Clarity, Art, and Life
by Joshua Fagan
The idea of art as a reflection of reality is a sensible one in theory that is questionable in execution. Aside from a few intentionally provocative statements made by aesthetes like Oscar Wilde, few writers or thinkers have asserted that art should not attempt to reflect reality. The most common characteristic of bad art is that it has no resemblance to the actual lives of breathing, sighing human beings. Trite sentimentalism offends because it presents an image of emotions and actions that has no resemblance to reality and elicits only cheap sensations. As George Orwell wrote, cliched phrases offend because they have no connection to reality, having “lost all evocative power.” Still, the question of how art should reflect reality is a more daring and contentious one.
Perhaps the most superficial way for art to reflect reality is to reflect the physical, external details of the world. For instance, a painting of an apple should resemble an apple. The quality of the painting depends on how closely it resembles an apple. Such a standard has a precedent dating back to antiquity, particularly in the visual arts. Pliny the Elder, a Roman historian and naturalist, relates the story of a competition between two painters in ancient Greece, Zeuxis and Parrhasius, over who could create the most life-like painting.
There are, however, several problems with this conception of art. The most obvious one is that it places art in an innately inferior position to nature. As good as a picture of an apple might be, it will never be quite as lifelike as an actual apple. In the past, a life-like image of an apple had at least an instructional quality, precisely depicting a variety of apple for the edification of those who could not see it in person. In the modern era, however, photography can perform that duty much more efficiently than any artist. A talented “photorealistic” artist can spend hours drawing an apple, and the end result will still be far less sufficient than a quick photograph taken by an amateur. The same is true of literary descriptions that strive primarily to convey the physical, external details of a place or person. None of these descriptions have the exactitude of even a blurred photo.
Still, the larger problem with this conception of art is that it is fundamentally reductive and somewhat shallow. If the only purpose of an apple painting is to physically, externally depict an apple, it has little use to those who have already seen many apples. Art made in this mode is, in a very real way, not creative. It only dutifully depicts, involving no imagination, emotion, or taste. The specific apple depicted may be unusually large or otherwise distinctive, but there is nothing to recommend the painting of it over the original. This form of art requires the power of observation but not that of perception or intellect. It simply depicts material qualities that any ordinary unclever person would notice. Even in an eminently naturalist form of painting like the old Dutch still-lives, the difference between good and middling works is not in how accurately they depict the fruit but in form and composition. Some particularly affecting ones can feel macabre and diabolic even while displaying nothing that does not exist in an average, ordinary fruit bowl. A still-life by an impressionist like Cezanne amplifies the focus on form and style to the extent that accurately depicting the external elements of the fruit is barely even a secondary goal.
Painting, perhaps more than any other artform, traditionally viewed the mission of art as one of external representation. Conversely, there is no other artform that now rejects this idea more overtly. This rejection created impressionism and post-impressionism, fauvism and cubism. Some of these movements succumbed to extremism, but the best artists working within them, from Van Gogh to Renoir, discovered the possibilities of art that conveys the essence of a moment or experience, not merely its external qualities. Importantly, these works are not rebellions against the idea that art should reflect life; rather, they challenge and reshape the idea of what that reflection means. The novelist Willa Cather makes a similar point regarding fiction-writing in her essay “The Novel Demeuble.” Acerbically, she asserts that any “writer who is an artist” understands that the capacities for observation “form but a low part of his equipment,” and that realism does not mean “the cataloguing of a great number of material objects.” Robotically conveying the mere numerical facts of existence requires little insight or thoughtfulness.
Conveying life in art, thus, means piercing to the inner essence of a person or an environment. For an environment, such a feat requires understanding the general atmosphere and mood of a place and emphasizing the specific elements that contribute to that atmosphere. Describing every detail in a sunny spring day in New York in writing, for instance, is both impossible and unwise; attempting would create a cluttered page that conveys less information than a photograph. Instead, the writer exercises an artistic sensibility to discern the important from the trivial, elaborating on the smell of food emanating from a bodega or how the rain looks on the petals of wildflowers bursting from the cracks in a sidewalk. There is sharpness and clarity to a succinct description, reaching toward feelings and ideas that will always have relevance, that will always be relatable. The same is true of people. The universal and the specific, far from being antagonistic, are innately related.
A concept of art that values the reflection of life’s feelings and perceptions marks a considerable advancement beyond a concept that only values the reflection of life’s physical, external qualities. Still, it is not altogether sufficient. Art can brilliantly and accurately copy the mood and sensations evoked by a particular person or milieu and still feel meaningless and inane. A novel that authentically presents the behavior of shallow and tedious people can successfully recreate the feeling of being in the same room as those people, but such an achievement is hardly laudable. In creative writing classes in college, I read a deluge of my classmates’ semi-autobiographical stories about judgmental parents, smug boyfriends, distant bosses, and confused protagonists. As mirrors of a specific bourgeois milieu, they were fully believable. The problem was that I did not care. The conundrum is not, in reality, too dissimilar from that of the apple. To the person who knows the milieu already, seeing it imitated well has no significance. There was no grace, no precision, no intensity in these stories, no organic and non-contrived attempt to find thoughtful clarity. These works simply replicated the vapidity and emotional sterility of a disaffected environment. J.S. Mill, reading Byron, found no comfort, but instead a lament that life “necessarily must be the vapid, uninteresting thing I found it.” Art absolutely does not need to reassure or comfort, but merely imitating the discontent and malaise of dour people without adding insight or illumination does not make art that is satisfying or worthwhile.
The problem is not with the creative-writing students at one school. Quite a few “literary” novels published today have the same problem; they delight in wryly and astutely observing the behavior of individuals, particularly individuals at their most flawed, but there is little attempt to find insight or purpose in those observations. They portray listless and vulgar people incapable of meaningful action, then assume they have accomplished a literary feat simply because there are, after all, such people in the world. As David Foster Wallace articulates in a review of Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho, if “readers simply believe the world is stupid and shallow and mean, then Ellis can write a mean shallow stupid novel that becomes a mordant deadpan commentary.” He suggests, astutely, that depicting shallow and selfish people being shallow and selfish does not make for a deep or compelling book. Doing so simply creates a work that is by itself shallow and selfish. The difference, similarly, between the great antihero dramas, from Mad Men to Tar, and shallow ones like Ozark or House of Cards, is not asserting that the protagonist is bad but offering a sort of meaning or greater significance amidst the immorality and depravity. Above all, what is needed is clarity.
There are of course facile kinds of clarity that are tedious or oversimplistic, that present the world as less complicated than it actually is. Still, the best kind of clarity does not mean reductivity or a lack of ambiguity. Art provides what life does not: a crispness of vision. Aristotle notes that art conveys “human action and life and happiness and misery,” but he proceeds to say that it does so in a specific way, as it demonstrates not simply what occurs but what will occur “in accordance with the laws of probability or necessity.” Stated more simply, art does not depend on simply what people do but on actions that communicate meaningful truths about what kind of person they are. An arrogant graduate student forgetting his girlfriend’s birthday is annoying; that same student remembering her birthday and then deciding he is too busy to buy her a present reveals something more scathing about his basic essence. The first may be more factually true, but the second conveys an intense and immediate portrayal of a specific personality. As such, the second is more artistically true.
Art does not simply mimic life; it reflects life with an intensity and precision that ordinary life lacks. It functions as a kind of magnifying glass, making vivid what is otherwise blurred and vague. The art critic Roger Fry states that emotions in art “are presented more clearly to the consciousness”; undiluted by the distracting demands of everyday life, these emotions appear without distortion. Paradoxically, the distance of art from the experience of life allows it to present that experience more fully. The ordinary understanding of the world is muddled and fractured, as the individual vision is necessarily limited and incomplete. As Fry writes, the sensations “we actually experience are too close to us to enable us to feel them clearly.” Distorted by individual biases and pre-existing expectations, perceptions of life as it immediately happens are vague and watery.
This limitation affects even the smartest and most thoughtful individuals. Certain contemplative moments, outside the chaotic rush of life, offer a glimpse of purposeful insights and revelations, but these moments fade. Clear comprehension, the capacity to see the world honestly and truthfully, is not unique to art, but it exists more abundantly in art. During the pursuit of professional labor or family responsibilities, that clarity appears in dingy accidental fragments, but in art, it appears radiantly, and it appears everywhere. As Percy Shelley wrote, art “purges from our inward sight the film of familiarity which obscures from us the wonder of our being.” Caught in the opacity and overstimulation of the world, one has difficulty seeing beyond one’s own preferences and values, and this lack innately leads to a kind of insularity, even if those preferences and values are worthwhile and moral. Only great art, removed from the chaos of everyday life and the burden of fulfilling immediate practical desires, can present those life-truths with a vivid clarity ordinarily inaccessible.
Joshua Fagan is an award-winning writer and critic currently residing in Scotland. His creative work has previously been published in venues including Daily Science Fiction, The Fantastic Other, and Star*Line. He is the author of The Philosophy of Avatar, an extended study of Avatar: The Last Airbender in the context of the Western philosophical tradition. As an academic, his work focuses on the intersection of literature, myth, and technology in the aftermath of Darwin, and he has published a variety of articles on writers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, such as William Morris, H.G. Wells, and Robert Frost. He is the founder and editor-in-chief of the literary speculative-fiction publication Orion’s Belt.