Fire and Knowledge

Developing “good taste” means learning how to “like” what is “good.” Taking pleasure (subjectively) in what is excellent (objectively) is the definition of good taste.

—Gene Edward Veith, Jr., State of the Arts, p. 40

You’ll never catch me watching Andrew Davies’s Bleak House

Thank God there are people like this out there—one almost despairs at times! If people would stop watching these and read the real books, they might realize how pathetic the movies are. By the way, this applies to the upcoming The Chronicles of Narnia, too.

Everyone who has seen any of the new Bleak House is terribly enthusiastic about it. Some, indeed, have gone a surprising distance in heaping praise on the dramatisation. Kathryn Flett, in the Observer said it was “all the more thrilling for so dramatically improving upon Dickens’s rambling potboiler”. In the Telegraph, Catriona Davies said that “to those who have ploughed through all 1,088 pages of Charles Dickens’s novel Bleak House, it may seem like an unlikely book to be transformed into a populist drama”.

Not having seen any of it, I can’t say, but it seems very unlikely that this dramatisation adds to the quality of the greatest novel in the English language. For a start, I’ve heard that there is no fog to be seen anywhere, which seems rather like filming Moby Dick without the sea. Vegas is surely rather adventurous casting for a character who is 76 years old, described on first appearance as “short, cadaverous and withered.”….

It isn’t, moreover, just a question of leaving out wonderful little corners of plot, or irresistible characters. It’s really a matter of not doing a 10th of the things a book does. A book can switch into historical narration, dense description, authorial comment. It can, as Bleak House does, alternate between past tense and present tense - it’s an extraordinarily sinister moment when Richard suddenly disappears from Esther’s narrative, and appears in an anonymous present-tense section. A film can’t do any of this; it is stuck, forever, in the most banal of a novel’s modes, the narration of action and the transcription of dialogue.

But the main reason for not wanting to watch this Bleak House is simply that one doesn’t want it in one’s head. I don’t want forever to have to think of Gillian Anderson when I get to Lady Dedlock, and certainly not of Johnny Vegas as Krook. How many novels have been subtly corrupted in the imagination like this? Certainly, I can’t read Brideshead Revisited without seeing Anthony Andrews and Jeremy Irons, and Julia Sawalha has a most disconcerting habit of intruding on a reading of Pride and Prejudice. The better the dramatisation, the worse the danger that another imagination will interpose itself between the author’s and the reader’s; one nothing to do with either.

Imaginative poetry produces a far greater mental strain than novels. It produces probably the severest strain of any form of literature. It is the highest form of literature. It yields the highest form of pleasure, and teaches the highest form of wisdom. In a word, there is nothing to compare with it. I say this with sad consciousness of the fact that the majority of people do not read poetry.

I am persuaded that many excellent persons, if they were confronted with the alternatives of reading “Paradise Lost” and going round Trafalgar Square at noonday on their knees in sack-cloth, would choose the ordeal of public ridicule. Still, I will never cease advising my friends and enemies to read poetry before anything.

—Arnold Bennett, How to Live on Twenty-Four Hours a Day (1908)

We will, of course, be enormously entertained by these images, and many of them will tell us stories in new and exciting ways. At the same time, however, we will have lost something profound: the ability to marshal words to describe the ambiguities of life and the sources of our ideas; the possibility of conveying to others, with the subtlety, precision, and poetry of the written word, why particular events or people affect us as they do; and the capacity, through language, to distill the deeper meaning of common experience. We will become a society of a million pictures without much memory, a society that looks forward every second to an immediate replication of what it has just done, but one that does not sustain the difficult labor of transmitting culture from one generation to the next.

—Christine Rosen, “The Image Culture“

In a slim pamphlet titled The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint, Tufte argued that PowerPoint’s dizzying array of templates and slides “weaken verbal and spatial reasoning, and almost always corrupt statistical analysis.” Because PowerPoint is “presenter-oriented” rather than content or audience-oriented, Tufte wrote, it fosters a “cognitive style” characterized by “foreshortening of evidence and thought, low spatial reasoning … rapid temporal sequencing of thin information … conspicuous decoration … a preoccupation with format not content, [and] an attitude of commercialism that turns everything into a sales pitch.” PowerPoint, Tufte concluded, is “faux-analytical.”

—Christine Rosen, “The Image Culture“

I have a confession to make. I have an addiction. I have had it for as long as I remember. You see, I am addicted to style. That is, style over substance. Form over content. I am obsessed with aesthetics over essence. This addiction has proven hard to break—in fact, I fear that it will never be completely broken. It resists reformation like the worst of fiends.

As I said, this has been haunting me since my memory begins. Life is a barrage of images seeking for my attention. They have confronted me from every front, and I have been undone. Television, video games, billboards, web sites, product packaging—there has been no rest. Even during middle school my addiction was plain. It is illustrated well by a Calvin & Hobbes comic: Calvin is confident that he will receive a good grade on a book report because of his professional looking clear plastic binder. I used to laugh at it because it was funny. Now I laugh at it because I see myself, and it is pathetic.

Calvin: Thank you. Before I begin, I’d like everyone to notice that my report is in a professional, clear plastic binder.
Teacher: That’s very nice. Go ahead.
Calvin: When a report looks like this, you know it’ll get an “A.” That’s a tip, kids. Write it down.

Of course Calvin ends up receiving a failing grade, and receiving no credit for his professional-looking binder. Unfortunately, I didn’t have the same experience, and somehow passed most of my classes.

Here is an example of what I mean: when I begin writing an article on the computer, I select a new serif font for the body—no Times New Roman for me, thank you—and select a classy sans-serif font for the headings. My footnotes must be just right. My indentations must be just so. It is quite pathetic really. When I have something “presentable” done, I take a step back and look at it and I think to myself—“now there’s an article!” Perhaps if I spent as much time revising my content, I wouldn’t be the only one reading this. While I am certainly grateful for my college education (although I didn’t quite finish it), I am not thankful that my classmates and I were marked off more for not conforming to our style guide than for writing a poorly-researched and poorly-written essay.

But of course, it’s not just essays. My addiction isn’t happy to stop there. Websites must look good. I have even been known to recommend templates to others, so help me God. The content can come later. And that is quite sad, since the best websites have a merging of style and content. As Francis Schaeffer put it, “For those art works which are truly great, there is a correlation between the style and the content. The greatest art fits together the vehicle that is being used and the message that is being said.”

The best art is a beautiful compliment of style and content. That is why it is impossible to create good writing when the main focus is on style. The content must come first, and must be done excellently. Then, after the content is completed, a complimentary style can be adorned.

And that is what I want to do. When I am creating art, I need to keep a balanced focus on the style and content. When I am writing an essay, I need to focus completely on the content, and not worry about the style until later. To combat my tendency to focus on style, I am currently handwriting all my first drafts. This allows me to focus solely on the content and leave the style for later. With websites, I need to understand the content and what the message is—then, it can be presented through a proper medium and style.

Perhaps my addiction will never be broken. But I will fight it.

The capitulation of the concert hall to the moving image suggests that in an image-based culture, art will only be valuable insofar as it can be marketed as entertainment. The moving image redefines all other forms of expression in its image, often leaving us impoverished in the process.

—Christine Rosen, “The Image Culture“

We tend to lose respect for things we can manipulate. And when we can so readily manipulate images—even images of presidents or loved ones—we contribute to the decline of respect for what the image represents.

—Christine Rosen, “The Image Culture“