'The Spiritual Situation of Our Age'

“Balzac is one of the most shameless traders in stereotype among the great nineteenth-century novelists. As a result, there are passages in his books that many of us today have to read in the spirit of camp as resounding expressions of the kitsch of his era.” 

I’ve read so little of Balzac – all in translation, of course – I have no business rendering a judgment. Half a century ago, while still an omnivore and still insisting on finishing every book I started, I know I read Eugénie Grandet and Cousin Bette. Later, I found V.S. Naipaul in an interview saying he gobbled up Balzac’s novels like candy, and I wondered what I was missing. Later still, I encountered Robert Alter in Pleasures of Reading in an Ideological Age (1990), whose passage above assuaged my uneasiness about failing to appreciate the French novelist. Alter goes on to salvage a bit of Balzac’s reputation by writing: “Nevertheless, he remains a major realist not only in his representation of places and processes and social institutions but also of character.”

 

I remembered Alter’s solace while reading Roger Kimball’s “Notes Toward the Definition of Kitsch,” published in the Winter/Spring issue of Modern Age. The editor and publisher of The New Criterion is more erudite than I can pretend to be, and he devotes most of his essay to the visual arts. Closer to my heart, kitsch is alive and well in contemporary fiction and poetry. One is tempted to explain kitsch as merely bad taste. As Kimball makes clear, there’s more to it than that. I suggest not relying on my impressions but reading his entire essay and following his reasoning closely. He makes subtle distinctions essential to understanding his argument. He’s not writing a Tweet:

 

“[T]he cliché is Janus-faced. Besides protecting us from experience, it caters to a thirst for emotional stimulation. Man turns to kitsch as a refuge from the drabness and spiritual emptiness of life. Cut off from a simple, direct relationship with the world, he compensates for his shadowy, insubstantial experience by cultivating ‘experiences.’ This accounts for the oft-noted tendency to ‘romance about the self’ in kitsch, which is part and parcel of the hypertrophy of the imagination at the expense of the more pedestrian but worldly activities of common sense and sound judgment.”

 

“Hypertrophy of the imagination” certainly characterizes most of the poetry copping prizes and clogging the magazines. See what Kimball has to say about artistic “distance,” absent from most lousy poetry:

 

“This insulation of kitsch from experience,” Kimball writes, “helps to explain its peculiar abstract quality: Kitsch is always ready to sacrifice the particular for the general, the specific for the universal, the concrete for the abstract.” So much of the poetry we encounter impresses us with the bland emptiness of the poet’s posturing, the words deployed so pretentiously. It’s in avant-garde noodling and in more domesticated and family-friendly forms of poetry. You can supply the names. Kimball again:

    

“Instead of attempting to communicate individual beautiful, true, evil, human phenomena, kitsch strives to incarnate beauty, truth, evil, and humanity without loss. Art is more modest. It sees the universal in the particular, true, but it does not thereby dispense with the particular; its gaze remains focused on the particular because it realizes and accepts that, for man, the world speaks not abstractly or all at once but piecemeal, in fragments, through this tree, this landscape, this face, this web of relationships in which I find myself. Kitsch refuses to acknowledge this reality.”

 

I’m strictly an amateur in such matters. Kimball gives us a way to ponder the bad art we see everywhere today, some of it formally impressive but dead in its essence. Usually, we just turn the page and chalk it up to a lack of talent, showing off to the workshop director or philosophical obtuseness. Kimball reminds us that kitsch is symptomatic of a more dire problem:

 

“Kitsch would be of limited interest—merely a curious aberration—if it were an isolated phenomenon. Unfortunately, this is not the case. In kitsch we see mirrored the spiritual situation of our age.”