Dickens, the humanity!

[imomus]

Because I'm generating a narrative myself at the moment, I'm super-sensitive to the way big bully narratives of different kinds shape our lives. They're everywhere. They're sort of Victorian-feeling, despite being made in the 21st century -- all about redemption and hope and humanity.

The more these over-hyped retro-Victorian mega-narratives bully and console us, the more people seem to love them. Roll up! Roll up! The greatest show on earth! All human life is here! The rich, the poor, the humanity, the melodrama, the orchestra, the spin-offs, the sales! You can't escape people discussing how the new Harry Potter is "a fitting conclusion", or how The Wire is "the greatest television ever made", or how Bill Viola's new video piece at the Venice Biennale is a moving meditation on the frailty of the human condition.

Nobody is telling us the new Harry Potter, or the last series of The Wire, or Bill Viola's new triptych is great because it shares insight with Kafka or Beckett or T.S. Eliot. No, we make a big lacuna over everything artists told us in the 20th century -- stuff rooted in Nietzsche and Freud and the Futurists and the Surrealists and all that nihilist dynamite.

Instead, they're invoking Dickens. Now, I have nothing against Dickens -- it's amusing, if a little exhausting, to keep meeting a man with a funny name who proclaims "I'll eat my head!", or to weep over the death of Little Nell. But is rolling out the name of a 19th century writer really the best way to legitimize art being made now? Have we just decided to skip the 20th century entirely?

"Rowling understands that grief is part of what makes us wholly human, along with the ability to love and forgive and show remorse. And while magic is ultimately seen to have limits -- Death has its dominion, even at Hogwarts -- love does not." That's novelist Elizabeth Hand, writing about the new Harry Potter in the Washington Post.

I'm already disturbed, in that, by the idea that some humans are not "fully human". You can already see, right there, how this brand of "humanism" might be employed in an inhumane way. We have to work to be human? Some of us aren't?

The kind of big-canvas, 19th century humanism being touted here is secularized religion, and therefore teleological (does love really have no bounds? Does human life really only gain meaning from suffering, vicar?) and rhetorical, designed to sweep us along, sweep us away, make us cry. Hand tells us she wept at the end of the Potter book, which reminded her of Dickens.

Someone else who summons Dickens to validate a 21st century artifact is Jon Wilde, who salutes four series of cop show The Wire in a piece in The Guardian.

"No other television drama comes close to the scope of its ambition," Wilde gushes. "As co-creator and executive producer David Simon says: "Our model when we started doing The Wire wasn't other television shows. The standard we were looking at was Balzac's Paris or Dickens's London, or Tolstoy's Moscow."

Woot! And yet... Is it really television's biggest and most laudable ambition to catch up, more than a century late, with the narrative and metaphysical models of the 19th century? Wilde adds that the Baltimore depicted in The Wire is a dark and hard place "not the fruitcakey world of John Waters movies". Good to know -- we wouldn't want any Waters (or any Oscar Wilde, for that matter) diluting our Dickens, would we? Who needs to hear about Baltimore from a homo-intellectual when they could have it described by "a former crime reporter and former homicide/narcotics cop"?

While Hand is lauding the Dickensian nature of the characters in the Potter book -- they have names like "Severus Snape" and you don't have to waste much time working out whether they're good or evil -- Wilde raves about the equally Dickensian-sounding "Bubbles, the most sympathetic character ever to appear in a TV drama... Bubbles breaks your heart every time he appears on screen... precariously holding onto his last scrap of dignity. I weep just thinking of him wheeling around his portable supermarket - a trolley piled with cheap toilet rolls and knock-off white T-shirts. More than any other character, Bubbles encapsulates the humanity at the heart of the show".

And all this weeping at the very thought of a character called Bubbles or Potter -- what would Brecht say? Is it really the mark of great art that it makes you weep uncontrollably? Are your 19th century tears making life any better for the poor?

The religiose, 19th century vocabulary of secular humanism gets wheeled out time after time to justify the greatness of mega-narratives. Humanity, hope, redemption, the human condition, moving, heart, dance. Sometimes it's commentators wheeling this creaky rubbish out as the ultimate justification and validation of works of art, sometimes it's the artists themselves. Take this Bill Viola interview about his video altarpieces at the Venice Biennale.

"This is a piece about humanity and it’s about the fragility of life," proclaims Viola. "Like the borderline between life and death is actually not a hard wall, it’s not to be opened with a lock and key, its actually very fragile, very tenuous. You can cross it like that in an instant and I think religions, you know, institutions aside, I think just the nature of our awareness of death is one of the things that in any culture makes human beings have that profound feeling of what we call the human condition and that’s really something I am really interested in."

I'd be interested in seeing Viola -- named, with Dickensian aptness, after the quivering stringed instrument designed to pluck your heartstrings -- draped over a tree in a Jake and Dinos Chapman installation, with his entrails being eaten by adorable little pet spaniels. (Only in a video triptych, of course.)

Timeless values... all religions... in any culture... through all ages... major work about our core humanity. It's such exhausted, rhetorical bullshit, especially when it's advanced as a claim for work as chocolate-box bland, and as technically clever, as Viola's (he boasts about using special effects designed by Hollywood director James Cameron's team). Put it together with the scary thought that some of us aren't quite as "fully human" as others, and you have the basis not just of a secular-humanist transcendental metaphysics but also the possibility of a kind of moral apartheid, and even a secular-humanist Spanish Inquisition: "Have you read Dickens? If not, you aren't fully human. I'm afraid we're going to have to torture you."

Let's look at what this Dickens-veneration ignores. Everything that's happened since, everything that displaces and disturbs our comfortable consolations, our desire for life to mean something tidy and pat, and for that meaning to come wrapped up in middlebrow blockbusters. Where's Nietzsche, or Freud, or Bataille, or Beckett, or Kafka, or Lacan? Where's just about any serious artist who's made work since the 19th century?

But, if you insist on staying in the European 19th century, let's take a look at the difference between Manzoni and Leopardi. Leopardi was an atheist who rejected the idea that life had any sort of transcendent meaning. He had to keep moving around because the Catholic authorities hounded and censored him. Tim Parks, writing in The Independent, describes his Moral Tales as "a world where the absence of all meaning is only made bearable by constant creativity, where a morally bankrupt Italy is urgently in need of some great collective illusion".

That illusion was provided -- very successfully, on a commercial level -- by Alessandro Manzoni. "Manzoni was feted for his great novel The Betrothed while Leopardi was ignored. The Betrothed is a must for understanding the other, non-Leopardi side of Italy: Catholic, confident, complacent, determined to believe that God is good."



So why have we skidded back to Dickens, and towards the sticky, chocolate-box sentimentality of the 19th century? Is it because, as we get increasingly fat, the provocateurs of the 20th century avant garde look to us like weird stick insects or Giacometti sculptures? Is the comedy nihilism of Beckett and Kafka just too ectomorphic for us? Is it because the post-war 20th century's trend towards income redistribution and global integration has been reversed, and that today's increasing gap between the super-poor and the super-rich leads to an essentially 19th century world -- a world of petty nationalism, unamused queens, wars of imperial conquest, charity for the good of the soul, faith-based initiatives and trickledown, religion-as-consolation, effulgent sentimentality, philanthropy, good works, handkerchiefs, workhouses, poorhouses, and chocolate boxes?

Comments

[jonathankorman.livejournal.com]

I certainly agree with that thesis. The Anglosphere has an unwholesome romance with the crime drama in which there's a weird tension between the romantic fascination with the Hobbsean outlaw's world combined with a tacit acceptance of and support for the bourgouis social order that the outlaws reject. Yeah, that tension reflects the condition in which we are uncomfortable with the social order but find it difficult to conceive of an alternative. So I agree that we aren't interested in being offered structural solutions by our drama, because we don't see structural solutions as possible.

But I'm hesitant to call the “gritty” voice of that school “realism,” or to simply oppose it to the fantastic and artistically self-conscious 20th Century art of Grass and Brecht, or to point to The Wire as an example of it.

Formally, The Wire uses a very different realism than we are accustomed to from “gritty” crime drama, and part of the show's agenda is showing how unrealistic that “gritty” voice usually is. This is in service of the show's agenda of describing social reality without affirming it. So I think that to ask how critics would respond to a version of The Wire with a different voice is a kind of non-question; what do you have left if you alter the voice from which all of the show's themes depend?

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I totally accept that "gritty realism" isn't the same as realism (whatever that is -- for the minister it's God, for the fisherman the sea, for Brecht the theatre, and so on). And I'll have to defer to your knowledge of The Wire, since I haven't seen it. I cued up an excerpt on YouTube the other day then decided not to watch it. As usual, I prefer glossing the glosses to getting my hands dirty with the thing itself. I kind of know I'd hate it, or I'd like it "despite myself", and then have a sort of aesthetic identity crisis.

It's kind of horrible to see Jon WIlde -- a critic I know, someone who's written kind things about my own records, and who I once remember asking me what I thought he should read, and buying Alasdair Gray's "Lanark" when I recommended it -- saying that raving about The Wire is a surefire way to "win friends and influence people". In other words, it's something to mix your own ego up with, to become an evangelist for. I couldn't possibly let that happen to me! Especially when I don't see a single dissenting voice in the comments section below his piece! It's monothought!

[jonathankorman.livejournal.com]

Yeah, you'd better not see The Wire, then, because you would become an evangelist for it. It's just really damned good, better than you would believe. The monothought is because it expands one's understanding of the potential of television, just as when Americans see their first Miyazaki film and are gobsmacked just that you can do that with cartoons, and it's hard to say anything at first beyond wow.

And by see, I'm afraid that I mean committing to a full season of the show. Watching a scene of The Wire on YouTube is like reading a couple of paragraphs of Murder on the Orient Express; it's not a meaningful representation of what the work contains.

So count me as a Wire zombie. Join us! There will be no fear. No doubt. No pain. Only the joy of belonging.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Actually, it's kind of funny with a laugh track added:

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[kaipfeiffer.livejournal.com]

"And by see, I'm afraid that I mean committing to a full season of the show."

true. after watching the first episode of season1, i wasn't convinced, and thought all the praise was rather undeserved. you see me now at the end of season 4, waiting for the 5th (last?).
a character like (ex) police major howard colvin, with his "social experiment", or violent cop pryzbylewski ending up a teacher, you just can't see that coming, and it wouldn't work as convincingly on a smaller canvas.