The commercialisation of modern life has been the subject of lamentation ever since it was first remarked upon, and ambitious theories – commodity fetishism, conspicuous consumption, the affluent society, and countless lesser attempts19 – have arisen from the natural revulsion that intellectuals feel towards the ‘getting and spending’ of others. But something new seems to be at work in the contemporary world – a process that is eating away the very heart of social life, not merely by putting salesmanship in place of moral virtue, but by putting everything – virtue included – on sale. The cynic, said Oscar Wilde, is the one who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. And in a letter to Lord Alfred Douglas he described sentimentality as ‘the bank holiday of cynicism’.20 Wilde’s quips tend to be more exciting than truthful. These, however, are exact. Cynicism and sentimentality are two ways in which things of value are demoted to things with a price.
To understand this we need to make a distinction that was first hinted at by Coleridge: the distinction between fantasy and imagination.21 Both fantasy and imagination concern unrealities; but while the unrealities of fantasy penetrate and pollute the world, those of the imagination exist in a world of their own, in which we wander freely and in full knowledge of the really real.
An example will establish what I mean. A morbid person may reflect endlessly on death and suffering. The image of agony is often before his mind. There is born in him the desire to witness what he so vividly imagines. At the same time fear, sympathy and the respect for human life make his desire abhorrent to him. He is not a torturer or a murderer, nor would he frequent the dark places where torture and murder occur. He looks instead for surrogates: the lifelike waxworks of the ‘chamber of horrors’, the realistic deaths and dismemberments in the films of Quentin Tarantino, and then – at the limit – the ‘snuff movie in which actual death is delivered but from another sphere, removed from all prevention. This process shows fantasy at work. The fantasy object intrudes into the real world: it is an unreal object of an actual desire, condemned to unreality by the mental prohibition that also summons it. The fantasy object must be as realistic as possible, in order to provide the surrogate for which the subject craves. Fantasy covets the gross, the explicit, the no-holds-barred display of the unobtainable; and in the crisis of display the unobtainable is vicariously obtained.
Hard-core pornography provides another instance. Indeed, modern society abounds in fantasy objects, since the realistic image, in photograph, cinema and TV screen, offers surrogate fulfilment to all our forbidden desires, thereby permitting them. A fantasy desire seeks neither a literary description, nor a delicate painting of its object, but a simulacrum – the nearest alternative to the thing itself. It eschews style and convention, since these impede the building of the surrogate, and veil it in thought. The ideal fantasy is perfectly realised, and perfectly unreal – an imaginary object which leaves nothing to the imagination. Advertisements trade in such objects, and they float in the background of modern life, a chorus of disconsolate ghosts. Observe the eager queue at Madame Tussaud’s, the waxwork museum in London, and you will understood how ubiquitous is the force of fantasy, and how easily satisfied. No effort of the imagination is required to understand a wax-work. It stands amid the wash of easy sentiment, and is never corroded. It is the paradigm fantasy object: absolutely lifelike, and absolutely dead. Through the work of art, by contrast, we encounter a world of real, vulnerable and living people, which we can enter only by an effort of the imagination, and where we, like they, are on trial. (Hence there are no comparable queues outside the National Gallery.)
The matter of imagination is not realised but represented; it comes to us, as a rule, heavily masked by thought, and in no sense is it a surrogate, standing in place of the unobtainable. On the contrary, it is deliberately placed at a distance, in a world of its own. The obvious examples of this – theatre and painting – tell us also that convention, framing and restraint are integral to the imaginative process. We enter the painting only by recognising that the frame shuts out the world in which we stand. Convention and style are more important than realisation; and when a painter endows his image with a trompe-l’oeil reality, we question the result as tasteless or despise it as kitsch. In the theatre too, the action is not real but represented, and however realistic, stops short of realising those scenes which are the food of fantasy.
Hence in Greek tragedy the murders took place off stage, not in order to deny their emotional power, but in order to contain it within the domain of imagination – the domain where we wander freely, with our own interests and desires in abeyance. The Greeks well knew what our cinéastes have since discovered – that the portrayal of sex and violence is the natural object of fantasy, and slides of its own accord from realism to realisation. Hence it disrupts the work of the imagination, which engages our sympathies, but not our real desires.
What is represented in the theatre does not happen on the stage, nor anywhere else in the world that we inhabit. Nor do educated observers think otherwise. They perceive what is going on, and perceive it as imaginary. Coleridge described the posture of the reader (and therefore of the spectator in the theatre) as a ‘willing suspension of disbelief’.22 He should have written a ‘willing suspension of belief: all pleasure and emotion depend on knowing that the action on stage is unreal. And the spectators enter this unreality by an act of will, not in search of surrogates for their own desires, but in order to explore a world that is not their own.
Hence, although fantasy constantly intrudes on the real world, and gains its credentials from desire, it also undermines reality. The fantasy-ridden person has a diminished sense of the objectivity of his world, and of his own agency within it. The habit of pursuing the ‘realised unreal’ veils the really real, blocking out demands and difficulties. In fantasy the object of desire loses the ability to withhold itself. And since gratification through fantasy is without apparent cost, it is endlessly repeated; desire invades the world and cancels the world’s demands. The character of the fantasy object, moreover, is entirely dictated by the desire which seeks for it – the object is tailor-made, the perfect dummy, the walking talking Barbie-doll who does what I want since my wanting and her doing are one and the same.
Although the passions suffered in the theatre are imaginary, they are guided by a sense of reality. The passions of the imagination do not precede their object; they are responses to imagined situations, and evolve and develop as our understanding grows. They derive from the sympathy that we feel for our kind, and sympathy is critical – it wishes to know its object, to assess its worth, and not to waste its heart-beats undeservedly.
The contrast here can be easily seen in the distinction between pornography and erotic art. The pornographic image is designed both to arouse sexual appetite, and to provide it with a surrogate object. The girl encountered in the image is the object of my desire, miraculously offered on a plate, without the impediment of real existence, and slavishly obedient to the lust that she arouses. The girl in the erotic painting is not the object of my desire, but only of imaginary desires in an imaginary world. And in that world she is real and resistant, as much a person as any other, whose sexual favours must be purchased by risk, adventure and respect. Erotic art aims to prompt not real desire but a meditative sympathy with the desires of imagined beings. Hence erotic art, unlike pornography, may be nuptial, dignified and chaste, in the manner of a Titian Venus.
The emotions inspired by serious art belong to imagination, not to fantasy. And that is why it is often so difficult to describe them. In the normal case emotion depends upon belief – as fear depends upon the belief that I am in danger, and anger on the belief that I have been wronged. When belief is suspended, ordinary emotions lose their foundation. A desire that arises from an imaginative thought is not a real desire: and without real desire, there is no real emotion. I no more desire Othello not to murder Desdemona than I desire to leave the theatre, even though murder is, in this imaginary world, as terrible as murders really are. In such a case desire is not felt, but ‘entertained’, just as the thought of what is happening is not believed but held in suspension.
In a sense it is even wrong to say that it is I who feel grief over Desdemona’s fate. I imagine such a grief, and am drawn into sympathy with the thing that I imagine. We might say that here there is neither real object nor real feeling, but a response in imagination to an imagined scene. In fantasy, by contrast, there is a real feeling which fixes upon an unreal object, in order to gratify vicariously what cannot be gratified in fact.
Since imaginative emotions are responses, they are determined by their imaginary objects. They arise out of, and are controlled by, an understanding of the world. And to exercise this understanding is to take an interest in truth. The questions arise: are things really like that? Is it plausible? Is my response exaggerated? Am I being invited to feel what I should not feel? Such questions are the life of imagination, and also the death of fantasy, which withers as soon as its object is granted independent life or subjected to interrogation.
For similar reasons, we can say that ‘realisation’, the creation of a surrogate or simulacrum, is not the main aim of imaginative thought, and may even impede it. The imagination, governed as it is by a sense of reality, seeks condensation, suggestion, dramatic completeness. The absolute realisation of specific scenes is no part of the imaginative purpose, which is better served by convention than explicit imagery.
But although imagination is, in this way, informed by a sense of reality, it need not represent the world as it is. On the contrary – the imagination idealises, ennobles, embellishes and re-presents the world. And it does so in a believable way, since (paradoxically) we can suspend belief only in the presence of the believable. Aristotle made the point in the Poetics. Poetry, he argued, does not tolerate the improbable, but it can tolerate the impossible, provided the impossible is also believable (as Ovid’s impossible metamorphoses are believable).
The ennobling power of the imagination lies in this: that it re-orders the world, and re-orders our feelings in response to it. Fantasy, by contrast, is frequently degrading. For it begins from the premise of a given emotion, which it can neither improve nor criticise but only feed. It is a slave of the actual, and deals in forbidden goods. Where imagination offers glimpses of the sacred, fantasy offers sacrilege and profanation.
It is helpful here to revisit the oldest of religious controversies: that concerning idolatry. The idol is a mundane object mistaken for a god: in focusing our religious feelings on an idol we profane what is most sacred, namely the act of worship, which is our only reliable link with the transcendental. The emotional disorder involved in this has been beautifully conveyed by Poussin, in his painting of the Golden Calf (National Gallery, London). The foreground is dominated by the calf, raised on its pedestal. The idol is a glowing surrogate, life-like but dead, with the emphatic deadness of metal. Aaron gestures with priestly pride to his creation, while the people, drunk, helpless and in the grip of collective delusion, dance like brainless animals around this thing less sacred than themselves. In focusing on the calf their emotions are also out of focus – bewildered, diseased, gyrating in a void. In the distance, barely visible, is the figure of Moses, descending from Mount Sinai with the tables of the law: the abstract decrees of an abstract God, who can be understood through no earthly image but only through law. Moses casts the stone tablets to the ground, destroying thereby not the law but its earthly record. The contrast here is between the active work of imagination, which points to a God beyond the sensory world, and the passive force of fantasy, which creates its own god out of sensory desires. Every idol is also a sacrilege, since it causes us to focus the worship that is due to higher things on something lower than ourselves. Only by responding to what is higher than the human, do we become truly human.
The fear of sacrilege is an essential part of religion. And the reason for this should be apparent from what was said in Chapter 2. The central concern of every religion is the focus of human emotion – and especially of those emotions which sustain the community. There are certain things which can be properly confronted only through solemn rituals, whereby absent generations shore up our human frailty. One such thing is death. Our feelings veer away from death, since it seems to deny all that we are. But by focusing beyond the sensory world – the world in which death occurs – we deprive death of its sting. The threat of nothingness is averted, and the community re-forms itself, as the dead person, by means of the ritual, passes to a higher place among his kind. The idea of the sacred performs a vital role in this transition: it focuses emotion beyond the immediate fact, and so enables us both to overcome our fears and at the same time to confront what has happened. By focusing on sacred things, we give the human world its proper weight, and experience it completely. By focusing on profane things, we ruin what is sacred. We subject the world to our fears and foibles, and take a step back from the true community towards self-isolation.
A telling illustration of this is the ceremony of marriage. In the Christian religion marriage is a sacrament – in other words, a relation that can be completed only by God.23 Marriage is not a contract, but a vow before God, undertaken in the sacred presence. Bride and bridegroom consecrate their lives, and this consecration is a sacrifice: their lives are henceforth given to something higher than themselves, and the privations of fidelity, mutual aid and childbearing are undertaken for eternity.
The shift in perspective from the sacred to the secular view of human institutions naturally changed all that. The Enlightenment brought with it an attempt to remake the marriage bond as a contract for mutual benefit – if not quite ‘a contract for the mutual use of the sexual organs’, as Kant described it in the Lectures on Ethics. There followed a brave but brief attempt to rescue marriage from the market, through the propagation of heroic ideals of mutual support and sacrifice.24 But we now know that the long-term effect of secularisation has been the gradual erosion of marriage, as a distinct form of human commitment: in place of it has come the defeasible contract for mutual profit. God has no part in the arrangement, and solemnity is a state-sponsored sham. As a result the sacrificial aspect of marriage has disappeared: people no longer consecrate their lives through marriage, and discard their obligations just as soon as a better deal appears. Reflect on this, and what it means for the reproduction of the community, and you will see how valuable the idea of the sacred was, and how intimate is the connection, not only in etymology, but also in fact, between the sacred, the sacrificial and the consecrated.
In the religious ceremony of marriage, the words uttered by bride and groom have a supernatural power. Although they have been spoken by every couple who were ever joined by them, it is as though they are being spoken here and now for the first time. Like spells, they create what they describe, and the vow becomes an eternal echo of the frail and mortal voice that utters it. Deny the sacred presence and the focus shifts to a man and a woman, and the words between them are no longer vows but defeasible promises, which can be cancelled when the parties choose. The words then lose their solemnity, become commonplace, trite and stilted, like the pseudo-antique jargon in a legal document.
Max Weber wrote in this connection of the progressive ‘disenchantment’ – Entzauberung – of social life. Places, times and actions lose their holiness, the gods retreat from us, and our bonds are sealed by no higher force than law. And this is what we must expect when religion dies, and the common culture evaporates like a mist beneath the sun of reason. It is in just these circumstances, I have argued, that imagination acquires its modern role – the role of ennobling, spiritualising, re-presenting humanity as something higher than itself.
But the shift in focus which threatens religion can occur also in a disenchanted world. Humanity itself may be profaned, and will be profaned when fantasy takes charge of human dealings. The second commandment makes idolatry a sin; but it also warns us against more modern vices. For the surrogate human is as dangerous as the surrogate god, and the demeaning habit of fantasy erodes all higher feelings.
Pornography again illustrates what is at stake. The pornographic image is essentially de-personalising; its function is to ‘market’ sexual gratification, by attaching it to an impersonal surrogate. The focus is on the sexual act and the sexual organs, detached from any personal relationship. In other words, pornography effects a shift in focus – a shift downwards from the human person, the object of love and desire, to the human animal, the object of lustful fantasies – from the face which is you to the sex which is everyone. As in the case of idolatry, the shift in focus is also a profanation. By focusing on the wrong things we pollute and diminish the right things. In pornography, desire is detached from love, and attached to the mute machinery of sex. This is as much a profanation of erotic love as dancing around a golden calf is a profanation of divine worship.
As I have argued, fantasy replaces the real, resistant, objective world with a pliant surrogate. And it is important to see why this matters. Life in the actual world is difficult and embarrassing. Most of all is it difficult and embarrassing in our confrontation with other people who, by their very existence, make demands that we may be unwilling to meet. It requires a great force, a desire that fixes upon an individual, and sees that individual as unique and irreplaceable, if people are to make the sacrifices upon which the community depends for its longevity. It is far easier to take refuge in surrogates, which neither embarrass us nor resist our cravings. The habit grows of creating a compliant world of desire, in which the erotic force is dissipated and the needs of love denied.
Fantasies are private property, which I can dispose according to my will, with no answerability to the other. If they fill my mind in the act of love, then they constitute an abuse of the other, who has become the replaceable means to a self-regarding pleasure, rather than the object of an individualising desire. For the fantasist, therefore, the ideal partner is the rent-boy or the prostitute, whose purchasibility solves at once the moral problem presented by the existence of another person at the scene of sexual release. Being purchasable, the prostitute is exchangeable, and therefore not truly present in the moment of desire. She is the universal absence which fantasy fills with substitute goods.
The connection between pornography and prostitution is witnessed by etymology. The effect of pornographic fantasy is to ‘commodify’ the object of desire, and to replace love and its vestigial sacraments with the law of the market. This is the final disenchantment of the human world. When sex becomes a commodity, the most important sanctuary of human ideals becomes a market, and value is reduced to price.
Fantasies of violence have a similar function: they obliterate the human person, by enlarging the human body, until it fills the foreground of our thoughts. This too involves a malignant shift of focus, and this too is a profanation. By focusing on the tortured body, we degrade the embodied person. In both sex and death we confront the mystery of our incarnation; and the temptation is to shift our focus from the embodied soul to the disanimated body, from the irreplaceable source of value, to the repeatable and transferable routine.
A comparable shift of focus occurs in sentimentality. And sentimentality plays a central role in modern culture – it is the mask with which fantasy conceals its cynical self-regard.
Sentimental feeling is easy to confuse with the real thing, for, on the surface at least, they have the same object. The sentimental love of Judy and the real love of Judy are both directed towards Judy, and involve tender thoughts of which she is the subject. But this superficial similarity marks a deep difference. The real focus of my sentimental love is not Judy but me. For the sentimentalist it is not the object but the subject of emotion that is important. Real love focuses on the other: it is gladdened by his pleasure and grieved by his pain. The unreal love of the sentimentalist focuses on the self, and treats the pleasures and pains of its object only as an excuse for playing the role that most appeals to it. It may seem to grieve at the other’s sorrow, but it does not really grieve. For secretly sentimentalists welcome the sorrow that prompts their tears. It is another excuse for the noble gesture, another occasion to contemplate the image of a great-hearted self.
Hence the mark of sentimentality in art is a singular failure to observe. The critic F.R. Leavis has argued the point in a striking series of essays, taking apart the vast human pretence that lies at the heart of so much Victorian poetry – and of the lyrics of Tennyson in particular.25 The object of grief in Tennyson’s In Memoriam, for example, is only schematically identified: he is given no reality, no concretion, is quickly drowned by the flood of sentiment. Indeed, he hardly appears in the poem – for stanza upon stanza he has no definition, since the grieving poet stands too hugely between him and the light. The dead man has been shorn of all human reality, all rough contingency and imperfection; he flits in the shadow of the poet’s great emotion, a thing unobserved. A favourite dog might have done just as well: as in pornography, the object of sentimental feeling is substitutable, is indeed a substitute for himself, a reconstruction in fantasy from which the embarrassing individuality has been deleted. When Hallam finally enters, it is as a holiday companion, reclining in the grass with a flask of wine beside him, a figure of Arcadian dreams. All of which, of course, is another way of saying that the source of the emotion is not Hallam at all, but Tennyson. This is not to disparage the beautiful descriptions with which this poem abounds or to deny its technical mastery. But it is to imply that Tennyson’s evocations hide an emptiness of feeling – an emptiness revealed in language which protests too much that it feels.
Sentimentality and fantasy go hand in hand. For the object of sentimental emotion is, like a fantasy object, deprived of objective reality, made pliant to a subjective need, and roughly discarded when the going gets tough. He is, from the beginning, only an excuse for an emotion whose focus lies elsewhere, in the great drama of which the sentimentalist is the sole enduring hero. Hence the object of sentimental love is given no security, and will find himself quickly replaced in his lover’s affections when the script requires it. The sentimental lover of Judy pretends to acknowledge her value; but in fact he has assigned her a price.
Sentimentality, like fantasy, is at war with reality. It consumes our finite emotional energies in self-regarding ways and numbs us to the world of other people. It atrophies our sympathies, by guiding them into worn and easy channels, and so destroys not only our ability to feel, but also our ability to bring help where help is needed and to take risks on behalf of higher things. It may seem to project and endorse a vision of those higher things, to take on itself some of the ennobling function which is the imagination’s proper task. But the appearance is an illusion. The object of sentimental emotion is in fact dragged down by the feeling which makes use of it, made grubby and tawdry in the game of emotional exchange. Sentimentality is another form of profanation. While pornography puts our sexual appetites on sale, sentimentality trades in love and virtue. But the effect is the same – to deprive these higher things of all reality, either by cynically denying them, or by making them insubstantial, dream-like and schematic.
This returns us to the question of ‘poetry and belief’. When religion dies, I argued, the vision of man’s higher nature is conserved by art. But art cannot be a substitute for religion, nor does it fill the void that is left by faith. Works of the imagination do not provide us with doctrines, or recruit us to the religious life, and if they try to do these things we stand back from them in rightful suspicion. The imagination can show us what it is like to believe some doctrine, and what it is like to follow customs and rituals that may be strange to us and alien; and in doing so it can awaken sympathy for emotions, beliefs and ways of life that are not and could not be ours. But it does not impart these things or impose them as a moral norm. The aesthetic understanding is tolerant, expansive, open to all that awakens sympathy. It interrogates the world, not as religion interrogates, in order to sniff out heresy and error, but in order to spread itself in sympathy. True religious poetry, like that of George Herbert, can be appreciated by the unbeliever. For it conveys an emotion which the reader can imaginatively share. Indeed, the greatness of Herbert lies in the innocent sincerity with which he expresses his doubts, his waywardness, and his joyful reunion with his Saviour. We can all enter into these feelings: the poems make them real to us, objects of a human concern, and petitioners for sympathy. If we speak of the truthfulness of Herbert’s poems, we do not mean the truth of the religious doctrine that gave rise to them, but the sincerity with which they convey the religious drama. ‘Truth’ here means ‘truth to life’ – or rather, truth to the higher form of life which human beings manifest, when they live from sincere conviction.
A high culture may survive the religion that gave rise to it. But it cannot survive the triumph of fantasy, cynicism and sentimentality. For these re-focus our emotions. They cheapen our endeavours, by directing them away from what is serious, long-term and committed, towards what is immediate, effortless and for sale. A common culture dignifies people, by setting their desires and projects within an enduring context. It makes the spirit believable and commitment sincere, by providing the words, gestures, rituals and beliefs which moralise our actions. A high culture attempts to keep these things alive, by giving imaginative reality to the long-term view of things, and by setting us in the context of an imagined redemption.
But in the absence of a common culture the pursuit of meaning begins to appear strenuous, fruitless and absurd. From within the high culture there arises a spirit of repudiation, a desire, in D.H. Lawrence’s words, ‘to do dirt on life’. Every avenue to the spirit is sentimentalised, lest it should appear to make demands on us. And a cold-hearted cynicism begins to take hold of human speech. Art itself turns against the vestiges of culture, and morbid fantasies occupy the foreground of thought. Such is our situation. But it is a new situation, and one that our high culture has until now vigorously resisted. Indeed, the attempt to guard the sanctuary of sentiment against the salesman, and to shut the door in his face, is the true explanation of the most distinctive feature of modern culture – the movement in art, music and literature that we know as ‘modernism’.