Hot Buttons in the Arts

Clive Hicks-Jenkins, Christmas at Camelot, study for a screen-print, 2016.
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight series.

No undead Nobels!

The lesson of history is that most writers, however celebrated they might have been in their own time, are quickly forgotten. --Samuel Johnson

The latest flap about the Nobel prize in literature is Daphne Williams-Fox's effort to have the Nobel prize awarded to the dead, and specifically to her grandfather, William Carlos Williams. While I give a bow of recognition to a reader-grandaughter's feelings, the current discussion misses something essential. And the argument against dead recipients is not simply because, as biochemist Sir Richard J. Roberts, said, “It could lead to a lot of problems [because] you could imagine the recipients all being dead, which might not be good for the ceremony.” Shades of the Zombie Apocalypse!

Williams-Fox is packed with unimpeachable sentiments. She says, “It’s wrong to also see a hugely influential figure like my grandfather not considered." She stresses that changing the rule would allow books to be awarded on literary merit. And she's right that Williams has been influential. She's right that it's sad to see people overlooked. Absolutely right. We can all come together in sweet, chiming chorus and agree with the general sentiment that unfairness exists in awards (and marketing and public acclaim and many other elements of the publishing-and-rewarding system.) For that matter, aren't we all clear on the idea that life itself tends to be unfair? But think about this: rewarding the long-dead is absolutely the only way books could be reliably awarded on literary merit.

The Nobel prizes, particularly in literature, are a salutary illustration of the fact that we sometimes get it right and sometimes get it wrong. They are a picture of justice side by side with injustice. Societies and writers are familiar companions in the realms of justice and injustice. Did life and readers get it right with Poe, scrabbling for survival? With Melville, who kept writing, decades into obscurity? With Kafka? With Keats? With Dickinson? With Hurston? Did anybody realize exactly how large Shakespeare would loom through time? The Nobel prizes in literature are a reminder that we don't always get it right, that we don't see fully and understand our own times and our wielders of words.

Ashley Norwood Cooper, Sleepless Night, 2017
36" x 30"

We don't need the Nobel prize to decide who is a major writer; that's not its purpose. Why don't we need it to measure greatness? Because we have time, the Mower. Time is wiser than we are. Some books are alive in their own time but suffer a decline among readers as years pass. Perhaps they rode the waves of culture and did not manage to catch and seal the energies of life, so they eventually vanished. The writers and artists of all sorts who are remembered are the ones who remain alive in lengths of time, who influence other writers and artists as time passes. Generative writers. Fertile writers. Writers of books that help their literary descendants to flourish.

To imply that the Nobel committee members have to "get it right" is also wrong. Because they are human beings seated in time and blown by the frisky, sometimes-harsh winds of culture--no way to escape that! Neither the Nobel Prize Committee nor our canon-abolishing universities are able to tell us for certain what current books or plays or poems captured life and will remain. Because these are human structures and institutions, limited in time. There is something much more powerful than English departments and committees that will sound the last word. Instead, we have the Nobel to show us what a society thought at a particular time.

So let the Nobel prize in literature be tossed to the living, sometimes justly, sometimes unjustly. The prize sharply illuminates our inability to roam through time, to see what will live beyond our own day. It shines a light on our successes and our failures at clear sight and understanding, at our limitations as beings caught in the sticky web of time. And those are things we need to recall.

Firing the canon

The central argument against rewarding the dead relates to what's rather pompously called canon formation. It used to be assumed that high aspiration and achievement in writing meant that work might last. Keats, for example, openly aspired to be in the canon of great English poets. In the last century, the canon was essential to the English major. But many (most?) English departments in universities don't teach to or support a canon these days. (As William Giraldi points out, neither do many readers: "The potent brand of immortality that was possible for Wordsworth, Keats, and Austen is no longer possible, and for myriad reasons, chief of which is the basement-level regard we now have for serious writers—the world doesn’t care about literature the way it did when those three were undergoing their immortalization.")

I'm curious about the recent attack on The University of Nebraska - Lincoln that started when a student was allegedly bullied by professors and then administrators. I don't know a lot about it; maybe you do! But I was particularly intrigued by how the event ended up impacting the English Department. In response to events, Nebraska senators have asked whether anyone teaches English anymore at UNL. When legislators start muddling around in the academy and asking such questions, trouble often follows.

I was interested enough to look up the English Department's mission statement, which begins with this mouthful of many marbles: "We, the faculty of the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, believe that one of the greatest strengths of our department is that in all areas of our curriculum—literary and film studies, creative writing, composition and rhetoric, and the digital humanities—we help students develop their capacities in imaginative reasoning so that in their lives as citizens of the world and members of their local communities they can discern connections and synthesize across seemingly incommensurable ideas or beliefs." The mission statement goes on to say that imaginative reasoning feeds into and supports a number of core values our department affirms, including:

• pursuing social justice
• affirming diversity
• engaging with a broad array of real and imagined communities based on empathetic understanding
• fostering a sense of belonging
• instilling a desire for civic engagement

It is curious to see how the intentions of a department and its majors have changed over time. There's no mention of literature or the best thoughts and creations of humankind. The language announces itself through a sort of clubby, up-to-date-with-the-culture jargon that is exactly what the writers desire to convey. The major is now a different thing entirely from what it once was, with different aims and different results.

Clearly the English major has come a long way from when I was an undergraduate, back in the winding mists of time, reading Gawain and the Green Knight and Shakespeare and George Eliot and Dickinson and Yeats. My recollection is being full of fire to make the beautiful, the true, the fine, the lasting--all that impossible youthful aspiration! I believed that adding to the sum of such things was a noble goal, one that did a little bit to transform the nature of the world.

Statement art

Last night I had a conversation with a poet friend on Facebook that seems to be related to issues of replacing art (literature, in the Nebraska comments) with some other program. Here's a little excerpt:

M: ...despite my Southern allergy to saying anything the least bit rude, I feel impelled to confess that I dislike this sort of "art" because it has no depth of meaning (the meaning is plumbed and exhausted instantly), no respect for craft, and no beauty--it interests me no more than Tracey Emin's unmade bed or Jeff Koons's balloon animals. The avant garde (and the ability to transgress in art) died about the time of Warhol's soup cans, but an amazing number of art schools haven't figured that out yet and keep producing people who do profoundly boring work. Shoot me now!
L: I can understand where you're coming from. Still, there is truth in the artist's statements about the pain that there is in making these kinds of art. I feel this national malaise in somatic and emotional ways every day-- and as the blows to civility affect us all, it seems harder to even write or make art...
M: I would say she's making a statement, period. I get it; I'm not stupid. I get it instantly. But just as I don't accept Emin's tent or bed as art, and I don't accept this as art. If we're going to talk about politics and the morale of the country, well, that's entirely different--a whole different issue from the debasement of art. Of course, people will have conversations around such objects (just as they might around other objects or around articles in a magazine) and many will find those conversations significant and meaningful. The conversations may advance thought. (But I still feel moved to say that I don't think that makes the objects into art. The visual arts have been suffering a malaise ever since Warhol. It's interesting to see the return of painting with narrative and figurative work...)
L: There are, nevertheless, artists (and art) that also desire to make "statements" - but are infinitely more layered and complex. So I agree with you on that. I think of Kara Walker's work, for instance - and compared to this one - instantly, also, one can see what a far cry it is from "statement, period."

I confess to being quite fascinated with the return of story and figure to painting, and the disparate ways that is being done, just as I'm interested in how form and sound and meter are seeping back into the mainstream of poetry. The aftershocks of Modernism may be dying away. Or not. I'm unsure. Are we heading forward by going back through tradition, and what will that look like? What does it already look like?

The art market looms like a monster, casting long shadows. Almost all art is eventually forgotten, but we are in an odd time when the market has thrown millions at new artworks, elevating their value in the eyes of many. The market does not want art schools to teach skills and craft again, does not want painting (long in abeyance) to return to figure and narrative, does not want already-purchased pieces (investments) to lose value. But a shift is occurring, little by little. What will happen next?

Touchstones and the Nobel kerfuffle

Muse reading a scroll by an open chest.
Attic red-figure lekythos, ca. 435-425 BC. From Boeotia.
Musée du Louvre. Public domain, Wikipedia.

Bob Dylan . . . can be read and should be read [italics mine], and is a great poet in the grand English poetic tradition. --Sara Danius, Nobel Permanent Secretary 

or 

There’s little that’s inherently controversial about praising words originally meant for vocal delivery. Playwrights have won the Nobel Prize for Literature before. But in an era when songwriting and song performance and song recording are tied together, when many musicians’ literary voices are first received via their literal voices, lyrics alone should inevitably have a hard time competing with “pure” poetry or prose. --Spencer Kornhaber (what a name!) at The Atlantic

A great many of my friends and acquaintances have been busy proving that Dylan either deserves or does not deserve the Nobel, given for the written portion of his work considered as literature. A great many famous people have done likewise.

Being a peaceable sort, I leave them to the joy of it.

But I'm pleased that people are talking about poetry.... What has interested me about this whole episode is the common lack of any sort of clarity about what poetry is, or what high achievement in poetry might look like. Instead, most people are carried away by a tsunami of love for Dylan, or by their anger at the debasement of literature--the latter group assumes that we all know what literature is, though I haven't seen any defining examples or analysis.

The problem with the award is that is given only for the written part of a singer-songwriter's work. But it's hard for us to look at just the words. The songs keep getting in the way, don't they?

I suggest a simple comparison based on some touchstone work by Dylan and a poet, a this versus that to let us consider and meditate on what it means to: a.) hold up lyrics to a song as written literature and b.) to hold up a poem meant to stand alone as written literature to be read silently or aloud.

Here are written lyrics to a Dylan song--do your best to not hear the music in your head. (Well, I can't do it, and I doubt very much that the Nobel committee could either!) Again, remember that the award is for the written words only. If you're my age--well, if you grew up in the Western world--you probably grew up with Dylan songs running through your head, so it's quite a challenge to look just at the words.

I will let Rolling Stone pick the song. Here's the no. 1 on their countdown list, 10 Greatest Bob Dylan Songs.

Once upon a time you dressed so fine
Threw the bums a dime in your prime, didn't you?
People call say 'beware doll, you're bound to fall'
You thought they were all kidding you
You used to laugh about
Everybody that was hanging out
Now you don't talk so loud
Now you don't seem so proud
About having to be scrounging your next meal

How does it feel, how does it feel?
To be without a home
Like a complete unknown, like a rolling stone

Ahh you've gone to the finest schools, alright Miss Lonely
But you know you only used to get juiced in it

The first fourteen lines of "Like a Rolling Stone" give you a taste, but maybe you'd better read the whole thing here. Copyright, copyright! I don't want to get in trouble with something quite so powerful as the Dylan enterprises.

And next to that, we should put a poem not set to music, one that aspires to literature. To lean over backwards and be generous yet parallel, I'll pick one by a living American poet who aspires to literature (but who was, of course, just passed over for the Nobel.) After all, Dylan hadn't won the Nobel until yesterday.

Like Dylan's lyrics, this poem is also under copyright protection, so I'll just give a 14-line excerpt and a link to the remainder. Here goes:

The eyes open to a cry of pulleys,
And spirited from sleep, the astounded soul
Hangs for a moment bodiless and simple
As false dawn.
                     Outside the open window
The morning air is all awash with angels.

    Some are in bed-sheets, some are in blouses,
Some are in smocks: but truly there they are.
Now they are rising together in calm swells
Of halcyon feeling, filling whatever they wear
With the deep joy of their impersonal breathing;

    Now they are flying in place, conveying
The terrible speed of their omnipresence, moving
And staying like white water; and now of a sudden

Read the rest of Richard Wilbur's "Love Calls Us to the Things of This World" at The Poetry Foundation, here.

But perhaps it is more appropriate to look at a poem by someone who has won a Nobel prize for literature. Try these fourteen lines:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre   

The falcon cannot hear the falconer; 

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; 

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, 

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere   

The ceremony of innocence is drowned; 

The best lack all conviction, while the worst   

Are full of passionate intensity. 

Surely some revelation is at hand; 

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.   

The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out   

When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi 

Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert   

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,   

Read the rest of "The Second Coming" by Yeats here. (Even if you've departed on a bandwagon already, Yeats is always worth a look. And, indeed, a second look.)

And now, after some meditation on words alone, perhaps it would be appropriate to have an opinion....

* * *

Postscript: A. M. Juster says, "Dylan’s Nobel honors his words for their musicality, accessibility, and ideas. His recognition may help to drag scholars, MFA programs, and literary journals away from their postmodernist tedium and toward a welcome revival of poetry that provokes and delights the public. For that reason alone, as others flame about Dylan’s Nobel don’t think twice – it’s alright." Read the rest here.