So like Hemingway, (and here’s three unlikely bedfellows), Spenser and Jonson reckon that your art’s got more chance of being worthwhile if it’s penny plain rather than tuppence coloured. Imaginative promiscuity is not the thing. Beneath the surface of art, there may well be nothing, and the richer it is, the more suspicions it will tend to arouse. It may look real. It may feel real. But it’s too rich to be real. [1]
These examples indicate two different ways the physical world can be represented; in ‘The Tempest’, insubstantiality characterizes a landscape where disorder and subversion can thrive; in ‘The Faerie Queene’ and ‘Volpone’ superficiality is a sure sign of lax moral standards. In all cases, order is associated with ideas of solidity and accuracy . Only in a solid, massy real object can meaning be successfully embodied.
And the moral of the story is - if you’re an artist, don’t let your creativity run away with you. Stick to the discipline of depicting reality as it is. Keep your language under control. It’s a rather austere and essentially conservative credo trotted out by many writers possessed of a strong Puritan streak.
I mention Puritanism because it’s a vein that runs a mile wide through English Literature. [2] And Puritans were very cagey about the use of language and its capacity for suggestion. In fact, they were actively frightened of it, since it imprecision was all bound up with the Fall of Man; words, and their tendency to be misinterpreted, represent the Fall from Divine Meaning. People who don’t know the meanings of words aren’t just fools, they’re dangerous subversives.
And this hostility arises out of a deep suspicion that language, being a man-made construct and hence the product of a fallen creature, can only ever be a superficial apprehension of reality. Form and meaning are in constant danger of coming apart, never coming together, or being wilfully mismatched to distort meaning. Feeling guilty, Eve?
Take this representative sermon from the Victorian preacher Charles Kingsley, author of ‘The Water Babies’;
A difference in words is a difference in things. Words are very awful and wonderful things, for they come from the most awful and wonderful of all beings, Jesus Christ, the Word. He puts words into men's minds. He made all things, and He makes all words to express those things with. And woe to those who use the wrong words about things! For if a man calls anything by its wrong name, it is a sure sign that he understands that thing wrongly, or feels about it wrongly; and therefore a man's words are often honester than he thinks; for as a man's words are, so is a man's heart ... and, therefore, by right words, by the right names which we call things, we shall be justified, and by our words, by the wrong names we call things, we shall be condemned. '
It’s not the greatest revelation that words can misrepresent what they’re supposed to mean, and to be fair to Kingsley, he does say words can be “wonderful” as well as “awful” (well he would - he made a tidy living out of them). But a doctrinal Puritan wouldn’t commonly give you the benefit of the doubt. Misuse a word and by default it signifies a darker purpose than simple ignorance. Language is DECEITFUL, full of lures and snares. Hence the Puritanical distrust of art, which represents nothing more than a graven image of reality. It was this, among other considerations, that led them to close all the playhouses in London for most of the period 1642-60.
But that distrust is ever-present in non-religious writers too. They worry that they can’t get the truth down on paper because words are not adequate symbols, or their talent won’t provide them with the correct words to embody their meaning - so we’re back at Big Theme #1 again - Art is Lying. It’s disorder masquerading as order, contingency replacing accuracy, surface standing in for substance.
But let’s not be Puritanical for a moment and cut the writer some slack - maybe he’s not lying deliberately.
Maybe, if he’s being honest and not simply neurotic, he genuinely can’t say what he means. That being the case, he can react in one of two ways; he can rail at the paucity of his own talent or lay the blame elsewhere - most commonly with the nature of contemporary reality as being unconducive to creating meaning that means something. And if he doesn’t want to lapse into a self-imposed silence (which will, of course spell the end of his career), he’ll adopt the latter expedient. What he’s having to confront is nothing more or less than (cue dramatic music) . . .
The Fall of Language: Modernists and Conservatives form unholy alliance shock.
"Then I went into the house and wrote, It is midnight. The rain is beating on the windows. It was not midnight. It was not raining."
Samuel Beckett, ‘Molloy’
Hugo Von Hofmannstahl was an Austrian dramatist and commentator who’s commonly cited by critics as being among the first in the modern era to raise this long-running issue of the fallibility of linguistic meaning. [3] As the twentieth century dawned, however, the situation was being addressed from a more secular perspective than it had been previously, so the restoration of meaning by simply returning to God or writing about Godly things were no longer default options. The future was looking black for our plucky writers in this rather circular argument - there’s no meaning because there’s no God (or God-equivalent), and there’s no God (or God-equivalent) because there’s no meaning. Result - impasse.
Hofmannstahl’s most famous essay is ‘Ein Brief’ (1905), an imagined fictional letter from Phillip Lord Chandos to Lord Francis Bacon. Chandos confesses a major crisis of language - he cannot express himself coherently and it isn’t his fault. Don’t point your finger at me, he writes, because "the nature of our epoch is multiplicity and indeterminacy".
And there’s your trouble; what other generations believed to be firm and constant, he considers das Gleitende (the slipping, the sliding). So his only option, if he’s to remain true to his artistic principles, is to keep quiet.
And the letter does communicate a genuine, heartfelt malaise; the only things that can still ignite a spark of creativity are a pretty desultory list of ‘real’ objects - a watering can, an abandoned harrow in the field, a dog in the sun, a shabby churchyard, a cripple or a peasant cottage. He’s got it really bad if that’s the best artistic fuel he can come up with. Can you imagine Milton trying to writer ‘Paradise Lost’ with those ingredients?
Chandos’s ennui, taedium vitae - call it what you will - was prompted by his perception that contemporary language is the product of a society that has fragmented; from being an aristocratic, feudal, humanistic and rural it’s now bourgeois, democratic, mechanistic and urban. And there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with that - certainly nothing which is necessarily hostile to art; Dickens’s fictional world with its seething hordes of characters, urban disorder, and cast of lowlifes teems with life and vigour. But with Chandos/Hofmannstahl, the problem lies much deeper - it’s an absence of any underlying order to help make sense of all this mess. In short, it’s a failure of aesthetics - modern life is just too ugly for art, which Chandos is confusing with an actual absence of spirituality.
It’s a common condition among writers in the early 20th century (although in this example, it’s being spoken through the mouth of an eighteenth-century aristocrat). According to this way of looking at the world, the spirit and unity that gave meaning to society (and the language appropriate to describing it) no longer exists. And you can’t build anything lasting because there’s no solid underpinning, and no framework holding the building together. While once “beneath the stone arcades of the great square in Venice,” he could conceive of “that structure . . . whose plan and order delighted him” he no longer has the tools to do the construction work he originally planned. Whether you believed that cohesiveness was divinely-inspired or not was academic - it simply wasn’t there.
And he wasn’t alone. As WB Yeats noted in his melodramatic and much-anthologized poem ‘The Second Coming’;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
And this mood of world-weariness and/or alarm was getting to philosophers too. Take this diagnosis from the Martin Heidegger, which contains all the above ingredients, and which he reckoned was still a propos as late as 1961:
The spiritual decline of the earth is so far advanced that the nations are in danger of losing the last bit of spiritual energy that makes it possible to see the decline . . . The darkening of the world, the flight of the gods, the destruction of the earth, the transformation of men into a mass, the hatred and suspicion of everything free and creative, have assumed such proportions throughout the earth that the childish categories of pessimism and optimism have long since become absurd.
And yet, all the time, the industrialized society creates a very plausible imitation of a world functioning as normal, with people who are not poets going about their daily lives as if nothing’s amiss. But lurking beneath the thin surface crust is a boiling sea of chaos that the writer no longer feels in control of, because his main tool, language, is ironically helping to construct that crust or veneer, by not getting to the heart or the essence of what it’s trying to capture. Language is no longer a vehicle that’s luminous and resonant because a) worthy subject matter isn’t there for it to describe and b) that subject matter has nothing animating it. It ends up bouncing off the outlines of things. So you end up writing about static or decaying forms or life that’s asleep - like watering cans and weary dogs.
Footnotes:
1. In other versions of the Grail story, particularly the 12th century ’Queste del Saint Graal’, the richly created landscape simply vanishes into thin air just as the knight’s about to succumb to temptation, forcing him to learn the lesson that overabundance symbolizes sin.
2. I’m not just referring to dyed-in-the-wool Puritans by using this term; it’s more a shorthand for the more ‘muscular’ tendencies in any religion for whom all artistic expression bordered on the sinful. Charles Kingsley, who I quote in a moment, was actually a Christian Socialist.
3. Which is still very much with us, as we’ll see in a moment.
