Howard Jacobson: artistic creation frees us from ‘right thinking’
Art can’t be judged by pressing ‘like’ and ‘not like’ buttons, and it
should stand outside of ideology. Let’s forget thou-shalt-nots and
remember the necessity of play
For some time now we have been in one of those “periodical fits of morality” Lord Macaulay found so ridiculous – minding our step, privileging the taking of offence over the giving of it, going in fear of people who have strong opinions when it should be axiomatic that an opinion is the least interesting thing a person has. What a piece of work is man, how infinite in faculty, in apprehension how like a god, but the minute he tweets us what he thinks in 140 characters the god goes out of him …
We have lost sight of the necessity of “play”. Diversion, not in the
sense of being distracted from what matters, but in the sense of being
distracted from what doesn’t – the false seriousness of belief systems,
conviction, ideology, thinking what it’s right to think.
Only to the degree that men and women create something surprising to
themselves are they surprising to us. The rest is imposture.
Convictions, nostrums, the censorious baggage of the doctrinaire – it is
from such profanities against art that we need to be diverted.
Once, to the consternation of reviewers, I published a novel in which
the protagonist asserts that every man secretly longs to see the woman
he loves in the arms of another man; not because this leaves him free to
bugger off into the arms of another woman, but because of the vexed
pleasure there is in jealousy. And also because uxoriousness, in some
men, evinces itself in the impulse to share. The theme is well known to
art. Only think of William Etty’s voluptuous painting pithily entitled Candaules, King of Lydia, Shews his Wife by Stealth to Gyges, One of his Ministers, as She Goes to Bed.
An act of husbandly magnanimity on King Candaules’s part for which the
queen, once she discovers it, has him killed. From this we can deduce
that she was neither a painter nor a writer.
Responses to my take on the Candaules story were, as we say in
the business, mixed. Some reviewers relished it, some did not. A
novelist can expect no more. But those who didn’t relish it had strange
reasons. The premise made them uncomfortable. If they didn’t find my
hero perverted, they found him preposterous. Myself, I found him both,
and thus a good subject for a novel. One or two, showing an
unfamiliarity with the wilder shores of eroticism – though not that wild
for anyone acquainted with the European novel – reported taking straw
polls among their friends to ascertain how many wanted to see their
wives without their clothes on in the arms of other men. Whatever the
reliability of the sample, none among those polled owned up to any such
ambition, or succeeded in imagining its appeal to others. Indeed –
ignorant of Othello and Leopold Bloom, to name but two – they doubted
such men existed.
We
now know about polls. If there are more shy Tories than polls ever make
allowances for, we might guess there are also more shy cuckolds. But it
isn’t the honesty of their responses that concerns me, but the fact of
their being appealed to in the first place. Everything is allowable in
literature, but what is not allowable in criticism is objection on the
grounds of probability. Can a man really metamorphose into a cockroach?
Whoever thinks that life, crude life, can verify so fine a thing as
fiction – as though what is true is something that can be decided on
before art makes it so – disqualifies himself as a critic.
Behind the probability demurral lurk, of course, the promptings of
propriety. That which the censorious say they find unlikely, they
usually turn out to be objecting to morally. When Rabelais identified a
certain breed of men as “agelasts”, he didn’t mean only those who cannot
bear the extravagance of laughter; he also meant those who hate
inordinacy in all its forms – the killjoys who go in terror of the
irresponsible play and profligacy of art.
“Play,” the poet Ted Hughes
said, “maybe that’s what all literature is, or should be.” He was not,
by all accounts, a frolicsome fellow. So by “play” we might guess he
intended something other than lightness of spirits.
And so do I. Play, as I think of it, is the means whereby we loose
ourselves from the mainland of the familiar and acceptable. The means,
too, whereby we lose ourselves in the act of creation, and find what we
had no idea we were looking for, and maybe sometimes wish we had not
found at all.
I’m not thinking specifically of such revolutionary funsters as Duchamp and Laurence Sterne.
You don’t have to be a joker to play, in the way I mean – and anyway,
the tragedian can usually be relied on to tell more stinging jokes than
the comedian. Remember Hamlet, hopping dementedly from grave to grave,
before coming upon the skull of Yorick, once the king’s jester. “Get
thee to my lady’s chamber,” he orders Yorick, and tell her no matter how
thickly she paints her face, she too will end up just a pile of
whitened bones – “Make her laugh at that.” The challenging question
asked of Yorick and all who entertain is this: where is the virtue in
any of your joking if it doesn’t invigorate in the face of death? If
invigoration against the odds is the justification of a joke, how much
more so is it the justification of art? Against the penury of existence –
its brevity and its disappointments – art releases the illusion of
plenitude.
Think of the aged and bed-ridden Matisse cutting out strips of
coloured paper, much as a child might, and investing them with a more
than mortal vitality … Those strips of paper resonate because they prove
that our materials don’t determine in advance the worth of what we
make. In art, where we play in order to discover, there is no “in
advance”; no intentionality that will survive creation; no
thou-shalt-nots advanced in the name of religious or social rectitude;
no theme so important that it will of itself confer importance on a
work, or so apparently trivial that it won’t; nothing – in the language
of social media – to like or not like and press a button to show which;
nothing, in online-speak, to agree or disagree with and tick a box – for
you can no more disagree with a painting than you can a flower. No
certainty other than the certainty that we can’t be certain of anything.
No traveller ever sets out with so little idea of where he is going
or how he is going to get there than an artist does. And no traveller
ever gets to a more wonderful place. Not everyone is fortunate enough to
earn their living playing. But what draws people to art and artists is a
desire to enjoy the propinquity of play. For it is the very freedom of
the imagination. And what else were we born to do, but imagine freely?
• This is an edited version of a speech delivered by Howard Jacobson at the Royal Academy.
http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2015/jun/20/howard-jacobson-artistic-creation-frees-us-from-right-thinking
