What Art Knows

Louis Arnaud Reid wrote an essay called 'Feeling and Aesthetic Knowing' in 1976, which begins:

The Exclusiveness of Propositional Claims. The Western world and its education have been dominated by a prejudice about the nature of knowledge so powerful that it is hard to know how to begin to question it with any effect. The prejudice is, briefly, that all that can genuinely and properly be called "knowledge" can be adequately stated or expressed in true propositions for which sufficient reasons can be given. The prejudice is not in the positive claim that knowledge can be so stated and justified, but in its denial, implied in "all that can properly be called 'knowledge' " is of that type—i.e., nothing else can. Of course any philosopher who assumes this common view does not deny that there are other words claiming to be knowledge words. One "knows" a person or a color; one "knows" mugging to be wrong; one "knows" this symphony or this picture. But, except as far as those can be translated or analyzed into true propositional statements, they tend to be dismissed as mere "intuitions," "hunches," or sayings which ex- press feelings or emotions. Some attention has been given in our own time to "knowing how," but it is knowledge like science and mathematics which remains the paradigm of genuine knowledge. And this for a plain reason: the unchallengeable development and success of science and mathematics since the seventeenth century, the development of systematic conceptual thinking coupled with understanding and cognitive and technological mastery of the world of fact, of "what is the case."

This doesn't seem so very radical. He goes on to argue that affect is a mode of knowing: that 'the intuitions and feelings we have in these matters are cognitive experiences, and that they make knowledge claims' [12]

Feeling is not of course the whole of this knowing; to say that would once again be to abstract and isolate it. But it is an intrinsic part of knowing. In a moral situation, for example, perhaps someone may be in need and in dire distress. Compassion and help seem to be called for. What it is wise and right to do in that situation may require in- vestigation and understanding. A moral problem may often require a great deal of cool impersonal analysis—though done within a context which requires a cognitively intuitive feeling for the whole situation. But on the other side, one cannot be truly compassionate, one can- not even know what compassion is, without at some stage feeling it. The wisdom of compassionate action, its rightness and appropriateness in that particular situation, its instrumental values—these are matters of a partly intellectual judgment that may be required to "prove" the action right, so far as the term "proof" can be relevant here. But the intrinsic goodness of compassion must be felt (at some stage) in order to be known; it can never be shown by purely intellectual means, by "knowing about" compassion and its uses, by being able to make correct propositions about it. (A moral psychopath can do that.) There is a sense in which the intrinsic goodness of compassion must be tested "upon the pulses."

Where things get stickier, I'd say, is when he moves to the aesthetic. A fatal vagueness enters, cloaked as necessary brevity:

It is impossible in a short paper to do any justice to how feeling operates in our knowledge of the arts—one reason being because different arts are so different from one another. In reading a good novel, for instance, our attention seems almost "transparently" directed towards the characters, ideas, and events depicted and imagined. Our cognitive feelings are the feelings mainly of all that; and although of course the scenes are conveyed in the medium of skillfully chosen words, focal attention to the feeling of the words can be distracting. In reading poetry it is very different. Poetry, of course, is about things as felt by the poet, but the feeling for the spoken, sounding, rhythmical, dynamically directional quality of the word pattern is central to the poetic meaning. Yeats's poem "Never Give All the Heart" is about its title, but every sounding word of the poem makes its contribution to the passion and the bitterness of the poetic meaning.

We need more, here. It's not enough to say that what King Lear 'knows' is that 'life is sometimes heartbreakingly sad'. Reid's example of the novel describes the empathy a reader feels for the characters about whom she is reading; but empathy is a very limited sort of knowledge. What separates out better art from lesser art is that the better art knows more; is wiser, is more effectively and potently demonstrative. One of the things that interests me about this is that this knowledge is very often a separate quality from the technical or formal accomplishment. Frankenstein is a very clumsily written novel, in many ways; gauche and melodramatic and lunkishly plotted. Yet Frankenstein 'knows' something eloquent and important about science: about the psychological logic of scientific discovery, about the balance of ambition and payoff, unintended consequence and violence. There are plenty of other examples: the Harry Potter novels are derivative, slackly written and sprawly; but they know something so significant that they connect, expressively and genuinely, with millions of people: they know that school, when you're of school age, is much more than a place you go to get educated, that it's the arena for all your most intense dramas, interpersonal and personal.

Death of Charles the Bad, King of Navarre, 1387

"Charles the Bad, having fallen into such a state of decay that he could not make use of his limbs, consulted his physician, who ordered him to be wrapped up from head to foot, in a linen cloth impregnated with brandy, so that he might be enclosed in it to the very neck as in a sack. It was night when this remedy was administered. One of the female attendants of the palace, charged to sew up the cloth that contained the patient, having come to the neck, the fixed point where she was to finish her seam, made a knot according to custom; but as there was still remaining an end of thread, instead of cutting it as usual with scissors, she had recourse to the candle, which immediately set fire to the whole cloth. Being terrified, she ran away, and abandoned the king, who was thus burnt alive in his own palace. Other versions have his bed set alight by a coal escaping from a metal warming-pan."

I love how the dudes on the right of this image are calmly chatting away, and how unconcerned the dog looks. It's a little like a more extreme, Game-of-Thrones-era version of that painting in Auden's "Musée des Beaux Arts"

Supposed Brontë Photograph

This image has been doing the rounds, after being released to the public as a photograph of the Brontë sisters. Almost certainly it's not: in the Guardian, John Sutherland mocks the very idea. Of course we can't be adamant it's not. It is, for sure, three 19th-century females, which the Brontës also were; and the back of the image has the word 'Bell' written on it, which was the Brontë pseudonym. Since Emily died in 1848, Anne in 1849 and Charlotte in 1855, it would have had to be taken in the mid-1840s, which would mean it most likely would have been a daguerreotype. That's not impossible. Although the image revealed to the public is not a daguerreotype, but a paper photograph, it is true that after daguerreotypy went out of fashion in the 1860s older photos were sometimes re-photographed in newer media. (The image has something of the floaty silvery quality of a reproduced daguerreotype: the way the faces and hands seem like separate elements from the rest, as if superimposed; I'm not sure a later wet collodion image, a more nuanced process, would have isolated face and hands so starkly). Then there's the question of resemblance: do you think those three females look at all like the three women so famously, if clumsily, painted by Branwell?

This guy thinks so: here's his manipulation of the images using facial recognition software.

Spotting resemblance is always going to have an element of the subjective about it, and the manipulations recorded here strike me (subjectively) as pretty distorting: three blokes in drag. There are other problems with identifying the original photo with three not-well-off parson's daughters in the 1840s. The clothes, for example, are rich; especially the dress of the woman on the left. The fashion is more 1860s than 1840s. 'Bell' was, apart from being the Brontë nom-de-plume, a pretty common surname.

What else? Well, the woman on the left surely looks facially older than the other two: I'd peg her in her late 30s and the other two in their late teens (all three would need to be in their 20s for it to be the 1840s-era Brontës). That's subjective too, but we don't need to rely on the faces. The woman on the left is dressed quite differently to the other two: they are in simple button frocks, she in an expensive gown; they are unadorned, she is wearing hoop earrings and a necklace. This looks pretty comprehensively like a mother posing with her two daughters. I'd suggest the mother is wearing a wedding ring, but the image isn't clear enough to determine whether she is or not.

Still, though not echt Brontë, it's a lovely image. Full of marvellously humanising touches. You can just make out one spar of the frame used to hold the right girl's head still long enough for the lengthy exposures required by 1850s photography. Maybe she was the family fidget and so got her head clamped; although her sister's face, ever so slightly blurred, maybe could have done with being restrained. The book in the mother's hand probably is a Bible or a Book of Common Prayer.

Strange Adventures on Other Worlds

Cover art for Planet Stories, January 1954. I like to think it's an illustration to the classic story 'Her Futuristic Golf-Clubs of Terror'.

Dementors

If it weren't for the restrictions of copyright, I'd quite like to write a Grendel-style novel that retold the events of Harry Potter from the point of view of the Dementors. I mean, don't you wonder what the world looks like to them? How does it feel for them to consume the happiness of other beings? Do they experience the emotions they devour as happiness and joy? Might it be that this predation provides their only chance for happiness?

Imagine yourself a member of an intelligent, sentient species doomed to pass your life in sorrow and despair except when you are able to feast upon the happiness of others. What others? Why, these scurrying, diminutive creatures, who seem to spend all their energy and time fighting amongst themselves, trying to outwit and hurt one another, and who despite their gift of joy are so frequently sad and self-obsessed. They have the happiness which you yourself have been denied. Do they deserve it? What is it about their behaviour, their manifest selfishnesses and carelessnesses and violences that leads you to think they do?

No: they are better off without their happiness, for then they at least lose their frantic restlessness and become calm. And why should you live your life in misery when so much happiness is scattered around, unnoticed and unappreciated, waiting for you to harvest it?

Gernsback's 'Radio Police Automaton' (1924)

What could possibly go wrong?

The tiny penile 'tear gas outlet' is an especially nice touch.

Ghost Man

Mid to late 1930s: from the same stable as the very popular 1933-34 Spanish SF magazine serial 'Los Vampiros del Aire'.

These 'Aerial Vampires' are a crime-fighting crew who use technology to be able to swoop down on criminals from above. They predate Batman by seven years.