dd month 200x, 1,963 words
In June this year, the University of the West Indies hosted a four-day conference titled "The Role of Art in Societies-in-Crisis". The core assumption behind this seminar was that art is essential to building a civilized society. More specifically, the assumption is that high art - as distinct from popular art - is essential to civilised behaviour. Unfortunately, nearly everyone who makes this argument does so from ideological grounds. That is, they argue from passionate assumptions, which are rarely backed up by empirical evidence or philosophical coherence. But, for all we know, causation may run the other way - it is civilization that gives rise to music, painting, poetry, plays, and so on. But this question was not addressed by any of the panellists.
In this essay, I will do a more rigorous analysis of this issue - applying information that the academics and artists who took part in UWI's conference were apparently not privy to. My starting point is anthropological: the most primitive societies - which is to say, hunter-gatherer bands - have some form of art. They have music, and instruments to play their songs; they have carving; and even painting, usually in the form of tattoos.
This tells us an important fact: that art is a basic need for human beings. This point was actually raised by one panellist at the conference, but he avoided the more difficult questions that arose from this, such as what function art fulfils. (He said it was for survival, but didn't say how.) And so we come to neurology. Like most species, we seek out patterns in the world. But our complex brains have enabled us to see much more complex patterns than any other animal. Art is an expression of that pattern-finding ability. In our brains, we have representations of the outside world. These are called schemata, and take a sensory form. We are the only animal able to re-represent these schemata as art - carvings or drawings. But we can also represent the world linguistically - in semantic form - then re-represent it by speaking (or, as of 5,000 years ago, by written symbols). That ability to communicate quickly and clearly was crucial to our social bonding and our species' dominance of the planet.
Neurologist Antonio Damasio suggests that narrative is a basic function of the human brain. "Telling stories precedes language since it is, in fact, a condition for language...Whatever plays in the nonverbal tracks of our mind is rapidly translated in words and sentences," he writes in his book The Feeling of What Happens. However, although art is universal and may well be innate, this does not justify a leap to the argument that art is essential to society, let alone civilised society. Human beings have been on the planet for 100,000 years or so, and art and religion developed around the same time in our evolution. To make any connection between art and social bonding, we must first ask what the adaptive use of fictional narrative (to limit the topic) might be.
The computer scientist Jerry Hobbs suggests that novels work like experiments. The novelist places his characters in a hypothetical situation where the rules of the real world, or the logic of an alternate reality, hold and then works out the consequences. This allows the reader to imaginatively place herself in situations and so be better able to handle them should they ever occur. It is not coincidental that the most popular genre of fiction is the romance and the thriller. The scholar Georges Polti has analysed the world's great literature and extracted 36 plots that cover all of them. Two-thirds of these have to do with love or sex or a threat to the safety of the protagonist or his kin. So even great literature reflects the two basic drives of evolution: survival and reproduction.
An indirect confirmation of this hypothesis comes from an elegant experiment carried out by researchers Larry Cahill and James McGaugh of the University of California. They had people read an unexciting story about boy and mother walking through a town, while other subjects read the same story but with emotional content - the boy gets hit by a car. Tested weeks later, people remembered the exciting part, as well as more details, than the people who had read the emotionally neutral story. It is reasonable to speculate, therefore, that narrative helped in conveying salient facts, about both the natural world and other people's psyches. Damasio notes that brain-damaged persons who lose the ability to have feelings cannot reason about social and moral issues. Does reading refine one's ability to do this? That is a question which can only be answered empirically, by examining the personal relationships of readers and non-readers. The only study I have ever come across tangentially related to this query surveyed women who were readers of Mills & Boon romances. Among other things, the study found that these women had more satisfying sex lives than women who didn't read romantic fiction.
But all this only suggests what personal effects narrative might have. Does it also fulfil a social function? It may seem obvious that anything which affects people personally must affect the social group. That is so, but it doesn't mean that what is personally beneficial is good for the society. Religion, for example, appears to provide psychological comfort to believers but religion, as an institution, is often a barrier to social development.
But art appears to have a positive function in at least one institution essential to any modern society. Education researcher Michael Gurian, in his book Boys and Girls Learn Differently!, says, "Boys want and need drama and other arts." He notes that "The arts are such a whole-brain activity they can work with the reading-disabled, the learning-disabled in general, and behaviourally-disabled. The arts are useful not simply with diagnosed students, but with all difficult students."
However, all this tells us is that the arts are useful for learning, which we already knew. This has the social benefit of making a more educated populace, and such a populace is likely to help society develop. But since the social utility of education is not in doubt, this says nothing about the social function of art per se - another issue that was sidestepped at the UWI conference. However, a telling example comes from the true story of Stetson Kennedy, the man who single-handedly stopped the Klu Klux Klan in its tracks in the 1940s, when the Klan had a member or supporter in virtually every important private and public organisation in America. How did Kennedy do it? He became a Klan member and passed on all their secret passwords and rituals to the producers of The Adventures of Superman radio serial. The effect was that children began to play games with Superman fighting the villainous Klan, complete with real Klan codes and signals. The humiliation caused Klan membership to drop drastically. Such is the power of drama combined with mass media.
Before I go on, I should identify the elements of literature in general, and drama in particular. Literature scholar Joseph Carroll, in his book Evolution and Literary Theory, defines literary works are "representations that either take the quality of personal experience as their special subject or register the writer's sense of the experiential quality of his or her subject, that are intended to stimulate emotional and aesthetic as well as conceptual responses in the reader." Drama does this through characterisation, theme, plot, and action.
Now in drama, unlike poetry or novels, literacy is not required. Shakespeare's plays were performed to mostly illiterate audiences who, we may presume, had no trouble following the high-flown language of the plays. We must bear in mind that this is somewhat more astonishing that might seem at first blush, because the iambic pentametered, imagetic language of the plays was strictly theatrical - nobody in Shakespeare's day actually spoke like that. The audience, both high and low, accepted the convention because rhetoric (in the sense of a mode of speech used only in rituals and other formal occasions) is a universal cultural characteristic. The King James Bible, in similar fashion, draws much of its power by being written in an English that was never actually spoken but which was fashioned, as befits the Word of God, to come mightily off the tongue.
In Philosophy in the Flesh, linguists George Lakoff and Mark Johnson's definitive work on metaphor, the authors write: "Whenever a philosophical theory seems intuitive to us, it is primarily because it is based on metaphors that are deeply imbedded in our cognitive unconscious and are widely shared within a culture. A theory will resonate for us just insofar as it is orchestrates many of the conceptual metaphors that make up our everyday folk theories."
Literature is, of course, the main cultural vehicle of metaphor, and metaphorical frames are ubiquitous in politics also. But note what Lakoff and Johnson say about the necessity of the metaphors being shared within the culture. Psychologist Jerome Kagan, one of the world's leading researchers on cognitive development in children, notes that the celebrity or indifference awarded to a work depends on the relation between the products of the artist and the beliefs of the community. In Surprise, Uncertainty and Mental Structures, he writes, "Very familiar or very novel events, whether objects for the infant or ideas for the adult, are less arousing and less likely to recruit attention than partial transformations of an agent's knowledge. This fact is mysterious...One possibility is that the central ideas in most creative novels and plays are semantic networks that are penetrated with schemata."
And this brings us back to our original question. Does high art help build a civilised society? The short answer, in my opinion, is No. This is because high art tends to be elitist, in the sense that it is created for an audience who is more interested in status than in aesthetics or in moral questions. Hitler is the irrefutable argument here: he started off adult life wanting to be an artist and he was an avid fan of opera. High art may, sometimes, engage the aesthetic, conceptual and affective elements which stimulate intuitive metaphor. But, more often, it tries to avoid doing so. This is because the main purpose of high art is not to enlighten and inform, but to make its creators and patrons seem superior to the petit bourgeoisie and the hoi polloi.
Applying all this to our own situation, it seems to me that a core reason why local drama has largely failed to engage Trinidadian audiences is because theatre productions have not engaged our culturally shared metaphors in an accessible manner. Trinidadian metaphors are imbedded in calypso and Carnival, which means satire and masks. But Walcott has been too high and Freddie Kissoon too low for their works to actually have a social impact. The middle path has been best achieved by a playwright whose works have won prizes but never been staged (although, with typical Third World ethics, this was a condition of the prizes offered by the National Drama Association and the Trinidad Theatre Workshop). Luke Jorsling's plays are marvels of wit and insight - but no theatre group here has seen fit to produce his work, although they might well make money and transform the theatre scene if they did. And, while I still can't definitely say what role art plays in a society, I am reasonably certain that the backward attitude of our intelligentsia helps keep us underdeveloped in spirit and in fact. And the UWI conference on the arts has only helped strengthen my conviction.
Copyright ©2005 Kevin Baldeosingh