<div>On 10/1/06, Michael Catolico <<a href="mailto:mcatolico@mindspring.com">mcatolico@mindspring.com</a>> wrote:<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"> in the thread on Faulkner Jerry Monaco wrote: > [...]I have again come to the conclusion that there is no > way we can argue over art -- we can explicate, praise, react, hope to > reveal, and help to experience but rarely if ever convince someone out of > their own confirmed taste. > > it's fairly disheartening to me when  i read this kind of perspective - particularly among progressives.  to me it's akin to  saying "ultimately there's no arguing with folks over the validity of science. if you choose to believe that astrology is superior to astronomy for explaining the nature of the universe, so be it. truth is  really relative and a matter of taste." </blockquote></div> Michael, One more thing I would like to add to the above. I think a person can rationally come to the conclusion, as Nabokov did, that Faulkner and Dostoevsky do not write well and thus are bad artists.  I may mostly disagree with the conclusion about Faulkner (Nabokov did not spend much time reading Faulkner was part of the problem) and mostly agree with the conclusion about Dostoevsky (Nabokov read most of Dostoevsky) without questioning the rationality of the conclusion.  Ultimately there is something that is extra-rational or non-rational about the difference between Nabokov's conclusions and my own, in this area.  Nabokov believed that all great writing had to be elegant in a certain way and had a visceral reaction against inelegance.  I think the power of great writing can beyond this kind of Nabokovian elegance. There is no way to rationally exclude either Nabokov's position or my own.  But, I do not think that, given the current state of knowledge, someone can come to a "rational" conclusion that there is a psychological-astronomical confluence and that confluence is expressed theoretically in the model provided by astrology.  Such conclusions are in all likelihood highly irrational, in our times, and an example of the human cognitive tendency to make patterns where no patterns exist, in all times.  The fact that it is _rational_ to argue either that Faulkner's _Absalom, Absalom_ is badly written and inelegant, as Nabokov implies, or that it is one of the most powerful novels ever written as I believe; but it is _unscientific_ to argue that astrology is a good psychological and/or astronomical theoretical explanation or model, should say to you, Michael, something about the difference between rational argument and scientific explanation.  There are usually accepted and set universal standards by which to judge scientific explanations, from within any particular science.  There are not usually accepted and set universal standards to judge most good art there all human beings can agree with -- though there may be a few by which to judge a lot of bad art.  I think this is also because both artistic experience and rational argument are human universals with a large degree of variation and within that variation there is the whole human experience.  Scientific explanations, I believe are part of a universal human capacity, but in practice are limited specialties, confined to trained communities with technical expertise and agree upon processes for testing, confirming, and falsifying there explanations and models.  As far as your statements about the "objectivity" of art I think that they are mostly mis-statements.  Art is objective simply because everything in the world is "objective" including subjectivity which is a special mode of the material world.  But that is not the question I brought up.  My question was whether it was possible to "show" that Faulkner, contra-Nabokov, wrote good and great novels.  And the answer is, not as far as I can see.  I can only make a good argument based on my criteria and provide good descriptions of my experience withing my own limited capacity.  I believe that there is good art and there is bad art.  But there is no way that you can do anything but provide a rational argument, explicate, praise, deprecate, try to understand, and help others to experience what you see as good art and bad art in any particular case.  I think that the whole corpus of Joss Whedon's "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" is worthy of the designation of a great artistic experience and I value it in similar ways that I value Dickens's _Bleak House_.   Maybe I am wrong, but I think I have good arguments that I am not.  There are no scientific arguments either way. Jerry