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The conduciveness of the artwork to contemplation of the work for its own sake refers to a characteristic of the work in episodes of esthetic experience. The esthetic experience of art can have various wider functions in life, which is to say that art and our experience of it is not a final end in itself in the way that lives are ends in themselves. This character of experience of art and the ability of an artwork to effect that sort of experience is not very controversial on its face and is left unstated in other definitions of art. I think that aspect needs to be explicit. I think it is one criterion of success or failure that can be put to work in appraising creations as art.
One way in which that criterion comes up is in connection with subjects in an artwork. Rand takes that criterion to be more restrictive on subject than I take it, so the application of the criterion, hence its exact full sense, is controversial, even though there is surface agreement.
Rand wrote:
Misery, disease, disaster, evil, all the negatives of human existence, . . . are not proper subjects of contemplation for contemplation’s sake. In art, and in literature, these negatives are worth re-creation only in relation to some positive, as a foil, as a contrast, as a means of stressing the positive—but not as an end in themselves. (1963, “The Goal of My Writing”)
In The Ways and Means of Painting, Joan Mitchell Blumenthal takes a less restrictive view of choice of subject and its suitability for artistic content in a painting (7–13). Rand’s thought on what is or is not suitable for the end-in-itself contemplation belonging to esthetic experience is contoured to her view of what are the functions of art in the human psyche and life. Those are true functions of art, I say, but not the only ones (IB, IC, IIIA).
The thought from Orson Scott Card has a cousin in Steinbeck’s East of Eden.
Adam said, “You two have studied this. I only got it through my skin and not much of it stuck. Then Cain was driven out for murder?”
“That’s right—for murder.”
“And God branded him?”
“Did you listen? Cain bore the mark not to destroy him but to save him. And there’s a curse called down on any man who shall kill him. It was a preserving mark.”
Adam said, “I can’t get over a feeling that Cain got the dirty end of the stick.”
“Maybe he did,” said Samuel. “But Cain lived and had children, and Abel lives only in the story. We are Cain’s children. And isn’t it strange that three grown men, here in a century so many thousands of years away, discuss this crime as though it happened in King City yesterday and hadn’t yet come up for trial?”
One of the twins awakened and yawned and looked at Lee and went to sleep again.
Lee said, “Remember, Mr. Hamilton, I told you I was trying to translate some old Chinese poetry into English? No, don’t worry. I won’t read it. Doing it, I found some of the old things as fresh and clear as this morning. And I wondered why. And, of course, people are interested only in themselves. If a story is not about the hearer he will not listen. And I here make a rule—a great and lasting story is about everyone or it will not last. The strange and foreign is not interesting—only the deeply personal and familiar.”
Samuel said, “Apply that to the Cain-Abel story.”
. . .
“I think I can,” Lee answered Samuel. “I think this is the best-known story in the world because it is everybody’s story. I think it is the symbol story of the human soul. . . . I think that if rejection could be amputated, the human would not be what he is. . . . Therefore I think this old and terrible story is important because it is a chart of the soul—the secret, rejected, guilty soul. . . .
Adam started. He sighed deeply. “Isn’t it too simple?” he asked. “I’m always afraid of simple things.”
“It isn’t simple at all,” said Lee. “It’s desperately complicated. But at the end there’s light.” [Remember this at the final moment of the novel.]
“There’s not going to be light long,” Samuel said. “We’ve sat and let the evening come. I drove over to help name the twins and they’re not named. We’ve swung ourselves on a pole. Lee, you better keep your complications out of the machinery of the set-up churches or there might be a Chinese with nails in his hands and feet. They like complications but they like their own. I’ll have to be driving home.”
Adam said desperately, “Name me some names.”
“From the Bible?”
“From anyplace.”
“Well, let’s see. Of all the people who started out of Egypt only two came to the Promised Land. Would you like them for a symbol?”
“Who?”
“Caleb and Joshua.”
“Joshua was a soldier—a general. I don’t like soldiering.”
“Well, Caleb was a captain.”
“But not a general. I kind of like Caleb—Caleb Trask.”
One of the twins woke up and without interval began to wail.
“You called his name,” said Samuel. “You don’t like Joshua, and Caleb’s named. He’s the smart one—the dark one. See, the other one is awake too. Well, Aaron I’ve always liked, but he didn’t make it to the Promised Land.”
The second boy almost joyfully began to cry.
“That’s good enough,” said Adam.
Suddenly Samuel laughed. “In two minutes,” he said, “and after a waterfall of words. Caleb and Aaron—now you are people and you have joined the fraternity and you have the right to be damned.”
It is Steinbeck’s novel, of course, not the simple Bible story it uses, that is the great work of art.
Rand could be comfortable with some of these excerpts from Card and from Steinbeck. They all overlap each other. She called art “the technology of the soul.”
However, Rand’s definition of art is a theoretical explanatory definition (cf.). What she means by “selective re-creation of reality,” the genus in her definition, is more narrow, as shown in her applications, than one might guess merely from those words. It turned out that unless a drawing or painting were figural, she did not count it as what she meant by a selective re-creation of reality. As art, such an artifact fails by not satisfying the genus.
Likewise it goes with the species factor “metaphysical value-judgments.” One could say “I know those English words, so I know what the phrase means.” No. One has to read further to ascertain Rand’s meaning for this phrase she adopts as a theoretical technical phrase in her esthetics. She spells out what she means by the phrase. I have argued that that cluster of value-concerns can be broadened modestly and still fall within her ambit. But her conception meant by metaphysical value-judgment remains narrow enough, even with that broadening, for one to argue, as I do, that the conception is not inclusive enough to capture all art, not even all representational art, within its scope. I think Rand’s metaphysical-value-judgments try at what is fundamentally at work in art is somewhat original in the history of esthetics and that it should be included within any valid species in a right definition of art.
