Threats of Pain and Ruin

by Theodore Dalrymple

  Art does not exist: Mr Mediavilla’s latest thesis is even more radical than that art is whatever can be passed off as art, or whatever those who claim to be qualified to distinguish art from anything and everything else say is art. Our author says instead that ‘That the human being can “create” nothing. In order to make something, it is necessary that it should already exist as a possibility.’ He goes on to say that ‘to make something come of nothing—such is the prerogative of a god. In taking himself for a “creator” a human being mistakes himself and his nature.’

  This seems to me merely a play on words. If to create means to bring something into being ex nihilo, then of course Man cannot be a creator (and philosophers might argue about whether a god, or God, could be one either). When someone says, perfectly legitimately, that Michelangelo created his Pietà, he does not mean that the sculptor made the marble, but that he fashioned the marble in a quite startling way that was unique to his imagination and capacity.

  Our distributor of tracts continues, with neo-pagan certainty:

  It [to believe that a man can create something] falsifies his personality and all he does (his life, his society, his world). His ‘divinity’ prevents him from seeing himself—from knowing himself—as a simple instrument of the planet (and therefore of the universe of which he is ignorant of everything essential).

  This is surely rather odd. Man cannot create, but a universe can have a purpose or purposes that make an instrument of Man. Beliefs in impersonal teleologies, religious and secular, have often led men into the most brutal and terrifying acts of fanaticism, mistaking their own purposes for those of something much beyond themselves. Indeed, they continue to do so, and will do so as long as Men claim the universe as alibi.

  ‘To admire, even adore, “works of art” represents the height of error and the humiliation of Man himself:’ so continues the tract. ‘However, present day Man still has a need of the religion of Art to make up for his impoverished life. Thus, he does not hesitate to sacrifice himself—personal dissociation, disequilibrium, with the overemployment of one capacity at the expense of others, recourse to artificial stimulants, etc.—to “create” so that he becomes a “creator”, a “genius.” This is absolutely immoral and what is more, inhuman. To go into raptures over, to kneel spiritually before, the sounds, colours, lines, words, bodily movements, stories, stones, etc., whatever the intelligence or other qualities that went into them, is completely ridiculous (as is to queue to get into an exhibition of painting or a museum of other “fine arts”, or into a concert, as is to read a novel, or see a film, or indulge in “artistic” tourism, etc.).’

  The author ends his tirade, his diatribe, against art as follows:

  It is certain that there is not, cannot be, any Art in the world. We are not, we cannot be, ‘creators.’ We are not, and there cannot be artists. Art is a lie. To believe in it is to be mistaken. To need it is unworthy of a ‘man.’ It is the pleasure of gods (and of small minds). Art is incompatible with Man in his fullness (and the negation of truth and authenticity).

  This irritation with art, or rather with those who claim that art is the whole focus or purpose of their lives when we know perfectly well that the slightest practical inconvenience prostrates them with rage and frustration, is something that I understand and in part share. Nevertheless, there is looseness of thought and insincerity of its own in this little tract.

  The author is a man with whom nothing that exists finds much favour, to put it no higher (or lower). For example, in previous tracts he has said that the Science Po is for him more a factory of ignorance than knowledge; and people there are taught not so much political science as politicking. He says of the Science Po:

  Those in charge do not accept their ignorance because of their personal dishonesty.

  They hand out diplomas that certify the ignorance of those who receive them; to give positions to people on the basis of these diplomas is to decompose society. To do so ‘maintains the people in the most degrading ignorance (and also impotence).’

  Just because he doesn’t think much of the teachers at the Science Po doesn’t mean that he is happy in his own skin. He says that negativity is forced upon him:

  I am for. I am not against. These people force me to show myself against.

  If it were not for ‘these people,’ then, he would be a kind of Dale Carnegie, Norman Vincent Peale or Napoleon Hill of philosophy.

  His opinion of others, quite apart from the teachers at the Sciences Po, is not very high. Here are a few of his reflections on mankind:

  The problem is the minorities and the people. It is total. People do what they can while not doing what they could. The gap is the drama of humanity.

  A change of personality is the basis of everything. The only solution.

  My contemporaries all, all have a false personality.

  One suspects that he might be a little lonely:

  Man is an individual He is not a couple, a group, a crowd, even if he can pass through these stages.

  The question, though, is whether his loneliness is the result of his opinions, or his opinions the result of his loneliness?

  From reflection on my own past, I know how easy it is to project one’s personal dissatisfactions on to the universe (or some other vast entity) and then blame the universe (or that other vast entity) for them.

  Although he seems to be an outsider, the author of these little tracts—which I much enjoyed reading, incidentally—captures quite a lot of the flavour of the times. His insistence that there is no such thing as art would be grateful to the ears of all kinds of relativists. If nothing is art, everything can partake of the kudos of art once only the connotation remains after the denotation has been removed. And if there is no art, there can—I think it follows—be no good and no bad art. Everything is the same, and we neither have to try very hard at anything nor make the painful discovery that we are not geniuses, that the achievements of, say, a Mozart or a Shakespeare are further removed from our own attempts than are our bank balances from those of Bill Gates.

  Oddly enough, two days before my lunch near the Sciences Po I had visited the Mondial du Tatuage, a world convention of tattooists, held in the old Nineteenth Century abattoir of Paris, now an exhibition centre in the midst of a wasteland of French modern architecture (among the worst in the world, the architects ever in search of ways to out-Pyongyang Pyongyang). There were hundreds of tattooists exhibiting their work and thousands of visitors, who paid $40 each for admission. If the French economy had grown as fast in the last ten years as the number of professional tattooists working in the country, it would by now be by far the richest country in the world: the number having grown by 1000 per cent in that time.

  The tattooists of France are apparently divided into two opposing camps, those who think that they should be considered artisans and those who think they should be considered artists. Those in the latter camp do not base their claim on the argument that art is what you think it is or persuade other people into accepting it as being; rather they think that they are in succession to real, indisputable artists such as Velasquez or Chardin. Only the material on which they work—human skin—happens to be different.

  This camp mistakes skill for art. It is undoubtedly true that tattooists often show astounding skill in, for example, indelibly dyeing someone’s back with a realistic portrait of a celebrity (Elvis Presley by far the most commonly). But skill is not art, at least not in the sense meant, and skill exercised in the production of something that ought not to have been produced at all makes it the worse, indeed much worse, rather than the better. A skilled man who produces a monstrosity is worse than an incompetent one who does the same.

  The French used to be relatively resistant to the vile fashion for tattoos, but they are now following it like sheep for the shearing. At one time I was sufficiently Francophile to believe that France�
��s people were too intelligent and cultivated to follow blindly the wild Anglo-Saxons outre-Manche (across the Channel). Alas, I was mistaken: the vicious bad taste of the English has spread among them like smallpox. The French are now only a few years behind the British in popular stupidity.

  There seems to be a dialectic between Sr. Mediavilla’s opinions of art on the one hand and the vogue for tattooing on the other. If nothing is art, then everything, including tattooing, is art. Therefore people can prove either their artistic ability or their sensibility by doing and having tattoos. (Or both, of course, for most tattooists are themselves heavily tattooed. Le patron automutile ici.) And of course, the more people who do it, the lower the opinion of humanity that seems justified.

  It is just possible, I suppose, that Sr. Mediavilla himself is tattooed. I hope not, though. I was impressed by how much food for thought he gave me on the way to lunch, and I like to think of him as a résistant to one of the brutalising fashions of our time.

  37 - Ford and Against

  Until quite recently I had never read John Ford’s ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore though I had always meant to do so, partly (I suspect) on account of its title. But while it is Man that proposes, it is Time that disposes; and it is one of the glories, or at least the consolations, as well as the frustrations, of our human existence that we never have time enough to achieve all our projects and purposes. Imagine what life would be after such complete achievement, how time would stretch before us featureless as oblivion but with the torment of awareness and the awareness of awareness, without any subject except itself to be aware of! No wonder people without projects or purposes go off the rails! At least self-inflicted crises give the illusion of meaning.

  Enough of philosophy, as characters say in Russian novels. I finally found time recently to read the play, which was published in 1633, only nine years before the Puritan closure of the theatres. A refrain ran through my mind as I read: ‘This is not Shakespeare.’ Of course, such a response is absurd on two counts: first Ford wrote the play twenty years after Shakespeare retired from the stage, seventeen years after his death, and no art can stand still; and second, only Shakespeare is Shakespeare. No art can consist only of its supreme achievement, but that does not mean that all else is without value.

  Far fewer biographical details are known of Ford than of Shakespeare, for example even the date and manner of his death are matters of conjecture, but no one, as far as I know, has suggested that therefore his later plays must really have been written by George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham. True, this theory might stumble on the fact that the Duke was assassinated in 1628, but publication of the later ‘Ford’ plays might have been held back to protect the Duke from the social ignominy of exposure for having written for the stage; and the fact that the second Duke, born in the year of his father’s death, also wrote plays, by which time such writing had increased in social prestige by as much as it had declined in quality, and that literary ambition and talent are often inherited, lends support to our theory.

  The work is always more important than the biography, however. The poetry of ’Tis Pity never rises to Shakespeare’s level (Ford’s verse was strong and muscular, competent rather than inspired, unmemorable even by those with a good memory for poetry) and it seems to me that the characters are marionettes, always manipulated by the puppet-master rather that acting from inner compulsion, as it were. They are mere instances of some characteristic or other rather than self-actuated human characters; the plot, in which as high a proportion of characters end up slain as in Hamlet, is creakingly contrived. The comedy is lamentable, though not apparently as bad as in his other plays. Ford, then, does not command our willing suspension of disbelief as does Shakespeare.

  Of all Ford’s works it is only ’Tis Pity that is ever regularly revived, and then not often: his other works are now but fodder for scholars of Jacobean and Caroline literature, a kind of PhD mine for those intent on an academic career. It is easy to see why ’Tis Pity is revived, though, for its theme is incestuous love, a subject that is as perennially interesting as it is taboo (indeed, it is interesting because it is taboo). And some of the discussion of the morality of sex that it contains is astonishingly modern and apposite to our times—probably to all times. Vasques, the servant to Soranzo, one of the main characters, exclaims, ‘O horrible! To what a height of liberty in damnation hath the devil turned our age!’ Was there ever an age when this could not justly have been exclaimed? Man’s conduct always disappoints men, and it always will.

  Giovanni and Annabella love each other passionately, sexually, but unfortunately are brother and sister. They consummate their love and continue to do so even as Annabella consents to wed Soranzo in order to wean her from her illicit passion. Just before the wedding feast, Giovanni slays his sister from jealousy and outrage at her ‘betrayal’ of him. His attitude is that of many a modern jealous murderer who kills: ‘If I can’t have her, no one else will.’

  The play begins in medias res. Giovanni is confessing, and trying to justify, his passion to the friar, Bonaventura. The friar has the opening lines:

  Dispute no more in this, for know, young man,

  These are no school-points; nice philosophy

  May tolerate unlikely arguments,

  But Heaven admits no jests…

  Throughout the play, intermittently, the friar and Giovanni dispute the rightness or otherwise of incest. Giovanni’s argument is that the incest taboo is merely customary, a prejudice that would prevent him or cut him off from loving her whom he loves. In the first scene he says:

  Shall a peevish sound,

  A customary form, from man to man,

  Of brother and of sister, be a bar

  ’Twixt my perpetual happiness and me?

  Giovanni argues that, in fact, his love is superior to that of other types because, as brother and sister,

  Are we not therefore to each other bound

  So much the more by nature? by the links

  Of blood, of reason? Nay, if you will have’t,

  Even of religion, to be ever one,

  One soul, one flesh, one love, one heart, one all?

  This is Giovanni’s intellectualisation of his frustration at society’s prohibition of his love which he thinks denies him what we would now, no doubt, call his fundamental human right to love and be loved. ‘Must I not do what all men else may, love?’ he exclaims, in tones of the most genuine and most universal of all emotions, self-pity.

  Giovanni is able to intellectualise his desire because he is a student at Bologna University, and a brilliant one at that (the friar has been his tutor there). The friar says, with all the pain of the teacher disappointed in his prize pupil:

  O, Giovanni, hast thou left the schools

  Of knowledge to converse with lust and death?

  Another of Giovanni’s arguments, enunciated later in the play, is the neo-Platonist one, a version of which Keats later summarised and that (taken more seriously or literally than Keats can really have intended) is deeply evil:

  “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” – that is all

  Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

  Giovanni turns Bonaventura’s teaching back on himself, for he later says to him:

  What I have done I’ll prove both fit and good.

  It is a principle (which you have taught

  When I was yet your scholar), that the frame

  And composition of the mind doth follow

  The frame and composition of the body:

  So where the body’s furniture is beauty,

  The mind’s must needs be virtue; which allowed,

  Virtue itself is reason but refined,

  And love the quintessence of that.

  To this Bonaventura can only reply:

  O ignorance in knowledge.


  In other words, Giovanni’s ratiocinations are an instance, a confirmation, of F. H. Bradley’s famous (and brilliant) dictum three and a half centuries later, that ‘Metaphysics is the finding of bad reasons for what we believe upon instinct;’ though he added ‘but to find these reasons is no less an instinct.’ In this case, however, it is not so much what Giovanni wants to believe on instinct, but what he wants to do on instinct: and I doubt that any of us has never used an abstract argument in this dishonest way.

  What does Bonaventura reply to Giovanni, other than expressions of grief? His arguments would cut little ice today, being all from authority: and authority (except our own) is precisely what we are disinclined to obey. In his very first speech, Bonaventura says: