The Eye of the Beholder

One of the few phrases I know in Latin is the aphorism, De gustibus non est disputandum:  There’s no accounting for tastes.  What it conveys goes double in the postmodern age with its deconstructionist foundations.  How could anyone even think of suggesting that there might be standards of, say, judging one work of art as better than another?  Someone I know told me that in certain art museums in New York City the way to get one’s paintings displayed is to be a friend of those who make the decisions.  After all, no one can complain that a given work is inferior to another that might have been hung.

In 1968 I had the privilege of viewing a one-man show of the works of American painter Roger Vail.  After I had spent some time with his paintings I told him I thought all of them were good, but that some were better than others, and also that I wouldn’t want some of the best ones hanging in my living room.  Then I asked him why that was.  He told me, “The important thing is that a painting affect you strongly, whether you like it or not.  If you walk by one, shrug and move on to the next one, it probably isn’t very good.”

Two years later, at my preliminary doctoral oral exam, the highly placed scholar John S. Brushwood led me directly into a trap and sprang it.  My job was to defend my scholarship on the Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes, and Brushwood asked, “Do you think Fuentes has written a good novel?”

Taking the bait, I glibly responded, “Yes, I think La región más transparente (Where the Air Is Clear) is a good novel, and La muerte de Artemio Cruz (The Death of Artemio Cruz) is an excellent one.”

“On what basis do you make that judgment?”  Caught like a rat in a trap.  Fortunately, I remembered that conversation with Vail, and I applied it to the case at hand.  I pointed out that I wasn’t the only one to feel as I did about those works.  Many scholars who were well established in the field felt the same way—including Brushwood himself, according to a chapter in one of his books.  Then I got into trouble by going off on a tangent, but Raymond Souza, my advisor, rescued me before I sank past my nostrils in the quicksand.

Some would say it’s like that infinitely long stack of turtles on top of which stands the earth.  In other words, on what basis can we possibly say who are the best scholars in a given field?  Who gave us the right to make that judgment?  And so on ad infinitum.  (That’s another of my Latin phrases.)

At some point, though, it has to do with what a majority of people in a given field think of each other and one another’s judgment.  I don’t know of anyone who would seriously claim that a painting by the average (there’s that judgment thing again) backyard artist can be judged to be just as good as one of Rubens’s masterpieces.  Why?  Well, when I look at the former I see paint that has been applied more or less skillfully to a canvas.  When I look at that Rubens I see something that seems alive.

In fact, in the latter years of my teaching career I found myself telling my classes that a true work of art in any genre gives an intelligent, experienced viewer the impression that it belongs in the world—that the world would be deprived of something essential if it were removed.  A homely example is the Eiffel Tower.  It hasn’t been there terribly long relative to the long history of Paris, but we simply can’t imagine Paris without it.  And what would happen to your mind if you were suddenly told that La Gioconda, the Mona Lisa, had never really existed, but was only a figment of your imagination?  It lives; it belongs to the world.

I lost a job at a prestigious college in Iowa in part because I had dared write a doctoral dissertation on a recent—and radical—Latin American novel.  I was informed that the majority of the faculty felt that no work of literature could be judged good until it had been around for a minimum of a hundred years.  Oh, right.  When the first part of Don Quixote came out in 1605, it immediately hit Spain like a bombshell, and a pirated edition came out in Lisbon two weeks later.  (That is a feat of marathon typesetting.)  Not long afterward, an ambassador came from China to request that Cervantes go there and teach Spanish to the Chinese, using Don Quixote as his textbook.

A more modern example is that of García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude.  When it hit the streets, it did so in Buenos Aires.  Legend says that Seymour Menton, a major scholar by anyone’s standards, called a friend and asked him to bring a copy to a conference in Caracas.  Menton locked himself in his room and read it, ignoring the people pounding on his door and begging for a chance to look at it.

There are standards of beauty built into the human unconscious, and we deny that to our peril.