Novels verboten? Music, maybe okay.
The invasion of Ukraine, repression, censorship, Covid-19 ... "at a time like this" how do readers and creators discover what's right and just to do?
Read time: about 6 minutes. This week: choosing “at a time like this” — is fiction appropriate? Poetry? A “cultural project” of any kind? And does art have power after all? Next week: a light read to forecast some of the topics ahead. Maybe a contest, too.
And if you haven’t yet …
Twitter, that fountain of glibness and spleen, spread a tweet that it calculated would stir things up. Posted sometime in the morning of March 17, the tweet asked how people could read fiction “at a time like this,” with war in Ukraine. Of course, the message had the twang of Twitter, and the tweet’s length displayed some craft in the genre — without even one abbreviation though missing a be or get:
Twitterati pounced, of course, and the tweet disappeared a couple of days later, leaving residues of retweets and clucks of Twitter-shaming. “Fiction” was defended and survived, at least as far as I could tell.
The episode focused on the kinds of reading that are “appropriate” in wartime, but broader issues of culture and art came forth, too. What is the point of artistic culture when times stress life, when attentions focus on destruction and tragedy, and joy or escape seem almost transgressions? What do readers do? (And, yes, it’s actually a valid question.) Even more pressing and related — what do painters, writers, poets, musicians, dancers do? What if you’re Russian or living in Russia — must reading and creating change?
“The main thing is: no words” or “a time to howl” or bloody words
Russians asked the question, too, mindful of the special complications of political and personal risk. Colta, an online magazine from Russian journalists and artists, sought comments on its Facebook page and reported them in a post on March 3. Colta editors asked three questions, translated here from The Point, which published a translation of the Colta post on March 11:
Is it appropriate (and personally necessary, for you) for cultural projects (readings, concerts, exhibitions) to function in Moscow, Petersburg, Riazan, etc. — during “military operations” and military censorship? Should they be canceled, should they continue, should their format be changed?
If they are antiwar, does this change anything?
What is an antiwar cultural event? Something that provides a real benefit? In what way?
Responses, of course, reflected depths of pain, urgency, and worry that the American Twitterverse often seems to know little about. Two days after the post appeared, the editors posted a letter on the website. “[T]he State Duma adopted a law that sharply limits the opportunities for journalists,” the editors wrote.
Colta’s articles ‘about culture and the spirit of the times’ did not represent them in isolation from each other. To write only about culture, leaving society aside, does not seem possible to us. But freedom of expression is now reduced to zero. And we consider it wise to be silent for a while under such conditions.
Less than a week later, in the afternoon of March 11, Colta.ru was blocked in the Russian Federation.
Responses to the editors’ questions varied, and some were quite specific about which type of “cultural projects” might be possible or desirable. Sergei Kozlov, for example, felt that “[m]usic is best of all. There are no declarations. The fewer the declarations, the stronger the effect. The choice of program is on the conscience of the performers. All other types of activity are much more dubious. The main thing is: no words.” Vladimir Druk, a poet, agreed,
I think that right now is not the time to read our poetry but to comfort one another and help, for example through online performances, silent prayer, [public] actions that are short on words, everything that can help people regain balance and give them support.… And the time for poems will come later, I hope.
But Katja Petrowskaja worried about shrinking into silence: “I think that now is the time to howl, to write general appeals to mothers, fathers, God, break through to the masses, and not take an exit into ourselves.”
Others called for words and argued about which ones to utter. “But if the war, God forbid, drags on, then will it be worth it to smash the last valuable thing you have before some new cultural revolutionaries do it for you?” asked Gali-Dana Zinger. “And here I will say that poetry as such has a much stronger anti-war potential than its applied version — ‘poems against war’.” Zinger noted that soldiers in the 1947-1949 Palestine War (known in Israel as the War of Independence) packed the poetry anthology Shirat Rusiya, the “Poetry of Russia” in their backpacks.
Inna Kulishova focused on poetry “projects,” asking which ones are necessary? “Some projects are unnecessary if it is just some nice chatter or an excuse to perform. But we need some projects. I have also been thinking about this. I understand the point of view that there is a time for poetry, etc…. Maybe there is no use for anything today at all.” Yet, Kulishova leaned toward “poems against war”: “But on the other hand, one could only create difficult things. Not pretty little poems and pretty little songs, but words written in blood. Probably.”
I am being a bit unfair, perhaps, by juxtaposing a tweet, maybe even a cavalierly composed one, against more pressured and even risky posts on a website now closed from view in the Russian Federation. It even might be unfair to set the action of reading so closely with the action of creating, since consuming culture in reading fiction, poetry, or nonfiction is different from choosing words and committing them to paper. The differences are pragmatic and obvious, but a work itself unites reading and writing. After all, the poem, novel, history, musical composition, painting, sculpture, etc. is the point where creator and beholder touch.
The question is simply, What voices, if any, should rise in times like these? Who ought to write what, and what ought to be read? What happens between culture (or art) and society in times of conflict?
Really, does art make anything happen?
These troubles of artists and audiences seem fresh, but they actually are old with paths well worn by thought and argument.
Some, like Bertolt Brecht, drew a line so thin between art and politics that it was nearly imaginary, or at least porous. Poetry serves political ends, and art teaches and reveals. Silence, for Brecht, is not an option, for art and politics are tied. During dark times, poets’ silence is their sin. As his epigraph from “Motto” declares,
In the dark times
Will there also be singing?
Yes, there will be singing
About the dark times.
Others, like W. H. Auden, eventually concluded that “poetry makes nothing happen” but he also qualified that (much quoted) claim, saying “it survives, / A way of happening, a mouth.” In dark times, poetry also has a role:
With the farming of a verse
Make a vineyard of the curse,
Sing of human unsuccess
In a rapture of distress.
Auden’s road to his view of poetry was torturous, and he was not unlike Brecht in his early views.
So where do we land? Is fiction okay to read? Are “cultural projects” necessary or must they be silenced, removed, canceled? Does poetry — or, for that matter, art — help in times like these?
I say, “Yes, but.…”
More than a year before Russian troops invaded Ukraine, Peter Schjeldahl, wrote about “Engineer, Agitator, Constructor: The Artist Reinvented, 1918-1939,” an exhibition at the MOMA in 2020. He described pressures that crises impress on art and, perhaps, hints at the ways that art untangles and explicates their upheavals. His essay concludes,
Many things are more important than art…. Hard light is wanted in a crisis; away with moonbeams. What needs saying conditions how it’s said, which means accepting the chance that, should conditions change, the work may prove to be ephemeral. No living artist I know of, however fervently activist, is renouncing art as a distraction from moral commitment…. But a good deal of recent polemical art suggests a use-by date that is not far in the future. Aesthetic judgment, based in experience, confirms differences between what is of its time and what, besides being of its time, may prove timeless. I feel that our present moment, marked by imbroglios of art and politics, forces the issue, even in face of tendencies a century old.
Observe that in the mid-1960s Auden quipped in “Marginalia,” “No tyrant ever fears / his geologists or his engineers.” He didn’t mention whether tyrants fear poets or artists, but I bet tyrants fiercely fear them. Because of “poems against war” and “poetry as such.”
Tags: war, art, culture, artists, Ukraine, poetry, censorship
Links, cited and not, some just interesting
Intimate and honest thinking from Russian artists about what they should do now: Anonymous. “Culture in the Time of ‘Military Operations.’” The Point Magazine (Online), March 11, 2022. https://thepointmag.com/survey/culture-in-the-time-of-military-operations/. From Colta, in Russian. Use Google Translate: “Культура Во Время «военных Операций» [Culture during ‘Military Operations’],” March 3, 2022. https://www.colta.ru/articles/specials/27777-opros-kultura-i-krizis.
I wasn’t the only one to think of Brecht and Auden; good article on poetry during strife by a translator and poet: Maguire, Sarah. “‘Singing About the Dark Times’: Poetry and Conflict,” March 13, 2008. https://www.poetrytranslation.org/articles/singing-about-the-dark-times-poetry-and-conflict.
What Auden went through to arrive at poetry makes nothing happen — a good and detailed article: Huddleston, Robert. “‘Poetry Makes Nothing Happen.’” Boston Review, February 25, 2015. https://bostonreview.net/articles/robert-huddleston-wh-auden-struggle-politics/.
Readable, thoughtful prose on art and artists: Schjeldahl, Peter. “What Are Artists For?” The New Yorker, December 21, 2020. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/12/28/what-are-artists-for.
And, quite recently: — . “Facing War.” The New Yorker, March 21, 2022. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/03/21/art-in-a-time-of-war.
To the readers of COLTA.RU on the interruption of publication: “От Редакции COLTA.RU [From the Editors of COLTA.RU],” March 5, 2022. https://www.colta.ru/articles/specials/29696-ot-redaktsii-colta-ru. Use Google Translate like I did.
If you own an iPhone, you can play your own performance: John Cage. “John Cage :: 4’33" App.” Accessed March 18, 2022. https://johncage.org/4_33.html.