[BLOG-LIKE POSTING] What to Do When Flawed People Make Flawless Art

[rfmcdonald]

I
The Jews, who in ancient times the prophets slew,
Were there when on the cross Christ died in blood;
Scoffers and hangmen they together stood
As Zion's crimes their celebrations drew.

The above paragraph is taken from Émile Nelligan's poem "The Deicides," which continues on for seven more stanzas divided into two sections of four stanzas each in much this tone. His poem 'The Antique Dealer" deals with an Algerian Jewish antique dealer whose shortsighted greed causes him to lose everything.



I was somewhat surprised by the anti-Semitism included in Nelligan's oeuvre; but then, anti-Semitism was common in Québec, well into the 1930s. It was a natural result of the dominance of an ultraconservative Catholic Church opposed to modernity and liberalism in all of its forms, and what could be more modern and liberal than a prosperous and liberated urban Jewish community? Not that Québec was uniquely anti-Semitic, as Esther Delisles argued, not by any means; the Christie Pits riot in Toronto was as bad as anything else in Canada. It's not surprising, on further consideration, that Nelligan was part of French Canadian society down to the unfortunate details, only sad.

This issue raises an interesting question: What do you do when artists you like believe in morally dubious things? What do you do when these beliefs infiltrate the artist's oeuvre? Can you still enjoy them? Must you reject them, in part or in whole?

Five months ago, Jonathan Edelstein considered the question of the Nobel Prize-winning Portuguese writer José Saramago, who wrote (on the topic of Israeli policies in the Palestinian territories, as translated from the original in the Spanish El Pais by the Forward)

Intoxicated mentally by the messianic dream of a Greater Israel which will finally achieve the expansionist dreams of the most radical Zionism; contaminated by the monstrous and rooted 'certitude' that in this catastrophic and absurd world there exists a people chosen by God and that, consequently, all the actions of an obsessive, psychological and pathologically exclusivist racism are justified; educated and trained in the idea that any suffering that has been inflicted, or is being inflicted, or will be inflicted on everyone else, especially the Palestinians, will always be inferior to that which they themselves suffered in the Holocaust, the Jews endlessly scratch their own wound to keep it bleeding, to make it incurable, and they show it to the world as if it were a banner. Israel seizes hold of the terrible words of God in Deuteronomy: 'Vengeance is mine, and I will be repaid.' Israel wants all of us to feel guilty, directly or indirectly, for the horrors of the Holocaust; Israel wants us to renounce the most elemental critical judgment and for us to transform ourselves into a docile echo of its will.

Yes, well. I don't think that he's necessarily anti-Semitic; I wrote that

[Saramago’s] view of politics and religion has (I’d say) been shaped by the Portuguese corporate state founded by Salazar, in which the Roman Catholic Church was rather spectacularly hegemonic. Anti-clericalism is quite common in like situations, and from there, a generalized opposition to the idea of forming a state based on religion.

And if you're hostile to a particular religion, why not be exceptionally hostile to that religion's source? Not that this makes Saramago's argument any the less blatantly and senselessly offensive, or ultimately futile.

Last month, while shelving I came across Saramago's The Stone Raft, describing the evolution produced by the detachment of the Iberian peninsula from Europe at the Pyrenees (and Gibraltar). It was a fantastic book, and only after I finished did his inclement words above really influence me.



A suggestion, to be debated: It is only relevant what bad an artist is believed to have committed or supported only if it generally infects the oeuvre, or if it is sufficiently extreme.

Thoughts?