ARTS
Knowers through feeling
Michael Tanner on why we are no longer required to think about works of art
Where once people who had just encountered a powerful work of art, whether a painting, a novel, a play or an opera, said that they had been very moved or impressed by it, they nowadays more often tend to claim that it has changed their life. Some of the more volatile and impressionable reviewers tend to be not only shattered but to have their lives changed at least once a week. It is of course a way of showing that even though one may go to far more performances of opera, say, than are good for anybody, one hasn't got stale, one's responses are still fresh and ardent.
'It changed my life' has become little more than a cliche, yet the fact that it has — and specifically in relation to works of art, more specifically still in relation to per- formance arts — is worth looking into. It indicates, among other things, that art has assumed a significance that religion once had — hardly a new thought, but the par- ticular idioms of conversion are a telling sign that we now accept that the experience of art can in itself effect a transformation, which certainly is a new thought, new, at any rate, to the Romantic age. The idea is that, thanks to whichever set of corrupting forces one puts the blame on — there are plenty to choose from — one has reached a. condition where some kind of rite is required to make one new, unsullied. Attending a performance of a suitably affecting work is the kind of rite that might do the trick, given the proper circum- stances. Wagner, one need hardly say, took this notion of the art-work having so pro- found an effect on its audience that neither they nor anything else would ever be the same to its lunatic limit: at one stage in his writing of the Ring he envisaged the whole cycle being performed in a temporary structure on the bank of the Rhine, entrance free, naturally. After a few perfor- mances not only would the temporary structure be burned but also the score and all orchestral parts, so that the work having fulfilled its purpose of cleansing the con- sciousness of its audience would itself be destroyed. It would no longer have a func- tion.
One imagines, and certainly hopes, that Wagner laughed at this wild idea in later life. Yet it was nothing more than an extreme version of the Romantic notion that it is the actual experience, primarily an intensely emotional one, that is crucial in our response to art, and not any thought that may take place afterwards, thought both about features of the work and about the effect it had on us at the time. It is the secular equivalent of baptism, of being passed through or submerged in water and
emerging purified. That archetypal pair Pamina and Tamino undergoing their trials become the symbol of the modern art- lover, except that our ordeals are less demanding than theirs; but it is worth not- ing how many of the great artists bent on transforming our nature see art as some- thing in which pleasure plays no important part. We become, as Wagner put it, know- era through feeling, leaving the prosaic pro- cesses of thinking far behind, since, in his, (and many of his contemporaries') view, thought, in its necessary employment of concepts, kept us wedded to the past, whereas the feelings which genuinely new art can create can make us free.
This all sounds now like an episode in the history of aesthetic theorising which is even quainter than the norm for that line of brooding. But in fact it lives on, and may in some respects be stronger now, in the sense of being held by many more people, than it ever was before. And the way in which they hold it is striking: they probably wouldn't want to articulate it, or at any rate they would find the attempt hard-going. It has the welcome upshot that not only is one not required to think about art, but that it is positively better not to. People who do, who offer accounts of the meaning of a work of art, are committing some species of fallacy, or even of heresy. The more thought that is done on the perform- ing side of the footlights, the less should be done on the spectators' side. So produc-
7/ was fine until they reversed the menopause.' tions become ever more intrusive, interven- tionist, deconstructive or whatever may be the preferred term, while those who wit- ness them have merely to be in a hyper- receptive state; any thinking that they might have been tempted to do about the work has been done for them by the direc- tor. At this point two radically discrepant schools of thought are yoked together: the Romantic one that I have been outlining and the hostile Brechtian view that we should never get too emotionally involved in a work, for that will stop us thinking about it. Under the new division of labour, the director does the thinking and we do the feeling. Or, to take it one stage further, the thinking also goes on in the programme book, that distinctively modern phe- nomenon. So far as I can discover, the ori- gins of the present-day programme book, thick with articles by academics, dra- maturgs and with excerpts from trendy books, once more lies in Bayreuth. Looking through the 1924 Festival Guide (354 pages long), I note articles such as The Politics of Love', which one might equally well find in present-day programmes. I have yet to discover anyone who reads them, either at Bayreuth or anywhere else, so it seems that the fact that they exist is enough to lay to rest any anxiety on the part of spectators about whether they should be thinking about the works.
I suspect that most people who want to have their lives radically changed by art, maybe by anything, are pretty keen on its being done quickly. After all, the desire for drastic change comes from urgent dissatis- faction, and this breeds impatience. There is also glamour and drama attached to a transformation, and so where better to undergo such a thing than in the theatre, where glamour and drama are what one goes for? Whatever the attractions of thought, it is arduous and slow. Criticism which really engages with great art is likely to be, by comparison with the art it is a commentary on, arduous and slow too. At any rate, one of the sources of the appeal of some art is that it deals with issues of the greatest importance, gives the impression of thinking about them, in that various characters say striking things on big sub- jects, but doesn't exactly ask that we join in the thinking ourselves. We watch and hear other people having thoughts, and perhaps acting on them, but we no more have thoughts ourselves than spectators at a cricket match bat or bowl. Art, at its great- est, can stimulate us to feel more alive than almost anything else can; but it can also give us the consoling illusion of having done much more for or to us than we are able to say. That is no doubt one main rea-
son why people become so surly if asked to explain their reactions to art in more than general terms; they feel that it has made a difference, but on being pressed they find that, as with so many momentous-seeming experiences, its effect has evaporated with vexatious speed. The only way to make sure that doesn't happen is to think about it afterwards, as the writers in those pro- gramme books hoped, or pretended to.
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