Jed Perl’s Authority and Freedom: A Defense of the Arts is, among other things, a 140-page subtweet.
In our data- and metrics-obsessed era, the central problem is that the imaginative ground without which art cannot exist is under threat. The idea of the work of art as an imaginative achievement to which the audience freely responds is now too often replaced by the assumption that a work of art should promote a particular idea or ideology, or perform some clearly defined civic or community service.
Perl does not provide supporting evidence, or explain how being “data- and metrics-obsessed” relates to the politicization of art. The only authority he cites on behalf of the trend he opposes is Leon Trotsky, in Literature and Revolution (1924). Though Trotsky later defended “complete freedom for art,” he did so “because the artist could not ‘serve the struggle for freedom’—the revolutionary struggle—‘unless he subjectively assimilates its social content.’” Perl writes:
To this day this idea—which I believe endangers art’s freestanding value and significance—is echoed in the thinking of many people who have rejected Trotsky’s revolutionary aspirations.
But he does not name names.
The upshot is that I’m not sure the trend in question is real. The demand for art to promote an ideology or perform community service isn’t something I’ve come across much in my own reading or looking or listening in recent years. But I wouldn’t claim to be representative.
I have come across an argument, addressed by Zadie Smith in the New York Review of Books,
that we can and should write only about people who are fundamentally “like” us: racially, sexually, genetically, nationally, politically, personally. That only an intimate authorial autobiographical connection with a character can be the rightful basis of a fiction.
Like Henry Louis Gates, almost 30 years earlier, Smith dissents:
I do not believe that. I could not have written a single one of my books if I did.
Perl’s argument is not purely negative or defensive. He has a positive thesis: that art is, and has always been, the spark of friction between traditional authority and the freedom of the artist’s imagination. Perl sees such freedom at work among medieval artisans, embedded in traditions. And he find respect for the authority of traditional forms even in the modernists who explicitly rebelled against them.
Perl cites T. S. Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” complaining that
he pushed authority too much in the direction of something singular and unified; there’s a whiff of authoritarianism in his view of authority.
But one could read his book as a revised and updated version of Eliot.
One could also read it as a rejoinder to the history on which “art” in the contemporary sense is an 18th-century invention. According to Larry Shiner, in an influential book, there emerged in the mid-1700s a distinction between fine arts and crafts, artist and artisan, along with the idea of the aesthetic and associated contrasts between genius and mere skill, disinterested pleasure and utility. The value of craft was about fitness to purpose, even if the purpose was transcendent, like the glory of God. The value of art was not subordinate to purpose in this way; hence the freedom of the artist.
In Shiner’s telling, the 19th century saw past works assimilated, retrospectively and anachronistically, to the artistic canon. Depending on your sympathies, Perl’s book is either the latest iteration of that anachronism or a credible rebuke to the simplicity of Shiner’s narrative. The transgressive architecture of Michelangelo’s Laurentian library, for instance, always registered a source of value not subordinate to purpose; as did the work of the craftsmen celebrated by John Ruskin and William Morris.
Still, even on the most generous reading of Perl, the history of art is not static. We cannot agree with Mondrian that “art is fundamentally everywhere and always the same.” The changes may be gradual and non-linear, but the traditions of architecture, painting, and the other arts have surely changed, and in radical ways. Fitness to purpose had a different role in medieval architecture than it does in Duchamp’s Fountain.
The upshot is a puzzle for Perl. He insists that art should be free from political pressures. The freedom of the artist is paramount. But then artists must be free to be political, too. And as artists exercise their freedom, the tradition or traditions with authority may shift, becoming more politically engaged.
At times, Perl seems to hint at a more stringent view: not that art should be free to be apolitical—“a world apart”—but that it must be. He spends some pages arguing against political readings of Picasso’s Guernica. And he cites W. H. Auden on W. B. Yeats:“Poetry makes nothing happen.” But there is nothing in Perl’s argument to suggest that poetry shouldn’t.
You can’t assert the unqualified freedom of the artist to reshape tradition without opening the door to changes you regret—including the politicization of art Perl fears. Smith is brilliantly consistent here. “I feel no sense of triumph in my apostasy” she writes of her commitment to writing characters who “are not fundamentally ‘like’ [her].”
It might well be that we simply don’t want or need novels like mine anymore, or any of the kinds of fictions that, in order to exist, must fundamentally disagree with the new theory of “likeness.” It may be that the whole category of what we used to call fiction is becoming lost to us. And if enough people turn from the concept of fiction as it was once understood, then fighting this transformation will be like going to war against the neologism “impactful” or mourning the loss of the modal verb “shall.”
What is a novelist like Smith to do in this predicament? Her interest, she concedes, “is not so much prescriptive as descriptive.”
For me the question is not: Should we abandon fiction? (Readers will decide that—are in the process of already deciding. Many decided some time ago.) The question is: Do we know what fiction was?
What follows is a loving description of Smith’s life in, and with, fiction, as both reader and writer. If this is not prescriptive, that’s not because it’s somehow neutral, standing above the fray: Smith’s values glimmer through her crystal prose. But she respects our freedom, too. “Only the reader decides,” she concludes. “So decide.”
If one wants to preserve an artistic tradition, one cannot appeal to the trans-historical essence of art. One has to persuade a living audience to listen, or look, or read.
See also: a polemic by Garth Greenwell in The Yale Review.
https://yalereview.org/article/garth-greenwell-philip-roth