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.”
