IT'S TIME TO TAKE SIDES Has Commonweal surrendered to the spirit of nihilism in the arts? Definitely not
McConnell, Frank
Frank McConnell Since my colleague Richard Alleva takes most of the heat from Counselor Hagen, and since he's a better writer than I am anyway, I'll be short. Can art conflict with morality?...
...I have a helluva hard time forcing myself to reread that most nihilistic of all books, King Lear, to teach it, which I do every year...
...exorcises about 90 percent of the world's literature as "un-Christian"-including his own greatest work...
...Art cannot make us want to be good, but it can preserve us from the illusion that we already are": that's W.H...
...Mind you, I hated Natural Born Killer...
...Okay...
...Art can conflict with morality...
...And the role of the "Christian intellectual"-unless I was misinformed by the Xaverian Brothers and the Fathers of the Holy Cross-is to find and honor God and man in the paradisal sewer of the world, not apart from it...
...Brown wants to understand them and thereby-it's not too strong a word-redeem the world...
...Let's get it straight that representations of violence have not, that's not, proved a correlation to real violence, otherwise the race would have self-destructed about the time of the Iliad...
...Come on: Oliver Stone, who is only slightly more subtle and ironic than a breath mint, gives us quick-cut after quick-cut of loony carnage, all the time nudging us and whispering, "See how desensitized you all are to the unspeakable...
...That's the gravamen of Hagen's brief for the prosecution, and the answer is yes, he's right, of course it can-and often does...
...Haven't seen Pulp Fiction-John Travolta gives me gas...
...And it's just dumb to say that some cretins watch Natural Born Killers as a training film...
...If Hagen only knew it, he and Stone are allies...
...and that the nihil obstat and the imprimatur, though industrial byproducts of the religious imagination, are essentially inimical to the holy thing that spawned them...
...Brother Hagen-with respect: you're righteous, but not right...
...Frank McConnell is media critic for Commonweal...
...Well, in the first place, any outrage you have to "muster" isn't really outrage, is it...
...Art, said Amiri Baraka back when he was LeRoi Jones, is "whatever makes you proud to be a human being...
...Of course they do: they're cretinsl I know a guy who thought (thinks) The Great Gatsby is about how the Jews want to take over everything...
...And religion, says Karl Rahner in The Practice of Faith, is the conviction "that it is meaningful for a mere human to speak into the endless desert of God's silence...
...In his story "The Secret of Father Brown," Chesterton tells us his little priest can solve crimes just because, in his own imagination, he too can envision the most monstrous evil...
...Let me suggest, deferentially, that just as Christianity is humanity in its fullness, "Christian art" is simply art, like life, in all its glorious, scary, and redeemable grunginess...
...Tolstoy's mistake-and Hagen's, Plato's and Kierkegaard's-is terminological...
...So is everything allowed, or should "Christian intellectuals muster outrage over brazen displays of cruelty in the arts...
...See how TV and movies have rotted your stupid, stupid minds...
...Auden, writing in Commonweal under the name "Didymus," in 1942...
...Art doesn't occasion outrage: it demands it...
...Prophets don't get points off for idiot fans...
...But I hated it because it was too moralistic...
...Plato banished poets from his Republic because they told gnarly stories, Kierkegaard couldn't forgive himself for loving Mozart's Don Giovanni, and Tolstoy's late book What Is Art...
...And yes, alas, everything must be allowed...
...And do you want to take Jeffrey Dahmer to the matinee of Silence of the Lambs...
...The politically correct Sherlock Holmes-and Hagen-want to ignore all the devils and thereby cleanse the world...
...But art never conflicts with religion, just because-and if I don't believe this then I don't believe anything-all art is religious...
...So does the daily crap-shoot of just living: like, say, all the time...
Vol. 122 • September 1995 • No. 16
