(no subject)

[proximoception]

I should stop calling people I'm inimical to narcissists, it's clearly an infinitely abusable word. And not a concept I necessarily understand.

Still, I mostly only hate them when I'm with them. At a distance they can be extremely amusing. In film and music they can achieve quite striking things: their tendency to see their own lives and whims as terribly important, epic, sacred affairs can be infectious at the remove these arts allow. Less so with painting, much, much less with literature, I'd say, which are forms where novelty itself can't carry the day. Narcissists don't understand what the rest of us find important, and tend to borrow the trappings of these Important Things to celebrate their own creative selves in a way that becomes immediately transparent in a book. (E.g.) Kanye West and Lady Gaga, like Madonna and Michael Jackson before them, are extremely amusing people you would want to murder if you had to deal with them in person and who have never spoken anything but bullshit on any actual topic. The only thing that tends to come out of their mouths is their ambivalence toward their own greatness. This ambivalence can take on complexity, intensity, and variation - and is probably forever novel to most of us - so it meets many of the basic criteria for artistic interestingness, but it can't take anything real into itself. It is ultimately stupid, which doesn't play in literature (and shouldn't have but did in the by-and-large train wreck that was 20th century visual art).

Great writers can be pretty horrible people, mind you, but you don't have to be a narcissist to be a horrible person. And vice versa - there must be border zones. Maybe great writers are in one? Smart enough to detect, crack out of their own colossal narcissism? The initial narcissism providing the energy used later to examine both it and other things? Who knows?

But part of me wants to go farther and agree with Borges that intelligent people are invariably kind. I think that fits with my own experience, but maybe I just try to make it. Ezra Pound's deficiencies as a writer and thinker seem to line up with his failure as a human being. And I've never seen the appeal of Chaucer, who may have raped someone - though he may be good in ways I can't yet see just like he may have been innocent of the charge. Dostoevsky, undeniably great in his way, was both a crazy dick and terribly unsound writer. The unsoundness works as a virtue in awfully narcissist-ish ways - more of the self-hating school of narcissists, or anyway the type fascinated to probe the rot of their own teeth. There must be exceptions? Schopenhauer? Flannery O'Connor? Her idea content's quite nasty but perfectly presented. They tell me conflating genius with goodness is fallacious (Truth/Beauty). But I think they may correlate, at least insofar as geniuses tend to understand morality better, and it's hard to be very bad when you understand the badness of bad.

Comments

[karinmollberg.livejournal.com]

Best thing I have read for a long time.

Especially considering Pound whose "economical" poetry I tried to read ages ago. What was it Stein said about him (herself as immense a bore as anyone can get to be): "He is a village teacher. Interesting if one is a village. If not, not." (Not exact, quoted from memory.)

I love the Borges take on this. I hope, it´s true. Thanks for a lovely essay!

[nightspore.livejournal.com]

"He was a village explainer, excellent if you were a village, but if you were not, not."

My favorite instance of the relation of kindness and intelligence is Henry James, advising his nephew: "Three things in human life are important. The first is to be kind. The second is to be kind. And the third is to be kind.'

[karinmollberg.livejournal.com]

Ah, merci!

I think, I may have met with one or the other Pound; even lately. I guess it´s because of my silly face.

Yes, "kindness is so much more important" as an ex explained to me when upset ("incensed") about someone´s ways. But in the end, he became quite a ...Poundy person himself. Then, he regretted it.

Personally, I quite like a lot of what Vonnegut has had figures say in his books, such as this:
"A little less love and a bit more decency" (also from memory).

(sorry; deleted, typoes corrected, reposted;)

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

Like at the end of Harvey.

Vidal quotes Williams as saying the only two sins are lies and deliberate cruelty.

[nightspore.livejournal.com]

Which is sort of like saying that if there two things Watt hated, one was the earth and the other the sky. Covers almost everything.

[maga-dogg.livejournal.com]

I think it may work the other way, to some extent; being a nasty person makes you a worse writer. For really extreme cases see Slacktivist on the Left Behind series, probably the best (and certainly the longest) critique I've encountered of really bad books; the plot is an irrational failure and the good guys are routinely sociopathic because the authors insist on following intellectually defunct theology to the letter. He has a refrain that how intelligent you end up being is often a moral choice: stupidity is mostly made up of comfortable delusions, and the self-doubt needed to overcome those delusions takes a moral effort.

These days I increasingly think about the critical relation of literature as being the respect that the author-in-work earns, and what they do with it. (If your respect for the author doesn't matter for your appreciation of a work, you're no longer dealing with literature.) One of the things the author can spend respect on is to get away with disrespecting the reader; this can do important things, but if it's attempted before the author's earned any respect themselves then failure abounds. Getting the whole enterprise to work is very similar to negotiating relationships without being an asshole. A lot of parallel skills, at least.

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

I agree with this and feel I've argued something similar.

Good examples are how Proust sells you on his book with his "Overture" and then when you start to worry about the diffuseness of what follows judged against the possible unenendingness of the whole work he throws in "Swann in Love" to prove he can (and will) plot and end. And how Shakespeare in the middle of Hamlet has Polonius reminisce about playing in Julius Caesar, a reminder to the audience: "Do not worry, I can totally write a tragedy - bear with me through this middle stuff, I'm doing a thing here."

[maga-dogg.livejournal.com]

My experience of Proust thus far is pretty much the reverse -- I was totally sold on the Overture and Combray, and I've experienced Swann in Love - Madame Swann at Home as pretty much of a piece: brilliant on the details, but so very, very slow on plot movement that by the time anything happens I have ceased to care. Possibly if I can't deal with multiple volumes mostly composed of ineffectual moping then Proust is just not for me.

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

His writing it was one of the kindest things that ever happened.

[andalus.livejournal.com]

Morality? Most writers would fail a Christian morality test, and a civics one -- understanding, if that is what writers have, may make you less selfish, but I wouldn't say it would necessarily make you more self-less. Selfish and selfless are tropes, and with understanding should come questioning.

I would agree only if you mean "kind" to be a sort of neutrality. Which is I think what you would get if you met shakespeare, a sort of polite and open dismissiveness. Because he knows better.



I've never met these personal narcissists you're so unfond of, the ones that aggravate me are cynics.

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

Christian morality is immoral. As is most civic.

And note that I mean good writers. Which of them has done harm? Hemingway? In bitchy little personal ways, sure, but mostly after he stopped being good. His public efforts and statements were quite well-intentioned.

I disagree that Shakespeare knew better than to be kind, but don't know how that conversation could go any further. We know much more about people who came after, most of whom tried to do good in their fashion and milieu. Not all were activists (though many were), but which of them were dicks?

[maga-dogg.livejournal.com]

Byron? Pushkin? Waugh?

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

Waugh's excellence is of a very limited kind, maybe Byron's too - satirists practice the art of meanness, and not always in service of unmean ends. So they can be horrible. And I don't think of them as being terribly smart as writers go. A lot of what's salvageable in Hemingway and Dostoevsky might come in exactly here too. What did Pushkin ever do that was dicksome?

[maga-dogg.livejournal.com]

Oh, socially-acceptable stuff: fought as many duels as he humanly could, pestered a lot of women in unpleasant ways, got the clap and spread it around, knocked up servants. His ancestors were mostly horrible, and he doesn't seem to have been particularly unpleasant to his wife, other than marrying her in the first place.

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

I thought he fought like two and shot up in the air for one. But he's underbrush as geniuses go, a wit and not a thinker.

[andalus.livejournal.com]

what you're dangerously close to saying here is that the difference between great writers and good writers is morality, while defining morality as that thing great writers have

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

Am I? I think morality's a matter of knowledge, something you figure out - as compared to the pseudo-morality of gentle harmless people or cause-joiners whose cause only happens to be just. And I think great writers can't help knowing, since they had to know to become great.

Which doesn't mean they're the only people who are moral - I think Hawthorne Turgenev were pretty moral, but I'd put them little above Pushkin and Byron as artists.

I might except great craftsmanship, e.g. that of Alexander Pope or (I guess?) Nabokov, as a kind of 'great writing' that didn't need to be accompanied by great thinking ability. And clearly there needs to be a satirist dispensation. And maybe a deranged-visionary one for e.g. Rimbaud, though he never drifted far from the freed hate school of satire either.

But the people whose books are most worth talking to are the ones able to pay full attention to what we are, and deliver that back with annotations. And that's like twenty, thirty people ever and none of them seem to have been dicks. Not all of them thought Things could be Improved (probably most versions of this hope or its usefulness are absurd, sure) but the ones who didn't tended to be just as charged with sympathy. I suspect deliberate cruelty was something none of them would have been capable of, once they'd come to know what they knew. Some of them performed their more positive actions only through their works, but those were quite extensively, intensively, thoroughly positive actions. Those writings have done an incredible, if unmappable, amount of good.

[consonantia.livejournal.com]

Is it naive of me to think about how happiness fits in here? I don't know that there's a correlation between intelligence and happiness; I think intelligence grants one a deeper understanding and keener appreciation of both the goodness of good and the badness of bad: one sees more how and that the world is wonderful to the same extent that one sees more how and that the world is horrible too.

But I think there is a correlation between goodness and happiness. I don't think that bad people can be happy, not really happy. But maybe what it is is that bad people don't miss happiness, or understand it, or want it in the first place, or that other pleasures -- being "right," feeling superior to, etc. -- are more important to them.

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

Not naive at all, but I've never known how to answer this one. I can only say that if you offered me the chance to be dumber I would never take it; if you offered me smarter, I'd take it at once. Possibly because I want to be right and feel superior?