The Missing Delight
Delight is an orphan. Many other moods and emotions have had champions in literature and philosophy, patrons invested in their cultural standing. Melancholy can claim The Anatomy of Melancholy, Robert Burton’s strange masterpiece from 1621. It generated a fashion for melancholy that has not entirely faded, which the Romantics powerfully refreshed, lionizing melancholy for its immediate purchase on beauty. Baudelaire liked to remark that sadness is an essential element of beauty. In Kind of Blue and Sketches of Spain and other albums, Miles Davis projected modern melancholy onto a liquid music that proves Baudelaire’s point. Joy is, in this respect, like melancholy: it has great advocates in art and perhaps the greatest musical advocate of all in Beethoven, who composed the “Ode to Joy” — via Schiller’s poem, which Beethoven embedded in his ninth symphony — regal and radiant. Despair and anguish have secure homes in the arts and in letters. They haunt the literature of loss, the literature of mortality, the literature of romance, the literature of regret, the literature of war. Happiness? It is enshrined in the Declaration of Independence as an inalienable right, or at least the pursuit of it is. Stendhal believed the exact opposite of Baudelaire — that happiness is what beauty promises. And happiness can be formidable in absentia. It, too, cuts a culturally imposing figure.
Horror is widely esteemed. What else could answer the human talent for cruelty? Horror intertwines with history — with Josephus chronicling the Romans’ destruction of Jerusalem or Thucydides relating his stories of plague and brutality or Gibbon summing up history itself as a record of the “crimes, follies and misfortunes of mankind.” In the twentieth century, the Holocaust and other shatteringly large mass murders have deepened history’s association with atrocity and crime, leaving its shadow on the face of literature. The literature of witness has many twentieth-century tributaries. It is paradigmatically modern, an entire genre governed by horror. Or horror can flourish outside the historical realm, in the psyche. It can be the ahistorical preoccupation of Edgar Allen Poe, Flannery O’Connor, Edvard Munch, Val Lewton, and Alfred Hitchcock. No video streaming service would be complete without an expanding collection of horror movies. Hollywood discovered a long time ago that even horror can give pleasure.
The more irate moods balance political with cultural stature. Raging against the dying of the light can resemble rage at the world’s injustices — the purity of political anger and the indignation that bends toward revolution. Karl Marx did not just study global commerce and speculate about alternative forms of political economy; a virtuoso of invective, he grounded his prophetic visions in fury. The dominant political mode in the United States at the moment is either anger or disgust, a point of convergence for the wrathful Right and the wrathful Left. Disgust is a mark of engagement and sensibility. Not to be disgusted is to be oblivious or simply to be stupid. For decades, disgust has colored contemporary art, which often confronts us with the extent of our rapacity, with the depth of our prejudice, and with our underlying commitment to the production not of value or of dignity but of garbage, of the waste we so callously leave behind. Disgust is definitely in vogue.
But delight is not in vogue. It almost never is. It is, as I say, an intellectual orphan. More fickle than happiness and almost physiological, a reflex as much as an emotion, delight evades easy definition. It is intensely subjective, more so perhaps than sadness or anger. It is lighter, and with fewer evident implications, and even more impermanent, than pleasure. Delight cannot be summoned. It comes when it comes and goes when it goes — usually quickly. It awaits occasions, and in their absence it cannot be spontaneously generated. Often delight owes something to surprise. Yet delight is not a less meaningful state of mind, a less fundamental human mode, than sadness or anger, rage or disgust, joy or melancholy. But where are its advocates? Its placelessness puts it in a precarious cultural position. It runs the risk of being overlooked and, by getting overlooked, of being dismissed or forgotten as trivial. It runs the risk of neglect at precisely the moment when delight might be most culturally beneficial, which is to say the moment we are living in right now. Slaves of anxiety and fear, surrounded by unimpeachable reasons for pessimism, we are still in need of it.
I would like to say a few words in defense of delight.
Delight is a Latinate word. The “de” is an intensifier placed against lactare, to lure or to entice. Old French modified delactare into delitier, meaning to please or to charm, and around the year 1200 Middle English winnowed delit from delitier, keeping its meaning. In the sixteenth century, delit acquired an “h” and with this addition its modern form, which by an accident of English spelling harbors a word that does not really belong to it — light. A room is lit, a lamp can be lighted, and a person can be delighted. Words properly related to delight are: delicious, delicate, lace, elicit, and dilettante. (A dilettante, unlike an expert, is someone who is often delighted.) The root of delight in lactare reinforces one of delight’s important aspects. It is an active emotion, kinetic in a way that anger and sadness are not. Compared to delight, anger and sadness can seem static.
The 1913 edition of Webster’s Dictionary provides three definitions of delight, wavering between sense and intellect. First, it is “a high degree of gratification of mind; a high-wrought state of pleasurable feeling; lively pleasure; extreme satisfaction; joy.” “Gratification of mind” is itself an interesting variation on “extreme satisfaction.” “Lively pleasures” emphasize delight as a word of motion, more active than passive. Somewhat circular is Webster’s second definition: “that which gives great pleasure or delight.” And third, lest “gratification of mind” grant too much to mind and to highly wrought inner states, there is delight as “licentious pleasure; lust.” Without explanation, Webster’s parenthetically puts the name “Chaucer” next to this third definition. The Canterbury Tales could reasonably be called a compendium of delights. Chaucer merged verse, humor, and bawdiness in his characters (male and female), cheerfully acknowledging the pleasure they take in sex. Chaucerian writing captures a distinctive version of delight.
Left out from the definitions in Webster’s are delight’s religious and spiritual overtones. Perhaps they are subsumed within the “gratification of mind.” Consider the thirty-seventh Psalm in the King James translation. Iterations of delight appear in it three times. The Psalm begins by eschewing antagonism. Its first line is an injunction: “fret not thyself because of evildoers, neither be thou envious of the workers of iniquity.” Antagonism is a distraction from God and from godliness. Trust, rather, in the Lord, the Psalm contends, and “delight thyself also in the LORD; and he shall give thee the desires of thine heart.” “Delight thyself in” might be a synonym here for worship, but more precisely it is an antonym to the Psalm’s opening word, an antonym to “fret.” To fret is to inhibit delight. To fret because of evildoers or to envy the workers of iniquity is to focus one’s mind on the evildoers and the iniquity, a technique for losing sight of God. Delight — by contrast — is the path to receiving one’s heart’s desires through God. It is the gate, the path, and the goal. This Psalm is a document not of a tormented religious sensibility, which is amply represented in all the religions, but of a joyous one.
The thirty-seventh Psalm guarantees the transience of wickedness. It promises the eventual demise of evildoers, after which “the meek shall inherit the earth; and shall delight themselves in the abundance of peace.” Together, righteousness and delight in the Lord are preludes to some period of God-given recompense, to a time when the meek can delight themselves in abundant peace. Both means and end, delight constitutes a virtuous circle in this Psalm. Its third and final mention of delight synthesizes the word’s first two appearances: “the steps of the good man are ordered by the LORD; and he delighteth in his way.” Abraham is ordered to sacrifice his son Isaac; Jacob must wrestle with an angel to become Israel; Job, a good man, is subjected to fantastic suffering. Such are the imponderables of God’s will and of faith in God. The thirty-seventh Psalm illuminates a separate pathway, of God ordering the steps of the good man and of the good man delighting in his way. Is delight the proof of his goodness? Is it the cause of his goodness? Is delight cause and proof simultaneously?
A more secular sensibility would link delight not to God or to goodness but to art and aesthetic experience. Delight is thinner than tragedy’s catharsis, the constructive churn of emotion that arises from the spectacle of disaster. Nor is delight at all related to the awe that one feels in response to the sublime, a category of art or nature that has long fascinated philosophers. The sublime is a vertiginous awakening of the senses to the magnitude of things, one part wonder and one part horror. The sublime shades into terribilita, the trait claimed by Renaissance painters such as Michelangelo. Grandeur and seriousness are the markers of an artist aspiring to terribilita. To achieve their desired effect they must produce an art that is large-scale and riven with tension, with light and dark, good and evil, piety and sin.
Delight is smaller and there is nothing cataclysmic about it. It is, in fact, anti-cataclysmic. It is a respite from intensity. Art in search of delight, art open to delight, tends toward moderation. It runs the risk of sweetness and harmony. Dangers abound for any art oriented toward delight. Aiming to please, to allure and to entice, it might please too much, starting in the gratification of the senses and ending in banality — the beautifully arranged image of a beautiful person in beautiful clothes contemplating a beautiful tree. Any excess will make a delightful work of art cloying. Another trap in which such easily grasped art might get caught is kitsch, and commodification. Once upon a time the Impressionists were shocking, with their revolutionary fidelity to sense impressions and their exhilarating liberties with color, but their paintings have since ended up on shower curtains and coffee mugs and picture puzzles. Delight sells, not least because it seems to demand no effort, merely a momentary capture of attention. The will to delight is a mainstay in the aesthetics of advertising.
Delight’s natural affinity may be less with “high art,” which by definition makes demands on the viewer, than with interior and industrial design. Delight is not just the currency of advertisers and not just the advertisement. It is the iPhone itself, which gives great pleasure or delight. Delight can be an appreciation of craftsmanship. It is the effect of examining a well-made watch — the fineness of the pieces, the interlocking parts, the exquisite smallness of everything. Or delight is there to be absorbed from distinctive furniture, the Eames chair that hits every mark of style, the color of the wood, the excellence of the fabric, and the austere geometry of the chair itself. Delight in this regard cannot escape certain class connotations. It intersects with luxury, with the licentiousness of objects. Prized objects can give delight, reflecting the money and the taste that made them possible. Delight walks arm in arm with connoisseurship, with the educated ability to recognize things, preferably rare and expensive things, that rise to the level of delight.
Two other domains of human experience, food and sex, do a lot to make delight their own. Food’s claim is self-evident — the unity of smell, taste, and sight heightened and then relished by appetite. The variety of a great meal, the conviviality: the hunger to be delighted by food is instinctual, something with which we are born. Even poor people can partake of it. The social character of eating has often been praised as an enhancement of delight: when Hume sought release from philosophical perplexity, his first instinct was to dine with friends. Similarly, erotica does not have much purpose beyond delight, giving fresh meaning to “a high degree of gratification of the mind.” Pornographic erotica often traffics in violence and exploitation, feeding into a high degree of rapacity of the mind, selling this rapacity to the highest bidder. It is often revolting. In milder erotica, however the mind similarly gratifies itself through fantasy, through idealizations or through idealized degradations, depending on tastes and preferences. As with food, the enjoyment of erotica is instinctive, crossing many cultures and many epochs. In ancient Pompeii, people had erotica painted into their houses without embarrassment. They displayed it with pride, as yet another way — in addition to images of field and flower — of ennobling a home with the delights of domesticity. In these examples, delight approximates the lively pleasures that are one of its defining features.
An enduring objection to delight as aesthetic experience is political. Is there such a thing as political delight? Political art might embrace sentimentality or the sublime, it may inspire or cast one down, but it has little patience with delight. Political art frets about evildoers and the workers of iniquity. It can be subtle and it can be marvelous as art, but at the very least political art must advocate. It must carry a message that can be broadcasted and received and sustained. That is its truest function. Upton Sinclair’s masterpiece of social protest, The Jungle, from 1906, channels the superior novels of Charles Dickens (who was an avowedly political writer) and the superior novels of Emile Zola (who was nothing if not a political writer). Sinclair was right about the intolerable labor conditions in Chicago. To remain right about this Chicago, he had to write a novel in which the modern American city is oppressive. Its stockyards are awash in blood. The city around them is dense with unhappiness. The sheer length of The Jungle makes it oppressive to read. Because the novel breathes the air of unhappiness, so, too, must the reader. Anything else would be a betrayal of its political purpose. In this context the genius of Dickens becomes even more pronounced. He produced novels that analyze and indict social conditions but somehow manage to layer passages of sheer delight into them, most palpably the delight Dickens always found in the written word.
If delight is not entirely an orphan, it is because it has a parent or a guardian angel in comedy. Conventional comedy has its genre requirements: the smooth passage past discordance and dissonance to resolution — the progression in romantic comedy, for example, from a relationship that makes no sense to the perfect marriage. All’s well that ends well and so on. Comedy traffics in laughter, which is an outward expression of delight (among other things). The parallel between laughter and delight lies in their physicality, in the force of laughter, which mirrors the motion of delight. Laughter is sudden, it comes as a relief, it cuts through, it pulls up, it breaks through boredom, anger, anguish, complacency, worry, grief. Beckett was the great master of such laughter. Of course not all comedy plays by the conventional rules. It can mix and combine with other emotions and genres, particularly with tragedy, its frequent fellow-traveler. Whether full-fledged or only a piece of the puzzle, well-fashioned comedy is pedagogic. By provoking laughter it teaches laughter. In this it once again resembles delight, which by provoking joy teaches joy.
Satire, an uncompromising version of comedy, is tied organically to delight. Satire takes as its point of departure evil, disaster, sanctimony, hypocrisy, vanity, and pomposity — and transforms them into laughter. Satire does not promise the eradication of misfortune. If anything, satire promises the intractability of evil. Satire and political art branch out in two separate directions: one toward reform and the other toward survival skills, the ones that can help us to co-exist with the never-ending foolishness and injustice. True satirists are not reformers. They are noticers, not just of evildoing but of the indifference that is so often the response to evil. The satirist depicts malice meticulously — most famously Swift observing how little people care about poverty in Ireland and then proving the point in his “Modest Proposal,” in which he made the policy recommendation that Irish children be eaten. The laugher that Swift incites is complicated. The dark delight lies not in the mention of poverty but in Swift’s complete psychological command of our unconcern. To laugh at ourselves is in this instance to see ourselves in a very unflattering mirror.
A less exacting species of delight resides in parody. By shifting registers, by altering the tone, parody exposes formula for what it is. In the film Blazing Saddles, Mel Brooks accomplishes a ferocious parody of the Western. Brooks gets us to laugh at ourselves in Blazing Saddles — at our enthusiasm for Hollywood formula — by rearranging the cowboy movie’s cliches. In Blazing Saddles, a man punches a horse, a visual gag and a joke about the movies. It would be nothing for a man to kill another man in a Western: the genre thrives on violence and on outlaws who upend social and ethical codes. Yet in Blazing Saddles the violence goes too far, exposing violence as not only wrong but absurd. A man punches a horse, and Brooks prods us to laugh at our shock and outrage. If we do, we are in the zone of delight. In 2022, one could easily imagine the film getting banned for its depiction of cruelty to animals, confirming the brilliance of Brooks’ joke. In 2022, indeed, Brooks’ whole film, with its parodies of racism, misogyny, anti-Semitism, homophobia, and religious piety, could never get made, which is a shame.
In 1964, Susan Sontag brought together satire, parody, and delight in “Notes on Camp.” Sontag captured a well-established cultural style — she traces it back to the eighteenth century — that thrives on responding with comic appreciation to art that is overdone, that is too much, that dramatizes itself far past the limits of good taste. The epitome of such comic appreciation, Camp is “the farthest extension, in sensibility, of life as theater,” Sontag writes. In this theatrical sensibility, “things are campy not when they become old — but when we have less invested in them, and can enjoy, instead of be frustrated by, the failure of the attempt.” The enjoyment of failure, Camp is “a seriousness that fails” and that by failing succeeds as Camp. Less investment, greater enjoyment. Without apology, seriousness is exchanged for lightness.
Sontag was writing against the literary-critical grain of her time. She was throwing down a gauntlet to the recondite academics and to the dour servants of the avant-garde. One sees this dual program in her defense of Camp, which “refuses both the harmonies of traditional seriousness and the risk of fully identifying with extreme states of being.” More than a take-down of the overly earnest and the overly intense, “Notes on Camp” is a celebration of “the consistently aesthetic experience of the world.” Camp is a method of appreciating some popular culture — or mass culture, as the editors of Partisan Review, the magazine in which “Notes on Camp” first appeared, would have put it. Camp is a method for having cultural fun, one that “makes the man of good taste cheerful.” Not quite the thirty-seventh Psalm, this, too, is nevertheless a way of reaching the desires of one’s heart. “The connoisseur of Camp is continually amused, delighted,” Sontag continues. Sontag’s argument for Camp is precisely that it delights.
Granting laughter and enjoyment their due as tools of delight, one must immediately add that there is a variety of delight that is not entangled in Camp’s ironies or in satire’s aggressions. Irony and satire are stances or attitudes. Delight is an experience. The purest delight arises from the aesthetic experience of it, as it might from experiences untethered to art: the easy delight that nature gives off, or the delight encoded in the giddier moments of friendship and love. Sensual or sensuous pleasure might issue in physical or psychosomatic symptoms — the fabled “Stendhal syndrome” induced by art or antiquity, or in Stendhal’s case, “a fierce palpitation of the heart” and “an attack of nerves” that followed a rapturous encounter with Volterrano’s frescoes in a chapel of Florence’s Santa Croce church. Delight is a different and less dramatic response. And yet, like the aesthete’s ecstasy, delight is more mystical than rational; and it transforms, not forever because it passes, but still it transforms. In its own way, the art of delight elevates. It juxtaposes two contrasting truths: that we do not live elevated lives most of the time, since we always carry many burdens; and that we are capable of elevation, even of levitation, though down we will go soon enough. The first truth might well be unbearable without the second. Delight defies the difficulties of life.
Case studies can lend these claims specificity, and I will provide three of them, traveling backwards in historical time. The first is the Chrysler Building, which was completed in 1930. This extraordinary skyscraper is profligate in the delight that it bestows on onlookers and passers-by. The second is Louis Armstrong’s 1928 recording of “West End Blues,” a studio performance that is evidence of Armstrong’s early mastery. The third is Mozart’s opera, The Marriage of Figaro, an opera buffa, which first appeared on stage in Vienna in 1786 and brings us (inevitably) back to comedy as well as pedagogy. Mozart’s Figaro shines with delight. No less does it teach its listeners or viewers to know delight, even though the story it tells is often harrowing. Like the classical style more generally, Figaro punctuates delight with poignancy. And the opera is an experiment in delight as philosophy, as a way of being, through which Mozart does the impossible: he sustains delight for hours, reversing the standard ratio and thereby arguing provocatively, in agreement with the thirty-seventh Psalm, that suffering is temporary but delight as eternal.
The Chrysler Building is a great work of art. It came about, though, for reasons that were to the side of artistic intention. Its architect was William Van Alen, who was born in New York City in 1883. From modest beginnings, he made his was to Paris in 1908, where he studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, a traditionalist haven, and then gradually acquired a taste for modernism. Van Alen’s great patron turned out to be Walter Chrysler, also of modest background. He was a man without much education and with an extreme talent for business. By 1928, Chrysler was promoting his Silver Dome car, running a booming company and seeking a prestige building in New York. He wanted it to bear the insignia of his name and his company. He wanted the advertising, and — as many did at the time — he wanted to be in on in the construction of the world’s tallest building. Van Alen delivered the goods, after which their relationship soured into acrimony with a court case about payment. Van Alen won the case, but by having brought it to court he lost his professional reputation. The Chrysler Building was his only major commission. He is an artist who made only one work and it is a masterpiece.
Up into the sky it rose, between 1929 and 1930. The distinctive steel used for the Chrysler Building, Enduro KA-2, was created not much earlier, in 1926. It must have mingled in Walter Chrysler’s mind with the Silver Dome, and cars were suggested and represented across the building. Its gargoyles, inspired perhaps by Van Alen’s time in Paris, look like gigantic hood ornaments. The building’s most notable feature, after its silvery steel, is its decorative spire, an unforgettable pattern of curving lines that suggest a sunburst, a pagan accent, and — more prosaically — the hubcaps of a Chrysler automobile. Pagan hubcaps! The Chrysler Building never shies away from business; it is all business. It bypasses the alleged tension between branding and art and between art and commerce, which curiously is a part of its glamour. Claudia Roth Pierpont once described the Chrysler Building as “the quintessential jazz baby of buildings” and as a specimen of “the honky-tonk sublime.”
Ever since it went up, the Chrysler Building has sparkled in films and photographs. The photos highlight the charm and exuberance of its many ornaments, while the aerial photographs divinize the building. Located on 42nd Street and Lexington Avenue, it is far enough from the downtown and midtown forests of skyscrapers to stand out, and to contrast its slender beauty to the many less sublime structures of the Manhattan skyline. It is less squat than the Empire State Building, less severe than the Twin Towers, of blessed memory, with less matter and more art than any of the countless other attempts to brand the New York City sky. The photographs are persuasive in admiring the Chrysler Building as New York City’s loveliest skyscraper. Postcards and refrigerator magnets tell us that what the Eiffel Tower is to Paris and the Coliseum is to Rome and the leaning tower is to Pisa, the Chrysler Building is to New York. Walter Chrysler could not have been more pleased with what his building has achieved. More than the car company, the building will immortalize his name.
The Chrysler Building’s involvement with delight runs along other grooves. It comes from seeing the building from the street. It comes by surprise, which is a feature of delight, when art or aesthetic experience is not what one was expecting. It comes either by day or by night. The day should be sunny. Street-level New York is loud. It overfills the eye: the signage, the foot traffic, the flood of cars. Above it are the usually multi-storied buildings, many of the them handsome, but they cannot compete with the spectacle of the near-at-hand. But cross a street, or walk into Bryant Park, and the sky reappears, and there, demarcating this blue sky perfectly, stands the Chrysler Building, its gleaming silver cleansing the eye and drawing it up to the crowning sunburst that, because it is so high, belongs more to the sky than to the city or the street. Seen purely, as an optical experience, the Chrysler Building signifies nothing but its own exquisite form. It promotes nothing. It is a building rather than an icon, but a building that transforms stone and steel and masonry into the visual stuff of levitation. In this way it surprises and delights its accidental viewers. When you look up you are lifted up.
In the evening, the Chrysler Building’s steel is invisible. It is one of a thousand skyscrapers. Its sole uniqueness is its domed top, the curves of which are lit up — something that Van Alen had contemplated but was not realized until the 1980s. The curves of light belong to the building, which at night is a metropolitan lighthouse, lending the city coherence and staving off disorientation. New York is too bright, even at the darkest pitch of night, to see the stars. The Chrysler Building takes their place, the city’s North Star, merging the delight of its design with the comfort of its identifiable presence. Amid the visual chaos of Manhattan the nighttime Chrysler Building is a constant, like its cousin the Empire State building, there to guide the late-night walker in the city. In the nocturnal city, which can inspire anxiety, the spire of the Chrysler Building comes as a great relief from darkness, as an answer to darkness, an image of form that playfully, cheerfully, solicitously oversees the endless city.
The Chrysler Building is a work of art ironically. Much as New York City does, Walter Chrysler wanted to impress. His adolescent eagerness to own the world’s tallest building, which for a while he did, was outpaced by this same adolescent eagerness in others. By 1932, the Chrysler Building was demoted to being the world’s second tallest building; and it continues to be so demoted; and it hardly matters. The Chrysler Building makes no secret of its impurity. It is neither a museum nor a monument, and it is no cathedral, except maybe to capitalism. It is an office building. Yet the sincere impurity of a building put up to celebrate gas-guzzling Chryslers does nothing to tarnish its gift of delight. Its form is unimpaired by what goes on inside it. To the contrary: by asking so little of its viewers, by not being Saint Peter’s Basilica or Notre Dame de Paris, it forces them to receive its gift with no expectations, without having to be aware of anything (other than the building’s name), without having to give it their religious or political allegiance. It lets them be merely delighted, and the surrounding city obliges as a foil, with its fumes, its din, its grays, its gaudy colors, and its unforgiving proportions. New York’s overwhelming density paves the way to the delight of a building that leaves it all behind and melts into a colorless, self-illuminated verticality. If fretful New York is the call, the Chrysler Building is the response.
Louis Armstrong came to New York in 1924. Born in New Orleans in 1901, he had moved to Chicago in 1922, a prominent member of the Great Migration from South to North. At age seventeen, Armstrong had begun playing on riverboats near New Orleans, and it was in 1923 that he made his first studio recording (in Indiana). New York, the big leagues, had the Fletcher Henderson band; but Armstrong went back to Chicago, where he made some of his most extraordinary music. Between 1925 and 1928, he recorded sixty songs — for which he received modest payment and no royalties — with different groups. Jazz was a new and fluid musical form, a work in progress, and Armstrong’s recordings in these years were some its greatest revelations — jazz’s scripture. There was the quality of the ensemble playing, which no other musicians could match. There were Armstrong’s improvisations, which no one could match. He did not improvise decorative ornaments. He improvised everything, the whole melodic line, playing with the total assurance that was his signature. Rather than find his way to a new style he brought to his recordings a new style fully formed.
A gem among these bejeweled recordings is “West End Blues.” The song had been composed by Armstrong’s mentor, Joe “King” Oliver, a cornet player. Its name evoked New Orleans and in particular a neighborhood, the West End, known as a summer resort. It was a popular venue for music — and the last stop on a New Orleans trolly line. On June 28, 1928, Armstrong came to the studio with the pianist Earl Hines, the clarinetist Jimmy Strong, the trombonist Fred Robinson, the banjo player Mancy Carr and the drummer Zutty Singleton. By the racial and popular-culture strictures of the day, Armstrong was an entertainer. He resented his wife (the pianist Lil Hardin) for promoting him as “the greatest trumpet player in the world.” He could not have been unaware of his genius, so fluently did it display itself in his recordings and in his concerts, but his own genius was not the point of these recordings. That much can be surmised from Earl Hines’s recollection of their reaction to “West End Blues”: “When it first came out, Louis and I stayed by that recording practically an hour and a half or two hours and we just knocked each other out because we had no idea it was gonna turn out as good as it did.” They had no idea!
A bit over three minutes long, “West End Blues” has several discreet parts. Armstrong starts alone with a baroque chain of arpeggios and clustered notes, all bravura and virtuosity. The next part is the song’s melody, a straight-up blues played by Armstrong to the underlying soft thump of his rhythm section. Armstrong makes way for a lazy trombone solo and then a clarinet solo, to which he added his voice, scat singing in dialogue with the clarinet. (Throughout his life what made Armstrong’s raspy voice into a lovely voice was the sound of delight within it.) What follows is an intricate, elegant piano solo from Earl Hines, going up the piano, staying momentarily high, shifting to the piano’s middle registers and then bringing out its bass notes — urbane blues par excellence. Armstrong hits a high note in the song’s climax, lingers over it and then plays a few blues figurations, after which he and Hines trade punctuation marks, giving the song a soft landing, a minimalist conclusion to its baroque beginning. However rehearsed it was, “West End Blues” is free and seamless and floating and seemingly effortless, a languorous summer afternoon in the West End of New Orleans.
The ensemble contributes a lot to the song’s delight. For its three minutes, the song moves through many textures: the cerebral clarity of the piano, the weary thickness of the trombone, the earthiness of the clarinet, and the conversational whimsicality of Armstrong’s vocals. As for the solos, Armstrong generously passes the baton, which continues to get passed, a touch of competitiveness flashing when Hines dares to play with no less imagination than Armstrong, and no less flair. None of the musicians reduces the number to a personal flight of fancy. “West End Blues” is a self-creating poem in which each verse is written with a new instrument or combination of instruments, a classical drama with a beginning, a middle and an end. Nothing intrudes. Nothing obtrudes. Nothing distracts. Nothing detracts. Nothing conflicts.
The ensemble is Armstrong’s of course, as is its approach to the song. His voice is lighthearted, imitating first the clarinet and then with a “wah wah wah” the trombone, not making fun of them but not taking them very seriously either. Armstrong’s trumpet is the song’s incomparable instrument of delight. The sound is bright and high, neither celestial (as a violin might be) nor melancholic (as a cello might be). “West End Blues” radiates delight much as the Chrysler Building does. As with the Chrysler Building, it uses altitude for effect. Armstrong’s introduction plunges down, a waterfall of notes that zig-zag lower and lower. Later, in his short solo, Armstrong flies up, staying as he liked to do for several seconds on a single note, the ensemble going on almost without him, as if he had forgotten about them and about the rules of gravity. Just as the eye sweeps up the Chrysler Building, the ear — and the soul — sweeps up with Armstrong’s high note and briefly remains ascended, standing with the trumpeter at the top of the mountain and relishing the height and the view and the cool air.
Armstrong’s rhythms complete the picture. Speeding up, slowing down, staying silent, he divides and subdivides time. The song starts with the jagged complexity of his introduction, brilliantly breaking down time and folding it in upon itself, after which Armstrong’s rendition of the melody is low key. A bit faster and it would be dance music, something at which Armstrong excelled: it was Armstrong’s marching-band and blues rhythms that formed the foundation for swing in the 1930s. Throughout “West End Blues” and without playing many notes, Armstrong uses syncopation to give the music its energy, its tension, its forward momentum. The biggest delight of all is that we can hear him improvise in “real time.” Though the number has structure, there is something blithe and serendipitous about it — its sophistication gives way to joy. If Armstrong and Hines had no idea what they had accomplished with “West End Blues,” it was not necessarily because they were modest or because they had been labeled entertainers rather than artists. They may have entered too blissfully into the moment and been too fully enchanted by the rhythms of their ensemble and solo playing to assess their handiwork. If so, they would have something in common with those who can listen to them play — on a record, on a CD, on a phone — and be startled and delighted (delight is always startling) by the music together with the musicians who were making it on June 28, 1928.
The Marriage of Figaro is perhaps the last word on delight. Listing the greatest hits of Camp, Sontag included “much of Mozart.” This is not quite right. Mozart could not fail musically, though he was certainly theatrical, and his operas were the apogee of his theatricality. Figaro and many of Mozart’s other operas do not skimp on ridiculous plot twists and on the silliness endemic to opera, especially to opera that does not declare itself to be comic — but Figaro has nothing in common with the bad Broadway musical that can be twisted, by a sophisticated viewer, into a fabulously bad Broadway musical. Figaro is an aesthetic experience for what it is, beginning with its marvelous plot and continuing in the music, which is psychologically astute and a kind of storytelling art unto itself. Averse to glum seriousness, though the pains of love and the injustice of class relations are among its subjects, and thrillingly comic, Figaro is as ambitious a work of literary art as there could be. It surpasses even Don Giovanni, the opera that Mozart would write a year after finishing Figaro. By placing the laurel wreaths of artistic perfection on a comedy, Figaro is an invitation, in its details and in aggregate, to ponder the exquisiteness of delight.
Figaro’s libretto came from the pen of Lorenzo da Ponte. Jewish by birth, Da Ponte grew up near Venice and became a less than proper Catholic priest. Having made his way to Vienna, he was a sought-after librettist who collaborated with Mozart on Figaro, on Don Giovanni, and on Così fan tutte. As if this were not enough for an interesting life, Da Ponte eventually settled in the United States. In New York City he ran a bookstore and served as a professor of Italian literature at Columbia University. He made many contributions to the musical arts in the early republic, helping to build up an opera house that was a predecessor to the Metropolitan Opera. With Figaro, Da Ponte was repurposing a controversial play, La folle journee, ou le Marriage du Figaro, written by Pierre-Augustin Beaumarchais, an avid supporter of the American Revolution, who portrayed a world of culpable aristocrats and admirable servants. Many readers of the play, including Danton and Napoleon, regarded it as an act of political subversion. Converting the play into an opera, Da Ponte took much of its political edge off. His Figaro is neither radical nor sanguine about what a college student might today call privilege. It is very canny about privilege.
The story is about an errant employer. He is the Count Almaviva, who eliminated the droit du seigneur from his Seville household but then tries to bring it back. Count Almaviva, an obstreperous baritone in the opera, has lost interest in his wife, even in her unhappiness. The libretto implies that he has seduced the gardener’s daughter, Barbarina. The action of Figaro revolves around Susanna, whom the servant Figaro wishes to marry and whom the Count wishes to seduce. The opera begins with Susanna’s fear, which the music makes clear: a servant’s bell doubling, while she sings, as an alarm bell. She is right to fear the Count’s lust and his will to power. Though Figaro has the happy ending that comedy seems to promise, and the resolution that is a formal requirement of the classical style, its exploration of barely restrained coercion, of jealousy, of emotional abandonment, of transgression hoped for if not always consummated, is rich and moving. In Figaro, these attitudes and conditions are not smothered in the myth and in the histrionics that make many operas famous for their music and infamous for their plots.
Delight has two guises in The Marriage of Figaro, the music of course and the narrative. They are not separable. A simple delight of Figaro’s story, augmented by its Spanish setting, is a house full of young and amorous people. It is la folle journee, the topsy-turvy day, on which two people are about to wed. Figaro and Susanna lend their anticipation to Figaro. Its first scene is Figaro measuring out the space for their marriage bed. Excitement is also instilled by Cherubino, a boyish man whose role Mozart wrote for a soprano. A character plucked from Da Ponte’s libertine past, Cherubino is the eroticized cherub. He cannot hide his attraction to the Countess, to Barbarina, to love itself. Cherubino is perpetually enamored — voi che sapete, tell me what love is, he sings in one of the work’s finest arias. No longer young, the Countess gets the opera’s most heart-breaking aria, its show-stopper. “Where have the sweet moments gone?” she asks with almost unbearable regret about her wayward husband in Act Three. Lamenting the loss of love, she is pure tenderness in this aria, foreshadowing the reconciliation with the Count destined to come in Act Four.
A less simple delight in Figaro crystallizes around perseverance and forgiveness. Resourceful Susanna, not simple-minded Figaro, is the opera’s protagonist, its heroine. Echoing the Beaumarchais play, Figaro celebrates Susanna as someone who can outsmart the Count. She has to outsmart her fiancée Figaro in the process. His insufficient and then overabundant jealousy threatens their relationship with ruin. Susanna’s soulful perseverance, embedded in everything she sings, rises far above the aloof Countess and above the narcissistic Cherubino, not to mention the bombastic Count. But it is this same fallible Count who breaks through to introspection and regret, getting down on his knees to beg forgiveness of the Countess, when the four-act merry-go-round of intrigue and impersonation comes to a halt and the Count finds himself eagerly trying to seduce his own wife. His missteps are certainly familiar from comedy, whether from the romantic comedies of Shakespeare or the romantic comedies of Hollywood. Yet when confronted with his wife, when recognizing her, he steps away from comedy. His request for forgiveness — the music leaves no doubt about this at all — is from the heart.
The Countess’s forgiveness of the Count captivated Lionel Trilling, who slipped a mention of it into his novel, The Middle of the Journey. Its main character, John Laskell, is listening to Figaro on the radio: “it was in full flight and nearing its end in the magical last scene where farce moves to regions higher than tragedy can reach.” What are these higher regions? Why can farce reach them when tragedy cannot? Ever the teacher, Trilling liked to give his readers questions without being so forward as to answer them himself. Tragedy scrutinizes error, loss, and death through nobility: the tragedy of King Lear, the tragedy of Prince Hamlet. Tragedy is surely the gateway to higher regions. Farce, if it goes higher, corresponds to daily life. It has the space in which to go up, to ascend, to gain altitude and to demonstrate — by means of delight, which is second nature to farce — that error is not necessarily followed by loss and death. Errors can pile up in such a way that from them love and forgiveness might materialize. Farce is not tangential to Figaro. Farce, the comedy of perpetual human error, and therefore a genre of eventual or sudden self-overcoming forgiveness, is what makes it move and what makes it moving.
Mozart’s music does the rest. It is the story and the commentary on the story. Mozart is the composer for whom the prime mover is usually delight. Simplicity is one factor, because it brings out the uncluttered melodic line, which is a vocal line in all of Mozart’s music, rising and falling in synch with the human voice. Mozart’s melodic line is lyrical, tinged with the pastels of his harmonies, not without darkness but suffused with light. Figaro’s music capitalizes on the conventions of opera buffa, mocking the Count’s vanity, cherishing the mistaken identities, and honoring Mozart’s own character, his irrepressible, almost angelic mirth. Mozart was born for farce. Yet his music wraps opera buffa in beauty, not in slapstick. The music is designed to provoke not wild laughter but a wise and grateful smile. Jealousy and self-understanding, love and deception, seesaw throughout Figaro in actions so petty, so humdrum, so familiar that they remind the viewers not of a fantasy-land eighteenth-century Seville but of their own twenty-first century dailiness, their own quotidian dramas. If it is “we” who are on stage in Figaro, failing to persevere or to forgive, misunderstanding and then misunderstanding again; it is also we who inhabit and are irradiated by the music’s beauty, and it is we who can wind our way through the convolutions of farce into the higher regions of delight. In this empyrean, delight feels almost like a worldview.
Art and the artist are said to have responsibilities, especially these days. One of those responsibilities is to respond to the surrounding circumstances and to take them into account. The word “novel” derives from the French word nouvelle, which is less about novelty than the news. Novels bring us the news. So too do all the arts, and these days the news is bad. Climate change has begun, standing like a roadblock before the future. Russia’s war in Ukraine, which already is a long war, is not a local war. It is an attack on international comity, an attack on American aspirations to global leadership, and an attack on peace in Europe. The record of atrocities is large and getting larger — committed sometimes on the same terrain whose previous experience with mass murder yielded the phrase “never again.” Climate change and war are occurring in the midst of pandemic, food shortages, and the gradual replacement of globalization (mixed blessing that it always was) with war economies guided by sanctions, military spending, and the rationing of goods that the war will soon demand. And China is on the march.
In the 1930s, the United States was an antidote to the bacillus of worldwide chaos and aggression. Italy had Mussolini, Germany had Hitler, Spain had Franco, Portugal had Salazar, and the Soviet Union had Stalin. The United States had Franklin Roosevelt. For Joe Biden’s America, the bacillus is foreign and domestic: the zombie-like nature of Donald Trump, who refuses to stay buried in the political grave of his electoral defeat; an intractable economic inequality; a Congress trapped in performative outrage and real gridlock; a polarized society intoxicated by its respective particularisms that is less and less curious about its own members, less and less capable of the empathy, compromise, patience, and calm that enable democratic practice and social peace; a civil society armed to the teeth in which massacres are a regular feature of civic life; a culture that vacillates between sanctimony and indifference, egotism and self-abasement, ivory-tower jargon and social-media vulgarity. The common impulse is not so much to analyze as to diagnose the United States, though nobody seems to know what the disease is. No matter: we are all advocating cures — more democracy, less democracy, more secularism, more Christianity, more civility, more fight, more rule of law, more attempts to storm the cockpit and prevent United 93 from crashing.
Artists have taken heed. Climate change and its causes are a more than valid subject for art. And not a new subject: you can spot an objection to industrialization in many landscape paintings of the nineteenth century, such as the train in the distance in Thomas Cole’s verdant mountains. The campaign to reverse climate change speaks to greed and moral escapism. Don’t Look Up, the recent movie on climate change, was Swiftean in its set-up, though neither clever nor cutting enough to be Swiftean in its execution. Responding to war is similarly one of the constants of art, which will be crucial to any reckoning with the war in Ukraine. Art eclipses the writing of historians in the public memory of war; it — Goya is the most powerful example — is the best aid to moral reflection, especially for events that disturb us into confusion and numbness. Art also crosses the borders that wars impose, taking people out of uniform, out of victimhood, and back to their humanity. But generally political art does not accomplish the restoration of humaneness. Art will not be capable of untangling the crossed lines of American politics, in the short term at least. Too often twenty-first century American artists surrender loudly to their politics and themselves become instances of the overarching political polarization that ails us. Needless to say, art does not come up with political solutions. To ask solutions of art is to ask a misguided question, to ask of art, even political art, more than it is able to give. Artists may think they have solutions to political problems, but the solutions will not be their art.
The mistake is to assume that art must take its inspiration from climate change, from war, from political dysfunction or from similar crises and public disfigurations. The irony is that these grand disturbances are far too small a palette for any artist. Art answers to a fuller spectrum of emotions and imperatives. Among them is the emotion and the imperative of delight. Even in dark times, or perhaps especially then, art cannot forgo the resources of delight, or ignore its utility, the temporary salvation from bleakness that delight provides. These three practitioners of delight, Van Alen, Armstrong, and Mozart, were not coincidentally innovators. Van Alen invented a skyscraper unlike any other, employing new materials, configuring the architecture to go as high and reflect as much light as possible. In 1928, Armstrong was pioneering the sounds and structures of jazz, and imparting its astonishing originality in the relatively novel setting of the recording studio. Mozart remade opera buffa into a high art form and did so with an edgy and transgressive story. (The original Beaumarchais play was banned from the Habsburg empire, a portend in 1786 of the revolution three years later.) Van Alen, Armstrong, and Mozart had problems aplenty. They did not bleach them out of their art. Neither did they fall so in love with their problems that they lost sight of their joy in creation, and in their individual genius for giving others delight.
Delight is, or had better be, an essential part of culture. It softens the rough edges. It opens the window. It balances out the indignities. It dissipates anger. It separates beauty from sadness. It converts the grapes of wrath into the wine of extreme satisfaction, of lively pleasures, of gratification of mind, when the weight of events does the exact opposite. Much as Van Alen’s Chrysler Building mutely witnessed the Great Depression, before which it was designed and during which it was built, art aligned with delight will not cast off or lessen the weight of events. Delight is impermanent. “West End Blues” lasts only three minutes. When it reaches its fourth act, The Marriage of Figaro is almost over, its plot about to resolve. Delight is so necessary because it will never be the rule; it is relief from the rule. Once one sees the Chrysler Building from the street, New York will heartlessly reimpose itself. It will not let you rest in that spire’s glistening ambience. The Chrysler Building was not placed gracefully in a planned city. It offers momentary respite from the frenzy of promotion, the money making, the reputation making, and the thrill seeking to which New York City is unashamedly devoted. Delight’s victories never last.
Yet its victories are precious nonetheless. They are restorative. While the sensation of delight passes in a rush, delight’s invigorations remain. Delight is the secret spring. It reveals an entire vein of possibility. It furnishes energy for the walk through the shadows that inevitably follows an interlude of delight. The memory of delight is one of our most valuable inner resources, internalized for the undelightful longue duree. Delight and dread are formidable antagonists, and delight teaches us to live with those elements that engender worry, sadness, oppression, and horror. Delight was Proust’s response to the scent of the madeleine: “An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, but individual, detached, with no suggestion of its origin,” he wrote. “And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory.” Proust started In Search of Lost Time before World War I, and he set down much of it during and after the war. As he rigorously documented malice and prejudice and desperation and cruelty in the people he knew and invented, he remained devoted to delight, as a principle and as an experience, without which he could not have begun his novel or continued it or come close to completing it. It was indispensable for his spiritual survival and his exploration of the vicissitudes of life, reason enough to be forceful but never to be uninterruptedly fretful.