Monday, March 3, 2014

Resolution to Wonder

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Will to Art on 13 January 2014.

I've always loved tangential meta-narratives, but I also love art that doesn't show signs of its process at all.

I would bet that every great piece of art has a great story behind it, but the art itself should be amazing regardless of the story.  By turning the story into the art, we may lose the wow factor of the "finished" products.  We'd have to maintain a fairly rigorous level of dynamism: the infrequent narration of a story in which nothing happens won't advance our cause.

One of my favorite things about your idea is that it has the potential to subvert a postmodern form: the meta-narrative.

I think the great modern writers generally hated the doctrine of modernism, and I think we may be in a similar boat, striving for Catholic orthodoxy while creating postmodern art.  I don't know a great way to put this, but I see in Apollonian/classical forms a tendency toward resolution and in postmodern forms such an assertion of relativism that resolution is impossible.  What I prefer to both is what I see as a very Catholic thing--something that is both and neither at the same time.

For lack of a better term, I'll call it resolution to wonder.

Christ tends to communicate truth in parable and paradox.  I'm always struck by the fact that what he says is absolute truth and perception-frying mystery at the same time.  It's truly satisfying food and endlessly hunger-inducing simultaneously.  It's an explosion and a resolution...we resolve to awe and wonder.

Where postmodernism's ambiguity tends to point toward relativistic nihilism in its irresolution, great Catholic art draws people toward truths infinitely larger than we are.   The result is that we can feel resolved and unresolved at the same time.  Chesterton and Graham Greene stand out to me as two Catholic authors who nail resolution to wonder in a modern framework (The Man Who Was Thursday and The Power and the Glory are particularly important to me).

I'd like to see what we could do with resolution to wonder in a postmodern framework.

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