Artists and Eccentricity

 

    In our day people associate artistic ability with eccentricity.  Research has indicated that people value art more highly if they are told the creator is unconventional in behavior {1].  Yet the association may not be unfounded.  According to another recent study truly creative people are indeed more likely to flout social expectations [2].  Yet this idea is far from universal.  In many cultures such as Heian Japan and Renaissance England poetry has been among the accomplishments expected of courtiers at the center of power.  For Pope, the poet, far from being a transgressive personality, is a skilled technician capable of eloquently expressing normative sentiments: “what oft was thought, but ne’er so well expressed” [3]. 

     The fact is that, though contradictory, both notions are valid, indeed complementary.  Just as every work of art reflects lived experience with a twist, never exactly duplicating it, and every phrase rests to some extent upon remembered language, every work in part affirms consumers’ expectations and in part twists or disappoints them.  In this way art transmits accumulated cultural data to every new generation yet avoids stagnating, always potentially admitting new data.  Folk, mass, and popular art are all more likely to tend toward the side of the continuum that confirms received ideas, while avant-garde art, including much contemporary work, is by definition more unpredictable. 

     Each tendency in fact has an archaic lineage, the first from shamans inspired by ecstatic experiences and the second from ritual priests capable of performing rites according to tradition.  The shaman’s vocation is by definition idiosyncratic, though his role is wholly traditional.  The distinguishing characteristic of his practice is a journey alone into spiritual realms inaccessible to others, often with the aid of those psychoactive substances called entheogens by their advocates [4].  Eliade’s classic study says that shamans are generally considered likely to display “aberrant psychic behavior patterns” if not outright “mental disease,” though he demurs in  part from this judgement, preferring to say simply that “they are separated from the rest of the community by the intensity of their own religious experience, "and that that break from the group begins the practitioner’s “true life” [5].

     On the other hand, priests are, even in pro-literate cultures, fundamentally learned men who are educated in the proper performance of ritual duties such as sacrifice.  In ancient Jewish, Hindu, and Classical Greek and Roman culture, the role of the priest is essential if one wishes one’s ceremonies to be efficacious.  His job, like that of a Roman Catholic priest administering sacraments, is in no way dependent on his individual spiritual character but rather on his knowing the prescribed procedures and the correct magic formulae.  Whereas the shaman may go into trance and otherwise act in extravagant or mysterious ways, the priest probably will present as a sober and respectable individual.  This function is as prevalent in oral cultures as in those with writing.  Thus an African anthropologist notes that only priests can offer “major sacrifices” and reliably transmit tribal lore.  According to an observer long resident among the Tiv of Nigeria, their priests were “grave” and “dignified” men [6].

     The same division is apparent in urbanized societies.  According to Plato, “just as they [Korybantian revelers] do not dance while in their right mind, thus the lyric poets are not in their right mind when they compose heir beautiful melodies” [7].  Yet the very fact that such celebrants were collectively enacting a social ritual indicates their normative role.  Moralizing poets like Theognis and the composers of Doric choral poems reinforced values shared by their community, while monodists might  express more idiosyncratic attitudes.  Thus Tyrtaios regularly praised valor in war, whereas Arkhílokhos expressed a more individualistic sentiment, and in  the nineteenth century Rimbaud’s transgression may be measured against the regularities of Claudel. 

     Genres may cluster toward one end or another of this spectrum.  Popular, folk, and mass literature all tend to reinforce pre-existing ideas, while experimental and avant-garde texts will overturn them.  A good deal of extremely sentimental, patriotic, and pious material is churned out to strengthen the status quo, while works more radical in form are likely to be cast in novel forms as well as are works of art brut.  One might contrast even within a single author’s oeuvre Christopher Smart’s craftsmanlike and orthodox Song to David with his unpredictable and verbally pyrotechnic Jubilate Agno.  In the twentieth century,  T. S. Eliot also illustrates both sides of the polarity, with his early poetry free and fragmented in form, disillusioned in vision, and quite novel in style and his later work in regular cadences as well as exemplifying his self-consciously reactionary formula (in “For Lancelot Andrewes”) "classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and anglo-catholic [sic] in religion.” 

     Earlier literature had been largely sponsored by either the court or the church, guaranteeing a more or less conventional ideology and well as stimulating fulsome dedications in the hope of patronage, the equivalent of what would today be a grant or a commission.  With the coming of capitalism and the spread of literacy accompanying an increase in the middle class, not only the authors of best-sellers, but also such accomplished writers as Dickens and Mark Twain sought middle-brow audiences while others like Baudelaire and Stephen Crane scorned the bourgeoisie, creating counter-cultural or otherwise elitist bohemias.  Today a career as any sort of artist (the case is particularly obvious for poets) is so marginal that one may be considered a bit eccentric even to consider such an impractical ambition. 

     This dialectic has been obscured by the principle critical tradition (including Plato, Sidney, Puttenham, and Matthew Arnold) which has, often defending art against those to whom it seemed frivolous and moral, always maintained that the poet’s task is to define and reinforce his society’s ethical rules.  This millennia-long public relations campaign has obscured the extent to which certain writers, and portions of the work of others, have criticized or flouted accepted norms.  Ben Shahn notes that many people who would be glad to have a Van Gogh on their wall would be discomfited to find Van Gogh himself in their living room [8]. 

     The indices of aesthetic and social conformity often coincide, though they need not.  One can imagine, of course, an individual of thoroughly irregular life who nonetheless writes in quite regular meters or, on the other hand, a pillar of bourgeois respectability whose work is wholly experimental.  Most works and most artists will prove somewhat elusive, occupy shifting yet meaningful positions in the spectrum of possibilities.  Identification neither as traditionalist nor radical indicates value.  Bohemianism associated with high spirits and extravagance in one person may manifest as cruelty and self-destruction in another.  Likewise, of a hundred new expressive novelties only a few will suggest fruitful avenues for continued work. (the percentage may be similar for scientific researcher proposing hypotheses in a laboratory.)

     Still, locating an author or a poem along the continuum of conventionality yields information about the theme and about the place of a given text in  the society of its day.  Surely Villon’s life among thieves influenced his innovations far beyond his use of underworld slang and Allen Ginsberg’s enthusiasm for flamboyant transgression was of a piece with the originality of Howl.  On the other hand the decorum of John Milton and Alfred, Lord Tennyson is consistent with their influential roles as Cromwell’s Latin Secretary and as Poet Laureate. 

     So the historic association between artists and eccentricity is neither baseless nor universal.  The two are articulated in a way meaningful for the expression of theme and style and indicative as well of the place of the arts in a given context.  The beards and berets that signify an artist in Bushmiller’s Nancy comic strip may be in part a silly Philistine invention, but such symbols are also indicators of a genuine social tendency.  Art is aways simultaneously conforming and nonconforming to the expectations of those who receive it.  It confirms and also challenges preconceived ideas, and, depending on which end of the spectrum of predictability a given work occupies, the artist may seem a pillar of the establishment or a revolutionary.

 

 

1.  Wijnand Adriaan Peter Van Tilburg and Eric Raymond Igou, “From Van Gogh to Lady Gaga: Artist eccentricity increases perceived artistic skill and art appreciation” in the European Journal of Social Psychology vol. 44 no. 2.

2.  Shelley Carson, “The Unleashed Mind: Why Creative People Are Eccentric,” Scientific American, May 1, 2011.

3.  Essay on Criticism, 97.

4.  The term was introduced in 1976 by a group of ethnobotanists including Jonathan Ott and R. Gordon Wasson.

5.  Mircea Eliade, Shamanism : archaic techniques of ecstasy.  See pages xi , 8, and 13. 

6.  According to Return to Laughter by Elenore Smith Bowen (pen name of Laura Bohannon).

7.  Ion.  534a. οὐκ ἔμφρονες ὄντες ὀρχοῦνται, οὕτω καὶ οἱ μελοποιοὶ οὐκ ἔμφρονες ὄντες τὰ καλὰ μέλη ταῦτα ποιοῦσιν.

8.  In “On Nonconformity.”

On Alexander Pope’s “Art of Sinking”

 with reflections on the abundance of bathos in our own time

 

 

I.

     Alexander Pope’s “Peri Bathous or the Art of Sinking in Poetry” [1] satirizes contemporary poets, in particular for what Pope (in a new application of the word) terms bathos, a mingling of the commonplace and the sublime that violates decorum.  While Pope’s title plays on the treatise On the Sublime attributed to Longinus, the piece is targeted at his poetic rivals, Ambrose Philips and a long list of others identified only by initials.  Pope was an active controversialist on the side of neo-Classicism and Tory rule, though personal rather than ideological motives seem at the base of many of his polemics.  In “Peri Bathous,” for instance, he is less concerned with setting forth literary principles than he is with criticizing others’ poor taste.  While the essay might disappoint the theorist, it is filled with Pope’s incisive wit, and accurately predicts a trajectory of modern poetry which, for better or for worse, has continued to pursue the “Art of Sinking.”

         In what might be called a comic apocalyptic reflex, Pope’s essay calls for an inversion of conventional values of literary judgement.  The fact is that there is little to differentiate the satirist from the objects of his ridicule in theory.  They all participate in the assumptions of neo-Classicism, yet in Pope’s view, his rivals are utterly incompetent.  Apart from ridiculing the absurdity of the “sinking” poetry they produce, Pope attacks hacks who write to order for pay in spite of the fact that he himself actively and successfully pursued a career as a professional writer.  

     Pope and the targets of his satire share their age’s stress on the value of models and in ornamentation through a generous use of rhetorical figures.   Thus, he declares, with the essay’s pervasive irony, that it is a “grievous errour” that “the rules of the ancients were equally necessary to the moderns” (I)  The tropes and figures he examines in some technical detail (X-XI) had been received ideas as the basis for the construction of aesthetic texts from the Rhetorica ad Herennium through Puttenham and into Pope’s day.

     The expressions Pope ridicules are not in form wrong; their absurdity arises through loss of decorum.   Pope’s central model of bathos is a figure in which one element is discordant with the next, the sort of ill-fitting parts that Horace figures at the outset of the “Art of Poetry” as monstrous chimerical creatures, for instance, part horse and part man, or woman and fish.  His rivals, he suggests, are unable to exercise taste enough to make the elements of their images match.  They work the same vein as he, but cannot perform up to his standard. 

     The poor taste of the poets Pope ridicules has, he believes, a material base: they write for money and thus will shape their efforts toward the most widespread popularity rather than the greatest beauty.  Rather than speaking of inspiration or genius, he focuses on the business of poetry, speaking of the “trade” and “manufacture” of literature.  (XIII)  Using the “Golden Rule of Transformation,” one may generate absurdities freely and reduce any object to the ridiculous by the simple technique of examining it through “the wrong end of a Perspective Glass, by which all the Objects of Nature are lessen’d.” (V)  This is in fact only an example of the departure from common sense and the acceptance of truth in nature which Pope decries.  In a way not wholly unlike the “commodity fetishization” Marx and his followers regarded as obscuring economic relations, this false view blocks the creation and appreciation of the sublime for Pope. [2] 

     Britain was moving already toward industrial capitalism during Pope’s time from the feudal agriculture-based economy, so the arbiter of aesthetic decision was becoming ever less the nobility and their toadies and becoming the literate bourgeoisie.  With even greater plausibility than those in the eighteenth century who doubted the judgement of the public in making political decisions, Pope’s persona neatly finesses his replacement of the Horatian formula by arguing that “if the intent of all poetry be to divert and instruct, certainly that kind, which diverts and instructs the greatest number, is to be preferred.”  The effect is to abandon any attempt to impress the cultivated, “men of a nice and foppish gusto, whom after all it is almost impossible to please,” or “to write for posterity of whose taste we cannot make any judgment,” and to make “gain the principal end of our art.” (II)  Though ironically expressed, these views echo Boileau who insists that the poet must write with “immortal Fame” in mind, that abject dedication to  patrons leads to work unbecomingly “fill'd with fulsome flatteries.”  The author must never choose “Gold for the object of a gen'erous Muse,” yet with “the Stars propitious Influence” a poet may yet hope “a sharp-sighted Prince, by early Grants/ Rewards your Merits, and prevents your Wants.” [3] 

     Therefore, one need have no particular training, background, or apprenticeship to be poetic; it is rather within reach of everyman.  In fact, Pope playfully suggests that certain low persons might prove especially gifted.  Since “nothing is more evident than that divers persons, no other way remarkable, have each a strong disposition to the formation of some particular trope or figure,” the production of poetry could be done collectively by these specialists. (XIII)  Thus fishmongers might compose epithets, since “epithets may be found in great plenty at Billingsgate,” anadiplosis may be trusted to “common criers and hawkers, who by redoubling the same words persuade people to buy their oysters, green hastings, or new ballads,” and “the ellipsis, or speech by half-words” entrusted to “ministers and politicians.”

     In what now seems a striking anticipation of both assembly line production and the capitalist creation of imaginative works by committee in film and television designed to appeal to the largest demographics.  In the early days of the Industrial Revolution Pope had in this essay invented the English use of the term bathos as though it were necessary to define a new phenomenon, but, in the centuries since, bathos has flourished to such an extent and readers have, during the last century, proven so fond on “low” imagery that the bathetic has proven dominant.

     In his own view, Pope was nothing but normative.  It is he who imitates nature and they who are “anti-natural.” (V)  To him he is the reasonable man calling attention to the failings of the unreasonable.  He considers himself a member not so much of a partisan group as of the party of the correct.  In terms of his condemnation of writing for money, his own practice had been mixed and transitional like his age.  While constantly seeking highly placed supporters, Pope had no illusions about patronage and in the Dunciad satirizes those who value the most extravagant praise from their poets over the most competent verse.  “He wins this Patron who can tickle best” (II 198)  Pope’s own competence, allowing him to build his villa in Twickenham, was made by the sales of his translations of Homer and then his edition of Shakespeare.  He also cultivated patrons such as Richard Boyle, 3rd Earl of Burlington and Allen Bathurst, Baron and later 1st Earl Bathurst.  Yet the transitional character of the age is clear in the fact the popularity and patronage were by no means mutually exclusive.  Pope and others published sometimes by subscription and one noble title on the list will attract others as well as those on lower rungs of the social ladder.

     The reader may look to Pope for superb craft and brilliant wit.  He excels at formulating “what oft was Thought, but ne'er so well Exprest,” but he does not strive after original ideas, nor is he really a man of ideas at all.  He is nonetheless an outstanding poet, and it is his poetic gift that illuminates “The Art of Sinking.”  In it the reader may see art questioning its own ability to survive the coming of the age of crass capitalist philistinism.  

 

 

II.

     Though the modern reader may suspect that Pope was not in the end arguing on behalf of anything more than his own superior practice, he was quite right about the shift in the business of literature.  With the hegemony of monopoly and finance capitalism in the centuries since has come likewise a further “sinking.”  The eighteenth century could scarcely have imagined the depths to which modern artists have sunk during an age in which popularity is virtually uncontested as an index of excellence, and even the educated discuss television shows and rock bands and know nothing further of the arts.  These commodified commercial forms, of course, for the most part assume the predominant values of their society just as all popular genres will tend to do. 

     The hierarchical structure which enables Pope’s complaint of mixing low and high is explicitly opposed by many modern poets.  The tendency is commonplace since Wordsworth was attacked for his

language “which is coarse, inelegant or infantine,” betraying “perverseness and bad taste.”  The influential Lord Jeffrey, with assumptions little changed from Pope’s found in Wordsworth the fault “of connecting his most lofty, tender, or impassioned conceptions, with objects and incidents, which the greater part of his readers will probably persist in thinking low, silly, or uninteresting.     All the world laughs at Elegiac stanzas to a sucking-pig — a Hymn on Washing-day — Sonnets to one's grandmother — or Pindarics on gooseberry-pye.” [4]

     Since that rear-guard assault by a traditionalist over two hundred years ago, the parameters of poetry have shifted dramatically and bathos has, proven if not a clear victor, the stronger contender.  Readers will require no evidence on this score as most of the innovative currents since the Romantics have justified the use of the banal, the vulgar, and the colloquial and have often intentionally linked low and high. [5]  A brief survey of such practices might include Whitmanic, Cubist, Imagist, Objectivist, and Socialist Realist poetry which each of which in its own way values the “low.”  Vorticism, Aleatory, and Language poetry privilege discontinuities. [6]  Surely Pope would have thought quite preposterous the ironic modes of aesthetic appreciation that have developed in the last hundred years: the kitsch, the camp, the hip all intentionally appreciate what a traditionalist would find ugly.  Great work has been done even by the extreme practitioners in this mode; one need think only of Gertrude Stein and Francis Ponge, but their achievements would have only bewildered a critic of Pope’s sensibilities. 

     The causes of this evolution may be various, but the most significant is surely that named by Pope – the substitution of an undiscriminating public for a smaller but more cultivated audience.  The analysis of audience is turned upon Pope himself by Christopher Caudwell, in his classic of ‘thirties vulgar Marxist literary history.  With the pose of certainty associated with “scientific” socialism, Caudwell asserts that Alexander Pope “perfectly expresses the ideals of the bourgeois class in alliance with a bourgeoisified aristocracy in the epoch of manufacture.”  [7]  Dependent on patrons, poets of his day were obliged “to To him “Pope’s poetry and his ‘reason’” are “a reflection of that stage of the bourgeois illusion where freedom for the bourgeoisie can only be ‘limited.’”  Introducing a surprisingly affective term Caudwell says that in the eighteenth century “the imposition of outward forms on the heart is necessary and accepted.”

    While true, these statements are not far from being simple truisms and thus of little probative value.  Every poet, even the avant-garde and the counter-cultural, must “speak the language of his paymasters.”  And surely freedom is always limited, the living heart cannot be entirely liberated.  Out of tension and contradiction arise history, consciousness, and poetry, charged always with unsatisfied desire.  Perfect satisfaction, total enlightenment is silent. Absence of form is chaos.  Human ideas are defined by the specific forms thought assumes under multiple determinants. 

     A siren in the form of the mirage of a coherent chain of being sang to Pope.  He saw his place beneath a proper king atop a structure that included enlightened patrons.  Aristocrats might demonstrate their nobility by refined taste in this scheme while less sensitive readers gulp down bad verse.  The more common modern illusion collapses the old value distinctions and eliminates the standard of decorum.  Yet the modern idea of the poet justifies itself by a kind of democracy of things, a notion developing from Donne through Wordsworth and Whitman, in which a bedbug may be as grand as a mountain and form is infinitely variable.  We look back on Pope, then, with nostalgia, as one who lived during those when one could imagine a bedrock of established truth beneath his feet.      

 

 

1.  the essay was published under the name Martinus Scriblerus in “The Last Volume” of Motte’s Miscellanies in  Prose and Verse March 8, 1727/8   The authorship is still contested by some scholars, with Arbuthnot and Swift the other candidates, but contemporary opinion favors Pope.  For a discussion of the issue in a complete critical edition see Edna Leake Steeves’ The Art of Sinking in Poetry (1952).

2.  Cf. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1935).

3.  Art of Poetry, translated by William Soames and revised by John Dryden, Canto IV, lines 100, 138, 143, and 155-159.

4.  Francis Jeffrey, Review of Wordsworth, Poems, in Two Volumes; Edinburgh Review 11 (October 1807) 214-31.

5.  Even trends like the Symbolists and later prophetic and “deep image” practitioners which aspire to sublimity do so often through unassuming or unlikely imagery. 

6.  Charles Bernstein says in “Semblance”: “Textures, vocabularies, discourses, constructivist modes of radically different character are not integrated into a field as part of a predetermined planar architecture; the gaps and jumps compose a space with shifting parameters, types and styles of discourse constantly crisscrossing, interacting, creating new gels."

7.  Illusion and Reality, 86.