"The Function of the Arts"

Until quite recently, I wasn’t convinced that there were any useful generalizations to be made about “the function of the arts.” I changed my mind when I found myself wholeheartedly agreeing with the following remarks by W. H. Auden:

“The primary function of poetry, as of all the arts, is to make us more aware of ourselves and the world around us. I do not know if such increased awareness makes us more moral or more efficient: I hope not.

“I think it makes us more human, and I am quite certain it makes us more difficult to deceive, which is why, perhaps, all the totalitarian theories of the State, from Plato downwards, have deeply mistrusted the arts. They notice and say too much, and the neighbors start talking.”  [“Introduction to Poems of Freedom” (1938), reprinted in Edward Mendelson, ed., The English Auden, pp. 371-2.]

The most intriguing part of that statement, to me, is “I hope not.” It may be useful to recall the context. In 1938, Auden lived in an England bound up in a strict and prying moralism, of the sort that has been the norm throughout human history. Conventional moralists rained down contempt upon homosexuals such as Auden; only forty years earlier, Oscar Wilde had been prosecuted and jailed for his homosexuality.

There is another and even more important context. By 1938 Auden was already sensing (as he would express in his well-known poem “September 1, 1939”) that totalitarian extremists of the left and right were about to wreak destruction upon Europe—though neither Auden nor anyone else could have guessed just how devastating the consequences of Nazism, Fascism, and Soviet Communism would be. The 1930’s had been a decade of political commitment in the arts, but the mass killings of the the 1930’s and 1940’s—the wars, the purges, the holocaust—would permanently sour many artists on political activism. Auden expressed his disillusionment in a poem in memory of Louis MacNeice, “The Cave of Making”:

                     . . . any faith, if we had it, in immanent

     virtue died. More than ever

life-out-there is goodly, miraculous, lovable,

     but we shan’t, not since Stalin and Hitler,

trust ourselves ever again: we know that, subjectively,

     all is possible.

It is in this context that Auden, as early as 1938, hoped that art will not make us more moral. He already anticipated the havoc that absolutists, angrily proclaiming their own moral superiority to others and demanding absolute loyalty, would unleash. 

We have forgotten the lessons of the 1940’s and 1950’s. The current decade more closely resembles the 1930’s: a lingering economic depression; a widespread disillusionment at government’s inability to address human problems; the waning of any desire for compromise in the interests of the common good; extremism on the left and right; an intemperate desire to shout rather than to reason; a chilling effect on political dialogue.  (It may be that one great man, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, saved the United States from the catastrophes that decimated Europe.)

America's intolerance has intensified in the arts as well as in the political realm. Politically, we are subjected to the petty belligerence of Donald Trump, the most defiantly unreasonable man in American politics. In the arts, the tasteless works of conceptualist pranksters like Kenny Goldsmith are denounced with a fervor normally reserved for mass-murderers. Gangs of internet terrorists on the left and right systematically destroy the reputations of anyone who accidentally offends them. As a result, it is impossible to have a conversation about the important political and artistic issues of the moment. Discussions on controversial issues become dreary and predictable, and any hint of heresy is ruthlessly stamped out.

Artists, to do good work, have to keep their eyes wide open. Political movements almost always want their followers to have their eyes wide shut. (The “Occupy” movements may have provided a brief exception, but their example of letting everyone speak and their message of hope-in-unity seem far behind us.) When political rhetoric outlaws honest dissent and reasoned debate, art necessarily suffers. Dreary, predictable art proliferates. Artistic surprises become too dangerous, and artists decide not to risk them.

In the 1930’s, left-wing writers who raised questions about Stalinism were condemned as heretics. But by 1938, when Auden wrote his introduction to a volume called Poems of Freedom, he was feeling uneasy about having been caught up in the revolutionary fervor and having written statements that, on careful consideration, he realized he didn’t believe. For example, he eventually refused to republish the powerful but incendiary poem “Spain,” which had advocated “the conscious acceptance of guilt in the necessary murder”—that is, murder as a necessary byproduct of revolution. As a result of his rethinking, he gave a definition of “the function of poetry” that would displease true believers “from Plato downwards.”

One of the best things that could happen to contemporary poetry would be a renewed respect for poems of freedom: a respect for the full range of poets who try to “make us more aware of ourselves and the world around us.” The urge to write poems of freedom is incompatible with the need to “watch what you say,” to avoid the slightest phrase that might be interpreted as heresy. We need to strive not to be more moral, but to be more human, more tolerant, more open-minded, and more difficult to deceive.