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Dec. 10th, 2010 01:33 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
proximoceptionI 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.
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.
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Date: 2010-12-10 09:05 pm (UTC)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?
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Date: 2010-12-10 09:58 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-12-10 10:40 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-12-10 11:24 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-12-11 07:55 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-12-14 03:23 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-12-14 04:05 am (UTC)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.