The Age of Atheists: How We Have Sought to Live Since the Death of God

by Watson, Peter

  NO MEANING IN THE PAST

  The aim of play and dance was spontaneity as a way of letting the unconscious “speak” in unadulterated form. Chance allowed this, at least in theory; and in the imitation of play, for instance, paper was torn into random shapes, and found objects were let fall where they would; poems were constructed from words randomly drawn out of a bag. “Every word that is spoken and sung here,” said Hugo Ball, “represents at least this one thing: that this humiliating age has not succeeded in winning our respect.”

  The most lyrical of the Dadaists was Kurt Schwitters, who found beauty in—or at least produced artworks made out of—the detritus of the modern city: old newspapers, bits of wood, the lids of cardboard boxes, used toothpicks; for a world of abundance inevitably produces an abundance of waste. These emphasized, as the Impressionists had done, the fleeting but intense nature of life in the (still relatively new) urban sprawls that cities were becoming, where unrelated strangers were thrown together cheek by jowl in unanticipated, sometimes unwanted, juxtapositions. One of his best works, The Cathedral of Erotic Misery (1923), suggested agglomerations of memories, memories to be discarded along with the materials themselves. There was no meaning to be found in the past; and the new was too new.

  • • •

  So much for the optimists who, as we have seen, were predominantly French and therefore, nominally at least, Catholics, or brought up in that tradition. A far less optimistic reaction came from the Protestant nations: the Netherlands, Scandinavia, Germany.

  Expressionism was the art form of those who, unlike the Impressionists and Fauvists, were bewildered and bothered by the changes taking place, including the death of God. Unlike Gravelines, Grande Jatte or The Red Studio, Expressionism is the art of struggle, the art of anxiety, the art of what it means to be alive in an indifferent (rather than a beneficently abundant) universe. What you feel with the Expressionists—and this was an idea that ran through the century and crossed the Atlantic later on—was that the encounter with paint, the struggle to make the artwork work, to make it mean what the artist wanted it to mean, is there for all to see. In Expressionist art, above all other forms, what we are told, what we see, is that after the death of God all that is left is the self. In some ways the Expressionist artist is overwhelmed by life, it rushes in on him, floods his mind to the point where it is all he can do to prevent images running away with him and descending into chaos. The Expressionist artist feels the responsibility of being an artist, of being human, of showing to the rest of the world the struggle that it is just to live from day to day.

  This is shown vividly and foremost in the paintings of the Dutchman Vincent van Gogh, whose whorls and swirls of heavy impasto—his starry night skies, his writhing mountains, his florid cypresses—almost burst off the canvas with the energy they seek to encapsulate. Van Gogh was less impressed by the colors of the South of France than by the sheer energy that he felt crackling in the atmosphere, the rocks, the vegetation. As if in response to Federico García Lorca’s line “Who will speak the truths of wheat?” in The Sower (1888), Van Gogh does just that. The truth of wheat is that its sowing, growing and reaping are an encounter between man and nature, with man as part of nature, and without God our encounter with nature is revised: the sun beats mercilessly down, everything in the picture is laid on thick, showing—highlighting—an assertion of man’s will. A Van Gogh image imposes itself, on the canvas, on the viewer. Here I am, the paintings say, my colors may not be your colors or my shapes your shapes but the composition shows their force, in an explosion of ecstasy. The paintings take a vision and push it to the limit. Come with me, says Van Gogh, and I will show you ecstasy in this world, whether it be by sunlight or starlight.

  This is not color as meaning but light and energy as meaning, intensity as meaning, an ecstasy that is available but can be achieved only by effort, physical struggle, the same effort as the sower expends. We must be alive to the energy in the world and use it for our own purposes. And we must manage our own energy if we are to live well, to know ecstasy.10

  But intensity carries risks as well as offering fulfillment. As the world knows, Van Gogh spent just over a year in an asylum in the South of France in 1889–90. He was not the only one to battle with instability. Edvard Munch wrote in a letter to a friend, “Disease and insanity were the black angels on guard at my cradle.”11 Though neither Van Gogh nor Munch, probably, had read the latest physics of the day (energy as a concept dated from the 1850s), energy in nature, its effect on the perception of nature, the potentially explosive, destabilizing effects of that energy, are rendered visible in paintings, which invite us to understand nature in a new way, suggesting that we must redefine our relationship with nature after the death of God.

  Munch’s was a much darker vision than Van Gogh’s. In Death in the Sickroom (1895), Munch painted his family in the room where his sister died. Their grief is intense, so palpable in the painting that we are invited to ask whether, religious or not, they are totally convinced that there is an afterlife. In Puberty (1894–95), a young woman contemplates her own naked body and her budding sexuality—adult life, the future—with a mixture of horror and bewilderment. Horror and bewilderment run through several of Munch’s other works, such as The Voice (1893), in which a woman dressed in pure white, but with her brown hair arranged around her head like a dead halo, is trapped in a lakeside (or fjordside) forest, where all the trees and even the reflection of the sun on water are represented as virile, implacable, imprisoning vertical bars. This is the modern condition—we are both estranged from, and yet trapped in, nature; alone. The other people in the painting, aboard a canoe on the water, are likewise locked into a different cell, wedged tightly between two trees, two more confining bars, not allowing them to move.

  And then there is The Scream (also of 1893), the main image of which has been much commented upon. Less remarked on is the fact that the two figures farther along the bridge over the fjord or chasm do not appear to hear the scream. They are ciphers for a world that doesn’t care. They are far away and indistinct, but given that one is dressed in a long dark cloak or coat, they could be clerics.

  Munch in many ways defined Expressionism: insecurity and unease become so strong that the artist has no choice but to recoil upon himself, treating that Self as the one secure point in an otherwise indifferent universe. Munch thought that “Salvation shall come from Symbolism,” by which he meant that mood and thought were placed above everything else, becoming the grounds of reality.12

  If we examine the works of the other leading Expressionist painters—the spiky, jerky figures of Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, the emaciated, flagrantly naked victims of Erich Heckel, the stiff elongations and violent awkwardnesses of Max Beckmann, the bloody, fleshy impasto of Chaim Soutine—we see, as one critic put it, “the sluices of the self” opened in the process that would become known as “expressive individualism.” In other words, the artist’s struggle to realize himself is defined in part as difference from others, and is achieved only with great difficulty by exploring distortion, violence, sickness, a sort of via negativa that cannot help but fasten together individuality and apartness, with the inevitable disappointment of which Valéry spoke (see chapter 6). In Expressionism, the Freudian visceral depths have replaced the soul as the ultimate reality in which we find meaning. Essentially we struggle to civilize our instincts, which, as Nietzsche foresaw, can be as destructive as creative. As a result, it is a reality we are apt to beware of as much as embrace. Intensity cuts both ways.

  THE FOUR TRAITS OF THE “NEW SPIRIT” IN ART

  Roger Shattuck, who, so far as I know, is the popularizer of the useful phrase “the avant-guerre” in English, distinguished “a new spirit,” in France especially, between 1885 and 1918. These were the “Banquet Years,” which, he said, carried the arts wholesale, not just the visual arts, into the “ultimate modern heresy: the belief that God no longer exists.” He went on:

>   “It implies further that after God ‘died,’ man himself became the supreme person, the only divinity. . . . With the field thus cleared of supernatural encumbrances, the true approach to the divine came to consist in man’s probing of his own most innermost states. For this century everything, from dream analysis to the perception of relativity, became self-knowledge as the first stage to self-assumption. The ancient sin of hubris, man’s too-great arrogance in the face of the cosmos, disappeared when divine powers no longer existed outside man. Evil was confined to failure in confronting oneself.”13

  Shattuck thought that the avant-garde began in France because of its tradition of protest, established back in the Revolution; and he identified the “New Spirit” in the arts as consisting of four traits, each one different and each epitomized by one of four remarkable individuals—the actor-playwright Alfred Jarry, the “primitivist” painter Henri Rousseau, the composer Erik Satie and the painter-poet-impresario Guillaume Apollinaire (the phrase “New Spirit” was first used by Apollinaire, in a lecture).

  The four traits Shattuck identified as crucial to the New Spirit began, he said, with a re-evaluation (in Nietzschean mode) of the very idea of maturity—who is the complete man? Throughout history, Shattuck said, the adult qualities of self-control have preponderated over those of the anarchic child. But after Romanticism, and even more after Rimbaud, a new personage emerges: the “child-man.” Artists became increasingly willing to accept the child’s “wonder and spontaneity and destructiveness” as not inferior to adulthood.14

  The second trait is a pervading note of humor. “Humor, a genre that can command the directness of comedy and the subtler moods of irony, became a method and a style.” And Shattuck refers (and defers) to Bergson on the distinction between comedy and irony. “Humor describes the world exhaustively and scientifically just as it is, as if that were just the way things are. Irony haughtily describes the world as it should be, as if that were just the way things are.” And this leads us into the device of absurdity, “the absence of any a priori values in the world, of any given truths.” Whereas Rousseau was indifferent—or even oblivious—to the mirth his work often provoked, Satie was not—instead, he made use of it. “Why attack God? He is as unhappy as we are. Since his son’s death he has no appetite for anything and barely nibbles at his food.”15 Faced with this, we no longer know how to react and this is the point: this absence of value becomes itself a value. In particular in the work of Jarry, the “baseness and incongruity” of life must be understood not as a source of disgust but of joy.

  The third trait of the New Spirit is the attachment of meaning to dreams. Dreams have always had some sort of oracular meaning, but it was in the avant-guerre that artists “abandoned themselves” to a “second life” of dreams. This was not necessarily Freudian in context—in fact, it was the ready preoccupation with dreams that helped Freud’s book have the impact it did (though it sold very few copies to begin with). “The employment of dream techniques in the arts implied an effort to reach beyond the bounds of waking consciousness towards faculties that could grapple with unrestricted intuitions. . . . These new realms of consciousness and expression were pursued with something approaching religious conviction by Bergson and Proust, Redon and Gauguin. Without relying on the existence of a ‘higher’ or spiritual world apart from our own inner being, dream can endow ordinary experience with an aura of ritual and the supernatural.”16

  Dream and humor lent themselves to the fourth trait that Shattuck identified—ambiguity. “Ambiguity here means neither meaninglessness nor obscurity—though both dangers are present. It means simply the expression of two or more meanings of a single symbol or sound.” By this account, there is no single true meaning banishing others that are faulty. Works can be at the same time beautiful and ugly, all meanings are possible, and the extraction of one alone “infeasible.”

  These four traits, Shattuck insists, reveal a profound unity. “They manifest an unrelenting desire to dredge up new material from within, from the subconscious, and in order to do so they attempt to forge a new and all-important mode of thought, the logic of the child, of dream, of humor, of ambiguity,” and this frees the artist from the need to make a work with a single, explicit meaning. This deep preoccupation with the subconscious, he says, is symptomatic of man’s belief that he can surpass himself, to reach into himself to extract what education and society have buried. “The blending of art and life represents an attempt to preserve spiritual meaning in a godless universe. In refusing a dualistic order of earthly and divine, the twentieth century has attempted to have its cake and eat it, too.”17

  Thus twentieth-century art—and this applies to Impressionism, Cubism, Futurism, Dadaism—seeks not so much to represent reality as to rival it; it strives to be its own subject. The boundaries, the frameworks, were overrun, the two universes, art and not-art, engaged in “mutual interference,” a major device whose lineaments have never been properly assimilated. “When the distinction between art and reality has broken down, we are ourselves incorporated into the structure of a work of art. Its very form importunes us to enter an expanded community of creation which now includes artist and spectator, art and reality.”18

  WHOLENESS VIA JUXTAPOSITION

  This, Shattuck says, has profound implications for the very concept of unity, of unifying wholeness. In the Romantic period, immediately preceding modernism, only the privileged personality of the artist could hope for the fulfillment of the yearnings for wholeness, for unity; but the modern sensibility, dispensing with frameworks and boundaries, sought new ideas of unity through dislocation. In the new aesthetic—also a new ethic, as it turned out—the approach to unity, even to wholeness, was to be achieved by juxtaposition.

  “The arts of juxtaposition offer difficult, disconcerting, fragmented works whose disjunct sequence has neither beginning nor end. They happen without transition and scorn symmetry.” The world is recorded, in effect, “in the still-scrambled order of sensation” (Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce); there is no fusion or synthesis, such wholeness as is formed is beyond the reach or grasp of logic, and represents a desire to respond to the voice within. These works, Shattuck says, have abandoned the possibility of meaning in the classical sense.19

  The point of juxtaposition is that “we cannot expect to reach a point of rest or understanding” in the conventional sense. The absurd is, essentially, an expression of the lack of connectivity in experiencing the world—play, nonsense, abruptness, surprise now become the order of the arts, rather than verification of certain general truths in the old tradition. “We can no longer expect to find in the arts only verification of knowledge or values deeply rooted within us. We will, instead, be surprised or dismayed.” The search for the subconscious functions by sudden leaps, “the way a spark jumps a gap,” which brings the spectator closer than ever before to the abruptness of the creative process. It is as if the spectator is now watching from the wings rather than the auditorium; there is a closeness, an intimacy of form in modern art that stems from this yearning for the subconsciousness shared by all, but which exposes the “jumpy” nature of the mind, the profound “unsteadiness” within us—“Few men ever attain the equilibrium necessary to live fully with what they have.”

  Juxtaposition arranges fragments of experience, perishable rather than possessing the stability of monuments, in which the (often) conflicting elements are to be experienced/understood simultaneously rather than successively, as was traditionally the case. “The aspiration of simultanism is to grasp the moment in its total significance or, more ambitiously, to manufacture a moment which surpasses our usual perception of time and space.” Simultanism establishes sources of meaning other than causal sequence, and seizes upon what is, for us in the twenty-first century, a new kind of coherence, a new unity of experience, not progression but intensification—intensification by standing still.20

  Juxtaposition requires assimila
tion without synthesis, directness free of conventional order, the compression and condensation of mental processes, freedom from the taboos of logic, potential unity at a moment in time, fixity. “Only by achieving rest, arrest, can we perceive what is happening outside ourselves.”21 The figures in this chapter, though diverse, were united in their daring.

  6

  The Insistence of Desire

  D

  id André Gide’s life owe its shape to the fact that he came from a Protestant family in Catholic France? Or that his father died when he was still a boy and his life at home (he was born in Paris but grew up in Normandy and the Languedoc) was largely influenced by the women of the family? Or that he was an only child? Can such questions ever be answered satisfactorily? Whatever motivation governed Gide’s makeup, he was able to end his last major creative effort, Thésée, with words that were to become famous: “I have lived.”1

  In fact, arguably the most important influence on Gide was the landscape that he explored with the family’s Swiss maid, a woman of the mountains, who shared—and fostered—his passion for wildflowers. Later, he was “intoxicated” by the beauties of the countryside around Uzès, near Nîmes in the Languedoc, the valley of the Fontane d’Ure and above all the garrigue, scrubland, where the wildflowers dazzled in the spring. Here, the not overwhelmingly lush surroundings permitted him to appreciate the heroic and dignified qualities of individual flowers. His reaction to natural beauty was never passive, and that fact was to play an important role in his view of life.