A definition of the poetics of a given period is perfectly legitimate and can even be considered a useful tool for a deeper understanding of the works, but it is seldom enough to justify a work. A work can be considered «good» only if, on direct contact, it offers us something richer, more varied, more elusive and allusive. Every time we reread Ulysses we understand things that the mere enunciation of its poetics could not have told us, and this, in turn, helps us amplify and verify the enunciation of its poetics.
In the light of this second hypothesis, we can thus bring the possibility of a critical evaluation back within the current aesthetic horizon. In other words, even those works that seemed condemned to be a mere pretext for a cultural description, a structural understanding, a historical justification, can offer us a choice.
This second hypothesis is, in addition to being an alternative to the first one, an attempt to define the conditions which, while allowing for future changes in the very notion of art, can still make room for a critical discourse that has long been part of our culture.
To the skeptics, we can answer that it is not true that contemporary art tries maliciously to elude all possible evaluation; it does not mock the expectations of yesterday’s critic, who approaches the work with the best of intentions, with flair, and with a taste for the concrete, only to see it slip away along the tortuous path of intellec tual communication and other abstractions. This is not true. Even the most decidedly experimental works cannot cheat—if the critic is alert and ready.
But in order to be alert and ready, the critic must understand the direction that the notion of art is taking today, so that he will not waste his time looking for «lyrical expressions of feeling» in works which are mostly concerned with giving a concrete, physical expression to a particular poetics and which deliberately exclude all emotional intrusions from their discourse.
And this is precisely why those works that investigate contemporary poetics have a validity that takes precedence over other critical processes: they make room for choice—provided this choice is not expected from the theoretical investigations of aesthetics, on which the very conditions of the choice rest, or from the investigations of cultural history, which are mostly concerned with the historical developments of both poetics and criteria of choice.
IX. The Structure of Bad Taste
Bad taste shares the same lot that Croce saw as characteristic of art: everybody knows what it is and how to detect and predicate it, but nobody knows how to define it. For this, it is often necessary to turn to the experts. the connoisseurs, people «with taste,» on the basis of whose behavior we can then define good or bad taste, in relation to particular cultural settings.
At times we recognize bad taste instinctively, in the irritation we feel when confronted by an obvious lack of proportion, or by something that seems out of place—a tactless remark (what we commonly know as a gaffe) or unjustified pomposity: «It was dynamic hatred and loathing, coming strong and black out of the unconsciousness. She heard his words in her unconscious self, consciously she was as if deafened, she paid no heed to them»; «Her subtle, feminine, demoniacal soul knew it well» (both examples courtesy of D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love). In all these cases, bad taste manifests itself as a lack of measure, a «measure» that is itself very difficult to define, since it varies from place to place and from ageto age.
On the other hand, it would be hard to find anything in worse taste than the funerary sculptures of the Cimitero Monumentale in Milan, or Forest Lawn in Los Angeles. And yet, these perfectly legitimate Canovian exercises, representing Pain, Pity, Forgetfulness, etc., can hardly be accused of lacking measure. Formally speaking, this is certainly not their problem. If lack of measure there is, it has nothing to do with the form of the object but rather with history or with circumstances: to imitate Canova in the middle of the twentieth century makes little sense, even though a representation of Pain cannot be considered out of place in a cemetery. What can be considered if not out of place at least tactless is the implicit prescription of the right attitude to assume in that particular circumstance. For the statue is essentially telling us how we should view a visit to somebody’s grave, thus leaving us little room for the individual expression of our own personal moods and feelings.
This last example leads us to another possible definition of bad taste, widely accepted, which does not seem to involve any immediate reference to measure, and pertains especially to art: the prefabrication and imposition of an effect.
German culture, maybe in an effort to exorcise a familiar ghost, has devoted particular attention to the study and definition of this phenomenon, for which it has invented a new category, that of Kitsch, so precise as to be nearly untranslatable and, as such, known by the same name in every language.’
A Stylistics of Kitsch
The sea whispers in the distance, and in the enchanted silence the wind gently ruffles the stiffened leaves. An opaque silken gown, embroidered with gold and ivory, flowed along her limbs, revealing a smooth sinuous neck swathed in fiery tresses. No light yet burned in Brunhilde’s solitary chamber; slender palmsrose out of precious Chinese vaseslike dark,fantastic shadows, in the midst of which flashed, white, the marmoreal bodies of ancient, ghostly statues. Barely visible, on the walls, lurked the subdued glimmer of goldframed paintings.
Brunhilde, her hands softly gliding over the keyboard of the piano at which she was seated, was lost in sweet reflection. Thus, music flowed in somber search, like veils of smoke rising out of incandescent ashes, frayed by the wind, swirling and soaring in fantastic tatters, away from the inessential flame. Slowly and majestically the melody rose, bursting into powerful accents, folding back onto itself with the pleading, enchanting, ineffablysweet voices of children and angelic choirs, whispering above nocturnal forests and solitary vales, ample, ardent, fraught with ancient steles, playing through forlorn rural cemeteries.
Clear meadows are thus disclosed, the slenderbodied games of spring, while autumn lurks behind an evil old hag seated under a shower of leaves. It will soon be winter; large bright angels, as tall as heaven above the snow, will bow over the listening shepherds and will sing about the wondrous child of Bethlehem.
A heavenly enchantment, full of the secrets of the holy Christmas, is thus woven around the wintry vale sunk in peaceful slumber, like the faraway song of a harp, estranged by the noise of day, like the secret of sadness singing of the divine origin. Outside, the nocturnal wind caresses the golden house with tender hands, and stars wander through the wintry night.
This passage is not merely a pastiche but a malicious collage by Walther Killy,2 consisting of six fragments from as many German authors: five renowned producers of literary pulp, plus an «outsider,» who I regret to say is none other than Rilke. As Killy points out, it is not easy to trace the composite origin of the passage, since the characteristic that is common to all six fragments is their desire to produce a sentimental effect, or rather, to offer it to the reader once it has already been exhausted, and duly packaged in such a way that its objective content (the wind at night? a girl at the piano? the birth of the Savior?) remains concealed behind its basic Stimmung, as a secondary concern.
The main intent here is to create a lyrical atmosphere. and in order to do so the authors use expressions that are already charged with poetic connotations, as well as random elements that already possess in themselves the power to excite emotions (the wind, the night, the sea). But this does not seem to be enough for the authors, who, obviously mistrusting the evocative power of each individual word, seem to have stuffed every expression with reiterations so as to protect the effect against any possible leak. Thus, the silence in which the sea whispers will be «enchanted,» and the hands of the wind, as if their tenderness weren’t enough, will «caress,» while the house above which the stars wander will be «golden.»
Killy also calls attention to the «fungibility» of the stimulus, its tendency to spread and grow all over the place—in other words, its redundancy. The passage he quotes has all the characteristics of the redundant message, in which one stimulus supports another by means of accumulation and repetition, since each individual stimulus, corroded by lyrical use, might need extra help to achieve the desired effect.
The verbs (whispers, flows, glides, wanders) contribute to stress the «liquidity» of the text (the condition of its lyricism), so that at every step one has a sense of the transience, the ephemerality of the effect, always on the point of dissolving in its own echo but never allowed to do so.
Killy cites the example of great poets who have occasionally felt the need to rely on lyrical evocation, even if (as in the case of Goethe) this meant grafting verse onto prose in order to suddenly reveal an
