The Art of Cruelty Read online

I don’t know who, exactly, feels as though they’re hearing truth spoken to power by watching a shellacked cable news anchor read aloud from incoming tweets, but no matter—it is characteristic of today’s supposed hunger for truth that it coexists with a general repudiation of, or disinterest in, fact. The results can be dizzying: think, for example, of Representative Joe Wilson’s notorious “You lie!” outburst during President Obama’s September 9, 2009, address to Congress, on the subject of health care—an address in which Obama was explicitly setting out to dispel, as he put it, “fabrications that have been put out there in order to discourage people from meeting what I consider a core ethical and moral obligation, and that is that we look out for one another.”

  Fact-checkers quickly confirmed that Wilson’s “You lie!” was technically in the wrong, but his supporters wasted no time printing up T-shirts, buttons, and bumper stickers anointing Wilson as a “truth-teller,” even if the truth Wilson might have been telling was unclear. (Was it the truth of his anger? The truth of his racism? The truth of the anger or racism of others, which he was channeling on their behalf? The truth of Obama’s duplicity, as he marches our great capitalism into a nefarious socialism, all under the ruse of some touchy-feely notion of “looking out for one another”?) Whatever one makes of such logic (or lack thereof), it’s clear that the distance between “fact” and “truth” is an accepted, if blurry, commonplace.

  This commonplace is by no means unique to cable news. Philosophers from Plato to Kant to contemporary French philosopher Alain Badiou have put in long hours attempting to differentiate “knowledge”—a category presumably containing discernible, provable facts—from “truth,” which can indicate the opposite (i.e., spiritual or metaphysical knowledge that is somehow evidence of itself ), or at least something altogether distinct (see Badiou: “Truth is first of all something new. What transmits, what repeats, we shall call knowledge. Distinguishing truth from knowledge is essential”). Theologians have been obsessed for millennia with the same, arguing that there is “truth” in its everyday sense, and then there is “Truth-truth,” and it is the duty of the God-fearing to tell the difference. Pursuit of the latter may, in fact, necessitate a willful seeing past or disbelieving of the former, if and when local truths appear inconvenient or inconsistent with Truth-truth.

  The idea that the visible, palpable, or present world is but a shadow of a different, “truer” world that exists elsewhere lies at the heart of the Platonic universe. It also undergirds the biblical notion that in the here and now, we must “see through a glass, darkly,” but that on Judgment Day, our vision will clear. As William Blake put it in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1793), “If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern.” Blake says man has “closed himself up”; a less pointed diagnosis might treat these “narrow chinks” as our inevitably limited senses, the apertures through which we must apprehend and construct the world, a world we presume to exist independently of us, “out there.”

  In Christianity, the textual paradigm for this form of seeing is typology, the teleological practice of reading the Old Testament as a set of figures or symbols that foreshadow events to come in the New Testament. And what a relief: instead of tumbling forth on a floating planet, which may or may not be an anomaly in the universe, its affairs driven by the twin whims of chance and will, we can imagine ourselves living a dress rehearsal for a foreshadowed revelation. Seen in this light, apocalypse seems less of a fear and more of a cheap ticket out of fear. What would you prefer: a bloody, climactic season finale, or the ongoing tragicomedy of inscrutable lives, inevitable deaths, and an unknowable universe?

  “Wherever he looks, he sees extremists,” said Hugo Chavez, president of Venezuela, in his September 20, 2006, address to the United Nations, referring, of course, to George W. Bush. Chavez went on: “And you—my brother, he looks at your color, and he says, oh, there’s an extremist.” In the same speech, Chavez counseled his listeners to make no mistake—Bush may have appeared in the chamber as a man, but really he was the devil, whose sulfuric stink Chavez could still smell at the podium. Amusing as Chavez’s speech was, I couldn’t help but notice his rhetorical flips: when Bush sees brown people who oppose his policies, Chavez argues, he mis-sees them as “extremists”; likewise, when we see Bush, we too are subject to a sort of mirage—the correct vision would behold not a man but a devil. In both cases, seeing things as they “really are” requires looking past that which is right in front of you—penetrating beyond deceptive appearances and into a reality imagined with alarming regularity as Manichean.

  Putting aside, for the moment, the question of whether this mode of seeing—or not seeing, as the case may be—provides any passage to the Kingdom Come, we must admit that historically speaking (and for Americans in particular) it has birthed some astonishing cruelties. “The Puritan . . . was precluded from SEEING the Indian,” writes William Carlos Williams in In the American Grain. “They never realized the Indian in the least save as an unformed Puritan.” Williams was utterly revolted by this legacy of Puritanism—its tendency to skip over the visible world, or worse than skip over it, to devour it. “They should be bread for us,” said Puritan founder Thomas Hooker of the Native Americans—that is, seen more correctly not as humans but as sacrament, to be consumed by the settlers with God’s blessing. This is an astonishingly efficient, well-worn recipe for making use of—or dispensing with—people whose presence on the earth strikes others as an inconvenience.

  Judge them as you will. But one thing is for sure: the Puritans were primed. Before their boats had even landed in the New World, they had been trained to have an intolerant, unseeing response to whatever they found here. John Winthrop’s 1630 sermon, “A Model of Christian Charity,” which famously lays out the imperative to found “a NEW ENGLAND”—a “city upon a hill”—no matter what stood in its way—was given to 700 settlers on the boat itself (the Arbella) as it tumbled across the Atlantic Ocean. Once the settlers arrived, they were mostly sick, under siege, and terrified. William Bradford, the Puritan governor of Massachusetts, described their state upon their 1620 arrival at Plymouth as follows: “what could they see but a hideous and desolate wilderness, full of wild beasts and wild men—and what multitudes of them they knew not . . . which ever way they turned their eyes (save upward to the heavens) they could have little solace or content in respect of any outward objects.”

  So when they turned their eyes to “outward objects,” their task was to transform them as quickly and convincingly as possible into parables that might justify their terrifying mission. Listen, for example, to Winthrop’s account of a skirmish between a mouse and a snake, recorded in his journal on July 5, 1632: “At Watertown there was (in view of divers witnesses) a great combat between a mouse and a snake; and, after a long fight, the mouse prevailed and killed the snake. The pastor of Boston, Mr. Wilson, a very sincere, holy man, hearing of it, gave this interpretation: That the snake was a devil; the mouse was a poor, contemptible people, which God had brought hither, which should overcome Satan here, and dispossess him of his kingdom.” There might be more comedy than cruelty here, had the “poor, contemptible people” not succeeded in dispossessing Satan (i.e., the Native American) of his kingdom, and were present-day Americans not its living inheritors.

  “There is a ‘Puritanism’—of which you hear, of course, but you have never felt it stinking all about you,” Williams wrote from New England, three centuries later. “It is an atrocious thing, a kind of mermaid with a corpse for a tail. Or it remains, a bad breath in the room. This THING, strange, inhuman, powerful, is like a relic of some died out tribe whose practices were revolting. . . . I wish to drag this THING out by itself to annihilate it.” At times it seems that such an annihilation would qualify as a blow of direct, ruthless compassion.

  IN THE publishing world, the
“fact”-versus-“truth” divide came to prime time most recently vis-à-vis the controversy over James Frey’s 2003 memoir, A Million Little Pieces. The revelation that Frey had fabricated aspects of his story drove New York Times book reviewer Michiko Kakutani to pen a splenetic, spasmodic piece titled “Bending the Truth in a Million Little Ways” (January 17, 2006). In this piece, Kakutani treats the Frey affair not as an instance of an individual taking liberties with the facts of his life for dramatic, mercenary, and/or psychological purposes, but rather as a referendum on “how much value contemporary culture places on the truth.” Her review—which never defines “the truth,” but instead takes a kind of if-you-have-to-ask-what-it-is-then-your-soul-is-already-lost attitude—lumps all kinds of purportedly malignant cultural and political phenomena together under the most purportedly malignant rubric of all: our “relativistic culture,” which, according to Kakutani, has spawned everything from reality TV to academics who “argue that history depends on who is writing the history” to the hazardous lies of the George W. Bush administration to the literary genre currently going by the name of “creative nonfiction.”

  For Plato, it was the practice of mimesis or representation itself that was to blame for this distancing from truth—in which case “creative nonfiction” (a la Thucydides) would have been no more at fault than fiction (a la Euripides). In fact, in the Phaedrus, written language itself is to blame for this distancing, and must therefore also be forsaken. For Protestant theologian John Calvin, two thousand years later, the problem had become even more difficult to exorcise, as Calvin diagnosed (correctly, so it would seem) the human mind itself as a “perpetual forge of idols.” As scholar Thomas Luxon has observed, this diagnosis puts Protestant Christianity in a bit of a fix, insofar as its “absolute success will be achieved only when ‘that perpetual forge of idols’ known as ‘the human mind’ is finally destroyed or exposed as the nothing all idols must always have been.” (This, Luxon notes, “has not yet come to pass.”) For Kakutani, the culprit is that by-now well-spanked bogey man, relativism, and its team of “fashionably nihilistic,” postmodernist pushers, who have created “a climate in which concepts like ‘credibility’ and ‘perception’ replace the old ideas of ‘objective truth.’ ”

  Such arguments received an elongated (if retro) photo-op during the 2009 confirmation hearings of Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, at which a host of (white, male) Republican senators dragged Sotomayor over the coals about her self-identification as a “wise Latina.” To their minds, this self-identification was but a welcome mat into a “Brave New World” (as Senator Jeff Sessions put it) characterized by “relativism run amok” (Senator John Kyl). In this Brave New World, as Sessions explained in his opening remarks, the “firm belief in an ordered universe and objective truth” has been overthrown by the anarchic likes of Sotomayor, with her acceptance—her celebration, even!—of the notion that gender and ethnicity may play a role, however inscrutable, in what kind of judge she, or anyone, is. “I reject such a view, and Americans reject such a view,” Sessions declared, on behalf of us all.

  For the record, I believe James Frey was dishonest; I also believe that Sotomayor is a relativist (which seems to me—as Sotomayor herself explained eloquently—a condition of possibility for judging rather than an impediment to it). But so long as people like Kakutani keep using “fact” and “truth” as interchangeable terms that need no definition or clarification, and so long as they continue to smear out the differences between dishonesty and relativism, or between political lies aimed to bring us into an unjust war and, say, the art of creative nonfiction, no clarity of thought is likely to emerge.

  Many artists have jumped into this debate, bending over backward to highlight their own truth-fetish. Armed with the Emily Dickinson mantra “Tell all the Truth but tell it slant,” they argue that their profession offers better, deeper access to the Truth, albeit through back and side doors. “We all know that art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize truth,” Picasso famously pronounced. Or, as poet Anne Sexton put it, “[Truth is] what I’m hunting for when I’m working on a poem. . . . It might be a kind of poetic truth, and not just a factual one, because behind everything that happens to you, there is another truth, a secret life.”

  When it comes to art, I personally cannot see the use-value of these proclamations, nor of the related, superficially inverse claims that a culture’s artists are somehow its “priests of truth.” I don’t mean to suggest that one isn’t working toward something while working on a piece of art, something that could be called “truth” (though it might also be called “making it work,” “aesthetic resolution,” or some such thing). But to approach works of art or literature with the hope that they might deliver a referendum on truth, or provide access to Truth-truth, is to set up shop on a seriously faulty foundation. A work of art may tell us little about factual truth, or about Truth-truth, but that is no reason to banish or belittle it. So long as we exalt artists as beautiful liars or as the world’s most profound truth-tellers, we remain locked in a moralistic paradigm that doesn’t even begin to engage art’s most exciting provinces.

  By virtue of its being multiply sourced, art cannot help but offer up multiple truths. To a moralist in the market for “an ordered universe and objective truth,” such an offering can be only a contradiction in terms. Worse still, because of its episodic nature, art offers the passing impression of truth, without the promise that the truth revealed will have any lasting power. For however powerful any given artistic truth might seem, a new, contradictory, or at least adumbrating truth might appear in the next instant, the next installment, the next frame, the next line, the next chapter, the next canvas.

  Poetry is especially tricky on this account, as it sets forth aphorisms that, upon first encounter, can feel like dictums to live by. Take, for example, Williams’s lovely line from his poem “The Ivy Crown”: “The business of love is / cruelty which, / by our wills, / we transform to live together.” Like most poetry forged from a good ear, this line convinces, momentarily, with no need of an argument. This is what poetic truths do: they blow in with the hot feeling of truth. You can then extract the line to read at an event (a wedding, a funeral, an inauguration, and so on) at which it makes sense, it marks the day. Everyone nods in assent, touched by how fitting, how wise, the words seem. Then you move on, the event moves on, life moves on. You turn the page.

  I almost used Williams’s line as the epigraph to this book, for example, simply because it sounded so good. But seeing as I could never figure out exactly what it meant, or definitively decide that it spoke any truth I believed in, I couldn’t bring myself to use it. Did it hold some great wisdom, or did it simply derive its power from the kind of aesthetic logic that Brecht, among others, has forcefully, often convincingly, deplored? “Through artistic suggestion, which it knows how to exercise, [aesthetic logic] invests the most absurd assertions concerning human relations with the appearance of truth,” Brecht wrote. “The more powerful it is, the more unverifiable its productions.”

  In other words, truth, in art, is but a feeling. An itinerant one. “Feelings are facts”: an adage I’ve heard some set forth as sage therapeutic advice; others, as the defining belief of a psychopath.

  For the fact is that Williams did not cast the business of love as cruelty all of the time, or even most of the time. Williams was a great love poet, whose most famous love poem, “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower,” describes love as a “garden which expands,” and credits his wife with showing him “a grateful love, / a love of nature, of people, / animals, / a love engendering / gentleness and goodness.” I must admit, I have never been able to read this poem without tearing up. It really is that beautiful. Poet Joanna Fuhrman thought so too, until a friend told her, “Yeah, Williams wrote his wife some nice poems, / but he was cheating on her the whole time. Everyone knew.” Alas: the business of love may not be cruelty, but certainly it is complexity.


  LIKE MOST artists charged with being cruel, or “cruel to be kind,” photographer Diane Arbus always testified to having a greater fidelity to the so-called brutality of fact than to either cruelty or compassion. “I don’t mean to say that all photographs have to be mean,” Arbus said. “Sometimes they show something really nicer in fact than what you felt, or oddly different. But in a way this scrutiny has to do with not evading facts, not evading what it really looks like.”

  Unsurprisingly, Arbus supporters have tended to rally around this claim, casting her forays into various subcultures (nudist colonies, circus sideshows, the world of sex workers, homes for retarded adults, and so on) as those of a fearless and compassionate renegade. Meanwhile, her detractors have charged her with being “an exploitative narcissist,” slumming it in communities in which she did not belong in order to generate provocative portraits that are fundamentally unkind to their subjects. (This fearless renegade/narcissistic exploiter dyad also dogged Sylvia Plath, which is one reason why Arbus is sometimes dubbed “the Sylvia Plath of photography”; her suicide is another. Lest we forget, to be called the Sylvia Plath of anything is a bad thing.) In this polar version of events, Arbus’s excursions to the “dark side” are either a record of adventuresome fellow-feeling or an extended exercise in callow, cynical coldness.

  Sontag famously thought the latter—in her 1977 book On Photography she roasts Arbus for “concentrating on victims, on the unfortunate—but without the compassionate purpose that such a project is expected to serve.” In retrospect, it seems clear that the problem lies more in Sontag’s standards than in Arbus’s alleged cruelty. Changing times have not served Sontag’s assessment well, as the so-called victims and unfortunates captured by Arbus that Sontag presumes we should pity—those lives Sontag assumes are defined by horrific pain—include drag queens, dykes, sex workers, sideshow performers, interracial couples, and others for whom pity does not now seem, a priori, the order of the day. Sontag also scolds Arbus for not being interested in “ethical journalism.” But who ever said she was? Ethical journalism was probably about the last thing on Arbus’s mind as she roamed about, photographing her freaks. Nor did Arbus shrink from admitting the stirrings of both cruelty and compassion within her. “And I photographed him then which was really cold,” she wrote of her visit to her father on his deathbed. “But I suppose there is something somewhat cold in me.”