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Magazine
Strands of genius
RUKUN ADVANI
THE most revolutionary single moment in the Western classical tradition of instrumental music is arguably the composition of Beethoven's Third Symphony, Eroica, 200 years ago, coinciding with the appearance of Wordsworth and Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads. For lovers of music and poetry, these are works of genius. They seem to arrive like bolts from the blue, without warning, and they seem so radically new that it is difficult to believe that the grounds for their appearance were prepared by earlier works and preceding composers.
But the idea of such a thing as "genius", in the old sense of incomprehensibly exceptional and wonderful, has been steadily undermined over the recent past. In relation to Beethoven, an informative study called Beethoven and the Construction of Genius by a cultural critic, Tia di Nora, tries to show, somewhat fatuously, that the composer's success was more social than musical, that he was "constructed" as a genius by aristocrats in Bonn and Vienna who needed a hero to replace the recently dead Mozart. Di Nora unearths an impressive mass of detail on Austrian musical politics to suggest that if Beethoven had been based in London rather than Vienna, he might never have been thought a genius. As a devotee of the composer living in gendered times, this makes me want to match absurdity with absurdity and ask what might have happened if Beethoven had been born a woman; or born a woman in Deorala and married off to a Rajput.
Ordinary people, unlike cultural critics, like the idea of genius. Geniuses must have a wild look, their hair must be in disarray, their mind must be in torment on account of their receptivity to divine afflatus, which comes in via the hair. This is so nicely Romantic, so visually and emotionally compelling, that artists and audiences have happily colluded in ensuring the image fits the idea. Conductors and soloists emulate composers in being carefully dishevelled: it would hardly be in keeping with their divine professions and their professions to divinity to emerge out of an inspired performance looking dapper. Einstein's hair was all over the place because Beethoven's was, and no doubt the new Indian President likes his locks flying about like the national flag on a breezy day less for reasons of state than for reasons of looking the great scientist.
An artist must seem wracked by ideas, he must seem so tortured by the need to arrange the thoughts crowding his head that he has no time to arrange the unruly fuzz upon it. So, for the artist or intellectual, there is no fate worse than baldness: lack of locks is almost the lack of art. A play called The Bald Prima Donna suggested, via its title, the high cultural notion of operatic greatness seeming farcical when bereft of the cranial wherewithal so essential to the part. For the same reason it seems nothing short of tragic that Vikram Seth, who has more than a fraction of Beethoven's powers, looks nothing like the original master. His admirers, among whom I am one, would feel immensely reassured of his genius if he bought himself a wig and looked at least vaguely like the composer.
Yet this idea of genius, reinforced by our image of it, implies an acceptance of the influence upon creativity of a divine or otherworldly thing, of the transfiguring influence of something unaccountable and mysterious. Some instinct buried deep, something primal that goes far beyond the boundaries of learning and expressible knowledge, seems to make us respond to such works. We are happy with the everyday feeling that, ultimately, nothing can adequately explain why they move us.
Our everyday acceptance of such an idea is not, however, palatable to historians and people like Tia di Nora who, sternly critical, operate in disciplines grounded in the assumption that everything man-made, including music and the Eroica Symphony and the works of Vikram Seth, is "constructed" and therefore explicable in the manner of an edifice, rather than "created" in the manner of something organic and ultimately inexplicable. Influential works of critical scholarship, including Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and Berger and Luckmann's The Social Construction of Reality, have emphasised the notion that even the most mindbogglingly new text or stupendously original work of art or theorem of science is made up of ingredients we can dissect and reveal as emerging from culture, society, history. Large numbers of academic books are nowadays devoted to showing how artefacts and scientific axioms are culturally constructed, how conceptual categories such as "gender" are socially constructed, how feudal traditions such as dowry are historically constructed. Historians and critics are as deep in the construction industry as the Ansals.
At the broadest level the world of knowledge now seems to comprise, on the one hand, artists and scientists who are busy "creating" works of genius and shrouding themselves in auras of mystery and greatness, often by just flying their hair to cater to audience expectations and, on the other, critics and historians busily deconstructing these artists and works to demonstrate the humdrum and mundane processes by which the supposedly great poem or theorem or symphony actually gets made. The more complicated and unfathomable the language in which such critical deconstruction is expressed, the higher the salary the critic or historian commands in the West. There seems an artistic logic at work here in the fact that, when critics too become ultimately and sublimely unfathomable, that is, when they construct works so arcane that there seems no way of accounting for their divine incomprehensibility, as might be said of works by two famous Indian professors of literature in the U.S. called Homi Bhabha at Harvard and Gayatri Spivak at Columbia such critics could be said to have paradoxically, or perhaps foxily, reconstructed their own selves into sublime artists and geniuses and in a manner no one can further deconstruct!
In the 200th year of the Eroica Symphony, a work of inexplicable inspiration by an ultimately unfathomable genius, it was my misfortune to try reading a book by Professor Homi Bhabha called Nation and Narration. I gave up after a few pages, but even those few pages by this modern critical "genius" caused in my head a divine inspiration so pure that not even Mr. Bhabha can deconstruct it:
Bhabha, Black Sheep,
Have you any Bull?
Yes sir, yes sir, three blah-blahs full.
One for my Master-Narration,
And one for my Dam(e)-Nation,
And one for the little Harvard boys
Who pay for all my circumlocution.
Rukun Advani is the author of Beethoven Among the Cows and runs a publishing company Permanent Black based in Ranikhet and Delhi.
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