The Romantic period of the arts, from roughly the second half of the 18th Century into the early 19th, was a reaction against the Classicist philosophical model put forward by the Enlightenment. Romanticism prized individualism and emotion in the artist, over the rational and logical artist of the neo-classical period. It is from the Romantics that we get the notion of the struggling artist, working in his garret on his masterpiece, ignored by the world, he is probably syphilitic and drunk on red wine. The Romantics (Wordsworth, Keats, Coleridge and Geothe in poetry, Mozart in music, Delacroix, Goya and Turner in painting), are primarily men of the industrial revolution, they are the interpreters for civilization of a world freed from the constrictions of serfdom. This manifests itself in the idea of individualism; the French and American Revolutions are Romantic in their nature, America is still unnaturally in thrall to the individualist notion summed up in its constitution, as too, unfortunately, are the arts.

Let us look at Homer, and the problems that biography pose for us when we do, there are many suppositions about who Homer was, but they must all remain suppositions barring some fantastical archeological discovery. What we deal with, in our discussion of the idea of biography in art, is fact, and fact is troublesome, especially in the area of historical fact. E.H Carr, is his work What Is History? asks us to reexamine our conception of the historical fact. Our image of the past is clouded, not just by the bias of the person recording, but also because of the reason for something being recorded. What we know of ancient Greece, comes from a select few people, mainly in Athens, we know very little of what it was like to be a Spartan, or a Theban, so even beyond examining an historical supposition with a eye trained to look for personal bias, we must also look for the huge gaps in our knowledge of history. The biography of Homer is recorded, but not truthfully, we have records from Lucian, but he is a satirist, not an historian, we know how certain groups perceived Homer, but we have no historical facts relating directly to Homer, we only have historical interpretations of Homer. Our own ideas about Homer are no more than suppositions, and for future scholars they will be little more than historical interpretations, our contemporary classical scholars can only make judgments on and conflations of previous historical interpretations, but, and here is the rub, these investigations can add nothing to the texts of the Iliad and Odyssey, the true areas of importance in our study of Homer. Like Shakespeare, it doesn’t matter who Homer was, it only matters what was written, and if they were written by someone else or through conflation of different sources, it doesn’t really make much difference. Would Hamlet somehow become a different text if Shakespeare were actually a woman? No. It is interesting that we know little to nothing about who wrote some of the best literary texts, but we will argue amongst ourselves about why Van Gogh cut his ear off. It should be enough to admire the work.

The reason for further eliminating the biographical reading of art works, whether that is in poetry, novels, paintings, etc, is expounded again by E.H. Carr. His example comes from Gustav Stresemann, Foreign Minister for the Weimar Republic; upon Stresemann’s death in 1929 he left behind a pile of papers, which have come to the English reader in the form of Gustav Streseman, His Diaries, Letters and Papers. What we must consider in our discussion of the fallacy of biography is how these mass of documents that Stresemann left behind, became the book that we must use to judge his time in office. Working backwards then, the book the English-speaking world has is different from the original in German, it is a selection of the papers and memos most pertinent to English readers. This original book is itself a selection of Stresemann’s full papers, it mainly focuses on the areas of foreign policy in which Stresemann was particularly successful; his dealings with Western Europe, his negotiation of Germany’s entrance into the League of Nations etc, it glosses over his relative failings in his policies with the USSR. So, with each step backwards that we take we move nearer to a complete picture of Stresemann. Except when we get to the actual papers themselves (which were salvaged in 1945 by the English Army), what we see is not a number of historical facts, but merely autobiography. Each of us writes himself, and all biography is first and foremost based upon autobiography, we create our own images for future consumption. In Stresemann’s personal memos, papers, files and diaries he is engaged in the creation of a mirrored self for future posterity, it is impossible to read Stresemann as a man because our interpretations of him are clouded by his own historical bias towards himself. E.H. Carr tells us as much,The documents do not tell us what happened, but only what Stresemann thought had happened, or what he wanted others to think, or perhaps what he wanted himself to think, had happened.
To make an autobiographical reading of a text we are engaged in reading into hearsay to illuminate the fact of a work. To read Stresemann’s documents to form a picture of him, as historical fact, is impossible. If we read On The Road by Jack Kerouac as a semi-autobiographical account of his own years spent on the road we are forced, by Kerouac himself, to accept not just the merits of the text, but what he went through to write it. We cloud our judgment of a novel through childish admiration of what the author’s biography can represent. Kerouac engages himself in the creation of autobiography in his text, this enables the novel to gain a veneer of reality that for large portions lacks much verve, suspense or insight.

Kerouac relies on substandard strands of our schooling that teaches us to see the artist as a grand struggling individualist creating his grand work of art, like Freidrich’s painting Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog; part of any discussion about a work in class focuses on the person who wrote it. The work must stand alone to be truly democratic. Contemporary art criticism places much emphasis on the work being propped up by the artist; the artist must somehow become a figure of great magnitude for his work to also be of great magnitude. The reality is that we are not in an age of figures of great magnitude. Ezra Pound implored us to ‘make it new’, this was Modernism, more or less, but isn’t it funny how the art world has taken it to mean, ‘find us someone new’. The Art Industry relies on money to survive, true novelty is unsellable because the industry doesn’t know how to sell it, a creative industry does not really rely on creativity, what it relies on is more of the same. Let’s take Four Weddings and a Funeral as an example, this film does well, Hugh Grant gets good audience reactions as a bumbling English stereotype, then we get to see more of Hugh Grant in new films, which are generally the same, because the Industry knows how to sell them. Look at film posters, they have set signs for what kind of film they are, the red lettering on white background with enlarged faces and a smattering of out of context ‘praise’. Or for another example let us take Grunge, when Nirvana went stratospheric in 1991 we have hordes of A&R men moving to Seattle like locusts to get another Nirvana on their hands, so they can make money. It is because the Industry knows how to sell this, they can sell Nirvana as music for disenfranchised teens suffering rebellion because they can create this idea of Kurt Cobain as biographically apt for them, they can sell Hugh Grant to middle-aged housewives because he plays the part of the charming stereotypical Englishman. Biography is parasitically attached to an artwork in order for it to become sellable. The art industry relies on the same premise, what we have is not ‘new’ art, but new artists who make old art, the YBAs were not ‘new’, merely successfully sold as ‘new’, and their work over the past fifteen years atones to the fact that Damien Hirst is nothing more than a coffee shop existentialist ripping off ideas that have been floating around for about a hundred years. The newness we may really speak of in contemporary art is not in the art itself but in the Industry, so to truly make something new we would have to get rid of the idea of artistic industry, as it exists now, and so it follows that the next new development in art must be to create a new kind of art industry, not a new kind of art.

Hypothetically, if there were to be a new type of art industry, one that wasn’t so much an ‘industry’, a word carrying connotation of pure economics and the processing of raw materials, via labour, into goods. A Marxist interpretation of the flaws of the art industry in very easy to concoct (although it is not the subject of this essay), but what we should be concerned with is a new way of presenting the reality of art, on a democratic level, whereby figures and money are unimportant. The word hobby isn’t palatable to the art industry, the true hobbyist is the person who does something for the love of it, it presupposes a love that is beyond profitability. A new art industry would place the hobbyist as its king. Once money becomes involved in matters of artistic creation it takes the onus off of creativity and places it on sellability, and one way that the art industry has of ensuring sellability of its product is by creating a fallacy of biography around its product. If you can convince people that the person creating a work has the biographical prerequisites necessary for them to be great you can ensure that work will sell regardless of its merits.

John Updike and The Modern American Aesthetic.

By James Maclaren.

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Martin Amis said of writing that it is not ever something you can choose to do or become, it is a compulsion, a need to make sense of the world – novels are vessels through which the world is furnished with meaning. Far more subtle and various than the everyday, they offer us a purpose – something innate in the human spirit, the need to make sense of our lives, to populate them with some notion of meaning or eloquence. Having a capacity for something so vital is part of a formation of an identity – in a rather high faluting kind of way many of the best writers feel that they were put here to write, and, as Dante’s Inferno tells us, one of the hottest sections of hell is reserved for those who have talent and do not use it. Updike as a young writer in his early twenty’s was trying to understand the changes that were happening in American culture – the post-war America of apple pie and Momma was being challenged by a new idea of what it meant to be young and American, something to do with being individual and choosing your own path rather then accepting the same choices and responsibilities as your parents. Updike wrote a short story in 1957 about a young grocery clerk in a sleepy suburb who is shocked out of the monotony of his work by a group of beautiful young women entering his shop in bathing suits, all buds and curves they peruse the shelves, and, all the other cashiers being busy come to his check out to buy their stuff. Breathless and stricken he serves them – they leave in a flurry of giggles, numb for a few minutes he tells his boss he quits and runs out of the shop in search of the girls. Of course they are gone and he is left with the desperate taste of something he could not quite touch. Updike was trying to get at the disparity between what this free liberated America promised and the reality of most young peoples lives – the same menial jobs as their parents but with the added resentment of having just missed out on something, something that was really first rate.

Updike, in early 1959 started writing Rabbit Run, in, as he called it, a “haze of cigarette smoke and dizziness”. His first full novel, started life as a novella; a small comment on sport as a type of hyperreality that elevates people to some sort of pinnacle before dropping them back into their second rate lives; grocery clerks, gas attendants, factory workers. It quickly became apparent that Updike had found his man, through the character of Harry Angestrom he could survey America in a big way – ventriloquising his own experience as a young man born into this new generation as well as looking beyond his own patch – he was married at the time of the novel’s creation, bound as we all are by decisions and restraints, he needed a narrator who would be there for him, another story to say what he needed to say. We meet Rabbit as a 26 year husband and father, demonstrating kitchen appliances in a store – in his school days he was a basketball star, by contrast his domestic life is full of demands and regrets. His small apartment is dotted with drained whiskeys glasses, bland food prepared without care or thought. There is a private moment of repulsion as he notices new lines in the corner of his wife’s eyes, rendering her plain rather then perky, as he knew her when he had courted her in the dime store they had both worked in. Updike’s gift is in saving this passage of prose from being gratuitous; he does not appeal toward anything base or misogynistic even though his protagonist is judging his wife in such a mean way. He is showing us a life drained of meaning; the idyllic picture of the American family is for Harry a prison where even the conciliations of lust and sex are being eroded by childbirth, familiarity, and the passage of years. These new lines are felt keenly because they are emblematic of living a second rate life, of having become irrevocably settled at twenty-six.

The novel’s title Rabbit Run can be seen then as an instruction to its hero, to get out and break away – the poverty of everyday life surrounds Harry, his parents live in a small dark house, his dad has given his life to the print factory in which he works and his mother gossips and resents Harry’s choice of wife; the small, spiritless Janice. His wife’s family run a car-lot, small minded people who never offered their daughter much love - her father pouring out his heart into his sales pitches, a cultivated artificial kindness. Even the towns reverend lives a beleaguered small existence, escapes to the golf course, his only respite from the web of his wife’s resentments and failed ambitions; at a time when Christianity and community were pillars in the functionalist family dogma, Updike shows it as failing, coming apart at the seems. Why not then should Harry want to break away, like the young cashier quitting his job and running out into the sunshine in search of girls. It may be a futile rebellion but it is a small attack on a American life that no longer works and maybe never did.

Another early novel then, about youth and freedom, tuning into the zeitgeist in anticipation of the 1960’s. No in fact Updike, even as a young man of 27 felt a distance from the reformists and freewheelers that were beginning to emerge out of the legacy of post-war consensus America ( this distance was not just imaginative but political, Updike was always patriotic- in contrast with the new wave of writers critical of American life, such as Norman Mailer, Noam Chomsky and Gore Vidal). He remembers a particular resentment toward Kerouac’s “On The Road” published in 1957, because although Updike was aware of the limitations in American family life he saw Kerouac’s celebration of individual freedom as dangerous because it did not stress enough what was left behind. Where we can understand Harry’s motivation for running, we also feel as readers that he’s mean and selfish, leaving a young girl only just out of her teens to look after his kid, as well as facing the twin humiliations of her parents intrusions and the towns gossiping cruelty. Updike does not think that this unbridled search for sensation is something writers should laud around – he looks at the disintegrating weave of late 1950’s America and sees it, at least in part as a loss.

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James Maclaren is an undergraduate student of English and Drama at Queen Mary’s University. He will be regularly contributing articles about literature for Off Modern.