Art responds to our need of pursuing an activity without end,for the pleasure of the pursuit, whereas morality compels us tofollow a determinate path to a definite end.—Emile Durkheim
Religious conservatives often complain that the contemporary world has been corrupted by the pursuit of pleasure. And they will recite long litanies of our sins in this regard, mostly connected with sexual indulgence, gluttony, and the abuse of drugs or alcohol. This is followed by a call for restraint, temperance, and self-denial as necessary steps in our moral reclamation.
Such an indictment is justified to some extent, and in some respects. But on a deeper level, these conservatives are completely wrong. I am now going to make a counter-intuitive statement: The contemporary world is starving for pleasure, and real pleasure is frequently denied it.
Sure, you can have the base pleasures of casual sex and drunkenness and wild partying. No one’s going to stop you from watching as many crummy action-flicks as you like, or hanging out in bars, or twittering, or whatever-the-hell-else inanity happens to appeal to your jaded tastes. But the nobler pleasures? There you are going to face some real obstacles.
The contemporary world is afflicted with a diseased streak of puritanism a mile wide, and one that works overtime to prevent us from being genuinely happy and satisfied in many areas. In music, architecture, painting, dance, and literature, this puritanical streak wants potential delight sacrificed on the altar of “something higher.” And in the name of “something higher,” large swaths of the arts have become sickening wastelands, devoid of anything to which a non-plastic human being can respond with pleasure.
This is certainly true in much contemporary poetry, where willful ugliness, incoherence, and narcissistic self-absorption remain the regular benchmarks of acceptable mainstream work. The tiny formalist rebellion against this hegemonic dominance remains embryonic, and it too is vitiated by the defensiveness and social-climbing tendencies of more than a few of its practitioners. Too many self-proclaimed Rebel Angels are still secretly loyal to Jehovah. As a result, pleasurable poetry remains rare.
Pleasure is always linked to the satisfaction of a desire. For connoisseurs of verse, their desires are directed towards order, concordance of elements, clarity, coherent structure, closure, and above all the intellectual delight that perfectly deployed idiom affords. A good poem satisfies all of these legitimate desires. A bad poem thwarts them.
Doubt and uncertainty are not pleasant. They are annoying distractions at best, and soul-destroying toxins at the worst. People don’t want questions. They want answers. Overly intellectual types, or what Frederick Turner calls “nuancey-wuancey workshop poets,” have never understood this elemental human trait. Therefore a poetry that insistently raises unanswered questions, or that deliberately aggravates uncertainty (assuming that such poetry is not merely self-absorbed or incompetent) is never going to perform the primary poetic act of satisfying our aesthetic desires. The sophisticated reader will eventually throw up his hands in exasperation and impatience when confronted with such poetry. It does not touch those centers of delight that normal human beings expect the products of all art to touch.
Are there “lessons” or “morals” or “messages” or “information” to be found in a well-made, pleasure-producing poem? Well, that’s a real possibility. And such bits of information may even contribute something to the pleasure. But those things are what you might call epiphenomena of the poem’s overall aesthetic effect. They emerge purely as a secondary by-product of the poem’s pleasure-quotient. In Aristotelian terms, they aren’t the substance of poetry, but only its accidents.
Consider the analogy of sex. For thousands of years of human prehistory, no one made the intellectual connection between sex and pregnancy. Birth was just a magical thing that some women experienced, and the sex act was just an amusement carried on in the back of the cave. And yet sex went on being practiced for century after century, simply because it was pleasurable. When the British arrived in Australia in the late eighteenth century, the aboriginals they encountered still didn’t have a clue as to the link between coition and reproduction.
That’s the way we have to look at all the arts. They serve no purpose external to themselves. They have no goal or agenda other than delighting us with their perfection, and satisfying our innate human need for a “well-wrought urn,” as the great critic Cleanth Brooks once said. Can they be complex and suggestive rather than absolutely clear? Of course—but the complexity and the suggestiveness have to work within an overarching framework of grounded meaning and discursive coherence.
The problem with an aesthetic of pleasure, as I have outlined it above, is that it is always challenged by the criticism of variable personal taste. By this I mean that the following argument will typically be raised against it: “I happen to like poetry that isn’t structured and clear and forthright. I happen to enjoy doubt and uncertainty and open-endedness. I happen to appreciate it when a poet is vague and nuanced. I’m into unending subtlety and ambiguity.”
The proper answer to such criticism is as follows: “Well then, you don’t really like poetry. You may like some sort of substitute that passes itself off as poetry, but you don’t like poetry in the traditional sense. Instead you prefer something that appeals to your corrupted taste, and that satisfies your sick need for anomie and rootlessness.”
A harsh answer, to be sure. But it is the only honest answer possible to those who are afflicted with the general corruption of taste that followed hard upon the triumph of modernism in the last century. A great many people became trained to appreciate garbage art, and to value it above the genuine product. The claqueurs for modernism became ensconced in the universities and academies and publishing houses, and built themselves a little empire. The reaction against them is still only in its incipient stages. Is it any wonder then, that large numbers of badly educated people have been trained like aquarium seals to jump through all the right hoops, and to sing the praises of garbage art? It is just a melancholy proof that bad education can warp people into disregarding their own best impulses and interests.
Sensible and uncorrupted persons, however, still respond positively to well-made and intelligible art. They haven’t learned to cauterize the pleasure-centers of their souls. Snot-nosed modernists always patronize and sneer at people who say “I don’t know art, but I know what I like.” This is presumed to be a philistine response by the untutored. Such condescension is rooted in the unspoken assumption that one has to be disciplined—against one’s better judgment and honest reactions—to like the pseudo-music of Schönberg and John Cage, the pathetic absurdities of Tristan Tzara, the wretched prose of Gertrude Stein, the mystifying blather of Samuel Beckett or late Joyce. But in fact the normal and healthy human response to disconnection and asymmetry and incoherence is distaste and revulsion. If you don’t like the pointless dribbles of Jackson Pollock, or if you think the Pompidou Center is a disgrace to France, that doesn’t mean you are a country bumpkin. It means you still have a grip on aesthetic sanity, while the people who look down on your supposed ignorance have lost it.
What we need is a rebirth of cultured hedonism in the arts—a quantum leap in the demand for that which is gratifyingly designed and aesthetically pleasurable. We need people who refuse, without apology or explanation, to accept the garbage art that is offered to them by a moribund establishment, and who order their art in the same cool way that they order their meals in a fine restaurant—by consulting their own cultivated tastes.
The Greek word for pleasure is hedone, from a verb that means to enjoy oneself. And the Latin voluptas is rooted in the verb velle, which means to want or to will something. That’s what pleasure is: the will to enjoyment fulfilling itself and indulging itself. If the arts can’t give you that, they have failed. Don’t let any stupid puritan tell you otherwise.
