December 09, 2007
Do we need a literary canon?
Richard Jenkyns in Prospect Magazine:
We live in a world without heroes. The one exception is Nelson Mandela, and his canonisation testifies to the void which he helps to fill. The middle of the last century saw men such as Churchill, Mao and De Gaulle who, for better or worse, were big figures. Two decades ago there were leaders like Thatcher, Gorbachev and again Mandela. Today, on the other hand, it appears that not one of the nearly 200 nations of the world is led by a person of truly exceptional quality. Perhaps we are fortunate to live in an age that calls for technocrats rather than titans, but something has been lost.
We lack cultural heroes, too. Isaiah Berlin used to say in his last years that there were no geniuses left in the world: no great novelists, poets, painters or composers. That judgement may or may not be true, but it surely expresses a general perception. On the surface there is a good deal of chatter about young British artists or brilliant novelists and filmmakers, but deep down we feel that nothing very large is coming to birth. Architecture is the main counter-example: Santiago Calatrava seems to me clearly a genius, Frank Gehry may be, and perhaps there are others. But architects are less crushed by the burden of the past than artists in other fields: modern technology opens up to them forms of expressive possibility unknown to earlier generations. Writers and painters do not share this advantage. I remember in the 1970s a distinguished person passing the Listener to me and saying, about The Old Fools, "There is a poem that will last for 500 years": it was Philip Larkin's latest. It is a sentence that one cannot easily imagine being spoken today. The present standard of musical performance, by contrast, is astonishingly high, but it is significant, again, that the best interpreters of our time receive the kind of veneration that used to go to composers: it reveals an absence.
More here.
Posted by Azra Raza at 08:06 AM | Permalink
Comments
Let me go off the deep end here: The decline in both the ability to create works of genius, rare as it is, and the ability to appreciate and benefit from exposure to works of genius is due to the electronic matrix we are all now living in. I am a schoolteacher and I think it is nearly impossible for young people to read something like Shakespeare with anything like the attention with which it was written or read over the previous centuries. There is too much electronic background noise in people’s heads today: TV, recorded music, text messages, a potential phone call, incoming or outgoing, literally in one’s pocket, accessible at any time, not to mention I’m wondering, as I write this, if there’s something new on Huffington Post worth checking out. I think works of genius came from artists manipulating the natural sounds and stimuli which were coming in: not only the sounds of nature, but also if human voices were heard, they were real people speaking in that moment only, if music was audible, it was being played by real human beings in the immediate area. I am from the Thucydides school of human development - Thucydides had the great insight to see that Athens’ rise to prominence was based on the poverty of its soil, which made it unattractive to raiding populations. I think great artists, and great human beings, similarly arise from what we would now call a relative paucity of external stimulation.
Posted by: old man | Dec 9, 2007 12:17:35 PM
Umberto Ecco wrote an essay several years ago where he expressed a similar concern, but in a different vein, as yours, old man.
His main point, if I remember aright, is that the process of scholarly research is degraded by the boundlessness of electronic sources of information. There is too much, and it is too equally weighted. To be thorough, one thinks, one should absorb it all before making a determination, but it can't be done.
Posted by: Carlos | Dec 10, 2007 2:07:26 PM
Absolutely, Old Man, you stated it so beautifully that I'm just adding noise by saying anything else.
Posted by: Aguy109 | Dec 10, 2007 4:21:06 PM
I think Old Man brings up a very interesting point. However, I feel as though I must disagree. Perhaps, as a college student, I fear that I will be lumped into a generation without culture or genius, and so my reaction is purely defensive. But I feel as though a genius harnesses the contemporary and creates something for the ages. Just because we do not recognize great figures now does not mean they will not rise up in the future. I do, however, believe that the geniuses of today, rather than fighting the existence of so much external stimulation, will embrace it.
Posted by: Prufrock | Dec 10, 2007 5:28:12 PM
It's an interesting question. My own formative years (long long ago) were passed in an environment without computers, iPods, etc., so I can't personally witness to what the present generation might be capable of. But there were such distractions as radio, TV, and telephones (all wired or plugged into walls, not toted around constantly) present in those days. I can't claim to have developed into a genius, but I think I managed to develop a pretty good appreciation for Shakespeare, etc., and I think that even the young ones of today can do the same, if they care to make the effort. They might even be aided somewhat in this effort by the Internet, though they will probably have to take the buds out of their ears for a while.
Whether it is still possible for geniuses to arise depends, obviously, on what you mean by genius. Plato even held that reading and writing ruined literature, because people didn't create poems like Homer's by singing them and consume them only by listening any more. So perhaps real genius died long ago. I would suggest that perhaps works of genius can be created (and in fact are being and will be created) out of the cultural materials present now, which are deeply imbued with electronics. But they will no doubt look quite different from the works of genius of the past, as Glass's, Reich's, and Stockhausen's music differs from Bach's and Mozart's. (Not claiming that the former are on the same level of genius as the latter, necessarily!)
In other words, is genius dependent on the material cultural means of an era, or is it an inherent human trait that can pop up at any time, in any environment? I would bet on the latter, but I don't know how to prove it.
Posted by: JonJ | Dec 10, 2007 7:23:39 PM
Then why, old man, if lack of external stimulation is friendly to art, do great artists ever arise at precisely those times that it's mighty interesting to be alive? That's a generalization to which there are many exceptions, of course, but then so is its opposite.
There is something about the very idea of genius that makes all of us want to generalize. As if the recipe for the right conditions to foster it could be inferred and replicated. We live in an era with so much Emperor's-new-clothesism that we have made it very difficult to tell genius from celebrity, success or even the kind of acute public distress that so often afflicts highly talented people, so that, having devalued the term with over-use, we may well wonder if the real thing can exist in our time.
I think it's a term that, properly understood and bestowed, applies only to fewer than 50 people who have ever lived -- that is, who have ever entered history. If we resisted the term whenever it's used meaninglessly -- as part of the personality-hyping industry, for instance -- we might be able to regain an idea of when it should be used. Woody Allen had a funny comment on the subjective interpretation of terms of high praise used far too loosely in _Manhattan_, where many characters were referred to as "totally brilliant." You soon got the idea that if all these people were totally brilliant, then it was a catch-phrase and nothing more. Now one hears the term "total genius" to describe a successful and indeed enthralling performance, when, actually, total genius -- if we can find it -- is earth-shattering. There is nothing quite like contact with total genius to make you understand, by contrast, the successful, enthralling and even brilliant.
Kenneth Clark once wrote of Edith Sitwell, the now seldom-read poet who was regarded at the Mid-century as a minor but real genius, that he wished her confessor would forbid her to use the word "golden" in her poems. I think if we forbore to use the word "genius" -- even when we found something to be "just great" -- it would over years and years become clearer when the word really applied.
Posted by: Elatia Harris | Dec 11, 2007 12:59:46 AM
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