Being Wrong - Kathryn Schulz [164]
This relationship between art and error can be subtle. When you are reading Dr. Seuss to your six-year-old, you probably aren’t thinking about the fundamental fallibility of humanity. In fact, until recently, artists (at least, Western artists) didn’t want you to think about this relationship. Their goal was to represent the world with as much verisimilitude as possible: to get you to mistake a representation for reality, or admire how nearly indistinguishable the two were—in other words, to paper over the gap between our minds and everything else.
But then modernism came along and changed all that. In dance, music, theater, literature, and the visual arts, the main cultural current shifted from trying to disguise art’s connection to error to trying to expose it. Art became interested in exploring its skewed relationship to reality and its status as representation—which is how the great Victorian novels of, say, George Eliot gave way to the modernist funhouses of Gertrude Stein, and the paintings of the realist Gustave Courbet gave way to the works of Picasso. Accompanying this increased interest in error was an increased suspicion of rightness, an ethos succinctly summarized by Tristan Tzara. Tzara was a Romanian poet who helped found Dadaism, a precursor to surrealism that emerged largely in reaction to the carnage of World War I. In one of his manifestos on the nature and obligations of art, Tzara implored his fellow artists, “Let us try for once not to be right.”
In an artistic culture where realism had reigned supreme for centuries, trying not to be right was a radical innovation. But if modernism marked a shift in how we think about art (and how we make it), it didn’t make any difference whatsoever to the nature of art itself. Whether you are trying to be right, like the realists, or trying not to be right, like the Dadaists, whether your medium is canvas or a urinal or the walls of a cave, the art you make will always be subjective and askew. Plato feared this fact, but no one who makes art can avoid it. If error is a kind of accidental stumbling into the gap between representation and reality, art is an intentional journey to the same place.
It’s not surprising, then, that artists often seem unusually aware of this gap, and unusually comfortable with its prevailing weather conditions of uncertainty and error. The most famous formulation of this relationship between art, doubt, and error comes from the Romantic poet John Keats. He had been talking over various matters with a friend, he wrote to his brothers in a letter in 1817, “and at once it struck me,”
what quality went to form a Man of Achievement especially in literature & which Shakespeare possessed so enormously—I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in un certainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.
Keats’s attitude toward uncertainty—and, for that matter, toward “fact & reason”—is not the common one. He embraced unknowability and fallibility, but not for the utilitarian purposes we saw in the last chapter. There, the point of embracing error was to curtail it—a kind of homeopathic remedy for wrongness. But Keats wasn’t interested in remedying wrongness. He recognized error and art as conjoined twins, born of the same place and vital to one another’s existence. In life as in linguistics, art is joined at the root to artificial—to the not-true, the un-real—just as a fiction is at once a creation and a falsehood.
Keats’s observation, while particularly famous, is not particularly unique. If you listen to artists talk about their craft, this concept of “negative capability”—the ability to live comfortably in the