Can Great Art Change Us?

Also: The search for a psychedelic utopia, Woody Allen in “The New Criterion,” Russian pseudoscience, being King Charles III, and more.

Rembrandt’s Return of the Prodigal Son (c. 1668) in the background. Image via Wikimedia Commons.

In this weekend’s The New York Times, David Brooks asks if viewing art or reading great books makes us better people:

Recently, while browsing in the Museum of Modern Art store in New York, I came across a tote bag with the inscription, “You are no longer the same after experiencing art.” It’s a nice sentiment, I thought, but is it true? Or to be more specific: Does consuming art, music, literature and the rest of what we call culture make you a better person?

He thinks so:

I confess I still cling to the old faith that culture is vastly more important than politics or some pre-professional training in algorithms and software systems. I’m convinced that consuming culture furnishes your mind with emotional knowledge and wisdom; it helps you take a richer and more meaningful view of your own experiences; it helps you understand, at least a bit, the depths of what’s going on in the people right around you.

More:

The novelist Frederick Buechner once observed that not all the faces Rembrandt painted were remarkable. Some are just average-looking old people. But even the plainest face “is so remarkably seen that it forces you to see it remarkably.” We are jolted into not taking other people for granted but to sense and respect the immense depth of each human soul.

When I come across a Rembrandt in a museum, I try to train myself to see with even half of Rembrandt’s humanity. Once in St. Petersburg, I had the chance to stand face to face with one of his greatest paintings, “The Return of the Prodigal Son.” He painted this one at the end of his life, when popular taste had left him behind, his finances were in ruins, his wife and four of his five children were in their graves. I have seen other renderings of that parable, but not one in which the rebel son is so broken, fragile, pathetic, almost hairless and cast down. The father envelops the young man with a love that is patient, selfless and forbearing. Close observers note the old man’s hands. One is masculine, and protective. The other is feminine, and tender.

Though this painting is about a parable, it’s not here to teach us some didactic lesson. We are simply witnessing an emotional moment, which is about fracture and redemption, an aging artist painting a scene in which he imagines all his losses are restored. It is a painting about what it is like to finally realize your deepest yearnings -- for forgiveness, safety, reconciliation, home. Meanwhile, the son’s older brother is off to the side, his face tensely rippling with a mixture of complex thoughts, which I read as rigid scorn trying to repress semiconscious shoots of fraternal tenderness.

Experiences like this help us understand ourselves in light of others -- the way we are like them and the way we are different. As Toni Morrison put it: “Like Frederick Douglass talking about his grandmother, and James Baldwin talking about his father, and Simone de Beauvoir talking about her mother, these people are my access to me; they are my entrance into my own interior life.”

Experiences with great artworks deepen us in ways that are hard to describe. To have visited Chartres Cathedral or finished “The Brothers Karamazov” is not about acquiring new facts but to feel somehow elevated, enlarged, altered. In Rainer Maria Rilke’s novel “The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge,” the protagonist notices that as he ages, he’s able to perceive life on a deeper level: “I am learning to see. I don’t know why it is, but everything penetrates more deeply into me and does not stop at the place where until now it always used to finish.”

I am working on a book on this question right now, and longtime readers won’t be surprised that I disagree with Brooks. He is right that great art does offer us an encounter, but I am not as confident as Brooks that that encounter changes us any more than anything else in life. Can great art change us? Of course. Can it change society? Perhaps. Is its primary purpose to do so? Absolutely not.

I don’t want to give too much away, but I’ll share an excerpt from the introduction of the book (which I am calling Literature as Encounter for now):

In 1959, Frank O’Hara complained in his sardonic “Personism: A Manifesto” about poets who worried about the reception of their work: “But how can you really care if anybody gets it, or gets what it means, or if it improves them? Improves them for what? For death? Why hurry them along? Too many poets act like a middle-aged mother trying to get her kids to eat too much cooked meat.”

The same could be said of critics and scholars today. We are told, on the one hand, that we should read literature because it enriches our lives and our experience of the world. Poetry reclaims, “the power and grace of words,” as one New York Times columnist put it, and gives us hope. On the other hand, we are told that literature is a powerful tool in the war against oppression. It teaches us to love our neighbors and calls us to fight those who subjugate others. It preserves our democracy. How many scholars have argued that the reduction or elimination of humanities courses is a threat to our way of life?

But both understandings of the function and value of literature miss the mark. While certainly motivated by the best of intentions, such defenses of reading often end up reducing literature to little more than a tool of self-actualization or societal transformation. They admit too much to the utilitarian man—that only things that are morally and socially useful are worthwhile—and too often prove wrong.

After all, if literature makes us better people, why are the individuals closest to it—the writers themselves—so often so terrible? Gabriele D’Annunzio was a blood-thirsty warmonger, Ezra Pound was a fascist, E.E. Cummings was a misogynist, William Carlos Williams was a philanderer, Vernon Scannell was a wife-beater and a drunk, and Amiri Baraka was an anti-Semite. Anyone who thinks that reading literature makes us less petty, more empathetic, has never been to an English department meeting.

It would be impossible to conduct a systematic investigation into the lives of writers and readers of literature, but if it were possible, I am confident it would show that writers and readers are no better than anyone else. Like the rest of us, some are bad fathers, and some are good fathers; some are bad mothers, and some, good; some are drunks, and others aren’t; some are angry and selfish, and others are more forgiving and magnanimous.

Moreover, if some poems subvert unjust “power structures,” as the jargon goes, others reify it. How many poets have casually suggested in their work that non-whites are more animalistic than whites? Emily Dickinson presents a man from Malay in “The Malay took the Pearl” as uncivilized and ignorant. Walt Whitman calls black people “baboons” and “wild brutes” in Song of Myself. Rudyard Kipling writes about the “white man’s burden” to save Filipino “captives” who are “Half devil and half child.” Kipling’s poem is about helping others less fortunate, of course, but in doing so he also suggests that Filipinos are incapable of helping themselves.

Defending literature in terms of its therapeutic or moral value has also had the effect of making it more easily dismissed or censured. If reading literature is supposed to improve my emotional well-being, but I find myself “triggered” by its images of sexual violence, why should I read it? If a poem contains morally or politically objectionable material—and its primary purpose is to make us more moral and society more just—why should high school or college students study it? What is the case, in other words, for reading literature when the therapeutic and moral accounts of its value have proven misleading or wrong?

That some professors seem unable to give a clear answer to this question and even give warrant to its premise by removing “harmful” works from their courses or calling for the cancelation of certain writers shows how confused we have become about what literature is and what it does and doesn’t do.

In short, critical defenses of literature’s supposed utilitarian value do more harm than good. They say too much about literature’s secondary values, which disappoint or make literature into something it is not, and they say too little—or nothing at all—about what makes literature distinct from other forms of discourse.

What we need instead, I go on to argue, is a renewed understanding of the religious nature of all great literature. It provides us with an encounter—with something or someone “hors texte” in an idealized form that leads to a moment of recognition. This is the surprise of literature, which in the best works is also a moment of momentary transcendence. It is for this moment that we read, whether it changes us or not.

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In other news, I noted on Saturday that Joseph Bottum and Sally Thomas have concluded their “Poem of the Day” column at The New York Sun. The good news, as I happily discovered this morning, is that they have launched a Substack called Poems Ancient and Modern. Check out their introductory post.

Andrew Ferguson reviews Philip Norman’s book on George Harrison: “There’s a contrast, to put it mildly, between George Harrison’s knavishness, by now well-documented, and his undoubted talent and eagerness to do good in the world, which included countless kindnesses, financial and otherwise, to strangers and friends, a heroic work ethic, and charitable giving that at a very low estimate amounted to $45 million. The contrast should have given this biography more of a literary spark and narrative drive than it has. It’s an oddly listless and incurious book.”

Gary Saul Morson reviews Lenin Walked on the Moon: The Mad History of Russian Cosmism: “Russia has given the world its greatest novels, but no one admires its economy. And as Michel Eltchaninoff observes in his recent book, Lenin Walked on the Moon: The Mad History of Russian Cosmism, it offers visionary schemes, not practical improvements. There is no Russian Thomas Edison or Steve Jobs. When was the last time you bought something made in Russia? When it comes to technology, Russia is weak, except for weapons and, at one time, space travel.”

The first account of King Charles III—”superbly researched and fascinating,” according to Tanya Gold—shows him to be “very odd”: “‘He can cry at a sunset, that one,’ says a courtier of Charles, and I believe it. A bullied child, and an intellectual among George Formby fans, he curls himself into nature. Is it an opportunity to feel small but happy? He dreams about gardening, and plants mazes. He was picking mushrooms when he was informed of his mother’s death.”

Two environmental protesters throw soup on the protective glass encasing the Mona Lisa: “One of the two activists removed her jacket to reveal a white T-shirt bearing the slogan of the environmental activist group Riposte Alimentaire (Food Response) in black letters. ‘What’s the most important thing?’ they shouted. ‘Art, or right to a healthy and sustainable food?’” You can’t make this stuff up.

The Los Angeles Times has laid off 115 people in the newsroom. It is, according to the paper itself, “one of the largest workforce reductions in the history of the 142-year-old institution.”

Naomi Schaefer Riley reviews Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class:

Among the first signs that Troubled is not a typical memoir of foster care and adoption is the author’s announcement on page 4 that he has never tried to locate his birth parents. “Why try to find someone who did not want you in their life?” writes Rob Henderson. It’s a good question, especially because it is almost an article of faith now that kids who are adopted can never lead a fulfilling life unless they understand the mystery of their biological origins. For Henderson—whose father abandoned him before he was born and whose mother was a drug addict who tied him to a chair so she could get high in peace before she was deported back to her home country of South Korea after being arrested—the urge never materialized.

Not just that. He writes that he was lucky in this regard: “I did not have to experience the revolving door of toxic biological parents continually entering and exiting my life the way so many of my foster siblings did.” This sentiment is practically sacrilege in the world of child welfare, where the assumption is that children are always better off with their biological parents and that those parents should be given as much time as they want to rehabilitate and as many chances at reunification as they need.

Michael M. Rosen reviews Tripping on Utopia: Margaret Mead, the Cold War, and the Troubled Birth of Psychedelic Science: “The famous Dupont slogan ‘Better Living Through Chemistry’ was never intended to apply to drug use, but as Benjamin Breen explains in Tripping on Utopia, his charming and highly readable history of the rise and fall of psychedelic substances in the United States and abroad, it might as well have been . . . Much more than a bunch of stoners, the midcentury exponents of drug experimentation were respected scientists seeking to make the world a better place. The so-called Macy circle, funded by the Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation over two decades, comprised psychologists, anthropologists, neuroscientists, pharmaceutical researchers, and even proto-computer scientists.”

The New Criterion has published a short story by Woody Allen. You can read it here.

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Edinburgh Castle in the 19th century. Photo by George Washington Wilson. Image via Wikimedia Commons.