Michael Curran Kitsch KITSCH Contents Dead civilization Capitalism’s style Effects of kitsch Novelty and nostalgia Sentimentality Clichés DEAD CIVILIZATION 1 Culture, civilization, kitsch First culture, then civilization, now kitsch. First myth, then poetry and prose, now cliché. At first tradition, next reason and imagination, now ingenuity and images. First the tribe, after that the state, last the borderless and atomizing market. A culture is soon crushed by a civilization, and a civilization is soon consumed by kitsch. For primitive peoples life drums a rhythm, for the civilized it sounds a melody, but for us it makes mere noise. And we just want to make it more and more raucous. We have declined through the ages of gold, silver, bronze and iron, and have at last reached the age of plastic, cheap, mass-made, characterless and toxic. ‘Egypt and Greece, good-bye, and good-bye, Rome.’ In a traditional culture society is a solid. In a civilization it is a liquid. But with us it is a gas. Each atom, loosed from its tight molecular bonds, jiggles with a febrile energy, rendering the whole volatile, unstable, ephemeral and thin. We are past the stage of the conquest of art by kitsch. Now kitsch itself is degenerating. Each year the cheaper, more crass, seductive and juvenile drives out what had been a bit less so. We are a long way beyond the age of mere decadence. 1 Michael Curran Kitsch In five hundred years the americas have hurtled through all the phases of history. In old times there were the rich cultures of its first peoples. Then came the civilization which beat them down. And now we see the triumph of the barren and mercenary kitsch which has hollowed it out. 2 The death of civilization Civilization is extinct. It died out in the middle of the twentieth century. But its embalmed corpse is still laid out respectfully in museums and concert halls, and is gaudily rouged and lit up by mass amusement. ‘It is,’ as Connolly wrote, ‘closing time in the gardens of the west.’ There has been no great novel since Céline and Faulkner, no great poem since Yeats, nor painting since Pollock, nor sculpture since Brancusi or Moore, nor building since Mies and Le Corbusier, nor science since Einstein and Heisenberg. Having put nature and art to the torch, the one decent thing we could do now is to throw ourselves on the pyre. We are gilded flies which buzz and blow on the offal of a necrotic organism. How cheerfully we live on, having killed civilization. ‘Is it with such insects as this,’ Cioran asked, ‘that a civilization so delicate and so complex must come to an end?’ Twelve thousand years of patient cultural evolution will soon be sucked dry by twelve billion frantic parasites. Yet when we have emptied it of its own beauty, and filled it with our own ugliness, it will seem more beautiful than ever. So when the human race soon wipes itself out, it will be finishing off a body which long ago lost its soul. The twentieth century made an end of civilization. And the twenty-first will make an end of nature. 3 We take in everything as kitsch Kitsch is the aesthetic of juvenile consumer capitalism. It is the mode both of all that it makes and of how it takes in all that it meets with. We have ceased to touch the world save through a greasy synthetic gauze. Even if what we experience is not kitsch, our experience of it is. Our looking turns art itself into kitsch. Kitsch is not a style of art. It is the one style in which everything presents itself to us now that art is dead. It has never been easier for anyone to be an artist, now that it is impossible for anyone to make real art. Kitsch, which promiscuously makes use of all styles, is now the one style that all of us embrace. 2 Michael Curran Kitsch 4 The idols of kitsch Kitsch is an imitation of an imitation. Every place on earth has now been imaged so many times, that it has waned to a hollow image of what it once so gloriously was. We have emptied the world of real imagination, and clotted it with hyperreal images. The saturation of likenesses has bleached both life and art, which are too thin to match the bright spectres projected by our devices. They have eaten up our dreams and memories, desires and vision. Mass society has turned art to a sham and the virginal earth to a wilderness of death. And we are glad to be rid of nature and art, since there was nothing in them to amuse us. We will swap the earth and our dear-bought civilization to gain one hour more of mindless fun. The world is now full to the brim with kitsch, as the seas will soon be overflowing with glutinous blobs of fluorescent jellyfish. The superb predators, which once awed the forest and savannah, will soon live on as mere trademarks to sell luxury junk. CAPITALISM’S STYLE 5 The style of capitalism In every society the economic base determines the cultural superstructure. But in capitalism it swallows it whole and spews out kitsch. Kitsch, like the capitalism that spawned it, is indestructible, since it can stay what it is while incorporating the most irreconcilable tendencies, rural nostalgia or citified chic, the sincere and the inauthentic, the morbid or the manic, levity or schmaltz, the homespun or the exotic, the folksy or the bombastic. And what is impossible to kill is sure to eat up all that is too good for it and more frail. Art was a vocation. Kitsch is big business. 6 Consumer kitsch Art gave us nothing that we wanted. Kitsch gives us all that we crave so as to goad us to keep on craving. We have lost the capacity to create. All we can do is consume. And what we consume are the second-hand copies of second-rate originals. 3 Michael Curran Kitsch We now have the wherewithal to gorge on the most costly things, but we have lost the will to make priceless ones. Force is harder to attain but easier to forge than form. So we are left with the restless fever of this outworn age. We run mad with our frenzy of consumption, and we feel that we are inspired by the fire of creation. All that we now have the strength for is a pacified levelling sterility or the huckster’s frantic hurry, which buys and sells but can’t create. An age of decline is not an age of exhaustion and stagnation but of manic activity. The spirit of the age shows up more in its advertisements than in its art. And foreign countries are now known more by their consumer brands than by their culture. These days it’s not beauty but advertisements that are the promise of happiness. An epoch makes nothing but kitsch, when consumers and not creators set its taste. In art the consumer is always wrong. 7 The city and the suburb Kitsch is the style of suburban happiness. Civilization was born in the city, and died in the suburbs. Most architecture is kitsch. It can’t copy nature, and so it naturally copies its own past. Most of the old world is not old enough, and most of the new world is not new enough. The old world imitates an older world, and the young world imitates these imitations and its own facsimiles of them. London or Paris are copies of old cities. And New York or Shanghai are copies of modern ones or of themselves. Each place will soon look the same as all the rest, and nothing like itself. 8 Global kitsch In the world market all styles are available for use, and all are mutations of kitsch. Art never grew to be universal or even cosmopolitan. But kitsch has fanned out all round the globe. It has proved to be the one international style. We are proud to be provincial replicas of spectral junk made in Los Angeles. The cities that were once the cultural capitals of the world are now the mere centres of kitsch, finance, fashion and advertising. 4 Michael Curran Kitsch Our hunger for travelling to exotic places will soon make all of them identical. In the past there was temporal continuity from age to age, but diversity from one place to the next. Now there has been a total rupture from all previous epochs, but a homogenization of locales. 9 High and low One of the chief tasks of galleries, orchestras and theatres is to give us permission to enjoy art as if it were kitsch, and to venerate kitsch as if it were art. We laud as benefactors those who drag down the high standards that hold in some field. People like going to see art more than the art itself. We heap some of our most scathing disparagement on the great achievements that we are least worthy of. Few things fill the common run of people with more contempt than great art, as few things fill them with more true veneration than cheap kitsch. What great souls we must have, to be able to look down as from a great height on things that are so far above us. High culture has ceased to spurn low culture. It now fawns on it and apes its winning ways to cadge some of its leavings. You can now tell the taste of one stratum of society from the next by how dear they pay for their kitsch. All that most of us aspire to is a more select gradation of it, be it the hushed urbanity of the boutique, or the flashy tat of the mall. When it costs a lot, we call it stylishness and elegance. When all are rich enough to get beauty, even the elite will make nothing but kitsch. 10 Kitsch and technology Civilization compounded technology with culture. And we have now subtracted civilization from technology. Our appliances have electrocuted the muses. ‘The machine,’ as Rilke wrote, ‘is a threat to all achievement.’ Our doltish fantasies and smart devices have devoured imagination. As civilization’s sun goes down, an imbecile neon twinkle fills our sky with its dazzle. And in our miraculous age of kitsch there will be no end of dazzlement, but a dearth of real wonder. 5 Michael Curran Kitsch We love the lucrative magic of technology but not the hard truths of science. And we wallow in the sickly sentiments of kitsch, but we spurn the exacting formality of art. It used to be our ethereal creeds that abstracted us from the real world. Now it’s our mundane devices. We laud as civilization the mass affluence which has drowned it. ‘The telephone is his test of civilization,’ Wilde wrote of the middle-class philistine, ‘and his wildest dreams of utopia do not rise beyond elevated railways and electric bells.’ We are not all artists, in spite of what maudlin people say. But technology makes each of us a curator of kitsch. 11 Political kitsch The public realm has at all times been theatrics. But each age fears that it is uniquely stagy, because it is irked by the tawdriness of its own histrionic style. Each kind of regime has prinked up its own style of prancing kitsch. Fascism made it colossal and belligerent, absolute kingship triumphal and ostentatious, and democracy syrupy and snivelling. Flags are patriotic kitsch. They are hoisted everywhere when the old conception of a country has been pulled down, while anthems sound a rousing requiem over its bones. We bow down to the empty symbol even as we do dirt on what it stands for. A country that has turned its back on its traditions is obliged to stage a constant round of noisy commemorative extravaganzas, with brass bands, bunting, tolling bells and tear-jerking orations. Civilization was for the few and for the long age. Kitsch, like democracy, is for the many and the jittering now. No wonder there is so much money to be made from it. Democracy, which we hail as the zenith of civilization, has marked its demise. Our unstoppable material and moral progress has put a stand to it. Art daunts us with its cold demanding dullness. Kitsch indulges us with a cosy democratic largesse. Kitsch is the sole contribution that democracy has made to art. 6 Michael Curran Kitsch It’s no longer the case that things happen twice, first as tragedy and then as farce. They are farce the first time they take place, and this is then repeated in ever more crass and gaudy forms. 12 Hunger for stories We read stories in the same way that we consume all the things that we hanker for. So avid are we for the next thrill, that we miss the wonders that are unrolling right in front of us. We nowadays consume the whole world through story, and stories urge us on to keep consuming. If you want to spruik anything, you have to package it as a narrative. Story is the form which is most characteristic of capitalism and bourgeois individualism. We love stories, since they rush us on from one episode to the next with no need to think, expecting to be surprised by some new twist. And we want to live in the same way. We delight in anecdotes, but we have lost the relish for art. All of us love stories, but few of us care for literature. We all love images, but few care for paintings. And all of us love a tune, but few love music. 13 Performance Every work now must be staged as a performance. And every performance exists to spark its instantaneous effect. Kitsch turns each event into a facetious or poignant story to be performed for mass entertainment. The audience corrupts everything. It clamours to be fed pap and then to be flattered for its fine taste. And it bows down to those who know how to court it most cloyingly. Each age has its own style of spectating as well as of creating. And the style of this age is at once hysterically fawning and yet transparently self-flattering. We learn at second-hand how to respond to performances from the responses that we have seen others make. The crowd must be trained how to clap, yell, whoop and whistle on cue. Performers have come to be stars now that makers have ceased to create. We have no more great playwrights, composers or painters. So we lionize entertainers, mimics, piano-players, 7 Michael Curran Kitsch divas, crooners, songsters, fiddlers, baton-twiddlers, directors, conservators and impresarios as if they were artists. Celebrity is a plastic fame, inane, broadcast, lucrative and anecdotal. It is the triumph of the life over the work, of media over art, of the mass over the elite, of personality over character, of publicity over privacy, of vulgarity over tact, and of commerce over creativity. Stardom is a kind of conspicuous insignificance. EFFECTS OF KITSCH 14 The immediacy of kitsch Art works by a slow revelation, kitsch meets with instant recognition. People spot and fall in love with the blatant charms of kitsch straight off. But they need to learn to make out the rigorous beauty of a work of art. And then they are as apt to resent it as they are to appreciate it. The art that appeals to us at once must be kitsch. We love what we can grasp or what grips us at first sight. Kitsch is naive in its form, but calculating in its effects. We take in art halfheartedly, but flock to kitsch in fads and crazes. Art is for the long ages, kitsch is for the crowded now. ‘Farewell, you infinitely slow works,’ as Valéry said in his adieu to the past. As Valéry remarked, all the world reads what all the world could write. We have Shakespeare, and we just leaf through newspapers. But we’ll make do with gold if we have to, when we can’t get our hands on dross. We have ceased to write holy books, but we churn out magazines and blogs. 15 Kitsch is on the side of life Kitsch is on the side of life. Art, like truth, is on its own side. All the stimulants of kitsch exist for the sake of life. But kitsch has reduced all life to simulation, fantasy and sham. Art and irony disintegrate the personality, kitsch and good faith make it whole. Kitsch is candid, art is self-aware. If we want to learn about art, we have to seek out works of art to teach us. But all the world is a school of kitsch in which we learn to mimic its cheap tricks. 8 Michael Curran Kitsch We used to need art so that we might not perish from the truth, as Nietzsche said. But now that we are immune to truth, all we need is kitsch. In kitsch story trumps thought, emotion trumps imagination, sentiment trumps form, personality trumps tradition, sincerity trumps honesty, fantasy trumps reality, and reality trumps truth. 16 Kitsch and the emotions Kitsch is coherent, art is at odds with itself, with its maker, and with the world. Art is dissonance, kitsch is harmony. When artists try to make it whole, they make it kitsch, as Eliot did in Four Quartets. Kitsch is emotionally callow but technically sophisticated. Kitsch is so congenial to us, because it works on the same lines as our unconscious. Imagination wells up from the depths of hell. Kitsch springs straight from the soul, which craves crass fun and thrills, but can flourish with no help from truth or beauty. When the heart was freed to ask for what it yearned for, kitsch was born. ‘All bad poetry,’ Wilde wrote, ‘springs from genuine feeling.’ By long cultivation we may learn to see the worth of what is real and great. But by some natural affinity we still choose what is saccharine, synthetic, phony, garish, slick and impermanent. Kitsch is the froth and effervescence of humanity drunk on its own power. 17 We love kitsch and are indifferent to art Art is a luxury, kitsch is a necessity. Kitsch is irresistible and indispensable. But art is unwanted and superfluous. Kitsch gives us what we think we want. Art gives us what it thinks we need. Art is indifferent to us, and we are indifferent to it. But we are so pleased with kitsch, because it makes us so pleased with ourselves. The inmost stirrings of the heart speak in the honeyed kitsch of cheap religion, cheap entertainment or cheap romance. Most people now would be bored and disgusted to be served up anything but kitsch. Kitsch yields us far more pleasure than art. Our famished hearts, which would be wearied by a poem, lick up the syrup of a pop lyric, and are moved to unseal their deepest moods in crude 9 Michael Curran Kitsch and trite scribblings. They brim with stale images, jellied sentimentalism and panting phantasms. So how could they be touched by anything but kitsch? Like Madame Bovary, we swoon at sensations more than art, from which we have to squeeze some use of our own. We welcome only those works that thrill us or amuse us or tell us how fine we are. 18 The vividness of kitsch, the blandness of art Art is cold and affectless. But kitsch is eager to please. The songs that heal our hearts are sure to be treacly, and the truths that warm them are sure to be lies. How bland and unaffecting a piece of art looks, when set alongside the blare and sensationalism of kitsch. Kitsch lights up every minute of our lives, as art and religion never did. Art to most people seemed like a dim shadow of life. Kitsch is brighter, more iridescent and more glamorous. All we wanted from art was that it should adorn and flatter life. And now we have found that kitsch does this far more lavishly and cheaply. Nothing that takes place in the real world can match the images that flash on our screens. Cultural life has never seemed more vibrant as now when there is nothing but moribund kitsch. 19 Art against beauty Kitsch makes things that are alluring and familiar as representations but repulsive as art. Modern artists made things that are brutal and unfaithful as representations but beautiful as art. The artist must dare to show us a beauty that we don’t yet have eyes for, and which we therefore see as ugliness. As Picasso said, ‘What is new, what is worth doing, can’t be recognized.’ Picturesque scenes catch the eye of bad painters, as poetic emotions win the hearts of bad poets. Artists are now loath to go to bed with beauty, for fear that they’ll wake up with kitsch. Kitsch is not ugliness but a sad aspiration to beauty. And the world is in love with kitsch, since it tells the world how lovely it is. We colour the grey vapidity of life with the glamorous vapidity of 10 Michael Curran Kitsch its depictions. Industry has made the world so hideous by overstuffing it with functional things, that we try to beautify our lives by ornamenting them with fancy trash. The real enemy of art is not ugliness but banality, as the real enemy of truth is not ignorance but conviction and common sense. In merely good paintings, such as Renoir’s, you have to squint to see the art for the prettiness. Kitsch has no deep form, and so it is free to find for itself a sleek surface. Kitsch is formula without form, sentimentality empty of real feeling, and images void of imagination. A rainbow is a sign of God’s lack of taste. 20 Cool, elegance, sublimity Real cool used to be the style of demotic nobility. But it has now been displaced by teenage kitsch, as elegance has been displaced by middle-aged kitsch. Pop songs epitomize the fantasies of adolescence. They are inventive but callow, up-to-date but outworn, frothy, arousing, disposable, faddish, immediately seductive and narcissistic. Elegance is kitsch in a lounge suit. Cool is kitsch in a tee-shirt. Fashion has such influence because our tastes are so pliant and our vanity is so constant. Young people confuse style with the latest fashion. And old people confuse style with the vogue that held sway when they were young. The sublime is now just the high style of kitsch. It is a sham which moves us far more than the real thing. The only way a piece of oratory can now soar is by cadging a few gaudy feathers from the great speechmakers of the past. Sober and prosaic America, as Tocqueville showed, is drunk on its own grandiloquence and tears. Its writers, though wedded to the colloquial, still lust for the sublime. 11 Michael Curran Kitsch NOVELTY AND NOSTALGIA 21 Kitsch and modernism After the rigorous experiments of modern art, kitsch has restored story to literature, figuration to painting, tonality to music, and reference to architecture. Is it any wonder then that we love kitsch and hate what is authentically modern? Art has at all times run more swiftly than beauty, as Cocteau said. But in the twentieth century it had to speed up so much to keep in the fore of kitsch, that it came to look graceless and unshapely, and left the public in the rear clutching its cute toys. Kitsch is candied romanticism. It is a confection made to please the sweet tooth of the masses. The victorian age was the vanguard of encroaching kitsch. And modernism was a doomed rearguard campaign against it. Modernism was not a crisis of representation. It was a last efflorescence of autonomous imagination, before consumerism turned the whole world to kitsch. But present day artists are in league with kitsch, and it pays them well for their collaboration. It’s no marvel so many of the great modernists were reactionaries in politics, as modernism was an aesthetic reaction against the progress of kitsch. Modernism gave art a shock treatment which killed the patient. Some artists turn out the sleek kitsch of another’s style, as Cocteau did Picasso’s. And some, such as Hemingway or T. S. Eliot, end by turning out the smug kitsch of their own. 22 Kitsch is up-to-date but not modern Kitsch is all that the modern world makes that is not modern. And that is by far the most of it. We race to keep up-to-date, but no one knows how to be modern. Artists now have neither the discipline to keep to the old ways nor the daring to shape what is new. Kitsch is the slick that was left coating the whole world when the wave of modernism went out. Nostalgia is the style of a society that has to keep on reinventing everything and yet can’t make anything new. Kitsch is the lurid corpse light given off by the mouldering cadaver of dead forms. 12 Michael Curran Kitsch Photography memorializes the sadness of time in a medium that claims to prevail against it. It replaces artistic form with gadgetry. And it replaces artistic feeling with sentimentality and selfcentredness. It paints the icons of our narcissism. The camera acted as the cannon of kitsch, which battered down the ramparts of art and authentic experience. We now pose and perform our lives for its eye. 23 Novelty and nostalgia Civilization has died at both ends. We pay no heed to the past, and we can make no work for the future. So we forge the kitsch that will fizzle for a day and go out. In kitsch’s hall of mirrors we divide our time between the latest fads and the hollowest nostalgia. Nostalgia now recalls us not to a richer and more authentic reality but to the artificial images of technicolour kitsch. We now dose ourselves with the stimulant of novelty and the soporific of nostalgia. We want to ride into the future cushioned by our cosy reveries, while our mouths drool to feast on the next sensation. People are mawkishly nostalgic in proportion to their rootless mobility. Kitsch is restlessly innovating, ceaselessly obsolescing, yet never original. We are in thrall to a nostalgia leached of tradition. And we hunger for novelty devoid of newness. We look forward to a future engineered by our sleek machines and upholstered with a twee cottage handicraft. We want all things fresh and all familiar. 24 Kitsch memories We are more stirred by truisms than by new concepts, and by revisiting one of our old haunts than by visiting a spot for the first time. We respond less to the thing as it is than to our own prior response to it. So we weep when we picture how we wept before. ‘We are moved,’ Pavese says, ‘because we were previously moved,’ or even because we were not, or because somebody else was. I melt at reminders of objects whose originals would leave me cold. 13 Michael Curran Kitsch Kitsch knows how to play on all our childhood memories. And our memories of childhood make up an anthology of kitsch. The aroma of the same dead flowers will delight us for the rest of our lives. Our tastes are fixed for life in early youth when we are most attuned to the hackneyed attractions of kitsch. A choice piece of kitsch marks each stage of our lives. And we recall our milestones by their associations with it. 25 Consumerist nostalgia Our consumerist nostalgia tells us that our memories are unique. But all we have now are the common memories of consumerist nostalgia. As Lampedusa said of his prince, he would be the last to have any unusual recollections. Our nostalgia makes us feel that we must be immortal. What other bark could lug this cargo of precious memories through till the end of time? Our past glories are the best guarantee of our future continuance. Even our nostalgia is now just a hunger for the junk of the day before yesterday. Its date grows shorter and shorter in this accelerated and forgetful world, where all is preserved and nothing is remembered. Kitsch is personally nostalgic but culturally amnesic. As our taste grows worse and worse, fashion dates more quickly, and the past seems to us intolerably gauche. 26 The death of tradition In our senescent age of forgetting, the old ways persist as an undead kitsch. They flatter us that we are preserving the past, while we are at work constructing our rootless and ruthless future. Having junked our age-old customs, we trump up fatuous replicas of our own and other cultures. So we cherish antiques, bibelots, christmas, dead ceremonies, reenactments, anniversaries, souvenirs, museums, revivals, eclectic bric-a-brac, marzipan monarchies, and all the scraps of heritage. We now refuse to be bound by tradition, but we keep up a yearly round of small personal routines to solemnize our consuming. 14 Michael Curran Kitsch Kitsch is the sickly sweet odour exuded by the corpse of a civilization which has been embalmed in sugar. Virgil was the prissy kitsch of Homer, as Rome was the pious kitsch of Greece. The New Testament was a kitsch rewriting of the Old. And post-modernism was the belated kitsch of modernism. A civilization lives by what it hands on, but ours will die by what it eats up. It is too exhausted to create anything, but it is hungry enough to devour everything. ‘To carry on a tradition,’ D. H. Lawrence points out, ‘you must add something to the tradition.’ SENTIMENTALITY 27 Sentimentality Mawkish people don’t claim to feel a real emotion, they really do feel a confected one. Sentimentalists tell us that we are all conjoined as one. The clear-sighted know that each of us is on our own. Optimists trust that we can slip our isolation and affirm our connectedness. But the disconsolate see that our connectedness won’t save us. Human victims touch us most poignantly when they are portrayed like animals, speechless, guiltless, bewildered, forgiving. But animals stir our tears most when they are shown to be like us, with an identity, a story and a name. Sentimentalists, like sycophants, are sickened by any sentimentality that smells unlike their own. Each age must concoct a new style of mawkishness to set it off from its predecessor’s, so that it won’t see it for what it is and recoil from it. Contemporary artists cook up an egalitarian schmaltz to cleanse their palate of the cloying chivalrous schmaltz of the victorians. It takes less skill to coax people to mimic what you feel than it does to move them by the real cause that made you feel. We weep not because we see the victims aching, but because we see the onlookers weeping. We are more touched by the tears of the bystanders than by the pangs of the sufferers. 28 Self-intoxicated sentimentality Those who purpose to affect others must first act as their own audience. So stirred are they by their own playing that they form a persuasive template for their real audience to follow. They intoxicate them by their own self-intoxication. 15 Michael Curran Kitsch People gaze on the anguish of others as a show to arouse their emotions. And then the spectacle of their own sensibility gets the better of them. They consume sentimentality in producing it, and produce it in consuming it. ‘The orator,’ Montaigne notes, ‘will be moved by the lilt of his own voice and by his feigned imagination. He will let himself be drawn in by the mood he is personating.’ His own excitement inflames him, and this brings his flow of words to the boil. An audience is electrified more by its own applause than by the skill of the performance. The roar of its own ovation bears it aloft. We are fooled by our own feigned moods, and warmed by frigid images. ‘Nothing tempts my tears like tears,’ Montaigne says, ‘not just real ones but tears of any kind, in feint or paint.’ ‘Tears in the reader only if there are tears in the writer,’ as Frost wrote. But they are both fake tears. We are disgusted by the stench of others’ mawkishness as much as we love to sniff the heady bouquet of our own. 29 Loss Sentimentalists swoon at the small and understated, at blanks and absences, erasures and their sad traces, at fractured, maimed and unfinished things, the overlooked, exile and displacement, at what they’ve lost and what they’ve dredged from the wreckage, the melancholy of failed crossings and failed connections, intersections of hurt and splendour, brief respites of grace and small redemptions, the grandeur of transcendence and the poignancy of not attaining it, frail affirmations, gaps and silences, the forlorn poetry of dates, maps and lists, the sadness of fine intentions, since they all miss their aim. We are in love with loss. We’ve lost others or we’ve lost our own selves. We’ve lost youthfulness and innocence. We have lost our roots. We’ve lost paradise. We have lost home or our faith and all the days that we have let slip away. Modernity is an elegy of loss and longing, and rupture is its pathos. Those who aim to seem modern try to pass off their nostalgia as a yearning for the new. 16 Michael Curran Kitsch 30 Cynical sentiment Sentimentality is the winner pretending to be a loser, the brutal pretending to be bruised by their own fine feelings, the uncaring pretending to care, the actorly repressing itself as the reticent, the dry-eyed squeezing out tears for their own and their viewers’ delectation. Cold-blooded creatures are fond of basking in the genial sun of sentimentality. Frigid hearts love to thaw out in tears, which veil their calculating and pit others to serve their behests. A callous sharper can, like Carroll’s walrus, weep thankful millstones for the nobleness of some sorry wretch whom he’s piously defrauding of half his life’s work. Hard hearts make their dinner on the sloppiest mush. A nice man may be a man of nasty ideas, as Swift said. But a nasty man is sure to be a man of mawkish ones. We justify the harm that we do our foes by calumniating them. And we hide the harm that we do our friends by our praise of them. We act kindly towards some people, so that we can think cruelly of them. And we think fondly of others, so as to hush our qualms while we’re cheating them. We are hardhearted and softheaded. Our maudlin and abject souls love underdogs, so long as they come out on top. 31 The swindle of sentimentality Sentimentalists don’t have emotions that they don’t wish to pay for, as Wilde claimed, they have emotions in the hope that they will be paid for them. They eke out a specious effect by converting an apparent worldly defeat to an affecting moral victory. So they gain power by feigning weakness, and milk a lost cause to make an unwarranted triumph of self-display. They are swindlers who manipulate their dupes by pretending to be at the mercy of their own emotions. These days you can garner a hoard of money or votes for your own use by assuring individualistic customers and electors that we are all in this together. Maudlin writers claim a reward of tears for their own by refusing to remunerate the characters that their tale has put through such trials. They make a show of conscripting art to fight for the good, but they just use a sham goodness to mock up a heart-warming tableau. Thus they win a cheap aesthetic potency by pretending to be overcome by the moral. 17 Michael Curran Kitsch 32 Sentimentality and irony Some writers use cynicism as a jet plush to set off the paste beads of their sentimentality. And some build up a large balance of irony and scoffing so as to have a long line of tearful credit on which to draw. Mawkishness thrives in dry and harsh climates. It flourishes both in the blathering perplexity of Beckett’s plays and in Hemingway’s swaggering tough guy self-pity. Self-mockers pretend to have mastered their emotions, maudlin souls pretend to have been mastered by them. It’s hard to tell which of the two is the more deceived by their own pose. Irony and sentimentality each work by indirection and disavowal. Beneath their guise of selfeffacement, both of them are arch and preening and crafty. Sentimentality is a sugared irony, or irony is soured pathos. Mawkish people amplify their sighs by battling to muffle them. But the sardonic deflate overblown fools with their sly hyperbole. 33 Restraint Sentimentalists pretend to feel less than they pretend to feel. The neophytes of pathos revel in excess, but its veterans revel in austerity and inarticulacy. They flaunt their tears most touchingly by their brave efforts to stem them, as David does in his threnody for Absalom. Our hearts melt at the sight of someone struggling courageously to get the better of a distress that they hardly feel. They seem to refuse to yield to a mood which they don’t quite feel, as a ruse to coax you to feel it in their stead. But they are then touched by the response that they make you feel. Maudlin and garrulous authors and eras resound with the babbling praise of silence. As Morley wrote of Carlyle’s clatter, ‘The whole of the golden Gospel of Silence is now effectively compressed in thirty-five volumes.’ Most of those who praise quietness mean other people’s. Actors have nothing to withhold, but have a trick of appearing to. They use a twofold chicanery, seeming to feel moods by seeming to suppress them. They don’t borrow a real face, but fashion a false depth. An actor ought to be a mask, as a dancer ought to be a marionette. The intelligence of stage actors is in their voice. The intelligence of film actors is in their face and body. 18 Michael Curran Kitsch CLICHÉS 34 Clichés Words are a wilderness, which we make a home in with our clichés. Some people’s stock opinions can be elicited as predictably as the saliva of Pavlov’s dogs. Speak the right words, and their lips will dribble the reflex formulas that you have heard each time before. The trunk of speech is now held up only by the clichés which are strangling it, and the sole fruit that it yields are catchphrases. We trust that we have mastered a theme or a style when we can fluently improvise its overworked idioms. I loathe others’ jargon and verbiage as much as I love my own. And I label their views as platitudes if they sound foreign to my own. But I’m dazzled by any that deviates an inch from the standard ones and that damns them as cant. Men and women are not more commonplace on supreme occasions, as Butler claimed. The supreme occasion just shows up how commonplace they were the whole time, as Eichmann made clear at his execution. People mention the brand names of the things they own with the same cosy sense of accomplishment that they yap about their friends. Are their possessions like friends, or are their friends like possessions? 35 Political clichés Men and women will always think and speak in stale phrases. And so each kind of regime has to manufacture the artificial ambience of accepted claptrap which will sustain it. In a dictatorial state the public talk in the cant of dictatorship. And in a democracy they talk in the cant of democracy. A depraved state is maintained by its murderous lies, a good state by its benign ones. The propaganda of tyrants appals us because it is so vile, while the fables of egalitarianism are so well-meaning that we take them to be true. A regime tries to make up for the banality of its concerns by the pomposity of its rhetoric. 19 Michael Curran Kitsch A democratic leader who thought and spoke in any form but platitudes and clichés would be lost. 36 Sloganeering Though we shut our hearts to principles, we keep up a passionate faith in our slogans. For if we let these go, how could we grasp or recall what it is that we are to believe? ‘The crowd,’ as Tocqueville wrote, ‘relinquishes the ideas it has been given more readily than the words it has learned.’ We need them to remind us of ideals which we don’t much care for, and to tidy a mangle of thoughts that fill our minds, so that we can digest the creamy and savoury slop we make of them. ‘Man,’ as Stevenson said, ‘is a creature who lives not upon bread alone, but principally by catchwords.’ We have our ideology to do our thinking for us, and our slogans to tell us what our ideology means. And in our consumer democracies brand names mean even more to us than slogans. Kitsch keeps up our faith in all the fine ideals that we know not to be true. And, as Dostoyevsky points out, ‘people can’t do without grand words.’ It’s those who have no feeling for language that are bewitched by brash slogans, pretentious titles, nomenclature, hackneyed tags, brand names and doggerel. And it’s those who scorn mere words that turn out to be their most egregious dupes. The most inspiriting orators, such as Lincoln, Kennedy or King, dealt from a thin pack of majestic and vacuous platitudes. And their bastard inheritors now strive to match their sonority by quoting a snatch or two from them. 37 Only craft can save us from the clichés of the heart All the commonplaces on a theme as commonplace as love are true. And all the truths on a theme as empty as death are commonplace. ‘All sensible talk about vitally important topics,’ Peirce says, ‘must be commonplace.’ A pop song will teach you as much about love as one of Shakespeare’s sonnets, though the sonnet will teach you a great deal more about the poetic mind. The heart speaks in the language of clichés. And how snugly our roomiest emotions fit into the threadbare suit of our starched opinions. Our liveliest sensations talk in the weariest tropes. But 20 Michael Curran Kitsch the worked-up passions of poets find the most durable words to voice what we feel. Only those who are not in love are free to craft a fresh discourse of desire. 38 Clichés old and new A traditional state is ballasted by its time-tried prejudices. But an innovative state is thrust on by its new-fangled prejudices, which it has to keep refurnishing and restocking. The herd lives its inherited truisms, but talks its new-minted ones. ‘Every generation,’ notes Thoreau, ‘laughs at the old fashions, but follows religiously the new.’ We keep venerable wizened clichés in place of wisdom, and voguish ones in place of wit. Conservatives and progressives differ primarily in the vintage of their fixed views. People love old clichés for their elegance, and new ones for their cleverness. We love fashion because it is a compilation of the most up-to-date clichés. 39 Accelerated clichés In our age of accelerated banality we produce, distribute and discard our spicy clichés as rapidly as fast food. They sparkle like pop songs, trite yet effervescent, modish, flashing and saleable. They used to fetter our minds to the past. Now they fetter them to the forgetful present. We think in tired platitudes, and speak and write in set phrases. Our motley vernacular imparts to our thoughts a variegation that they have not earned. And we try to revitalize their tiredness with a hyperactive vocabulary. Our speech grows more miscellaneous as our vision shrinks and shrivels. Our thoughts are barren, but our language twitches promiscuously. We all love to read the latest books, since they are patched up from current clichés to pander to the platitudes of the hour. As Burckhardt wrote, ‘the shams of today are addressed to us and are therefore amusing and intelligible.’ 40 The proof of repetition We are won over more by repetition than by reason. ‘Tell a lie once and it stays a lie,’ Goebbels said, ‘tell it a thousand times and it becomes a truth.’ We have so few ideas, what else can we do but go on recapitulating them? And if we repeat them often enough we come to believe that they must be good ones. ‘By often repeating an untruth,’ Jefferson notes, ‘men come to believe it themselves.’ 21 Michael Curran Kitsch We keep descanting on our views, in the hope of convincing others or at least of convincing ourselves. Most of us are persuaded of a thesis by hearing it reiterated. And our own iterations persuade us better than another’s. Who else could we trust so much? 41 The pride and pleasure of repetition We stoop to pick up the opinions of others, and we take pride in reprising our own. When I trot out my readymade thoughts, far from blushing at their destitution, I gloat that I’ve proved them right once more. ‘He that knows little,’ says the saw, ‘soon repeats it.’ Others have to keep restating their views, because they have such a dearth of them. But I feel entitled to restate my own, since they make such rich sense of the world. Who would not choose to reutter their own ragged falsehoods rather than learn a new truth? ‘The creeds are believed,’ Wilde said, ‘not because they are rational, but because they are repeated.’ We take more pleasure in reaffirming our illusions than in excavating the facts. My own refrains soothe and amuse me as much as those of others anger and irk me. My driedup phrases sound to me as wise as proverbs and as witty as jokes. And I’m sure that they do so to others too. People love to harp on their convictions, because they think so much of themselves and so little about everything else. They can’t keep off their hobbyhorse, not because they think so seriously about it, but because they think so trivially about anything. We keep reasserting our ideas, not because they contain so much matter, but because our heads contain so little. 22