by
Jon Baskin
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But what is it that makes something worth doing? In a lecture delivered in 1900, meekly titled “What Makes a Life Significant?,” William James tries to find the line between ennobling, purposeful activity and its enervating opposite. He has just spent a week at Chautauqua—a kind of fin-de-siècle TED-talk vacation colony—and is left sickened by the buffet of intellectual delicacies on offer. His internal pendulum swings hard to the opposite extreme: under the sign of Tolstoy in his peasant phase, he tries on a sort of worker-worship, a hallowing of all that’s rough and rugged. But soon this too fails him, as he is unable to ignore the fact that most of the workers around him seem more or less miserable, degraded, directionless. “If it is idiotic in romanticism to recognize the heroic only when it sees it labelled and dressed-up in books,” he writes, “it is really just as idiotic to see it only in the dirty boots and sweaty shirt of some one in the fields.”
Characteristically, James tries to split the difference. Meaning, he proposes, must be a product of two factors: effort and ideal. Heavy toil without some explanatory framework is misery, but so is a life of ease and intellectual thrill without struggle. It’s their combination that produces stable purpose: a struggle against some worldly resistance, for some socially shared goal. Both the content of the activity and the way it’s understood in the culture, the what and the why, matter. “Ideal aspirations are not enough,” he writes, “when uncombined with pluck and will. But neither are pluck and will, dogged endurance and insensibility to danger enough, when taken all alone. There must be some sort of fusion, some chemical combination among these principles, for a life objectively and thoroughly significant to result.”
Objectively and thoroughly significant! In Graeber’s story, the sort of work that meets James’s requirements is precisely what’s cut out of the present arrangement. It’s the hole at the center of the wheel. Hard but necessary labor (like cleaning) lacks the valorization and rewards that might make it bearable, while the sorts of large-scale undertakings which by their nature combine effort and ideal—projects aimed at reducing general suffering, like building affordable housing, adequately staffing schools or greening the power grid—are not being done, or only in small defensive formations. Between James and Graeber, we get an image not only of a busted material economy, but of an economy of meaning that’s weirdly warped as well: a wide base of important jobs denied social recognition, a thick middle of pointless or destructive feudal make-work, and a little penthouse on top full of tenured professors, superstar artists and NGO executives, the one-percenters of purpose, munching hors d’oeuvres and talking in hushed voices about the dire state of the world.
the last image is beautifully vivid
Beauty, like love, requires effort. When I think of “difficult” art—art that requires work to appreciate and understand—I think of the two maddening weeks I spent reading Henry James’s The Wings of the Dove, unable to make sense of his syntax, crashing against unyielding paragraphs, making out the irrepressible Kate Croy and the doomed heiress Milly Theale like rouge-streaked shadows in a silver mirror. But difficulty is not reserved to high culture or to modernism. Outside the window to my left is a slim gray tree, about twenty feet tall, its delicate branches curving in all directions. How long would I have to stare at this tree to take in the full measure of its beauty? Thirty seconds? Two hours? One premise of aesthetic education is that deepening our sensitivity to art and beauty demands the deliberate application of attention. Lest we turn out like Oblomov, the winning yet incurably lazy hero of Ivan Goncharov’s classic nineteenth-century novel, who lives in rooms strewn with books he never finishes.
Beauty brings us to a halt: it imposes, if only for a flash, the cessation of activity. (On the lawn in front of the library, seeing a runner in red shorts complete the last flailing strides of a sprint before pitching forward, his fingers caressing soft dirt: I let my book fall.) [...]
In high school I was learning how to read for symbols in addition to surfaces, and I read Lolita as a symbol for the things we love but cannot keep. I was old enough to know, if not accept, that my hormone-fueled infatuation would dim, just as Lolita’s charms fade into a banal adulthood. (She looks “pale and polluted” when Humbert sees her last.) “Lolita has to be impossibly young,” writes Elif Batuman in the London Review of Books, “because the brevity of youth is a metonym for the brevity of life, and the monstrousness of Humbert’s passion is the monstrousness of facelifts, or of Lenin’s tomb, or of the wedding cake in Great Expectations.” A passion for youth is a passion for what is at every moment in the process of decline. Lolita, then, is not only about the irretrievability of innocence but about the doomed structure of desire itself. Desire, like youth, is endangered by its very continuation. To try to remain young is to grow old. To want all the way to the culmination of consummation is to stop wanting. Orgasm = death. What romance doesn’t come to seem “pale and polluted” in the aftermath?
Watching denizens of the #MeToo movement squint so suspiciously at a book I have found so beautiful in so many ways, I can’t help but feel that we are depriving ourselves to no end. We, the survivors of male abusers and the victims of workplace harassment, are supposed to become gluttons for the additional punishment of excommunicating artworks bearing the slightest tint of taint. But what good is this festival of renunciation? It only broadens the scope of our already substantial losses.
[...]
This reading around, Lolita seemed to me to enact a fantasy of impossibly perfect curation, like Ingmar Bergman movies in which every scene is composed as exactly as a painting. Life could never look so good, which is why we need the movies. The point of erotica, at least to some extent, is that it is so radically unlike fumbling tongues in middle school or struggles with stubborn zippers. Books like Lolita and Story of O are fairy tales. In them, desire does not undo itself. Pain does not hurt. Youth does not age.
In his book of literary commentary, The Hatred of Poetry, Lerner posits a very different role for art in modernity, one that turns not on the willing suspension of disbelief, but on our “embarrassment” that poems and novels exist at all. Beginning from the memorable opening words of Marianne Moore’s “Poetry”—“I, too, dislike it”—Lerner observes that “the poem is always a record of failure.” He does not mean by this to discourage the reading or writing of poetry; he wants, rather, to show how this failure can become the foundation for a properly self-conscious form of literary appreciation. Indeed, he argues that the greatest poets are the ones able to most powerfully evoke our disappointment at the gap between the transcendental impulse that inspires us to write poetry, and the anticlimax of individual poems, bounded as they are by “the human world with its inflexible laws and logic.”
In spelling out the theory behind his artistic practice, however, Lerner exposes the misunderstanding in the hatred of literature’s disenchanted heart. He confuses the incapacity to suspend disbelief—the unwillingness to enter into the artwork’s imaginative world—for a mark of intellectual sophistication, when, as has always been clear to all but its most embarrassed proponents, it is a mark of imaginative destitution. “I have never been ‘disenchanted’ with language,” says the contemporary poet, critic and non-hater of literature Patricia Lockwood. “Well, except the times a businessman has talked to me.”
Literature, after all, is precisely that which is not bounded by “inflexible laws.” This does not mean it escapes those laws entirely, whether the laws of nature or the lawlike relations that govern our political and social lives. Literature is about life and thus contains everything in it that life contains—including politics, history and certainly disappointment. But when we read something that moves us to tears or laughter, pity or terror, conviction or bewilderment, it is because it reminds us that the “real” is not always disenchanted, our lives not always reducible to the conditions of their possibility. Perhaps we do live in a time, as our greatest poet of disenchantment once described it, of “specialists without spirit, and sensualists without heart.” All the more reason to resist the march toward a literary culture without love.
i dont really get the context of the lerner critique but i always love writing about writing
In his autobiography, Ninagawa recalls an incident from a couple years before his career turned to Shakespeare. A teenager called out his name and approached him outside a movie theater in Shinjuku. The kid had a question he needed to ask: “Can you name any unfulfilled aspirations?” Ninagawa smoked silently. “None worth mentioning,” Ninagawa said finally. “I don’t name aspirations.” “Oh,” the teenager said, “I’m glad,” pulling out a jackknife from his pocket and showing it to him. “I’ve been watching your plays for a while. I was going to stab you if you told me you’ve started to aspire to things, instead of doing them.” Ninagawa would write that the boy’s voice never left his mind when he directed; that if there were a thousand teenagers in the audience—a thousand eyes—they could hold a thousand knives. He had to create a theater that roused enough feeling that it would make a teen want to wield a knife for Japanese theater.
Watching Ninagawa in college, I had a single wish: that someone would clap and it would all suddenly be clear to me: the characters I transform into, what I transform from, who I am performing for. There were moments of inanity in everyday American life when I wanted to pull a Ninagawa and make things giant and absurd—drop a life-size horse on someone’s head—so that I didn’t feel obliged to be a cordial translator for “my” culture. When I watched Ninagawa, I felt a sense of security: I wanted to swallow his assurance in a stable idea of a Japanese person, who he wanted his audience to be, because I didn’t have it. Most of all, I wanted him to put a framing device on my world. After losing R, I wanted to be legible to someone again.
Dropping the taboo on treating characters as if they were real won’t tell us what questions to ask or how to go about answering them. Nor will it tell us what books we should now embrace and try to canonize. Dropping the taboo just increases our freedom to be whatever kind of critic we wish to be, to work on the kind of writing we care about, in ways that make intellectual sense to us. But such freedom can feel scary, for now we have to find our own way forward. To echo a theme in Cavell’s work: we need to “stake our own subjectivity” in our writing. This doesn’t mean that we have to become painfully private. A critic’s confessions may be fascinating, but the place to reveal them is not necessarily in an essay on Jane Austen. To stake oneself in one’s writing means, rather, to try to acknowledge, as far as possible, what our own investments in a topic are. These investments may well be intensely intellectual, but they are no less personal for all that. There is a lot to be said about this. Here and now, I’ll just explain what I want to do now that I have understood what’s at stake in the taboo.
My dad was a garbage truck mechanic on the day shift. Mom worked night shift in a factory line that filled aerosol spray cans, deodorant tubes, perfume bottles. They were trying to save enough money to buy a home of their own. In the meantime we rented a house in a campground.
Just when there was any extra money at all, my brother or I would snap a bone doing something crazy in the campground.
When my brother and I complained about having to do something we didn’t want to do, dad reminded us that the job he worked so he could feed us involved him sometimes having to crawl under a garbage truck and heat up rusted parts with a blowtorch. Oh how the maggots fell on him. We’d do our homework then. We’d clean our rooms then. Whatever we could do to avoid a life of maggots.
My parents lived paycheck to paycheck. While mom was guiding the forklift driver over to a pallet of a zillion cans of hairspray, dad opened the oven and pushed in a baking sheet filled to max capacity with frozen store-brand fish sticks.
And times got worse for my mother and father. Campbell’s soup shrunk the size of their canned creamed corn. The store-brand frozen green beans with the almond slivers vanished from the freezer section. The toaster broke and we drove around from store to store searching for a replacement, but there were no good deals. Dad bought a toaster he didn’t like at a price he didn’t like and we had peanut butter and jelly for dinner while my mom stood at a conveyor belt, missing us and counting down the minutes to her cigarette break so she could call us from the payphone and say goodnight.
Art isn’t something you should protect from yourself. Just run towards it full sprint and embrace how ridiculous your ideas are, how unguarded, how close to something a child might think up, lying on their back in a field overgrown with weeds. The sights and sounds of the rotating world revealing itself to you, or not.
Take a sip of black gas station quality coffee, take a bite of fish sandwich, write down the adventures of the day. Every day adds up. Every lunch break is something more than a lunch break.