By FLÁVIO R. KOTHE*
The great work is built from horizons broader than the present domination: it allows the reader to fly over abysses
There is something that distinguishes art but that escapes definition, although it can be perceived when one reads a good text. Kant's definition of beauty, “that which pleases without a concept”, is a contradiction: the concept is there to have no concept; the definition, to have no definition. Wanting to be analytical, Kant became dialectical. He went beyond his assumptions.
Your concern in Criticism of judgment It was to show that not everything can be resolved by conceptual reason: it loses its reason when it fails to see its limitations. However, not only the beautiful and the sublime occur without conceptualizations. Also imagination, passion, the divine, selective affinity, etc.
Artists work with the concrete entity they construct, but this is always more than just an entity: it contains diverse meanings that are combined into a singular entity, giving it uniqueness. Based on concerns that take hold of them, they work obsessively on the work, but it does not necessarily end up being good art. The work is created in him, being made in him, using him to make itself. A great artist does not make bad works, even though he leaves some unfinished or others are lesser. He is a danger to the works, because he is tempted to remake them when he returns to them.
Hans-Georg Gadamer proposed the concept of “horizon of expectation,” a variation of what Aristotle did when he suggested that all new understanding is based on what is already understood. If the understanding of something new is based on what is already known, the tendency is to reduce the new to the old, diluting it in it and thus losing the notion of difference.
If there is a horizon of expectation, it can either mean that the work is reduced to this already outlined horizon or that a space is delimited that needs to be surpassed by a work that aims to be new because it has something different to say. A great work is constructed beyond the horizon that prevails in a given era and environment, but it manages to say something to the horizons of different eras.
The strange mystery of great texts that, reading after reading, reveal new levels of meaning as if each page opened onto new pages, is no mystery to the common reader: he does not even realize it, he reduces the complex to the simplistic, he wants a text that clearly presents a simple and direct meaning, like a newspaper article.
The average newspaper reader generally does not realize that what is passed on to them is filtered by the will of the newspaper owners: they highlight certain information and hide others. In the highlighting there is a showing that serves more to hide than to reveal.
If one does not grasp the mystery of great art, one does not grasp the mystery of journalism. Nor is it perceived in reading so-called sacred texts, in which one has been trained to believe that everything happened as it is told. This tendency has been exacerbated on cell phone screens. Its best model is Wikipedia: short and quick information, with the intention of resolving something complex in a simple way. Its model is the catechism.
A joke works when, in the end, it frustrates an expectation and presents a surprising relationship between different vectors. The problem is that, when told again, the relationship is already known and there is no longer any surprise. It loses its charm. It is like striking a match that has already been struck. In a great text, each time it is reread, new correlations are presented, generating levels of meaning that were not captured before.
Sigmund Freud read in the dream text the emergence of the contradiction between the desire to say and the repression of what wants to be said but should not be said. Carl Jung saw in the dream the reappearance of forgotten events from everyday life, but already charged with a symbolic charge that had not been perceived. This charge is a connection between one event and others, one person and others.
The writer reworks memories, as if he were a mimetic operator. If he begins as a worker who copies something seen or imagined, upon realizing the specific needs of his text he begins to perform operations that generate something that becomes increasingly strange to the starting point: the work is created in the author. He “lies” to tell truths that perhaps could not be told in other ways.
Since what lies is the most hidden part of the mind, it ends up being faithful to what it seems to be betraying. This does not mean sticking to the singularities of the author, but capturing “universalities” that intersect with other beings and events. They are not abstract, empty “universals”, but rather concreteness of other beings that go beyond them.
A refined and complex reading of a “simple” text is just as possible as a “simplistic reading” of a dense and meaningful text. Dogmatic doctrinaires are not interested in deconstructing textual procedures, reevaluating their semantic gestures, or dismantling consolidated lies. The issue transcends the text, because those who learn to decipher texts are also inclined to make a politicized reading of historical impasses, of current proposals, of what is best for the oligarchy and what is most in the interest of the common good. Democracy cannot be sustained if it does not have the support of an enlightened population.
There are conformist authors who seek to reiterate and reproduce the profile outlined by the national canon, even in regional variations, and there are also more rebellious authors who seek out what lies outside their horizon of expectations. The author's personal attitude does not in itself guarantee the quality of the text, just as gender, sexual orientation, religion, and skin color are guarantees. It is not enough for the author to want to do something good. Good intentions do not result in good texts, just as examples of bad character can be given by authors of brilliant works. Being crazy does not guarantee a quality work.
Although two different horizons can be outlined – one more conformist, of self-help, which does not clash with repression, but is accepted by the mainstream media; the other, marginal, marginalized, which does not accept the command and command of those who always have power –, neither of them is a guarantee of literary quality.
There are works of domination that are considered elevated by those who applaud processes of control and domination. The great work is constructed, however, from horizons broader than the present domination: it allows the reader to fly over abysses.
A great work can be ignored and lost, just as lesser works can be awarded and celebrated precisely because they do not support higher flights. It is intrinsically one with the search for freedom. It tells us, however, that no one owns the truth: it is a search without an owner.
* Flavio R. Kothe is a retired full professor of aesthetics at the University of Brasília (UnB). Author, among other books, of Allegory, aura and fetish (Cajuína Publisher). [https://amzn.to/4bw2sGc]
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