(Faber, £12.99)
For the sake of argument, let's say that your drink of choice is Château Lafite, ideally the 1961 vintage. And let's further say that I regard this drink as unadulterated swill and would always reject it in favour of a tumbler of room-temperature Ribena. You feel superior to me, of course—you regard me as a philistine with an infantile sweet tooth—whereas I regard you as a social climber who prefers to impress others rather than take pleasure in a tasty and refreshing beverage.
And what could an enlightened and disinterested observer say about this divergence of taste? Only a few things with any certainty. He could point out that I don't know what the Lafite tastes like to you, nor can you know what it tastes like to me (and of course the same obtains for Ribena). He could observe that our choices are likely to reflect many factors about our background that have little directly to do with the taste of wine or of concentrated, fortified fruit syrup. And he could assure us that neither of us is "right" in any absolute, objective sense. What gives me the greater pleasure is the better drink for me, and the same must hold true for you.
There. Now you don't have to read John Carey's new book, What Good Are the Arts? Anyone looking for its thesis has just read it. The rest, as Moses Maimonides might say, is commentary. But the book should be read anyway. Carey's fundamental thesis is perhaps the least compelling thing his book has to offer. He is a wonderfully entertaining polemicist, marvellously shrewd and woefully wrong-headed by turns, an exhilarating and funny but sometimes inexcusably unfair demolition-man, especially when confronted by pretension and intellectual fuzziness.
Carey is a subtle and imaginative literary critic, and when examining literary texts he reveals an elegant intelligence attuned to nuance and suggestion. In his forensics, however, he deploys a blunter instrument: an almost perverse literalness, a bullying refusal to acknowledge ambiguity or shades of meaning, a my-way-or-the-highway sort of dogmatism. He scores plenty of points in this manner, but sometimes at the expense of a high-minded pursuit of truth.
For example, he begins his book with an attempt to define what art is (more accurately, it is an attempt to demonstrate what it is not; to wit, almost anything any precious theorist has ever said it is). He gleefully threads his way through pompous and self-aggrandising definitions supplied by centuries of intellectuals, easily exposing the threadbare logic and snobbery behind them all. It is a convincing display in its way, but also a slightly unseemly exercise, bearing a nasty odour combining gunpowder and fish in a barrel; art is not, after all, a fact of nature, it does not exist independently of the people who create and experience it, and therefore the distinction between art and non-art is not so clear-cut as the difference between, say, a dog and a tree. Many of the witnesses Carey eviscerates are not aiming for a definition, although they pretend to do so; they're groping, however maladroitly, towards a description of what aesthetic pleasure feels like. Carey refuses to recognise this. The reductive definition he supplies in opposition to them, that "a work of art is anything that anyone has ever considered a work of art, though it may be a work of art only for that one person," is logically indisputable, but sheds no light.
Similarly, he takes issue with the supposed "immortality" imputed to great art by some high-flown enthusiasts. "No art," he tells us, "is immortal, and no sensible person could believe it was. Neither the human race, nor the planet we inhabit… will last for ever." Well, yes. But surely this misses the point. In context, it seems clear that immorality is intended as a trope, not a literal description. Art permits us some limited contact with, say, the mind and soul of a blind Greek bard who lived several thousand years before our own time. It even grants us a clouded glimpse into the minds of prehistoric hunter-gatherers who dwelt in dank caves in southern France. This phenomenon may not qualify as literal immortality, but it is no negligible achievement all the same, permitting us, as it does, to traverse millennia and make contact with the consciousness of our forebears in a way nothing else can. Carey considers the notion religious, but he has got that backwards; it is profoundly humanist, so much so that it even interprets the concept of immortality in purely human terms.
There is a fierce anti-elitist class-consciousness behind much of Carey's ferocity. And God knows he adduces plenty of evidence of egregious snobbery to justify his vehemence. But there are also times when he slips into what can only be called demagoguery. Addressing the question of whether opera is "difficult," he says, "What is difficult about sitting on plush seats and listening to music and singing? Getting served at the bar in the interval often requires some effort, it is true… But the well-fed, well-swaddled beneficiaries of corporate entertainment leaving Covent Garden after a performance and hailing their chauffeurs do not look as if they have been subjected to arduous exercise, mental or physical."
Leaving aside the facile inverted snobbery, the difficulty in question concerns degrees of preparation and levels of sustained attention, not arduous physical labour. I do not doubt that many in the Covent Garden audience go for reasons other than aesthetic pleasure and snooze through the entertainment on offer, but those who genuinely appreciate opera probably extend some effort in order to reap maximal pleasure from it. One need not grant it any abstract hierarchical superiority to suggest it presents a more demanding experience than, say, lying supine on one's plush sofa watching Celebrity Love Island.
Remarkably in a man so erudite and so manifestly proud of his erudition, Carey also consistently elides the entire issue of knowing something. While he takes delight in pointing out the ways various experts disagree with one another (as if disagreement is not ubiquitous in all fields of human endeavour), and the ways aesthetic fashion changes over time, he refuses to accept that knowledge might nevertheless confer some added level of discrimination on those who possess it. It is unlikely that, when he was an Oxford don, he was quite so willing to let students get away with an ignorant and unsupported assertion of personal literary preference, quite so willing to grant equality to all points of view. One suspects his nihilistic indifference to the value of expertise is a rather more recent stance.
The American physicist Richard Feynman was once asked to provide an explanation of the significance of his work for laymen. He said it could not be done. Conversance with the higher mathematics, he felt, was a prerequisite for understanding his theories. The fine arts are different from physics, of course, and their ultimate goal is to entertain, but they do evolve out of a long and complex tradition, and as a result they have become increasingly abstruse; and while this does not necessarily make them "better" than their popular counterparts, it does make some art more difficult to grasp for those who come to it without preparation. Some pleasures are simply less accessible than others. Does Carey really derogate the role of knowledge? At the very least, knowing something surely widens the field of one's potential enjoyment.
In the second part of the book, Carey makes a case for literature as the greatest of arts. That this assertion embodies a contradiction with his basic thesis he good-naturedly concedes, but his concession does not make the contradiction go away. And even within his own terms, he is less than convincing, first assuring us that he is only presenting his subjective feelings, and then proceeding to contradict that position as well.
For example, when discussing the role of contemporary celebrity culture, he writes, "literature's contribution could be seen as a counterweight to the mass media's focus on celebrities, which helps to glue society together by giving it common interests, but is empty by comparison with literature." Is not an absolute value embedded in the sentence's final clause?
He also claims that literature is the only art that establishes an ongoing dialectic with itself over the centuries. This, I think, is simply wrong. Anyone familiar with, say, Mozart's Jupiter symphony, or Beethoven's late quartets and late sonatas and Diabelli Variations, or Schumann's piano quintet and piano quartet, or Brahms's Handel Variations or 4th symphony, or Stravinsky's Symphony of Psalms, is aware that each of these composers is engaging with the fugal style of Bach and Handel, as well as all the composers who were in turn influenced by Bach and Handel. That this conversation does not take place within the realm of verbal ideas does not mean it is not occurring. (Of course, some prior knowledge is necessary to recognise it.)
At bottom, though, Carey's claims for literature seem to rest primarily on its social utility. His exhibit A is the way the teaching of writing to convicted felons and to troubled teens can sometimes improve their self-esteem and help transform them into productive citizens. And while this, if true, is a strong argument for a certain kind of social policy, it is not an argument for the intrinsic superiority of the art itself. Most of us don't read books to avoid robbing banks. If some potential bank robbers are dissuaded from pursuing that line of work by becoming acquainted with literature, so much the better, but that fact—if it is a fact—has no relevance to literature's value as literature. In addition to which, I would guess that art and music education probably have the same effect: simply having an accomplished teacher pay attention to and commend his students' creative efforts strikes me as the determining factor in this transaction.
And finally, it is worth stating the obvious, that some things are true even if they cannot be logically demonstrated. Intuitive certainty can, admittedly, be a dangerous form of self-delusion, but that does not mean it never has any validity at all. I cannot prove that I love my son and I cannot demonstrate that that love is ennobling—the feelings are internal and untestable—but nevertheless, I do, and it is.
Those of us who respond to the so-called higher arts also, by and large, enjoy the popular arts too. We love the Beatles along with Alban Berg. We cherish The Simpsons and The Sopranos as well as Shakespeare, Raymond Chandler and Elmore Leonard in addition to Tolstoy, Robert Crumb alongside Picasso. But we also recognise that there is frequently a qualitative difference in the nature of the pleasures these experiences afford us. And even though this difference is indefinable and therefore resists any attempt to construct an absolute hierarchy upon it, we probably do derive a deeper or higher pleasure from the more "elevated" work. Without being able to explain this pleasure with satisfactory precision, we nevertheless know what it feels like (and so does John Carey, as his literary exegeses attest). Some of our responses may be socially conditioned, but some are not. Having such responses in our emotional repertoire does not make us better people, not in a moral sense or any other, and it may not suggest anything at all beyond our good fortune at having been exposed to the classics when our tastes were still being formed. I would not base any practical social policy upon the notion. But I believe the difference is real. Having been lucky enough to have tasted and enjoyed both Ribena and Château Lafite, I do believe that for those willing or equipped to appreciate it, the latter provides a more satisfying and more complex nexus of pleasures. Yes, damn it, absolutely.
