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. 

Fustian Sacrifices on the Altar of Love: the Poet Pablo Neruda and the Murderess Mrs Pearcey

I mentioned in an earlier post my attendance at a wedding when we heard from the altar, at the bridegroom’s request, a recitation of Siempre (‘Always’), a characteristic rodomontade by Pablo Neruda.

I am not jealous

of what came before me.

Come with a man

on your shoulders,

come with a hundred men in your hair,

come with a thousand men between your breasts and your feet,

This boast invites a challenge, coming as it does from an arch philanderer and from a husband who in pursuit of other women abandoned an inconvenient wife and their ailing infant daughter, a choice of moral worth little different from that of Rainer Maria Rilke whose daughter was similarly abandoned, before the age of one, to be sacrificed on the altar of art.
See:  https://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2014/08/the-irreconcilable-sententiousness-of.html

That Anglo-Saxons shrink from such declarations as too operetta-ish was borne in on me when I read today the love letters of possibly England’s most notorious murderess Mary Pearcey (hanged 1890).

Novelettish professions of  sacrificial love:
the Kentish Town murderess Mary Pearcey and
the Chilean Nobel-Prize-winning poet, Pablo Neruda. 

Mary killed the wife and baby of her lover in an attack described as a bloodbath after inviting her victim to afternoon tea. The noted English criminologist, Fryniwyd Tennyson Jesse, disdains the ‘fustian emotions’ of the killer and suggests they were fired by the romantic novelettes (shades of Madame Bovary) that were such a feature of railway bookstalls of the period. 

Five Percent Fervency.
Indeed, the emotions are ‘fustian’ – in the sense of overblown declarations of love – should we choose to judge Mary by the melodramatic appeals to her lover found in her letters, but whose fervency can be quantified as no more than five percent in intensity when measured on the Latin scale of Neruda’s vulgar overwrought declamatory promises. Mary wrote, aged twenty-four:

I would see you married fifty times over – yes,

I could bear that far better

than parting with you for ever

and that is what it would be

if you went out of England.

Murder following English afternoon tea seems well-mannered and modest when you consider Mary’s actions as commensurate with the sacrifices she was prepared to make in sustaining her affair with her married lover and, certainly, they are decidedly moderate when compared with the satyriatic effusions of the Nobel Prize winning Neruda, who is regarded as a provocative object of controversy by Chilean feminists.

So . . . two somewhat novelettish  professions of undying sacrificial love . . . from a buffo-sonorous Nobel-winning Chilean poet and a sordid murderess from Kentish Town . . . I leave you to judge the precise gamut of their credibility.
    

Adamantine Madame. Enamelled Emma.

My last post raises the question of Nobel prize-winners with feet of clay boosted to stand on the adamantine shoulders of giants. http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2013/02/pinterland-hogs-crabs-parnassus-and.html

Adamantine. 

Now that descriptor, I confess, is suggested by a remark made by novelist and Francophile Julian Barnes at the Hay Festival Cartagena de Indias last month, reminding us of his ever-intensifying veneration for Flaubert.

For myself, I continue to read him, and I find that I do read the books differently, still. I go back the most often to Madame Bovary, and I still find, in its adamantine perfection, that there are new things to discover, things I had not noticed before.

A remark which makes me wonder whether Julian Barnes is aware of the subtle workings of his subconscious, which have led him to well-nigh an élégance palindromique in his choice of adjective.

Indeed, an adamantine Madame.

The fact that this palindromic effect is subliminally perceived at the threshold of our awareness might be taken as further evidence, should we need it, of the magic Flaubert continues to exert on us each time we return to him.

I was reminded of an interview conducted by novelist Megan Taylor in 2009, where my own veneration for Madame Bovary is given full rein http://www.megantaylor.info/2009/02/an-interview-with-catherine-eisner/:

Also I am re-reading ‘Madame Bovary’ in the first (and brilliant) English Edition translated by Karl Marx’s daughter, Eleanor ( I have an original copy; it cost me £250 even twenty-five years ago!). How’s this for an image from Flaubert: ‘The daylight that came in by the chimney made velvet of the soot at the back of the fireplace …’ However, I suspect Flaubert may have been chiding the indolent Emma for neglecting to have her chimney swept!

Perhaps I should have mentioned, too, those sticky unwashed cider glasses...

Some flies on the table were crawling up the glasses that had been used, and buzzing as they drowned themselves in the dregs of the cider. The daylight that came in by the chimney made velvet of the soot at the back of the fireplace, and touched with blue the cold cinders. Between the window and the hearth Emma was sewing; she wore no fichu; he could see small drops of perspiration on her bare shoulders.

Of course, Julian Barnes has famously remarked that the colour of Emma’s eyes is puzzlingly changeable throughout the novel.

Seen thus closely, her eyes looked to him enlarged, especially when, on rousing, she opened and shut them rapidly many times; black in shade on waking, dark blue in broad daylight, they were like layers of different colours, and darker in the background, grew paler towards the surface of the enamel.

... la surface de l’émail.

Yes, I can see the character of Emma there in her eyes. Her superficiality. Enamelled Emma.

That the DNA of Madame Bovary remains still to be unthreaded is the measure of the adamantine integrity of this complex masterpiece. That is why we should be very cautious indeed as to whom, in any age, we should single out to wear the laurel crown for honour as supreme Man (or Woman) of Letters... Flaubert set the bar so high, at such a rarefied altitude, that none but authentic titans can command a pedestal worthy of comparison.