On beauty, taste and 'hearing the performance' - Part 2

 

Transposed to the classroom, the discussion above (in Part 1) has two very clear consequences:

First, assuming that most pupils (or students, or even people at large) read little fiction – something national studies consistently show – it will mean that the texts you give them are likely to be the first token of that type. In other words, the first example of a genre, style, narrative approach and all the rest of it. All those elements you take from granted when you know the genre will become distractions, obstacles for the others. What seems evident to you is for them a nuance they cannot yet perceive; what stands out as possibly symbolic to you remains prosaically what it is for them. A stone is for you mineral so it could symbolise death, or it symbolises the past, or solidity, or an opposition to the lichen on top; for them it’s just, well, a stone. With some lichen on top, which they’re likely to have ignored (details, Watson, details!).

And let’s not forget: those elements can also be simple distractions, hindering the reading, disrupting the attention necessary to read. Even conventions fall prey to that, as in poetry (visual aspect, rhymes/no rhymes, meter/no meter), paragraphing (witness the difference between a Young Adult novel and a mainstream, literary one in terms of paragraphing), margins, use of language, internal monologues, psychological insights and so many more.

 If all this is also true, it means that appealing to the discourse level (the third, see above) when reading a novel is simply not on: that discourse was /is identified by de facto experienced readers: that, and the very fact of having experience, whichever it is, sets them apart from the readers in the class.

That’s like asking someone who can only see in black and white to describe different colours in a painting. You must develop the ability to see, and you must not expect it to just be there, ready to go. It’s latent, we hope, in all of us, but what is possible is not always realised.

 A second consequence of this music/performance opposition is to do with aesthetics and style. Now, these are two big, big words I realise, fuzzier than pure fuzz, but it would be remiss of me not to mention it, even in passing – although I will post later about style, but most certainly not on aesthetics. So let’s say it again: as aesthetics is cultural, it’s like music – you need acquaintance with it. The chances are that if you’re not a reader, you won’t find Shakespeare ‘beautiful’, nor will you sing the praise of, say, John Updike’s prose. Don’t appeal to beauty, it’s off-putting and slightly humiliating for those who don’t see it the same way. Also remember that it took the Romantics, really, to make people see beauty in nature; before that, people saw beauty in nature tamed, not wild – i.e. they saw beauty in people’s control over nature, not in nature itself (unless it was synonymous with abundance, and therefore survival).

If this is true (and it is, barring the globalised aspects of, say, fashion, and even that could be seen as culturally defined, the culture being simply the biggest in size), then it is a fortiori true of younger readers, who have as yet little experience of the world in general, and of the Arts in particular. That is, they have not had time to amass enough conflicting, varied artistic (and otherwise) experiences to build a (statistically) significant corpus of perceptions and emotional responses: they have not yet had time to develop their own perception of beauty.

Now, that may well mean that they find beautiful what the closest people around them find beautiful, and as such could be a way of justifying imposing beauty on them (i.e. selecting texts that are found to be beautiful among experiences readers, and simply assert their beauty).

On the other hand, the situation above also means that those readers lack the means of comparison: what is presented to them as beautiful, as exemplifying the notion of literary beauty (or significance) cannot be linked to other experiences.

In any case, the result will be an imposition of criteria to which most readers simply cannot relate.

 So really, better not to talk about taste, about beauty, about any of that stuff. Better to talk about familiarising ourselves with the music, so that eventually, after a while and if we keep our eyes and ears open, we will come to hear the performance. By then, each  text will reveal more its possibilities for us – that’s how I read this line by Kundera in his little essay on literature (1986), where he explains he’s had a dream and thought its meaning was very clear: ‘However [he writes], the meaning did not precede the dream: the dream preceded the meaning. So the way to read the tale is to let the imagination carry one along, not, above all, as a rebus to be decoded. By insisting on decoding him, Kafkalogists killed Kafka’.

 We’ll expand on that next time.

 

·       Kivy, P. (2007). Music, Language, and Cognition: Essays in the Philosophy of Music). Oxford: OUP.
this is not really about literature at all but it asks similar questions, e.g. is there meaning in music? Great stuff.

·        J-L. Borges. The detective story (1978) in both Lectures (1978) and The total library (the complete non-fiction of Borges, 1999).
Borges loved detective stories, and here he explains, in a very short essay, why those stories are just as worthy of attention as any Great Text.

·          Chris Beckett: Message to people who don’t read sf, at http://www.chris-beckett.com/uncategorized/2400/message-to-people-who-dont-read-sf/
Beckett is an excellent English writer most associated with sf, but whose books increasingly blend genres. This online piece is very good at pointing out what is common to all reading.

·          John Updike (1985). Self-consciousness. London: Penguin.
It’s a memoir, akin to Nobokov’s Speak, Memory both in its attention to style and in its rambling, non-chronological nature. Beautiful 😊.

·          Milan Kundera (1986). The art of the novel
A small essay – at the height of post-modernism – from an author at the height of his powers. Filled with love for books and ideas about them. Wonderful (and a famous bit on kitsch in it as well!).