Rocket and Lightship Read online

  Rocket and Lightship

  Essays on Literature and Ideas

  Adam Kirsch

  For Remy

  Contents

  Preface

  Art over Biology

  Darwinism at 150

  Francis Fukuyama and the Beginning of History

  The Last Men: Houellebecq, Sebald, McEwan

  Under the Volcano: Giacomo Leopardi

  Up from Cynicism: Peter Sloterdijk

  The Deadly Jester: Slavoj Žižek

  Still the Good War?

  Beware of Pity: Hannah Arendt

  The Interpreter: Walter Benjamin

  Alfred Kazin’s Clamor

  Susan Sontag’s Seriousness

  The Importance of Being Earnest: David Foster Wallace

  The Lesson of the Master: Cynthia Ozick

  Liberation and Liberalism: E. M. Forster

  Zadie Smith and the Future of the Novel

  The Turbulence of Saul Bellow

  Proust Between Halachah and Aggadah

  Rocket and Lightship

  Acknowledgments

  Preface

  “It is important, therefore, to hold fast to this: that poetry is at bottom a criticism of life.” Matthew Arnold’s formulation, which he advanced in his essay on Wordsworth and returned to in later essays, has never quite recovered from the beating it took at the hands of T. S. Eliot, who found it a shallow way of thinking about something as fundamentally mysterious as poetry. “At bottom, that is a great way down; the bottom is the bottom. At the bottom of the abyss is what few ever see, and what those cannot bear to look at for long; and it is not a ‘criticism of life,’” Eliot replied. Indeed, it is hard to be quite comfortable with the way Arnold goes on to define the “criticism of life” as the “powerful and beautiful application of ideas to life.” Application sounds like too external and mechanical a process, and not all the ideas we need are beautiful.

  To understand the phrase more broadly, however, may redeem it. All literature, not just poetry, is a criticism of life—but not in the sense of a negative comment or a suggestion for improvement, as Arnold seems to imply. Such criticism is, rather, the record of one mind’s response to the experience of being in the world. Each genre of literature has its own methods for representing that experience and interpreting it: poetry uses rhythm and metaphor, fiction uses plot and character. In a broader sense, even genres of writing that are not ordinarily thought of as literary—such as theory, philosophy, politics, history—can also be seen as criticisms of life. For any kind of serious writing is expressive of the writer’s experience of being in the world, of his aspirations and expectations and anxieties.

  If this is so, then almost any genre of writing can be usefully subjected to literary criticism. For criticism, too, is a kind of literature; the critic expresses his own sense of life through his responses to other minds and sensibilities. This makes criticism, inevitably, a less immediate and powerful form of writing than poetry or fiction, and a more self-conscious one. But since all serious readers engage in this same process of shaping themselves in response to what they read, criticism is also capable of a unique kind of intimacy, and even, despite appearances, vulnerability. For the critic’s assertions are always, read truly, only propositions, impressions, requests for assent. This is how it seems to me: does it seem that way to you too?

  Thinking of my own work as a critic in this way, I see a basic continuity between writing about poetry, as I have done in the past, and writing more broadly about literature and ideas, as I do in this book. These essays, written over approximately the last eight years, engage with texts at the point where literature intersects with society and history—the point where, I think, criticism eventually has to end up. Begin thinking about, say, the novels of E. M. Forster, and soon enough it becomes clear that Forster’s fiction is born from, and limited by, a certain understanding of liberalism. Thinking about Darwinism means wondering what the animalization of humanity means for art and ethics. Examining a writer’s Jewishness, as I do in several essays, means exploring his or her most personal being and most public, historical identity.

  This way of thinking about criticism rests on the liberal principle that the individual, the individual’s experience of life, is prior to all the languages we use to describe it. Different kinds of writing demand different techniques of response, but in every case what interests me is the criticism of life a text expresses. And the way that certain themes and concerns keep coming back from essay to essay in this book suggests that I have tried, at times unconsciously, to express something of my own experience in the form of criticism.

  Rocket and Lightship

  Art over Biology

  In his early story “Tonio Kröger,” Thomas Mann created a parable of one of the central modern beliefs, which is that the artist is unfit for life. Starting from childhood, everything about Tonio serves to mark him out from the society in which he is fated to live. Dark among blonds, half-Spanish among Germans, an introvert among the sociable—all these are merely symbols of his true estrangement, which is that he is a writer. But his pride in the depth of his feeling and understanding is inseparable from his longing for, and envy of, the ordinary, which is embodied in his boyhood friend Hans Hansen and his teenage love Ingeborg Holm—neither of whom reciprocate or even notice his passion. At the end of the story, Tonio has a vision of these two paired off in happy, fruitful partnership—a destiny he can never share: “To be like you! To begin again, to grow up like you, regular like you, simple and normal and cheerful, in conformity and understanding with God and man, beloved of the innocent and happy.” But love and marriage and parenthood are barred to Tonio, because he has an artist’s soul: “For some go of necessity astray, because for them there is no such thing as a right path.”

  In associating art with loneliness, sorrow, and death, Mann was not presenting a new idea but perfecting an old tradition. Everywhere you look in the art and literature and music of the nineteenth century, you find examples of this same figure, the artist banished from life: in Leopardi, the stunted, ugly, miserable poet; in Flaubert, the novelist too fastidious for bourgeois existence; in Nietzsche, the wanderer upon the earth. What is different about Mann is that, writing in 1903, he has fully assimilated the Darwinian revolution, which taught him to think about life in terms of survival and fitness. In his great novel Buddenbrooks, Mann tells the story of a family whose fitness to thrive in modern society declines in tandem with the growth of its interest in ideas and art. Its last representative, Hanno, is a musical prodigy who dies an excruciating death before reaching sexual maturity.

  Mann’s sense of the perverse glory of the artist’s unfitness is one of his legacies from Nietzsche, who wrote in Human, All Too Human, under the rubric “Art dangerous for the artist,” about the inability of the artist to flourish in a modern, scientific age:

  When art seizes an individual powerfully, it draws him back to the views of those times when art flowered most vigorously. ... The artist comes more and more to revere sudden excitements, believes in gods and demons, imbues nature with a soul, hates science, becomes unchangeable in his moods like the men of antiquity, and desires the overthrow of all conditions that are not favorable to art. ... Thus between him and the other men of his period who are the same age a vehement antagonism is finally generated, and a sad end—just as, according to the tales of the ancients, both Homer and Aeschylus finally lived and died in melancholy.

  As Nietzsche’s reference to the Greeks suggests, the link between artistry and suffering is not a modern invention. What is modern is the sense of the superiority of the artist’s inferiority, which is only possible when the artist and the intellectual come to see the values of ordinary life—prosperit
y, family, happiness—as inherently contemptible. The exhilarating assault on bourgeois values that was modernism, in all the arts and in politics too, rested on the assumption, nurtured through the nineteenth century, that there was nothing enviable about what T. S. Eliot bitterly derided as the cycle of “birth, copulation and death.” Art, according to a modern understanding that has not wholly vanished today, is meant to be a criticism of life, especially of life in a materialist, positivist civilization such as our own. If this means that the artist cannot share in civilization’s boons, then his suffering will be a badge of honor. (Dictators who sought to protect their people from the infection of “degenerate art” were paying a twisted homage to this principle.)

  It is no coincidence that the same era should have given birth to Darwinism and to the aesthetic cult of decadence. The iron law of Darwinian evolution is that everything that exists strives with all its power to reproduce, to extend life into the future, and that every feature of every creature can be explained as an adaptation toward this end. For the artist to deny any connection with the enterprise of life, then, is to assert his freedom from this universal imperative, to reclaim negatively the autonomy that evolution seems to deny to human beings. It is only because we can freely choose our own ends that we can decide not to live for life, but for some other value that we posit. The artist’s decision to produce spiritual offspring rather than physical ones is thus allied to the monk’s celibacy and the warrior’s death for his country, as gestures that deny the empire of mere life.

  Darwin himself recognized that the human instinct to produce and admire art posed a challenge to the law of the survival of the fittest. He addressed the subject obliquely in 1871 in The Descent of Man, the work in which he advanced the idea of sexual selection as a complement to natural selection. Sexual selection was Darwin’s ingenious way of explaining features of the natural world that seemed gratuitously wasteful, in a fashion that the parsimony of evolution ought not to have permitted. The classic example is the peacock’s tail: why should the bird devote so much of its energy to producing a totally nonfunctional but amazingly decorative tail? It is the kind of natural splendor that, to earlier generations, might have spoken of the generosity of a Creator. The problem plagued Darwin: “The sight of a feather in the peacock’s tail, whenever I gaze at it, makes me sick.”

  The discovery of sexual selection solved the problem with brilliant economy. Such displays, Darwin realized, were male animals’ ways of competing for the favor of the female. By this logic, the tiniest initial preference of the female for a conspicuous male—a peacock with a patterned tail, an elk with enlarged antlers—sparked a continual competition among males to become even more conspicuous. In every generation, a more beautiful peacock would leave more offspring than a homelier one, thus passing on the genes for beauty to his offspring, who would undergo the same kind of selection.

  Animals produce beauty on their bodies; humans can also produce it in their artifacts. The natural inference, then, would be that art is a human form of sexual display, a way for people to impress mates with spectacularly redundant creations. There is even an animal precedent for this: the Australian bowerbird, which attracts females by building an incredibly elaborate bower out of grass and twigs, and decorating it with colorful bits and the juice of crushed berries. The bower is a perfect example of an artwork whose explicit purpose is to promote reproduction.

  For Darwin, the human sense of beauty was not different in kind from the bird’s. “This sense,” he remarked in The Descent of Man, “has been declared to be peculiar to man,” but “when we behold a male bird elaborately displaying his graceful plumes or splendid colors before the female ... it is impossible to doubt that she admires the beauty of her male partner.” Still, Darwin recognized that the human sense of beauty was mediated by “complex ideas and trains of thought,” which make it impossible to explain in terms as straightforward as a bird’s: “When ... it is said that the lower animals have a sense of beauty, it must not be supposed that such sense is comparable with that of a cultivated man, with his multiform and complex associated ideas.”

  In particular, Darwin suggests that it is impossible to explain the history or the conventions of any art by the general imperatives of evolution: “Many of the faculties, which have been of inestimable service to man for his progressive advancement, such as the powers of the imagination, wonder, curiosity, an undefined sense of beauty, a tendency to imitation, and the love of excitement or novelty, could hardly fail to lead to capricious changes of customs and fashions.” Such changes are “capricious” in the sense that they are unpredictable from first principles. Put more positively, one might say that any given work of art can be discussed critically and historically, but not deduced from the laws of evolution.

  This sensible reticence served both art and science well enough for more than a century after Darwin’s death. But with the rise of evolutionary psychology, it was only a matter of time before the attempt was made to explain art in Darwinian terms. After all, if ethics and politics can be explained by game theory and reciprocal altruism, there is no reason why aesthetics should be different. In each case, what appears to be a realm of human autonomy can be reduced to the covert expression of biological imperatives.

  The first popular effort in this direction was Denis Dutton’s much-discussed book The Art Instinct. For Dutton, the exposure of the Darwinian origins of art was meant to build a case against the excesses of postmodernism. If human aesthetic preferences—for representation in visual art, tonality in music, and narrative in literature—are the product of hundreds of generations of evolutionary selection, then it follows that art that rejects those preferences is doomed to irrelevance. In this sense, Dutton’s Darwinism was aesthetically conservative: “Darwinian aesthetics,” he wrote, “can restore the vital place of beauty, skill, and pleasure as high artistic values.” Dutton’s argument has been reiterated and refined by a number of subsequent writers, who do not necessarily share his aesthetic agenda or his artistic cultivation. But their proliferation suggests that Darwinian aesthetics—and its more empirical cousin, neuroaesthetics—is growing quickly in confidence and appeal.

  On its face, the notion that the human instinct to make and appreciate art can be explained by evolution seems true, even a truism. We are the products of evolution in the things that make us distinctively human no less than in the things we share with the lower animals. There is no longer any argument, for example, that language is an evolutionary adaptation, which over the course of human prehistory must have paid large dividends in terms of survival and reproduction. This makes theoretical sense—language is the basis of human cooperation and innovation—and the evidence supports it: language is a human universal, appearing in every culture and learned by every individual in the same way at the same phase of life. It is as innate as walking and eating.

  Almost the same can be said of art. As Dutton put it: “The universality of art and artistic behaviors, their spontaneous appearance everywhere across the globe ... and the fact that in most cases they can be easily recognized as artistic across cultures suggest that they derive from a natural, innate source: a universal human psychology.” Dutton’s own fieldwork among the Sepik River people of New Guinea showed him that the Sepik carvers were automatically identifiable as artists even to an American who is the product of a wholly alien culture: “Sepik criteria of artistic excellence are in principle available to anyone with the time and the will to learn to perceive; they are not monadically sealed in Sepik culture.” Again like language, art is universal in the sense that any local expression of it can be “learned” by anyone.

  Yet earlier theorists of evolution were reluctant to say that art was an evolutionary adaptation like language, for the simple reason that it does not appear to be evolutionarily adaptive. After all, every moment and every calorie spent carving a canoe, or building a cathedral, or writing a symphony, is one not spent getting food, evading predators, or reproducing. Not only
is it not obvious that art and “high culture” help human fitness; as we have seen, there is a long tradition holding that the artist is peculiarly unfit for life, especially family life.

  To avoid this contradiction, Stephen Jay Gould suggested that art was not an evolutionary adaptation but what he called a “spandrel”—that is, a showy but accidental by-product of other adaptations that were truly functional. Gould, Dutton writes, “came to regard the whole realm of human cultural conduct and experience as a by-product of a single adaptation: the oversized human brain.” Having a large brain was useful to our ancestors, allowing them to plan and forecast, cooperate and invent; and it just so happens that a large brain also allowed them to make art. Steven Pinker suggested something similar, if more disparagingly, when he described the brain as a “toolbox” which, in addition to promoting survival and reproduction, “can be used to assemble Sunday afternoon projects of dubious adaptive significance.”

  The new Darwinian aesthetics is motivated by a desire to defend the honor of art against this kind of dismissal. In a strictly Darwinian nature, of course, there is no such thing as honor, value, or goodness; there is only success or failure at reproduction. But the very words “success” and “failure,” despite themselves, bring an emotive and ethical dimension into the discussion, so impossible is it for human beings to inhabit a valueless world. In the nineteenth century, the idea that fitness for survival was a positive good motivated social Darwinism and eugenics. Proponents of these ideas thought that in some way they were serving progress by promoting the flourishing of the human race, when the basic premise of Darwinism is that there is no such thing as progress or regress, only differential rates of reproduction. Likewise, it makes no logical sense for us to be emotionally invested in the question of whether or not art serves our evolutionary fitness. Still, there is an unmistakable sense in discussions of Darwinian aesthetics that by linking art to fitness, we can secure it against charges of irrelevance or frivolousness—that mattering to reproduction is what makes art, or anything, really matter.