Art is for seeing evil Applies to all narrative ficiton, and some images/sculptures Evils = bad things/misfortunes, etc. Many great works depcit entirely bad stories, none depict entirely good ones Life does not show us evil:
- Think about what you see when you enter a room. If you’re tired, you’ll notice places you might sit; if you’re thirsty, you’ll notice cups you might drink out of; if you’re hot, you’ll spot windows you might open or close. If the room belongs to someone about whom you would like to know more, what will jump out at you are those items—such as books—that offer up clues. What you see in the room is a function of what’s useful to you in that room, given the aims with which you walk into it. Most of what’s in the room you miss. Recall that famous psychology experiment in which a man in a gorilla suit walks through a group of students passing around basketballs, and the experimental subjects don’t notice the gorilla because they are busy following the instruction to count the number of times the players in white pass the ball. Your whole life is like that.
- We commonly praise some piece of art for its “realism”; we could fault life for its lack thereof. Realism and unicorns
- We are relentlessly efficient in targeting our movements, including those of our eyeballs, at some apparent good. Even our mental movements—thought processes—are subject to this regulative pressure. You permit a problem into your line of sight only insofar as you are looking for solutions to it; we instruct our children to ponder the mistakes they’ve made, but only so as to do better in the future; holding wrongdoers accountable is important because it allows us to “move forward.” The value of mourning lies in “working through” grief; crying is a way to “let it out.” When you criticize someone, you should do so “constructively.” The soul is like a compass; it can’t help but point goodwards almost all of the time.
- The positive has a secondary and derivative place in fiction, just as the negative has a secondary and derivative place in life. In life, we are looking for all the various ways to make our marriages succeed; in fiction, we are fascinated to observe all the possible ways a marriage could fail. That is the insight behind Tolstoy’s opening sentence: it is true of fiction, even if it is not true of life.
- Tolstoy’s moral voice is represented by Levin’s outraged wife Kitty, who, learning of this meeting on the eve of giving birth to their first child, furiously condemns Anna as a nasty, fallen woman. Levin, ashamed of having been tempted, commits to avoiding her. Levin must live a good and upright life, and that is incompatible with giving Anna the attention that Tolstoy on some level feels she deserves. But the reader stands where Joyce describes the artist as standing: in the background, indifferent, paring our fingernails. We have the luxury of admiring Tolstoy’s many detailed descriptions of Anna’s dangerous beauty and of her devilishly deceptive charms. Unlike Kitty, we don’t need to “condemn” Anna for being a fallen woman; unlike Levin, we aren’t duty-bound to turn away from her as quickly as possible. We can allow our eyes to take their fill of her delicious badness.
- The lie is that art is a vehicle for personal moral edification or social progress, that art aims at empathy and happiness and world peace and justice and democracy and the brotherhood of man. But those are the goods of friendship, or education, or politics, or religion—not of art. The point of art is not improved living; the point of art is precisely not to be boxed in by the sometimes exhausting and always blinkered project of leading a life.
- Plato banishing the poets understood this theory of art.
Leontius looking at corpses suggests a desire to see evil, that we usually censure as rubbernecking, spiteful gossip, true crime, etc.
The poet William Blake commented, of Milton’s Paradise Lost, that “The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels & God, and at liberty when of Devils & Hell, is because he was a true Poet and of the Devil’s party without knowing it.” Blake is implying that art—real art, true art, great art—is not designed for seeing good.
What about slice of life anime? Is there a similar escape from striving that we crave, though it is not evil. Why aren’t true crime podcasts high art? Why does grimness != quality? How is functional beauty, like furniture and architecture, and maybe games worthwhile art?Self-forks and games
- note this applies best to non-parasocial slice of life, like mushishi, or maybe YKK, not the cute girls camping or azumanga daioh or whatever.