The Lonely Aristocracy of True Art

One of the great regrets experienced, living in our time, is the decline of literature, and that of art generally. We might lay the blame for this at many sets of feet. Certainly, the relentless commercialisation of beauty in the name of entertainment has done its work well; most classical symphony orchestras now record scores for video games. This isn’t to call them bad; take a listen to the work of Jeremy Soule or Marcin Przybyłowicz. They nobly hold their own, lift the chin skyward, and we must judge a thing on its own merits, however one regards the importance of the sculptor to the sculpture.

Nobody disregards Leonardo da Vinci thanks to the Borgias, though to enjoy a true flowering of the arts, we could do with some latter-day Medici. There is something to be said for patronage that is more than a mere market, for patronage that doesn’t need to always be considering mass appeal, bottom lines and sales figures; and this is to say nothing of the patronage of modern government. As Mencken wisely reminded us, nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the average person, and perhaps we could add to this the discernment of the average bureaucrat. We could say the same about taste generally, though appetites grow with the feeding, and what passes for art today is often prolefeed on the one hand or the outright rejection of beauty on the other. The latter is done mainly in the name of ego, largely among those who have declared themselves the arbiters of what constitutes the beautiful.

I am inclined to think the driver behind this decline is a demotic general culture that can only exist in hostility to anything aristocratic. Good literature is aristocratic—in the most basic sense, rather than the socio-economic one; it is about the best. And in this celebration of the best is a certain kind of truth. All our postmodern pretences to universality, most of which are cynically political in intention and utilise the language of liberalism, miss that it is in high art that genuine universality can be found. The travails of the human condition, and the existence of beauty that makes it all worthwhile, are the only truly universal things most of us experience.

This was driven home to me, walking beside a scenic lake with a friend educated in Singapore, who related to me those works that had affected her most: Shakespeare, obviously, along with what furnished the curriculum of her international school. To receive a decent Western education, you’re better off in the East; we’ve mangled or abandoned Shakespeare, he being too difficult for our current crop. Among the books she listed were those that came from other parts of the world: Silence by Shusaku Endo, The Redundancy of Courage by Timothy Mo, The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini. Good literature is not parochial, even if our current bent in fiction, masquerading as something universal, most certainly is. There is something transcendent about it.

I expect very little from popular culture, yet still manage to be disappointed. Game of Thrones is the best example of what now qualifies as literature adapted to mass-audience appeal, and most of us would agree that the first few seasons were very entertaining. Towards the end, it began to show its demotic credentials, and finally devolved into something that checked all the right boxes for the postmodern consumer. You cannot expect anything aristocratic to come from an author who declares himself to be the anti-Tolkien; it’s all whores, dishonour and betrayal, because to the person with no upward trajectory, all pretence to honour and morality is the delusion that those things enjoy an objective existence. In an inversion of St Basil’s credo, it is wickedness, not good, that is the prime substance of the universe. In an age increasingly reduced to thinking of everything human in terms of evolutionary psychology, this should not be surprising, but we should be careful to guard ourselves against becoming too cynical. Nil desperandum; there are few things as contemptible as the lucky man who refuses to renounce his metaphysical pessimism.

It ought to be a firm reminder that a liberal dispensation can only manage heroism with a series of winks and nods to the audience, to make sure they are in on the joke. There are no heroes in the West any longer; as the Iranians quipped after suffering the drone-striking of a national hero, they regretted that they were unable to assassinate SpongeBob SquarePants in return. The liberal hero rings false. The cowboy who gruffly declares that he doesn’t take kindly to homophobia around here could never exist in the world that birthed his form. Liberal heroes are limited to superhero franchises, because they cannot be human beings; the logical incarnation of the liberal hero is the antihero.

Contrary to popular belief, we still need heroes, and the lukewarm selection we have been recently served by those toiling in what Adorno called the culture industry do not pass muster.

How did we, a people spoiled by every material advantage, end up so cynical? It says something profound about what human beings are really like, that nothing will make you worse than the strenuous avoidance of all difficulties in life, to bleat forever about scars that were never wounds. Suffering can ennoble as well as break; Solzhenitsyn thanked the camps, and Nietzsche urged us to swallow our poison, as we badly need it. Yet so often the suffering depicted in contemporary art is more akin to that of the snuff film. Modern forms certainly enjoy rolling in the gutter, but seemingly have no interest in looking at the stars.

Cormac McCarthy, one of the last great American writers in the vein of Melville and Faulkner, died recently. His loss is insurmountable, his contribution similar. He enjoyed an interesting relationship with the modern liberal who read his work, yet seemed to misunderstand his themes. There is an awful lot of hand-wringing on various literary forums, where commentators argue about which character really speaks for the author; you suspect they hope none of them, and certainly not the Judge. Well, all of them, I’d say; McCarthy was ultimately writing in the genre of the tragic, his antecedent Sophocles, and like any of the greats, could provide an entirely three-dimensional view of the world. Tragedy turns suffering, evil of both the human and natural sort, into something palatable; catharsis, Aristotle called it. Despite the vignettes of vivid violence throughout Blood Meridian, the work of McCarthy has nothing in common with that of the pornographer; it is always in the pay of a higher meaning, groping towards some evocative truth about life. The words of Sheriff Bell, dreaming of his dead father in the epilogue to No Country for Old Men: 

I had two dreams about him after he died. I dont remember the first one all that well but it was about meetin him in town somewheres and he give me some money and I think I lost it. But the second one it was like we was both back in older times and I was on horseback goin through the mountains of a night. Goin through this pass in the mountains. It was cold and there was snow on the ground and he rode past me and kept on goin. Never said nothin. He just rode on past and he had this blanket wrapped around him and he had his head down and when he rode past I seen he was carryin fire in a horn the way people used to do and I could see the horn from the light inside of it. About the color of the moon. And in the dream I knew that he was goin on ahead and that he was fixin to make a fire somewhere out there in all that dark and all that cold and I knew that whenever I got there he would be there. And then I woke up.

McCarthy’s work is full of references to fire, and carrying it into horizons growing dark. Where most modern literature is not serving the function of the pornographer, it is unable to manage an ontology of loss, or pain, at all; it’s bland nihilism, a departure from anything that can speak in a still small voice. That’s why somebody swaddled in the postmodern appropriation of art can only mouth hollow platitudes when real suffering comes knocking; there’s got to be a Disney ending somewhere, otherwise all is darkness, and courage in short supply. Frivolity and despair are their primary ingredients, so we ought not be surprised that what they serve up proves indigestible. Too often they have no fire to carry forward, or consider such a thing deluded optimism; never mind that the average person today never lived through anything resembling the tumults of history. They have not earned their cynicism, if such a thing can be considered any kind of laurel.

Recently, on fervent recommendation, I made my way through the Slough House books, written by Mick Herron, turned into a television production, and a top seller in Britain. The author spends a great deal of time describing the muck and gloom of Slough House, the dilapidated titular setting, a neglected outpost of the British intelligence services. He might as well have been describing the state of Britain in the post-imperial period, which I suspect is largely the point; and all the characters, including the quasi-protagonist Jackson Lamb, are walking embodiments of that literary cynicism. The books encapsulate the sense of decline that permeates everything in the West today, including all the nostalgic or predictable enemies offered up endlessly; the bad guys, if not the Russians, are the establishment and institutions of British society. This much I might be tempted to yield, if for different reasons than the author intended, yet the books offer no antidote, no salve to the reader’s spirit, no possibility of victory, real or imagined. Comparisons to the legendary John le Carré, who we must concede leaned towards the liberal end of the aisle, are well out of place; George Smiley was not only a genuinely likeable character, but a genuinely heroic one. This is a real conundrum for authors who wish to write liberal heroes: they wind up being either unliberal or unheroic. There’s no making alloys out of oppositional parts.

Part of this is why the anti-war genre often feels so uncanny, an attempt by those with liberal sentiments to co-opt the heroic. I suppose I should be careful to point out that my criticisms are no defence of indiscriminate suffering in the name of that all-pervasive nihilism, nor of the pointless killing that casts so much contemporary entertainment into the realm of pornography, and certainly not of unjust wars. But we might as well admit that war will continue as long as man does, and pointing out that it’s not very pleasant, and causes great misery, is unlikely to lead to global peace; besides which is hardly insightful. McCarthy was good on this, too: “when the lamb is lost in the mountain, they cry. Sometime come the mother. Sometime the wolf.” As long as there are wolves in our world, there will be a need for heroes to drive them away.

While these stories are about heroism, and often do a commendable job of expressing it, they too often negate courage and selfless sacrifice as an unfortunate waste of everyone’s time, a far cry from Homer’s aristeia. You feel as if they want to square an impossible circle; to give the postmodern world a taste of the thing, whilst denying the thing in full. The prevailing mood these works leave is that it would be better if everybody was just grinding out a nine-to-five somewhere, or having too many beers at the pub. There’s no longer any sense in the West of the Good Death, as Yukio Mishima was keen to remind us, and though we ought to guard against too foolish a machismo, it’s worth considering that we all die someday. You can’t help but suspect these stories serve too as voyeurism for cowards, who seem to have missed an important part of human nature. War has been of persistent interest to man—there must be something to it. McCarthy’s line, delivered by the Judge: “it endures because young men love it and old men love it in them”.

Leo Strauss wrote a little about the inability for the heroic to find purchase in a society rendered cynical by liberal principles. Heroes, after all, can never be egalitarian; they are, by definition, exceptional. They might expound egalitarian principles but, by every remarkable action they take, they demonstrate the hollowness of egalitarian principles as a guide for life. The exceptional person, if he is a true egalitarian, ought to hobble himself, should he wish to remain true; and many do, or allow others to do it to them, in what we call cutting down the tall poppy. Literature that taps into the oak has the habit of presenting the true, like a skilled artist painting a landscape, no matter the author’s intentions; there’s an objective reality out there somewhere, including to our nature, and it exists in spite of us. In this sense Roland Barthes was right about the death of the author, though few things will reduce your will to live faster than reading formalised literary criticism, especially that produced by the French. I still haven’t forgiven them for Derrida.

If good literature can illuminate the true, it can do the same for the good, without being tinny about it; sometimes, by exposure to the very worst, as McCarthy manages very well. Anyone who has marched through the terror of The Kindly Ones by Jonathan Littell, told from the perspective of SS officer Maximilien Aue, will know what I mean, and will recognise the protagonist’s shout: “I tell you, I am a man just like you!” As our heroes degrade, so too do our villains, and the best we can muster now are cartoon cutouts, designed most often to answer an immediate political purpose; observe how often the moustache-twirling antagonist is backed by classical music. You are invited to draw the obvious conclusion, that the latter begets the former. Classical music is about as aristocratic as one can get, and aristocracy remains the enemy.

In the Australian play Black Diggers, which appeared on school curriculums in recent times, anti-war qualities are present, if not its prime substance.

This slim volume is the literary equivalent of Prague’s Dancing House, sacrificing structural integrity and aesthetics for novelty, complete with a confusingly non-linear plot and interchangeable characters. Predictably, it was lavishly praised by the Australian art scene when it arrived in 2014. Should you read this play—I cannot in good conscience recommend you see it on stage—you will be led to believe that the greatest tragedy of the Great War was the treatment of Aboriginal soldiers by the Australian Expeditionary Force. This is not to suggest that what happened to those soldiers, especially in terms of their compensation after the war, was anything but an injustice; but in the scheme of injustices, millions of men blown to pieces in industrial slaughter might rate a little higher. They are made victims twice over.

There have been plenty of books and films written about that war, and it is hard to improve on Ernst Jünger, or John Masters a little later on. The only real contribution of Black Diggers is to add indignation to the present political moment, to lend fuel to fires currently blazing, and that hardly qualifies as a novel mission for the intelligentsia these days. Fortunately for them, they can count on plenty of patronage from the usual quarters; the modern-day equivalent of the Medici family is the Australian Council for the Arts, the perfect blend of banal progressivism and bureaucratic sludge to personify the age.

Black Diggers, and works like it, aim to stimulate cheap thrills in already-primed audiences, the soft-drinks and lollies of the artistic world. They paint a world so reductionist that only racism and discrimination can find good purchase, and generations raised to think only in those terms can feel righteous in their moral certitude. Contemporary white progressives are left feeling angelic compared to their terrible, terrible ancestors: truly a patricide of the soul.

That good literature is difficult, to write as well as read, is another temptation that beckons, which is why plays like Black Diggers have replaced King Lear or Macbeth in so many schools. Aristocracy, I’m afraid, just isn’t for everyone, and I doubt anyone walked away from Black Diggers having had a moment on the road to Damascus. It’s doubtful its publication even saved Adam Goodes a single taunt. They preach to the converted, or to classes of bored and recalcitrant students, who make out of Black Diggers the all-too-obvious Cockney slang. Better to view them as pseudo-religious tracts, dealing solely in ersatz pathos, than literature.

Motivating much of this is the sense that we stand on the shoulders of giants, giants we have come to resent. To the postmodern, that eternal adolescent lacking the skill or scope to live up to the example of his ancestors, a snarky bitterness leads to the endless glorification of whatever is seemingly novel or fresh, whatever breaks with convention, whatever elevates the low above the high, and nowhere is this more pronounced than among those living in the creative world. They are the green-haired and bone-nosed new generation that Ed Bell laments in McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men. Unfortunately, there is nothing new under the sun, and we must concede that this is really just decadence giving itself airs, the waste product of a society that, in the ideational sense, appears to have run its course. It is helped along by a demotic artistic culture, terrified of excellence in general, lest somebody be made to feel bad about his or her own shortcomings. Any sense of humility in the face of natural aristocracy is the worst sort of treason to the self; the rally-cry of the egalitarian is that nobody dares be better than him. At its heart, it is not honest; and out of dishonesty nothing good can come.

What separates art from mere entertainment is the presence of the sublime. Most of the modern cuckoos pushed forward by the mass culture that has absorbed our once magnificent high culture manage to be neither sublime nor entertaining, and we are doubly robbed as a consequence.

While real literature and real art are aristocratic, everybody can appreciate the true, the good and the beautiful, if they are oriented the right way; and an elite ethos steeped in the appreciation of these things can exert a general pressure, as used to be the case, before the age of demotic mass culture and the warped spirit that guides it. We can’t all be the best, and only a very small-souled person hates everybody who does better than him; and this sort of person is exactly the type who feels his itch scratched by the modern propensity to denigrate the good, the true and the beautiful.

Christopher Jolliffe, a frequent contributor, wrote “The Noble Art of Teaching” in the April issue