Where Has Joy Gone?

I've been reading a Pulitzer Prize winner. Without Mr. P's name on the cover, I'd have stopped after 30 pages. I persevered, and have come almost to the end. The characters that in the beginning made me grind my teeth have matured or died. From the beginning, the writing was vivid, original, attractive, but the situations and people in them made me want to drop them as quickly as I could. Even now, with only a few pages to go, and filled as I am with admiration for the creativity evident in
A Visit from the Goon Squad, I'm shaken.

I'm not a prude, and the Anglo Saxon epithets were realistic, suited to the mouths uttering them. I simply wondered why I should care about people who were not only crude (though sometimes sensitive), but self-absorbed and amoral. Their world seemed to offer nothing on its surface to suggest they might need to become observant, other-directed, or altruistic, but their lack of imagination on their own behalf astonished me as the material that had won such a prestigious prize. I think that was the point, and satire was evident, but I felt cheated by seeing nothing else for so long.

It got me thinking about fashion. We all know that it comes and goes. We all know it applies to a lot more in our lives than clothes. It appears to be omnipresent in either the persons or the perceived rankings of judges — of all the arts. Where (outside of that enclave known as "Inspirational") are critics who are willing to look to the effects of their judgments on viewers and readers? What has happened to contemporary art? Why is the public so ready to immerse itself (if I may refer to it as a monolith for the sake of this argument) in the down sides of life?

Happiness is so often as easy as understanding Rabbi Schachtel's aphorism: Happiness is not having what you want, but wanting what you have. It's clear that nothing is quite that simple, but it's also clear that too many young people, especially those who have almost everything they could ever want, are the most dissatisfied and depressed and at a loss in the whole population.

Even today there are plenty of anecdotes about triumph over adversity, and too few of humility and gratitude. It's disheartening to see how much adult literature is devoted not just to showing the abstracted, drugged gyrations of musicians, actors, and those who look to the noise in their headphones or the text screens of their smart phones to define themselves, but also to those who glamorize mindless sex as being as uncomplicated as the next drink at a bar, who give not a thought to how their actions may cause others to suffer, or even and especially to the harm they do to themselves.

These days, you almost have to venture backwards in time to find pictures of life redeemed in spite of or because of depravity, dishonesty, error. The ancient Greeks, Shakespeare, Hardy, Austen, even Sinclair Lewis or Harper Lee ... make your own list have so much more to say than just calling attention to or bewailing or glorifying what least deserves it in what we like to call civilization. Writing and painting and music hardly dare to be beautiful these days, except for a few poets. The cachet is in being gritty, hip, up on the latest fashionable depravity and/or illegality.

Just because all young men don’t look like Michelangelo’s David, must the majority aspire to replicate a troll under the Grimm brothers’ bridge? Rosetti’s dreamlike maidens with flowing hair and drapery may not conjure high fashion, but must the most successful models look as though they were spending their last bits of strength suggesting that what they want above all is to be ravaged? Every artist has a personal vision. Understood. It isn’t always conventionally pretty. Also understood. Yet even Guernica uses its ugliness to make a statement about perhaps the most lofty social goal: peace.

Being human should not be made to appear like a sentence to misery that might be lifted only by discouraged, even degraded compromise. A bit of fantasy that suggests how it might fit into real hope would be worth advertising and promoting. If artists can make a contribution to showing glory, they could serve a whole lot more than their bank accounts.

Painting: Pia de' Tolomei (1868-1880). Spencer Museum of Art, Unversity of Kansas, Lawrence. Model: Jane Morris

Joan Cannon's latest book is a collection of short stories called Image from Amazon
Peripheral Vision published by March Street Press and Amazon

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Where Has Joy Gone?

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