Finding a Form

by William H. Gass

  However, when I create a work of art, I have entered into no contract of any kind with the public, unless the work has been commissioned. In this sense, most esthetic acts are unbidden, uncalled-for, even unexpected. They are gratuitous. And unlike Lenin’s intention to overthrow an empire (which can scarcely be an intention of the same kind as mine to meet you for lunch, involving, as it does, several years, thousands of folks, and millions of rubles), my writing will, all along, be mine alone, and I will not normally parcel out the adjectives to subordinates and the sex scenes to specialists, or contract out the punctuation.

  I have many reasons for going to the Golden Egg, then: I am hungry; you are pretty; we have business; it is a good place to be seen; I need a change from the atmosphere of the office; you are paying, and I am broke—oh, yes … and I promised. All these interests are easily satisfied by our having lunch. There is no need to order them; they are not unruly or at odds.

  So why am I writing this book? Why, to make money, to become famous, to earn the love of many women, to alter the world’s perception of itself, to put my rivals’ noses out of joint, to satisfy my narcissism, to display my talents, to justify my existence to my deceased father, to avoid cleaning the house; but if I wish to make money, I shall have to write trash, and if I wish to be famous, I had better hit home runs, and if I wish to earn the love of many women, I shall have more luck going to work in a bank. In short, these intentions do conflict; they must be ordered; none of them is particularly “good” in the goodie sense; and none is esthetic in any way.

  But there is so much energy in the baser motives, and so little in the grander, that I need hate’s heat to warm my art; I must have my malice to keep me going. For I must go, and go on, regardless. Because making a work of art (writing a book, being Botticelli) requires an extended kind of action, an ordered group of actions. Yet these actions are not the sort that result, like a battle, in many effects, helter-skelter: in broken bodies, fugitive glories, lasting pains, conquered territories, power, ruin, ill will; rather, as a funnel forms the sand and sends it all in the same direction, the many acts of the artist aim at one end, one result.

  We are fully aware, of course, that while I am meeting you for lunch, admiring your bodice, buying office equipment, I am not doing the laundry, keeping the books, dieting, or being faithful in my heart; and when I am painting, writing, singing scales, I am not cooking, cleaning house, fixing flats. The hours, the days, the years, of commitment to my work must necessarily withdraw me from other things, from my duties as a husband, a soldier, a citizen.

  So the actions of the artist include both what he does and, therefore, what he doesn’t do; what he does directly and on purpose, and what he does incidentally and quite by the way. In addition, there are things done, or not done, or done incidentally, that are quite essential to the completion and character of the work, but whose effects do not show themselves in the ultimate object or performance. As necessary as any other element, they disappear in the conclusion like a middle term in an argument. A deleted scene, for instance, may nonetheless lead to the final one. Every line is therefore many lines: words rubbed out, thoughts turned aside, concepts canceled. The eventual sentence lies there quietly, “Kill the king,” with no one but the writer aware that it once read, “Kiss the king,” and before that “Kiss the queen.” For moralists, only too often, writing a book is little different from robbing a bank, but actions of the latter sort are not readily subject to revisions.

  The writer forms words on a page. This defaces the page, of course, and in this sense it is like throwing a brick through a window; but it is not like throwing a brick through a window in any other way. And if writing is an immense ruckus made of many minor noises, some shutting down as soon as they are voiced, then reading is similarly a series of acts, better ordered than many, to be sure, but just as privately performed, and also open to choice, which may have many motives too, the way the writing had. Paintings and performances (buildings even more so) are public in a fashion that reading and writing never are, although the moralist likes to make lump sums of everything and look at each art as if it were nothing but a billboard or a sound truck in the street.

  If we rather tepidly observe that a building stands on its street quite differently from a book in its rack, must we not also notice how infrequently architects are jailed for committing spatial hanky-panky or putting up obscene façades? Composers may have their compositions hooted from the hall, an outraged patron may assault a nude, a church may be burned to get at the God believed to be inside, but more often than not it is the littérateur who is shot or sent to Siberia. Moralists are not especially sensitive to form. It is the message that turns their noses blue. It is the message they will murder you for. And messages that are passed as secretly as books pass, from privacy to privacy, make them intensely suspicious. Yet work which refuses such interpretations will not be pardoned either. Music which is twelve-toned, paintings which are abstract, writing which seems indifferent to its referents in the world—these attacks on messages themselves—they really raise the watchdog’s hackles.

  In life, values do not sit in separate tents like harem wives; they mix and mingle rather like sunlight in a room or pollution in the air. A dinner party, for example, will affect the diners’ waists, delight or dismay their palates, put a piece of change in the grocer’s pocket, bring a gleam to the vintner’s eye. The guests may be entertained or stupefied by gossip, chat, debate, wit. I may lose a chance to make out, or happily see my seduction advance past hunt-and-peck. The host may get a leg up in the firm whose boss he’s entertaining; serious arguments may break out; new acquaintances may be warmly made. And if I, Rabbi Ben Ezra, find myself seated next to Hermann Göring, it may put me quite off the quail—quail that the Reichsmarschall shot by machine gun from a plane. There should be no questions concerning the rabbi’s qualms. It would be a serious misjudgment, however, if I imagined that the quail was badly cooked on account of who shot it, or believed that the field marshal’s presence had soured the wine, although it may have ruined the taste in my mouth. It might be appropriate to complain of one who enjoyed the meal and laughed at the fat boy’s jokes. Nevertheless, the meal will be well prepared or not, quite independently of the guests’ delightful or obnoxious presence, and it would be simpleminded to think that because these values were realized in such close proximity, they therefore should be judged on other than their own terms—the terms, perhaps, of their pushier neighbors.

  The detachment it is sometimes necessary to exercise in order to disentangle esthetic qualities from others is often resented. It is frequently considered a good thing if moral outrage makes imbeciles of us. The esthete who sees only the poppies blowing in Flanders fields is a sad joke, to be sure, but the politicized mind is too dense and too dangerous to be funny.

  I have been mentioning some differences between moral acts as they are normally understood (keeping promises, saving the baby) and what might be called artistic ones (dancing the fandango, painting the Botticelli), and I have been drawing attention to the public and private qualities of the several arts lest they be treated en bloc. Finally, I have suggested that values have to be judged by sharply different standards sometimes, though they come to the same table. However, my dinner party differs from Petronius’ banquet in another essential: it is “thrown” only once. Even if the evening is repeated down to the last guest’s happy gurgle, the initial party can be only vaguely imitated, since you can’t swallow the same soup twice (as a famous philosopher is supposed to have said). The events of my party were like pebbles tossed into a pond. The stones appear to shower the surface of the water with rings, which then augment or interfere with one another as they widen, although eventually they will enlarge into thin air, the pond will become calm, and the stones’ effects will be felt only after eons, as they lie, slowly disintegrating, on the bottom.

  Art operates at another level altogether. Petronius’ story does not fling itself like a handful of stones a
t the public and then retire to contemplate the gradual recession of its consequences, but occurs continually as readers reenact it. Of course these readings will not be identical (because no reading is written or automatically becomes a printed part of the text), but the text, unless it has been mutilated or reedited, will remain the same. I shall recognize each line as the line I knew, and each word as the word that was. The letter abides and is literal, though the spirit moves and strays. In short, the mouth may have an altered taste, but not the soup.

  For this reason the powers of events are known to be brief, even when loud and unsettling, and unless they can reach the higher levels of historical accounts—unless they can reach language—the events will be forgotten and their effects erased. Accounts, too, can be lost or neglected, so those texts that are truly strong are those whose qualities earn the love and loyalty of their readers, and enlist the support and stewardship of the organizations those readers are concerned with and control (schools, societies, academies, museums, archives), because the institutions encourage us to turn to these now canonical texts again and again, where their words will burn in each fresh consciousness as if they had just been lit.

  Moralists are right to worry about works of art, then, because they belong to a higher level of reality than most things. Texts can be repeated; texts can be multiplied; texts can be preserved; texts beget commentaries, and their authors energize biographers; texts get quoted, praised, reviled, memorized; texts become sacred.

  The effects of a text (as every failed commission on pornography has demonstrated) cannot be measured as you measure blows; the spread of a text cannot be followed like the course of an epidemic; there is no dye that can be spilled upon the ground to track the subtle seepages of its contamination. Texts are not acts of bodies but acts of minds; for the most part, then, they do not act on bodies as bodies act, but on minds as minds do.

  Most religions do not gather their followers about God, as they pretend, or attract the faithful to the high ideals they claim to serve and defend: no—these believers have sold their souls to a book, and sit inside a text as though it were a temple, and warm themselves with the holy, unmistaken, and enduring Word. They protect the Word; they preach the Word; the blade of their sword is made mostly of the Word; and any other word is suspicious, likely to be an enemy bent on endangering the authority of whatever’s gospel.

  The position I am trying to defend is not that literature has no relation to morality, or that reading and writing, or composing, or painting, aren’t also moral, or possibly, immoral acts. Of course they can be. But they are economic acts as well. They contribute to their author’s health or illness, happiness or melancholy. They fill libraries, concert halls, museums. And much more. The artistic value of a book, however, is different from its economic value, and is differently determined, as is its weight in pounds, its utility as a paperweight or doorstop, its elevating or edifying or life-enhancing properties, its gallery of truths: new truths, known truths, believed truths, important truths, alleged truths, trivial truths, absolute truths, coming truths, plain unvarnished truths. Artistic quality depends upon a work’s internal, formal, organic character, upon its inner system of relations, upon its structure and its style, and not upon the morality it is presumed to recommend, or upon the benevolence of its author, or its emblematic character, when it is seen as especially representative of some situation or society.

  As I have already suggested, values may reinforce one another, or interfere with their realization in some thing or person. The proximity of Herr Göring may put me off my feed. Perhaps I ought to be put off. Perhaps the chef should have poisoned the quail. Perhaps each of the guests should have left in a huff. And the housemaid and the butler grin as they quaff champagne in the kitchen, grin so little bones appear between their open teeth. How’s the pâté no one invited would eat? Deelish.

  Wagner’s works are not wicked simply because he was; nor does even the inherent vulgarity deep within the music quite destroy it. Frost’s poetry seems written by a better man than we’ve been told he was. In fact, we are frequently surprised when an author of genius (like Chekhov) appears to be a person of some decency of spirit. The moral points of view in works of art differ as enormously as Dante’s do from Sophocles’, or Shakespeare’s from Milton’s. Simply consider what we should have to say if the merit of these writers depended at all upon their being correct, even about anything. In any case, Balzac sees the world quite differently than Butor does; Goethe and Racine cannot both be right; so if being right mattered, we should be in a mess indeed, and most of our classics headed for the midden.

  How many of us are prepared to embrace the cuckoo-clock concepts of Blake and Yeats? Or perhaps Pound? How about Kipling? D. H. Lawrence? The Marquis de Sade?

  If author and art ought not to be confused, neither should art and audience. If we were to say, as I should prefer, that it is the moral world of the work which ought to matter to the moralist, not the genes of the author’s grandfather, or the Jean who was a longtime lover, or a lean of the pen holder toward the political right or left, we ought also to insist that the reactions of readers aren’t adequate evidence either. If Wagner’s anti-Semitism doesn’t fatally bleed into his operas and, like a bruise, discolor them, and if Balzac’s insufferable bourgeois dreams don’t irreparably damage his fictions, then why should we suppose the work itself, in so much less command of its readers than its author is of the text, will communicate its immoral implications like a virus to the innocents who open its covers?

  To be sure, authors often like to think of their works as explosive, as corrupting, as evil. It is such fun to play the small boy. Lautréamont asks Heaven to “grant the reader the boldness to become ferocious, momentarily, like what he is reading, to find, without being disoriented, his abrupt and savage path through the desolate swamps of these somber and poison-filled pages.” Yet this is an operatic attitude; reading is never more than reading, and requires a wakeful understanding—that is all. Certainly we should like to think that we had written some “poison-filled pages,” but no luck. Even chewing them won’t make you sick, not even queasy. And if you feel the least bit odd afterward, it’s the ink.

  If the relation of morality to art were based simply on the demand that art be concerned with values, then almost every author should satisfy it even if he wrote with his prick while asleep. (Puritans will object to the language in that sentence, and feminists to the organ, and neither will admire or even notice how it was phrased.) Henry Miller’s work has been condemned, but Henry Miller is obsessed with ethical issues, and his work has a very pronounced moral point of view. Madame Bovary was attacked; Ulysses was forbidden entry into the United States; Lady Chatterley’s Lover was brought to court, where they worried about signs of sodomy in it; Lolita, of course, was condemned; and, as Vonnegut has said (who also has suffered such censorship), so it goes. How long the list would be, how tiresome and dismaying and absurd its recital, if we were to cite every work that has been banned, burned, or brought into the dock.

  It is simply not possible to avoid ethical concerns; they are everywhere; one is scarcely able to move without violating someone’s moral law. Nor are artists free of the desire to improve and instruct and chastise and bemoan the behavior of their fellow creatures, whether they call themselves Dickens, D. H. Lawrence, or Hector Berlioz. Céline is so intensely a moral writer that it warps his work. That is the worry. “There are still a few hatreds I’m missing,” he wrote. “I am sure they exist.” Hate, we mustn’t forget, is a thoroughly moralized feeling.

  It is the management of all these impulses, attitudes, ideas, and emotions (which the artist has as much as anyone) that is the real problem, for each of us is asked by our aims, as well as by our opportunities, to overcome our past, our personal aches and pains, our beloved prejudices, and to enlist them in the service of our skills, the art we say we’re loyal to and live for. If a writer is extended on the rack of love, let pain give the work purpose, and disappoi
ntment its burnished point. So the artistic temperament is called cold because its grief becomes song instead of wailing. To be a preacher is to bring your sense of sin to the front of the church, but to be an artist is to give to every mean and ardent, petty and profound, feature of the soul a glorious, godlike shape.

  It is actually not the absence of the ethical that is complained of, when complaints are made, for the ethical is never absent. It is the absence of the right belief, the right act, that riles. Our pets have not been fed; repulsive enthusiasms have been encouraged, false gods pursued, obnoxious notions noised about; so damn these blank and wavy paintings and these hostile drums, these sentences that sound like one long scratch of chalk.

  Goodness knows nothing of Beauty. They are quite disconnected. If I say “shit” in a sentence, it is irrelevant what else I say, whether it helps my sentence sing or not. What is relevant is the power of certain principles of decorum, how free to be offensive we are going to be allowed to be. When the dowager empress of China, Cixi, diverted funds intended for the navy to construct a large and beautiful marble boat, which thousands now visit at the Summer Palace in Beijing, she was guilty of expropriation. If her choice had been a free one, she would seem to have chosen to spend her money on a thing of peace rather than on things of war (a choice we might applaud); in fact, we know she simply spent the money on herself. She cannot have chosen the beauty she received, because beauty is beyond choice. The elegant workmanship which went into the boat, the pleasure and astonishment it has given to many, its rich and marvelous material, are serendipitous and do not affect the morality of the case.