The Conversation Continues...

Dear Mr. Loedel,

Your essay, “A Defense of the Moment,” makes a moving case for why we should understand great art not as the byproduct of individual genius, but as the offspring of dynamic conversation. This fecund conversation, as you construe it, is one between past and present. The chasm between past and present operates by means of synapse, facilitating communication between two disparate ages precisely by granting them space. Yet the danger opened by this gulf, as you note, is that it may become unbridgeable. In your metaphor, taken from Kenneth Burke, the parlor doors may be eternally locked.

Nevertheless, reverberating from the frustrated knocks upon the bolted doors is a profound echo, whose “still small voice” (Kings 19:12) may be more gripping and enduring than the baroque bombast inside. Your primary anxiety, however, is not that we will be debarred from the parlor, but that we will no longer even seek to gain entrance to it. Tragically, but without the consolation of catharsis, you envision that we will no longer even know where the parlor doors stand.

Allow me to dissuade you of your melancholic diagnosis by proposing that there is not one parlor, but many. If we have abandoned certain parlors, we have not at all abandoned the rich conversations which constitute our creative lives, but simply moved to other venues, perhaps ones which are more inviting of all people and which do not require us to check our identities at the door in the posturing, Enlightenment spirit of universalism.

In proposing that there are many parlors, I am not disavowing the greatness of Homer and Shakespeare. These, in fact, are the best examples of poets whose works were as accessible to the aristocracy as they were to the illiterate (thanks to the fact that their works were originally performed rather than read). But, I am contesting that these giants, and the other writers of the Western pantheon, provide the only models of “greatness,” a concept which seems to me rather dubious.

You write,

“[I]t is precisely the timeless in art which creates its value, for it alone can convince the skeptics among us that there is such a thing as life whose Form is as real and undying as that of a circle or the number two” (40).

But, why do you want art to be comparable to the static, eternity of the number two? What is glorious about a truth which is indifferent to those who possess it, whose Platonic perfection renders it unchanging? Literature gains its forcefulness, not as an end in itself, but precisely because it speaks to people. Insofar as it inspires, challenges, undermines or provokes, literature emerges from its Cartesian cocoon into the world, a world filled not with a priori concepts, but desires, hopes, wounds, fears, and beliefs. Only In this messy life “under the sun,” does literature speak. And while certain themes may pervade the literatures of all cultures, these themes are human: curiosity, shame, jealousy, love, friendship, enmity, etc. They seize us not primarily because they are useless, but on the contrary, because they are full of wisdom. Wisdom, for many ancient cultures was a pragmatic category. The village sage did not simply perform logical deductions; he advised people how to live and what to do.

Thus, it is not the detached world of literature which humanity requires— an escape from our technologically, goal-driven cosmos— but an invested world of literature, which opens from within our fallen globe, challenging us, as Shakespeare did, to call into question the very dichotomy between life and theatre.

In his essay, “The Avoidance of Love,” Stanley Cavell asks why we don’t protest when we see Othello strangle Desdemona to death. He argues, provocatively, that it is no excuse to say that Othello is merely “acting,” that he is simply a character on a stage. For do we not show the same indifference to Desdemona as we do to the catastrophic events which circumscribe our everyday life? Do we not open and close the newspaper with the same, swift attentiveness that holds us in our seats between the opening and closing of the curtains? For Cavell, the goal of art is not to take us away from the world but to call attention to the fact that, although we inhabit it, we constantly avoid taking responsibility for it. The tragedy of King Lear is not only the tragedy of a fickle king who cannot bear to love, to be a fragile, mortal human being. It is also our own tragedy, our aversion to acknowledge the people for whom we most care, and our propensity for banishing anyone and anything that could undermine our pathological desire for self-reliance.

The so-called “great” writers of previous generations were not great because they were talented. Nor were they great because they were ambitious. Their “greatness” consisted in their sensitivity to the world’s fracture. The poet, writes Heinrich Heine, is the one whose heart is the fault-line through which the world’s cracks traverse.

We can gain admission into the parlor of tradition not by knocking in vain upon the locked entrance, but by running around back to the open exit. There, we can see that the true party is not in the parlor itself, but in the people who are leaving it, joining our own company as exiles.