Freedom and Art

Metropolitan Opera Archives

The Metropolitan Operas 1991 production of The Magic Flute, with sets by David Hockney. For excerpts from The Magic Flute

That great eccentric of the Enlightenment, Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, who put into his private notebooks just about everything that came into his head, once jotted down: Whoever decreed that a word must have a fixed meaning? He was perhaps the first to recognize the psychic constraint involved in the perception of meaning and the attempt to make it firm.

In his discussion of humor, Sigmund Freud deals with this laconically by a profound reflection. The mechanical structure of psychoanalytical theory is now rightfully laboring under some discredit, but Freuds literary genius gave him insights that are still valuable. After treating at length the kind of humor that allows a safe and neutralized outlet for the taboo expression of sexual desire and of social aggression, he arrives finally at pure humor, the jokes that are innocent of repressive fantasies, but just simple word games, silly puns that are only a form of play. (I can remember a superannuated example from my junior high school days: Why do radio announcers have such small hands? Wee paws [we pause] for station identification.)

To explain our delight in such foolishness, Freud invokes the lallation of very small children, who sit and repeat long strings of nonsense syllables (ba, da, mamow, bow, wowetc.) at great length for their own amusement. Learning a language, being forced to attach a meaning to a sound, is a burden to the child, who, in reaction, strings together senseless rhyming noises as a form of escape. Even for adults understanding speech is not devoid of effort, and can be a source of fatigue. With a silly play on words, there is a split second when a word suspended between two incompatible senses briefly loses all meaning and becomes pure sound, and for a lovely moment we revert to the delighted state of the child freed from the tyranny of language. Of all the constraints imposed on us that restrict our freedomconstraints of morality and decorum, constraints of class and financeone of the earliest that is forced upon us is the constraint of a language that we are forced to learn so that others can talk to us and tell us things we do not wish to know.

We do not learn language by reading a dictionary, and we do not think or speak in terms of dictionary definitions. Meaning is always more fluid. Nevertheless, we are hemmed in, even trapped, by common usage. Senses we wish to evade entrap us. The greatest escape route is not only humor, but poetry, or art in general. Art does not, of course, liberate us completely from meaning, but it gives a certain measure of freedom, provides elbow room. Schiller claimed in the Letters on Aesthetic Education that art makes you free; he understood that the conventions of language and of society are in principle arbitrarythat is, imposed by will. They prevent the natural development of the individual. The clash between the imposition of meaning and freedom has given rise to controversy in ways that Schiller could not have predicted.

The critical problem of the battle between conventional meaning and individual expression was best laid out many years ago in Meyer Schapiros apparently controversial insistence that the forms of Romanesque sculpture could not be ascribed solely to theological meaning but were also a style of aesthetic expression. What that meant at the time was quite simply and reasonably that the character of the sculptural forms could not be reduced only to their personification of theological dogma, but possessed a clear aesthetic energy independent of sacred meaning.

The fallacy that Schapiro was attacking has reappeared recently in musicological circles with the absurd claim that music could not be enjoyed for purely musical or aesthetic reasons until the eighteenth century since the word aesthetics was not used until then. (This naive belief that independent aesthetic considerations did not exist before 1750 without social and religious functions would strangely imply that no one before that date could admire the beauty of a member of the opposite sex unless it could be related to the function of the production of children.) It is true that some thinkers of the eighteenth century would proclaim the fundamental precedence of the aesthetic: Johann Georg Hamann observed with Vico that poetry is older than prose, and insisted that music is older than language, horticulture than agriculture.

We should recall here the extraordinary sixteenth-century controversy about style between the admirers of Cicero and of Erasmus, the former, led by tienne Dolet, believing that style had a beauty independent of the matter of the literary work, and the latter insisting that the beauty of style was wholly dependent on its consonance with meaning. (Dolet was burned at the stake, but not for his admiration of Cicero. Montaigne took the Erasmian position against pure stylistic shenanigans, but foreshadowed some twentieth-century criticism by avowing that when the style was as masterly as Ciceros it could be said to have become its own matter.) The contention that pure aesthetic appreciation was impossible before 1700 not only would make the existence of that controversy as early as the 1500s impossible, but also astonishingly overlooks both the innate aesthetic impulses of any human animal and the most obvious characteristic of every form of artistic endeavorthat at some point it inevitably draws attention away from its meaning and function to the form of expression, or from the signifi to the signifiant, to use the well-known structural linguistic terms that were so fashionable only a few decades ago.

This is most obviously the case when the signifier, the artistic form, so to speak, seems to have developed a sense somewhat at odds with the ostensible signified. Perhaps the most spectacular depiction of freedom in music may be brought up as evidence of this: the greeting of Don Giovanni to the masked guests at his party, Viva la libert! In the libretto, these words are only an invitation to have a good time, but they have often been understood politically. Oddly, the astute Hermann Abert denied the political implication, basing his view on the sense of the libretto. However, Mozart sets this as a call to arms, with trumpets and drums unheard in the work since the overture, and with an evident traditional martial rhythm, while the singers forte shout the words Viva la libert over and over again. In 1789, after twelve years of political agitation since the American Revolution, it is unlikely that anyone missed the political sense.

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Freedom and Art