Reflections On Literature As A Minor Art

...III In one important respect, however, literature cannot become a minor art, for it is the art of language...

...It is a situation so peculiar that it is not noticed...

...have so far produced pathetically inferior works that cannot pretend to compare with the masterpieces of book and stage over 2500 years...

...The diminution of letters is especially evident to those of us who write very seriously, who try for the classical liter ary functions of subtile ideas and accu rate distinctions, ingenious and cogent reasoning, distilled learning, poetic ex pression...

...In many ways literature has, in this century, become a minor art, more important than pottery or weaving, perhaps less important than block-printing or other graphics...

...Since there is little legal censorship, it is possible for nearly any idea to get itself printed...

...The picturecoverage of an event in an illustrated magazine can powerfully direct what people feel about it...

...By the 19th century, compared to the preceding 500 years, although men of letters still had respectable positions in the homes and palaces of the policy-making elite, they certainly had ceased to function as important first sources of ideas that would eventually shape practice...

...Note that in our times the question of the quantity of diffusion of ideas is essential...

...In every generation, the art of letters renovates and codifies the style of speech, assimilating what has sprung up new, inventing new things itself...

...These functions are not easily or often adapted to the major modern media, to cinema, photography, or tele vision, for in the adaptation they are blurred, blunted, curtailed, and lost...

...It is possible that that exists...

...To be sure, rich people collect objects of paintings and sculpture and thereby support artists, but these artists do not produce their works for the collectors any more than poets write for them...

...on the other they have ceased to follow writing, or expose themselves to it, as major artistic experience...

...So far as the subtile, learned, reasoned, and persuasive treatment of ideas is a function of Ietters, our present shift to other major media, and literature becoming a minor art, is socially unfortunate...

...he would have taken a dim view of audio-visual education...

...but it is not inconceivable that the new media will get hold of themselves (I do not say "mature" since, in cinema at least, the works of a generation ago were much more promising than those today) . Naturally, for men of letters our new status is personally unfortunate...

...In general, through the ages we can estimate the importance of letters as sources of policy by the negative test of the censorship of letters...

...Cinema and radio-television, journalistic photography and series of illustrations, and persistently architecture and a kind of music: these are arts of the great public in a way that books, even best-sellers, have ceased to be...

...we practice a minor art and occupy a minor place...

...and also the style of speech is a good part of our philosophy of life, for a point of view proves itself viable and gets abroad by being able to tell a real story in a new way...

...But subtile and learned explanation, the application of history and experience, the play of thought and hypothesis, the effort toward the truth under the surface that does not leap to the eye, everything that Matthew Arnold meant by "criticism of life," these things are not skilfully accomplished without letters and training in letters and a high expectation from letters...

...The comparison to pottery and weaving is apt, for what we are doing is analogous to individual handicraft, no doubt rare and beautiful, compared to the major media of the present which tend to be produced by teams with a standard technique, not unlike machineproduction...

...11 A second way in which literature has diminished is that it is no longer the source of ideas important for social policy and moral behavior...

...and throughout the high middle ages and in modern times there was always a heavy censorship...

...This is lonely-making...

...The exceptions stand out and illustrate my point: the social-revolutionary ideas of the Russian writers that brought nearly every major Russian man of letters to jail or exile, or the moral ideas of the European and American writers that at once awakened the censorship...

...Where books are heavily censored, books are important for social policy and moral behavior...

...Firstly, it is no longer an art of either the mass-audience or an elite audience...

...Now this lapse of letters from a major position is not a new thing...

...the average student (like the average editor and publisher) no longer reads English like a native...

...Of course in America it is not from the government that we would expect the important censorship of ideas or expression, but from those who control the capital-means of communication, the owners of radio stations, publishers, theatrical producers...

...our adolescent fantasies of becoming major artists are doomed to be fantasies...

...we cannot be made use of...

...So the plastic arts, drawing and painting and sculpture, cannot become minor arts for they demonstrate perception, how people can see and are to see...

...Let me then suggest the following possibility: since what these persons do diffuse is not important, policy-making, literature, if there exists any important literature at all, it must be in what they refuse to diffuse, what they censor...

...Such ideas as now get influentially abroad—I am not often impressed by their wisdom or brilliance— originate among economists, social scientists, administrators and businessmen, and technologists...

...Moving pictures can powerfully determine norms of behavior and style of life...

...This is far-reaching, for the style of speech is our interpersonal attitudes, which are largely patterns of rhetoric and syntax...

...In the earlier and hotter days of thought, Socrates complained that a book was a poor thing compared to a man because you couldn't question it and reason with it...

...When Shelley spoke of poets as "unacknowledged legislators," he should have meant not merely that they were unoffi 292 cial but also, by his time, unaccepted...

...But through the 19th century, except in Russia, this decreased, and in our own days it is trivial...

...in its artistic taste and needs this group does not distinguish itself from the rest of the people...

...But as Trotsky said, "History fells the dead wood and the chips fly off...

...Speech is not going to stop changing, and so men of letters, marking down the speech, relating it to character, and developing the characters, are always indispensable...

...To the extent that in metropolitan centers the stage is still a popular art, it is not a literary stage, the emphasis being rather on the stars, the spectacle and music, and the production...

...The result is that the ever-new speech is not strongly characterized and explored into its poetry and ideas and assimilated with a great humane tradition...

...people get their speech, in low-grade letters, as a caricature and a stereotype, with the conformism and thin conversation that we hear...

...but our country is swamped with printed matter —more than twenty books a day are printed in large editions and literally tons of newsprint and magazines—and there is no difficulty in muffling any idea at all by refusing to spread it widely...

...We were trained in a tradition where letters had a quite different ambition and scope...

...We are not then deceived, like other writers, by the illusion of finding ourselves in the swim...

...Indeed, we have the interesting paradox of precisely the overworking of printing-presses being a possible cause of the reduction of Iiterature to a minor art...

...It happens that, on the whole, cinema and television, etc...

...These writers were thinking up ideas not for the makers of policy, but against the makers of policy...

...and so a people's music is its kind of feelings...

...Now the shift to other media is not necessarily a cultural misfortune...

...and ironically, just because we are too good for the current scene—for we draw on a tradition better than the current scene, but that tradition is irrelevant—we find it hard to adjust to the realities...

...But the mass of speakers are faced with the dilemma: on one horn they must get their style from the writers...

...I AM sE1TING down the following melancholy reflections not with any hope of a remedy, but because the matter is important and nobody else seems to be saying it...

...For the elite, the policy-making, audience there is no particular art as such...

...Also, when, as often, we are called on to teach our English and our Literature, we find ourselves like curators in a museum...

...that is a verbal business, it is specifically literary...

...These are, I suppose, the first decades in the western tradition that letters have not been a major art...

...Cinematic and pictorial arts do not treat ideas adequately...

...And the strong and subtile writers are fulfilling this function as always...