Poetic Rule

In contrast, Noé’s controversial Irréversible, a film that unsparingly depicts murder, torture, and rape, captures the bleaker reality of our current era. Where Kubrick depicts the cosmically blessed arrival of rational man, Noé shows us a philosopher beating out the brains of a sadistic rapist. Indeed, the murderer’s use of the fire extinguisher to pummel his victim’s skull is an ironic updating of Moon-Watcher’s use of a bone to bludgeon a zebra. Noé depicts not the technical evolution of humanity, but our regression to a bestial state.

Viewed side by side, these two works of art indicate that, in just over thirty years, we have exchanged the revolutionary social and technical optimism of the Age of Aquarius for the reactionary militarism and pessimism of the so-called Age of Terror. Whether Kubrick or Noé intends to promote either opti-mism or pessimism is not the issue; their respective works of art are relevant to their times and, perhaps, all time.

In a May 19, 2004, lecture at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, French philosopher Jean Baudrillard commented on “ “—the violence perpetrated upon and with images. He claimed that the image is separated from reality, but that its revenge is to be exploited endlessly in documents and documentaries, so as to reproduce reality, particularly that of violence and misery, for moral, pedagogical, political, and advertising purposes. Images of assassinations, explosions, massacres, tortures, and other forms of violence in our Age of Terror are denuded of meaning as they are manipulated to promote competitive agendas: the American torture of Iraqis becomes the rationale for Iraqi beheadings of Americans. And all these crimes are captured on film and transmitted endlessly.

The violent image, dissociated from its causes, is always at once grotesquely visceral and repellently suspect. The only effective attitude in relation to violent images that stimulate, to use Fraser’s phrase, “the pain of consciousness,” is a constant interrogation of their meaning. As Northrop Frye insists, “We have revolutionary thought whenever the feeling ‘life is a dream’ becomes geared to an impulse to awaken from it.” The whole duty of art is to render reality more real, pain more painful, beauty more beautiful, and truth more truthful. And this function carries social ramifications.

The American poet Ezra Pound famously wrote, “Literature is news that stays news.” Perhaps we can fine-tune Pound and propose that literature is not news, but meta-news, hyper-news; it is the news not yet written. Like all art, arguably, it is irrelevant, finally, to action, but it is crucial for the reflection that effective action must be based upon. In this regard, American writer Ray Bradbury’s novel Fahrenheit 451 (1953), which envisions a future wherein possessing literature is a capital crime, was prescient. In Bradbury’s truly terrifying society, a television-like device “tells you what to think and blasts it in” and “rushes you on so quickly to its own conclusions your mind hasn’t time to protest.” In contrast, books allow argument; they “remind us what asses and fools we are. They’re Caesar’s praetorian guard, whispering as the parade roars down the avenue, ‘Remember, Caesar, thou art mortal.’”

Certainly, the literary record advises doubt regarding the positive outcomes of crusades and jihads, but it also advises recourse to the only real defenses against barbarism—reason, justice, and empathy. Mass literacy is necessary to counter Albert Camus’s truism that “an atmosphere of terror hardly encourages reflection.” There is something in literature, in the stories we tell, that insists on provocation. Reading can change everything by changing minds—especially if a text is memorized. Frye points out that, with memorization, “the work of literature [acquires] the existential quality of entering into one’s life and becoming a personal possession.”

According to Frye, “the written word is far more powerful than simply a reminder: it re-creates the past in the present, and gives us, not the familiar remembered thing, but the glittering intensity of the summoned-up hallucination.” If Frye’s perception is true, it is our failure to explore the resonant, real-world contexts of literature that reduces reading to a rendering of rote interpretations. A good book, like any good work of art, forces one into a realm of constant questioning—of self, of psychology, and of society. We cannot know ourselves and we assuredly cannot improve ourselves without con-fronting ourselves via the superior consciousness of literature and art. Frye puts the matter this way: “a specifically historical situation is latent in any enlightenment: man has to fight his way out of history and not simply awaken from it.” An insightful work of art incites discovery and self-discovery without regard to temporality; it is a revolutionary text that never ceases being revolutionary.

Ultimately, no artist can claim convincingly to exist outside the political realm. And if artists are not to be crushed or summarily silenced, then they have no choice but to engage in public life, while knowing that such engagement may exact a heavy price.