Ouch!

Oh, hi, grasshopper. Forgive the mundane interjection, but I listened to Tolstoy's "What is Art?" this weekend on my oft-traveled 6-hour automotive roundtrip between northern and southern Virginia, and I'm still reeling from the potential philosophical and practical implications of the numerous maverick paradigms set forth therein. I'm glad you've joined me here on my morning constitutional so that I can tell you all about it -- or at least so that I can provide you with a sort of verbal "memory dump" on the subject, since the Count's esthetic positions are so new to me that I have yet to assimilate them sufficiently for the purposes of passing them on intelligibly to grasshoppers such as yourself. Still, as Tolstoy was apparently the last person in the world to beat around the ideological bush (and indeed his own esthetic demands this clarity on his part, as we'll soon find out) I think I can hold forth without fear of outrageously misrepresenting the basic tenets of the Russian author's controversial (indeed, originally banned) publication of 1897. At any rate, it's a good hour's walk down this woodsy mountain here to the village below, so we'd better talk about something of educational relevance, if only so that I can feel like I'm giving you your philosophical money's worth here at this so-called Guru Village of mine.

Guru Village Grasshoppers of all ages will love the philosophically correct alpine environment of each of our five convenient locations in (ordinarily) peaceful Nepal. Ask about our "parents stay free plan" for young grasshoppers!

Speaking of which:

Tell your parents I'm sorry that I had to raise tuition rates again this fall, but the price of shipping schooling supplies to a mountain retreat such as this one is growing every year. True, we try to cut back by living as rustically as possible up here, eating nothing but various kinds of vegetable soups made by the school's dozen or so grasshoppers themselves and consumed quietly behind thatched walls by the light of a few equally homemade candles, but the village officials down below are always worried that we're going to "overdo it" in this rustic regard (especially considering the supposed "fire hazard" that they claim is implicit in such an arrangement) and in fact have only recently told us that we'll have to install fire alarms in every hut by January or risk losing our tax-exempt status in the Kingdom of Nepal! But then I'd better discuss this hot-button topic on a future morning constitutional, lest we arrive in the village below astride a disdainfully curveting high horse, only to realize in alighting thence that we've said nothing whatsoever about the topic of the day: namely, the arguably oddball theories of one Leo Peapicking Tolstoy.

Whoa! Slow down, grasshopper! This mountain here is what our friend Shakespeare likes to call a "steepy mount," so you'd better watch your step down these almost improbably rocky switchbacks. I'd have a lot of explaining to do to your parents if you ended up in the Nepal Community Hospital with a broken leg! I'd be like, "I'm sorry, Mr. and Mrs. Grasshopper, but I warned your son that this was a steepy mount! But would he listen to me? No! Who am I, after all? I'm just his guru!"

What's that, grasshopper? You kneel in abject abasement? (Sigh!) You kneel in nothing of the kind! Now, stand up, will you? ("Abject abasement," indeed!) You're going to ruin your school-supplied white robe (which is a quality cotton-weave garment, by the way, not a simple burlap sack like those provided at some of the chintzy rival schools in the area). Besides, as Page says to the overly penitent Ford in "The Merry Wives of Windsor" (a comic play by that aforementioned playwright of ours): "Be not as extreme in submission as in offence."

That's it, up you come. And now, about face! Forward, march!

Speaking of Shakespeare, would you believe that Tolstoy doesn't consider the Bard to have been a great artist?

I kid you not.

To the contrary, the author dismisses the playwright's present-day popularity as a sort of cachet-invested habit foisted upon elitists by agenda-driven critics, whose main role in the art world is to ridicule change while judging current would-be artistic productions strictly on the basis of what has been sanctioned in the past by the critic's previously conservative counterparts. Moreover, these elitists embrace such icons in bad faith because the Bard of Avon doesn't produce any "true art" at all.

But soft: I shall now provide you with Tolstoy's two principal litmus tests for a work of true art:

1) They should communicate strong and/or significant feelings(s) to the beholder (reader, listener, etc.): namely, the strong and/or significant feeling(s) that the artist themselves experienced during the creation of the work of art in question.

2) They must be accessible to "the People" without professional guidance, and not just to a segment of the "in" crowd that consists, for example, of the leisure class that reads the Sunday edition of The New York, London, (or Moscow) Times in bed.

Of course Tolstoy hadn't soured on Shakespeare alone in the realm of literary art. The author finds similar fault with the supposed artistic value of such chronologically and geographically diverse authors as Miguel Cervantes, Charles Dickens, Guy de Maupassant and Henrik Ibsen, all of whose work lacks the universal appeal that Tolstoy believes is necessary in a world that (to the Count at least) seems to be moving ever closer toward universal brotherhood.* In fact, for an author who believes that critics are superfluous and even dangerous to the cause of art, Tolstoy does a lot of categorical "panning" of artists in this book of his. Artists, nothing: He dismisses entire genres with the stroke of an indignant (if hilarious) pen, noting, for example, in the case of opera in chapter one:

"...that people do not converse in such a way as recitative and do not place themselves at fixed distances in a quartet, waving their arms to express their emotions, that nowhere except in theaters do people walk about in such a manner, in pairs, with tin foil halberds and in slippers; that no one ever gets angry in such a way or is affected in such a way or laughs in such a way or cries in such a way and that no one on earth can be moved by such performances. All this is beyond the possibility of doubt."

Yes, sir, Tolstoy, sir! (Did somebody say "curmudgeon"?)

A reader of this broadbrush indictment (or indeed a car-bound listener such as myself) could be forgiven for thinking that they had accidentally purchased a self-justificatory treatise on The Joys of Cultural Illiteracy by Billy Bob Thornton (an actor, incidentally, who is on record as sharing Leo's dim view of the Bard of Avon, evidently championing, instead, the pristinely uneducated redneck as a sort of noble savage whose uncommon horse sense would only be corrupted by a hoity-toity obsession with big words).

Slowly, grasshopper! Slowly! Remember all those forms I would have to fill out if you fell!

Right, so let's sum up, shall we? if only because I already hear car horns and bicycle bells below us, admonishing me that we have almost reached the urban goal of our morning constitutional.

As a guru, I'm obviously sympathetic to Tolstoy's call for universally relevant art based on the understanding that we are all part of the "brotherhood of man," as he calls it, which seems, in fact, to be a sort of "religion without walls" with the author, because he keeps harping on it throughout the book ("Brotherhood of Man" this, "Brotherhood of Man" that...) But I just can't see how Tolstoy, of all people (i.e., a man obviously familiar with wordcraft and above all with the horizon-expanding effects of a higher education) could claim that the very works of Shakespeare are not artistic, merely because they are not immediately transparent or understood by uneducated modern audiences. Speaking for myself, my greatest literary joys these days consist in reading the works of authors whom I did not understand 20 or 30 years ago. Nor did my initial failure to understand their works imply that the authors were not communicating real feelings to me -- only that the satellite dish of my mind was not yet powerful enough to pick up the relevant literary signals that they were putting out. (Don't tell me that we gurus have to stop reading authors like Franz Kafka until the day that the elderly checker players down at the Country Market can understand "The Trial"!)

I can only speculate on the reason for Tolstoy painting his theory of art with such a broad and curmudgeonly brush in his book called "What is Art?"

Perhaps, this serf-owning member of the nobility felt guilty for his wealthy status in class-divided Russia, and therefore, by way of atonement and recompense, he attributed a disproportionate insight to the largely uneducated People from which he felt so damningly alienated by his wealth and position, in the way that Rousseau was ready to uncritically idealize the "Noble Savage" a century earlier for their seeming ability to express the feelings that 18th-century society required that he suppress.

But I ask you, grasshopper: How can either of these philosophically minded authors logically deny (or at least give such emphatically short shrift to) the transformative power of the very education and worldliness that gave them these cross-cultural insights in the first place? Doesn't their position on these topics seem to involve a sort of "conflict of interest" on their part? Doesn't it seem condescending and presumptuous for such fantastically literate personages as these to suggest in effect that the "People" that they supposedly champion are better off, in a way, BECAUSE of their own lack of literacy? Wouldn't it be better to elevate these "People" to the educational point where they, too, can advisedly participate in discussions on crucial subjects like these rather than unilaterally developing philosophies for them that purport to find genius, insight, and true artistic feeling in the "have-not" environment itself?

Well, blast me if this isn't Main Street, dawg -- er, I mean grasshopper.

Oops! QUIET! Don't say anything. I think there's a black pheasant over there in the brush. Aww! Sorry, I didn't mean to startle you like that, but we Enlightened Ones are crazy about nature in all its forms (with a few common-sense exceptions, of course, but that's not important right now).

I'm only glad that my brother isn't with us. He'd be looking for his shotgun even as we speak. (What a scandal!) Then I'd have to spring into action in my most plaintively precise Indian accent:

"No, brother! Please to not pepper the wildlife with buckshot. It is not the way of the Magi!"

Still, I shouldn't be too hard on Ranji -- for such is the name of this evil twin of mine. (Oops. Did I just say "evil twin"?) He's had a hard life, after all, as he's been a bounden slave to the almighty dollar ever since his teenage years, making fistfuls of that commodity on an almost daily basis at one business deal after another! It must be quite nerve-wracking indeed, and, one need hardly add, quite spirit destroying -- so much so that it's even prevented him from finding time to send me so much as one pittance of the windfall that he's enjoyed all these years -- or rather that he's suffered from, what with him being a bounden slave to it and all.

But then again, we each have our own talents, grasshopper. Mama used to tell us, in her own charming Indian accent, of course: "Now, now, boys, please to stop beating each other upon your respective noggins in an unseemly battle for egotistic ascendancy. We all have our talents, after all. Brian here is the Enlightened One of the Family while Ranji has a very steady trigger finger indeed!"


Anyway, please forgive the somewhat disjointed exposition, but like I warned you back at the summit: This Tolstoy book blew some serious mind.

Speaking of which, it's a good thing I'm not a student any longer, because if I had to do a book report at this point on "What is Art?" by Tolstoy, the most emotionally honest thing I could do would be to turn in a one-page composition containing the following solitary exclamation:


OUCH!

Ouch! Our guru was never a man of many words (unless, of course, he was discussing the apparently involved philosophical rationale for his own taciturnity). Here we see his famous one-word book review in fourth grade for "What is Art?" by Leo Tolstoy, thereby giving the teacher to understand that he (Brian) was flummoxed by the work in question and that all further discussion of it was therefore pointless until the tea leaves of the new paradigms had steeped in the teapot of his mind. (What's that? I think I hear the kettle now! Come and get it, Bantam Books!)

Get it?

Any teacher worth their incense would see where I was coming from at once with that solitary "ouch" of mine. They'd realize immediately that I had been shocked by my reading of the Tolstoy thesis and that I'm not yet able to come to terms with it, and so, scorning to presumptuously write a pompous and empty-headed paper on the subject matter at hand, I had done the only emotionally and educationally honest thing that I could do, namely to submit a concise interjectional summary of the emotional state occasioned in me by the paradigms which, if we're to be fair about it, a young and thoughtful mind like mine must now be given time to digest.

I can see it now as the philosophically intuitive teacher reads my extremely short essay to the entire class and then cries:

"Well done, thou good and faithful!" (meaning me, of course).

My terse but emotionally honest composition would be recognized by the educational world for what it was: namely, the grade-schooler's equivalent of the widow's mite.

"Away with all your fancy report covers purchased by your parents on your behalf at CVS Pharmacy; away with all your cannibalized re-renderings of encyclopedia articles on the subject at hand: This boy has told me more in one handwritten word about his truthful emotional reaction to reading Tolstoy than the rest of you lot have told me in a thousand typo-laden, grammatically problematic and very possibly plagiarized lines of 11-point Verdana!"

Of course, in reality, the teacher would probably just rap me on the knuckles with a ruler -- but then philosophers like myself do not look at the world through the rose-colored glasses of naive religious assumptions.

"Ouch?" says the teacher. "I'll show you 'ouch'! We'll give you a good reason now to say 'ouch'!"

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*Universal brotherhood, indeed. Little did he realize how far short the bloody 20th-century would fall from this admittedly noble desideratum of his! Return to Asterisk