Monday at work I was listening to the “Reality” episode of To The Best of Our Knowledge and heard an exchange between Jonathan Lethem and Jim Fleming that reminded me why, despite being published, I live in defiance of the observation that Brain Evenson once made during my first Summer Writing Program at Naropa University. He’d observed that unpublished writers tend to cling to their aesthetic because it is the only thing that justifies their claim to being a writer to their friends and family. Having had my first novel published, I find that I still cling to my aesthetic not because it justifies my existence as a writer, but because it justifies the continued existence and relevance of my profession as a whole to the great forward thrust of society.
Lethem, essentially, argued that art is “peculiar” in that it’s not very productive because it doesn’t “generate wealth” in the way that say, oil exploration does, it doesn’t feed or dress people, - and mostly shockingly to me - doesn’t “improve things” and it “doesn’t educate as well as education does” and that it’s just a “thing.” He goes on to say that he likes art’s resistance to usefulness, and that he just wants to make something that people can be amused by. When Jim Fleming asks him if writing can help people to make sense of life, Lethem comes back with “Well that’s a very nice kinda productive Protestant work ethic excuse for art that you’re offering me, but I actually think that it’s not that, it’s that it’s to make you experience something, not to explain your experience, but in order for you to have a new one, and maybe also to remember and embody, sit inside, abide with your own experiences more deeply in a more conscious way, but not to explain them, because it couldn’t possibly do that. It could never help you really understand, could it?”
The last line he delivered to Fleming with, quite possibly, the most condescending tone I’ve ever heard in my life: as if to ask Jim Fleming if he really is that naive about “art” to think that it means anything at all. The condescension seemed to so fluster Fleming that he stumbled into asking Lethem to read (When I ranted to my sister in New York about it, she downloaded and listened to the podcast. She later sent me a text message that read “Oh sweet jeebus almost 9 mins in & he sure does sound like a Park Slope hipster tool.” - I love my sister.).
But it was more than his tone that irked me. It was his whole stand on the general uselessness of his profession and product as a writer for anything more than amusement and self-referential navel gazing.
It’s kind of hard to argue that books aren’t lacking a certain amount of utilitarianism in the world. Obviously Art isn’t as immediately useful as a hammer, or a step ladder, in building a house, or a cathedral; however, there should be no doubt that a book stands behind the grand and symbolically moving architecture of a cathedral while little more than classroom practicality and self-indulgent displays of wealth stand behind most homes built today.
I also find it disheartening to hear people describe “wealth” only in monetary terms. In a very narrow way, Lethem is right when he argues that writing does not generate a lot of monetary wealth considering the number of people who write professionally. I’m certainly no richer than I was before selling my book, and neither is my publisher. By that narrow definition of wealth, both me and my publisher should give up and become plumbers: by Lethem’s definition that would be both more useful and financially rewarding for us. But in a world already so deeply impoverished that someone like “The Situation” is both wealthier and more well known than even Jonathan Lethem, I think we need to reevaluate this idea of wealth. For me, wealth would be a comfortable life, but not extravagant, a life where I earn enough money that I do not need to worry about paying my bills every month the way I do now, or dying of a curable disease, and where I can write more than I currently do. But, more than that, I consider the books I have collected and read and value deeply to be a form of wealth: my experience and understanding of the world, I believe, would be incredibly impoverished if I’d never read “The Alexandria Quartet,” or “The English Patient,” or “The Sun Also Rises,” or “On The Road,” or “To The Wedding” (oh, how poor my life would be without that one). This form of wealth, this richness, should not be diminished because it does not generate cash the way coal mining does - but that seems to be exactly what Lethem is claiming.
It is that richness of experience that brings me finally to the most confusing part of Lethem’s snipe - at least for me.
After Lethem made his statements that art doesn’t educate us as well as utilitarian classroom exercises, Jim Fleming tried to defend art by arguing that it has a utility, that through it we make the imaginative leap into understanding a world that we could not have acquired through our own, direct experience. What Fleming was getting at was empathetic imagination - the ability to imagine for ourselves what it is like to be The Other. Lethem seems to shoot that down, but it also seems that he doesn’t quite get what he is talking about.
Lethem said: “I actually think that it’s not that [to help us make sense out of life], it’s to make you experience something, not to explain your experience, but in order for you to have a new one, and maybe also to remember and embody, sit inside, abide with your own experiences more deeply in a more conscious way, but not to explain them, because it couldn’t possibly do that. It could never help you really understand, could it?”
So let’s see if I can reconstruct the train of thought: according to Lethem, art doesn’t teach us anything, it makes us experience something, but doesn’t explain it, it gives us a new experience which is also supposed to make us remember our experiences and abide with our experiences in a more conscious way, but not explain them. In other words, Art doesn’t teach, it just makes us experience something that may or may not be new and if it’s not new then it references our past experiences, which we are supposed to dwell on with our conscious mind but not understand.
Got it? Yeah, neither do I.
First off, let me throw out an old aphorism: Experience is the greatest teacher.
It is the experience of something that best teaches us how to cope with the vagaries of life, correct? Sometimes the experience comes to us first hand, sometimes, it comes to us second hand. Or, to put it another way, some of us learn not to touch fire by getting burned; some of us learn not to touch fire by seeing someone else, or something else, get burned by fire. Art is, at its most basic, second hand experience; however, transcendent art contains a certain mimetic quality - that empathetic imagination I mention before - that can act like first hand experience, and wake us up to things in the world that we could not have otherwise learned.
For years I have held the belief that the stories we tell can and do have an effect on the world. And it’s not just my naive, midwestern, Lutheran upbringing now semi-Buddhist leanings, that gave me those ideas. The same ideas are held by the likes of Dzevad Karahasan, a Bosnian Muslim writer who weathered the siege of Sarajevo, and which he expressed in his book “Sarajevo: Exodus of a City.” Lethem’s argument to Jim Fleming seems to me to embody what Karahasan and I would call “Art for Art’s Sake” - a self-referential game that is unconcerned with the rest of the world: a piece of fluff asserting its meaninglessness upon us. The problem with art that asserts its meaninglessness is that by providing this particular kind of “experience” of meaninglessness, it teaches us that anything we experience is meaningless. I have found that such nihilism makes a person susceptible to the kind of manipulation at the hands of demagogues who promise to provide that missing meaning if only we’ll do as they command.
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