One of the oldest clichés of rhetoric is the modesty topos, [1] a convention so familiar that it must constantly assume new forms, mutating to make a fresh impact. If the old classic exordium beginning “Unaccustomed as I am to public speaking . . .” is rarely heard in quite that form, it flourishes in a good many other incarnations.
Ordinarily, one would hardly attempt to impress an audience by denying one’s own ability at what one has set out to do. Yet the speaker quite often opens by claiming to be incompetent at speechmaking hoping to gain thereby his listeners’ conviction that he will say nothing but the unvarnished truth. Socrates’ address to the jury in Plato’s Apology is one example among a great many.
They have hardly uttered a word, or not more than a word, of truth; but you shall hear from me the whole truth: not, however, delivered after their manner, in No indeed! but I shall use the words and arguments which occur to me at the moment; for I am certain that this is right, and that at my time of life I ought not to be appearing before you, O men of Athens, in the character of a juvenile orator - let no one expect this of me.Socrates characterizes his accusers not merely as liars but as accomplished speakers capable of delivering professionally smooth and richly figured orations while he himself will simply speak extemporaneously and thus more honestly. Though we cannot know except from his general reputation how skilled the philosopher was at public speaking, it is clear that he knew at least that the pose of modesty might be useful for his defense.
In poetry one of the loci classici for this convention is the first poem in Sir Philip Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella.
Loving in truth, and fain in verse my love to show,
That she, dear she, might take some pleasure of my pain,—
Pleasure might cause her read, reading might make her know,
Knowledge might pity win, and pity grace obtain,—
I sought fit words to paint the blackest face of woe;
Studying inventions fine her wits to entertain,
Oft turning others' leaves, to see if thence would flow
Some fresh and fruitful showers upon my sunburn'd brain.
But words came halting forth, wanting invention's stay;
Invention, Nature's child, fled step-dame Study's blows;
And others' feet still seem'd but strangers in my way.
Thus great with child to speak and helpless in my throes,
Biting my truant pen, beating myself for spite,
"Fool," said my Muse to me, "look in thy heart, and write."
The last line suggests that to this Muse pure self-expression is the sole end of poetry, a view which neglects other goals such as melodious beauty, didacticism, and entertainment while suggesting that the unselfconscious transcription of consciousness (what is “in thy heart”) is the route to poetry. This contention is patently indefensible in itself, but it may succeed in gaining the writer a reputation for direct and ingenuous self-expression.
What can sincerity or honesty mean in a work of art? Whatever else it may be a poem is an artifice, a composed object. Sidney’s sonnet is black marks on a white page or certain patterns in sound. It is a play of fancy, framed by a story such as this: “Imagine that a person were one day to say these words . . .”
There can be no question of facts. Art works through images and indirections, affect and associations in a manner entirely different from a scientist or a historian. It means nothing to ask whether Botticelli’s Primavera is sincere or insincere or, indeed, in some sense “true.” However, just as it is possible for a painter to depict a scene “realistically,’ though his product be but daubs on a canvas, a writer may create in the reader a sense that he is straightforward and sincere.
In fact Sidney’s whole poem is steeped in the very sort of sophisticated rhetorical figures he claims to eschew. The sonnet form itself and the sonnet sequence this poem opens are highly conventional literary choices (though Sidney does use hexameters). The word invention bears a technical meaning in the world of oratory since the earliest manuals of rhetoric. The modesty topos is only one of a series of rhetorical pyrotechnics with antecedents going back to the ancients by which Sidney seeks to impress his readers. The anadiplosis of lines 3 and 4 and the references to allusion with its implication of art inspired by art rather than personal experience are among many other signs of the calculated design behind the poet’s pretense to simple sincerity.
Still, many critics have valued what seems to be poetic honesty what seems to be poetic honesty. Matthew Arnold argued that “charlatanism” has no place in poetry and that the best poetry possesses a “high seriousness” that arises uniquely from “absolute sincerity.” [4] With his classical training he could not but be aware of the rhetorical sophistication of his favorite poets and he thus claimed that “the superior character of truth and seriousness, in the matter and substance of the best poetry, is inseparable from the superiority of diction and movement marking its style and manner.”
The criterion of sincerity clearly has a lengthy history in European criticism associated with generally positive values. Its similitude at least may be shown to be inscribed within characteristics of the text itself. With far less theoretic ground but greater fervor some readers have considered moral characteristics that leave no trace whatever in the written word to be nonetheless relevant to its evaluation.
In part as a testament to poetry’s role in transmitting culture from one generation to the next and a reaction to puritanical criticism from religion and philosophy, poetry has, since the earliest times, claimed to inculcate morality. Thus, an upright life or at any rate the inclusion of generally accepted morality in literary texts might seem to imply a good writer. The arts have repeatedly been condemned as immoral through the centuries, and their partisans have not been satisfied to deny that accusation; they have generally sought to maintain that the arts are a positive moral influence. [5]
Often such discussion is sufficiently confused as to jumble the separate categories of an artist’s own personal morality and that represented in an artistic work. Politics, which in the aesthetic realm is presented primarily as moral questions, and religion, judged by the standards of beauty, provide ample territory for the erroneous judgement of art.
This is obvious when dealing with comments from those who know nothing whatever of art. The Catholic Church had such great authors as on its Index librorum prohibitorum which was maintained from the sixteenth until past the middle of the twentieth century. When it was discontinued in 1966 Cardinal Ottaviani declared that its end was not due to liberalizing but rather to the fact that modern times had produced such a quantity of sacrilegious writing that the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith could not monitor it all. [6]
When NEA and NEH funding was drastically cut in the nineties, the assault was led by Jesse Helms, whose political career was founded in racist bigotry. One of the chief targets of the philistines was Andre Serrano’s “Piss Christ.” It became perhaps the most popular objet d’art among evangelical Christians in modern times -- reproductions of it appeared in right-wing Christian publications for years afterwards. Needless to say, Mr. Helms had probably not set foot in a gallery or museum in his entire adult life, and the same may be safely assumed of the outraged Christians. The very same silly drama was reenacted around Chris Ofili’s “The Holy Virgin Mary” made in part of elephant dung, but also, since one must always up the ante, with cutouts of pudenda from pornographic materials. (Such controversy has always been good for business. Ofili’s “Mary” resold in 2015 for just short of three million pounds.)
The very same erroneous standards appeared in Nazi Germany with the condemnation of “degenerate” and Jewish art and in the Stalinist Soviet Union after the imposition of a radically reductive “socialist realism” in 1932. Each of these represented an attempt by the state to restrict art to a simple-minded statement of the most basic socially approved values.
Nor are all such critics know-nothing yahoos. The sensitive have questioned the stature of authors with fascist sympathies, such as Louis-Ferdinand Céline or Ezra Pound. Thoughtful people have expressed reservations about appreciating the films of Roman Polanski and Woody Allen, not because of any shortcomings in the work itself, but rather what they view as unpardonable acts by the artists.
Such criteria can create fans as well as critics. At one of his readings, archived now on tape, Charles Bukowski entered to great applause carrying a six-pack of beer. The excitement audibly heightened as he opened a can and proceeded to drain it. Waves of applause. Bukowski leaned toward the microphone confidentially, and emitted a loud belch. The hall went wild, not because of the poet’s very real verbal art, but because he was mocking bourgeois morality and decorum.
The opponents of oppression may also rely on non-aesthetic standards. Recently, while visiting a museum in Warsaw, we saw a work by contemporary artist Zbigniew Libera titled "Lego Concentration Camp" [7] containing neat little Lego block constructions of the familiar watchtowers and barracks. In his image Nazi guards (slightly modified figures from the Lego Police Station set) stood among and grinning skeletal inmates some of whom were placing others in the oven. (The skeletons were from the Pirate set.) To me the picture was indeed jarring with its conflation of innocence and the deepest guilt. Such a work stirs some thoughts in most viewers, including regular calls for it not to be exhibited.
Non-aesthetic criteria may intrude from any directions. A jazz fan might have a semi-conscious preferential option for musicians who are also junkies, while some readers of Orwell are put off by his late role as a government informant on those he considered Communists or fellow travelers. A parent may approve of Narnia books because their author is a good Christian. Those fascinated by suicide may become devotees or Sylvia Plath or Kurt Cobain. Though Sir Thomas Malory’s arrests for rape and theft are mere footnotes today, surely many people would find themselves unable to stomach Lolita, one of the most beautiful books of its era, were it known that Nabokov was in fact a pedophile. (He was, of course, not.)
In modern times advocates of art for art’s sake have often cooperated with their foes by ostentatiously behaving in ways meant to épater les bourgeoisie. Since the Romantic era, the bohemian antics of those in particular who identified themselves with the avant-garde embodied the same standards as those bourgeoises who did not understand them.
The examples might be multiplied indefinitely, but the phenomenon is sufficiently familiar that further illustration would be redundant. Clearly art must be judged as art. Poets are experts in the use of words, not in optimum social arrangements or morality. Just as history has its own standards (in which the aesthetic plays at best a secondary role) as does physics and every other field, literature must be granted its own standards. Justice and goodness and truth are all compelling qualities in certain arenas, but not when evaluating a work of art.
1. See Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, “Affected Modesty,” p. 83-5 for a survey.
2. Jowett’s translation.
3. Astrophil and Stella 1
4. In “the Study of Poetry,” originally published as the introduction to T. H. Ward’s anthology, The English Poets (1880) and later in Arnold’s Essays in Criticism, Second Series. In Arnold’s time related views were espoused by John Ruskin and George Macdonald. Since that time, among the more significant critics who have sought to analyze the notion of literary sincerity are M. H. Abrams who in “Poetic Truth and Sincerity,” in The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition argued that sincerity was “the primary criterion, if not the sine qua non, of excellence in poetry” during the nineteenth century. Later studies include Lionel Trilling’s Poetry and Sincerity and Susan B. Rosenbaum’s Professing Sincerity: Modern Lyric Poetry, Commercial Culture, and the Crisis in Reading. On the other hand, critics such as T. S. Eliot made “impersonal” a word of praise.
5. Sir Philip Sidney’s A Defence of Poetry is one prominent example.
6. L'Osservatore della Domenica, April 24, 1966. The Index had included such authors as Montaigne, Descartes, Galileo, Pascal, de Beauvoir and Sartre.
7. The Lego company, unaware of the artist’s design, had originally cooperated, donating the blocks, but, when they learned Libera’s theme, they tried to block him from showing it, but eventually conceded. Hence each box in the installation bears the line "This work of Zbigniew Libera has been sponsored by Lego." The work was banned by bureaucrats from the Polish of the Venice Bienniale in 1997. Lego later refused a request for their blocks from Ai Weiwei.
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