Must Art Be Good?

For much of the Early Modern period the French were, to most tastes, not at good at playwrighting as the English. This was not because France lacked talented people in its theaters and its literary culture; there were Racine, Molière, and Corneille, to name just a few. The problem was, rather, one of standards being set at the cultural level, especially at the level of the elite culture; French playwrights were still expected to adhere to certain “unities” that artificially constrained things like time and setting, whereas in English theater Shakespeare and most playwrights after him, as well as some before him, had exuberantly dispensed with the unities and with the absolutist, prescriptive attitude towards “good” narrative that they represented. Some playwrights, especially Molière, occasionally mocked the unities, but the fact that they had to be responded to in the first place constrained the dramatic tradition in the French language for well over a hundred years, even as the language and the Parisian literary class that spoke it exploded with creativity in other genres.

Today we can look back on the unities, laugh, and mourn what could have been in terms of French theater in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It is easy, however, to get complacent about this. The truth is that current artistic production, too, has rules for good art, especially good narrative art, that seem objective to us most of the time but are in fact just as culture-bound as were the unities. It is not at all obvious across all times and places that The Lord of the Rings having non-naturalistic dialogue and character writing that progressively reveals static personalities to the reader are objective problems with the text. It has these “flaws” insofar as current readers often dislike books that are written this way. Tolkien's audience first and foremost was himself, and the fact that a large audience of other people like his writing as well was, for him, a happy accident. This is without even getting into more expressly political or ideological aspects of artistic taste like the idea that a story should seek to “represent” the experiences of an abstract intended reader. I asked my mother once what she thought of representation as a priority in narrative art and she said that, when she was growing up, she wanted to read about practically anyone other than lower-middle-class white Catholic girls from suburban New England, an experience of the world that she already knew more about than she cared to by virtue of her self-awareness. In that sense my mother was more “represented by” the characters in books by authors like Kipling and Hardy than by those in, for instance, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, because her priorities as a reader were being represented and it isn't self-evident that every reader's priorities will include self-recognition. This is without even reaching the cases of those who might learn new things about themselves by encountering the apparent other in fiction, like religious converts, transgender people, and people inspired to learn a new language after reading or watching something in translation.

Some of these newer norms for “good art” are religious or religion-related in character. Yellowjackets, my favorite current television show and one that I think has the potential to be the most interesting mainstream American television show of the 2020s, is a survival horror story that treats the question of supernatural agency within the plot with a light (or, in less well-considered moments, muddied) touch. The effect is somewhat akin to that achieved in classic folk horror movies like The Wicker Man and Witchfinder General. Are the characters having the severe psychological problems that they are because of literal, external supernatural agency, or is the darkness entirely located within them? We don’t know for sure, although there are suggestions that something genuinely spiritual or paranormal is occurring, but this does not stop certain viewers of the show from arguing for the sake of “realism” that the supernatural must be absent—as if people who believe in the supernatural never have psychological problems in real life. The effect of this is to imply that what someone who has supernatural or religious beliefs sees in her own experiences of the world is deficient and can never rise to the same significance as what someone with no such beliefs sees in the experiences of her “believer” peer; the idea that Yellowjackets is a show where the supernatural events aren’t actually occurring isn’t itself a prescriptive or exclusionary one, but the idea that it “should” be that type of show for “realism’s” sake certainly is. Never mind that in many other societies in the past it would be seen as unusual for this kind of story not to include supernatural forces. As Doris Bargen points out in A Woman’s Weapon, the well-known episode in Genji monogatari in which Lady Rokujō possesses Lady Aoi and causes her to die in childbirth reflects Genji’s origin in a society where attempting to possess people one disliked was simply what one did as a woman in certain types of social situations.

Sometimes the implied preference for secularity as a precondition for artistic merit affects entire genres. Most of us take it for granted that, put frankly, Christian contemporary music, especially of the sort that burgeoned in Evangelical and some Catholic spaces in the 1990s, sucks. Why? Is it because it is religiously motivated? So is half of Bach. Is it because the artists are mostly right-wing? So was Ian Curtis. Is it because they tend to have bad taste in other media? So do tons of secular pop stars. Is it because it prioritizes achieving effects other than maximum artistic and technical ambitiousness? In the age of poptimism, that usually does not matter. I think the issue is less any of this and more that this music has the “vibes” of being for a narrow religious interest—which, to be fair, it is; the genre, especially today, pillarizes itself from outside culture in a way that gives the impression that most Christian contemporary artists would rather not be considered “good” by secular critics. If there were a Natalie Merchant song from the same time period as Rebecca St. James’s rendition of “Be Thou My Vision,” even if it was a cover of a hymn (and there are Natalie Merchant songs that are!), where halfway through the track the lyrics cut out and a combination of reverb effects and hi-hat cymbals and helicopter sound effects from a bad Vietnam War movie started eating the melody alive, the secular music press would take that song dead seriously. St. James, however, probably does not want the secular music press to take her “Be Thou My Vision” dead seriously, because the foolishness of God is wiser than Pitchfork.

Readers will have noted a generally author-focused approach in this essay so far; this is because I think that the pop reception of Roland Barthes and the “death of the author” harms attempts to assess art as a process of communication between a creator, or creative community, and an audience. The pop-Barthesian reader is solipsistic and is unable to assess what she thinks makes art good or bad because she is unable to assess the social and cultural pressures on the creator or creative community. This is once again relevant to Yellowjackets, a show whose fandom tends to misattribute its flaws to the screenwriters even though most of them are demonstrably the fault of other people, such as network and production executives. It is also relevant to essentially anything that is read or watched in translation, because pop-Barthesianism puts forward John Dryden’s attempt in his translation of the Georgics “to make Virgil speak such English, as he wou’d himself have spoken, if he had been born in England, and in this present Age” as the only kind of good or even conceptually apprehensible translation, for what amount to ideological reasons.[1] A translator cannot, instead, with Friedrich Schleiermacher, seek to build a conversation between two people, the (abstract structure of the) author and the (abstract structure of the) reader, unless she is willing to try to make the reader have a conversation with a corpse. Certainly it looks a bit morbid for a translator who takes the death of the author seriously to attempt to lead the reader towards the original author rather than vice versa, as was Schleiermacher’s own preference. Pop-Barthesianism’s extremely low understanding of “authorship” overthrows the tyranny of the author at the expense of imposing a tyranny of the reader that takes on overtones of cultural supremacism whenever the reader’s values are closer than the author’s to those values that are culturally dominant. (Barthes as a critic of the “dead white men” canon may or may not have believed that this was possible, but it obviously is.) Combine this with straightforward misunderstanding of what the artistic production process actually involves, as in the Yellowjackets example, and one gets the basic conditions for the infamously entitled reading style of modern media fandoms.

I do not mean to suggest that criticizing the quality of a piece of art or writing is always ungenerous or entitled on the part of an audience, only that it should be undertaken with some humility about what “quality” means, and what aspects of a work might come across as quasi-objectively good or bad to some generations of readers, or fans, but not others. I often see younger people recommending older anime series like Haibane-Renmei and the original Trigun with caveats about the sketchy art styles and choppy animation; I, conversely, can’t watch many newer anime series because they are so smooth and high-definition that they make me feel like I am swimming in a vat of motor oil. I can practically hear the rank-and-file animators breaking out into “The Red Flag” in my head. Arguing that a piece of art or writing or music “just isn’t good,” or for that matter that it “just is good,” is never as simple as one thinks it will be when the argument begins.

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[1] Dryden had, as we say nowadays, bad takes on the unities as well. In An Essay on Dramatick Poesie he accuses Shakespeare’s history plays of seeking “not to imitate or paint Nature, but rather to draw her in miniature, to take her in little; to look upon her through the wrong end of a Perspective, and receive her Images not onely much less, but infinitely more imperfect then the life.” It’s not impossible to imagine him having the same problem with the supernatural elements of Yellowjackets, the dialogue in The Lord of the Rings, or the didacticism of Christian rock “if he had been born in America, and in this present Age.”

One Only Has to Use One’s Head

「少し頭を働かしなさいや」

―谷崎潤一郎　『細雪』

A few years ago I remember hearing about a movement in the publishing industry, particularly concerning books for younger readers, called “Own Voices.” Own Voices was based on the idea that writing that involves representational concerns—a term that here means concerns about how historically disadvantaged types of people are represented in the text—should, either generally exclusively, be by people who belong to the groups in question. Thus an LGBT author should be writing about LGBT characters, a black author about black characters, and so forth. Own Voices was roundly criticized, partly for forcing closeted authors of LGBT literature to come out or incur serious reputational harms, and is no longer in vogue. (Personally my criticism of Own Voices was somewhat different: it makes internally diverse ensemble casts of characters impossible. A thoroughly Own Voices literary scene would be one in which most books published in the West are still about straight white people and most that are not are set in homogeneous, pillarized communities. Even among socially aware stories of yore, you can’t have a Deep River that’s Own Voices for Indian people as well as for a religious minority in a country other than India, or an Across the Barricades that’s Own Voices for both Protestants and Catholics. I don’t read a lot of “issues novels,” and someone who does could probably come up with better examples.)

            But what about the actual literary and artistic merit of the kinds of books Own Voices was supposed to produce, and those against which it was supposed to be a reaction? That might be a different question than its effects on the industry or the culture. Indeed, I think it almost indisputably is; there is an awful lot of bad art and fiction out there written about disadvantaged or marginal populations by writers from privileged and mainstream ones. We could name minstrelsy, Old Mother Riley, and most depictions of women in pornographic literature written by and for straight men, just to name a few of the most infamous examples. I do not think, however, that this needs to be the case; rather it represents an abdication of imaginative faculties by writers writing characters about whom they have prejudiced or stereotyped ideas. The fact that this is not necessarily intentional—Moby-Dick is genuinely not supposed to seem as hostile to Polynesian people as it does, nor Heart of Darkness to Congolese people—goes some way towards explaining the appeal that a blunt-force solution like Own Voices had.

            Lately I’ve been getting deeply into a book series called Otherside Picnic, by a male Japanese author called Miyazawa Iori. (Miyazawa has alluded to some degree of gender dysphoria in at least one interview, but I am just about the last person to look too closely at something like this if the person in question does not want to emphasize it.) Otherside Picnic, a series in the “yuri” tradition of Japanese writing about women, begins as a loose adaptation of the 1970s Soviet science fiction novel Roadside Picnic before developing its own identity. This identity consists, in large part, in an intricate portrayal of the lives of two college-aged women, Sorawo and Toriko, as they explore a dangerous parallel universe and gradually fall in love. The series is good to the point that I almost hesitate to gush about it for fear of implausibility. Sorawo and Toriko are astonishing creations, both as individual characters and as a budding relationship. They have traumatic backgrounds that do not feel prurient and flaws that do not feel calculated for maximum relatability; Sorawo in particular is such an accomplished binge drinker that she is developing cirrhosis in her early twenties. The Otherside—dangerous, terrifying, and inhabited by folkloric monsters that it generates by actively reading Sorawo’s mind—nevertheless exerts a bizarre pull on the characters, a pull that the reader comes to feel as well and that works as a semi-allegorical commentary on several different aspects of LGBT life.

            Miyazawa has spoken several times at events in Japan about the writing process for Otherside Picnic. His comments on this are in some cases deeply bizarre, even when the subject matter is not. An extended and fairly conventional Eliotic point about objective correlatives, for example, might include phrases like “yuri of absence” and end with Miyazawa expressing an “Ash Wednesday”-esque desire to become a pile of bleached bones scattered in the desert. He has attained notoriety for this in some online spaces that are only peripherally aware of the series itself. If one reads the interviews in full, however, what emerges is someone very concerned with representational issues and committed to doing right by the types of people (i.e. gay people and in particular gay women) about whom he is writing. He lists off common pitfalls and outdated presentations, muses on the differences between Japanese and American gay fiction, and cites the 2010s NBC Hannibal series as an inspiration for deciding to write gay fiction himself. The quality of the series is clearly due to consideration, not happenstance.

            One point of frustration that I have with Otherside Picnic is that, as the title of this essay implies, much of what makes it such an astonishing achievement on the representational level consists in employing writing techniques that should be obvious but are not. Miyazawa’s stated principles for male writers approaching lesbian subjects, such as accounting for the fact that the characters have sexual desires and avoiding the temptation to insert oneself as a voyeuristic third party, should be defaults when it comes to romance writing, not accomplishments. Otherside Picnic would still be an extraordinarily good series for many other reasons in a world in which all the usual pitfalls were widely acknowledged. It would still work with genre in interesting and considered ways—the series is a romance, a science fiction story, a horror story, a comedy, and at points a campus novel or a technological thriller. The Otherside as a setting would still be a better extended metaphor for LGBT realization and LGBT community than any other I have seen in years (one is reminded at points of Fingersmith’s Briar Court). Sorawo and Toriko’s relationship would still be a touching exploration of how to build bonds with others after early experiences seeing people mostly as potential threats. Yet there is no good reason why the state of literature should be such that it impresses us when the leads in a love story openly want to have sex with each other, when a piece of fiction lacks an obvious preoccupation with the author’s own erotic tastes, or when these types of protagonists are old enough to drink. Otherside Picnic doing these things so well says wonderful things about Miyazawa Iori, but a fortiori says very bad things about many other writers.

            I think this can be extended to other representational questions too, not just ones relating to sexuality. Miss Saigon is not as jarringly racist a musical as it is because there’s some secret knowledge about Southeast Asian people that is missing; it is jarringly racist because basic principles of human psychology and social relationships aren’t being applied to the Southeast Asian characters. The 1950s Disney Peter Pan is not racist against Native Americans insofar as it does not provide an intimate portrait of real Blackfoot life; it is racist insofar as it presents the Blackfoot characters as grotesques whose skin color is the result of constant blushing and who only learn things by asking the white man “how?” To be sure, little is being done in lesbian fiction (or even in the yuri genre, which isn’t necessarily the same thing, although Otherside Picnic is both) that is anywhere near as offensive as these two examples. Even works of the past that were aggressively bad representationally, like 1950s pulp in the US or certain early-2000s anime and manga series in Japan, have their semi-ironic defenders. But that should not exculpate the other examples; indeed, the fact that more people take genuine offense to Miss Saigon and Peter Pan makes those cases even more galling.

“Anxious Not to Appear Unhappy”; or, Why Mansfield Park Is the Austen Novel One Never Knew One Needed

So-called “classic” art and literature comes into and goes out of fashion just as do popular culture trends. For most of the twentieth century Edward Elgar was considered a fundamentally unserious composer; today he has reentered the classical concert repertoire. Johann Sebastian Bach, unbelievably, went through the same rehabilitation in the early nineteenth century. Renaissance castigation of High Medieval art has gradually over the past several centuries given way to appreciation of that art’s numinous aspects. Post-World War II horror at Victorian architecture and interior design, as seen for instance in Shirley Jackson’s novels, seems itself quaint and dated today. In literature, too, we see such long-term trends. To the end of understanding why certain books spend decades or centuries in or out of favor, I recently read the Jane Austen novel Mansfield Park. For many years Mansfield Park was considered a contender for Austen’s best novel; today it is widely seen as her worst.

            A great deal about Mansfield Park makes it immediately obvious why it is currently unfashionable. It is a didactic, relatively unfunny novel, whose passive and extremely introverted heroine, Fanny Price, comes across quite frankly as a personality-free drip to current sensibilities. Fanny drifts from one abusive situation (with her parents and siblings; her sisters sleep with knives in hand on account of her father’s drunk and handsy Royal Navy friends) to another (with her rich slaver uncle Sir Thomas Bertram, who is absent for much of the novel and whose wife and children treat her as a glorified domestic servant). She falls in with the witty and urbane Crawford siblings, Mary and Henry, then breaks from them after getting relentlessly hammered for chapter after chapter to compromise her strict Protestant morals for the sake of their social circles. Finally, she marries her cousin Edmund, an aspiring Church of England priest who is the only character to consistently treat her like a person (albeit still not one whom he seems to like very much). The book’s treatment of where the Bertram family’s wealth comes from is mostly off-page, with one exception: Fanny asks her uncle to his face at dinner what he thinks of the slave trade, only to be met with “dead silence” that she takes as her cousins being bored of discussing politics. Edward Said infamously interpreted the novel as tacitly pro-slavery due to the extremely limited explicit treatment of the subject; although, as I will argue, the novel is swarming with implicit condemnation of slavery, not spelling it out in extremely clear terms goes against current tastes in political art.

            All of this being the case, I actually liked Mansfield Park very much and am glad I read it. The lurking implications and intimations of deep evil within the novel attracted me to its moral imagination despite its over-the-top sermonizing about less serious subjects like live theatre. Indeed the way the book relegates deeper moral and social pathologies to subtext strikes me as a level of irony more characteristic of Austen than most of today’s readers seem to think. Sense and Sensibility does the same thing, has a resolution to its marriage plot that is at least as unsettling as Fanny’s marriage to Edmund, and probably only escapes being excoriated for the same reasons as Mansfield Park because it is funnier.

            It is my belief that the book becomes much harder to understand if one refuses to situate it biographically. I’m not particularly interested in set phrases like “separating art from the artist” or “death of the author.” I think it’s common sense that at least some aspects of an artist’s personality will show up in her art, at least some aspects of a work of art will reflect the artist’s or artists’ personal circumstances, and the pertinent questions are what aspects and how the reader or viewer or listener feels about them (“deciding to ignore them” is a perfectly valid answer to this). With Mansfield Park a great deal is going on that reminds one of Jane Austen’s own life and family; she was a Tory who admired anti-slavery Tory thinkers like Burke and Johnson, she had intimate family connections both to right-wing politics and to the Royal Navy, and some of these family connections would themselves eventually become anti-slavery in nature. Admiral Sir Francis Austen would, decades after his younger sister’s death, spend four years responsible for the Navy’s efforts to intercept slave ships as Commander-in-Chief of the North America and West Indies Station.

            This odd dynamic of “Toryism” (in the broadest sense) opposing itself to something far worse than Toryism is, as I keep saying, currently unfashionable. It is, however, familiar to me, both from other British literature and from the heavily Austen-influenced Japanese novel Sasameyuki. The World War II-era ultranationalist regime in Japan interdicted Sasameyuki’s publication due to the book’s antiwar and antifascist content, yet this antiwar and antifascist content takes the form mostly of depicting militarism as a modern aberration distracting the Japanese people from their real traditions, such as midsummer firefly hunts and collecting very specific types of dolls. Similarly, much of Mansfield Park’s moral criticism of the wealthy slavers in Fanny’s life takes the form of intimating that they are un-English: Mary Crawford plays the harp (seen at the time as a very Continental instrument); the theatricals are an affront to English Protestant moral piety; characters make constant reference to Mansfield’s park’s “air,” and the Earl of Mansfield’s anti-slavery opinion in the 1772 King’s Bench case Somerset v Stewart had used “English air” as a metonym for freedom.

            Mary Crawford brings us to the subject of sexuality in the book. (In fact the heroine’s name brings us to this subject, but part of what makes the name “Fanny Price” so funny is that nobody in the book remarks upon it, so I’m not going to remark upon it at any great length either.) I tend to resist reading same-sex desire into books like Mansfield Park, not because I have a bias against such readings but because I have a bias towards them and have a habit of overcorrecting for this bias when doing serious analysis of this type of novel. With Mansfield Park, however, I genuinely think that much of the deviant or proscribed sexuality hinted at in the book is being hinted at on purpose. Mary Crawford, raised in a circle of perverted admirals, makes what is either an anal sex joke or a BDSM joke in mixed company in Chapter VI; Fanny overtly says that she is physically attracted to Mary in Chapter VII (almost immediately before the narration describes Edmund’s own interest in Mary as “a line of admiration of Miss Crawford, which might lead him where Fanny could not follow”—wording that has hints of apophasis) and muses on her fascination with her in Chapter XXIII:

Fanny went to her every two or three days: it seemed a kind of fascination: she could not be easy without going, and yet it was without loving her, without ever thinking like her, without any sense of obligation for being sought after now when nobody else was to be had; and deriving no higher pleasure from her conversation than occasional amusement, and that often at the expense of her judgment, when it was raised by pleasantry on people or subjects which she wished to be respected. She went, however….

Attempts to analyze and address this attraction between Fanny and Mary in adaptations and fanfiction usually present the more brazen and transgressive Mary as the sexual or romantic pursuer, but this isn’t what we see in Mansfield Park itself. Instead it’s the pious killjoy Fanny who seems to respond to Mary in a way that she does not to anyone else in the book, including her eventual husband Edmund. Austen disposes of Fanny and Edmund’s wedding in an oddly perfunctory and unenthusiastic way, vaguely referring to it as “a hopeful undertaking” and “quite natural.” In a novel advocating values as conservative as those advocated in this one, this is not the clear damnation with faint praise that it would be in a romance novel written today, but it still raises the question of how appealing exactly this marriage actually is to Fanny, or to Edmund for that matter.

            With a book that is didactic in the very strange and archaic way that Mansfield Park is—slavery is bad, adultery is bad, flirting is bad, live theatre is bad, and all four things are the province of the same basic types of hedonistic rich people—one cannot really claim anything related to sex as “representation” in a positive or affirming sense. In terms of what’s depicted in the novel, though, whether Austen approves of it or not, the way these characters relate to and experience sexuality treats very little as beyond the pale. Here is my reading of the sexual aspects of the story, all of which I am able to cite from the text, with a focus on Mary Crawford and her problems:

            Fanny and Mary are both raised in deeply dangerous circles of depraved Navy men. Both are traumatized in ways that the reader isn’t wholly privy to, Mary probably worse than Fanny. Fanny reacts by becoming withdrawn, submissive, and morally irreproachable; Mary reacts by becoming a charismatic social butterfly who thinks life is about taking other people for the proverbial ride at all costs. They meet and get along at first; Fanny especially is taken with Mary, who sparks confusing feelings in her. Mary makes sex jokes in public and wholeheartedly embraces the Bertram family’s raunchy (for 1814) lifestyle; Fanny, pressured relentlessly to compromise her puritanical values by just about every other character, hangs on until her slaver uncle (himself probably up to no good) comes home and has a My Immortal-esque “what the hell are you doing, you motherfuckers?” reaction that takes the heat off her. When Maria Rushworth cheats on her husband with Mary’s brother later on, Mary’s antinomian reaction alienates Edmund and burns all remaining bridges with Fanny, who, Mansfield Park after all being a deeply conservative novel, drifts into a path-of-least-resistance marriage to the only male character who is as moralistic as she is. Mary, meanwhile, implicitly shakes off the psychic influence of the perverted admirals eventually, but not for a long time.

            This was the only Austen novel that Vladimir Nabokov held in high regard, and it isn’t difficult to see why once one looks at it through the “sex is tyranny is sex is tyranny is sex” lens that Nabokov perfected in Lolita. Mansfield Park might not be as interested in slavery in particular as critics like Edward Said have wished it to be, but it is very interested in abuse of power in general. The “air” references are, in this reading, part of a semantic field that also includes repeated use of lemmas like “oppress” (which occurs seven times by my count, mostly with Fanny as the person being oppressed), “tyrant” (which occurs three times, two of them referring to the slaver Sir Thomas and his family), “abuse” or “ill-use” (four times), “cruel” (twelve times), and “wicked” (four times). The book uses its vision of human evil as a hammer rather than a scalpel, and although it’s still funny and often even sweet it is not difficult to see why people who find Pride and Prejudice and Emma comforting and consoling reads might disfavor it.

            Mansfield Park’s vision of evil and tyranny is, like it or not—and I don’t like it very much myself—inseparable from its preachy Protestant piousness, something that I think derails many modern readers and makes them less able to notice or realize that the book does contain social critique. Protestantism is unlike Catholicism, the Destiel of religions, partly in that it tends to be either epicurean or censorious; even the Social Gospel progressives of the early twentieth century had tendencies towards the no-fun positions on attempted social reforms like Prohibition and, more regrettably, eugenics. The antislavery movement in Britain had strong Methodist and Evangelical contingents and included figures who were, as mentioned above, staunchly conservative even for the time on other issues. It thus should not surprise the theologically knowledgeable reader that the Austen heroine who attempts to grill her uncle about the slave trade at dinner is also the one who stubbornly insists that it is immoral to act in a play alongside her own extended family.

            People should read Mansfield Park. People who have already read Mansfield Park and disliked what they thought it had to say should read it again. The book has a fundamental stance and vision that seems alien at first but has a bracing moral clarity to it once one digs into the depths of the text. It is good and salutary to subject oneself to unfashionable classics; indeed, I would say that doing so is at least as good and salutary as is reading fashionable classics. Certainly Fanny Price herself would think so, and she would know; she is a bootlicking scold.