the artist as fallen angel
This is not a post about antisemitism. I promise. It just happens to be the cause du jour.
In his essay, On Three Ways of Writing for Children, C.S. Lewis avers an attitude toward morals in stories that I have adopted (and cited) in defense of the notion that the moral of the story should not, in fact, be the storyteller’s focus. Lewis says:
Anyone who can write a children’s story without a moral had better do so—that is, if he is going to write children’s stories at all. The only moral that is of any value is that which arises inevitably from the whole cast of the author’s mind.
More than once, I’ve referred to Lewis’ “whole cast of the author’s mind” line—it’s something of a maxim for me—to rebut narrow criticism of certain elements in The Horse and His Boy and the rest of the Narniad. And I have used it to explain how I think the self-aware creator creates stories that happen to possess a good moral framework.
But about a week ago, I had a bit of a crisis: this pillar of storytelling philosophy suddenly appeared unreliable. Two essays which I read back-to-back caused this crisis. The first was Jeffrey Bilbro’s Media-Friendly Sins of Other People (in Plough), a commentary on Wendell Berry’s new book, The Need to Be Whole: Patriotism and the History of Prejudice. The second essay was R.J. Smith’s Céline, Literary Antichrist (in Quillette).
sin, the artist, and the audience
Both of these essays talk about sin. Bilbro’s talks about the sin of the public figure and the public itself. Smith’s talks about the sin of the late French writer Louis-Ferdinand Céline.
We love sin! We love it when other people sin, and we hear about it, and we can criticize them for it. We love feeling smug and satisfied. We love sin so much that we have created a particular class of “media-friendly sins” that we all get outraged about. This is the point Wendell Berry makes in his new book, according to Bilbro:
Different political or cultural groups might have different lists of unforgivable sins, but the narrowness of the list—and the resulting self-congratulatory feeling most of us maintain—is widespread. Sure, we may be guilty of run-of-the-mill venial sins that everyone slips into, but we’ve avoided those mortal sins: we haven’t said the n-word or applied blackface or had an abortion or sexually harassed someone.
Add another mortal sin to the shortlist: antisemitism. That’s Céline’s crime (and Kanye’s, apparently). Céline, who died in 1961, was so antisemitic that Nazi propagandists got tired of his “filthy slang” and “hysterical wailing.”
Despite predicting he would “end up being the century’s most cursed author,” Céline is enjoying a bit of a renaissance today. A collection of his unpublished manuscripts and 6,000 pages of missing writings were revealed in 2021. And two new novels of his were published just this year—followed by the criticism anyone familiar with his views would have seen coming. “The fashionable line of attack is that Céline’s views were too reprehensible for his art to be appreciated,” Smith sums up in his Quillette piece.
In a recent article in the New Yorker, Adam Gopnik says Céline’s anti-semitism cannot be separated from his work because “writing doesn’t work that way…rawness, an overcharge of emotion and appetite, is exactly what makes Céline’s work so characteristic. The anti-Semitic fulmination is all of a piece.”
Gopnik also suggests: “The line between Céline’s pamphlets and Auschwitz is direct; to pretend that it’s not is to sin against history.”
I want to digress into why “to sin against history” is a nonsense expression, but I don’t want to distract from the crisis at hand. The crisis—my crisis—being: what if the artist is so bad, that the only thing coming from ‘the whole cast of the artist’s mind’ is also bad? Is the art and the sinful artist all of a piece? Can it then have value?
Smith answers this question relatively easily for himself:
It is difficult to take those who advance the argument that art and artist cannot be separated seriously, for the simple reason that if we demand that our artists be angels we will not have any art left to appreciate.
He and Wendell Berry are shaking hands across the aisle now. I am not in any position to demand that artists be angels, and Berry seems to argue, albeit in a different context, that no one is. Bilbro writes:
We have all sinned. Rather than taking comfort in our abstention from a limited set of publicly denounced sins, Berry would have us reckon with our own complicity.
Smith again:
Our society has forgotten the great insight of Dostoevsky—that we all have the capacity for evil.
the difficulty of forgiving the artist
Before we go off pogroming art because of the sins of the artist, we must remember that we (the receivers of the art) are broken too. And that is why there is such vehemence toward complicated artists: they are mirror-makers. They hold up a reflective glass, and, amid the fractures, we see their heart and our own.
We are not always brave enough to name a sin if it belongs to us too. That is why, according to Berry, we need “the traditional lists of commandments, sins, and virtues. [They] have a human and a humanizing amplitude. They serve as a working definition of our species...”
And that is why we need our complicated artists. We need our Célines and our Kanyes. We need to know the whole cast of the artist’s mind. And we need to acknowledge that what is in the artist’s mind is not divorced from the society and culture in which the artist resides.
Art is not made in a vacuum. The art beaches are pounded and propounded upon by religious, political, moral, and cultural waves. When the ocean retracts, we see what remains: sometimes, laying bare on the sand are naught but putrefying carcasses. We are repulsed, but we have long been swimming in the waters in which that art has formed.
“At some point we began to internalise the Christian injunction that we defend victims,” Smith writes in relation to the outrage over Céline’s newly published works, “but we continue to eschew all the others, especially forgiveness.” Perhaps we eschew forgiveness because, somewhere internally, we know that forgiveness is not what is called for here. The fallen artist has not sinned against us. She and her work have only made us uncomfortable. They are telling us things about ourselves that we do not like to be told—i.e., the truth.
Eschewing forgiveness, we turn to something else—something Luciferian in desire: setting ourselves up as moral arbiters in a universe that is not our own. According to Smith:
Where previously we viewed everyone as fallen, today whether one is a sinner depends on their political views and unalterable characteristics. Transgression of this new religion’s cardinal sins demands “accountability,” which is merely a euphemism for revenge.
We appear sated when an artist (or public figure) gets their comeuppance—resounding condemnation on Twitter, the displeasure of the barons of mainstream media, and a few slaps to the pocketbook. But we are actually more pleased that we have kicked up all the dust and swept it right under the rug. We are better than our forebears who would have gone along with the transgression of the day. We are very proud of ourselves.
Bilbro remarks:
…it would seem that a people formed1 by repeatedly asking God to “forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us” ought to be more prone to conduct public debates with grace… One would expect such a people to no longer label others as on the right or wrong side of history but to confess that we are all guilty, all in need of forgiveness and redemption.
who’s really of the devil’s party?
Artists—the honest ones—tell the truth. Sometimes that truth is good and beautiful. But good, beautiful art isn’t manufactured. The artist doesn’t make it good and beautiful. She just makes it. It arises, Athena-like, out of the artist’s head and the artist’s life—the whole cast of her mind.
Sometimes, the whole cast of the artist’s mind is subsumed by divinity—like the Hebrew prophets who engaged in shocking performance art. Isaiah paraded around naked for three years to show his people how they would be carried off to Assyria in shame “with buttocks bared.” Jeremiah raised a “soiled loincloth” to show how his prideful country would be brought low. They were frowned on for offending sensibilities—imagine if I hung my dirty underwear in the Smithsonian. But they were hated because they held up a mirror to their society, and their society didn’t like its reflection.
I’m not saying every artist is prophet-like or bears a message from on high. Quite the contrary. I am saying that every work of art bears witness to some truth—some truth about the artist and about the environment in which the art is produced. If we are offended by it—if the art and the artist are bad in the moral sense—perhaps we ought to be. But our offense must not end with the art. Our offense ought to pass through the art to the things it speaks of.
Berry and Smith contend that we refrain from adopting a prideful stance toward those artists and public figures who appear to be, in the words of William Blake, “of the devil’s party.” To lean into the prophet comparison, our artists are Cassandras, and we ought to listen whether we like what they are saying or not. Perhaps we ought to listen more if we don’t like what they say.
Pride prevents us from really listening—the same pride that made Lucifer think he and his angels could “re-ascend, self-raised, and repossess [their] native seat.”2 Our outrage against troublesome art and sinful artists is proof—faulty proof, but still proof—that we are fallen. And our prideful reaction is proof that we, the audience—not the artists, are truly of the devil’s party.
my crisis resolved?
I acknowledge now that art ascending from “the whole cast of the author’s mind” applies not just to art that is true and good and beautiful, but also to art that is true and bad and ugly.
I do not plan on reading the newly published Céline novels. (Nor do I plan on trashing them simply because the author was openly antisemitic.) But I hope those who participate in Céline’s stories—or any story—can see them for what they are: a window into a man’s mind and a mirror of that man’s world. In light of recent events, the mirror that Céline holds up might be a reflection in which we still need to gaze.
We don’t need to police art. We need less criminally-minded artists. So now I must rephrase my earlier question: How do we make the artist good so that what comes from ‘the whole cast of the artist’s mind’ is also good? C.S. Lewis answers aptly in his essay. Instead of asking, “What morals should I put into this story?”
…It would be better to ask, “What moral do I need?” for I think we can be sure that what does not concern us deeply will not deeply interest our readers… The matter of our story [or our art] should be a part of the habitual furniture of our minds.
Perhaps we—as artists and as audience—should be less concerned with what art shows us about ourselves or our society, and more concerned with the furniture we are moving into our hearts and minds: the spiritual ideologies, political liturgies, and moral and ethical matrixes that we appeal to and rely on. Because it isn’t about the art so much as it is about the artist. The art is, in fact, the byproduct. To develop the art, you must develop the artist.
asides + signal boosts
Watch Jon Stewart’s thoughts on Kanye West, Kyrie Irving, Dave Chappelle, and the latest furor over antisemitism. Just watch the video. I think he actually answers how we deal with this stuff beyond slapping someone on the wrist, putting them in the corner, and telling them they did a bad thing. Because, clearly, that’s not working.
I am currently up to here in social influence theory and organizational communication as this semester draws to a close. So, I haven’t been up to much else that I want to recommend. But I did finally see Get Out! And that movie would have been 50% better if Chris’ dog had been in the TSA car with Rod when Rod finally showed up to rescue his friend. Missed opportunity right there. Perhaps, that is the real horror.
Finally, in Substacks to Watch, check out the brand-new Exile Aesthetic by my friend Elizabeth Joy Sanders. I know she can split hairs with the best of them, so if you’re into art, faith, or photography, keep an eye on it. I’ve never told her this, but I’m secretly impressed by the writing in her Instagram captions, and I’m looking forward to seeing more of it here.
He’s talking about American citizenry.
John Milton, Paradise Lost: Book 1, Lines 633-34
thank you for the shoutout !! :)