Rock Island, IL

Consider three stories, all from the nineteenth century, no two alike, all having one thing in common: each is a work of art in which a work of art is featured. I doubt there can be many reasons to take these three stories up together in a single motion of thought except for the fact that they share this commonality.

Perhaps the best known among them is Hawthorne’s “Artist of the Beautiful” (1844), in which the aptly-named Owen Warland (remove the “e” and you have some sense of his travails) struggles to create, amid the unsympathetic utilitarian ignorance of those around him, a beautiful mechanical butterfly.

Stephen Crane’s “The Open Boat” (1897) isn’t quite as popular, certainly not as subtle, but it too is fairly well-known. In it a group of men struggle in a dingey against a snarling sea that rages in a world at best indifferent to them, and at one point one of the characters, a correspondent, unexpectedly recalls a verse, long ago forgotten, about a soldier who lay dying in Algiers and who becomes aware that he will never see his home again.

The third story, and probably the least well-wrought, is Rebecca Davis’s “Life in the Iron Mills” (1861), in which a young ironworker fashions out of korl (an iron by-product) a statue of a woman. The statue suggests fierce desire and hunger and longing, and in the dim light of the mill it arrests a group of men who have ducked into the mill to take shelter from a rain shower.

Hawthorne, Crane, and Davis are typically classified as Romantic, Naturalist, and Realist writers, respectively. The borders of these categories, like most borders, are somewhat amorphous, but they do denote real differences of technique and purpose.

(Hawthorne himself once said that the writer of a Romance doesn’t concern himself as assiduously with the probable as does the writer of a novel, whose obligations to what might happen in real life must be more strictly respected. Davis, by contrast, wanted “to dig into the commonplace, this vulgar American life, and see what is in it.” That’s a fairly anti-romantic remark, one that Crane matches with the first sentence of “The Open Boat”: “None of them knew the color of the sky.”)

But whatever we wish to say about what separates these stories and their writers, these three pieces of fiction have, as I said, at least this much in common: they are works of art that feature works of art.

Now I want to recast that and say that each puts a work of art on offer.

In Hawthorne’s story the artist achieves the beautiful: he successfully creates a mechanical butterfly. But not only does his creation go unappreciated; it gets destroyed by a “child of strength,” who reaches up, grabs it, and in doing so destroys it. At this moment the child’s mother, who delights in but fails to understand the artist’s accomplishment, screams. Her father bursts “into a cold and scornful laugh,” and the child’s father, a blacksmith with no mind for art whatsoever, opens the child’s hand “by main force” to reveal a “heap of glittering fragments.”

In Crane’s story the correspondent, who fights for a life the story suggests is ultimately meaningless, suddenly realizes that he cares desperately about the soldier who lay dying in Algiers. “In his childhood, the correspondent had … never regarded the fact as important.” But now “it quaintly came to him as a human, living thing. . . . it was an actuality—stern, mournful, and fine.”

In Davis’s story the men arrested by the statue are at leisure to observe it closely, to talk to the hungry artist himself, to question him, and to consider his plight among the poor exploited immigrant workers at the mill. Their responses range from indifference to cool irony. One of them, a physician, takes little more than an anatomical interest in the korl statue.

These three episodes from these three different stories have a distinct educative value. They give us an opportunity to look at (and think about) how characters within the stories respond, or don’t respond, to art. We get to see whether art can awaken them from their dull stupid slumber. This is an exercise akin to looking in the mirror, the benefits of which both the Bible and Hamlet have something to say about.

But these three episodes also remind me of something a colleague once told me. He was with a group of students in Florence, standing outside the door of the Accademia. The students were counting their money: should they purchase admission to the museum or save their money for wine that evening? My colleague said to them, Let me get this straight: on the other side of this door is, arguably, the most famous statue in the world, and you’re not sure if you want to spend your drinking money to see it?

They were very frank with him: that is exactly what they weren’t sure about. Wine or the David?

And that story about statuary reminds me of Rilke’s poem, “Ein Archaischer Torso Apollos,” which features a very stunning and very smart turn toward the end. At a certain crucial point in the poem it is not we (or you, for there’s a shift in person) looking at the archaic torso; it is the torso that is looking at us: “denn da ist keine Stelle, / die dich nicht sieht” (“for here there is no place / that does not see you”).

And the poem ends: “du mußt dein Leben ändern” (“you must change your life”).

A way of thinking about this poem, and from it back up through the doorstep of the Accedemia and into the three specimens of American short fiction, is this: art is on offer, but at a certain point in the aesthetic encounter it is not we who judge art; it is art that judges us. And sometimes it weighs us in the balance and finds us wanting. It tells us we must change.

Hawthorne, Crane, Davis, Michelangelo, Rilke: each puts art on offer. Each puts judgment on offer. Each gives us an opportunity to look, to investigate. And each says to us that if we have looked with attention and devotion we might be surprised to find ourselves standing with averted eyes, made ashamed by the stern gaze of the object now investigating us. Each offers us the opportunity to turn, chastened, with firm purpose of amendment.

This business of putting art on offer worries me a great deal. Or, rather, not putting art on offer worries me a great deal. I worry that young people, students in particular, who should expect to undergo several crises of conscience during the course of their tuition, are not led deliberately, nor with sufficient care, into those very crises that make education so awful, so terrible, so adventurous, and so rewarding.

I have known many talented teachers who either cannot or will not make that one last move and say: You see, the work of art is on offer here, and you can walk away from it. You can spend your money on wine if you want to, for that is your choice. But, you see, wine doesn’t look at you the way the torso does, and it never will. It doesn’t tell you to change your life.

Such teachers merely put the object on the slide and say “look.” That all things are startlingly moral, that good and evil are never at a moment’s truce (as Emerson and Thoreau taught), is no concern of theirs.

But it seems to me that the truly and fully conscientious teacher will, at some point, say to his students: You found the novel dull? Let me tell you something: you do not judge this book; this book judges you. The teacher, in saying so, offers the remark as a gift, and the measure of his skill is in whether the remark is received as a gift. Not everyone can give a gift outright.

But something else worries me, namely, that too often students aren’t even led to that penultimate point. Not only aren’t they brought painstakingly to a crisis of conscience; they aren’t even told about the crisis. No one bothers to advise them that if they’ve never had a crisis they deserve a refund. They are simply asked to put the whole cultural tradition on a slide, to observe it with cool detachment, and then in conclusion to say: so that’s how it is.

And I think this means they are being taught by whores.

We read in the Pentateuch that, once upon a time, “Israel abode in Shittim, and the people began to commit whoredom with the daughters of Moab. And they called the people unto the sacrifices of their gods; and the people did eat, and bowed down to their gods. And Israel joined himself unto Baal-peor: and the anger of the Lord was kindled against Israel” (Num. 25:1-3).

We know from our reading (for we do wish to learn about it) that this sort of behavior pisses off the God of Israel and that unpleasant consequences tend to accrue to certain offenders if He finds out. And, sure enough, “the Lord said unto Moses, Take all the heads of the people, and hang them up before the Lord against the sun, that the fierce anger of the Lord may be turned away” (4).

An impressive slaughter ensues until one puckish chesty Israelite makes bold to “bring unto his brethren a Midianitish woman in the sight of Moses, and in the sight of all the congregation of the children of Israel, who were weeping before the door of the tabernacle of the congregation” (6).

Well, Phinehas (son of Eleazar, son of Aaron the priest) is having none of this. He follows the man and woman “into the tent” and with his javelin shish kabobs them together in one mighty thrust. (I think we’re to assume that he catches them in the clutch, or in flagrante delicto, as is sometimes said.) “So the plague was stayed from the children of Israel” (8), though 24,000 do die because, apparently, there has been a lot of bad behavior.

We learn from our reading (for we also wish to learn from it) that it’s not a good idea to go whoring in Shittim.

“Shittim” would make a good name for a college or university, don’t you think? And wouldn’t that make “Whoring in Shittim” a good an alternative to “teaching in the humanities”?

Be that as it may, I wish to add this: it does seem to me that being hired and agreeing to introduce students to their great cultural heritage, and drawing a paycheck for doing so, means that certain contractual obligations obtain. Failing to let students know what is on offer to them, and failing to tell them that what is on offer draws but also returns their gaze, promising them the great pleasure of a crisis, is a lot like whoring in Shittim–and may even be worse.

I don’t expect the consequences of this whoring to come by divine retribution, but I do expect them to come. And I doubt they’ll be trivial.

As for Phinehas (son of Eleazar, son of Aaron the priest), he was richly rewarded.

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Tagged as: Crane, education, Hawthorne, Michelangelo, Rebecca Harding Davis, Rilke