October 15, 2006
Analyzing Art Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 08:30 AM EST Regarding my dialogue with Fred Smoler about the film High Noon, John Steele Gordon wrote: “I confess I have no appetite for analyzing works of art, be they novels or movies or paintings or whatever. And make that double for analyzing the politics of such creations, explicitly political works excepted, of course. But the number of those that live beyond the age of their creation is notably few. I haven’t heard of any Clifford Odets revivals lately.” Actually, Odets wrote the screenplay for Sweet Smell of Success (1957), which Marvin Hamlisch and other adapted in 2002 for stage. Sweet Smell of Success: The Musical garnered seven Tony nominations; John Lithgow earned the Tony for Best Performance. In addition in 1991 Joel and Ethan Coen scored a critical success with their film Barton Fink, which was loosely based on Odets’s professional travails in Hollywood. I’m less interested in Clifford Odets than in Mr. Gordon’s resistance to “analyzing works of art, be they novels or movies or paintings or whatever.” This is surely a curious confession. Of course one should enjoy art for enjoyment’s sake, but is Mr. Gordon truly averse to analyzing it? What else should one do with a book, a film, a play or a painting? One meets very few historians these days who disavow cultural history. Cultural productions are, after all, just as much a part of the public discourse as political speeches and census data, and when used judiciously and critically, they help unlock the mysteries of particular peoples in particular contexts. One needn’t be a historian to appreciate the importance of critical analysis. My colleague Fred Smoler is much better qualified to discuss the different modes of literary criticism available to readers. But I’m reminded of the once furious debate among literary critics about the relative merits of New Criticism, a school of analysis pioneered in the 1950s, which sought to identify certain timeless and universal structural themes in literature, and New Historicism, a competing school that came into vogue in the 1970s and sought to anchor works of literature to their specific historical milieus. Shakespeare proved fertile ground for both schools of analysis. One could read Northrop Frye on the themes of comedy, tragedy, and romance in Shakespearean drama, or Stephen Greenblatt on the Elizabethan politics and social context behind Shakespeare’s works. In either case I always found that the criticism enhanced my appreciation of the literature. One needn’t even bring theorists into play at all. Even a five-year-old can critically assess a painting on some level. But to resist analyzing works of art? This seems an unusually extreme position to hold.
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