of our modern idea of the transgressive. It is interesting, however, that Bataille believed that the breaking of taboos was both a necessity and a “reinscription” of the violated border. “Transgressions suspend taboos without suppressing them.” Julia Kristeva amplifies this: “The issue of ethics crops up wherever a code must be shattered in order to give way to the free play of negativity, need, desire, pleasure, and jouissance, before being put together again, although temporarily.” Here, then, is a second possible answer to the would-be censors in our new, more timorous age: artworks, unlike terrorists, change nothing.
On the five defenses of art, Julius is excellent: the First Amendment defense; the “aesthetic alibi”—“art is a privileged zone in which the otherwise unsayable can be said”; the “estrangement defence” (it is the job of art . . . to alienate us from our preconceptions, by making the familiar strange and the unquestioned problematic); the “canonic defence” (works of art exist in a tradition of such works and must be judged and understood in relation to that tradition); and the “formalist defence” (that art has its own distinct mode of existence and is not to be confused with cognate but distinct works of the imagination, such as propaganda and polemic). As someone who has had some experience of transgression and its consequences, I have at different times employed all these defenses, as Julius is kind enough to note. He concludes, however, that “the aesthetic potential of the transgressive has been exhausted.” In this I am not sure he is right.
Even before the attacks on America, I was concerned that, in Britain and Europe as well as America, the pressures on artistic and even intellectual freedoms were growing—that cautious, conservative political and institutional forces were gaining the upper hand, and that many social groups were deliberately fostering a new, short-fuse culture of easy offendedness, so that less and less was becoming sayable all the time, and more and more kinds of speech were being categorized as transgressive. Outside the Western world—across the Arab world, in many African countries, in Iran, China, North Korea, and elsewhere—writers and intellectuals are everywhere under attack, and more and more of them are being forced into exile. If it was important to resist this cultural closing-in before 9/11, it’s twice as important now. The freedoms of art and the intellect are closely related to the general freedoms of society as a whole. The struggle for artistic freedom serves to crystallize the larger question that we were all asked when the planes hit the buildings: how should we live now? How uncivilized are we going to allow our own world to become in response to so barbaric an assault?
We are living, I believe, in a frontier time, one of the great hinge periods in human history, in which great changes are coming about at great speed. On the plus side, the end of the Cold War, the revolution in communications technology, great scientific achievements such as the completion of the Human Genome Project; in the minus column, a new kind of war against new kinds of enemies fighting with terrible new weapons. We will all be judged by how we handle ourselves in this time. What will be the spirit of this frontier? Will we give the enemy the satisfaction of changing ourselves into something like his hate-filled, illiberal mirror-image, or will we, as the guardians of the modern world, as the custodians of freedom and the occupants of the privileged lands of plenty, go on trying to increase freedom and decrease injustice? Will we become the suits of armor our fear makes us put on, or will we continue to be ourselves? The frontier both shapes our character and tests our mettle. I hope we pass the test.
February 2002
ENDNOTES
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*1 See Aljean Harmetz’s definitive The Making of the Wizard of Oz (Pavilion Books, 1989). Return to text.
*2 When I first published this essay in 1992, the idea of “home” had become problematic for me, for reasons I have little interest in rehearsing here. (But see Part II, “Messages from the Plague Years.”) I won’t deny that I did a great deal of thinking, in those days, about the advantages of a good pair of ruby shoes. Return to text.
*3 According to some contemporary revisionists, Major Doyle never got the 350 Munchkins, and the filmmakers had to settle for 124. Return to text.
*4 After the publication of an earlier version of this essay in The New Yorker, I received an appreciative letter from the Munchkin Coroner, Manfred Raabe, now living in a Penney Retirement Community in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. He liked what I had to say so much that he sent me a gift: a color photocopy of a picture of his big moment on the steps of the Town Hall, holding up that big scroll with its Gothic lettering reading “Certificate of Death.” Under this lettering he had painstakingly filled out my name. I
don’t know what it means to have a Munchkin death certificate, but I’ve got one. Return to text.
*5 There were those who criticized me for making this comparison. Apparently I am the only person not allowed to make fatwa cracks. My job, no doubt, is to be the butt of them. Return to text.
*6 Mr. Naipaul—now Sir Vidia—published a new novel, Half a Life, five years after making this statement. We must thank him for bringing the dead form back to life. Return to text.
*7 Allen Mandelbaum’s translation of the Metamorphoses of Ovid (Harcourt Brace, 1993). Return to text.
*8 M.D. Herter Norton’s translation, from Translations from the Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke (W. W. Norton, 1993 reissue). Return to text.
*9 When this piece was first published in The Observer, a caustic reader wrote in to say that although he supposed (wrongly) that I probably hadn’t had much sex in recent years, he really didn’t want to read about my lusts. Well, too bad, pal. Return to text.
*10 Some of these thoughts found their way into the mind of Ormus Cama, the hero of The Ground Beneath Her Feet. Return to text.
*11 However, it is deeply disturbing to discover that the club records contain no reference to this game, although there was an Arsenal–Real Madrid friendly in September 1962, which Real won 4–0. It seems I have somehow constructed a phantom memory, on the veracity of which my mind continues to insist, in spite of the documentary evidence to the contrary. An early indication, perhaps, that my métier would turn out to be fiction. Return to text.
*12 A joke with legs. In 2001 it happened again. Sol Campbell, the Spurs’ captain and star defender, decided to switch allegiances to Arsenal as well. Return to text.
*13 This love affair didn’t last. Eventually Graham’s true nature reasserted itself and Ginola was sent packing. But not so long afterward, Graham was sent packing too. That’s soccer, as they say. Return to text.
*14 George Graham’s sacking made possible the Second Coming of Glenda. He took over at White Hart Lane and kept the spiritual stuff to himself. Return to text.
*15 They haven’t knocked it down yet. Instead, in the great tradition of British fiascoes—cf. the Bouncing Bridge across the Thames, the Millennium Dome—the super-stadium plan has hit snag after snag. Will there be a new stadium in North London or not? Who knows? Return to text.
*16 When first published in two slightly different versions, this essay caused howls of protest and condemnation. Almost all Indian critics and most Indian writers disagreed with its central assertion. Readers are accordingly warned that mine is an improper view. Which doesn’t necessarily mean it’s wrong. Return to text.
*17 One OFD who managed to allow a bullet-proof Jaguar to be stolen while in his care was instantly named the king of Spain by his colleagues, because the king of Spain (say it aloud) is Juan Carlos. Return to text.
*18 See page 129, in “Farming Ostriches.” Return to text.
*19 Gianni Pico, who negotiated the release of many of the Lebanon hostages. Return to text.
*20 Nicholson and Temple-Morris have both left the Conservatives: Nicholson is now a Liberal Democrat MEP, and Temple-Morris joined Labour. Return to text.
*21 Aziz Nesin did survive the Sivas attack. He died in 1995. Return to text.
*22 The cost of my protection has always stuck in the throat of many British commentators. Estimates ranging from the wild (one million pounds a year) to the surreal (ten million pounds a year) have been repeated so often that they have become pseudo-facts. The British authorities have over the years placed me in an invidious position by refusing to clarify the facts while “senior Home Office sources” regularly leaked misleading information. The truth is as follows. First, although the “thirty different safe houses” provided for me, according to the Mail, at “an estimated cost . . . of ten million pounds” are by now a well-established myth, the fact is that no safe house was provided for me at any time. I always found, and met the cost of, my own accommodation. The cost to the British taxpayer was nil. Second, I was protected by officers who, had they not been allocated to me, would still have been on the police payroll; the additional cost to British taxpayers of protecting me was therefore limited to overtime expenses. Third, during these dark years I have paid a great deal of income tax on those big book deals and large royalties of which segments of the media—and Islamic members of the House of Lords—so disapprove. I would suggest that the British exchequer has actually made a net profit on our strange relationship. Finally, the U.K. taxpayer has never footed the bill when I’ve been out of Britain. Return to text.
*23 The Mail had attacked me for responding to the Prince of Wales’s reported view that too much public money was being spent on me. I had been asked by a Spanish journalist what I thought of Ian McEwan’s remark that Prince Charles cost much more to protect than I did but had never written anything of interest. I had replied light-heartedly that I agreed with Ian. The wrath of the Mail—that same Mail which had devoted dozens of pages to Prince Charles’s desire to be Ms. Parker-Bowles’s tampon!—knew no bounds. Return to text.
*24 Or he didn’t. It now looks probable that Malraux’s much-quoted dictum, “The twenty-first century will be a century of religion or it will not be at all,” which he is supposed to have come up with not long before he died, falls into the same category of never actually made remarks as “Play it again, Sam,” and “Come up and see me sometime.” I’m relieved to discover this. It’s nice not to have to think of Malraux—for so long so sophisticated on the subject of religion—as an old fool at the last. Return to text.
*25 Or, in the new world of the George W. Bush administration, when America tries to foist a useless missile shield, and maybe a new arms race, on us all; or when America withdraws from the Kyoto environmental accords, or refuses to sign a treaty designed to outlaw chemical weapons . . . In spite of all Bush’s attempts to turn the USA into a pariah state, however, it remains the case that American culture isn’t the enemy. Globalization itself isn’t the problem; the inequitable distribution of global resources is. Return to text.
*26 Apparently this wasn’t a joke. I later found out he’d said the same thing, quite seriously, to Lou Reed as well. Return to text.
*27 Now that the Bush administration has revealed itself to be a hard-line, ideological right-wing regime, this article looks ridiculously naÏve. It is the columnist’s fate to be rendered absurd by events. Return to text.
*28 On March 6, 2002, Arundhati Roy was given a “symbolic” one-day jail sentence, and fined two thousand rupees (approximately fifty dollars), for contempt of court. The court said it wanted to show that it could be magnanimous and had taken into account that Arundhati Roy was “a woman.” Return to text.
*29 When I wrote these words, I’d meant to say that we’d probably be subjected to more annoying, intrusive checks at airports. I failed to foresee the eagerness with which Messrs. Ashcroft, Ridge, et al. would set about creating the apparatus of a more authoritarian state. Return to text.
*30 Translated by John Mavrogordato in Poems by C. P. Cavafy (Chatto & Windus, 1951). Return to text.
*31 From T. H. White, The Sword in the Stone. Return to text.
*32 From an article in The Guardian. Return to text.
*33 In the film Little Big Man, the old Cheyenne chief, who calls the Cheyenne “the Human Beings,” which is apparently what “Cheyenne” means in Cheyenne, explains mournfully to the eponymous hero that there is no resisting the advance of the white man because, while there appears to be an inexhaustible supply of white men, there is a strictly limited number of Human Beings. Return to text.
*34 By Stephen Ives and Ken Burns, from their documentary The West; see www.pbs.org/weta/thewest. Return to text.
*35 “The Frontier in Medieval History,” American Historical Association (1955). Return to text.
*36 Q.v., “Columns,” April 1999. Return to text.
*37 In Lectures on Russian Literature, 1981. Return to text.
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Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, LLC: Excerpt from “Songs for a Colored Singer,” from The Complete Poems 1927–1979 by Elizabeth Bishop. Copyright © 1979, 1983 by Alice Helen Methfessel. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, L.L.C.
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W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.: “A Villanelle,” from The Country Without a Post Office, by Agha Shahid Ali. Copyright © 1997 by Agha Shahid Ali. Used by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.
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