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Aristotle. The Greeks: they keep the moderns and post-moderns honest.
C. Dale Young, in a recent article in the American Poetry Review, writes:
We live in a strange time, a time when the word accessible is a dirty word, used mostly to denigrate writers. We hear it used for other media as well. A movie is accessible but a film is Art. That folk melody is accessible but the Mahler piece based on it is difficult, is Art. I dare say that the word accessible is virtually never used in a positive manner. But buried in the word accessibility is the root word access, and in our Post-modern life, it appears to me that Art is not supposed to be a means of access but an object to be observed, studied, pondered. What many seem to admire in Art today, especially in the Literary Arts, is excess whether linguistic or emotional. But is there good reason for Art to be an access and not just an object? Is there not a moral imperative lurking behind almost every lasting work of Art?
In this APR essay, “The Veil of Accessibility,” Young close-reads Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, a book he found accessible in high school. After many subsequent readings, however, Young found the book to be complex, largely because there are two narrators—”the reason Heart of Darkness seems accessible, simple enough to be read by a high school student is the fact that the majority of the novella is not written in the voice of this unnamed narrator but in the voice of Marlowe.”
When Young writes, “the reason Heart of Darkness seems accessible,” we start to wonder if Young’s essay is a true defense of “the accessible.”
If you say, this door is not really a door, are you defending access?
If objects, or anything we attempt to grasp or objectify, are not really accessible, then perhaps the whole literary issue suffers from bad terminology; neither the espistomological debate nor the aesthetic debate is really about ”accessibility” at all—because we’re finally talking about a door within a door within a door…
Young doesn’t treat this; he plows dutifully ahead, turning his attention now to poetry:
Both Frank O’Hara and Kenneth Koch have been praised and lauded, but they have both been equally savaged by critics over time. Both are considered “accessible,” the term used almost exclusively as a way to say their work is slight. But is their work slight?
The obvious follows: O’Hara’s two poems, “Ave Maria” and “Poem” (Lana Turner Has Collapsed!), and Koch’s “One Train May Hide Another,” are found to be poems which only seem accessible, after Young lifts the veil for us.
But isn’t this ass-backwards? If one lifts the veil to reveal inaccessibility? Isn’t Young guilty of arguing against his stated thesis?
Young does a very close-reading of O’Hara’s two poems, but one mostly concerned with technical aspects of person and voice. One might call this a discussion of “access”—or not. It depends on whether we are talking about a door, or a door-within-a-door.
Despite the length and the ambition of the piece, Young doesn’t really say anything about these poems that we don’t already know. He offers a personal anecdote, (one he calls “embarrassing,”) on O’Hara’s Lunch poem, ”Ave Maria,” and we have to wonder, finally, does C. Dale Young intend his homosexual anecdote of “Ave Maria,” and his close-readings of these New York School poems to make these poems more “accessible,” or less, especially since he likes these poems and seems to agree that “accessible” is bad? It’s hard to tell.
Thank goodness Young mentions a classical author so we get a respite from modernist confusion and ambiguity:
In his Rhetoric, Aristotle discusses the fact that speech can produce persuasion either through the character of the speaker, the emotional state of the listener, or the argument itself. He goes on to argue that the most potent arguments, the most convincing, are ones in which the speaker presents material in a way that prompts the listener to come to the issue “as if on their own.” That is, an argument proved indirectly is more effective than an argument proved directly. If a speaker simply states the view he wants the listener to believe, that view can be too easily ignored by a listener (who does not share the speaker’s view). This is exactly why Aristotle believed that Poetry (and I would argue to include all of Literature) can be among the most powerful means of making an argument.
Now we are getting somewhere. A similar argument is found in Poe: the heresy of the didactic.
In both Poe and Aristotle we have a rather common sense, psycho-aesthetic argument, one that nicely side-steps the whole impossible issue of “accessible” v. “difficult,” in which Young flounders—even as he writes a very entertaining article.
We don’t want to surrender to a shallow sort of ‘content-only’ reading of “Ave Maria,” but it does makes us wonder how much the meaning of a poem needs to be put on the table when one discusses a topic like ”accessibility.”
O’Hara’s ”Ave Maria,” which Young quotes in full, would seem to be a celebration of sexual predation, using adolescent boredom and family hatred as a cover, with a little TV and movie metaphor thrown in. Young seems to imply that this content has a lot to do with the poem’s “accessibility” but has little to do with the poem’s accessibility as a work of art—the latter depending on O’Hara’s artistry and indirection.
To repeat what Young wrote at the beginning of his essay:
In our Post-modern life, it appears to me that Art is not supposed to be a means of access but an object to be observed, studied, pondered. What many seem to admire in Art today, especially in the Literary Arts, is excess whether linguistic or emotional. But is there good reason for Art to be an access and not just an object? Is there not a moral imperative lurking behind almost every lasting work of Art?
Young is linking “a moral” with “access” in art, and perhaps he is correct to do so—though this raises an interesting question: When we speak of “accessibility,” we need to ask the question, “Access to what?”
Would it be merely a low-brow response to greet the moral meaning of “Ave Maria” with moral indignation?
Is this what happens when accessibility in art gets linked to easy moral judgments?
Young doesn’t touch on this at all, part of the whole ambiguity of his essay’s approach: is Young defining accessibility? Is he defending it? Or is he mistreating it, as he claims everyone else does?
When Young writes that “Art is not supposed to be a means of access but an object to be observed, studied, pondered,” is he aware that a pebble is not accessible as part of its nature, while a beautiful palace, as part of its nature, is?
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Image may be NSFW.Clik here to view.
