Fame, Recognition, and the Inconceivable Future 3 comments

By Santiago Ramos

To claim that Adam Kirsch’s little essay in a recent issue of Poetry on literary fame will one day be recognized as a belletristic classic is to get tangled in a paradox. Such a claim holds that posthumous literary recognition is something meaningful and desirable, and that is a notion the essay deconstructs.

At its core, Kirsch argues, literary ambition is actually a yearning for recognition that could be satisfied by other means.

The argument goes like this: Literature is struggle over recognition. Every human person wants to be recognized, wants his or her desires, hopes, feelings to be acknowledged by others; there is not enough recognition to go around. We compete by making art, and recognition is awarded to the art with the greatest aesthetic merit. This merit is measured and conferred by mediating institutions: editors, magazines, critics, publishing houses, etc.

Two recent developments have changed the rules of the struggle. The first is the internet, which has eroded the power of the mediating institutions, has democratized the struggle for literary recognition, and has “exposed literature for what at bottom it really is—a power struggle.”

The second, less momentous development, is the publication of a novel titled All the Sad Young Literary Men, by Keith Gessen, a writer who, in pursuit of the “promise of literature with such naive directness, exposed its true strangeness.”

So Kirsch asks some questions:

Why shouldn’t a writer who simply expresses that need as clearly and urgently as possible be rewarded with the recognition he demands—regardless of whether he has created a beautiful linguistic object? Isn't there something trivial, even monstrous, about a system that makes artistic gifts—which are randomly, amorally distributed—the only means by which recognition can be purchased?

“Beauty,” he continues, “is the currency, as arbitrary as gold or paper, in which recognition is bought and sold.”

I can’t tell whether Kirsch really believes that the emperor has no clothes—that aesthetic judgments are ultimately meaningless, and that the struggle has been made more honest, rather than more superficial, by the infighting on the internet.

But either way, he posits a resolution to the struggle, an “inconceivable future,” something like the noosphere of Teilhard de Chardin, SJ, where “The internet, which seems so immensely sophisticated to us, turns out to be just the first primitive stage in the evolution of a global, networked mind. In time—a thousand years or a million, it doesn’t matter—what was once humanity becomes a virtual entity, inhabiting every place and no place, singular and plural at once.”

And “because it is infinite, it will have more than enough attention to give to each of our lives. Even the least articulate of us will become the focus of a kind of ancestor cult, subject to the devoted meditation of innumerable intelligences.” We will be saved by the future. “If only we could be certain that this was the future we had in store,” Kirsch declares, “no poet would ever have to write another line.” Otherwise, all we are left with is the “always hypothetical and probably useless” imagination of redemption.

But that claim is easily falsified by pointing to all those poets who believed in a god—in an overpowering, omniscient, all-enveloping presence that, if nothing else, recognizes the existence of the poet. The “inconceivable future” is actually quite conceivable. We needn’t get creedal here. What are relevant are the dimensions of the Mystery that the poet believes in. T.S. Eliot announced his belief in a personal, loving God in “Ash Wednesday,” and he kept on writing.

The gods of the Greeks weren’t anything like Eliot’s, but if nothing else, those gods kept track of human lives, and made a place for them to go to after death. Homer still summons the Muse. The religious poet or artist, broadly understood, is, like anyone else, desirous of recognition from his or her peers. But I don’t think that ultimately, artistic work for them is a struggle, so much as it is participation within a world created and surrounded by a mysterious god; a collaboration of sorts, sometimes harmonious, sometimes violent.

Even a person who has been recognized and affirmed to an infinite degree feels the need to make art. People who already feel as though they have been “saved,” who need not hope for the inconceivable future, still make art.

This is something that Kirsch’s theory can’t explain, and the reason for it is that there is something more to beauty than the value determined by the artistic market. There is something that we are after that cannot be satisfied by mere recognition; something that we wish to make. We usually call that which we want to make “beautiful.” There’s more to it than that, surely. Art is about more than the anarchy Kirsch describes.

The deficiency in Kirsch’s piece is that he doesn’t ask about the meaning of the phenomena he is describing. The meaning of beauty is debunked, and the meaning of our desire for recognition isn’t even explored. This erotic desire to connect with another, to have an Other affirm us—there might be something to that. And the relation between that desire and that which we call “beautiful” is also something worthy of exploration. To reduce it all to a mere power struggle is to give in too soon.

Ingmar Bergman, something of an egomaniac, reflecting on the fact that no one knows the names of the builders of the Chartres Cathedral, wrote:

...if I am asked what I would like the general purpose of my films to be, I would reply that I want to be one of the artists in the cathedral on the great plain. I want to make a dragon’s head, an angel, a devil—or perhaps a saint—out of stone. It does not matter which; it is the sense of satisfaction that counts. Regardless of whether I believe or not, whether I am a Christian or not, I would play my part in the collective building of the cathedral.

But the question remains: what is this building—as an activity—ultimately about?