Going Against the Flow
I was reminded recently of how years ago I gave a talk on how to be a good writer. In this presentation I threw Ernest Hemingway under the bus.
This was mainly because I had taken the time to read—and to admire—For Whom the Bell Tolls, at least until I finished it.
It’s unqualified trash.
The last few pages of that book did a lot to solidify my disillusionment with not only postmodern thought but also mainstream culture. Thankfully, I found solace in Booker’s Seven Basic Plots and Roche’s A World Without Heroes, which defend reason and order.
Hemingway had style and originality; his technique boasts many imitators. Here’s the thing, though: a work can be original and technically brilliant but that doesn’t make it beautiful, and it certainly doesn’t make it art.
Because it has never sat right with me, I’ve resisted the postmodern definition of art pretty much from the first time I came across it.
I think of it more as an excuse than a definition anyway because the essence of it, which has unfortunately been widely accepted, is that a thing can only be art if it has no purpose outside itself.
How tyrannical and absolutist is that?
The very fact of its enigmatic inaccessibility guarantees that only its proponents, those who fabricated such a narrow and intolerant view, could ever be its arbiters and guardians. It allows all kinds of nonsense into our art museums, and that nonsense in turn steers the ship of society toward certain doom.
One of my main problems with what is being excused as art these days finds its roots in how our thinking is flawed. Postmodernism has elevated irony to the sublime. It’s hilariously good fun to a postmodern thinker when everything is meaningless and exists for literally nothing outside itself. This is why MGM’s motto, translated as “art for the sake of art” or “art for its own sake” is so desolate. Picture a snake devouring its own tail and you’ll begin to get it.
The postmodernist’s error, which has become a global disease of the soul, is centered on the denial of Truth, and at least in Hemingway it found expression in the meaninglessness of the tales he told. For Whom the Bell Tolls was told with technical skill and typical postmodern snark, but the real irony is that Hemingway proved in the expression of his understanding of truth that his actual life was pointless because he obviously lived it apart from all hope, which is to be found in Christ alone.
I wanted to throw the book across the room when I read the end because everything I had invested in all that he had created was for absolutely nothing. It’s not clever, it’s not daring or avant garde. The reader is left alone in shock with a profound sense of outrage.
And I find it even more outrageous that because of critical acclaim, Hemingway’s work is universally praised as brilliant when it isn’t. It doesn’t satisfy, it doesn’t provide lift to society, it doesn’t illuminate the soul, and it doesn’t reverence the Creator. All it does it glorify the utter pointlessness it worships.
All postmodern art and thought suffers from this defect. It says collectively,
“Oh, how clever we are, and oh, how cunningly we bait the observer with hope and then switch him with desolation and meaninglessness so that we can mock him for being too stupid to ‘get’ what we do.”
Do they not realize that they’re mocking themselves? If postmodernism really believes everything is pointless, its highest expression should be the blank canvas, the song not written, a man belching in a library and winning the Pulitzer.
This is what art is to them.
But it’s much more akin to propaganda.
Or worse, marketing. What could they be selling, I wonder?
But art must have a purpose. Art requires skill and discipline, and its highest and purest expressions are attainable by only those who press in to the call of the Creator, those with the talent and dedication required to achieve lift, blessing, even transcendence. The fact that it is rare, that it requires a gift, training, practice, skill, and reverence for something outside itself is part of what makes it valuable. What really makes it valuable is that it is creative, not destructive, and that means that it echoes back to the Creator at least some of the divine attributes.
Art does have a purpose.
It is to glorify God, the original Artist.
Art is worship, and it is only valid if its object is worthy of all praise. When art worships vanity, when it worships itself, it is a blight and a curse.
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