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The Bad and The Beautiful

“Genius and evildoing are two things that do not combine,” Mozart remarks in Mozart and Salieri, Alexander Pushkin’s short play written in 1832. The Mozart of Pushkin’s play is an impure genius. He does not see perfection in himself or seek perfection in others. He has a natural humility and earthiness. On his way to visit his friend and fellow composer Antonio Salieri, Mozart hears a blind violinist playing one of his melodies in a tavern, and to Salieri’s irritation Mozart brings the violinist along with him. He wants this street musician to perform for Salieri. Mozart is enamored of the blind violinist’s rude art, leaving it to Salieri to spell out his disdain: “No. I don’t find it funny when some worthless dauber/makes smears and drips on Raphael’s Madonna,/ I don’t find it funny when some vulgar showman/ reels off parody that dishonors Dante.” For Salieri, the very point of genius is the escape from impurity that it enables. “You, Mozart, are a god,” Salieri declares, “and you don’t know it.” In this play Salieri is so consumed by envy that he poisons Mozart. Too refined to tolerate smears or drips on a Raphael painting or to suffer through a parody of Dante, Salieri becomes a murderer. Whereas Mozart, already writing his Requiem at the behest of a mysterious black-clad visitor, is human enough to be mortal. 

 

Pushkin’s Mozart believes in genius no less than Salieri does. Artists are not godlike for Mozart, though they “form a priesthood seeing only beauty,” and the members of this priesthood “are but few.” Musing about this small priesthood, Mozart advances his thesis about genius — that “genius and evildoing do not combine.” Salieri and Mozart diverge in the degree of their talent, but they diverge more fundamentally in the ethical tenor of their talent, a distinction mirrored in Salieri’s homicidal jealousy and in Mozart’s affection for the blind violinist, which is his love for his audience or for humanity, of which the actual Mozart was such a stupendous benefactor. Surely Pushkin must have seen himself in Mozart: an artist not so pure as to be inhuman and no snobbish connoisseur of Raphael and Dante (like Salieri), but a poet of innately moral genius. He belonged to the priesthood seeing only beauty and who, by creating beauty, could not be involved in evildoing. To complete the affinity between author and subject, Russian poet and Austrian composer, Pushkin died at the age of thirty-seven, two years older than Mozart had been at the time of his death. Pushkin’s global following is smaller than Mozart’s, but his posthumous fame is certainly Mozart-like in Russia. 

 

Outside of contemporary Russia, very little of Mozart’s angelic innocence accrues to Pushkin. In an essay in The New Yorker called “Reading Russian Classics in the Shadow of the Ukraine War,” the writer Elif Batuman episodically addresses the careers of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, but she keeps circling back to Pushkin. She describes a movement known as Pushkinopad, “Pushkin fall,” which began “sweeping Ukraine [in April 2022], resulting in the dismantling of dozens of Pushkin statues.” In ways she herself had not recognized before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, “the Pushkin who championed individual freedom was always alternating with the Pushkin who celebrated the [Russian] Empire.” Throughout Batuman’s essay, Pushkin’s art tends to melt into “the interests of the Russian Empire.” She notes that Dostoevsky’s speech at the unveiling of a Pushkin monument in Moscow in 1880 “is quoted on the Russkiy Mir Foundation’s web site.” Russkiy Mir is a Russian government initiative intimately connected to the war in Ukraine, to Vladimir Putin’s notion that Ukrainians and Russians are one people, and to the Russian government’s efforts to snuff out Ukrainian language and culture. 

 

Pushkin’s Mozart has a purity that Pushkin himself does not possess, although the historical Mozart was never free from political appropriation. Together with Bach and Beethoven, Nazi Germany upheld Mozart as an example of German cultural superiority. Pushkin has the distinction of having been instrumentalized by imperial Russia, by the Soviet Union, and by post-Soviet Russia. Nor is this, in Batuman’s view, an accident of fate. The politicization stems from Pushkin’s literature. Complicit in the spread of Russian imperialism, Pushkin is anything but pure, and his impurity is not the humdrum impurity of his fictional Mozart; it is not broadness of mind or closeness to the people. Batuman does not dispute Pushkin’s genius, and she does not argue against reading or teaching Russian literature, but she comes down on the opposite side of the argument from Pushkin’s Mozart or (possibly) from Pushkin himself. Genius and evildoing are two things that can go together. (Batuman’s essay is a kind of apologia for her book The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them, a puckish and entirely apolitical celebration of Russian literature published some ten years after Putin came to power. In 2023, she suddenly writes to register her discomfort with Pushkin and with Russian literature in general, with its newly discovered political impurity, or, as Batuman might put it, its old impurity suddenly perceived.)

 

Scrutinizing the terrible uses to which great art can be put is a necessary exercise for lovers of beauty. “There is no document of civilization that is not at the same time a document of barbarism,” Walter Benjamin famously declared. Whether or not every document of civilization is simultaneously a document of barbarism, civilization and barbarism are certainly intertwined. Brutal dictators have had their favorite painters and writers — Hitler’s outsize love of Rembrandt, Stalin’s studied love of novels and especially of poetry. Empires have always projected themselves forward through art, recognizing instruments of power where others see only beauty. Even when untouched by the political powers that be, most works of art and documents of civilization betray opinions and prejudices. In antebellum America, passages from Aristotle and the Bible were deployed to justify slavery; Aristotle was a defender of slavery, and the Bible does not always validate equality, not to mention diversity and inclusion. The Dostoevsky who adoringly remembered Pushkin in 1880 let his hatred of Jews and Judaism stain his fiction, including some of his best work — his novel Crime and Punishment, for example, which revolves around the killing of a sinister Jewish moneylender. Mark Twain’s and William Faulkner’s novels are full of racial epithets, and not only because these two writers wanted their readers to think critically about racial epithets. Figuring out the meaning of prejudice in art is the job of cultural critics, of historians and scholars of art, literature, and music. It is a public service, and one that does not make the art in question either less interesting or less artistic.

 

Still, however just and however helpful, identifying unclean political undercurrents in art and chronicling the corruption of art and artists by armies and political institutions carries some risk. The risk is a hunger for purity in the art itself, for an art without a trace of prejudice, without any political baggage, without any adjacency to evildoing. One senses in Batuman’s essay the longing to rescue the Pushkin who championed individual freedom from the Pushkin who celebrated the Empire — to save Pushkin from Putin. In the hands of a less adept critic, this could become the desire to eliminate the “imperial” Pushkin and to exchange him for another Pushkin, one who flattered only freedom; to rewrite the past or to edit a literary oeuvre so that it conforms to the sensitivities of the reader; to excise the awful impurities embedded in artistic creation and to replace them with the healthful purities of our moral imaginations. After all, being uncomfortable with an alleged impurity is one of the paradigmatic cultural postures of our moment, when the perfectionist ethos of progressivism is once again ascendant. 

 

This new enthusiasm for innocence and rectitude, which are not the same thing, of course, exacts a two-fold cost. An overly acute discomfort can imply that art — to make us comfortable — must be morally or formally pure. This can be a stern regimen for the production of art, for which discomfiture is no liability. The aversion to discomfort could also imply that art — to make us comfortable — must turn from impurity altogether, a prescription for the omission of disturbing and otherwise unacceptable art. To the extent that artists internalize the fear of discomfort and the love of security or of purity, they will be the makers of a boring and bad culture.

 

Art’s salutary impurity runs through different channels. There is impurity of form: art that defies expectations by rejecting the expected structures, pushing sense and language and image in bizarre, unpredictable directions, breaking up straight lines, flirting with ugliness, defying representation, leaving much unsaid, smudging borders, bubbling over into excess. This happens to be one of the main lines of what could be called modern art, in literature, in music, and in the visual arts. Then there is impurity of content: art that refuses to validate virtue or ensure that evil find its comeuppance or that endings resolve into moral schemes that can be easily recognized and articulated; art that moves not with stylized Mozartian grace but in concert with the very evildoing that Pushkin’s Mozart considered incompatible with genius; art that draws its force from the diabolical, the dark, the devilish, the immoral. (Of this Mozart’s own opera, Don Giovanni, is a stirring example, even if its moralistic subtitle is Il dissoluto punito.) And, finally, there is the impurity of artistic experience: not merely the depiction of evil, which is a common enough, but the programmatic insinuation of impurity or evil into the mind of the reader or the eye of the viewer, into the mind of Baudelaire’s hypocrite lecteur, the hypocritical reader who wants to appreciate evil from a distance but not to encounter it from within. Such triune impurity is essential to art. It is essential to the energy of art, to its moral and aesthetic freshness, to the achievement of contrast, to the tensions that make a work of art a living work of art, to the fullness of our response to art and, most of all, to the freedom of the artist. 

 

The infatuation with purity in art has its modern roots in the Renaissance and its many theories of artistic perfection. It became widespread in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in what came to be called “classicism” and “neo-classicism”, whose affinity for purity of form was associated with a deference to classical — meaning ancient — models, which permeated eighteenth-century education. For understandable reasons, the great texts and sculptures and architectural specimens of the Graeco-Roman past defined “high art.” Since the Renaissance, enormous effort had been expended to recover the classical world, to preserve its textual legacy, to learn from its legacy, and then to compete with it. In 1704, Jonathan Swift satirized this long competition, this querelle in European culture, in “The Battle of the Books,” his response to the question of whether the ancients bested the moderns or the moderns the ancients. Europe’s reconnection with Greek and Latin texts and its reconnection with the aesthetic ideals present in classical antiquity (or imputed to it) generated multiple intellectual and artistic revolutions. The Enlightenment was not an antiquarian pastime. Its practitioners sought to discover the modern through the ancient, and one such discovery turned out to be the American Republic, which was created by a cadre of modernizing intellectuals thoroughly preoccupied with classical antiquity. That the American Republic was from the beginning a neo-classical venture is apparent from the civic architecture of Washington, DC, and Monticello, Virginia, and countless other American towns and cities.

 

Radical as the encounter with antiquity could be, it was equally possible to derive a static sense of form from that which was labeled “classical.” It was possible to gather noble white statues, which had once been gaudy with color, and to fetishize them for qualities they may not have had when they were made — for the restraint they represented, for their disembodied elegance, for their perfect proportions, their implicit harmony, their very will to be classical. It was possible to make “the classical” a cognate for purity of form, a tendency that would dominate the graphic arts, the plastic arts, and architecture in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. (It sometimes takes effort to find the life in neo-classical marble beneath its polished white “perfection”.) This regimenting and idealizing tendency could be felt in literature as well, from the written sentence, which to be pure had to follow a Latinate syntax and cadence, to the conventions of genre. Tragedy, comedy, epic, and parody were techniques for fashioning the well-wrought urn of literature. The epic was Homer. The tragedy was Sophocles. The comedy was Aristophanes. The parody was Juvenal. A pure work of literature was one that honored all that had been discovered about genre hundreds and hundreds of years ago. Studying this tradition was a method for achieving the symmetries that became synonymous with greatness in art.

 

If purity of form came from an eighteenth-century deference to classical models, purity of content and experience had a more nineteenth-century pedigree. These versions of artistic purity were championed in Victorian Britain, continental Europe, and the United States. Purity of content translates into rules of rhetorical or representational respectability, into a code that determines what can be said and what cannot be said, what can be depicted and what cannot be depicted, what can be insinuated and what cannot be insinuated. These formal straitjackets certainly produced beautiful art (and of course a lot of poshlost’), and by no means did all nineteenth-century artists rebel against this ideal. But many of them chafed against it, some defying it at their own expense, risking marginalization or censorship, and some finding ways of undermining it from within. They launched the long and still unfinished war against bourgeois strictures. And yet the power of the code was enormous. Charles Dickens, the Victorian Shakespeare, knew exactly how to function within the code, perhaps because he did not have many disagreements with it and could therefore express it willingly. In his case, however, the tropes did not thwart his appetite for truth or wildness, for the eccentric and the grotesque. Crime and poverty, malice and cruelty, figured prominently in his novels, which, among their other effects, could be profoundly disturbing. He wrote about them with his uncanny gusto, and used his unsparing accounts of the evils of his time to plot the way from the hell of displacement to the respectable paradise of the middle-class family. He was neither a revolutionary nor an apologist for his time. The purity of content in Dickens (by the standards of the Victorian age) is not a debit of his fiction. The happy conclusion of David Copperfield’s union with Agnes Wickfield certainly affirms the mores of the era, but we do not dismiss the safe climax as a surrender to a trope: it comes at the end of a harrowing search for safety, a long and sometimes pitiless story of pain and tribulation. Dickens affirmed without prettifying. This is part of what makes his fiction so satisfying, just as it is the aspect of Dickens that gets perverted into holiday kitsch.

 

Purity of content in the Victorian mode was proverbially a matter of covering up. This was especially the case with the body and with the sexual impulse. Just as the styles of dress popular in mid-century Britain and the United States constricted and hid the body from view, so too did much Victorian literature consciously obscure a great deal from view — whether it was forms of sexuality outside the heterosexual norm or simply sexuality itself, as opposed to sexuality’s more respectable second cousins, marrying and having children. In the Victorian era’s less exalted artistic creations, for example, piano legs were designed in such a way as to avoid resemblance to women’s legs. (In Washington, DC, where I live, an array of statues — male nudes — were put up in Union Station when it was constructed in 1908, in the afterglow of the Victorian era, but because of the ensuing embarrassment they had to be given enormous shields. The statues are still there, and so are the shields.) In the graphic arts and in sculpture, however, the nude was not abandoned, though the nudity was usually chaste — until the explosive nakedness in Goya and Courbet and Manet. And a similar development away from conventionality occurred in fiction. Though the nineteenth century was the heyday of the family novel, respectability began to invoke its inverse: two of the century’s greatest novels, Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina, and there were others, curved the marriage plot into the adultery and divorce plots. Neither Flaubert nor Tolstoy lived the lives of eminent Victorians, but as Lytton Strachey showed in 1918 in his book of that name, the eminent Victorians themselves did not live the lives of eminent Victorians. The magnitude of repression often measures the magnitude of desire. There were also what Steven Marcus, in his study of the licentiousness of the Victorian era, called “the other Victorians.” 

 

Not only in the straightlaced Anglo-American world was there a strong attachment to the improving purity of artistic experience. This nineteenth-century attachment was evident even on the more freewheeling European continent. The architecture of nineteenth-century artistic institutions underscored the ideal of art as elevation. One was the opera house, massive neoclassical temples built to convey urban prestige — the Wiener Staatsoper of 1869, the Opera de Paris of 1875, the Bolshoi of 1876, the Komische Oper in Berlin of 1892. (The Metropolitan Opera in New York began its life in an enormous neoclassical building, completed in 1883, before moving to the more enormous but no longer neoclassical Lincoln Center in the twentieth century.) Not just a temple to art but a place of pilgrimage, Richard Wagner’s Bayreuth was finished in 1876. These opera houses take concert attendees out of the city, away from the tumult of moneymaking and cheap thrills and up the steps to a higher state of being. Even if the stories on stage were violent or scandalous, even if they were set in shabby bohemian garrets, the marriage of respectability and art gave opera its social purpose. Even Wagner’s diabolical ecstasies were meant to refine one’s feeling for heroes and lovers. 

 

The other nineteenth-century institution that enshrined the edifying purity of artistic experience was the art museum. Architecturally, it could resemble the opera house. Imposing, neo-classically temple-like, many nineteenth-century European museums were designed to instruct their modern visitors in the wisdom of the ancients, introducing a few other stages on the path to cultural maturity: the pious centuries of medieval art and the aristocratic riot of the Baroque. Progression and elevation were the story of art, the unfolding of genius learning from genius, beginning with the perfection of ancient Greek sculpture, such as the winged statue of Nike placed in the Louvre’s main staircase in 1884, which could also have the effect of indicting modern art for falling away from the flawlessness of antiquity. Elevation is the literal experience of going through these museums, such as the Prado, opened to the public in 1819, gallery after wondrous gallery above ground, cafeterias and amenities below. The proudly neoclassical National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, completed in 1940, is a fine replica of its numerous nineteenth-century European antecedents. It stands eloquently on the National Mall, there to elevate the citizenry.

 

Impurity was not invented in 1900, although the pursuit of impurity was galvanized by the formalities and the rigidities of nineteenth-century European and American culture. The Victorian age launched a thousand rebellions. Forbid something and people will hunger for it. By covering things up, the code overstimulated curiosity about what was being covered up: Karl Marx delighted in pulling aside the drapes and pointing to the capitalist mayhem beneath the surface of bourgeois respectability, and Sigmund Freud rent the veil of sexual respectability, having come to know and resent it as a young man in Central Europe, unmasking the maskers. As Marx and Freud (and their legions of artistic imitators) were both aware, the greater the pitch of respectability, the sharper the revolutionary instinct. The shielding of the nude statues in Union Station must have delighted Freud if he saw them on his trip to America in 1909. They were such an effortless metaphor for the conundrums that he devoted his life to studying. The pursuit of impurity, even if it emerged with intensifying force in the late nineteenth century and characterized large swaths of twentieth-century art, had always been there. Purity is forever condemned to living with its antithesis. 

 

Three examples will illustrate the magnificence of an impure art. The first is Ulysses, published in 1922 and a gargantuan experiment in impure language and form, beginning with its convoluted homage to Homer’s Odyssey, the classical text that gave Joyce’s novel its title and Joyce his excuse to transform the grandiose Homeric hero into an unspectacular modern man. By inventing an impure novelistic idiom Joyce could explore layers of consciousness that a love of purity might deny — or forbid. The second example is Moby-Dick, a novel that appeared in 1852 and that stupendously exemplifies the artistic blessing of impure content. The most ominous book in the American canon, it is the grand anti-narrative of American politics, the book that takes the triumph of democracy, the necessity of solidarity, and the prospect of equality and shipwrecks them all, making the reader a party to the shipwreck. Melville tells his wildly impure story with near manic conviction. Third, there is Vermeer’s masterpiece of impurity, The Procuress of 1656, which is anything but art as elevation. To view this painting is to experience a truly unexpected impurity, not in the composition or in the painter’s abilities, but in oneself, the viewer — a shocking dissociation of beauty from virtue. In sum: if genius and evildoing do not combine, there are places where they meet and do business.

 

Joyce’s Ulysses is a never-ending pastiche. Joyce was fantastically learned, and in digressions and in conversations in pubs and libraries Ulysses lays bare the mechanics of literature, whether it is the Irish epic waiting to be written or the Oedipal rhythms of Shakespeare’s dramaturgy, all of which gets treated in depth. Perhaps Ulysses is itself the Irish epic that its characters were looking for. Perhaps it is a travesty of such epics, so often does it slide into parody. Perhaps it is a picaresque novel condensed into a single day in June 1904. Perhaps it is a psychological novel: it is celebrated for taking streams-of-consciousness to new heights (and new depths). Perhaps it is a novel of ideas, a meditation on empire, on post-colonial striving, on mass society, on the grandeur and folly of novel-writing. Perhaps it is all of the above. Joyce elaborated a new form for the novel by putting all previous literary forms into the blender and mixing them up. The resulting form may be pure pastiche, pure modernism, but if so it is a peculiar purity, a virtuosic breaking down of anything resembling “classical” stability of form.

 

While exploding pre-existing notions of fictional form, Joyce reconstituted English as a written language. Grammar and syntax often dissolve into fragments and elisions in Ulysses, and these fragments intersect (seemingly randomly) with snatches of popular song, newspaper headlines, advertisements, quotations from Shakespeare and Aquinas, and the inchoate, sometimes unintelligible private language of the characters. The reigning impurity of language, the mongrelness of the diction, is not impurity for impurity’s sake. Joyce was striving to make discoveries about life by defying and discomposing the conventions of language, to take the lid off the consciousness of his characters, to peer into their souls and to have the reader peer into their souls. The reader finds sublimity, the embers of love and artistic creation, and the reader finds prurience, prejudice, aggression, infidelity, obscenity, and loneliness. Joyce uses expletives as well as linguistic indirection to convey the irrepressible indecencies of existence, from defecation to masturbation to the unwanted prevalence of death.

 

Early on in the novel, Leopold Bloom, the Irish-Jewish Odysseus of Ulysses, attends the funeral of someone he knows. His mind travels — through extremely foul language — away from and toward the subject of death:

I [Leopold Bloom] daresay the soil would be quite fat with corpse manure, bones, flesh, nails, charnelhouses. Dreadful. Turning green and pink, decomposing. Rot quick in damp earth. The lean old ones tougher. Then a kind of tallowy kind of a cheesy. Then begin to get black, treacle oozing out of them. Then dried up. Deathmoths. Of course the cells or whatever they are go on living. Changing about. Life for ever practically. Nothing to feed on feed on themselves.

 

Each of the images here is revolting. Each turn of Bloom’s mental and emotional process is inappropriate to a funeral. Bloom is not remembering the life of the man being buried. He is not honoring that life or reflecting on his own grief. He is distracting himself from elegy and ode, perhaps because ode and elegy instill sadness. Bloom’s mind burrows instead into the decomposition of corpses. Joyce’s rearrangement of “proper” English — kind of tallowy kind of a cheesy, nothing to feed on feed on themselves — augments the impurity of Bloom’s thoughts. So, too, do neologisms like “deathmoths,” which flitter into Bloom’s psyche suddenly and then disappear; no verb in the sentence, no other words, just a strange noun followed suddenly by a period. The telegraphic psychological insight in this passage would be inaccessible without the impure language that mirrors the impure literary form of Ulysses.

 

As he states on the novel’s final page, Joyce wrote Ulysses between 1914 and 1921 in Trieste, Zurich, and Paris. Joyce must have had an atmospheric motivation for advancing the cause of impurity in literature. He had to have been responding to World War I, which remains inexplicable but must have been overwhelmingly inexplicable at the time, especially for a writer from Ireland, who was not one to wave the flag of the British Empire. Hemingway would answer World War I with impeccably pure prose, a clean and lucid style, an astringent minimalism that put words like “honor” and “sacrifice” in quotation marks. He countered the impurity of war with the purity of the unadorned English sentence. A pacifist, unlike Hemingway, Joyce would answer the ruptures of war with the ruptures of language. “History is the nightmare from which I am trying to awake,” Stephen Dedalus, the aspiring writer in Ulysses, pronounces. More than Edgar Allen Poe, Joyce places us inside the nightmare, and he does so through a nightmare’s emphasis on abrupt non sequiturs, half-formed images, and a nagging, elaborate incoherence. He does so by means of impure form. 

 

Set some ten years before the outbreak of World War I, Ulysses is more ecstatic than it is despairing. Joyce’s other motivation for advancing the cause of impurity in literature was to liberate. It was to affirm through impurity, which is the program that fires Ulysses and its volcano of language. Joyce famously concludes Ulysses in affirmation via impurity, channeling Molly Bloom, the vocalist wife of Leopold Bloom as she lies next to him in bed: “I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.” The impurity of form here is fully commensurate with the purity of the desire that it portrays. It is modest by the experimental standards of Ulysses. Easy to follow, it all makes sense and is neither repugnant nor outlandish. It is simple language taking unsimple flight by evading punctuation and grammar, another experiment in the rewards of formal transgression. If good style dictates that there be only one “yes,” then good style is joyless. From the cemetery to the marriage bed, Joyce winds his way through the plenitude of impurity to its versatility and abundance, and to the gifts it can give to those who are not too cautious, too squeamish, or too Victorian to receive and to cherish them.

 

In Moby-Dick, Melville anticipates the impure language and the impure form of Joyce’s Ulysses. The narrative voice of Moby-Dick, which belongs to Ishmael, a character but far from a main character in the novel, is educated and colloquial, the voice of someone who went to sea at a young age without much formal education and who then read many, many books (and needs to tell the world about them). Ishmael’s voice recedes at a certain point, as Ahab’s fevered mind takes over the novel and the Pequod’s journey alike. Along the way, the novel splits into Shakespeare-like dramatic sequences, into long passages on the scientific nature of whales and into minutely detailed excursions into the pros and cons of the whaling industry. Apart from the story of the voyage and the story of the hunt, which are as elemental as they come, Moby-Dick has no purity of form at all. It is a kind of grand miscellany. The novel is composed as much by its stubborn reluctance to go forward and its constant digressions as it is by its relentless drive toward the disastrous termination of Ahab’s quest.

 

The more potent impurity in Moby-Dick is its impurity of content. Prophesy haunts this novel. In its opening chapters, set in New Bedford and Nantucket, portents of death and disaster are everywhere. In chapter nineteen, titled “The Prophet,” a man named Elijah predicts catastrophe for the Pequod — “what’s to be, will be; and then again, perhaps it won’t be,” referring to the lives of those on the ship. (Ishmael dismisses him as “a humbug.”) At the core of the novel, though, is not the fact of fatalism. It is a pattern of choice that leads step by step to the crew’s enslavement to Ahab and ultimately to the lack of concern that Ahab has for the ship he captains, so concerned is Ahab to heal his wounded self by killing the white whale. On the ship, Ahab is only one person. The several dozen members of the crew do not have to follow him. They force themselves to follow. Their collective self-defeat is more terrifying than the white whale and the malice that it symbolizes.

 

The pivotal individual in the Pequod’s collective self-defeat is Starbuck, the ship’s first mate. A study in contrast, he is a “staid, steadfast man, whose life for the most part was a telling pantomime of action, and not a tame chapter of words.” Not given to literary dalliances, he is nevertheless not a man of action; he is merely an active man. He has “a deep natural reverence, [and] the wild watery loneliness of his life did therefore strangely incline him to superstition; but to that sort of superstition, which in some organizations seems rather to spring, somehow, from intelligence than from ignorance.” His intelligent superstition is an aspect of his passivity, and “Starbuck was no crusader after perils; in him courage was not a sentiment; but a thing simply useful to him, and always at hand upon all mortally practical occasions.” Faced with immediate physical danger, Starbuck has great courage. On the Pequod, his undoing is that he must deal with someone who does not put him in immediate physical danger until that danger is inescapable.

 

Across several chapters, Melville elucidates the twisted relationship between Ahab and Starbuck. If he can subdue Starbuck, Ahab can subdue the Pequod, of which Starbuck is the day-to-day manager. Starbuck is rational enough to foresee the ship’s demise and superstitious enough not to trust what reason tells him. He pleads with Ahab to steer the ship back to Nantucket, back home, though he should have known that Ahab is unreachable, and when Starbuck speaks “Ahab’s gaze was averted; like a blighted fruit tree he shook, and cast his last, cindered apple to the soil.” Starbuck, whose intelligence and courage do not coalesce in time, underestimates the blight in Ahab, who will not turn back. A bit later, Starbuck contemplates a loaded gun on the ship and considers taking it up to shoot Captain Ahab, but he cannot. His life is a pantomime of action. For this forgivable fault he goes to his death.

 

The impurity of Moby-Dick does not concern its anger and aggression, which permeate the novel. It does not concern Ahab’s aggression of thought and deed or the ruthless profit motive of those who send the Pequod out on its doomed journey. That the aggression is met with tragedy is not an impure framing for a novel; it is a moral framing, a familiar framing. Moby-Dick’s impure content concerns the impotence of virtue, which exceeds Starbuck’s personal weakness. The crew of the Pequod collaborates with Ahab, meaning — as with wartime collaborators — that they are not exactly free agents. They are under his command, but they are aware that he is dangerous, that his thirst for the white whale’s blood is nihilistic, that they would be better off shaking themselves free of him. They are aware that Ahab, who at one point baptizes his crew (in Latin) in the name of the devil, is an agent of evil, and they carry out his will. They man his ship, and they lower for the final chase. The charismatic Ahab intuits their common virtue, which varies from character to character, inverting their virtue into his own desire for death. Had his crew had his degree of rage, they might have defied him, and they might have lived to tell the tale.

 

An alternative ending to Moby-Dick might have taken Melville back to Nantucket. He could have described the community’s acceptance, after years, that the Pequod would never return, showing us the grief of Ahab’s and Starbuck’s families. He could have ended his sad novel sadly. Moby-Dick is not an epic, because it is about a battle lost. Neither is it a tragedy, at least in the classical sense of the genre: a collision between noble intentions and implacable fate. Ahab’s intentions are ignoble, and they are abetted by the short-sighted virtues of Starbuck and others. The novel’s ending is not with the families of Nantucket. Rather than sadness, Moby-Dick climaxes in extraordinary images of indifference. The quest has been pointless because the white whale has outlived it. The destiny of the Pequod’s crew is equally pointless:

 

Now small fowls flew screaming over the yet yawning gulf; a sullen white surf beat against its [the Pequod’s] steep sides; then all collapsed, and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago.

 

This is the Book of Genesis in reverse. The sea generously lays itself, like a shroud, over the deceased Pequod, the ship having collapsed quickly into nothingness. In the blink of an eye, the Pequod’s vital, vivid characters are uncreated, their lives a meaningless interlude in the sea’s endless roll. Melville’s thirty-eight-word sentence confronts the reader with the oceanic emptiness into which everything disappears. In the content of its story, Moby-Dick is a uniquely sullen tragedy. It is tragedy without catharsis.

 

The form of Vermeer’s painting The Procuress is not in the least impure. Vermeer had astonishingly sharp vision, and he had the painterly technique to project this vision onto canvas. His rendering of even the smallest details in The Procuress — buttons, glass studs on a wine glass, a decorative motif on a carpet — has a precision that photography cannot match. In this painting, the people and the objects appear to the viewer in the clearest possible air, no smoke, not much shadow, just a limpid light, nothing to distort the clarity in which they exist. The painting’s composition is careful, four figures quite close together, patches of darkness on one side of the painting and sharply delineated blocs of color on the other side, an interior setting that invites the viewer to see and understand exactly what is going on. On display is, as with many of Vermeer’s paintings, a method of presentation that lies closer to scientific inquiry than to mystification or to mythmaking, a dignified economy of expression. 

 

The content of The Procuress, starting with its title, is less than pure, and even sordid. The painting’s procuress is dressed in black, and she wears a black headpiece. She is looking at two of the painting’s figures, with anticipation and perhaps with a touch of amusement. One of them, a man, is dressed foppishly in a red coat and a wide-brimmed feathered hat. With his left hand he is touching the breast of a woman and with his right he is dropping a coin into her outstretched palm. She wears an attention-getting yellow shirt and a white bonnet, hinting at or making a mockery of respectable dress; her cheeks are rouged with youth. She is the one who has been procured. To the right of the procuress stands an elegant man holding a full wine glass, an onlooker and at the same time a part of the proceedings. Many art historians believe him to be a self-portrait of Vermeer. Each of the painting’s four figures are smiling — the procuress avariciously, the man in red lewdly, the man in black jocularly, and the young woman either resignedly or bashfully. 

 

Paintings set in brothels were not uncommon in the seventeenth-century Netherlands. Vermeer was not inventing his subject. As might be the case with Vermeer’s The Procuress, brothel scenes could be tied to the parable of the prodigal son. They could thus be approached as the first half of the story, as the moment just before the prodigal son’s change of heart, before his atonement, before his return to his father’s house. Scenes of prostitution might lend themselves to allegorical readings and possibly to allegories of moral purity, since they imply the progression from sin to salvation by portraying the motion of sin, the unchecked inebriation and lust, the willingness to purchase someone’s body and for a moment’s pleasure to leave the traces of sin in that person’s soul. Vermeer may well have been painting in a religious mode, or he may have been exploring impurity secularly, without allegory. Or he may have wanted to leave the framing to his viewers. Let them figure out in what relation sin stands to redemption.

 

Whether it is imbued with Christian meaning or not, the picture draws on its austere purity of form to arrive at something more than an impure tableau. The Procuress is ravishingly, painfully beautiful. The composition has a taut natural drama to it, almost as if these are four characters on a pared-down modern stage, each unhidden and each relating to the other. The painting’s many dark areas enhance its drama, forcing our attention on the young woman. Beauty emanates as well from the material world that Vermeer conjures — a rug that is a tapestry of folded patterns, impossibly lifelike; a blue-and-white wine pitcher, its lines and its proportion converging into elegance and luxury; and the young woman’s face, neither ethereally innocent nor crudely sensual, neither comfortable with the proceedings nor made overtly miserable by them. The painting’s beauty is unarguable and arresting.

 

Owing to its subject, the painting’s beauty unsettles its moral order outside of allegory. Not one of its brushstrokes is didactic. At the very center of the painting is the glistening edge of a coin, and surrounding it are the hands of the buyer and the bought. Beauty envelops a rank transaction, over which no tears are being shed: each of the four figures is smiling. The aesthetic and the moral dimensions of the painting challenge one another. They are at war with one another, which is the experience that Vermeer gives to his viewers, who cannot miss the depravity at work in this brothel and who cannot fail to find it beautiful. The painting has a compressed sensuality that, in the hands of a lesser artist, could become erotica, but there is far too much complexity in the young woman’s face and far too much hardened appetite in the faces of the two men and the procuress for the painting to titillate. That the procuress gives the painting its title (which may or may not be Vermeer’s) is telling. More than appeal or desire, this is a painting about the selling of sex, and it is exquisite. 

 

If it is open to allegory, The Procuress may be an allegory about art. Living in a mercantile society that worshiped money and conspicuous consumption, seventeenth-century Dutch painters served a highly developed art market. These artists could not ignore the transaction on which their livelihoods depended — the selling of their art. Perhaps Vermeer’s self-portraiture in the picture was not limited to the man on the side of the painting; perhaps the self-portraiture extended to the painting as a whole, to the selling of self that is entailed in the selling of art. It is not at all obvious that Vermeer is decrying prostitution in The Procuress or that he is decrying the selling of art, if that is one of the painting’s intended themes. Instead of recoiling from commerce, he very much wants his viewers to behold the sale of that which is beautiful and to see this sale for what it is, to stare at its transactional impurity. Art need not rise high to be great. It need not transcend. (And it need not debase itself.) It can vibrate gorgeously with a candor that is moral and immoral, civilized and barbarous, right and wrong. This is us, it can say, and to know us is to know our impurity as buyers and as sellers, to know this impurity directly, unfiltered, and not to externalize our reaction to it into pity or outrage or into the noisy condemnation of procuresses and the customers they find. 

 

“I have written wicked book,” Herman Melville wrote in a letter to Nathaniel Hawthorne in 1851, “and feel spotless as the lamb.” He was referring to Moby-Dick, which is dedicated to Hawthorne. Melville may have been exaggerating for effect, playing up the wickedness of Moby-Dick to the author of The Scarlet Letter, a book with its own purchase on wickedness and its own inquiry into the intimacy of virtue with evil. Melville was fond of verbal extremism. He was nevertheless right about Moby-Dick, right in noting that it is not so much a novel about wickedness, though it is that too, as it is a wicked book. Read at times as prophetic of fascism, Moby-Dick owes its gravitas precisely to its wickedness. The crew of the Pequod — the novel’s “we” — marches behind Ahab. He gets their vote, and they elect for a lunatic quest. They extinguish democracy democratically, and in favor of a charismatic leader, while in the richest possible language the novel exalts the brutality of nature. Ahab dominates the ship and the white whale dominates the seas. In the battle between these two ferocious animals, the stronger one wins, the only possible outcome in Melville’s absolutely godless universe. For Melville, if not necessarily for its dreamy narrator Ishmael, Moby-Dick is a wicked book in part because it is so resolutely amoral, one of the many reasons why the book was a critical failure, not just for years but for decades.

 

To sting, the wickedness of a book or the wickedness of a work of art must be real. It cannot be mimed or counterfeited, a devil’s costume that can be put on for a performance and then taken off. In the case of Moby-Dick, wickedness consisted in its contention that democracy may be weak and that it may undermine itself. And its sense of nature is so godless that it makes Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, published seven years after Moby-Dick, seem genteel and pious by comparison. Melville wrote an avant-garde novel so impure — by the standards of 1852 — that it wrecked his career, much as Ahab’s hunt for the white whale wrecked his career as a ship captain. Prior to publishing Moby-Dick, Melville had been a literary celebrity. After Moby-Dick, he faded from view. The novel itself was largely forgotten until the twentieth century, when its insult to an assertive Protestant nationalism became less burdensome to its American readers and its godlessness more in tune with the times. Yet the sting is still there. It is there every time Americans sense instinctually that the ship of state could go down. Moby-Dick is wicked because it is so persuasive and so stark in its predictions. What it predicts is the suicide of American democracy.

 

A genuinely impure art provokes harsh reactions. Ulysses has a tangled publication history. Due to worries about obscenity, it was not released in the United States until 1932. (By contrast, Vermeer’s mother-in-law had a painting in her home titled The Procuress. Vermeer was not taking a risk in depicting a brothel.) Such resistance is natural and inevitable even in societies that think of themselves as free. It is par for the course in more authoritarian and repressive political orders, which invariably exalt some interlinked principle of cultural and political purity. 

 

Yet the will to purge impurity demands particular consideration at the present moment. American culture is taking a neo-Victorian turn, though its propriety is very different from what propriety meant in the 1860s or the 1870s. In the artistic and intellectual worlds, contemporary propriety is rooted in progressive politics and in a shifting set of attitudes that conform to a particular conception of the political good. Conservatives have a similar catechism in the idea of the “common good,” of “don’t say gay” and anti-drag legislation and book-banning.  To endorse these attitudes in art is to be pure. To impede them is to be impure. Books are getting forcibly liberated from their impurities, as was the case recently in the United Kingdom with several of Roald Dahl’s children’s books, which were rewritten and sanitized for contemporary publication. In the history of culture, periods without formal or informal censorship are exceedingly rare.

 

The defense of impurity is not that artists sometimes miss the mark or that they are fallible as people. It is not that impurity is a byproduct of changing mores, a skin that an artist might be taught to shed or that editors, critics, and publishers might assist artists in shedding. The defense of impurity is quite simply that it is integral to art. Troubling by definition, as art, too, should be, impurity is a kind of skepticism, a naturally adversarial stance, a form of friction that calls for a separate and sequential resistance: the reader’s response to Captain Ahab that does not make him out to be a counter-cultural hero, a glamorous madman with a death wish, but that pitches against Ahab’s seductions; and the viewer’s response to The Procuress that avoids cynicism, that does not confuse “this is us” with “this is all we are,” that ponders relationships not stipulated by money, that envisions an exit from the comparison of life with a brothel. In the background of Vermeer’s painting, one detects a faint window to the outside world. The brothel is not the only world there is. There are other worlds. 

 

The defense of impurity in a culture, beyond any single work of art, is not less valuable. A culture that believes in its own innocence is dangerous. Cultures that can harbor an impure art, which they do at their own peril, lend stature to contradictions, which are an inalienable feature of human affairs, and by dignifying contradictions they may become more tolerant. But the opposite is also the case: contradictions make for political enemies, and for intolerance. State governments are removing Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved from school libraries because they cannot tolerate the contradiction that it embodies, the affront that it gives to simplistic and self-serving historical narratives. The complications of history frighten them. Universities that protect their students from conservative speakers fear the contradiction that they intuit in non-progressive points of view, or more precisely, in the discomfiting fact that there are non-progressive points of view. On and on the merry-go-round of cultural purity goes — with a spin from the right, a spin from the left — in hopes that one day all the contradictions will be bled dry. But the contradictions will persevere, and a great deal of damage can be done in the name of eliminating them. Whereas cultural purity is a foolish ideal, a respect for impurities can teach a culture to know and to live with its contradictions. This helps the polity behind the culture to stay sane. 

 

The less conspicuous phrase in Melville’s letter to Hawthorne wanders from wickedness. Having written a wicked book, Melville feels spotless as the lamb. Given his Christian wording, Melville seems to have undergone a communion ritual of authorship. He does not feel like a lamb. He feels like “the lamb,” the lamb of God whose innocence is perennially sacrificed yet whose presence returns after the confession of wickedness. Melville’s journey to spotlessness is instructive. Purity cannot be distilled from purity, goodness from goodness, virtue from virtue.  Purity must be distilled from impurity, which is the alchemy of art. The best defense of impurity may not concern impurity at all. It may be that without impurity there can be no purity, that without the experience of impurity there could be no discovery of purity. Pushkin’s Mozart was too categorical. Genius and evildoing are not antipodes. Genius, purity, and impurity are three points on an equilateral triangle. A proof of this geometry, in the second year of a war that has repurposed his reputation without diminishing his genius, would be Pushkin’s own art. Like Mozart, his fictional alter ego, Pushkin was an impure genius.