Beyond the Pale of Feeling Have you ever cried …
Beyond the Pale of Feeling
Have you ever cried before a painting? I haven?t. Art doesn?t ?speak? to me. Yet. But I suppose if I were interested as much as an art historian, then perhaps it would have happened. A thought-provoking article by the art historian John Elkins wonders why crying before art is a taboo in his profession. Surely, he asks, feeling is as important as thought? He says ?piles of information smother the capacity to feel?. Does it? The saturation coverage of recent events in America seemed to do the opposite. And the limiting of factual coverage of Afgani children being ripped apart by Christian cluster bombs seems to leave most Westerners cold.
As a reader, I?ve never cried reading a book. I?d be interested to hear about anybody else?s experience, because it doesn?t seem to be very important to me. If one reads a novel and cries, is one releasing pent up emotion from one?s own life, or responding to the fiction? If it?s the former, what has that got to do with the work (it might just as well been another)? And if it?s the latter, isn?t one indulging in fantasy and thus avoiding the Real World? Where's the good in either?
Elkins? concern, like everybody else with true feeling for art, is for what is ?beyond the pale of thought?. Yet art, by definition, is mediation. It is not the Real World. This means a priori that it has intellectual origin and content. To deny it is like clinging to an idyllic childhood. Perhaps the infantilisation of culture is the mutant offspring of Romanticism. To resist, we need to get beyond the pale of mere feeling as well as thought.
