The near-irrefutability of art

July 22, 2013 at 10:37 am (Uncategorized)

The opening lines of Larkin’s Annus Mirabilis is quoted to death, but here is the whole thing:

Sexual intercourse began
In nineteen sixty-three
(which was rather late for me) –
Between the end of the Chatterley ban
And the Beatles’ first LP.

Up to then there’d only been
A sort of bargaining,
A wrangle for the ring,
A shame that started at sixteen
And spread to everything.

Then all at once the quarrel sank:
Everyone felt the same,
And every life became
A brilliant breaking of the bank,
A quite unlosable game.

So life was never better than
In nineteen sixty-three
(Though just too late for me) –
Between the end of the Chatterley ban
And the Beatles’ first LP.

As a critic of the sexual revolution that Larkin here praises, I have all sorts of intellectual and philosophical responses to the poem: it overlooks the benefits of social stability that were ensured by the culture that was rejected “in nineteen sixty three”; it is marred by overlooking the benefits of sexual sublimation (viz. culture, high art); it is blind to the vulgarizing effects of free sex, which lead to a coarsening of art, language, and discourse; it has nothing to say of the catastrophic consequences of disease, home-wrecking, and the inevitable cruelty that follow sexual licence; it fails to see that sex-on-demand destroys romance and that it very quickly becomes boring, since the ecstatic power of sex is lost when it is not dammed up.*

But what is all of this? Just another Catholic blogger giving first-draft philosophical arguments. It does nothing to touch that part of the soul that Larkin’s very refined lyric penetrates to. I can only watch poem do its work and do nothing to stop its course. The only refutation of the poem would be one of comparable lyric force that describes the sexual revolution as it actually is: a short-sighted hedonism that devastates society by degrading the underclass to a fatherless, crime-ridden, swinish existence and alienates the elites into self-absorbed tyranny.

But to write such a poem would require a poet of extraordinary lyric skill and philosophical insight, and such a person requires an entire civilization ordered to making him. If we had a poet with Larkin’s skill, what would he learn at, say, Harvard?  If society took notice of his writing talents, what sort of writing career would exert the strongest and most constant pull on his ability? He might end up script writing for Desperate Housewives  or making copy for advertising firms, but it would never cross his mind to refute Annus Mirabilis. 

All of this is a variant on Socrates’s lament in Book VI of the Republic: we need a well-trained elite mind to counteract the perversions we find in our midst, but one would never expect an elite mind to resist the attractive power of advancing them. This attraction is intense and life-long, working both through manifest incentives and subconsciously understood structures.  It’s not for nothing that the system of the Anti-Christ is called the world.

And yet for all that, we still have one hope: Larkin’s poem is bad art, since art by its nature shows things as they are. The love of art itself is a force that threatens to blast Annus Mirabilis to pieces, and such a force can’t be restrained forever.

________

*On one reading of the poem, Larkin recognizes this downside by saying things were never better than before “the Beatles first LP” which leaves open the possibility that things got a lot worse after the Help album in 1965. But several reasons seem to rule out such a reading: (a.) Larkin describes sexual intercourse as beginning in ’63, not as enjoying a brief ideal period, (b.) if this is what Larkin meant, he does nothing to develop the idea, and (c.) it would stand to reason that if this is what he meant, he would be just a little bit sad to see the old regime die, when in fact he speaks of it only with contempt. This is why I read the Chatterly/ Beatles LP line not as describing a single moment of greatness that was lost within a matter of months but as simply locating 1963 in time.