by Santiago Ramos at The Wisdom of Crowds: Here’s how the novelist Phil Klay recently described the role of the fiction writer in the New York Times, using imagery that a broken glass–crawler like Iggy Pop would admire: “The fiction writer is a child playing in the alley behind the butcher’s shop, rummaging through the trash, pulling out bits of teeth, offal, hair and hide, holding them up to the light and beaming, so pleased to display a piece of the once-breathing animal.”
That’s good as far as metaphors go. The world, with ideologies and laws (and literal wars), butchers reality; the artist tries to put it back together. Attempting this reconstruction, the artist actually creates something new: a twisted portrait of reality, a funny or scary representation of it, an imitation of the original, the baseline. The artist is faithful to reality in some possibly unconscious way. The artist is more likely to be faithful to reality, in fact, than those who are in the business of changing it through ideas or violence (i.e., ideology or war).
But what exactly does the truth the artist gives us amount to? We need to get more specific. Obviously, different types of art communicate different kinds of messages: punk rock and the Great American Novel are very different things. But we can distill a few basic categories of truth that art provides. These categories help us pick up on the deep structures of human life, which are ultimately the building blocks of politics and history. Among them:
Tragedy. In a tragedy the hero encounters catastrophe because of some flaw in his character, some secret in his past, or some other bug in the system of life. For example, King Oedipus, who does everything he can to save his city from a plague, not knowing (at first) that he is the cause of it. Or Romeo and Juliet, who pursue love and end up killing themselves. Or Jay Gatsby, making a pile of cash to reach his beloved, only to end up at the bottom of a pool, having lost his soul. It’s a pattern that you can detect in real life after stories have trained you to see it. A young diplomat who works on the Abraham Accords, promising peace, only to sweep a particular issue under the rug that will later fuel a great war . . . Or the Boomer who attends Woodstock and ends up working on Wall Street. Actually, this last example might be closer to . . .
Irony. “I’ve become what I hate” is a common fear among successful Americans of a certain age. It’s one of the main types of irony: a type of story that ends up in circumstances which are the opposite of what the hero intended. Irony can be funny, though darkly so. That’s what the ancient fear of “selling out” was about. That’s what The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit is about. In fact, the sentiment prompted J. D. Vance to shift from moderate conservatism to Trumpian populism (a trajectory that could become tragic; see above). The artist can bring irony into focus. The perception of irony opens the door for redemption (see: It’s a Wonderful Life). A lot of stand-up comedy concerns irony; Dave Chappelle is an ironist even when his jokes aren’t funny.
Comedy. Happy endings happen. It’s best to prepare for them by watching romantic comedies (e.g., You’ve Got Mail) or listening to love songs (e.g., 99% of all songs ever composed). The ultimate happy ending is a long poem called The Divine Comedy, which shows how everyone gets what they deserve and a great deal less, and how there’s a happy ending to everything — to all of human history. If all of human history can have a happy ending, even the darkest moments (e.g., wars) might end well. An artist can imagine those happy endings and draw compelling pictures.
Pattern Recognition. You hear a lot about “vibes” these days. That’s because we have access to a lot of information, a lot of “voices” and points of view, but we lack a big picture of what is happening in American culture. In fact, we don’t even have a coherent method for making or obtaining such a picture. All we have are the vague sentiments of a few writers who have their finger on the pulse, who can read the vibes. Some of them are fake, but some of them are good. These writers are seeking patterns. All those essays about a so-called post-Woke vibe shift were attempts to connect the dots between changes in fashion, slang, headlines, humor, and events. Marshall McLuhan: “The absolute indispensability of the artist is that he alone in the encounter with the present can get the pattern recognition. He alone has the sensory awareness to tell us what the world is made of. He’s more important than the scientist.”
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