Criticism: John Carey takes a stand against artistic snobbery - but ends up contradicting himself, writes John Banville.
The story is told of James Joyce sitting at dinner with his family in a Paris restaurant in the 1920s when a fervid young man approaches the table and asks if he might kiss the hand that wrote Ulysses. Joyce, smiling graciously, extends the sacred hand, saying, "Yes, you may - provided you remember it has done a lot of other things as well."
Whether it happened or not, the little confrontation between panting admiration and its object nicely catches Joyce's humour, common sense, and disinclination to act in the role of the Great Man. The fact is, it is often the artist himself who least holds art in awe.
Joyce was one of the few great Modernists who largely, and deservedly, escaped John Carey's flailing fists in a previous assault upon the champions of high art, his The Intellectuals and the Masses, in which he excoriated the likes of TS Eliot, DH Lawrence, Virginia Woolf and WB Yeats for their contemptuous attitude, often and openly expressed, for what Prof Carey likes to call "ordinary people". That was a peculiar book, in which the professor, criticising artists - mostly writers - of the Modernist movement for lumping together those who did not read them as "the Masses", himself proceeded to lump together an inchoate and intricately diversified group of people into another mass, which he designated, with a snapping curl of the lip that was almost audible, "the Intellectuals".
Carey had a valid point. A goodly number of the finest writers of the early decades of the 20th century were anti-democratic in their art and quasi-fascist in their politics; many, such as Eliot and Graham Greene, were also brutally anti-Semitic, in their writings if not in their lives. These are facts not to be lightly dismissed, though they often are. When Eliot writes in Gerontion of the Jewish landlord "spawned in some estaminet of Antwerp" who "squats on the window sill", or Lawrence looks forward in sub-Nietzschean exultation to the annihilation of millions of the lower orders (whence, not incidentally, he had sprung), one is inclined to ask, in some dismay, the question which Prof Carey has taken as the title of his latest foray into the cultural wars.
The biographical note on the back flap of What Good Are the Arts? tells us that the author has been "at various points in his life a soldier, a barman, a television critic, a beekeeper, a printmaker and a Prof of literature at Oxford", to which the caveat "not necessarily in that order" might have been added, but was not. No doubt this declaration is intended to indicate that the professor, although he has written books on Dickens, on Thackeray and, wonderfully, on Donne, is no intellectual snob, but an ordinary bloke and a proud member of "the Masses". To some, that claim will seem a bit rich coming from an Oxford professor emeritus of English and a fellow of the British Academy.
If The Intellectuals and the Masses was a passionately argued defence of humble folk against the withering disdain of those who would set themselves up as their intellectual betters, What Good Are the Arts? is a highly peculiar, ill-tempered and self-contradictory provocation offered to an assortment of artistic arbiters ranging from Theodor Adorno to Jeanette Winterson, from Schopenhauer to John Paul Getty, from Ortega y Gasset to Adolf Hitler. Some easy targets there, all right. Not for nothing is Prof Carey a former beekeeper: his book is the literary equivalent of a sharp stick poked into a busy hive.
The work is divided into two parts. The first addresses such questions as "What is a work of art?", "Is 'high' art superior?", "Do the arts make us better?", while the second is devoted to an exposition of the author's belief that literature is better than all the other arts. The chasm between the two parts is wide and deep, although Prof Carey seems unaware of, or at least seems indifferent to, the drop over which he has nimbly leapt. The self-contradictions between the theses he puts forward are so glaring that one wonders if the book might not be a sort of grim jeu-d'esprit the only real object of which is to épater the not so good and the less than great of the self-styled cultured world.
But no. Prof Carey may be at times an intellectual bruiser, but he is entirely serious. He is also, in many instances, entirely right in his assertions. A very great deal of claptrap is talked about art and its benefits to the individual and to society. When poor Jeanette Winterson, who gets repeated cuffings throughout these pages, witters on about "the huge truth of a Picasso", or dismisses her mother's taste for factory-made artefacts while "I move gingerly around the paintings I own because I know that they are looking at me as closely as I am looking at them", one does squirm. Yet Winterson, for all the po-faced bathos of her claims to a higher sensibility, is, like so many others, feeling her way desperately through a fog of unknowing toward some kind of definition of what it is we experience when we look at, listen to or read a work of art.
For all his acuity and his fine ear for the bogus, Prof Carey is as lost in that fog as anyone else - as, to be fair, he more than tacitly admits. Having in his first chapter considered attempts by various others to define what is a work of art, he comes up with the extraordinary statement that "a work of art is anything that anyone has ever considered a work of art, though it may be a work of art only for that one person". This answer to an age-old question begs many further questions. Here is one. A few days after the 2001 attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, composer Karlheinz Stockhausen declared that what the terrorists had wrought was a work of art on a stupendous scale. By Prof Carey's definition, therefore, 9/11 must be considered a work of art. The qualifier that "it may be a work of art only for that one person" qualifies nothing, for the definition says that "a work of art is anything anyone has ever etc" - not might be, or appears to be, but is.
Prof Carey's scorn for more high-falutin attempts to nail down a definition of art would seem, on the face of it, to imply an abdication of the critic's task. What, one wonders, in the days before he was emeritus, did he tell his students - that, where art is concerned, anything pretty well goes? That would be music to many an ear, inside and outside academe. One applauds the professor's candour and good sense, which are amply evident here, but one shrinks from the thought of the ammunition he is handing to the philistines. It is disheartening to note the sources of the approving blurbs on the jacket of this book; all those on the back cover, praising The Intellectuals and the Masses, come from newspapers on the anarchic right - Daily Mail, Daily Express, the Sunday Times, where John Carey is chief fiction reviewer - while on the front cover there is a general encomium for Carey's rationality, humour and common sense from Julie Burchill, whose politics and cultural convictions are, well, peculiar.
Prof Carey is right to expose and dismiss very many of the definitions of and claims for art made by people who should know better. In this post-religious age, TE Hulme's characterisation of Romanticism as "spilt religion" might be extended to include all of art. The young man bending to kiss Joyce's hand imagines, despite Joyce's acrid reminder, that it is the hand of a god that his lips so adoringly touch. This is a common misconception of who artists are and what art is. The work of art is a human artefact, made by people, for people. There are no gods, only men. Yet what some men have wrought is magnificent, mysteriously so, and it is the critic's job to investigate the mystery, and try to elucidate it, if only a little.
Prof Carey would not be so simple-minded as to say that all works of art are of equal value. What he is arguing for, in his impatient way, is a sort of super-democratic approach to the arts. He seems to hate what might be called the high high arts, such as opera - his contempt for the well-heeled patrons of Glyndebourne or Covent Garden is palpable - and certainly when one thinks of how much of the share of British Arts Council money goes to the support of grand opera one is inclined to agree with him. Yet anyone who heard the recent first concert performance of Gerald Barry's new work, The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, to be staged shortly in London, will surely be convinced that opera, for all its anachronistic position in the 21st century, must continue to be supported. Nothing is as simple as Prof Carey would have it be.
His conclusion to the first part of the book is a very lame argument for what amounts to a resurrection of the arts and crafts movement, even though he has had harsh words to say of Ruskin, William Morris and Carlyle. Take the money from the opera houses and distribute it among the people, to fund their artistic aspirations, seems to be his message. He is apparently unaware of or unwilling to acknowledge the fact that the majority of people do not have artistic aspirations, at least not in the relatively narrow sense in which most respected aesthetic theorists - and there are such - would define art, and are perfectly content to slake their thirst for beauty and elegance in spectator sports, say, or gardening (the professor puts a persuasive case for the joys of amateur horticulture). There is nothing tragic in this situation. Art, despite pronouncements from arts councils and community arts organisations, is not of very great importance to society at large, although to those for whom it is important it is very important indeed.
It is not the defenders of high art, or "high" art, as Prof Carey would insist on figuring it, who make the grandest claims for the spiritually restorative powers of art, but the proponents of the "art-for- everyone" doctrine for whom Prof Carey seems to wish to stand as champion. In this view art, or rather the art process, is regarded as a kind of physic for the national health, an emollient to be administered to all, like fluoride in our drinking water. In fact, what is being argued for here is not art, but kitsch, a word which, significantly, does not occur anywhere in Prof Carey's book.
Having decided in part one that art has no moral purpose or weight and that it does no one any good - surely a true contention: art is, as Nabokov used to insist, inutile, which is precisely what makes it valuable - Prof Carey in part two enters a plea for literature which, he says, "Like drugs, drink and antidepressants . . . is a mind-changer and an escape, but unlike them it develops and enlarges the mind as well as changing it." Surely that contradicts his conclusion in part one that in all studies of the effects of art on people "the results do not support the conventional belief that exposure to the arts makes people better". What would Jeanette Winterson say?
But all that has gone before is of little significance compared to the final chapter of the book, in which Prof Carey argues, with true critical passion and perceptiveness, that the great strength of literature is its very indistinctness, a consequence of the figurative language out of which it is necessarily made, and which stimulates the imagination and "enlarges the mind". When writing is dense with metaphor and simile, as it is in Shakespeare, says Carey, the imagination has to keep fitting things together that rational thought would keep apart. It has, that is, to keep ingeniously fabricating distinctness - or whatever approximation of distinctness it decides to settle for - out of indistinctness.
This is a true and enlightening insight, and in his development of the consequences of it Prof Carey's book flashes, at last, into real, critical, life.
John Banville's most recent novel, The Sea, is published by Picador.
What Good Are the Arts? By John Carey, Faber & Faber, 286pp. £12.99
• John Carey will take part in a debate on the topics raised by his book at the Great Southern Hotel, Eyre Square, Galway, on Wed, July 20, at 6pm as part of the Galway Arts Festival. The panel includes theatre director Garry Hynes; writer and satirist and Stuart Carolan; author Pat McCabe; journalist and critic Donald Clarke and artist and writer Stephen Dee