Affirmation in Art...? [003]
"It feels prosecutorial to have spent so long detailing what seems to me the novel’s homophobic logic, but my intent isn’t to condemn Giovanni’s Room. It’s instead to understand how, despite this, the novel offers a kind of affirmation many of our current conversations about art can’t explain. As I’ve said, I don’t think the desire for affirmation is trivial; I don’t think it’s degrading of art. Viewed in a sufficiently strenuous way, 'emotional support or encouragement' is the aim of that therapeia at the heart of much spiritual and philosophical enterprise, whether that of the Desert Fathers on their pillars or of Stoics seeking shelter from the vicissitudes of circumstance. But I do think that much contemporary art praised as 'affirming' falls short of this strenuousness, this seriousness, in a peculiar way. Calls for 'affirming literature,' especially in the context of certain identities, are bound up with ideas of 'positive representation,' ideas that have been much debated in recent years and as a result have gained a certain sophistication. It’s not the case now that we feel characters must be spotless, even especially admirable in their conduct. But it does seem to me that much art praised as 'affirming' presents a vision of the world in which nothing and no one is finally irreparable, in which, however dire the tribulations faced, and even if redress requires multiple generations, everything can finally be overcome.The genuine affirmation we need from art is different from this, I think. Because the fact is that we live in the irreparable; we need art to help us 'say Yes to life' (a phrase Baldwin uses in Giovanni’s Room and elsewhere) from within the irreparable. This is a form of 'emotional support or encouragement' that doesn’t map onto a particular identity, that isn’t historically determined at all, but instead built into the existential condition of humanness: encouragement of a peculiarly stark, a peculiarly bracing kind. Any art that excludes the irreparable excludes the possibility of genuine affirmation, as I’m trying to articulate it here; such art can only ever be propaganda for life, which can’t offer us any help at all. It is a sense of the inevitable boundedness of our lives, their finitude and fragility, the minuteness of our agency in the face of their contingency, that I worry is excluded by the current usage of the term 'affirming' in conversations about art."
Enamored of the Abyss: On the place of affirmation in art, by Garth Greenwell, from Harper's Magazine