Does a work of art always express the emotions of the
artist?
Ted Gracyk thinks that the answer to this question is “no.” (By contrast, I would say "yes.") His objections are based on some credible
examples.[1] First, Muddy Waters denied that his songs were
autobiographical or that he accepted the superstitions encountered there. This counterexample would seem to work against
a theory like Leo Tolstoy’s about the value
of self-expression, i.e. that for self-expression to be good it must be a sincere expression of emotions one has
felt in one’s own life. However, let’s
back up a bit. Few people not bewitched
by assumptions of contemporary philosophy would think that this would show that
Muddy Waters was not expressing himself. Artists express themselves: that is what they do (this is the common
sense position, and one never really refuted by philosophers). Maybe Muddy Waters was
not expressing himself sincerely (although I reject this view, as will become clear below), but
he was creating a representation that in some sense represented his own way of
seeing things, including his own emotions. One does not have to have a one-to-one
correlation between a felt emotion and an emotion found in a work for that work
to be a self-expression of the artist. Self-expression
can be, and usually is, much more subtle than this. Consider Gracyk’s second example against the
thesis that art involves self-expression of one’s emotions. He notes that a novel such as Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings involves several
characters, and asks “Is it plausible that Tolkien was always expressing his
own emotional experiences in the emotions displayed” by such diverse
characters. The answer is that Tolkien
was certainly expressing something about his emotional attitudes towards each
one of these characters. There is
perhaps an ambiguity here. Gracyk thinks
that expressing one’s own emotional experiences requires that one have the
character feel a feeling that one has directly felt oneself. However, an artist can put him or herself
into the mind of another, and a feeling can be one that has little to do with
his or her own life, and still be an expression, even a sincere one. Similarly, Gracyk denies that actors and
actresses are engaged in self-expression, since clearly the emotions of the
characters they portray have different life-stories than their own. But, again, this goes against common
sense. Actors constantly talk about how
they are expressing themselves on stage or in a film by way, for example, of
their identification with the character they portray. Again, art as a form of self-expression is
not a one-to-one matter. Self-expression
for an actor involves creation of a character, and this involves a kind of
fusion of the emotional life of the artist (in this case the actor) and the
character. For example, there is nothing
in the script that says that the character must have the physical features of
the actor who portrays him. And yet the
actor uses his “instrument,” i.e. his body and his repertoire of gestures and
speech intonation to accomplish this. This
is what self-expression amounts to for an actor. It is helpful to see self-expression of this
sort as a fusion of the self with a fictional other. Gracyk is right that the great actor Lawrence Olivier
is not engaged in self expression of his own emotions when he plays Hamlet but
only in the sense that he is not engaged in portraying prominent emotions
associated with his own life-story when he is an actor on stage portraying a
particular character (with his own
life story). Instead, however, he is
expressing himself by way of using his instrument to express the emotions of
the character in his (Olivier’s) unique way:
and this is a form of creative self-expression. This is why acting can be rewarding: people find it satisfying to express
themselves, even in ways not directly related to their personal lives. However, this is not to say that referring to
one’s own life is irrelevant: indeed,
many actors try to find some part of their personal lives that relates to the
experience of the character in order to effect a better fusion, a better
self-expression. Sincerity can come in
here as well. It would be silly to
accuse Shakespeare of insincerity in providing us with a fascinating character
such as Othello without ever having experienced such an extreme of jealousy. Shakespeare’s sincerity is a function of how
honest he is in his portrayal of Othello:
for example, whether he panders to the audience (which he definitely
does not do.) Tolstoy’s problem of
course is that he believed that self-expression should be a one-to-one between
a directly felt emotion of the artist and the emotion felt by the audience. He thinks that the boy
who tells a story about his encounter with a wolf should give his audience
exactly the feeling he had, if he is to sincerely express his emotions. And I agree that if the boy achieves this
infection then this is a powerful and valuable thing. However, if he never encountered the wolf but
is still able to express himself through telling a story (i.e. use his own
emotions, for example emotions of sympathy for another boy who had this wolf
encounter, or for a fictional boy imagined by him to have such an encounter) to
infect his audience then this is sufficient for the experience to be one of art.
This slight revision of Tolstoy saves us
from the danger that the great works of art in history fail to be art: they transmit emotion and they express
emotion, but the emotions felt by the audience need not be the same as those
that are expressed by the artist, and the emotions expressed by the artist need
not be the ones hypothetically experienced by the characters in the play or
figures in the painting. Also, sincere
expression of emotion is possible in music.
And most music is expression of emotion of some sort. Beethoven need not have been sad when
producing a sad musical work, but his experience of creating such a work is nonetheless
emotionally expressive. The artist must
express emotion since one cannot do anything without expressing emotion. As Dewey observed, every experience (including
the experience of creating), has an emotional quality that gives it a pervading
sense. We cannot escape self-expression,
although sincere self-expression is difficult to achieve.
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