From a piece worth reading in its entirety in Salon article today:
Percy Shelley famously wrote that “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” For Shelley, great art had the potential to make a new world through the depth of its vision and the properties of its creation. Today, Shelley would be laughed out of the room. Lazy cynicism has replaced thoughtful conviction as the mark of an educated worldview. Indeed, cynicism saturates popular culture, and it has afflicted contemporary art by way of postmodernism and irony. Perhaps no recent figure dealt with this problem more explicitly than David Foster Wallace. One of his central artistic projects remains a vital question for artists today: How does art progress from irony and cynicism to something sincere and redeeming?
Or put another way: Why did the avante-garde lead to nowhere?
I'm working on an essay tentatively titled "1848" in which I try to understand (think out loud about) the impact of what I called in a recent post the Flood and what Eric Hobsbawm calls the "dual revolutions"--i.e., the French and Industrial Revolutions--on European and by extension world culture. It's also an attempt to explore further a question I address in my essay "Metaxis": Why did Romanticism die?
Why did its intoxicating spiritual aspirations, aspirations that dominated the cultural elite of the first half of the 19th century, from Schiller and Beethoven to Shelly and Wordsworth, become something about which the cultural elite of subsequent generations could only talk about ironically? Why did their imagination of the world lose and a soul-shriveling bourgeois materialism win? Why was the last great Romantic, Friederich Nietzsche, the first great postmodernist in the nihilist key? Why did David Foster Wallace, an achingly honest, good man, commit suicide? Why will his Bizarro doppelganger, Don Draper, probably do the same? What options, what life possibilities are open to talented, imaginative men and women such as these?
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An afterthought: Later in the article the authors talk about the spiritual "Nobody Knows the Trouble I've Seen" as pointing to the antidote:
In an interview with Bill Moyers, Professor James Cone of Union Theological Seminary explains the seeming contradiction between the grief of the refrain and the promise of the closing exaltation.
"And you sort of say, sure, nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen. Nobody knows my sorrow. Sure, there is slavery. Sure, there is lynching, segregation. But, Glory Hallelujah. Now, the Glory Hallelujah is the fact that there is a humanity and a spirit nobody can kill."
One can hear that abiding spirit in the voice of Sam Cooke in his pop adaptation of the song, and in renditions by others like Louis Armstrong and Marian Anderson. Cornel West elaborates on the contradiction between the refrain and rejoinder.
"Glory Hallelujah is a tragicomic moment. Going to struggle anyway. Cut against the grain anyway. Never view oneself as a spectator but always a participant. Never view oneself as somehow outside the struggle but always meshed in it."
Both West and Wallace call for participation over spectatorship. We must move toward the Glory Hallelujah, toward the possibility of something greater. The best art can inspire us and push us closer.
Watch Fellini's "Nights with Cabiria" with this in mind. I just saw it for the first time over the weekend. Its last scene is a perfect example of what the writers are pointing to. It was one of the most deeply moving moments I've experienced from a film in a long time. Cabiria's look into the camera breaks the fourth wall in a way that breaks your heart most unironically. But then Fellini is a great Romantic.
"Even though he slay me, yet will I trust him," says Job--and says the Negro spiritual singer. False consciousness? Or one that has made a discovery?