The Utility of Art as a Social Function according to Heinrich Böll

Or should that be The Utility of Art at a Social Function?

I think I’ve written all I want to say on the topic of the Non-Utility of Art,

see Schoolboy’s Mock-Heroic Epic:

https://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2014/03/sussex-exodus-of-altisonant-frogs.html

 

‘That art is non-utile is a self-conscious truism voiced oftenest by post-Marxian cynics. 

‘As Oscar Wilde, a socialist manqué, makes clear: All art is quite useless. 

‘This banality is no more absurdly pointed up than in the verses of a lofty poet who compares himself with his father digging the family cabbage patch – a spade wielded with evident utility – yet who claims a special dispensation for his own artist’s pen . . . “I’ll dig with it.” (Pause for involuntary cringe.)

‘Anthony Blunt – tarnished knight of the realm, professed communist, and Keeper of the Queen’s Pictures – was unequivocal when a young man in expressing his utopian sympathy for the cultural worthiness of Social Realism: “The culture of the revolution will be evolved by the proletariat to produce its own culture . . . If an art is not contributing to the common good, it is bad art.” ’

Yet, I now must acknowledge I’m a positive infant in my understanding of this sociocultural conundrum since reacquainting myself recently with the works of that West German champion of dissident literature, Heinrich Böll (1917-1985), staunch enemy of  Consumerist Materialism and scourge of its correlative, News Media Corruption . . .  

 

. . . specifically, the closing passages of Böll’s excoriating polemical novel, The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum, or, How Violence Develops and Where It Can Lead: 

 

A Specimen of Instant Art.

Well, if we are to be honest we have regretfully to report that at this moment Blorna did punch Straubleder in the jaw. Without further ado, so that it may be forgotten without further ado: blood flowed, from Straubleder's nose; according to private estimates, some four to seven drops but, what was worse: although Straubleder backed away he did say: “I forgive you, I forgive you everything — considering your emotional state.” And so it was that this remark apparently maddened Blorna, provoking something described by witnesses as a “scuffle,” and, as is usually the case when the Straubleders and Blornas of this world show themselves in public, a News photographer  . . . was present, and we can hardly be shocked at the News (its nature being now known) for publishing the photograph of this scuffle under the heading: “Conservative politician assaulted by Leftist attorney.” . . .   

 

At the exhibition there was furthermore a confrontation between Maud Straubleder and Trude Blorna . . .  in which Trude B. hinted at Straubleder's numerous advances to her . . . 

 

End of a Long Friendship.

. . . At this point the squabbling ladies were parted by Frederick Le Boche [artist] , who with great presence of mind had seized upon the chance to catch Straubleder’s blood on a piece of blotting paper and had converted it into what he called “a specimen of instant art.” This he entitled “End of a Long Friendship,” signed, and gave not to Straubleder but to Blorna, saying: “Here's something you can peddle to help you out of a hole.” From this occurrence plus the preceding acts of violence it should be possible to deduce that Art still has a social function. 

The Audit of Fame 1: Prodigal Son Vincent Van Gogh

Let me declare at once that I claim first dibs on the title, The Audit of Fame, as it may be found set in stone on page 313 of my Sister Morphine (Salt, 2008), where my embittered, disinherited heroine identifies a practice in art history indistinguishable from vanity publishing  . . . in other words, her Portrait of the Artist as a Remittance Man (in this case, Boy, her spoilt-rotten younger brother).
See: http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/sister-morphine.html

I don’t think the general public is aware that art for art’s sake is a privileged pursuit often underwritten by family trust funds or that, immediately after the Second Great War, art was considered a gentleman’s profession very like the practice of publishing, and infested with remittance men.                                                                                            The Audit of Fame remains a book that begs to be written by an aesthetical chartered accountant. I repeat, had not Mother progressively sold off parcels of land from my father’s estate — including Wilkes’s prized vegetable plot — Boy would not have had the wherewithal to mount his one-man exhibitions, nor would he have garnered that minor entry in the current guides to British artists, under ‘H’ (my maiden name is the sole inheritance we share).

                Dispossession.

Such an audit of artists would, without doubt, include Degas, whose aristocratic kinsfolk owned banks with branches in Paris, Naples and New Orleans. Edgar, himself, was born on bank premises at the Paris branch of the Banque de Naples, which his father managed. Nor should our audit ignore Toulouse-Lautrec, the scion of aristocratic wealth, and the possessor of an allowance and studio in Montmartre, by the grace of his parents, the Comte and Comtesse de Toulouse-Lautrec. Cézanne, too, was the son of a wealthy banker and granted an allowance to study art in Paris. In 1886, at the age of 47, he inherited his father's wealth and became financially independent.

The Squandering Prodigal of Yellow.

However, the shabby task of running a post hoc slide-rule over the loose change of 19th Century trustafarians is not my intention here. 

No. Not here. My fiduciary duty on this occasion is confined to the ledger account of that archetypal remittance man, Vincent van Gogh.

And, since Van Gogh’s socialist sympathies are nowhere more evident than in his depictions of indigent saboted peasantry, my interest, you might say, is one of purely Marxian economics defined by the true cost of labour, for it recently struck me, just as a scientific hypothesis, to compare the daily wage of the said saboted peasant with the profligacy of van Gogh’s impetuous smorgasbords of impasto pigments – value-costed by oil paint per square centimetre of canvas. 

The correlation yields a result that is somehow unsurprising, given my lifelong ascetic disdain for van Gogh’s technique of squandering gobbets of oil paint straight from the tube.

The coverage I’ve calculated is derived from a typical Vincentian wheat field’s massy yellow, which approximates to 1,400 square centimetres. Hence, in my estimation, allowing for wastage, some two and half double tubes of couleurs fines pour les arts were likely consumed, with each tube (retail) representing a manual worker’s average daily wage. 

For additional fascinating insights I am indebted to the diligence of Brian Dudley Barrett whose 2008 dissertation, North Sea artists’ colonies, 1880-1920, contains an excellent account of the mounting costs faced by followers of the fashion for plein-air painting.

Typically, for early pleinairists of the 19th Century, ‘a medium-sized canvas (125 x 80 cm.) took approximately 100 francs worth of paint . . . In the 1895 Lefranc catalogue prices for tube oil-paints average approximately two francs for a size number 6, c.60 ml. ... It is worth noting that Lefranc’s size 13 tube, their largest, at over 15 cm. long and 3.5 cm in diameter, c.200 ml., cost five francs each, one of which alone was approximately equivalent to an average labourer’s daily pay.’ Or, indeed, the cost of a day’s food for his family. [Five francs was a Parisian’s daily wage, one suspects; in the provinces, 3 francs per diem rate was more likely. In context, the price of a prostitute was also typically 3 francs.]

Agreed, these are sketchy figures. Yet, by contrast, Vincent van Gogh’s tube oil-paint consumption is well documented.

A Docket for the Quartermaster.

In early April, 1888, Vincent writes from Arles to his brother, Theo, itemising his 

. . . order for paints; if you order them at Tasset’s and L’Hôte, Rue Fontaine, it would be a good thing – since they know me – to tell them that I expect a discount equal to at least the cost of carriage, which I will willingly pay; they need not pay the carriage, we pay for it here, but the discount in that case should be 20%. If they agree to that – and I'm inclined to think they will – they can supply me with paints until further notice, and that you mean a big order for them.

So a ‘big order’, then, to his brother who was, in effect, his quartermaster; an order that included ten Double Tubes of Chrome Yellow No. 2 (cf. Goupil’s grades) and ten Doubles of the Jaune Citron he adored. Even with the wholesale discount Vincent demanded, just the cost of these items alone would have fed a worker’s family for a month.

The magnitude of ‘Vincent’s Account’ with his indulgent brother may be judged by the cost to Theo of painting materials in the period June 1889-July 1890, listing 901.80 francs for materials supplied by the firm of Tasset & L’Hôte, and 381.25 francs for Tanguy. 

Total: 1,283 francs.

Estimates suggest that Theo spent an average of around 100 francs a month on Vincent; that is some 15 percent of his annual income on his brother’s remittances.

So I return to the problem of Marxian aesthetics, as hypothesised by a callow Anthony Blunt long before the Iron Curtain had clanged down to crush the beliefs of fellow-travellers in the West who harboured a utopian sympathy for Social Realism. When a young man, Blunt cleaved to a vision of Art’s future under Communism that was unequivocal: ‘The culture of the revolution will be evolved by the proletariat to produce its own culture ... If an art is not contributing to the common good, it is bad art.’  [Cf. Footnote 2, below.]

See
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2013/10/slaves-to-seconal-droguee.html

Stakhanovist Artistic Licence?

Mmm. The proletariat would have its own culture, eh?  Stakhanovist masterworks to stand witness to the Dignity of Labour? Tell that to Mademoiselle Sans Sabots of Arles, who must scythe a hectare of wheat per day for less than the price of the yellow vermicelli squirted by the town’s wanton dauber, never mind that the sunstruck remittance man’s confounded easel is planted in the path of her reaping blade.

Yet, if a recognised exemplar of Western Art is the attempted transmutation of the haecceity of wheatfields into the vermiculations of a Vincentian yellow-encrusted canvas, then, by contrast, the Marxian aesthetic, to my mind, was never more powerfully expressed than in the inspired stroke that transubstantiated a Russian Orthodox church into a hungering people’s Grain Store. As Social Realism at its most potent and most emblematic, it surely then outclasses any of the conceptualist vapidities that the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern has lately foisted on our Intelligentsiya.

Soviet Grain Store. 1930s.

Footnote 1 (December 13 2014)

Of course, were not Conceptualism a discredited art, a more sober reading of the 1930s Soviet Grain Store is to consider the 30,000,000 deaths accounted by the Patriotic War and Stalinist Purges as represented by seeds of grain. By my estimation – if each death were expressed as a seed of grain – then some eighteen sacks of grain would memorialise the tragedy of those lives lost.

Footnote 2 (January 6 2018)

In his prophetic satire of England’s Galsworthian leisured classes, W. Somerset Maugham (Christmas Holiday, 1939) describes the views of a young Cambridge-educated communistic firebrand and admirer of the iron fist of Felix Dzerzhinsky, the founder and Director of the Cheka. The political tyro claims: ‘Art! It’s an amusing diversion for the idle rich! Our world, the world we live in, has no time for such nonsense . . . I know what you would have thought; you would have thought it gave a beauty, a meaning to existence; you would have thought it was a solace to the weary and heavy-laden and an inspiration to the nobler and fuller life. Balls! We may want art again in the future, but it won’t be your art, it’ll be the art of the people.’    

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For more observations concerning the artistic legacy of M & Mme Anon, see . . .

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/10/mr-and-mrs-anon.html

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Catherine Eisner believes passionately in plot-driven suspense fiction, a devotion to literary craft that draws on studies in psychoanalytical criminology and psychoactive pharmacology to explore the dark side of motivation, and ignite plot twists with unexpected outcomes. Within these disciplines Eisner’s fictions seek to explore variant literary forms derived from psychotherapy and criminology to trace the traumas of characters in extremis. Compulsive recurring sub-themes in her narratives examine sibling rivalry, rivalrous cousinhood, pathological imposture, financial chicanery, and the effects of non-familial male pheromones on pubescence, 

see Eisner’s Sister Morphine (2008)

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/sister-morphine.html

and Listen Close to Me (2011)

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/published-this-autumn-listen-close-to.html  

Sussex Exodus of Altisonant Rats: Schoolboy’s Mock-Heroic Epic

That art is non-utile is a self-conscious truism voiced oftenest by post-Marxian cynics. 

As Oscar Wilde, a socialist manqué, makes clear: All art is quite useless. 

This banality is no more absurdly pointed up than in the verses of a lofty poet who compares himself with his father digging the family cabbage patch – a spade wielded with evident utility – yet who claims a special dispensation for his own artist’s pen . . . ‘I’ll dig with it.’ (Pause for involuntary cringe.)

Anthony Blunt – tarnished knight of the realm, professed communist, and Keeper of the Queen’s Pictures – was unequivocal when a young man in expressing his utopian sympathy for the cultural worthiness of Social Realism: ‘The culture of the revolution will be evolved by the proletariat to produce its own culture . . . If an art is not contributing to the common good, it is bad art.’ 

So, by Blunt’s measure, even the Queen’s Poet Laureate should cleave to utilitarian art . . . notwithstanding it’s a demand unmet by a recent incumbent in the opinion of those republican readers who’ve submitted the laureate verses of Ted Hughes to closer scrutiny. Although, of that versification, the finest – the beautiful Little Salmon Hymn – is a witty act of lese-majesty since the licensed poet-jester cheekily commands his empress* to collude in acceptance of his metaphors as givens: ‘Say the constellations are flocks. And the sea-dawns, collecting colour, give it, the sea-spray the spectrum.’ [My italics.]

So any success in our tracking down utilitarian verse is likely to be somewhat limited, particularly as the poetry of knee-jerk imperialism is an overglutted market. (‘Who, or why, or which, or what, is the Akond of Swat?’ An example of lese-majesty in verse of the grosser sort, since the Principality of Swat is surely owed more than the glib doggerel of a melancholic syphilitic artist from the West, if one agrees that such smirking, unthinking condescension merits a reciprocal reductio ad absurdum.)  

After all, Maxim Gorky had a city named after him so at least one utilitarian writer can claim to have changed the landscape with the stroke of his pen, an act that was matched by only one rival . . . an autocrat . . . Tsar Nicholas I, who reputedly took his own sword as a ruler and astonished his surveyor by drawing a perfectly straight line on a map to ordain the path of the railroad between St Petersburg and Moscow. ‘Voilà votre chemin de fer!’ he decreed.

A utilitarian schoolboy poet . . . the necessity for literary invention.

Is art necessary? Well, for an enterprising Sussex schoolboy in 1812, aged fifteen, the facility to dash off classical Latin verse, as an accomplishment no different to boxing or riding to hounds, could earn him the valuable privileges of a ‘Senior’ promoted to a higher class. Indeed, in the memoir that follows, the narrator confesses, ‘I had such an object in view’, with the additional motive of earning a ‘higher mark’ that would win him a half holiday on a Friday. 

This utilitarianism in youthful art, which knowingly converts scholarly diligence into social advancement, explains, I believe, how a child can be father of the man who’s destined to outgrow a too facile creativity**. For there is a certain dilettantish class of patrician that disowns in adulthood the tyro dauber and dabbler he once was, and whose haughty defence is, ‘Been there, done that, got the T-shirt.’

Very small beer indeed.

Though it is surprisingly the case that the juvenile poetic facility described in the memoir you are about to read is later dismissed as journeyman work by its author, this dismissal must be understood in a scale of things beyond most people’s reckoning . . . for the author is destined to become the 19th century’s preeminent uniformitarian geologist, and one of the first who dared to believe that the world is older than 300 million years, so, for him, in the perspective of cosmological aeons, such poetical considerations as metaphorical ‘givens’ at Her Majesty's pleasure would seem to be very small beer indeed.
 

A memoir of schooldays by Sir Charles Lyell Kt FRS.

At the end of the first year arrived . . . what was called ‘the speaking,’ when certain boys recited verses written by themselves, those in the first two classes; and the rest different Greek, Latin. and English passages. The rehearsal first began, at which every boy had to exhibit, and then ten were selected to perform before the public. I obtained one of the places for reciting English, and was accordingly gifted with a prize, Milton’s ‘Paradise Lost,’ of which I was very proud. Every year afterwards I received invariably a prize for speaking, until high enough to carry off the prizes for Latin and English original composition. My inventive talents were not quick, but to have any is so rare a qualification, that it is sure to obtain a boy at our great schools (and afterwards as an author) some distinction.

Irregular versification. 

I had a livelier sense than most of the boys of the beauty of English poetry, Milton, Thomson, and Gray being my favourites; and even Virgil and Ovid gave me some real pleasure, and I knew the most poetic passages in them. I was much taken with Scott’s ‘Lady of the Lake’ on holidays, when I had risen to the second class, and presumed, when the prize was given on ‘Local Attachment’ in English verse (it being an understood thing that the metre was to be the usual ten-syllabic rhyme), to venture on writing it in the versification of Scott’s ‘Lady of the Lake.’ The verses were the only ones out of the first class which had any originality in them, or poetry, so the Doctor [the headmaster] was puzzled what to do. The innovation was a bold one : my excuse was that he had not given out a precise metre; on which he determined that this case was not to serve as a precedent, that in future the classical English metre was to be adopted, but mine was to have the prize, being eight-syllabic and irregular, and not in couplets.

When in the second class, I wrote a Latin copy of verses (a weekly exercise required of all) on the fight between the land-rats and the water-rats, suggested by reading Homer’s battle of the frogs and mice – a mock-heroic. Dr. Bayley had just drained a pond much infested by water-rats, which was on one side of our playground, and they used to forage on not only our cakes and bread and cheese in the night, but literally on our clothes and books. I am sure that from the date of this early achievement to the present hour I have never thought of this copy of verses; but I can recall with pleasure the incident, and it convinces me that I must very early have felt a pleasure not usual among boys of about sixteen in exerting my inventive powers voluntarily. 

Migration to sewer.

The plot was begun with a consultation of water-rats, to each of whom altisonant [high-sounding] Greek names were given, after the plan of Homer — cake-stealer, gin-dreader, book-eater, ditch-lover, &c. The king began by describing a dream in which the water-prophet covered with slimy reeds appeared to him, foretelling that the delicious expanse of sweet-scented mud would soon dry up, and foreboding woes. Part of the warning was copied or paraphrased from the Sybil’s song to the Trojans in the ‘Æneid’ of what should happen when they reached Italy. The dream and warning, taken, I suppose, from Agamemnon’s to the Grecian chiefs, being communicated, the others entered into the debate what they should do, and it was agreed that, as the fates had decreed the drying up of the waters, they should migrate to a neighbouring sewer, and should destroy the house-rats, who consumed so much provender in the schoolroom, and who had usurped their rights.

One passage, in which a chief was described as a great map-eater, and having at one meal consumed Africa, Europe, Asia, America. and the Ocean, was admired as good specimen of pompous description of mighty deeds, on the first entrance of a hero in an epic poem. The verses ran to thirty-eight, and when done, there was great discussion whether I should dare show up such a thing. It was thought, however, a wondrous feat, till the second master, Mr. Ayling, a youth of nineteen, who heard of it, said, ‘I dare say it’s all nonsense and bad Latin.’ I was requested, in vindication, to let him see it before it went up to Dr. Bayley. To justify his own anticipation, he cut it up as much as he could, pointing out all the grammatical errors and one false quantity. Though he thus made many think light of it, and checked my growing vanity not a little, it of course had the effect of my correcting the lines, and rewriting a copy.

Literary ambitions quenched.

Dr. Bayley, when he saw it, was much surprised at the correctness of the Latin, and struck, more than he chose to admit to us, with the invention displayed in the whole thing. He told the class that it was such good Latin that I deserved great credit, but he did not wish them or me to send him up more mock-heroics. From this time I took it into my head that I should one day do great things in a literary way, but my ambition was quenched afterwards, by failing in carrying off any prize at Oxford.

A frog, depicted on the Archaic silver staters of Serifos (circa 530 BC).

More probings into the contradictions in the life of Sir Anthony Blunt may be read here:
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2013/10/slaves-to-seconal-droguee.html

*Note (May 24 2023): It’s been brought to my attention that ex-Poet Laureate, Andrew Motion (Ted Hughes’s successor), remembers Queen Elizabeth II telling him: ‘Ted Hughes and my mother did see quite a bit of each other. Actually, I’d like to have a poet laureate who paid attention to me . . .’ Reportedly, King Charles III is ‘a much keener reader of poetry than she was.’

**It should be added that the English belletrist, Geoffrey Madan (who won the most prestigious scholarship to Eton in 1907), earned a day’s holiday for the whole school by the excellence of his account of Eton written in Herodotean Greek.

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The Hexameter Challenge

Shortly before Christmas 2017 I hit upon a notion that the Sussex Exodus of Altisonant Rats might yet still be restored in spirit for the amusement of a later generation of budding Latinists. So, ever the completist (as I have admitted elsewhere), I tasked a number of Latin scholars around the world to re-imagine the achievement of the teenage Charles Lyell with their own versions of the opening verses from the boy’s mock-heroic epic.

On a whim, the actualisation of the Latin hexameter was prompted by an English couplet — of my own devising — composed of roughly hexametric dactylic lines. Yet, despite it comprising six metrical units, you’ll observe it’s lacking, in its sixth foot, the prescribed anceps of ideally two syllables.  

Oh woe the day that saw our Realm of Ooze undone, for Zeus a Drought has wrought                     to goad us rend old Foes: Tribes of the Netherworld whose Blood our Grudge long sought.

Nevertheless, I believed it conveyed the gist of young Charles’s intentions of 1812. What followed my ‘Hexameter Challenge’ was an extended period of instruction during which it was explained to me, in my innocence, that Latin hexameter — insofar as metre can be recognised by appearance — does not resemble the identifiable patterns of syllabic stress and intonation of classical prosodists composing in English, i.e. effectively five dactyls followed by the prescribed anceps of ideally two syllables:

dum-ditty | dum-ditty | dum-ditty | dum-ditty | dum-ditty| dum-dum 

Contrastingly, we learn, Latin hexameter permits any of the first four dactyls (one long syllable followed by two short syllables) of a line to be replaced with a spondee (two long or stressed syllables). However, the fifth foot is nearly always a dactyl, with the sixth foot an anceps, i.e., either a long-long (— —) or long-short (— ^). To accord with the art of recitation, the anceps is always treated as long to fill out the line.

Honours Board

The winning entry fulfilled admirably the specification to retrieve a schoolboy’s composition from over two centuries of oblivion. 

             Vae tibi dire dies! Nostrum ex uligine constans
             Imperium periit, nam Juppiter arida fecit
             Flumina ut antiquos stimulemur diripere hostes.
             Tartareas gentes quarum petiere cruorem
             Crimine nostra diu praecordia laesa doloso.

             Woe to thee, dreadful day! Our empire of swampyness 
             has perished, for Jupiter has made the flowings dry 
             so that we should be goaded into tearing ancient enemies asunder, 
             underworld peoples whose gore our innards have
             sought for a long time, affronted by a deceitful misdeed.

Using d for dactyl and s for spondee you'll see the first five feet of each line conform to the metrical rules described above, with the fifth foot, in each case, a dactyl in accordance with the fixed harmony of hexametric Latin verse.

             d d s s d
             d d s d d
             d s d s d
             d s s d d
             d d s d d

In this delightful Latin rendering we can recognise many familiar words, some still serviceable for flourishes of a more florid character in English prose: dire = fearful; cruor = gore; uliginous = slimy marshyness; arid flume = dried up channel; hostiles = enemies; perished empire, etc., so there is much that is pleasing to the uninitiated.

Regrettably, for purely etymological reasons (which many may consider irrationally idiosyncratic), a phrase from a rival submission to meet the Hexameter Challenge did not ‘make the final cut’ as we say . . . ‘tum periit Unctum regnum cunctum ariditate’. A worthy runner-up, but I preferred the uliginous characterisation of mud to its unctuosity! 

So, sorry, close but no cigar!

●

Catherine Eisner believes passionately in plot-driven suspense fiction, a devotion to literary craft that draws on studies in psychoanalytical criminology and psychoactive pharmacology to explore the dark side of motivation, and ignite plot twists with unexpected outcomes. Within these disciplines Eisner’s fictions seek to explore variant literary forms derived from psychotherapy and criminology to trace the traumas of characters in extremis. Compulsive recurring sub-themes in her narratives examine sibling rivalry, rivalrous cousinhood, pathological imposture, financial chicanery, and the effects of non-familial male pheromones on pubescence, 

see Eisner’s Sister Morphine (2008)
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/sister-morphine.html

and Listen Close to Me (2011)
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/published-this-autumn-listen-close-to.html 

and A Bad Case (2015)
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2015/07/a-bad-case-and-other-adventures-of.html