Author Archives →

Downton Abbey as a Jane Austen style Tragedy

The third season of Julian Fellowes’ BBC hit Downton Abbey has finally arrived in the United States, and it’s getting all the buzz you would expect: most notably, from my perspective, the series has recently received positive coverage in Books & Culture and at Christ & Pop Culture. Both of those pieces draw out the ethical and artistic strengths of the show. I’m willing to concede that Downton has definite strengths–I have taken the time to watch a little over two seasons, after all–but my overall evaluation of the show is getting progressively more negative with each new episode. To explain why, I need to go back to Jane Austen.

As a costume drama, Downton lives in the tradition of social comedy exemplified and initiated by Austen. Any history of costume drama on the screen would have to include, at minimum, the famous Colin Firth version of Pride and Prejudice and Emma Thompson’s Sense and Sensibility. And Downton partakes of many other Austenesque qualities, from its emphasis on the leisured classes to its social intrigue to its witty dialogue. In all of these ways, Downton draws positively from Austen’s legacy.

Downton Abbey

Downton Abbey (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Yet there is one aspect of Austen’s storytelling that I find myself seeking vainly for in Downton, and it speaks to what is ultimately the show’s failure on both moral and artistic levels. A recent piece in Philosophy Now points to Austen’s monumental stature as a moral thinker, a judgment with which I concur.

Austen’s novels are investigations of virtues and vices, with the aim of pointing we readers toward the good. The novels are not didactic, but they are formative–after reading Sense and Sensibility, I want to be like Elinor Dashwood. Austen’s method for accomplishing this ethical project involves specific moral registers assigned to her protagonists and her minor characters. Austen’s heroes and heroines are generally morally serious, if not morally exemplary–even those who have distinct flaws, such as Emma Woodhouse, generally come to see the error of their ways. Continue reading →

Capitalism Won’t Save the Arts—Vocation Will

In our recent discussion about art and commerce, I made a point of expressing my distaste for one way that some artists have sought to earn a living recently–giving away their art in order to sell merchandise. I concurred with Tony Comstock in finding that business strategy ugly at best.

You might think, then, that I would hate Camille Paglia’s recent WSJ column, “How Capitalism Can Save Art.” But you would be wrong.

Paglia’s is concerned about a lack of “creativity and innovation” in studio art. She accuses artists of living in “an airless echo chamber” of liberal political orthodoxy and of perpetuating a pseudo-provocative avante garde. In short, Paglia’s complaint about contemporary art is that it fails to engage generously and openly with a wide audience.

This might seem a problem altogether different than the disappearance of art into marketing that I identified. Indeed, one might argue that the problems are diametrically opposed. Yet I would argue that the same failure lies at the root of both fine art’s stagnation and popular art’s selling out: the failure of the work to be a gift.

Cover of "The Gift: Imagination and the E...

Cover via Amazon

Lewis Hyde has best traced the nature of art as gift in his beautiful book The Gift (the book has had various subtitles over the years; for my money the best one is the original, Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property). Hyde argues that any art must contain an element of gratuity, a value which exceeds the monetary. When artists do their work, they often feel that something in it arrives from beyond them: inspiration, the Muse.

That element of givenness, Hyde says, remains with the work of art even if the work enters into the capitalist marketplace—for the art buyer receives something from the work far beyond the purchase price. What price would we take, after all, for our first experience of a beloved book? A work of art can thus be both gift and commodity. However, this balance can be upset: Hyde insists that “a work of art can survive without the market, but where there is no gift there is no art.” Harlequin romance novels, he notes, are market researched from cover to cover, thus losing the gift of art due to their commerce-driven manufactured status.

Reading Paglia from this position, we might be tempted by her polemical title to think that she proposes artists subsume the gift to the profit motive. However, this would be a profound mistake. The core of her proposal for the rescue of art lies here:
Continue reading →

Advocacy and Ending Copyright Infringement

Editor’s note:  We like thinking through every area of culture here at Mere-O, which is why I’m delighted that we’re going to spend a little time talking about the way technological changes have affected people’s ability to make money–and what we should do about it.  Matt Miller goes first, Stephen Carradini will write on Wednesday, and then on Friday they will do a dialogue on the issues that come up.  Thanks for reading.  — MLA

The Internet’s already over two decades old, and we still haven’t figured out how to cope with its potential for copyright infringement.

Any creative medium that can be digitally replicated finds itself in danger—music, film, photography, and every form of writing. Widespread pirating, Google Books, and other digital distribution methods threaten to make art something that consumers expect to get for free, always and everywhere.

Professionals in all these fields continue to feel acute anxiety at the potential that digital distribution could destroy their livelihood—and they’re right to feel this way. Similarly, anyone concerned about the ongoing artistic vitality of our culture should be concerned about a future in which it’s impossible to make a living in the arts. How are artists to make money when their work can be copied and distributed with such ease?

DRM is killing music, and it's a rip off! Paro...

DRM is killing music, and it’s a rip off! Parody of home taping is a rip off. Based off Image:DRM Is Killing Music.png (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Many people have proposed or attempted solutions to the problem, but without much success or variation: in essence, all the proposals I have seen boil down to three approaches. And only one of the three, in my view, offers us any hopeful way forward.

The first approach is that most frequently taken by the big media companies: find a way to regain control over the means of copying and distribution. This might mean enhanced digital rights management (DRM) software; it might mean refusing to publish e-books; it might mean lobbying to enhance copyright law via SOPA/PIPA.

The problems with this solution are myriad, ranging from the rage you induce in consumers (and some artists) to lost revenue from refusing to engage in the digital market. Bottom line: increasing copy restriction doesn’t work, because those dedicated to circumventing DRM or copyright law are always more nimble than those dedicated to enforcing them.  Continue reading →

Ray Bradbury, J.R. R. Tolkien, and the Benefits of Nostalgia

In an excellent piece on Ray Bradbury’s nostalgia, Andy Rau tosses off this fascinating but undeveloped parenthetical: “Of the various Christian fantasists of the 20th century, I think only J.R.R. Tolkien matches Bradbury’s sad but determined nostalgia for what we’ve left behind or cannot attain.”

Rau’s analysis of Bradbury is full of wisdom, and I encourage you to click through and read it. But don’t do so expecting him to unpack that connection between Tolkien and Bradbury. For that, dear reader, stick with me.

Though Tolkien was a British, Catholic, Oxford professor and Bradbury was an American, vaguely Buddhist, self-educated writer, there are deep affinities between the two, affinities which should make both writers essential imaginative resources for the sort of people who read a site called Mere Orthodoxy.

The “sad but determined nostalgia” that Rau identifies in both Tolkien and Bradbury is perhaps the most important emotional resonance of their work. Tolkien and Bradbury are masters of a certain longing for the past, a desire for a history which we feel ourselves to be alienated from. This longing is one of the most powerful anxieties created by modernity, especially in those of us who are of a traditionalist or conservative stripe: a persistent sense of being cut off from a more authentic, holistic tradition.

Tolkien's Cover Designs for the First Edition ...

Tolkien’s Cover Designs for the First Edition of The Lord of the Rings (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Some of this emotion, of course, is simply a golden-age nostalgia experienced by people in every age, the feeling that our forebears were heroes and we a diminished people. Some of it is appropriate critique of modernity’s excesses. But the middle ground between the false idealization of the first impulse and the discursive critique of the second is made up of raw longing for a different world, an unease with the world as it is.

Tolkien articulated this discomfort with throbbing beauty in the final chapters of The Lord of the Rings; he expressed it more directly when in a letter he described his spiritual position as a soldier fighting “the long defeat.”

Bradbury’s work is concerned with an American version of this longing, one less heroic and more childlike, but beautiful nonetheless: read his de facto epigraph, published in the New Yorker not long before his death, and try not to be moved by his longing-but-joyful memorialization of his childhood. In Dandelion Wine, an autobiographical novel drawing on the same memories of boyhood in Illinois, he describes his work this way: “the boy-hid-in-the-man playing in the fields of the Lord on the green grass of other Augusts in the midst of starting to grow up, grow old, and sense darkness waiting under the trees to seed the blood.”

Like Tolkien, Bradbury feels both the green spaces of his boyhood and their ultimate loss and destruction as present realities. Cynics and progressives may dismiss such a response as golden-age thinking, but anyone who feels affection for their past knows the emotion at some level and can find value in its literary expression.

Those of us with conservative or traditionalist leanings are uniquely poised to appreciate this sort of literary expression, for like Tolkien and Bradbury our beliefs are premised on the essential (if not thoroughgoing) goodness of the past, rather than its essential evil. From this perspective, literature that calls up our desire for that past schools us in the virtue of fidelity to that past, and love for it. Like Tolkien, for Bradbury our love what has gone before disciplines and chastens our hope for the future. He is thus an essential imaginative resource for all of us who would do the same.