Figure 1. Hugo Simberg, The Wounded Angel. Wikimedia Commons.
This article is part of the b2o: an online journal special issue “The Question of Literary Value”, edited by Alexander Dunst and Pieter Vermeulen.
Literary Value is Nonliterary Value
Pieter Vermeulen
Ever since it was first shown to the public during the exhibition of the Finnish Artists’ Association in Helsinki in October 1903, Hugo Simberg’s painting The Wounded Angel has continued to elude stable interpretation. When the work was first exhibited, Simberg “put a long dash where its title should have been” (Levanto 1993, 78); he only provided a title when the painting was later submitted for a Prize competition. No further interpretive clues were offered. The painting presents two ordinary boys (whom Seamus Heaney, in his poem inspired by the painting, refers to as “manchild number one” and “manchild number two” [qtd. in Karhio 2012, 34]), one of whom looks at the viewer with what one commentator has called “an expression of worried solitude and remorseful restraint” (Heinz 2011, 143). On the stretcher they carry between them, we see an androgynous figure that looks like an angel— with its wings and white dress. If the boys are clearly presented as “sturdy, robust, and rooted in the earth” (Lakeland 2017, 157), the angelic figure does not for all that offer a clear contrasting figure of ephemeral transcendence: one of its wings is injured and seemingly smeared with blood, and its pure whiteness is spoiled by what look like traces of dirt from its encounter with the soil. Its dirty head bowed, the creature carries a bunch of flowers, which look like the same flowers that also dot the scene’s background. There is an undeniable awkwardness in this constellation of figures: rooted in the earth, condemned to one another, yet visibly mismatched.
The Wounded Angel has often been read biographically, as presenting “an image of victory over fatal illness” after Simberg’s recovery from a disease that almost killed him (Levanto 1993, 81). It has also been read as a religious admonishment, accusing the audience of having fallen short of buoying up the angel through proper acts of faith (Lakeland 2017, xi). Yet such readings of the painting as either a reminder of transcendence or “an internalized and transfigured depiction of a personal passion play” (Levanto 1993, 81) do not fully account for the eminently enfleshed nature of the constellation of figures: the awkwardness of bodies thrown into proximity of and dependency on one another. This embarrassment is expressed in the three figures’ resolute avoidance of eye contact with one another: the boy in front expressionless, staring in front of him; the angel’s eyes cast to the ground; the boy at the back staring at the audience as if to accuse them of having failed to prevent him from having to adopt responsibility for the angel so prematurely. The grown-ups who could have saved these figures from each other, it seems, have left the scene. However unwillingly, the boys and the angel are abandoned to one another.
Which is to say: whatever diminished suggestion of transcendence the painting conveys is sustained by the boys carrying the angelic figure. The suggestion of transcendence—or indeed semi-transcendence: angels have, after all, only ever been “God’s middle managers” (Kotsko 2012), they have never been properly divine—depends on the acts of care of two decidedly earthly creatures. Far from having the power to redeem the world it has joined, the angel has itself become a pale part of an irredeemably mundane reality. As Paul Bové notes in his interpretation of the painting, the wounded angel is “thrown at [the manchildren’s] feet, in a truly mundane landscape” and “become[s] a burden from which they cannot escape” (Bové 2021, 36). Yet if the angel depends on the boys’ support, they also in a very real sense depend on it: in the trackless landscape, on a road to nowhere specific, at an age too old for innocence and too young for self-confidence, for the boys, in their nondescript clothes, it is the assignment to sustain the angel that orients their movement and endows them with, just perhaps, some sense of purpose. In a world abandoned by transcendent powers, the source of that assignment can only be the fragility and vulnerability of the angel itself—a kind of wounded albatross around their necks. It is this circularity (a fragility that compels acts of care that sustain the belief in something that transcends fragility) that saves the paintings’ scene of abandonment from becoming a desultory scene of dejection.
Something that once intimated the existence of higher things; something that once participated in those higher things, but that now depends on secular support to escape its reduction to the merely mundane: if this description captures the tenuous existence of Simberg’s wounded angel, it is also, I submit, a suitable emblem for the social life of literature today. If the value of literature used to be self-evident, it no longer is. Today, literature finds itself in competition with other commodities that spark joy and offer meaning: videogames, hiking trips, shopping apps, woodworking workshops (the triviality of this list is the point). Nor can literature be counted on to provide the cultural capital that it once offered. Already in 1993, Jon Guillory foresaw that the prestige that literary sophistication used to provide would become “increasingly marginal” to new elites and that we would soon see the consolidation of a “professional-managerial class which no longer requires the cultural capital of the old bourgeoisie” (Guillory 1993, x, 45). Today, the ultra-rich who rule the world no longer show any interest in literature.
Today, there is very little that prevents literature from being reduced to the status of a pure commodity. In this situation, the backlash against the traditional humanist celebration of literary value that arrived in literary studies in the last quarter of the twentieth century—most notably in work inspired by Pierre Bourdieu, which disarmed claims to literary value as covert strategies for social promotion—is not something that literary culture can really afford. With the distinctiveness of literature as something other than a commodity at stake, the persistence of literary value cannot be taken for granted. Which is to say: literary value is something that has to be actively justified in order for literature to persist.
There is very little that prevents literature from being reduced to the status of a pure commodity, just as there is preciously little that saves Simberg’s creaturely angelic figure from its abandonment to the merely mundane. Except, of course, the care of the manchildren, who somehow respond to the angel’s vulnerability, its demand for succor, and who make that response their mission. Literature, also, today depends on explicit legitimations of its value by its stakeholders: publishers, writers, translators, reviewers, critics, teachers, and others who make up literary culture. In the field of sociology, a Bourdieu-style critical sociology that sees it as its mission to puncture claims to distinctive value has, since the 1990s, been complemented by a less overtly normative and more descriptive pragmatic orientation that observes how value is generated and articulated in particular situations. This entails a shift “from value to valuation”: from the simple assertion of particular values to the “close observation of the operations by which actors actually manifest the value they assign to this object” (Heinich 2021, 77). Such pragmatic approaches study, in sociologist Michèle Lamont’s words, “how value is produced, diffused, assessed, and institutionalized across a range of settings” (Lamont 2012, 203). This pragmatics of valuation has made few inroads into literary studies, where the overtly Bourdieu-inspired projects of Gisèle Sapiro and Pascale Casanova continue to define the contours of world literary studies, and where a more covertly Bourdieusian literary sociological ethos continues to animate the study of post-45 literature. The muted example of Simberg’s Wounded Angel suggests that a more pragmatic consideration of actual valuation discourses might be more attuned to the awkward reality of contemporary literature’s existence on the contraptions that keep it suspended between transcendence and banality.
Once we attend to the pragmatics of valuation—the discursive stretchers that sustain the illusion that literature remains afloat, even if Simberg’s painting shows the angel’s garment to drag along the ground—we notice that they increasingly justify the existence of literature (as more than a commodity) by tying literature to more robust value domains. Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, the singularity of literature has often been justified in nonliterary terms: through its singular capacity to witness to past atrocities (consider, for example, W.G. Sebald or Nobel Prize winners like Imre Kertész, Herta Müller, Svetlana Alexievich, or Han Kang whose work involves trauma); to forge empathetic connections (the biofictions of Colum McCann and Colm Tóibín for example come to mind; but one can think also of the newly sincere David Foster Wallace Industrial Complex); or to imagine cosmopolitan communities (in the dejected mode of Teju Cole’s Open City, for instance, or in more upbeat and sprawling globe-spanning novels or novels of migration). Literary value is sustained through its articulation with political, ethical, affective, and memorial value domains. These domains serve as what sociologist Niklas Luhmann calls “Anlehnungskontexte”: “supporting contexts” that sustain a literature no longer capable of sustaining itself (Luhmann 1995, 256). In this dispensation, where commodification and delegitimation work to reduce the distinctiveness of literature, literary value is always nonliterary value: it is an effect of successfully justifying literature in nonliterary terms.
The angel’s downward gaze, in its avoidance of eye contact, conveys that this is in many ways a shameful situation: a situation of dependence and fragility. The angel could decide to cover its eyes with the bandana, but it instead faces up to its disgraceful condition (an awful lot of contemporary literature obsessively thematizes its own quasi-redundancy). The first manchild’s expressionless gaze conveys that theirs is a task that needs to be performed and that asking questions is a luxury they cannot afford. The second manchild’s confrontational gaze, for its part, betrays a resentful if impotent memory of a time when our relation to literature was plain and pleasant. Yet he marches on; the muted palette of the landscape and the grayed sky have little else to offer.
Let’s also say explicitly what Simberg’s wounded angel is most pointedly not: it is not Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus, a figure that more confidently radiates spirituality, and even less the angel of history that Walter Benjamin saw in Klee’s painting and that critical theory developed into a paradigmatic figure of historical witness to suffering. Indeed, the angel of history’s famed capacity to condense “a chain of events” into “one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage” was often elevated into a poster figure for critical theory’s ethos of witnessing to historical atrocities without “mak[ing] whole what has been smashed” (Benjamin 1968, 257)—without canceling the fragmentation it records. This messianic capacity for heightened witnessing without false integration can be repurposed as an allegory, not only for the project of critical theory, but also for a particular conception of literature’s transcendent powers (its paradoxical power, that is, for indexing the universal or the spiritual while remaining committed to the everyday—a conception that is as central to the work of someone like Erich Auerbach as it is to the reflections of the New Criticism). Yet that conception is not the one we find in literary value discourse today: the insistence on literature’s capacity of witnessing, while widespread (in the reception of Sebald, in the proliferation of trauma fiction), is less a celebration of transcendent power than a somewhat desperate way of articulating literary with memorial value so as to avoid that literature comes crashing down to earth and never gets up again. This is the situation emblematized in Simberg’s lesser angel. As Bové notes in his comparison of the two figures, Simberg’s creature “does not … bring messianic redemption from history but adds itself—in its perpetual failure—as a ruin to the … world” (Bové 2021, 34). Simberg’s angel inhabits the world not as a redemptive force but as a thing that becomes part of an unredeemed reality.
Importantly, relating literary to nonliterary value is only half of the work that literary value discourse needs to perform. The relation between literature and other value domains cannot become too intimate, so as to avoid that literature is absorbed by them. Justifying literature through its capacity for enhancing empathy, for instance, should not end up as an advertisement for the powers of empathy—which can then be reattached to, say, videogames or mindfulness training. Celebrating literature’s capacity for reconnecting to the past is perfectly useless for the persistence of literary distinction if the value of reconnecting to the past can best be satisfied through, say, AI creations, or even plain old historiography. The articulation of literary and nonliterary value, then, needs to strike a delicate balance between forging a compelling association and yet insisting on the distinctive literariness of that connection. In contemporary literary culture, the insistent distinctiveness of literature is preserved through a preference for works that are, while far from experimental, at least formally interesting: self-reflexive (often in the guise of autofiction), often multimedial (again: Sebald is a crucial example here), intertextual and somewhat mysterious in the way different narrative units are juxtaposed (which explains the prevalence of parataxis, or juxtaposition without subordination, in the narrative grammar of so many celebrated works of twenty-first-century literature). Ambitious works of literature today aggressively insist on their literariness so as to make sure the discourses connecting them to more robust value domains don’t absorb them. Literary value, today, persists through an always tenuous balance between external justification and aggressive differentiation from nonliterary realities.
In Simberg’s painting, this insistence on distinction is most apparent in the curved shape of the creature’s wings. The rest of the painting is marked by straight if slightly sloping lines: the upstanding manchildren, not yet tall enough to carry the composition; the nearly symmetrical borders of the mountains, the lake, and the land; and the two symmetrical lines of the stretcher that, while fated to be kept straight, cannot quite avoid the tendency to follow the slight slant of the landscape. The wings, Lance Olsen notes, are arching up “like gigantic feathery parentheses separating her from the surrounding text of the world” (Olsen 2003, 111). If this painting seemed to escape the complexity and vulnerability of the literary condition I have taken it to emblematize, it here begins to be infected by the instability it seemed to ward off. Parentheses separate, but parentheses are, if nothing else, also inescapably textual. They always risk being read as merely more text. There, for now, is where literary value persists.
References
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