The Aristos

by John Fowles

  13 The parallel with man: we also pass like fireworks, like flowers, like fine food and fine wine. We feel a kinship with these ephemeral arts, these manifestations of human skill that are born after and die before us; that may be come and gone in a few seconds.

  Unrecorded performances in music, on the stage and on the sports field fall into the same category.

  14 So there are two kinds of artefact: those we admire, and perhaps envy, because they survive us and those we like, and perhaps pity, because they do not. Both kinds are aspects of feeling about time.

  15 All art both generalizes and particularizes; that is, tries to flower in all time, but is rooted in one time. An archaic statue, an abstract painting, a twelve-tone sequence may mainly generalize (all time); a Holbein portrait, a haiku, a flamenco song may mainly particularize (one time). But in the portrait of Ann Cresacre by Holbein I see one sixteenth-century woman and yet all young women of a certain kind; in this austere and totally unrooted concatenation of notes by Webern I hear nonetheless the expression of one particular early twentieth-century mind.

  16 This balance between particularization and generalization that the artist struggles to achieve, nature achieves without struggle. This butterfly is unique and universal; it is both itself and exactly like any other butterfly of its species. This nightingale sings to me as it sang to my grandfather, and his grandfather; and to Homer’s grandfather; it is the same nightingale and not the same nightingale. It is now and it is ever. Through the voice I hear – and Keats heard – this passing night I enter reality two ways; and at the centre meet my richer self.

  17 How we see a natural object depends on us – whether we see it vertically, in this one moment, now, or horizontally, in all its past; or both together; and so in art we try to say both in the one statement. Always these complex factors of time are inherent in the seeing and the saying.

  18 How I see this artefact may depend on how the artist wants me to see it, vertically-now or horizontally-ever; but even with artefacts I can choose. I can see Caravaggio’s St Jerome vertically-now, in itself, or horizontally-ever, inserted in the history of painting. I can see it as a portrait of one old man, or as a study of the hermit; as a quasi-academic study in chiaroscuro problems; as a document with information about Caravaggio himself, about his age; and so on.

  19 We also experience artefacts in ‘intended’ and ‘fortuitous’ ways (see group 5, note 49) and in ‘objective’ and ‘actual’ ones (6.23). These too are aspects of time.

  20 Both in the creator and the spectator, art is the attempt to transcend time. Whatever else it may be and intend, an artefact is always a nexus of human feelings about time; and it is no coincidence that our current preoccupation with art comes at the same time as our new realization of the shortness of our duration in infinity.

  THE ARTIST AND HIS ART

  21 Inside this fundamental relationship with time, the artist has used his art, his ability to create, for three main purposes; and he has two main tests of success.

  22 His simplest purpose is to describe the outer world; his next is to express his feelings about that outer world, and his last is to express his feelings about himself. Whichever of these purposes he has in mind, his test may be that he satisfies himself or it may be that he satisfies and pleases others. It is probable that all three purposes are present, and both tests satisfied, in varying degrees in almost every artefact. The simplest and most unemotional realism, mere description, still involves the selection of the object described; any expression of feeling about the outer world must obviously also be an expression of the artist’s inner world; and there can be few artists so self-sure that the approval of others means nothing to them. For all that, there have been great shifts in emphasis during the last two hundred years.

  23 When other means of description were almost nonexistent, art had a great representational and descriptive duty. It made what was absent present; the bison loomed on the cave wall. The, to our eyes, charming stylization of Stone Age art was certainly, to begin with, a result of technical inefficiency, not of lack of desire to paint as realistically as possible. But very early on the cave men must have realized that stylization had a double charm: it not only brought to mind and recorded the past or the absent, but the deviations from strict reality also kept the real past and the real pressure at bay. So the first function of art and stylization was probably magic: to distance reality at the same time as it was invoked.

  24 There was also a strong ritual motive in the use of stylization. It was only a short step from drawing animals in charcoal in order to give information to accentuating certain features because such accentuation seemed more likely to guarantee the end desired – killing for food, and so on. Some scientists argue that this ritual-traditional element in art represents a great flaw in its utility, a kind of only partially sloughed skin the poor artist has to drag behind him. They point to all the empirical methods and criteria that science has evolved to rid itself of ritual-traditional elements. But this is akin to the absurd fallacy that one can produce great art by the exercise of pure logic and pure reason. Art springs from humanity as it is, from history, from time, and it is always more complex in statement, if not in method, than science. It is for other human beings; it is consolatory or menacing, but always more or less therapeutic in intention, and its therapy has to apply to a thing far too complex (and indeed ritualistic) for science to control or cure – the human mind.

  25 A second great utility of style must have become more or less consciously apparent to the visual artists of primitive man. Style distorts reality. But this distortion is in fact art’s most vital tool, since by its use the artist is enabled to express his own or communal feelings and aspirations. Fifty-breasted fertility goddesses are clearly not failures to portray realistically, but visual translations of feeling. The parallel in language is the development of metaphor and all that goes beyond the strict needs of communication. The parallel in music is the development of all those elements that are not strictly necessary as accompaniment to dancing; all beyond the drum or clapped hands.

  26 The first two artistic purposes, representational and outer-feeling, were the main ones until at least the Renaissance; and the third purpose, inner-feeling, has been triumphant only during the last century or so. There are two principal reasons for this. The first is that the development of better means of exact representation than art has made purely descriptive realistic art seem largely mischanneled. The camera, the tape recorder, the development of technical vocabularies and scientific methods of linguistic observation – these things all make much overtly representational art look feeble and foolish. That we are not more aware of this is probably due to the fact that historically this representational art is of great value to us, and we still have not shaken off the habit of using it, even though far better means are now at hand.

  27 If for example we really want to honour an eminent man it would surely be better to have good photographs or films of him taken, or to publish linguistic accounts of his eminence; anything rather than having his portrait painted by some ‘academic’ hack. No one supposes such portraits have any intrinsic biographical or artistic merit; they merely satisfy a traditional social convention about the rewards of eminence.

  28 The second reason for the triumph of inner-feeling art is the rise of the importance of self in the existence of each as a result of those nemo-creating conditions I have already mentioned. It is not coincidence that the Romantic Movement, whose influence is still so powerful, was a result of the machine-orientated Industrial Revolution; and many of our contemporary artistic problems spring from a similar hostile polarity.

  29 The result of this has inevitably been the emergence of style as the principal gauge of artistic worth. Content has never seemed less important; and we may see the history of the arts since the Renaissance (the last period in which content was at least conceded equal status) as the slow but now almost total triumph of the means of expression over the thing expressed.


  30 A symptom of this triumph is the attitude of artists to the signing of artefacts. It is with the Greeks that signing becomes frequent, and as one would expect, it is in the most self-conscious art, literature, that it was commonest. But as late as the Renaissance many artists felt no great need to sign; and even today there is a tradition of anonymity in those craft arts, like pottery and furniture-making, that are least susceptible of exploitation by the artist’s self.

  31 The artist’s main need today seems to him to be the expression of his signed feelings about himself and his world; and as our need for representational art has dwindled, so have arisen all those modes and styles, like abstractionism and atonalism and dadaism, that put a very low value on exact representation of the outer world (craft qualities) and on past conventions about the artist’s duty to that world; but that conversely allow the widest possible field for the expression of an unmistakably unique self. The enormous ‘liberation’ in style and technique and instrumentation (use of materials) that has taken place in our century is strictly caused by the need artists have felt for creative Lebensraum; in short, by their sense of imprisonment in the mass of other artists. Prison destroys personal identity; and this is what the artist now most fears.

  32 But if the main concern of art becomes to express individuality, the audience must seem to the artist less important; and the slighted audience will in turn reject this doubly selfish art, especially when all other artistic purposes are so excluded that the artefacts must appear hermetic to anyone without special information about the artist’s intentions.

  33 Two characteristic camps will emerge, and have emerged: one of artists who pursue their own feelings and their own self-satisfaction and who expect their audiences to come to them out of a sense of duty toward ‘pure’ or ‘sincere’ art; and the other of artists who exploit the desire of the audience to be wooed, amused and entertained. There is nothing new in this situation. But the camps have never been so clearly defined and so antagonistic.

  34 All inner-feeling art thus becomes a disguised form of the self-portrait. Everywhere the artist sees himself as in a mirror. The craft of the art suffers; craftsmanship even becomes ‘insincere’ and ‘commercial’. Even worse, in order to conceal the triviality, banality or illogic of his inner self, the artist may introduce deliberately hermetic and ambiguous elements into his art. This is more easily done in painting and music than in literature, because the word is a more precise symbol and false ambiguity and hermeticism are in general more easily detectable in literature than in the other arts.

  ART AND SOCIETY

  35 But the tyranny of self-expresion is not the only factor the modern artist has to contend with. One of the most striking characteristics of our age has been the ubiquitous use of the poles of violence, cruelty, evil, insecurity, perversion, confusion, ambiguity, iconoclasm and anarchy in popular and intellectual entertainment and art. The happy end becomes ‘sentimental’; the open or tragic ends become ‘real’. It is often said that art movements do no more than reflect those of history. Our century is evidently violent, cruel, and all the rest: so what else should its arts be if not black?

  36 But this suggests that the artist is incapable of any higher aspiration than that of presenting a mirror to the world around him. This is not to deny that a great deal of the ‘black’ art of our time is, alas, historically justifiable; but it is very often a result of the pressures unfairly put upon art by society. The artist creates blackly because society expects him to; not because he essentially wants to.

  37 Black art may bring us a certain kind of pleasure, not only because we are secretly violent, cruel and nihilistically chaotic ourselves, and not only because the emotions such art arouses afford a vivid contrast to our day-by-day lives in a safe society, but because those grey-fearing lives gain a reality, colour and validity they lack if they have no such contrast easily accessible to them. This violent death is my safe life; this distorted shape is my symmetry; this meaningless poem is my clear meaning.

  38 One of the deepest pleasures of tragedy is simply that we survive it; the tragedy might have, but has not, happened to us. We not only experience the tragedy empathetically; we have the subsequent survival.

  39 There is thus a very deep-rooted sense in which the public never takes ‘black’ art at its face value. It is indeed a frequent defence of pornography that whatever its apparent intentions, its final effects are often highly moral. The spectacle of Vice’ and perversion serves to remind people of their own virtues and their normality. Sadism is far more likely to provoke increased respect for others than further sadism; and so on. But whichever view one takes – that such art corrupts society or that it secretly benefits it – the effect on the artist must be bad.

  40 Art has to provide today what ignorance and social and physical conditions provided in the past: insecurity, violence and hazard. This is a perversion of its true function.

  41 It is this unnatural role that accounts for a partiallarly common manifestation of guilty conscience among many so-called avant-garde artists; the attempt to suppress the creator from the creation, to reduce the artefact to the status of a game with as few rules as possible. Paintings where the colours and the shapes and the textures are a matter of hazard; music where the amount of improvisation demanded of the players reduces the composer to a cipher; novels and poems where the arrangement of words or pages is purely fortuitous. The scientific basis for this aleatory art is perhaps the famous, and famously misunderstood, principle of mdeterminacy; and it also springs from a totally mistaken notion that the absence of an intervening, in our everyday sense of intervening, God means that existence is meaningless. Such art is, though apparently self-effacing, absurdly arrogant.*

  42 An artist can choose not to be an artist, but he cannot be an artist who has chosen not to be an artist.

  ARTISTS AND NON-ARTISTS

  43 The artistic experience, from the late eighteenth century onwards, usurps the religious experience. Just as the medieval church was full of priests who should have been artists, so our age is filled with artists who would once have been priests.

  44 Many modern artists would no doubt dispute that they are priests manques. That is because they have substituted the pursuit of artistic ‘truth’ for the pursuit of good. There was so much injustice on every doorstep, once; it was easy to know what good meant in terms of action. But now even in – didactic art the pursuit is much more of the right aesthetic or artistic expression of the moral than of the moral itself.

  45 It is true that the best right expression of the moral best serves the moral; the style is the thought. But an excessive pre-occupation with the style of the thought tends to produce a devaluation of the thought: just as many priests became so pre-occupied with ritual and the presentation of doctrine that they forgot the true nature of the priesthood, so have many artists become so blind to all but the requirements of style that they have lost all sight of, or pay no more than lip service to, any human moral content. Morality becomes a kind of ability to convey.

  46 The growth of industrial civilization, the stereotyped work processes, the population surge, the realization, in an age of close international communication, that men are psychologically more similar than different: all these factors drive the individual to the individualizing act, the act of artistic creation: and above all to the creation that expresses self. Drink, drugs, promiscuity, unkemptness, the notorious conventions of anticonvention, are explicable statistically as well as emotionally.

  47 The ominous innumerability of our world, the endless repetition of triviality, breeds the nemo. Our modern saints are the damned: the Soutines and the Alban Bergs, the Rilkes and the Rimbauds, the Dylan Thomases and the Scott Fitzgeralds, the Jean Harlows and the Marilyn Monroes. They are to us what the martyrs were to the early church; that is, they all died for the worthiest of causes – immortality of name.

  48 How else can we explain the popularity of romanced biographies of artists and cheap biograph
ical films? These new hagiographies, like the old ones, are less concerned with the ultimate achievements and motives of their subjects than with the outward and sensational facts of their private lives. Van Gogh with a razor in his hand; not with a brush.

  49 But this produces an imitative insincerity in many modern artists. The great artists who have gone to the dark poles have been driven there. They are always looking back towards the light. They have fallen. Their imitators did not fall; they jumped down.

  50 The lives of ‘bohemian’ artists, of les grands maudits, are more interesting to the public than their works. They know they could never make the works; but they might have lived the life.

  51 Increasingly art has to express what the nonscientific intellectual élite of the world think and feel; it is for the top of the pyramid, the literate few. When the chief fields for intellectual expression and the main channels for the stating of personal views of life were theology and philosophy, the artist was able to remain in closer contact with a public. But now that art has become the chief mode of stating self, now that the theologian-philosopher is metamorphosed into the artist, an enormous gap has sprung.

  52 The only persons who might have stopped this schism between the artist and the non-artist are the critics. But the more obscure and the more ambiguous a work of art the more need there is of interpretation and interpreters. There are thus excellent professional reasons for critics to encourage the schism. There is also a marked tendency to lycanthropism: to being a creator by day and a critic by night.*