Three Lessons in Beauty

The Oak at Flagey by Gustave Courbet

In his essay Testaments Betrayed Milan Kundera recalls taking lessons in musical composition from a friend of his father’s, a Jewish composer who was at that time required to wear the yellow star. Seeing the young Kundera out of the tiny Prague flat where he camped out with others whose apartments had been confiscated, the composer suddenly stopped: “There are many surprisingly weak passages in Beethoven. But it is the weak passages that bring out the strong ones. It’s like a lawn—if it weren’t there, we couldn’t enjoy the beautiful tree growing on it.” Some time after sharing this insight with his pupil, the composer was transported to Theresienstadt. Kundera was never to forget the moment: “. . . that brief remark from my teacher of the time has haunted me all my life (I’ve defended it, I’ve fought it, I’ve never finished with it) . . .”

Few of us will receive lessons in beauty under such circumstances. Yet anyone who has sought to make or comprehend art has probably come across at least a few similarly unforgettable statements—insights that, it seems, can never be exhausted. Some we accept unconditionally because they articulate an intuition we have had ourselves but were unable to express. Others we wrestle with for a long time, unwilling to give them our full assent yet equally unable to leave them behind. Whether we find them in books or hear them from teachers, whether they console or perplex or even irritate, they are lodestars to which we return in moments of creative doubt. Here are three such statements about art that have accompanied me in recent years:

Metaphysical ugliness can contribute to the beauty of a literary work of art

In his Aesthetics, Dietrich von Hildebrand addresses the problem of evil and “metaphysical ugliness” in literature. “How is it possible,” the philosopher asks, “that characters in a literary work of art, despite the metaphysical ugliness of their stupidity, banality, triviality, and repulsiveness of all kinds, contribute to the artistic value of the literary work?” Literature, Hildebrand answers, offers the artist a possibility unavailable in the imitative arts of painting and sculpture:

There are two ways in which a novel can depict something. Either the author himself speaks and describes the characters, and indeed tells us about their inner life and about everything that is going on in them; or else he lets the characters themselves speak, thereby presenting them to us in a living way and characterizing them in their personality . . .

Hildebrand calls these the “two channels of depiction,” and notes their presence in the “deep insights into human nature” that Sancho bears in Don Quixote; in Dostoevsky, who “succeeds in placing all pettiness and metaphysical ugliness in the sublime light of the drama of the human being”; and even in Balzac’s Père Goriot. The link between the two channels, he says, “is decisive for the question of metaphysical beauty in a work of art and for the entire problem of the relationship between morality and art in literature.”

In works that lack the distance implied by these two channels, the “entire metaphysical ugliness of that which is depicted is wafted toward us and oppresses us” (for me this brought to mind Michel Houellebecq’s brilliant but often morose naturalism). Where they are present, on the other hand, the “spirit of the author” shields the reader from the characters, “drawing the poison” from their negative qualities of arrogant stupidity, shallowness, and triviality.

We would not want to spend time with Proust’s snobs. In their most honest moments, even his characters describe the fancy dinner parties they attend as boring and stifling. But to read about these soirées, and the people at them, is another matter. Similarly, if we were to encounter him in real life, Jane Austen’s Mr. Collins would be a bore; on the page, he is at once a bore, and, with his absurd boasts about the size of the chimney-piece at Rosings Park, a pure delight. In both cases the authors make us enjoy the sort of people we would try to flee at a cocktail party. It is not only that Proust’s prose and metaphors are exquisite, but that he turns the wretched maneuverings and deceit of his snobs into poetry. Out of pretense, dullness, and even malice, Austen, too, makes art.

The formal innovations of the great masters always have a certain discreetness about them

Recently while sick in bed I listened to Beethoven’s Piano Sonata 31, Op. 110 performed first by Rudolf Serkin and then by Glenn Gould. Composed in 1821, Op. 110 is the next to last of the composer’s piano sonatas, and falls squarely in his “late” period, during which he created many of his most beautiful and formally adventurous works. Beethoven is known for bridging classical and romantic styles. In his late years, however, he was also drawn to the contrapuntal music of the earlier baroque period.

The Op. 110 sonata is especially notable for its third movement, which employs musical structures from different moments in the history of music: classical homophony (a melody played by the right hand unfolding over chords played gently by the left); a more impassioned, stormy section expressing romantic emotion; and a fugue divided into two parts. In Serkin’s interpretation, and even more so in Gould’s, this fugue, built on a short, ascending theme, sounds very much like Bach. By paying reverent homage to the polyphony of Bach and Handel, Beethoven, as if by accident, created a novelty in the homophonic form par excellence, the sonata.

In one of his essays Milan Kundera praises this third movement of the Op. 110 sonata for “its extraordinary heterogeneity of emotion and form.” And yet, he adds, “the listener does not realize this, because the complexity seems so natural and simple.” From this beguiling naturalness Kundera draws the following lesson: “the formal innovations of the great masters always have a certain discreetness about them; such is true perfection; only among the small masters [petits maîtres] does novelty seek to call attention to itself.”

This observation calls to mind Virginia Woolf’s comment about Jane Austen: “of all the great writers,” she is “the most difficult to catch in the act.” One of Austen’s formal innovations occurs in Northanger Abbey, where she makes her “defense of the novel” as an art that gives “unaffected pleasure” while truthfully representing human nature in beautiful language. Austen admired Henry Fielding, who included mini-essays on the novel at the beginning of each of the eighteen books of Tom Jones. When she shares her own thoughts on fiction half a century after Fielding, however, she makes them emerge seamlessly from her characters’ obsession with Gothic fiction, and—with the discretion of a great master—tucks them in at the end of chapter five. What in Fielding comes across as theoretical reflection added on to the fictional narrative is in Austen woven into the work’s fabric. In this way she keeps one foot in the aesthetic of the eighteenth-century novel, with its obtrusively playful authorial interventions, while bringing a new level of unity and polish to her chosen form.

To what other artists or works of art might Kundera’s insight apply? Because the kinds of formal innovations he singles out avoid drawing attention to themselves, it takes a certain amount of knowledge about a given art form to come up with good examples. And conversely, attempting to catch a glimpse of such shy novelties promotes a deeper appreciation for the habits of great artists as well as for the inner workings of artistic tradition. 

The literary form of Catholicism is comedy

Several years ago, while reading an especially uproarious contemporary Catholic novel, it struck me that the work in my hands broke with the prevailing mood among current religious writers. Looking back to an age when Christian institutions exerted a greater influence over everyday life than they do today, our most prominent Catholic and Protestant novelists have tended to take a serious, lyrical approach to fiction, as if seeking to capture the doomed beauty of what, with the advantage of hindsight, they know to have been a fleeting cultural moment.

On the other hand, the novel I was then reading seemed to have sprung up from the great tradition of European fiction beginning with the comic writers Cervantes and Rabelais, the latter of whom the Polish novelist Gombrowicz once described as writing with the unselfconscious delight of a little boy relieving himself against the side of a tree. A sense of the comic also characterizes the English and American Catholic novel during its brief ascendancy. “What these writers have in common,” remarked Dana Gioia of Evelyn Waugh, Muriel Spark, Flannery O’Connor, Anthony Burgess, and John Kennedy O’Toole, “is not simply their Catholicism, but […] that they are comic writers who luxuriate in humanity’s fallen nature.”

Two of the most distinguished living Catholic novelists, Piers Paul Read and Martin Mosebach, have made similar observations, with Read advocating for “the use of irony” to “mock the complacency of the politically correct,” and Mosebach offering an even stronger statement in a recent interview with Süddeutsche Zeitung Magazin:

The foundation of the Catholic world view is the conviction of the irreformable imperfection of the fallen world of original sin, in which every kind of grand and lofty endeavor at some point fails miserably. T.S. Eliot called the Catholic religion the “philosophy of disillusion”—not to expect from the world that which the world cannot give. Thus, comedy is the really Catholic form of literature.

As much as this idea elicits my sympathy—indeed, I have adopted it as my own informal artistic credo—there is the danger of transforming such provocations into a new, self-serious orthodoxy. Gioia includes Brian Moore and Graham Greene among his favorite Catholic writers, although, as he acknowledges, neither is primarily a comic novelist. And then, comedy is often produced by deeply serious or anguished personalities (“Is it hard to make people laugh?” the French filmmaker Francis Veber once said. “It’s a nightmare. When you look at Woody Allen’s face, you understand.”). There is also a forced, adolescent way of joking that comes from feeling ill at ease in one’s own skin. “One always writes comedy at the moment of deepest hysteria,” V.S. Naipaul once remarked. He was referring to his own turn away from farcical writing and the early influence of Evelyn Waugh. His words stand as a warning to anyone who would make humor the sine qua non of Catholic fiction.

 Trevor Cribben Merrill is the author of Minor Indignities (Wiseblood Books).