Difficult art and striving upward

I’ve been thinking a lot about an essay I recently read about the collapse of “cultural aspiration,” the desire of people to seek out, encounter, and enjoy the excellent in literature, music, art, architecture—you name it. Sooner or later I’m going to write at length about that essay and some of my thoughts on what has brought about this collapse. But part of it is surely resentment, the envy endemic to populism.*

Two items I’ve been reflecting on re. that essay and this cultural trend:

Item one—this blog post on “accessibility” in literature. The key passage:

A reader complains that he doesn’t understand the poetry of Geoffrey Hill. So far, so good. Hill can be difficult, though I find his poems worth the effort they sometimes demand—repeated readings, a bit of research (which can pay unexpected dividends), an overall familiarity with his work, contemplation. My reader’s reaction is different: “He’s an elitist. He has contempt for readers. He thinks we should know everything he knows. He’s impossible to understand.”

The idea that every work of art we encounter should be instantly accessible, free of difficulty, depths and ambiguity, is a strange one. How deeply self-centered. In an interview, Hill once addressed this peculiar notion, saying “the word accessible is fine in its place; that is to say, public toilets should be accessible to people in wheelchairs; but a word that is perfectly in its place in civics or civic arts is entirely out of place, I think, in a wider discussion of the arts. There is no reason why a work of art should be instantly accessible, certainly not in the terms which lie behind most people’s use of the word.”

Item two—from Letter 215 in The Letters of JRR Tolkien, an incomplete draft of a letter on children’s books and aiming higher than one’s station, so to speak, in one’s reading:

We all need literature that is above our measure—though we may not have sufficient energy for it all the time. But the energy of youth is usually greater. Youth needs then less than adulthood or Age what is down to its (supposed) measure. . . . Therefore do not write down to Children or to anybody. Not even in language. Though it would be a good thing if that great reverence which is due to children took the form of eschewing the tired and flabby cliches of adult life. But an honest word is an honest word, and its acquaintance can only be made by meeting it in the right context. A good vocabulary is not acquired by reading books written according to some notion of the vocabulary of one's age group. It comes from reading books above one.

Charges of “elitism” have always seemed, to me, to be a Trojan horse for becoming complacent. It begins by assuring yourself that failing to measure up to the standards of snobs is okay and ends with denying that there is any qualitative difference between the bad and the excellent. And so people who could enjoy the best are not only happy but congratulate themselves for staying put and reveling in the mediocre (or worse).

A final note: All my favorite books I have discovered either by 1) intentionally finding something reputed as good and stretching myself to understand it or 2) taking the recommendations of good friends who have already done #1.

Food for thought.

*Cf. CS Lewis in his essay “Democratic Education”: “Envy, bleating ‘I’m as good as you,’ is the hotbed of Fascism.”