Norman wants poetry even whilst Gaza burns.
Ben Macintyre proposes what I take to be a novel interpretation of a famous remark:
The German writer T.W. Adorno once declared: “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.” What he meant, I believe, is that art simplifies and reduces history that is messy, ugly and often unsatisfying.
I very much doubt that this was the meaning Adorno intended, and it’s certainly not the main way in which his remark has been understood. Rather, he has been taken to mean that there is something obscene about creating beauty in a world in which there has been Auschwitz. It may relate more particularly to taking material from that monstrous human crime and attempting to give it aesthetic form – as, for example, in Paul Celan’s powerful Deathfugue. But, in any case, the idea is that we have no right to these artistic ‘enhancements’ when people can be done to death at once so cruelly, in such huge numbers, with such indifference, such dull routine.
Adorno was wrong about this. A world with Auschwitz and poetry is better than one with only Auschwitz. Furthermore, we have not only a right but also an obligation to try to comprehend the evils of humankind, including the worst of them. Poetry and the other arts are ways of trying to do that and of trying to get others to see.
Within Adorno’s dictum there may be a defensible kernel of meaning, and it’s this: to allow the time and attention we give to forms of artistic output to divert us from the duties of assistance we have to those in dire straits – duties of solidarity and aid – is to live a life of criminal complicity. But, if too demanding, even this injunction states an inhumanly cramped ethic and one impossible to live by. There is a real problem about how much each of us owes to others in distress or dire need. But nobody owes so much that they are disqualified from enjoying the pleasures of this world – as found in poetry amongst many other things.
Adorno himself, it should be said, later reconsidered his famous remark.
