Art that engages with the roughness of life
I was recalling some things I read in C.S. Lewis's autobiography Surprised by Joy (an excellent read). I came across his account of journeying with literature while exploring religion, and he wrote about a curious distinction between the more religious and less religious writers. I'm not sure how strongly people would agree with his observation, but in any case, that was his personal experience in figuring out what he thought of Christianity. One thing I think is for sure though, is that his observation probably doesn't hold up for art in the past few decades.
Here is what he said:
“All the books were beginning to turn against me. Indeed, I must have been blind as a bat not to have seen it long before, the ludicrous contradiction between my theory of life and my actual experiences as a reader. George MacDonald had done more to me than any other writer; of course it was a pity that he had that bee in his bonnet about Christianity. He was good in spite of it. Chesterton has more sense than all the other moderns put together; bating, of course, his Christianity. Johnson was one of the few authors whom I felt I could trust utterly; curiously enough, he had the same kink. Spenser and Milton by a strange coincidence had it too. Even among ancient authors the same paradox was to be found. The most religious (Plato, Aeschylus, Virgil) were clearly those on whom I could really feed. On the other hand, those writers who did not suffer from religion and with whom in theory my sympathy ought to have been complete—Shaw and Wells and Mill and Gibbon and Voltaire—all seemed a little thin; what as boys we called “tinny”. It wasn't that I didn't like them. They were all (especially Gibbon) entertaining; but hardly more. There seemed to be no depth in them. They were too simple. The roughness and density of life did not appear in their books.” —Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life
But to many Christians nowadays, the unspoken attitude is essentially that art is worldly—too close an association with a “godless world”—unless you're using the approved forms. Use the approved phrases. Even if you use approved lyrics, if your chords are too minor and your genre too alternative, are you being too dark? If you're filming, use the approved plots. Especially happy marriage movies and seamless recoveries from ill health.
Compare that to the increasing depth of the art that people appreciate today. Spencer Kornhaber wrote a fascinating commentary on the pop genre of music, which highlights this. Contrasting Katy Perry's 2010s Teenage Dream craze to today's Billboard Hot 100, he writes concerning the latter: "Almost nothing creates the sucrose high of Teenage Dream... The early-2010s strain of [pop] seemed like the height of irresistibility, and yet it’s mostly faded away. There are many reasons for that, but they can all be reduced to what Perry’s journey over the past decade has shown: Life and listening have become too complex for 2D." The despair in the world may be mounting. We can't know that for sure. But what's certain is that this despair is being increasingly expressed and assuaged through art—a reel of poetry on Instagram stories, a Lorde playlist radio on Spotify, even a delightfully serious meme page on Facebook. The 2010s pop may be a helpful distraction, but the art that really soars today is that which bleeds pathos and yields catharsis.
though, I think the reason for it is the increasing access to art (for both creators and consumers of art)
That is captured in a well-loved Advent carol (which I'm shamelessly already playing on repeat): “No more let sins and sorrows grow, not thorns infest the ground. He comes to make his blessings flow far as the curse is found; far as the curse is found.” A dominant idea here is that Jesus comes to overturn really bad stuff, and not just some of it, but all of it. It is so comprehensive, it gets in the cracks and cleans out all stains. Stains in the creation around us, and stains in the crevices of human hearts. Mental despair, systems of oppression, transnational crime, persistent famine, crushing diagnoses. He didn't clap us through afflictions when he was on earth. He addressed many of them in what he said (expressing many a woe) and what he did (healing the sick). Most importantly, he promised and secured the removal of them for our eternity.
That gives us all the reason we need to get our hands dirty, identifying and expressing the "roughness and density of life" in our creation and consumption of art. There is a depth of pain that casts a dark shadow over the world, and it is amply expressed in contemporary art. But there is an equal (or greater) depth of hope that promises redemption for all the cursed things we reckon with. Paul wrote in 2 Thessalonians 3 that God "loved us and by his grace gave us eternal encouragement and good hope". We do that hope injustice by filtering it through a helium balloon. Instead, we should identify the cursed gashes in our reality, and then rejoice at the fact that Jesus has bound them up and, as surely as can be, will heal them completely. And we can do that by listening/singing, reading/writing, and sharing memes/creating memes in a way that authentically laments pain and messiness, and then shares that phenomenal hope to its deepest measure.
- Spencer Kornhaber, "How Pop Music's Teenage Dream Ended" (The Atlantic, 2 September 2020)
- John Piper, "C. S. Lewis—Romantic, Rationalist, Likener, Evangelist: How Lewis’s Paths to Christ Shaped His Life and Ministry" in Seeing Beauty and Saying Beautifully (Crossway 2014)—for a taste of C.S. Lewis's beautiful expression.
