Almost 50 years --- and how many cultural revolutions --- later, this seems not only odd, not only a contradiction to what we know to be true, but an actual affront to our deepest and most important sensibilities.
The artist has a duty??!! What nonsense.
Well, perhaps. Perhaps the current wisdom that each of us is responsible only to himself; that self-actualization is the only goal that matters; and that art and perhaps all of life is about self-expression only --- perhaps these currently conventional truths are true. Perhaps there is nothing more than "It's all about me."
Frank Sullivan believed something different and was using Chaucer, his work, and the time he lived in to make his point.
We were studying "The Canterbury Tales," a series of stories which, one after another, reveal the vanities, self-delusion, cupidity, venality, and self-importance of the tellers. But Chaucer never condemns his characters. They are presented to us as flawed --- they're human, after all --- but still understandable, enjoyable, and lovable. Humbly laughing at our own foibles and failure is the goal.
The "Tales" are never anything but life-affirming because of Chaucer's deep affection for his characters.
Professor Sullivan contrasted this attitude with the attitude of most of 20th Century literature: the Theatre of the Absurd, the "angry young men", the "slice of life" dramatists, and the rest. Their response to the difficulties and dangers and horrors of the 20th Century was to give in to despair and then to inflict that view on the rest of us.
But Chaucer lived in a time of danger and horror, too, the time of the Plague, which had killed a third of the population of Europe, nearly emptied the cities, and inhibited social, cultural, and economic progress for a century or more. Sullivan's point was that people in Chaucer's time were just as afraid of the Plague as we were of the Bomb.
(Six months later, many of us spent a lot of time in the Chapel, praying that the nuclear standoff over the missiles in Cuba would not lead to the end of the world. Our fear of the Bomb was a very real thing and the comparison was rich.)
Chaucer, and Sullivan, believed that in times of trouble it was the duty of the poet --- the singer of songs, the teller of tales --- to tell stories that reminded us that life was worth living, that there are deeper meanings than the merely material, that courage and steadfastness in the face of adversity are admirable. To be reminded, as Aragorn says in Lord of the Rings, "There is always hope."
But in the last almost 50 years, the tellers of tales --- the makers of music, movies, and television --- have, for the most part, described the human condition as absurd and hopeless; all are greedy and selfish, it is "the war of all against all," everyone is in it for his own gain, and anyone who contends otherwise is either a naive fool or is working a scam.
We have gone beyond irony to post-irony, where mockery and ridicule are taken to be the proper response to anything and everything.
This is, without question, an understandable reaction to the horrors of the 20th Century which had no precedent in human history. Many of the smartest, best-educated, and most thoughtful among us concluded in what seemed like nothing but mere rationality that the whole Western project had been a delusion and that we were --- and there was certainly plenty of evidence to support such a conclusion --- nothing but cruel, vicious beasts barely held in tenuous control by the forces of society. Cynicism, nihilism, and pessimism then became not a failure of nerve but a courageous facing up to reality.
An understandable reaction, but wrong.
There are millions of people who see their lives as meaningful and live accordingly, without much help from the "poets" of our time. But how much better off we would be if the tellers of tales, the keepers of the informing myths, were to remind us that honor, nobility, sacrifice, and decency are not only possible but necessary; if the teachers, the clergymen, the musicians, the writers of fiction, and the makers of movies consistently reminded us of the deeper meanings of our lives.
The great chief Tecumseh is quoted as saying, "When the legends die, the dreams end; there is no more greatness." Or, from another tribal culture, The Book of Proverbs says, "Where there is no vision, the people perish."
In After Virtue, the philosopher Alisdair Macintyre refers to our time as a "new dark age" one in which "the barbarians are no longer waiting outside the gates but have been governing us for quite some time." He concludes the book by saying that "What we need is another, doubtless very different, St. Benedict." (See also.)
What we also need is another, doubtless very different, Geoffrey Chaucer.
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