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current Monday
Report below!
This week's report by Tony Christini, Socialit.org
Politics and Art: The Personal is the Public and Private
What does it mean to be an American novelist today?—a crucial question for
novelists in a time of intensifying political and biological crisis. Any answer
would have to be circumstantial, likely taking into account the social and
economic background of the author, as well as various private variables.
Inadvertently, perhaps, helping to shed some light on this question is a
recent troublesome article on politics and art (TV shows and novels in
particular) in The New Republic (electronic edition, at least), a publication
which has a long history of mixing conventional politics and criticism of
literature and art. Lee Siegel's article “Jumping off the Page” on the decline
of the novel and the rise of television is thoughtful and observant to a point,
but seems greatly limited by its relatively apolitical nature in exploring the
current artistic situation:
Whither the American imagination? Few novelists nowadays seem able to
imagine anything that doesn't already exist. This might account for the fact
that just about everybody in the fiction business is writing a historical novel.
… [And more] and more graphic novels are being written as more and more
novels falter on self-conscious language that is divorced from experience.
Movies are slowly becoming more complex. And television is picking up the
general imaginative slack—it's getting better even as the multiplying reality
shows and so much else on the air are making it worse. It will keep getting
better as it keeps getting worse because of its peculiar hybrid nature…. [Yet
it] seems almost inevitable that in even the most serious television dramas,
a beautiful complexity sooner or later gets caricatured into a senseless plot
twist that leads to shooting, or punching, or screwing. The novelists have
history; the screenwriters have violence and sex. It makes you want to
shout "Fire!" just to wake everybody up.
This is well put, but one wonders, if anyone yelled “Fire!” at, say, Siegel
himself over some perceived lack, what would be his response? It may be a
clever way to end an article dissecting a firefighting TV drama and making
some observations on novels, but it diverts from the article’s utter lack of
explanation as to why TV shows and novels and their creators so
consistently come up with such poor creations.
Maybe Siegel simply ran out of room. Whatever the case, he has done the
easy thing here, scrutinizing and picking apart contemporary TV, film, and
literature in a way that anyone with two eyes might likely notice. How about
an explanation, or even an educated guess, a hint, at least, as to why it
might be the case that TV so predictably and mindlessly devolves to
“shooting, or punching, or screwing”? Why are TV shows and novels often
so weak or degraded? One problem may be that corporate media and their
art are so predictably and stultifyingly apolitical or anti-political about so
much of life, including many of the most urgent matters facing (and
attacking) members of the public, that the myriad insubstantial and
redundant corporate productions of art and entertainment are forced to
resort to graphic excess to stir interest and attract attention. In place of
meaningful, useful substance, viewers get cheap, or toxic, spectacle.
In Siegel’s insights about how television is usurping the novel in examining
the intimate private, social, and psychological lives of people there is no
word about people’s public lives, the lives of citizens in a democratic public,
as if this aspect of life does not exist and never did exist in novels or
television. Somehow, according to Siegel—in denial of even some common
understandings of the histories and capacities of these forms—“the intimacy
of the novel” and television rule out “broad public meanings”—nevermind
the patriotic political exhortations of the ongoing nationalistic governmental
TV epic, The West Wing, and scores of other shows that openly trumpet and
steadily reinforce the priorities of the establishment in an criminally
aggressive America that is also horribly and inexcusably (given the wealth
and advantages) wracked internally by inhumane failings in health care,
literacy, prosperity, and security, an establishment America that is
ideologically opposed to economic democracy as well as being largely
opposed, in effect, to political democracy. This is the status quo that is
upheld and reinforced by corporate America and other ideological bastions
that account for the art pouring out of the airwaves, transmitting noxious
private spectacle along with “broad public meanings” of the retrograde
establishment sort.
Can it be any more likely that a shift from novels to the even more corporate
dominated medium of television will allow, let alone encourage, more focus
on the critical, urgent, and compelling public aspects of our lives that
increasingly swamp and threaten to drown our private lives? Under
corporate and other cultural pressures (that, again, largely spurn needed
compelling insight into how powerful public realities engage, enable, or
destroy private lives and how these private lives push back on difficult
public conditions) how else might television hold the attention of the vast
majority of people—who are deeply involved with a complex and awesome
world much larger than their individual private realities—other than resorting
to ever more graphic excess, whether it be sex or violence, or the
voyeurism of “reality” shows and so on?
What might prevent television from going the route of the novel (as Siegel
perceives it) into a sterile self-reflexivity or impotent historicism, to the
extent that it is not already there? Larry Spence, a lively professor I had the
good fortune to take class with, once noted that many of the most urgent
and important aspects of our collective lives go undiscussed at college (and
school generally) in greatly needed and often greatly desired ways. The
same holds true, probably more so, for television (also novels) especially as
they are shaped by intense corporate pressures, in denial of the public’s far
more fully human needs and priorities.
The same lack of urgently meaningful public interplay with the private exists
in film, the movies. Michael Moore and the at least somewhat progressive
documentaries in his line are stepping in to fill that lack, appearing in
theaters in record numbers, and there is no reason why the same sort of
phenomenon could not happen with fiction, in film, television, and novels—
except of course for the mighty corporate and cultural forces arrayed
against such a happening. Why has at least some urgent publicly cognizant
non-fiction in the form of documentaries begun to gain something of a
foothold in theaters far moreso than fiction films? Possibly it is taken for
granted—true or not—among the powers that rule that fiction is far more
powerful than non-fiction, often far more emotionally compelling and
therefore far more energizing, and therefore far more threatening to
illegitimate (however legalized) power.
In brief, the old (reactionary) argument goes that public/political issues and
social facts do not make for good fiction, do not mix with highly compelling
and insightful explorations of the fully human, the full human condition, the
essence of humanity—of character, psychology, personality, motivation,
mindset—that is of fiction’s foundation as a form. Nothing could be more
false. Whatever can be made personal, at the least, can be made fiction, and
the personal easily includes not only the private realms of people’s lives but
the public realms as well, and especially most intriguingly and sweepingly
that highly charged personal realm within which, in astonishing and
quotidian ways both, the private and the public interact, overlap, mix,
combine, fuse, recombine and so on, in the astounding dance of lives lived,
of thoughts energized, of feelings, perceptions, and insight heightened. In
the intensely complex and personal realm where the public and private
intersect, this is where fullest life lies. To narrow focus to merely the private
is to commit a form of aesthetic, intellectual, moral, emotional suicide, or at
the very least to amputate some great part of the personal, the foundation of
fiction, and thus of what it means to be human, fully or otherwise.
What it means to be a novelist, script writer or art critic today has a lot to do
with what it means to be anyone alive in an unjust world, which means that
nothing is more crucial than increasing awareness and understanding of the
public realms within which a large part of life and our individual lives are
found; it means increasing our involvement in such realms in ways that are
thoughtful, lively, and effective; it means we need more progressive
political art.
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