'Art Must Be Giving Pleasure'

A reader asks if I can identify the quality in a work of literature that most quickly causes me to stop reading and put the book away. An interesting question, one that is not trivial and may help to define critical standards otherwise unexamined. My first thought was merely sloppy, dull writing – indifferent poetry or prose that lies inertly on the page like a cadaver. There’s no energy, no spark of life. The reader is given no encouragement to sacrifice his time and attention to work not even on life supports. 

To answer my reader’s question more directly, I think the quality described above, when combined with pomposity, kills any good will I can bring to a work of literature, even an individual poem or story read in isolation. Pomposity can be a matter of style or content. To cite a writer who combines both: Ezra Pound. His brand of literary Modernism has emboldened generations of poets and critics to write badly and hold readers in contempt. In his conclusion to Lectures on Shakespeare, perhaps as an antidote to any suggestion of artistic smugness (on his part or Shakespeare’s), W.H. Auden says this:

 

“I find Shakespeare particularly appealing in his attitude toward his work. There’s something a little irritating in the determination of the very greatest artists, like Dante, Joyce, Milton, to create masterpieces and to think themselves important. To be able to devote one’s life to art without forgetting that art is frivolous is a tremendous achievement of personal character. Shakespeare never takes himself too seriously.”

 

I hadn’t thought of this until reading Auden’s observation. After more than four centuries, Shakespeare sounds “natural” – not contemporary, exactly, but without pretensions. He sounds like a reasonable guy talking to us.

 

Auden delivered his Shakespeare lectures in 1946-47 at the New School for Social Research in New York City. He is the poet of the divided self, and he recognizes in Shakespeare a kindred poetic spirit. In addition, Auden was deeply immersed at the time in Kierkegaard, the most incisive psychologist.

 

When Lear calls man a “bare, forked animal,” he hints at our divided nature, and that is Auden’s starting point. Richard II, he writes, “is interested in the idea of kingship rather than in ruling. Like a writer of minor verse -- he is good at that – he is interested more in the idea than the act. He is good at presiding over a tournament, not at taking an action that means something, and his passion for ritual even embraces self-humiliation.”

 

We all know such people. Some of us recognize ourselves in Auden’s analysis. Among bloggers, poets and self-styled bohemians, the type is common – “interested more in the idea than the act.” In his lecture on the play he most admired, Antony and Cleopatra, Auden writes:

 

“Antony and Cleopatra’s flaw, however, is general and common to all of us all of the time: worldliness – the love of pleasure, success, art, ourselves, and conversely, the fear of boredom, failure, being ridiculous, being on the wrong side, dying. If Antony and Cleopatra have a more tragic fate than we do, that is because they are far more successful than we are, not because they are essentially different . . . Every day we get an obsession about people we don’t like but for various reasons can’t leave. We all know about intrigues in offices, museums, literary life. Finally, we all grow old and die. The tragedy is not that it happens, but that we do not accept it.”

 

At the end of his concluding chapter, Auden writes his final sentence: “But in order to continue to exist in any form, art must be giving pleasure.”

 

 [See Auden’s Lectures on Shakespeare (ed. Arthur Kirsch, Princeton University Press, 2000).]