By Sam Kahn.
In the ’90s, Edward Albee was a bit stuck. He had an idea for a play in which a successful doctor, “having reached his limits,” feels incomplete and decides to inject himself with HIV. The shock and horror Albee received from everybody who heard the idea convinced him that, “clearly, [he] was onto something!”—but, unfortunately, some other playwright came up with the same idea before Albee got around to writing the play. Undeterred, he went “further afield than [Lolita]… to find a taboo still standing,” as his biographer puts it, and eventually came up with one: writing a play about the love a man has for a goat.
A few years before that, Allen Ginsberg joined NAMBLA—the National Man/Boy Love Association—and crowed to his assistant, “You know I think I finally found a cause that is completely indefensible!”
And something similar seemed to have been going through Romain Gary’s mind when he had a leisurely lunch with his publisher, returned to his Paris flat, and shot himself after writing, “No connection with [ex-wife] Jean Seberg. Aficionados of broken hearts should apply elsewhere….So why? … I have at last said all I had to say.” In other words, twenty novels and four pseudonyms in, he was out of ideas—and had to revert to gestures.
All of this is a kind of malady that I associate with a particular artistic generation—although there’s a long history leading up to it. The presumption is that art must shock—that the violation of taboo is what gives art its charge; and that, actually, shock and the overturning of societal norms is art’s highest purpose.
Art-as-subversion runs very deep, of course. If in Greco-Roman art it’s sometimes hard to catch the subversive notes, art was considered insidious enough that Plato, within a chapter of designing his ideal state in The Republic, was discarding whole poetic genres and musical scales for being too politically dangerous. But somewhere in the 19th century the notion develops that a work of art can be most effective when it’s ugly, when it deeply mirrors certain social realities and presents them in such a way that the audience is spurred to immediate action. Napoleon praised The Marriage of Figaro for instigating the French Revolution and Lincoln credited Harriet Beecher Stowe with the Civil War. Opera buffs have been inspired by how a vigorous performance of The Mute Girl of Portici in 1830 bled directly over into the revolution that created Belgium; and stage actors are always a little miffed that their performances, however great, do not lead to the sort of murderous riots that broke out between the partisans of the dueling Macbeths, Macready and Forrest, in 1849. As the 19th century developed, the call to “épater la bourgeoisie” became the centerpiece of art—and the real meaning, in a sense, of the phrase “art for art’s sake.” Sometimes, the shock came in the form of a critique of conventional morality, as in Flaubert or Courbet; sometimes in an overturning of good taste, as in Baudelaire; sometimes in an assault on grammar or sense itself, as practiced by Rimbaud, Mallarmé, Verlaine. Always—and this continued throughout the 20th century—great art was linked to revolutionary politics, or at least to a certain revolutionary spirit, so that every significant work of art was assessed in large part by its ‘influence,’ which really meant its ability to serve as a wrecking ball to various social norms. All of this has become so established that it almost goes without saying. In school, my modern art history textbook—a dry, straightforward book encompassing a hundred years of art—was called ‘The Shock of the New.’ Works of art are always hailed as ‘revolutionary,’ ‘shattering,’ ‘innovative,’ ‘explosive,’ ‘incendiary,’ ‘provocative’—terms of praise that would have surprised medieval or Renaissance artists and would have sent Plato’s guardians scurrying to forbid new rounds of musical scales. These trends were most apparent in visual art—in the focus on movements and concepts, each rapidly supplanting one another in the constant bid to be ever more innovative and avant-garde, so that, by the 1950s, the highest praise that could be bestowed upon Robert Rauschenberg was that he regularly made gallery patrons vomit.
And then—this is my contention—somewhere towards the 1960s the culture simply ran out of ways to shock. Modern art abruptly reversed course and became interested in things like Land Art and Warhol’s practical jokes. All kinds of people continued to do very shocking things for the sake of art, especially in the garish ‘80s—Chris Ofili threw dung on the Virgin Mary, a Russian man nailed his testicles to the Red Square, Ozzy Osbourne bit off the head of a pigeon, Dee Snider (worried that Twisted Sister was losing its edge) filed down his teeth—but the secret was out by now, none of this was stylish but annoying and exhibitionist.
Caught flat-footed were people like Albee, Ginsberg, and Gary. The assumption had been that artists were entrusted with the sacred task of “pushing the envelope,” as Albee insouciantly put it, but they were finding that the culture had gotten way ahead of them. And at the same time—and this was really unnerving to a certain type of artist—the culture revealed itself to be shameless, tawdry, and grotesque in ways that were supposed to be reserved for the avant-garde.
So, in other words, a dead-end—artists simply repeating passed-down wisdom about their expected social role as risqué exhibitionists without really considering what they truly wanted to create.
***
Every essay is expressive of some personal anguish—and where this essay is coming from, really, is a feeling that I carried around for a while but that became acute only around my mid-30s. I began to find less and less around me interesting. The moments in arguments or in interactions or in art—especially in stuff I’d written a few years earlier—where somebody really wanted to impress, provoke, push the buttons of the audience or whoever they were talking to, the moments when people wanted to shock, started to rub me the wrong way, and I noticed that what I liked instead was a very dry, steely maturity, people knowing themselves and their limitations, affirming life with clarity but not optimism. These were random, assorted moments in art, Barbara in August: Osage County telling her teenage daughter, “I don’t care what else you do, how you screw up your life, just die after me, ok?”; the mother in Tiny Furniture listening with perfect composure as her daughter describes how she’d read her diary, had sex in the street, wreaked havoc in every possible way around her, and the mother’s puzzled expression saying something like ‘and you think this can upset me?’; the Bill Murray character in Lost In Translation being asked “Does it get easier?” and having to think for a long time and finally saying, “Yes, it gets easier.” All of these hit me, affecting me in a way that I recognized as a coherent aesthetic that was different from the systemized, patterned shock of taboo-breaking, of provocation, that I’d been conditioned to associate with ‘high art.’
To try to put these ideas into some sort of framework, I found myself zeroing in on a split that I connected with, roughly, the 1880s. This was the period, in Europe, when transgression—a steady diet of ever-more-shocking new art—became normalized as part of the artistic economy. This occurred almost simultaneously to the emergence of a set of artists and intellectuals who were really scandalous—Ibsen, Strindberg, Nietzsche, Ensor, Dostoevsky—and who called into question all conventional values. So, on the one hand, Paris and carefully-calibrated, marketable transgression, taboos shattered with the regularity of the fashion industry trotting out new looks; and, on the other hand, archipelagoed around the periphery of Europe, real madmen, real iconoclasts in anguished exploration about whether there was such a thing as goodness at all.
And the iconoclasts reached a surprising place: resignation. This was the feeling that, in some higher sense, good-and-bad didn’t matter at all and all action could be met with a shrug. The most startling line I’ve come across in Nietzsche is in The Antichrist in which he praises Buddhism as a religion for “peoples in a further state of development” before concluding that Europe is “not nearly ripe for it yet”—at which point Nietzsche kicks into another mode and espouses the familiar apparatus of his philosophy, the Übermensch, the will-to-power, etc., as more conducive to the current status of the European spirit. In other words, both ways are possible; and it’s a kind of coin-flip between the two. A similar sensibility is evident in Dostoevsky—the raging of the Underground Man, of Raskolnikov, paired with what Dostoevsky calls “the initiation into a new unknown life” of Raskolnikov’s rehabilitation in Siberia, the acceptance of faith, a certain slowness and overcoming of his nature. For me, the critical line in Dostoevsky is Svidrigailov speculating, “Maybe eternity is just a small room with spiders”—none of the polarity of heaven-and-hell, as in Christian conceptions, and none of the sturm und drang of the social reformers—the correct attitude towards eternity being a sort of quietude, a wry resignation. Which is where Dostoevsky’s thought, as a whole, lands—if everything is permitted, as Ivan Karamazov puts it, then license loses its power, shock is unavailing, and nothing is more charged than anything else.
These, to me, feel like the twin strands of Western art through the next century—the dominant narrative of shock, dynamism, propulsion, and then, underneath, a serene and detached Buddhism, a wise watcher waiting for the storm to play itself out. That’s the framework, explicitly, of Hermann Hesse’s Glass Bead Game—which, in its tone and structure, is as understated as a hymnal and juxtaposes the orderly, meditative existence of Castalia, the intellectual haven, with the frenetic energy of Tito (“who in his high spirits or his shyness could not move fast enough”) and the tumultuous contemporary world outside Castalia. Hesse’s conclusion is similar to Nietzsche’s—there is a way of being that’s more serene, more satisfying, but Western civilization, in the thick of modernity, isn’t ready for it. And the framework, too, of The Trial or of Waiting for Godot—some dramatic action, some shock, is pushed far enough outside the scope of the narrative as to be essentially non-existent; and a different reality is hinted at, something with foreknowledge, boundless acceptance, a perfect identification with one’s fate. As Hesse writes of the Buddha in Siddhartha, “He did nothing different from any of the other monks, but every gesture spoke of peace, spoke of perfection, sought nothing.”
***
I’ve been bouncing around and free-associating a bit—so I’ll try to put what I’m saying in linear order. Keep in mind that everything so far is limited to Western art as expressive of deeper trends in (broadly-speaking) Western culture.
– From time immemorial: art is seen either as protective or subversive of the sociopolitical order.
– In modernity, particularly the 18th century Enlightenment, a linkage of art with progress—and, in particular, with liberal and revolutionary movements, this being the case with Diderot, Voltaire, Beaumarchais, Byron, etc.
– Towards the mid-19th century, a new taste—shock largely for its own sake. The sense of a deep rot in the social order and art as renovation and corrective. Association with Baudelaire, Flaubert, Courbet, Rimbaud. ‘Épater la bourgeoisie’—piss off the bourgeoisie—a rallying cry. Linkage with revolutionary politics at least in the abstract—if not a specific political point, then a sense of constant war between art and the powers-that-be.
– Around the 1880s, an existential crisis. A generation of genuinely radical thinkers—Ibsen, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, etc.—in one breath finding the core of civilization to be hollow while having no idea how to create a more satisfying system of values. An existential coin toss—Dostoevsky espousing a version of Orthodox faith, Nietzsche the coming of the Übermensch—but an understanding buried in their work that deeper truth is in resignation, indifference.
– A period running from, let’s say, 1905-1960 in which high art is linked with the avant-garde, politically, sexually, stylistically. Just about every ‘significant’ artist you can think of in the 20th century is associated with transgression, boundary-pushing—Joyce, Lawrence, Miller, Nin, Nabokov, etc, etc.
– A sudden loss of ability to shock; the mainstream culture at least as tawdry as the artistic avant-garde—a generation of artists (Albee, Ginsberg, Gary, Roth, Mailer, Amis) suddenly, conspicuously, out of ideas.
– A different taste altogether, as if Nietzsche’s coin-flip had gone in the other direction and the civilization had become Buddhistic, mature, serene. A sub-stream running through Hesse, Kafka, Beckett, avoiding the sensation of shock, and producing very strange, almost otherworldly aesthetic effects—Kafka and his friends laughing to tears as he read them the opening scenes of The Trial; the prisoners at San Quentin watching Waiting for Godot in rapt silence. Some potentially very different aesthetic just starting to come into focus.
This different taste is the predominant theme in the utterly exemplary career of J.M. Coetzee. The strands that come together in Coetzee echo Dostoevsky for his sense of repentance, Beckett for his simplicity and use of silence, Kafka for a certain bemusement at the fact of life itself. Throughout his career, Coetzee struggles with a sense of insecurity about whether he is too quiet, whether he is foregoing the dynamics of shock too completely. He tells the story of a girlfriend leafing through his first book, Dusklands, and thinking to herself, “Someone complaining about his wife. Someone traveling by ox-cart. What is it? Is it fiction?” On the other hand, this sort of interaction is exactly how Coetzee pictures artistic transmission—not necessarily passing through the center of the culture at all, but a curious shift in gravity, an ennobling: his girlfriend, in spite of herself, is impressed, finds herself in an unexpected new presence.
Disgrace—the masterpiece of masterpieces—turns, above all, on this dichotomy. David Lurie, the novel’s protagonist, is a professor of Romantic literature, a Byron scholar. This involves a fidelity to the European high art tradition with its insistence on a brutal honesty, on a certain sexual frankness—a search for shock, for Eros, a fearlessness, as Lurie puts it, in “following a thought down its winding track.” Lurie is professionally vulnerable as a white professor in the near aftermath of apartheid, and, in short order, he missteps, has an affair with a student, is dismissed from his post. In disgrace, all of his cultural reference points collapsing, Lurie begins to work on a long put-off opera on the life of his hero Byron. And, to his surprise, he finds himself utterly uninterested in Byron, Byron’s magnetism, or Byron’s torrid love affair with Teresa Guiccioli. Instead, with a curious mesmerism and tenacity, he finds himself composing a sort of extended aria about Teresa set when she is a “middle-aged widow, Byron long dead.” He has no great hopes for this—it is clear from the outset that the opera will never be performed—but nonetheless a quiet miracle occurs for Lurie. He sits dreamily, he plucks at a banjo, “and, astonishingly, in drips and drabs, the music comes.” After a lifetime of thinking about art, critiquing art, art for the first time passes through him: he plucks at the out-of-tune banjo, a tune comes and words to accompany it. “So this is art, he thinks, and this is how it does its work. How strange! How fascinating!”
It’s important, in discussing Coetzee, to recognize that his art is intricately, inextricably, linked with imperialism and its wind-down. Just as Waiting for Godot is, in a sense, only possible after the Bomb, David Lurie’s conversion, the awakening of his artistry, can occur only after a string of politically-tinged humiliations—loss of power, loss of dignity, an entire cultural framework negated. And this is the other point to make about 1880—the period of the nihilistic rupture, of the deep questioning about the foundation of morality—for this is also the period when imperialism truly kicks into overdrive, ‘The Scramble for Africa,’ ‘The New Imperialism.’ The complete Nietzsche quote on Buddhism from The Antichrist is that Buddhism is only possible in a society with “great customs and gentleness and no militarism.” His Europe—he assumed—was disqualified from that, and any viable European philosophy had to involve dynamism, propulsion, the ‘will-to-power.’ And then, in post-apartheid South Africa, on the far side of the imperialistic tumult, the propulsive 20th century, is David Lurie, in disgrace, adopting an attitude of deep quietism, composing his opera. “Plink-plunk squawks the banjo in the desolate yard in Africa,” Coetzee writes of Lurie. A very different taste—the opera has “no action, no development,” as Lurie fretfully thinks, no propulsion at all, no shock. But there is a power to it, as Lurie and Coetzee seem to discover together, something on the far side of the ‘Western project,’ almost not ready to show itself, slow, resonant: wisdom, art.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Sam Kahn‘s writing includes the novel Kaleidoscope, the short story collections Altered States and Dirty Stories, the plays Chatter and Ultraviolence, and essays in AGNI, The Awl, etc. As a producer, he has had work air on Netflix, Showtime, Paramount+, etc.
First published in 3:AM Magazine: Wednesday, January 5th, 2022.