Ban, ‘Ban, Cacaliban
Has a new master: get a new man.
Freedom, hey-day! hey-day, freedom!
The Tempest
What do we mean when we talk about freedom? More to the point, what do we mean when we talk about artistic freedom? Can an artist ever really be free if the medium in which she works is governed by the law of the market, by ideology, or simply by the banality of cultural expectations?
We idealize the concept of the artist’s freedom because we love the narrative of the solitary genius who changes the way we see the world. Joyce, Picasso, Balanchine, Stravinsky: we invest our imagination in visionary moments like the painting of Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, the first performance of The Rite of Spring, or Ginsberg writing “Howl” in the Caf?? Med in Berkeley in the summer of 1955, trying to free his voice with those long breath lines. And we do so for good reason: these are moments of cultural breakthrough in which some previous limitation of vision ??? the culture’s “horizon of expectations,” according to Hans-Robert Jauss ??? gets shattered, allowing both artist and audience a brief sense of revelation before the horizon closes in again as the larger culture makes sense of this breakthrough by claiming it as an inevitable product of its values.
But every culture loves its dead artists and hates the ones still sitting in the caf??s struggling for that breakthrough at the edge of starvation and madness. Culture and its industries ??? publishers, theaters, galleries, critics, universities ??? are always a day late and a dollar short when it comes to artists, taking credit for breakthroughs they did their best to prevent. It’s rare that culture industries really encourage the new, since they’ve invested so much in the old. And when they try, they usually get it wrong, their eyes dazzled by the flash in the pan while the really important work goes on elsewhere, unnoticed. American culture, in particular, loves the idea of freedom, but hates those who insist on forcing us to look at its monstrous children. Only when the monster survives, grows up to rule our collective imagination, do we come to love it, praise it, surrender to it. In this sense, we’re like Caliban, singing joyfully about a freedom he’s just given away.
Some of this is inevitable: it’s the paradox of democracy, as we all sing together our hymns in praise of freedom. We all want to think we’re unique, and that everybody else is the same. Artists and writers share this delusion, but it’s rare that one really ventures outside of Plato’s cave. And who can blame them? It’s a suicide mission. You won’t get published or paid. In fact, let’s be honest: you won’t even make it out into the light, distracted by other shadows in other rooms. Picasso made bulls out of bicycles; his visionary whores in Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, with their faces like African tribal masks, would have surprised no one in Cameroon. (Never trust an artist. Asked about the influence of African art on the painting, Picasso said “L’art n??gre? Connais pas!” Which translates loosely as “Shut up! I’m a genius!”)
So is freedom just a myth? Sure, but think about those words — just a myth. Myths are the stories by which we define our minds and so map out the cave in which we sit imprisoned. What can any artist hope to do but, like Nabokov’s tragic ape in the Jardin des Plantes “who, after months of coaxing by a scientist, produced the first drawing ever charcoaled by an animal,” sketch the bars of our cage?
I’ve been thinking about this question of freedom as I watch the commercial publishing houses and movie studios stagger toward their own extinction. Is there some way, I keep wondering, that writers can come out the other side poorer, but more free? Economics is a form of politics in which prisons can be built without walls. While there’s no question that artists need a way to pay the bills, there’s a cost to every dollar you make in the free market. (Think about it: you sell spices at the spice market, fish at the fish market. So what do you sell in a free market?) Publishers are cavemen: they trade in shadows on the wall, so they’re terrified by new sources of light.
So what do you get if you take the profit out of publishing? Poetry. Seriously, in Plato’s Cave, poets got the seats by the door. Admittedly, poets are crazy, but at a time when everybody’s running for the exits, they’re the ones who’ve been smelling fresh air. What poets have learned over the last few centuries is how to survive without the blessing of the marketplace. Poetry is a nonprofit enterprise, like anything else in our culture that does good but not well.
Does that mean that poets are free? Sadly, no. Just cheap. Economically, poetry is a patronage system run by universities and foundations. Since universities base their claim of cultural value on ideals of free thought and experiment, there’s more artistic freedom than you find among commercial publishers. But universities are also memory machines, built to preserve an intellectual tradition, so in practice they can end up as strangely conservative places where we simply explain to the young the shadows we see dancing on the cave’s wall. For writers, that means that there’s an expectation of conformity to established ideas and aesthetic values, enforced by tenure committees, small presses, and literary journals like The Kenyon Review.
So what’s the difference? In a sense, none. Both systems demand that artists stay in the cave, sacrificing some freedom if they want to cast their own shadows on the wall. But that doesn’t tell the whole story: a journal like KR not only can afford to take risks that a commercial press won’t, it actually has to take those risks to remain relevant. A good literary journal is the telescope through which the culture can see the cloud of dust out on the horizon, how fast it’s coming, and how angry the barbarians who come to burn our proud towers and set us free. In the end, they’ll build more towers as they settle in and start enjoying their power, but in the meantime, we can all join the wild dancing in the marketplace, singing
Ban, ‘Ban, Cacaliban
Has a new master: get a new man.
Freedom, hey-day! hey-day, freedom!
And for a while, we’ll believe it.