56: The Purpose of Art is Art's Purpose

56

The Purpose of Art is Art’s Purpose

“A minor novelist with a major style,

hovering always near a greatness he is too shrewd

or diffident to risk.”

Professor Harold Bloom

 on John Updike

I don’t know why I was called to write this musing, but while working on another book this morning (The Sign of Things to Come) I wrote something that jumped out at me like a news bulletin from tomorrow, a hierophantic insight that was a remarkable confirmation of the theme of my new book on the sign of things to come but which called out to be explored in a musing, an insight that falls squarely into that dreaded category of dangerous musings.

A dangerous musing hits close to home, so close that it nicks the sacred bone of one’s vulnerable life, and it can come back to play nasty with the author; but that, essentially, is the theme of today’s spiritual musing—daring to take the risk and cross the line into the unknown territory of the creative unconscious where the objective will of the creative principle and the subjective will of the author become one purposive drive which brings to mind those famous words by T. S. Eliot, the celebrated poet of The Wasteland: “We shall not cease from exploration /And the end of all our exploring /Will be to arrive where we started.”

From the earliest age I wanted to be a writer like my high school hero and literary mentor Ernest Hemingway, but in grade twelve I read Somerset Maugham’s novel The Razor’s Edge and was called to become a seeker like Maugham’s intrepid hero Larry Darrell, and I spent many years exploring the spiritual teachings of the world to find an answer to the haunting question of my life, who am I?

Happily, I found the answer to my question and my explorations brought me right back to where I started, which was my desire to become a writer, and I wrote indefatigably to make up for all the years that I spent looking for my true self; and the more I wrote the more I learned about the art of creative writing, until one day I discovered the secret of all great writers, and that’s the dangerous subject of today’s spiritual musing…

Penny Lynn joins me for coffee every morning in my writing room, and we talk about our dreams and other things and always about the book she brings in to read when I go back to my writing, and it’s surprising how quickly she can read a book in such a short time each morning before she goes to work; like The Selected Stories of Mavis Gallant, 887 pages long; Alice Munro’s book of short stories, The Love of a Good Woman; and the book she’s reading now, John Updike’s Pigeon Feathers and Other Stories. And of course we talk about her impressions of the authors.

That’s how I gauge the quality of the books she’s reading, because I trust Penny Lynn’s judgment implicitly; and her impressions of John Updike’s writing confirmed Professor Harold Bloom’s indictment that Updike was a minor novelist with a major style who hovered near a greatness he was too shrewd or diffident to risk. Penny loved Mavis Gallant, and even more Alice Munro’s stories; but Updike she can take or leave because his stories, though brilliantly written and masterfully crafted, do not leave a lasting impression.

“They fade away as soon as I read them. It’s like he never gets to the soul of his story,” she said to me, and I had to wonder why, because as much as I love John Updike for his brilliant style and uncanny mastery of le mot juste his stories faded away on me also, unlike many of Hemingway’s stories which left a lasting impression; but when I was given the insight for today’s spiritual musing, I knew why—which is why I felt compelled to explore it in today’s musing; and so, once again into the breach…

Creative writing is a mystical experience. The novelist Norman Mailer called it “spooky.” He didn’t’ know why writing is spooky, and neither does any other writer (not that I’m aware of, anyway); but I resolved this mystery in my other musings, and especially in my talks with Padre Pio (The Man of God Walks Alone), because writing my spiritual musings and dialoguing with Padre Pio brought to the fore the mystical element of creative writing, which is the intelligent guiding principle of life that can for all intents and purposes be called our creative unconscious but which in other contexts has always been called Divine Spirit; and herein lies the danger of today’s spiritual musing, because it dares to bring God into the dynamic of creative writing which will be sure to raise a few skeptical eyebrows.

Without mincing words, I’ve come to see that Divine Spirit is the élan vital, or the creative force of life that runs through all of life, and writers have the gift of being able to tap into the creative force of life with their writing. And herein lies the dilemma of the creative writer’s art, because tapping into the creative force of life incurs a moral responsibility that can humble the most talented writer, like it did John Updike for example.

Literary critic and Sterling Professor of the Humanities at Yale University, Professor Harold Bloom felt that the highly successful author John Updike was too shrewd or diffident to risk the greatness of his art, but he never explained why, which is what I was called upon to explore in today’s spiritual musing; but to do so I have to explain that the creative writer who does not work in willful harmony with the intelligent  guiding principle of his life will impede the flow of the creative process and damage the integrity of his art.

“Art is the truth above the facts of life,” said Karan Blixen (Out of Africa), and our own Canadian Nobel Laureate Alice Munro said, “Memoir is the facts of life. Fiction is the truth of life.” I quote these two highly accomplished writers to make the point that the inherent purpose of art is to explore and reveal the truth of life. That’s why Hemingway began every story that he wrote with the truest sentence that he knew upon which he built the rest of his story to satisfy his literary credo to “tell it the way it was.”

But that’s not the whole secret of Hemingway’s art, because being as true to what it was does not satisfy the creative process, as Hemingway learned the hard way when he experimented with his memoir The Green Hills of Africa, a literal account of his African safari with his second wife Pauline Pfeiffer which proved to be an aesthetic failure and taught Hemingway the lesson that every great writer has discovered: the miracle of imagination.

Hemingway reveals his secret in his memoir A Moveable Feast, the final book of his life that he was working on just before blowing his brains out with his favorite shotgun: “I was learning something from the paintings of Cezanne that made writing simple sentences far from enough to make the stories have the dimension that I was trying to put into them. I was learning very much from him, but I was not articulate enough to explain to anyone. Besides it was a secret.” And that secret was what made Hemingway a great writer.

After licking his wounds for the literary failure of The Green Hills of Africa, the resourceful writer used the same African safari experience to write two of his best short stories, “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber,” and my favorite Hemingway story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” which proved to Hemingway that imagination was necessary to make art, thereby confirming what the poet Adrienne Rich said about creative writing: “Poetry (art) is an act of the imagination that transforms reality into a deeper perception of what it.” Hemingway gave his African safari experience to the intelligent guiding principle of his creative unconscious, and the deeper perception of his experience was revealed in his two remarkable short stories which bared the wretched soul of his characters.

That’s how art is made. But as much as I understood how art is made, I could not quite give my understanding of the secret of art the clarity it needed to be seen in all its majesty; and that’s when the merciful law of synchronicity kicked in to assist me, which was proof yet again of the intelligent guiding principle of life which I’ve learned to trust implicitly…

I started writing this musing yesterday morning, but I had to stop because I could not take it any further; it needed “something” to bring it to resolution. And as divine synchronicity would have it, this “something” came to me when I was nudged later in the evening to go online and watch one of Professor Jordan Peterson’s lectures on his Personality series: Jung—Personality and its Transformations; something he said about art jumped out at me, because it was precisely what I needed to bring resolution to my spiritual musing.

Giving a Jungian interpretation of the movie The Lion King to his students, Professor Peterson inadvertently revealed that certain “something” about the creative process that was exactly what I needed to bring resolution to my musing: “Art cannot be designed for a purpose. The purpose of art is art’s purpose,” which is the secret of all great writing.

Ironically, this is the mystical nature of creative process that has been called spooky, because no one understands how it works. But Carl Jung intuited this secret in his essay “Psychology and Literature” in his book Modern Man in Search of a Soul: “The artist is not a person endowed with free will who seeks his own ends, but one who will allow art to realize its purpose through him. As a human being he may have moods and a will and personal aims, but as an artist he is a ‘man’ in a higher sense—he is ‘collective man’—one who carries and shapes the unconscious, psychic life of mankind” (Modern Man in Search of Soul, C. G. Jung, p. 169, bold italics mine). Which implies that the creative process is the intelligent guiding principle of life that seeks to bring the truth of life into existence through the medium of the artist but which, as Hemingway and all great artists come to learn eventually, can only be done when the artists engages the transcendent function of his imagination to transform the reality of his experience into a deeper perception of his experience, as Hemingway did with his African safari experience when he wrote two of his most famous short stories.

Being aware of the mystical nature of the creative process, I engaged my imagination to transform one of the most pivotal experiences of my own life (flipping a coin into the air and letting my coin make up my mind for me on major life decisions) into a deeper perception of that experience in my novel The Golden Seed, so I know how this process works; but what does it really mean to say that the purpose of art is art’s purpose? What is art’s purpose?

I could explore this indefintely, but the short answer is that art’s purpose is to bring to light the inherent meaning of man’s existence; and when an artist imposes his own will upon the will of the intelligent guiding principle of his creative process he impedes the truth that his creative process seeks to bring to light; and this is what separates the great artist from all the rest, regardless how gifted and brilliant the artist may be, like John Updike who hovered near a greatness that he was too shrewd or diffident to risk.

Which means, if the logic of art holds true as I believe it does, that the greater the truth the intelligent guiding principle of the creative process seeks to bring to light, the greater the risk the artist will have to take to make it happen; and, as the history of art tells us, only the very few dare risk their all for the greater truth of their art, as Hemingway did when he bared his wretched soul in his iconic story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro.”  

───