In the postwar period, a generation of critics, inspired by Lionel Trilling, encapsulated the difference between high art and popular art in a single word: “complexity.” “Literature,” Trilling wrote, “is the human activity that takes the fullest and most precise account of variousness, possibility, complexity and difficulty.” Henry James, Austen, Coleridge, and Shakespeare (“King Lear” was the pinnacle of Trilling’s qualities), not to mention modernists from Proust to Kafka, from Woolf to Celine: their books are sanctuaries of anti-closure and infinite perspective, of right and wrong mashed together and dissolved. Following the endless turbulent commentary on Dylan Farrow and Woody Allen, and the commentary on the commentary, you could be forgiven for feeling that literary art, as Trilling defined it, has been largely displaced by life—or, at least, by the pictures of life ceaselessly produced by the all-powerful media—as the realm in which we lose ourselves in a moral problem.
No sooner are you convinced that Farrow is telling the truth than you are persuaded by Allen, only to return to Farrow, then back to Allen and back to Farrow, and on and on. The alleged abuse is heinous—there’s nothing “artistic” about it—yet the arguments of each party are suffused with the kind of rich, if indeterminate, emotional, psychological, and intellectual twists and turns that literature seeks to delineate. No less than if you were reading Ford Madox Ford’s magnificent fugue of perspectives, “The Good Soldier,” you try to weigh the arguments of Farrow and Allen, their defenders, and the legions of commenters by applying all you know about being human to the story.
This is not just “the news.” This is a piece of reality so dense that it goes beyond art in illuminating just how nebulous reality is. (But, then, the news stopped reporting reality and started to constitute a new layer of reality years ago.) These days, the conventions of art seem quaint and tidy. Zadie Smith, borrowing the phrase from the novelist David Shields, has written about her “novel-nausea,” an impatience with literary artifice. Her frustration is shared by novelists from Tim Parks to Naipaul, Roth, and Munro, the last three of whom have given up writing fiction altogether. (It could also be why the autobiographical novels of Karl Ove Knausgaard, which read like direct transcriptions of reality, are so popular. “Just the thought of fiction,” he writes, “just the thought of a fabricated character in a fabricated plot made me feel nauseous.”)
It took a while for culture to bring art to this point of exhaustion. Not long after Trilling’s generation, popular art began to acquire the rich impasto of perspective that was once the province of high art, even as high art began to tire of its own “complexity.” As the Vietnam War put public pieties and official authority in doubt on a grand scale, filmmakers like Sam Peckinpah and Martin Scorsese infused the simple moral framework of Hollywood movies with a literary intricacy. Novelists like John Barth, Robert Coover, and Thomas Pynchon upended Trilling’s gravity (“Gravity’s Rainbow”) with burlesques of complexity. Variousness, difficulty, et al. were embarking on their long march out of art’s rarefied arena and onto the public stage.
In retrospect, even the celebration of moral relativism by the post-structuralists of the nineteen-nineties was, despite its cloistered classroom quality, a development that took complexity out of literature’s privileged hands and brought it closer to everyday life. In post-structuralism, the person speaking or acting—the “subject”—was immediately suspect, merely an unwitting, unreliable product of social, psychological, cultural, and linguistic forces beyond her control. It was the reader or spectator’s job to cut through the subject’s illusion of integrity and get to the forces that were manipulating her. Sound familiar? Hundreds of thousands of people, often on interminable commenting threads, are trying to “deconstruct” Farrow and Allen in order to put a finger on precisely how one or the other is being manipulated by a third party or by his or her own hidden motives. We are all post-structuralists now.
Pardon the attempt at a thumbnail historical sketch, but all the splintered perspectives in the Farrow-Allen story make you reach for the largest perspective possible, like fleeing rising water and rushing debris for higher ground. To be sure, there have been public events beyond simple comprehension: the Kennedy assassination comes to mind, as well as the Lewinsky scandal. In retrospect, though, their complexity isn’t moral. Whoever killed Kennedy was bad, period. And, if it hadn’t been for virulent partisan politics, the moral challenges posed by Clinton and Lewinsky would have been run of the mill. There have been few, if any, events in American public life that match the ethical density of recent public controversies. This is hardly because life has become more ethically complicated. Rather, falling boundaries between private and public, an old morality increasingly muddled by new laws and new technology, and the dominance of a no-holds-barred media, have made moral conundrums that once never happened, or touched the lives of only a few people, the daily fare of millions.
This is not to say that our insoluble national events all follow the same pattern. You could make a taxonomy of impossibly complex happenings in which we cannot for the life of us reach the comfort and certainty of assigning simple blame. There are those events in which something unequivocally bad is claimed to have been done, but we cannot know what actually happened: Farrow and Allen. Then there are those in which we know that something happened but can’t decide if it was bad: Edward Snowden. Finally (though there are countless sub-categories), there are situations in which we know that something unequivocally bad happened, and we know who did it, but, because the law in these situations seems so weak, even perverse, we—society—do not know whether to blame the perpetrator, the victim, or the legal system: George Zimmerman and Trayvon Martin; the recent shooting over texting in the Florida movie theatre.
The confusion created by these mounting, everyday enigmas is so impenetrable that it is difficult to say whether this trend of being incapable of moral closure is itself good or bad. On the one hand, we are now able to talk about injuries and abuses that were formerly swept under the rug. Twenty years ago, adults who, as children, had been sexually abused by Catholic priests, or were the young victims of Jerry Sandusky, would not have come forward, for fear of being accused of mendacity or mental illness. On the other hand, our conscientious parsing of particulars may lead us to miss the blazing forest for some smoldering trees. As we labor over our public enigmas, the country does not seem to be becoming more equal or more fair to people left behind. Perhaps, on some level, and in the face of social problems that are ultimately simple cases of gross injustice, we find these murky ethical situations gratifying, as if they offer us an excuse—human existence is just too complicated!—not to try to make meaningful changes in our public life. Or maybe our attempts to get at the truth of an imbroglio, like that involving Farrow and Allen, reflect a frustrated aspiration to retrieve some kind of shared, collective truth, period.
Still, our insolubles have created at least one clear trend. As a reaction to the blurriness and confusion, some people resort to ideological certainty or personal animus to steady themselves. For each person who shifts back and forth between Dylan Farrow and Allen, there are others who, judging from the furious commentary, seem to have made up their minds even before Farrow published her open letter in the Times. Mia is a slut, Allen is a depraved sex addict, Dylan is a monstrous liar, and so forth. There’s a backlash of fanatical certainty and malevolent personal projection.
In the early nineteen-nineties, David Mamet’s play “Oleanna,” in which a female student accuses a college professor of sexual harassment, had audiences erupting into screaming matches during the intermission. As with Farrow and Allen, there was no clear answer to the question of what actually happened between professor and student. Almost a quarter of a century later, the impossible complexity is on the other side of the stage. Instantaneous news of what happened, or might have happened, has become our art, and, like the chorus in ancient Greek tragedy, we are all part of the swelling roar.
Lee Siegel is the author of, among other books, two collections of criticism, “Falling Upwards: Essays in Defense of the Imagination” and “Not Remotely Controlled: Notes on Television.” He is a frequent contributor to Page-Turner.
Illustration by Istvan Banyai.
