Culture Shock:Often, great art comes not from the moral and spiritual wholeness of its creator, but from the desperate attempt of the imperfect human to find a space beyond guilt
In the brilliant "Trick or Treat" episode in the second series of Curb Your Enthusiasm, Larry David gets into a row with a fellow Jew in a cinema queue for whistling Wagner's Siegfried Idyll. The man, played by Zane Lasky, attacks Larry's fondness for Wagner as a betrayal of Judaism. Larry has earlier emulated Wagner by having the piece played for his wife Cheryl to celebrate her birthday. At the end of the episode he hires the musicians to play a passage from Die Meistersinger, often considered Wagner's most anti-Semitic work, on Lasky's lawn.
For all the slapstick comedy of the episode, it neatly encapsulates the conflict of art and morality. Larry clearly takes the view that Wagner's vile prejudices have nothing to do with his art, that the music transcends the limits of its creator.
Lasky, on the other hand, finds it impossible to separate the art from the artist. Like many Jews, he hears in Wagner's notes the ranting of Hitler.
In the controversy over Neasa Ní Chianáin's documentary on the poet Cathal Ó Searcaigh and his apparently exploitative relationships with Nepalese teenagers, both Ó Searcaigh's defenders and his detractors have tended to be more Lasky than Larry. Both seem to agree that there is a direct relationship between the poet and the poetry.
Artists such as Máire Mac an tSaoí and Pauline Bewick, who have gone on Liveline to defend Ó Searcaigh, find it hard to believe that someone who writes such beautiful poems could be guilty of such crass behaviour. On the other hand, callers outraged by that behaviour have made the same connection, but drawn a different conclusion, seeing the poems themselves as tainted by the sins of the author and demanding that they be withdrawn from the Leaving Certificate Irish curriculum.
The underlying assumptions in both positions are essentially the same - a bad man couldn't write good poems. If the man is bad the poems must be bad; if the poems are good, the poet must be good. Against all this Lasky, however, we could do with a little Larry. The relationship between art and morality is seldom pure and never simple.
OSCAR WILDE WROTE in his preface to The Picture of Dorian Grey that "There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written. That is all . . . An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style." In one sense, Wilde is clearly wrong. Many great works of art are infused with ethical sympathy. And there are immoral books, poems, paintings, movies and plays. (Immoral music, admittedly, is a bit of a stretch.) Art can objectify oppressed groups. It can lend a mystique to atrocities. It can glorify tyrants. It can dignify ideas that kill people.
But, in another sense, Wilde hits on a fundamental truth - the morality of a work of art is inherent in its own structures. If it is well made, those structures will contain tensions, contradictions and complexities that allow it to transcend the moral limitations of its maker.
Take, for example, one of the seminal plays of the 20th century, Bertolt Brecht's The Caucasian Chalk Circle. It was written for a deeply immoral purpose - to justify Stalin's deportation of the entire Chechen population to central Asia after the second World War. If I were a Chechen, I would find it impossible to watch. But the very things that make it a great play - its formal suppleness, its aesthetic distance, its moral dynamism - allow it to function independently of its origins.
A poet, as WB Yeats put it, "writes always of his personal life" and thus the sins of that life will always have some presence in his or her work. But, as Yeats went on, "he is never the bundle of accident and incoherence that sits down to breakfast; he has been reborn as an idea, something intended, complete." That rebirth, even for the most guilty of artists, is a leap into innocence. By beginning again, as a real creator does every time, the artist can try to transcend the failures of life.
The deeper the failure, the greater the effort required to begin again, and, potentially, the greater the success. There are reasons Shakespeare makes Macbeth a greater poet as he sinks farther into evil, or why the violence that blighted Caravaggio's personality is such a powerful aspect of the beauty of his paintings. Often, great art comes, not from the moral and spiritual wholeness of its creator, but from the desperate attempt of the fallen, imperfect, haunted human being to find a space beyond guilt and self-loathing.
As it happens, Cathal Ó Searcaigh has a rather beautiful poem, Sneachta, about the innocence of creation. It describes the exhilaration of a snowy morning, when there is (in Ó Searcaigh and Aodán Mac Póilín's translation) "dumb whiteness all around/ and the world imagined anew."
He goes on to imagine the white page before him that "like the snow-land/ tempts the child within/ to put his own stamp on blank creation." In the man's life, there is a need to know what the blanket of snow might be hiding.
In the poet's, it is enough to know what is inscribed on its surface.
