The Black, the White, and the Gray: Tom Wolfe and the borderline between Art & Propaganda
Zach Czaia
Issue date: 2/16/05 Section: Feature
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"All propaganda must be so popular and on such an intellectual level, that even the most stupid of those toward whom it is directed will understand it...Through clever and constant application of propaganda, people can be made to see paradise as hell, and also the other way around, to consider the most wretched sort of life as paradise."
-Adolf Hitler
The jury might still be out on whether or not Tom Wolfe is a great novelist. This "jury," if it exists, doubtless consists of intellectual and literary luminaries and so will probably take its time in reaching a decision.
The court of public opinion, though, is much more immediate in its decision-making, and though it has remained mum on the subject of Wolfe's literary greatness, it has, since the 1960s, judged him, at the very least, a great controversialist.
His latest novel-whatever its merits and flaws may be-has caused readers to reflect upon the nature and purpose of art, particularly the art of fiction. In last week's issue of The University News, junior Kara Maggiore wrote that Wolfe's new book is a "literary horror-house" and that his method and style of composition is fundamentally unethical. In fact, it was this criticism of I Am Charlotte Simmons that became the decisive factor in judging the book for Washington Post columnist Michael Dirda, who has declared the book a work of "mere propaganda" (albeit, he concedes, "well-written" propaganda).
But what is propaganda?
The simplest, and perhaps best for our purposes, dictionary definition of the word reads simply: "information that is spread for the purpose of promoting some cause." Is this necessarily a bad thing? Where is the borderline between art and propaganda-or does such a borderline even exist?
"Art and propaganda?" asked history department chair Thomas Jodziewicz. He laughed. "Some people say they are the same thing." But Jodziewicz had plenty of examples that might support this point of view, instances where an artist clearly desired "information to be spread for the purpose" (though perhaps not the express purpose) "of promoting some cause."
Jodziewicz cited Charles Dickens ("His writing is advocacy; just think of how many of his characters' names have themselves become derivatives"), Mark Twain ("He wants you to see a black person as a fully-fleshed human being in the person of the slave, Jim"), and John Steinbeck ("State officials in California and Oklahoma protested the publication of Grapes of Wrath") as authors who were both great artists and great social critics.
Jodziewicz admitted that none of the authors he mentioned were particularly "subtle" in their literary style or social criticism, but he didn't think that invalidated any of the authors' artistic accomplishments.
"I think it's a sort of gnostic idea, to assume that a work has to be somehow obscure or 'difficult' to have artistic value. Just because something is obvious doesn't preclude it from being a work of art," he said.
Rather, Jodziewicz said, a true work of art ought to look at those "obvious" things-life, meaning and suffering-and make them seem new and fresh. He offered the Catholic writer Flannery O'Connor as an instance of a recent author with this gift of making the obvious new. Dr. Theresa Kenney, associate English professor, agreed with Jodziewicz's assessment of O'Connor's artistic merit, though she said she had difficulty reconciling O'Connor's representation of violence with that author's Catholic vision.
"I think you, as a Catholic reader, have to bring to your reading the Catholic understanding of grace and the sacraments in order to understand the action of her stories in that way...I don't think a non-Catholic or non-Christian would understand the action in that manner," she said. This is not to point out a weakness in O'Connor's representation, Kenney said, it is only to say that conversion to a creed or set of beliefs is not an express purpose of her art. But Kenney maintained that, from a Christian perspective, all artistic expressions are necessarily moral expressions as well.
"If you are a moral being-and if you are a Christian, you believe that all human beings are essentially moral beings-then your work, whatever it is, is going to have a moral element to it," she said.
This inescapable moral element can be conveyed to the reader in an artful or in a baldly didactic manner, and it is in the manner of the conveying, Kenney said, that we judge the artist.
"Take the Da Vinci Code, for instance," she said. "It has a moral component. It, in fact, is propagandistic; it appeals to popular anti-Catholic viewpoints and attempts to convince the reader of the validity of those viewpoints." But the book's anti-Catholicism was not why it was such a chore for her to read the book (at the recommendation of one of her graduate students). No. Her primary objections were aesthetic ("It is just so badly written! The thought is so puerile...and the English is so bad!").
In fact, Kenney said, it is not unheard of that art and propaganda can coexist in a creative work. An obvious example of such a work, she said, is Spenser's Faerie Queene (a work students read in Kenney's Early Modern class), a poetic political championing of Queen Elizabeth, as well as a polemic against the Roman Catholic Church.
Kenney herself worked at one of the largest Catholic publishing houses in the U.S., Ignatius Press, as a freelance copy-editor and proofreader. During her five years there, Kenney said she did not see Catholic fiction of any artistic quality being produced, a condition she said has not improved very much to this day.
"There are lots of theological books being printed up. There is a lot of interest in C.S. Lewis. But there is almost no Catholic fiction being written," she said. So the halcyon days of Flannery O'Connor, Graham Greene, J.F. Powers, and Evelyn Waugh are gone. Catholics today are left with the works of these authors and reprints of books from authors of an even more bygone age-the age of Chesterton, and after him, that of the Anglican Lewis.
Jodziewicz suggested that though Catholic artists might not be able to gather much spiritual nourishment from the modern world around them, they will find great raw material in that world, a world he called a "nexus of art."
"There has always been this temptation for Catholics to mock and stand aside," Jodziewicz said. "But I think it's our duty to get 'down and dirty,' to be 'in the world, not of it,' as the saying goes...You have to get into the 'gray' while still maintaining your sense of the black and white."
It is in this "getting dirty," Jodziewicz said, that a person comes to terms with one of the most basic questions of the Christian faith, as Jodziewicz asks it, "How do you love God and your neighbor in the real, historical moment of every day?"
-Adolf Hitler
The jury might still be out on whether or not Tom Wolfe is a great novelist. This "jury," if it exists, doubtless consists of intellectual and literary luminaries and so will probably take its time in reaching a decision.
The court of public opinion, though, is much more immediate in its decision-making, and though it has remained mum on the subject of Wolfe's literary greatness, it has, since the 1960s, judged him, at the very least, a great controversialist.
His latest novel-whatever its merits and flaws may be-has caused readers to reflect upon the nature and purpose of art, particularly the art of fiction. In last week's issue of The University News, junior Kara Maggiore wrote that Wolfe's new book is a "literary horror-house" and that his method and style of composition is fundamentally unethical. In fact, it was this criticism of I Am Charlotte Simmons that became the decisive factor in judging the book for Washington Post columnist Michael Dirda, who has declared the book a work of "mere propaganda" (albeit, he concedes, "well-written" propaganda).
But what is propaganda?
The simplest, and perhaps best for our purposes, dictionary definition of the word reads simply: "information that is spread for the purpose of promoting some cause." Is this necessarily a bad thing? Where is the borderline between art and propaganda-or does such a borderline even exist?
"Art and propaganda?" asked history department chair Thomas Jodziewicz. He laughed. "Some people say they are the same thing." But Jodziewicz had plenty of examples that might support this point of view, instances where an artist clearly desired "information to be spread for the purpose" (though perhaps not the express purpose) "of promoting some cause."
Jodziewicz cited Charles Dickens ("His writing is advocacy; just think of how many of his characters' names have themselves become derivatives"), Mark Twain ("He wants you to see a black person as a fully-fleshed human being in the person of the slave, Jim"), and John Steinbeck ("State officials in California and Oklahoma protested the publication of Grapes of Wrath") as authors who were both great artists and great social critics.
Jodziewicz admitted that none of the authors he mentioned were particularly "subtle" in their literary style or social criticism, but he didn't think that invalidated any of the authors' artistic accomplishments.
"I think it's a sort of gnostic idea, to assume that a work has to be somehow obscure or 'difficult' to have artistic value. Just because something is obvious doesn't preclude it from being a work of art," he said.
Rather, Jodziewicz said, a true work of art ought to look at those "obvious" things-life, meaning and suffering-and make them seem new and fresh. He offered the Catholic writer Flannery O'Connor as an instance of a recent author with this gift of making the obvious new. Dr. Theresa Kenney, associate English professor, agreed with Jodziewicz's assessment of O'Connor's artistic merit, though she said she had difficulty reconciling O'Connor's representation of violence with that author's Catholic vision.
"I think you, as a Catholic reader, have to bring to your reading the Catholic understanding of grace and the sacraments in order to understand the action of her stories in that way...I don't think a non-Catholic or non-Christian would understand the action in that manner," she said. This is not to point out a weakness in O'Connor's representation, Kenney said, it is only to say that conversion to a creed or set of beliefs is not an express purpose of her art. But Kenney maintained that, from a Christian perspective, all artistic expressions are necessarily moral expressions as well.
"If you are a moral being-and if you are a Christian, you believe that all human beings are essentially moral beings-then your work, whatever it is, is going to have a moral element to it," she said.
This inescapable moral element can be conveyed to the reader in an artful or in a baldly didactic manner, and it is in the manner of the conveying, Kenney said, that we judge the artist.
"Take the Da Vinci Code, for instance," she said. "It has a moral component. It, in fact, is propagandistic; it appeals to popular anti-Catholic viewpoints and attempts to convince the reader of the validity of those viewpoints." But the book's anti-Catholicism was not why it was such a chore for her to read the book (at the recommendation of one of her graduate students). No. Her primary objections were aesthetic ("It is just so badly written! The thought is so puerile...and the English is so bad!").
In fact, Kenney said, it is not unheard of that art and propaganda can coexist in a creative work. An obvious example of such a work, she said, is Spenser's Faerie Queene (a work students read in Kenney's Early Modern class), a poetic political championing of Queen Elizabeth, as well as a polemic against the Roman Catholic Church.
Kenney herself worked at one of the largest Catholic publishing houses in the U.S., Ignatius Press, as a freelance copy-editor and proofreader. During her five years there, Kenney said she did not see Catholic fiction of any artistic quality being produced, a condition she said has not improved very much to this day.
"There are lots of theological books being printed up. There is a lot of interest in C.S. Lewis. But there is almost no Catholic fiction being written," she said. So the halcyon days of Flannery O'Connor, Graham Greene, J.F. Powers, and Evelyn Waugh are gone. Catholics today are left with the works of these authors and reprints of books from authors of an even more bygone age-the age of Chesterton, and after him, that of the Anglican Lewis.
Jodziewicz suggested that though Catholic artists might not be able to gather much spiritual nourishment from the modern world around them, they will find great raw material in that world, a world he called a "nexus of art."
"There has always been this temptation for Catholics to mock and stand aside," Jodziewicz said. "But I think it's our duty to get 'down and dirty,' to be 'in the world, not of it,' as the saying goes...You have to get into the 'gray' while still maintaining your sense of the black and white."
It is in this "getting dirty," Jodziewicz said, that a person comes to terms with one of the most basic questions of the Christian faith, as Jodziewicz asks it, "How do you love God and your neighbor in the real, historical moment of every day?"