Aut Prodesse Aut Delectare
This is probably the most important paper which I have written this semester, which is why I am going to post one of my own essays for the first time in my personal blogging history. This, as I told my professor, is what I think a Christian Renaissance would look like, with respect to literature.
Aut Prodesse Aut Delectare
Sontag is modest; she challenges only the entire tradition of literary criticism from Plato to Pound. Beginning with the statement that “the mimetic theory, by its very terms, challenges art to justify itself” (545), Sontag points out that “it is the defense of art which gives birth to the odd vision by which something we have learned to call ‘form’ is separated off from something we have learned to call ‘content,’ and to the well-intentioned move which makes content essential and form accessory” ( 545).
Of the numerous well-taken points made in her essay, I will deal primarily with Sontag’s view of form as at least equal to—and probably superior to—content. For her, “Our task is not to find the maximum amount of content in a work of art . . . . Our task is to cut back content so that we can see the thing at all” (550). Sontag believes that we must not “sustain the fancy that there really is such a thing as the content of a work of art” (546). For her, the experience of art, the “sensuous surface” (550) of it, is what matters. She rebels against the idea that “a work of art is its content” (545).
Sontag’s argument against the reduction of art to content, and the subsequent interpretation of that content ad nauseum, is persuasive. In fact, she misses nothing in her analysis except the ultimate point—by which I mean the ultimate end of art, the reason for which art was intended, the function which it is designed to perform.
Sontag considers what art does, what art means (or rather, why we should not try to discover what it means), but never what art ought to do, or what it should mean. For that, we must revert to an age which still expected to be taught something true by its artists—I mean that we have got to go back before Nietzsche, who misrepresented language, and Kant, who misrepresented truth. We have got to get back to the telos of art, for art is not an end in itself. Art is a means to an end, and mankind—being akin to art in that regard—must surely see the necessity of understanding “what it is we were put on this earth to do.”
Horace gave us a summation of art’s telos in this phrase: aut prodesse aut delectare: to teach and to delight. Sidney sets forth an explanation of it, first declaring that, “Poesy therefore is an art of imitation, for so Aristotle termeth it in his word mimesis, that is to say, a representing, counterfeiting, or figuring forth—to speak metaphorically, a speaking picture; with this end, to teach and delight” (137-138). Sidney insists that the power of art lies in its ability to clearly represent good and evil, as the philosophers do, and then impel us towards the good, as the philosophers cannot:
Seeing in nature we know it is well to do well, and what is well and what is evil . . . but to be moved to do that which we know, or to be moved with desire to know, Hoc opus, hic labor est[2]. . . . Where the philosophers, as they scorn to delight, so must they be content little to move . . . (144)
So much for the telos of art—now consider it in light of the telos of man, for they are profoundly connected.
Christians understand well that “the chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy him forever.” John Piper (and before him Jonathan Edwards) phrased it, “to glorify God by enjoying him forever.” Bearing in mind the earlier dichotomies of content and form, teaching and delighting, consider these horizontal categories and their vertical parallels:
Content Form
Teaching (By) Delighting
Glorifying God (By) Enjoying God
We are taught, by means of content, how to glorify God. This is the realm of the theologians, of Sidney’s philosophers. The great power of literature is that it adds form to content, delight to teaching, the enjoyment of God to the glorification of God. It moves us to do through its form that which it also teaches us is right through its content. As we see the form, we are drawn to the content; as we delight, we are taught; as we enjoy, we glorify.
That is what art ought to do, what good art really does. That is why Christians object to art which depicts good as evil, and evil as good—because art has the power to impel us towards what it teaches. There is another way of misusing art, however, and it is a peculiarly modern one. The new question is: what if the people do not want to learn?
One seldom hears, these days, of literature which anybody expects to act upon. The food of literature is not now a way of strengthening the body for labor; it is instead grounds for deferring labor in order to quarrel over the flavor of last night’s béarnaise sauce. We do not say, “Teach us, that we may know what is right to do,” but rather “Now, concerning the command that you gave me, I do not like the manner in which it was given” or “Good physician, I do not think you have quite convinced me that every part of your order hangs precisely together. Therefore I will not do as you say and take water to that dying soldier over there.”
I do not mean reasonable and legitimate objections, the kind that men use to distinguish right from wrong when they have every intention of doing what is right as soon as they can clearly make it out. I mean the sort of objections that a child makes in order to avoid his little bed. The point is that the people do not want to obey—that they would rather ask for another story, and then quibble about whether the dragon in it is metaphorical, in order to postpone that moment when the light is turned out.
They want to be entertained, to delay the consideration of night—or perhaps they do desperately want to learn how to sleep safely through it and wake again, but their teachers have discarded the sacred obligation of guiding them towards eternal day, and are now themselves engaged in arguing about dragons.
What a pretty pass! It is small wonder that Sontag prefers to study form rather than content. Whereas form is still a matter of delighting, content has ceased to teach. What good, therefore, is content? Why does it exist now, except to have the stuffing kicked out of it, and its sensuous surface “mucked about” (559) by pedants? Sontag is wrong to say that “what is needed, first, is more attention to form in art” (549), but who can blame her, considering the content with which she has had to deal?
Sontag could not be more accurate in her statement that “Real art makes us nervous” (547). It makes us nervous because it has the power to move us, to bring us to the point of action. That is a frightening power indeed, and that is what form can do. But there is no salvation in the form alone—to love a work of art for its form only is like loving a woman for her body only, and not for her soul.
Again, form is not everything, but it is not nothing. In effect, Sontag is backing up Sidney when she writes, “By reducing the work of art to its content and then interpreting that, one tames the work of art” (547). Stripped of form, art no longer moves. It becomes once more a matter for the philosophers. But Sontag is crucially mistaken in her insistence that “The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means” (550).
Meaning matters, and always has mattered. Criticism should show what a work of art is, certainly—but this throws us back upon the question: “what is art?” Art is content full of a teaching message clothed in a form full of delight. Form, so pleasurable or nerve-wracking, so moving, impels us towards the meaning of the content. Art itself—not merely a defense of poetry made necessary by the Republic—testifies against Sontag’s attack. Why does Crime and Punishment so stir us? It is because Dostoevsky’s message, which he imparts through a form perfectly tailored to it, is powerful; a lesson that nihilism ultimately leads to despair.
Sontag remarks that “it is still assumed that a work of art is its content” (545), but she is mistaken. For Sidney, at least, a work of art is content and form, teaching and delight, the glorification of God, and the enjoyment of him. In the fullest sense, perhaps, it is teaching by delight; glorification by enjoyment. Sontag’s solution—the elevation of form at content’s expense—fails. It fails because, like lessonless content, it falls short of the harmonious whole which both teaches and delights. Aut prodesse aut delectare is the proper function of art, just as glorification and enjoyment is the proper business of man, and with the same object: God. A theory of literature which defiles either—teaching or delighting—will destroy the marriage-bond of both, distort their children beyond recognition, and divert them from the worship which is their joy.
[2] “That is the labor, that is the task.” Virgil, Aeneid 6 (Richter 144).
Aut Prodesse Aut Delectare
Sontag is modest; she challenges only the entire tradition of literary criticism from Plato to Pound. Beginning with the statement that “the mimetic theory, by its very terms, challenges art to justify itself” (545), Sontag points out that “it is the defense of art which gives birth to the odd vision by which something we have learned to call ‘form’ is separated off from something we have learned to call ‘content,’ and to the well-intentioned move which makes content essential and form accessory” ( 545).
Of the numerous well-taken points made in her essay, I will deal primarily with Sontag’s view of form as at least equal to—and probably superior to—content. For her, “Our task is not to find the maximum amount of content in a work of art . . . . Our task is to cut back content so that we can see the thing at all” (550). Sontag believes that we must not “sustain the fancy that there really is such a thing as the content of a work of art” (546). For her, the experience of art, the “sensuous surface” (550) of it, is what matters. She rebels against the idea that “a work of art is its content” (545).
Sontag’s argument against the reduction of art to content, and the subsequent interpretation of that content ad nauseum, is persuasive. In fact, she misses nothing in her analysis except the ultimate point—by which I mean the ultimate end of art, the reason for which art was intended, the function which it is designed to perform.
Sontag considers what art does, what art means (or rather, why we should not try to discover what it means), but never what art ought to do, or what it should mean. For that, we must revert to an age which still expected to be taught something true by its artists—I mean that we have got to go back before Nietzsche, who misrepresented language, and Kant, who misrepresented truth. We have got to get back to the telos of art, for art is not an end in itself. Art is a means to an end, and mankind—being akin to art in that regard—must surely see the necessity of understanding “what it is we were put on this earth to do.”
Horace gave us a summation of art’s telos in this phrase: aut prodesse aut delectare: to teach and to delight. Sidney sets forth an explanation of it, first declaring that, “Poesy therefore is an art of imitation, for so Aristotle termeth it in his word mimesis, that is to say, a representing, counterfeiting, or figuring forth—to speak metaphorically, a speaking picture; with this end, to teach and delight” (137-138). Sidney insists that the power of art lies in its ability to clearly represent good and evil, as the philosophers do, and then impel us towards the good, as the philosophers cannot:
Seeing in nature we know it is well to do well, and what is well and what is evil . . . but to be moved to do that which we know, or to be moved with desire to know, Hoc opus, hic labor est[2]. . . . Where the philosophers, as they scorn to delight, so must they be content little to move . . . (144)
So much for the telos of art—now consider it in light of the telos of man, for they are profoundly connected.
Christians understand well that “the chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy him forever.” John Piper (and before him Jonathan Edwards) phrased it, “to glorify God by enjoying him forever.” Bearing in mind the earlier dichotomies of content and form, teaching and delighting, consider these horizontal categories and their vertical parallels:
Content Form
Teaching (By) Delighting
Glorifying God (By) Enjoying God
We are taught, by means of content, how to glorify God. This is the realm of the theologians, of Sidney’s philosophers. The great power of literature is that it adds form to content, delight to teaching, the enjoyment of God to the glorification of God. It moves us to do through its form that which it also teaches us is right through its content. As we see the form, we are drawn to the content; as we delight, we are taught; as we enjoy, we glorify.
That is what art ought to do, what good art really does. That is why Christians object to art which depicts good as evil, and evil as good—because art has the power to impel us towards what it teaches. There is another way of misusing art, however, and it is a peculiarly modern one. The new question is: what if the people do not want to learn?
One seldom hears, these days, of literature which anybody expects to act upon. The food of literature is not now a way of strengthening the body for labor; it is instead grounds for deferring labor in order to quarrel over the flavor of last night’s béarnaise sauce. We do not say, “Teach us, that we may know what is right to do,” but rather “Now, concerning the command that you gave me, I do not like the manner in which it was given” or “Good physician, I do not think you have quite convinced me that every part of your order hangs precisely together. Therefore I will not do as you say and take water to that dying soldier over there.”
I do not mean reasonable and legitimate objections, the kind that men use to distinguish right from wrong when they have every intention of doing what is right as soon as they can clearly make it out. I mean the sort of objections that a child makes in order to avoid his little bed. The point is that the people do not want to obey—that they would rather ask for another story, and then quibble about whether the dragon in it is metaphorical, in order to postpone that moment when the light is turned out.
They want to be entertained, to delay the consideration of night—or perhaps they do desperately want to learn how to sleep safely through it and wake again, but their teachers have discarded the sacred obligation of guiding them towards eternal day, and are now themselves engaged in arguing about dragons.
What a pretty pass! It is small wonder that Sontag prefers to study form rather than content. Whereas form is still a matter of delighting, content has ceased to teach. What good, therefore, is content? Why does it exist now, except to have the stuffing kicked out of it, and its sensuous surface “mucked about” (559) by pedants? Sontag is wrong to say that “what is needed, first, is more attention to form in art” (549), but who can blame her, considering the content with which she has had to deal?
Sontag could not be more accurate in her statement that “Real art makes us nervous” (547). It makes us nervous because it has the power to move us, to bring us to the point of action. That is a frightening power indeed, and that is what form can do. But there is no salvation in the form alone—to love a work of art for its form only is like loving a woman for her body only, and not for her soul.
Again, form is not everything, but it is not nothing. In effect, Sontag is backing up Sidney when she writes, “By reducing the work of art to its content and then interpreting that, one tames the work of art” (547). Stripped of form, art no longer moves. It becomes once more a matter for the philosophers. But Sontag is crucially mistaken in her insistence that “The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means” (550).
Meaning matters, and always has mattered. Criticism should show what a work of art is, certainly—but this throws us back upon the question: “what is art?” Art is content full of a teaching message clothed in a form full of delight. Form, so pleasurable or nerve-wracking, so moving, impels us towards the meaning of the content. Art itself—not merely a defense of poetry made necessary by the Republic—testifies against Sontag’s attack. Why does Crime and Punishment so stir us? It is because Dostoevsky’s message, which he imparts through a form perfectly tailored to it, is powerful; a lesson that nihilism ultimately leads to despair.
Sontag remarks that “it is still assumed that a work of art is its content” (545), but she is mistaken. For Sidney, at least, a work of art is content and form, teaching and delight, the glorification of God, and the enjoyment of him. In the fullest sense, perhaps, it is teaching by delight; glorification by enjoyment. Sontag’s solution—the elevation of form at content’s expense—fails. It fails because, like lessonless content, it falls short of the harmonious whole which both teaches and delights. Aut prodesse aut delectare is the proper function of art, just as glorification and enjoyment is the proper business of man, and with the same object: God. A theory of literature which defiles either—teaching or delighting—will destroy the marriage-bond of both, distort their children beyond recognition, and divert them from the worship which is their joy.
[2] “That is the labor, that is the task.” Virgil, Aeneid 6 (Richter 144).
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