The epitome of classical punishment in the West is the myth of Sisyphus, a king condemned by the gods to push a rock to the top of the mountain only to see it roll back, after which he had to start again.
That punishment is easy to understand. It was meted out through the exertion of intense labor without purpose and end. But labor somehow dignified the condemned. The story is a somber one and Sisyphus is no clown.
Modern Beckettian characters suffer a punishment of an altogether different kind. In terms of setting, they have complete freedom. They could come and go as they please. But they are idle, with whatever little movement there is being spontaneous and without purpose.
We do not know why they are in that situation. Nor do the characters themselves. Not that they seek answers or suspect that the situation demands an explanation. Apathy is all there is. (In Waiting for Godot, Vladimir and Estragon do not bother to hang themselves).
In the continual idleness, words fail. They lose their connection with the material world. They become absurd. The characters uttering absurdities become the subject of ridicule. They appear as fools, crazies, clowns and tramps.
That is the nature of the modern man’s punishment, being ‘free’, yet unable to act with purpose, acting with purpose being what separates him from the beast. (Beckett said that his Endgame was “more inhuman than Godot”.)
Even relating this situation is punishing, as Beckett no doubt knew. At the end, his style which had been evolving, hit a wall. Becket was describing situations that could not get worse; any further deterioration would dissolve their “plot” into nothingness. The language describing those situations likewise could not improve. Any “improvement” would sink it into incoherence. The critic Richard Seaver observed:
Is it possible for Mr.Beckett to progress further without succumbing to the complete incoherence of inarticulate sound, or to ... silence?"Indeed Beckett produced little prose afterwards.
Replace the “situation” in Becket with “old age” and you will have the condition of old writers, composers, painters and directors in the West generally and the U.S. particularly. They can’t go on because they have nothing of value to say. “The talent has run out”. But they must go on because they need money. The result, when artistic works of no value must be commoditized and sold for money, is the absurdities, farce, drivel and incoherence that we see. But unlike Becket’s characters, the old artists in the West know, or at least feel, how much they have diminished, the way a senile ex-Olympian on a wheelchair would feel and know. Hence, the angst and the depression.
Life, you see, is dialectical. So is the evolution of thought which comprehends it. The driver of dialectics is progression from falsehood to truth: the mind perceives the worldly object, notices its contradiction (falsehood) and proceeds to resolve it at a higher plane of reason, higher in the sense that the previous contradiction is explained in the new phase and absorbed into it. The dialectical process is the process of evolution in which every advancing state is the necessary other of that which preceded it. This process reveals the universal truths.
Philosophers and artists both follow this process. Both groups search for truth, only philosophers describe their search; artists portray it.
Logically, the process does not depend on time. That is why the “classical” works of art and literature are said to stand the “test of time”. The universal truths they reveal are acknowledged by all men at all times.
But physically, because the mind resides in the body in the material world, the evolution from lower to higher phases of reasoning corresponds to the passage of time, i.e., aging. So, the work of a true philosopher or artist – the one who follows a constantly evolving dialectical path – improves with age. Think Picasso. Think Beethoven. John Berger. Chekhov. Hegel. Newton. Sartre. Godard. The list is legion. And I am only mentioning the Western names.
And if the dialectical path is not followed? Then one will have personal observations, reminiscences and the life’s tidbits, but not universal truth which is expressly not personal. Personal is contingent, accidental, transient and forgettable. It is the stuff of sitcoms. It is inherently limited.
The limit impedes the progress of literary/artistic work. As the writer/artist gets old, he runs out of things to say.
Some perceptive and intelligent artists like Jackson Pollock recognize the problem and build their works around it. In Keeping a Rendez Vous, John Berger explained Pollock’s style:
Painting throughout its history has served many purposes, has been flat and has used perspective, has been framed and has been left borderless, has been explicit and has been mysterious. But one act of faith has remained a constant.... The act of faith consisted in believing that the visible contained hidden secrets, that to study the visible was to learn something more than could be seen in a glance.... Jackson Pollock was driven by a despair which was partly his and partly that of the times which nourished him, to refuse this act of faith: to insist, with all his brilliance as a painter, that there was nothing behind, that there was only that which was done to the canvas on the side facing us.(Berger is mistaken in attributing the urge to go beyond the visible to an “act of faith”. What drives the going beyond the immediately visible is the compulsion of the mind that follows a dialectical path. Noting that Hegel uses immediate to mean mere fact (without contemplation), he begins his Doctrine of Essence thus:
Since the goal of knowledge is the truth ... knowledge does not stop at the immediate and its determinations, but penetrates beyond it on the presupposition that behind this being there is still something other than being itself and that this background constitutes the truth of being. This cognition is mediated knowledge.)Pollack was a Beckettian tramp if there ever was one.
And he was an exceptional. He saw the limit and made it the centerpiece of his work.
The great majority of old artists and writers are clueless. Of course, they, too, suffer from inability to produce but they think it is something in the air – or in old age. Recall Sondheim from Par I: “It’s age ... I have checked with other people."
So they go about trying to write and produce as before but what comes out, thanks to the peculiarity of art and literature, is a precise reflection of their lot. Art and literature are powerful stuff!
In What is Literature, Sartre explained the reason:
It is always unintentional contribution of the writer which has the chief importance … A work is never beautiful unless it in some way escapes its author. If he paints himself without planning to, if his characters escape his control and impose their whims upon him, if the words maintain a certain independence under his pen, then he does his best work.This applies with equal force to artists.
Take a filmmaker like Woody Allen. They gave him an Oscar in 2011 for the screenplay of the Midnight in Paris. He called it a “personal view” of Paris. See now what his personal view reveals to two film critics of the Financial Times:
Peter Aspden:
Allen had form, once. But he lost it a long time ago. About 20 years ago, if you want to press me. Since then he has made films prolifically – but badly … Some of them are so bad – anyone out there seen Scoop? – that the next film cannot help but constitute some kind of return to form. If you constantly lower your bar, occasionally you will drag yourself over it. It is a novel form of creative evolution.Antonia Quirke:
Midnight in Paris is essentially shallow, a nostalgia trip … [It]has grossed more than $107.6m worldwide and counting. In terms of box office revenue for Allen, this is easily a record … And yet the film is always crashingly sad too: All those brilliant, beautiful people in the past, it simply says, all dead after years of being drunk, made crazy and broke and increasingly careless of the company they kept, many of them ultimately sad, abandoned bores. And we are stuck with this god-awful present. A present that seems to Allen to be mantled in some massive, ineluctable disgrace – a hub of numbness.Exactly.
The qualitative difference between old age and youth is experience. But merely being exposed to events and conditions does not by itself create a qualitative edge. The mind must process the experienced event and place it in the context of its proper universal.
Pursuit of money interferes with that ability. It deflects, however subtly and imperceptibly, the focus of the mind away from the search for truth and towards more money. The mind so affected produces “truths” which are not authentic but synthetic. Like the search results of Google, they are produced in response not to the subject of the search but the social factors which influence it. That is the destruction of artistic talent, artistic talent being nothing more or less than the ability to show and tell the truth in ways never before seen or heard.
Obstructing the mind's ability to process the events is the destruction of experience; we say exposure to events without the ability to process them does not count as experience. Since experience is the qualitative edge of old age over youth, its destruction turns the old men to children. Hence, the well-known child-like talk of the adults in the U.S., peppered with “gee” and “gosh” and the corresponding conduct to go with it. From Bill Gates to the State Department to Mitt Romney no one escapes its hold.
Agamben, as I pointed out earlier, noticed this phenomenon but could not elaborate on it. Nasser satisfactorily explained it.
Returning to old artists, can you think of a better specimen of a man-child than Woody Allen, a man passed the social security age who talks like an adolescent?
I can.
David Mamet was no Tolstoy. The stories and plays he wrote were always light and idealized but you could see the gem of a talent in them. Some of them like The Untouchables, The Verdict and The Postman Always Rings Twice were turned into memorable movies.
His latest book? Why I Am No Longer a Brain-Dead Liberal?
Last year, John Gapper of Financial Times had a revealing lunch interview with him:
[Mamet's latest book] has had some hostile reviews, including one from John Lloyd in the FT, and Mamet stands accused of turning conservative as he has grown older and richer. When I mention this, he bristles. “People say, Oh, Dave just wrote this book because he made a couple of bucks or because he believes in the state of Israel and he cast his liberal beliefs aside, but what about the arguments?” Mamet who attends synagogue regularly, cites the Jewish mystical tradition of Kabbalah.The culture that produces child-like lottery winners who go bankrupt within a few years also produces talented young artists who become child-like old men within a few decades. As with money, so with the talent: both are wasted.
I ask whether anything in particular prompted his change of heart and he cites the 2007-2008 film and television writers’ strike and The Unit, a TV show that Mamet created and produced. “All of a sudden, the show was off the air and everyone was thrown out of work – the stagehands, the grips, the custom designers, all the people who worked 16 hours a day … I realized I had been screwed by unions as much as I’d been helped by them.”
This peroration, delivered in a husky voice with traces of his native Chicago, is interrupted by the waitress. Mamet switches seamlessly to ordering his food in Hollywood manner – he now lives in the Brentwood district of Los Angeles... “Filet mignon rare, and no mashed potatoes please, and no sauce please. I’ll start off with the green salad with the balsamic vinegar on the side.”
As the waitress brings Mamet’s steak and a hamburger for me, he exclaims with relish: “Yum, yum, yum”.
At a younger age, Cormac McCarthy would have realized these things.
