Rachel Phillips on Joyce's "Araby," Camus' "The Stranger" and Sontag's "On Style," Research Paper/Spring 2017

Rachel Phillips                            

Wendy Cheng

Writing and Lit II

April 25, 2016

Artists and Religion

Artists have established themselves as nonreligious people: spiritual, maybe, but not religious. James Joyce, for example, split from the Catholic Church. Albert Camus was very openly atheist, channeling his beliefs into his character Meursault in The Stranger. Susan Sontag proposed that moral works of art give us a basis of morality rather than relying on laws or religion to guide us. Artists, by delving into the arts and educating themselves, can develop a level of understanding that allows them to free themselves from the restrictions of religion; they develop their own philosophy, they create their own boundaries, and therefore no longer need organized religion to guide them and comfort them in their life.

While many artists, of course, follow religion, just hearing the term “artist” in modern times brings up connotations of someone divorced from religion. To some, this may be a negative connotation; my parents in particular (devout Christians) often thought of many artists who openly express their opinions as sacrilegious and misguided. However, most of art used to be religious. In the West, secular art began to emerge as artists were encouraged to go back to Greek and Roman roots with the Renaissance (“Defining Secular Art”). With the rise of humanism, which the British Humanist Association describes as a belief that “in the absence of an afterlife and any discernible purpose to the universe, human beings can act to give their own lives meaning by seeking happiness in this life and helping others to do the same,” Renaissance artists began to create non-sacred, or secular art. Over time, more art became less religious. Now one is hard-pressed to find something religiously based in a gallery, and the shift from negative to positive connotations in secular art is owed to humanism and the Renaissance.

James Joyce’s split from the Catholic church came as no surprise. Pat Cairney believed, although no one knew in particular why Joyce left, that he valued his individuality over the community of the church (James Joyce’s Quarrel With Catholicism). In Joyce’s time, the Catholic church would have valued conforming, rather than expressing. Joyce probably felt treated as a number rather than a person. There are sayings: “don’t be sheep,” or “swim against the current.” Think for yourself, break from the crowd, be original, be a leader not a follower. Joyce would’ve connected with all of these. It is not shocking that Joyce valued individuality. He was a highly intelligent man:

From an early age, James Joyce showed not only exceeding intelligence but also a gift for writing and a passion for literature. He taught himself Norwegian so he could read Henrik Ibsen's plays in the language they'd been written, and spent his free time devouring Dante, Aristotle, and Thomas Aquinas. (James Joyce Biography.com)

Joyce was the kind of person always in the pursuit of knowledge. “Joyce taught English and learned Italian, one of 17 languages he could speak, a list that included Arabic, Sanskrit, and Greek” (James Joyce Biography.com). His ambition and brains served him well; even before Ulysses came out, it was under the heavy fire of criticism for obscenity. The debate skyrocketed sales (James Joyce Biography.com), but in addition, a connection to the Church would have dampened the content. I know plenty of people who will refuse to watch television shows with sex scenes for the sake of keeping their mind pure for God. Especially in Joyce’s time, being the producer of such sinful intrigue would have been much more of a struggle while in the Catholic Church. All in all, Joyce’s pursuit of knowledge resulted in a unique, intellectually aware man who felt the pressure of the Church on his mind and made the decision to leave for the sake of his individuality.

            Coming into popularity as a writer a couple decades after Joyce, Albert Camus was quick to insert and never faltered in his opinion. Very openly atheist, an accurate representation of his beliefs can be analyzed through his character Meursault in The Stranger. Meursault is openly against any belief in any god and is never afraid to say so.

 … He had drawn himself up to his full height and was asking me very earnestly if I believed in God. When I said, “No,” he plumped down into his chair indignantly. That was unthinkable, he said; all men believe in God, even those who reject Him. Of this he was absolutely sure; if ever he came to doubt it, his life would lose all meaning. “Do you wish,” he asked indignantly, “my life to have no meaning?” (Camus 43)

The magistrate here places the entire weight of his life on his belief in God. Here, Camus is not afraid to criticize the religious. Although never identifying as existentialist, Camus, a philosopher himself, built upon their ideas and created the absurdist way of thought (Albert Camus Biograpy.com). Similar to humanism in that humans must find happiness in a godless world, absurdism embraces the meaninglessness of our existence. Rather, absurdism embraces the absurdity of our existence; the chances of us being here, of intelligent life forming on a planet perfectly positioned with respect to the sun, with no higher power being credited with our creation, is insane. Many people rely on God as their source of happiness and meaning in life, but Camus’s exploration of philosophy and life attribute to his happiness in atheism; his logical way of thinking, rather than relying on sentimentality, helped to create a specificity of philosophy that helps people find exhilaration in their life while also allowing a dissection between that and religion.

            Susan Sontag summed up both of James Joyce and Albert Camus’s process on expanding knowledge. In her discussion of style, she mentions morality in art.

The moral pleasure in art, as well as the moral service that art performs, consists in the intelligent gratification of consciousness… But if we understand morality… as a generic decision on the part of consciousness, then It appears that our response to art is “moral” insofar as it is, precisely, the enlivening of our sensibility and consciousness. For it is sensibility that nourishes our capacity for moral choice, and prompts our readiness to act, assuming that we do choose, which is a prerequisite for calling an act moral, and are not just blandly and unreflectively obeying. Art performs this “moral” task because the qualities which are intrinsic to the aesthetic experience (disinterestedness, contemplativeness, attentiveness, the awakening of the feelings) and to the aesthetic object (grace, intelligence, expressiveness, energy, sensuousness) are also fundamental constituents of a moral response to life. (Sontag “On Style”).

Sontag declares that delving into arts and broadening our horizons, analyzing art and opening ourselves to it, can provide us with a moral capacity by enabling sensibility. In simpler terms, studying art makes us better people.

            As our society steps away from religion, with more reliance on science and logic, rather than myth and the divine, we must rely on art to inform our decisions. Our technology is developing fast, and as we exponentially discover more, the reliance on religion the older times held will be further weakened. As we struggle to keep up with our advancements, we will need to find new ways to inform our moral decisions rather than relying on laws we must strictly obey, and art is the primary route to enliven our intellectual experience as humans. Joyce left the church because it hurt his individuality, and Camus was steady in his philosophy that we live a meaningless existence without a creator. Both of these artists owe their revelations to their exploration of knowledge and thought. If they had been stuck in the rut of religion, they would have been blindly obeying rules left to them by books written eons ago, rather than using their own awareness to inform their decisions. After all, what is the use of the morality of religious laws if people follow them like sheep? For example, one is not moral because they follow the Ten Commandments if they are only strictly told to do so; the religion restricts them, halting their mental progress. True mental awareness can only be achieved by those willing to leave the herd and form their own thoughts and opinions through the study of art, through the development of their mind.

            The School of Life summarizes this fairly well:

Its evidence that we have no real clue what culture and art are really for, and what problems they could solve. We like to declare the humanities worthy and noble and fund a few professors to dig away in the archives, but basically, at a societal level, we don’t know what the humanities could do for us… Good news is that the humanities actually do have a point to them. They are a storehouse of vitally important knowledge about how to lead our lives. Novels teach us about relationships, works of art reframe our perspectives, drama provides us with cathartic experiences, philosophy teaches us to think, political science to plan and history is a catalog of case-studies into any number of personal and political scenarios.

Our society must begin relying on the arts to inform our decisions, rather than the religious ways of the past. Once individuals begin intellectually exploring, our society can begin bettering itself as it further steps outside the realms of religion. For once, our decisions could be based off our own processes of problem solving, rather than being told to us by the elite at the church.

Works Cited

"Albert Camus." Biography.com. A&E Networks Television, 02 Apr. 2014. Web. 27 Apr. 2017.

Cairney, Pat. James Joyce's Quarrel With Catholicism. Thesis. Department of English Emporia Kansas State College, 1977. N.p.: n.p., n.d. Print.

Camus, Albert. "The Stranger." Trans. Stuart Gilbert. (1942): n. pag. Macobo. Librairie         Gallimard. Web.

"Defining Secular Art or A Different Kind of a Religious Experience." WideWalls. Widewalls, 2017. Web. 28 Apr. 2017. <http://www.widewalls.ch/secular-art/>.

"Humanism." British Humanist Association. British Humanist Association, 24 Apr. 2017. Web. 27 Apr. 2017. <https://humanism.org.uk/humanism/>.

"James Joyce." Biography.com. A&E Networks Television, 03 Feb. 2016. Web. 27 Apr. 2017.

Sontag, Susan. "On Style." Coldbacon. N.p., n.d. Web. 27 Apr. 2017. <http://www.coldbacon.com/writing/sontag-onstyle-annoted.html>.

Why Art Graduates Are Under-Employed. The School of Life. Vale Productions, 2 Sept. 2015. Web. 27 Apr. 2017.