SHORTY I mean, if in 100 years nobody in the world liked Shakespeare—like everybody thought he was total garbage—but say The Bridges of Madison County were held up pretty universally as like the greatest literary achievement of mankind...would it still be true in any meaningful sense that Shakespeare is "great"? Or would that mean The Bridges of Madison County was better than Shakespeare?
GIRL Shut up.
For years I saw this as evidence of the girl's fundamental cognitive limitations, but recently it occurred to me that, yeah, maybe I needed to shut up.) But so once I start trying to answer the question, "What makes Grace Paley so great," I pretty quickly spiral all the way back to the question of the absolute vs. the relative, the question of whether anything has any inherent value at all—which is pretty far from the original subject. (Or is it? Maybe part of what makes Paley so good is that her literature makes those questions seem not to matter at all—which indeed maybe they don't: maybe we're dealing with the sort of claim that meaningfully is neither true nor false?**)
Didn't Camus say that the only question that mattered—or the most important question, or something like that—was whether to kill yourself? For some reason I feel like asserting that the only question that matters is whether God exists. I say that impressionistically, or let's say metaphorically, because taken literally I don't find the question interesting at all. In fact I suppose I'd better rephrase it: do we live in chaos, or does order exist? In Barthelme's excellent "On Angels," "The death of God [leaves] the angels in a strange position," as they are forced to reevaluate their meaning and function in the universe, to redefine themselves (because their main function used to be adoration [of God]); one proposal is that they "affirm chaos": "The work of definition and explication could, if done nicely enough, occupy the angels forever, as the contrary work has occupied human theologians." I love this. I love it because, yes, we have been, some of us have, occupied forever by the work of finding order; why not have the angels work to find chaos? At any rate, those two extremes—and everything between, usually denied or ignored at the poles—must be considered when considering the "goodness" or "badness" of a work of art.
There's literature that enriches, there's literature that entertains...I remember Woody Allen said—I think in a book called Woody Allen on Woody Allen?—that what art is is a kind of entertainment, just entertainment for a different kind of person with slightly more sophisticated interests and tastes. Dropping the value judgment, let's just say that there is a kind of entertainment that is all about a certain kind of intellectual stimulation. (Or does it maybe go the opposite direction? Is all entertainment about intellectual stimulation, just different kinds of intellectual stimulation? Colorful flashing lights have got to be about as intellectually stimulating as anything in the world, for a baby, who is only just beginning to learn about the nature of reality, the I and the other, the world of events and accidents and intentionality...I mean, man, do we even have an equivalent, intellectually? It would be like having some pandimensional superbeing give you a tour of something indescribable that makes you feel like a hick not for living on Earth but for living only in the universe.) What I find the very most alienating about its being suggested I'm a snob for enjoying Gravity's Rainbow (because, yes, people think you must be a pretentious jerk if you like stuff like that, and they're often not afraid to tell you) is not the insult, not what I see as the total wrongness of the judgment, but the fact that the reason I like Thomas Pynchon is that I find him incredibly entertaining...and I find a lot of other novels that more people like actually quite boring! And these are not intellectual positions I'm taking—I'm not trying to make some kind of point—it's just that I happen to be a person who likes this one kind of thing and you happen to be a person who likes this other kind of thing; what's so alienating is that you think I can't possibly like what I like or not like what you like and accuse me of being disingenuous or even malicious—what's so alienating is that you reject my taste so absolutely that you can't even conceive of the possibility that it is my taste!
But then of course we're back to the relative versus the absolute. And, sure, I would love to find some way to prove that the stuff I like deserves to be liked. Am I satisfied saying, "Well, I like this and you like that"? No! I want to bring you around to my opinion! And failing that, I want it demonstrated finally and conclusively that I am right and you are wrong! That's why this post is what it is: I don't want to say, "Hey, everybody, I happen to like Grace Paley"; I want to say, "Hey, everybody, Grace Paley is OBJECTIVELY GOOD!"
From a relativistic standpoint, the best you can do to disprove a claim is to show that it's internally contradictory. (And even that of course requires that everyone involved agrees that a position must be consistent to be valid—or indeed that a claim requires validation!) But maybe a more satisfying way around the strictest absolute–relative debate would be to point out the ways in which a thing can have the capacity to affect at leastsome as opposed to merely one: for example, in response to claims that a book like Gravity's Rainbow is "unreadable" (yes, these claims are made, often angrily), the fact that many people do in fact read it might be taken as an appeal to a reality outside of either camp's potentially solipsistically delusional perspective. But then of course you could say, "You're lying."*** And would this argument mean that if a bunch of people see the Virgin Mary's face in a pretzel, then it must in fact be some kind of objective miracle?
Maybe in the end we can only talk about ourselves and speculate about others, and what matters is how this talk and speculation "land" elsewhere. But that's depressing...it's like we're each on our own desert island putting messages in bottles. How about this: connection and meaning and communication do not take place inside each of us, but by definition require interaction, require the minds of two people. As such, the meeting of two individuals is like a Venn diagram, an overlap, still grounded in individual perception but blending with another's...? There was a lot of talk a few years ago about how you aren't supposed to praise children but are instead supposed to praise their hard work (e.g., instead of "You did such a good job on that paper!" you should say, "You obviously worked really hard on that paper"—which is idiotic because the correlation between hard work and good results is anything but direct), and maybe, like so many things, that's partially true rather than simply true or false: maybe it's good to praise kids but for that praise to be an expression of admiration, something that passes between two individuals in relation to their existence and behavior in the world, rather than an assertion of some kind of absolute static property of the universe—more "I am impressed by you!" or even "You have impressed me!" than "You are impressive!" or "You possess characteristics that are impressive!" for example...?
Oh, I don't know, I'm not a philosopher.****
"I saw a famous angel on television; his garments glistened as if with light. He talked about the situation of angels now. Angels, he said, are like men in some ways. The problem of adoration is felt to be central. He said that for a time the angels had tried adoring each other, as we do, but had found it, finally, 'not enough.' He said they are continuing to search for a new principle."
-Barthelme, City Life 140
* And, in particular, to group her with folks like Barry Hannah and Denis Johnson.a
** My greatest shame: I have never been able to appreciate Tolstoy all that well. I am convinced that probably Anna Karenina is one of the greatest novels ever written, and yet I couldn't get through it because I felt that I was required to accept Tolstoy's morality (as opposed to Dostoevsky, whom everybody seems to agree is vastly inferior to Tolstoy, but whose possibly more explicit Christianity never seems to insist upon itself outside of the fictional world—i.e., if Alyosha believes that Jesus is the Lord, there is no particular pressure for the reader to agree with him before moving forward with the story). Donald Barthelme, in "At the Tolstoy Museum": "The entire building, viewed from the street, suggests that it is about to fall on you. This the architects relate to Tolstoy's moral authority...Too, those who are caught by Tolstoy's eyes, in the various portraits, room after room after room, are not unaffected by the experience. It is like, people, say, committing a small crime and being discovered at it by your father, who stands in four doorways, looking at you." (Further defense of my probably indefensible position: Mailer wrote something about how, when Chekhov met Tolstoy, Tolstoy laid into him about how terrible his plays were, and that they were "even worse than Shakespeare"; Chekhov later wrote [or Mailer imagined that he wrote, I'm not sure which], "I drove to the train station over snow-covered roads. I whipped the horses. I beseeched them to go faster. Faster! And to the full moon I cried aloud, 'I am even worse than Shakespeare!'")
*** I think also of A Fish Called Wanda: "Monkeys don't read Nietzsche." "Yes they do, Otto, they just don't understand it."
**** Although I am the Head of the Philosophy Department at Harvard University.
a In the interest of total clarity I should note that while I have read let's say six of Johnson's books (including the big one), only one (Jesus' Son—a novel of short stories, maybe uncoincidentally) struck me as Great with a capital G, and one other (Resuscitation of a Blind Man) struck me as lowercase great—but in nothing of his that I've read have I not been very pleased with the writing...just more so, sometimes, than I am with the book. If that makes sense. In other words the level on which Johnson's genius is visible to the naked eye is: the sentence?
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