Mr. Miyagi’s America
The aesthetic appeal of Japanese culture in the West has, I think, had at least as many points of continuity as points of rupture over the decades. Consistently Western observers of Japan have noted that it has an exceptionally beautiful visual and material culture, in ways that are difficult to define without lapsing into Orientalist cliché, regardless of what the observer thinks of the social and ideological aspects of Japanese life. Yet the way people in the West respond to this aesthetic appeal has obviously shifted over time; a Victorian artist’s model lounging in a kimono gives one a feeling of change-in-continuity vis-à-vis a cosplayer wearing a similar kimono at a late-2000s anime convention.
Things That God Created to Train the Faithful: A Partial List
I write this from a more or less okay hotel lobby computer in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, dashed off in a slapdash fashion. It is my second Dune-inspired not-quite-essay, after the wildly successful (in some, extremely narrow, circles, which I suppose robs the expression “wildly successful” of most or all of its force) “Who Said It: God-Emperor Leto II or Greta Thunberg?” The original saying, attributed by noted pro-life femcel Irulan Corrino to (who else?) Muad’dib, is, of course, “God created Arrakis to train the faithful.” To Irulan’s immortalization of her husband’s observation, I add:
Must Art Be Good?
For much of the Early Modern period the French were, to most tastes, not at good at playwrighting as the English. This was not because France lacked talented people in its theaters and its literary culture; there were Racine, Molière, and Corneille, to name just a few. The problem was, rather, one of standards being set at the cultural level, especially at the level of the elite culture; French playwrights were still expected to adhere to certain “unities” that artificially constrained things like time and setting, whereas in English theater Shakespeare and essentially all playwrights after him, as well as some before him, had exuberantly dispensed with the unities and with the absolutist, prescriptive attitude towards “good” narrative that they represented. Some playwrights, especially Molière, occasionally mocked the unities, but the fact that they had to be responded to in the first place constrained the dramatic tradition in the French language for well over a hundred years, even as the language and the Parisian literary class that spoke it exploded with creativity in other genres.
Today we can look back on the unities, laugh, and mourn what could have been in terms of French theater in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It is easy, however, to get complacent about this. The truth is that current artistic production, too, has rules for good art, especially good narrative art, that seem objective to us most of the time but are in fact just as culture-bound as were the unities.
Unkillable Grief Monsters
Of late I have been getting very into the television show Yellowjackets, and also into the Locked Tomb books by Tamsyn Muir. Or perhaps it is more accurate to say that I have been into the books for a while and have only recently discovered the program, but I am currently getting similar things out of them. Both of these are series that assess grief very openly and in great emotional and narrative detail. The overtly fantastical setting of The Locked Tomb is built, cosmologically, on grief (for loved ones, for the natural world, for human societies), and in the superficially more normal but still demon-haunted world of Yellowjackets grief is the only thing that gives the relationships between some of the characters their longevity and meaning.
“Anxious Not to Appear Unhappy”; or, Why Mansfield Park Is the Austen Novel One Never Knew One Needed
So-called “classic” art and literature comes into and goes out of fashion just as do popular culture trends. For most of the twentieth century Edward Elgar was considered a fundamentally unserious composer; today he has reentered the classical concert repertoire. Johann Sebastian Bach, unbelievably, went through the same rehabilitation in the early nineteenth century. Renaissance castigation of High Medieval art has gradually over the past several centuries given way to appreciation of that art’s numinous aspects. Post-World War II horror at Victorian architecture and interior design, as seen for instance in Shirley Jackson’s novels, seems itself quaint and dated today. In literature, too, we see such long-term trends. To the end of understanding why certain books spend decades or centuries in or out of favor, I recently read the Jane Austen novel Mansfield Park. For many years Mansfield Park was considered a contender for Austen’s best novel; today it is widely seen as her worst.