When integrity belongs to a particular work, the work will communicate a moral sensation not through rhetoric or gesture, or anything that can be isolated within the work, but through the wholeness of the work, as if the vision of the artist (which is manifested by the talent but is shaped by, or rooted in, the soul) is given over for the audience to experience.
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One of my favorite artists, the painter Francis Bacon, would probably roll over in his grave if he knew that I regarded his work as moral. But what I mean is that the integrity of his work is convincing, sophisticated, and absolute.
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Because when I say ‘moral,’ in this context, I do not mean it as a legalism, but as a condition by which an integrity of the personality (and of the work) is maintained.
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Though I would not go so far as to say that an artist need consider themselves ‘moral’ in order to imbue their work with a moral reality and certitude.
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I think, for example, of Fra Angelico, Horace Pippin, Agnes Martin, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Emily Dickinson. Whose diligence and hiddenness I imagine was connected not only to their artistry, but to a morality that was inseparable from their artistry.
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For the position where we find Dedalus, by that novel’s end, is best described as a reaction to the more suffocating avenues by which the establishments of nation and religion would, during his time, fasten the individual in place; and does not indicate, I don’t think, that he has abandoned the vitality from which those establishments had once flourished (and now may have calcified). And so, to me, he is still the fictional model of an ideal that I’m conscious of when I contemplate historical persons, particularly artists.
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Which isn’t to say that Stephen Dedalus does not feel himself to be in harmony, for I think he does, and is (or anyway is inclined to be), but that the conclusion that readers sometimes extrapolate from that novel (that his disenchantment with Catholic Ireland, and his commitment to artistic pursuits, represent an extinguishing in him of the faith in its broader terms, and an embrace of a limitless moral freedom, or even an amorality) seems to me precipitous, and is, I think, an abbreviation of what should be a more robust and ambiguous understanding of his character.
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Though perhaps a better way of saying this is a soul that is recollected and tranquil, rather than ill at ease.
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And while it is true that these artistic and moral instincts (or complexes, or drives), which are so visible in Stephen Dedalus, can seem sometimes to conflict with each other, I don’t think they have to, or necessarily will. Not, anyway, in the individual whose soul is ordered, rather than disordered.
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That the name Stephen Dedalus suggests both the artistic (Daedalus, the artist of Greek myth) and the moral (Stephen, the first Christian martyr) speaks, I think, to a relationship between the two that is natural, if not inextricable.
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Though Joyce strikes a more enthusiastic tone than does Kant, speaking as he is through a character who is making an utterance with his entire personality (and which utterance that character has arrived at after the years of struggle and formation with which the novel is concerned), and not as a philosopher writing academically, in a mode of recollection or detachment.
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That statement from Dedalus is, to me, evocative of Kant’s categorical imperative: “Act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law.”
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Meaning, I suppose, that he is committing himself to the consequences of the knowledge that moments have no essence until we participate in them and imbue them with the aspect of our deeds; and that he, Stephen, will not be able to shirk or evade the responsibility for defining himself, even if he would like to (which does not seem to be the case, as he sounds joyful at the prospect of doing so).
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Even Stephen Dedalus, the religiously ambivalent protagonist of Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, recognizes the responsibility he has as an artist (if not as a believer) to inhabit each moment honestly. Thus he says, at that novel’s end, “Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.”
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So that while the tendency we might have to distract ourselves from, and numb ourselves to, the insistence of reality (and what it would reveal about our capacities and potentials) is understandable, to yield to that tendency is not commendable.
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Thus, anyone who, on reaching maturity, does not recognize how terrifying their own freedom can seem (and whose intelligence has not been impaired by an injury or a debilitating condition) is not sufficiently engaged with that freedom.
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In other words, the authentic individual recognizes that very little prevents them from establishing the record of their own personhood, through deeds that can range from the horrific and the murderous, to the lazy and uninspired, to the absurd and incoherent, to the holy or ‘good.’ And the responsibility that comes from that recognition can at times be overwhelming.
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Which is what Kierkegaard understood, and what he meant, I think, metaphorically, when he said, “Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.”
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Because in order to be in command of one’s humanity, as well as of one’s talent, one must recognize the power one has in the wielding of it. When I stand at the top of a cliff, and feel the gusting wind, and smell the sea air, I sense that nothing but my own volition prevents me from throwing myself off.
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What freedom really means for an artist (or what it ought to mean if it doesn’t) is closer to the existential conception of it, wherein every moment brings us to the precipice of its own nothingness, which produces in the authentic individual such a keen awareness of each moment’s potential that one could not be blamed for staggering or trembling before it.