Looseness as an aesthetic concept, moral v artistic value, and the Pilgrims.

Lightning reviews: December 2022

1. Fisherman’s Box, The Waterboys (2013; complete sessions for the 1988 album Fisherman’s Blues).

The Waterboys, on this set, are loose. The metronome is off; they’re free, there’s room to breathe, and they swing. It’s not easy; looseness, like the aesthetic generally, is fragile. Loose drumming eases in behind the beat; too loose, and the drumming sounds clumsy—listen to the out-of-time whacks in “On the Darkside,” John Cafferty’s pseudo-Springsteen single. A loose song grooves with increasing energy. Too loose, and the song becomes shapeless; cool riffs circle into boredom, as on “Wicked as it Seems,” and, honestly, most of the songs on Keith Richards’ 1992 album Main Offender. Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers achieve looseness on their just-releassed Live at the Filmore (recorded 1997), but it is an afternoon backyard party loose. They’re playing for the crowd. The Waterboys sound like they’re playing on an exhausted spiritual adrenaline, alone in the dark.

2. Robust Immoralism, by A. W. Eaton.

Beautiful people can be vicious, and the homely can be morally pure. Moral and aesthetic qualities are independent. Or are they? Virtue is sometimes called inner beauty, and an evil soul, a moral deformity. The same debate rages about art. If a work exhibits a moral flaw, does that make it worse as a work of art? Or is it aesthetically neutral? Or—maybe this is the heroic position—can a moral flaw sometimes enhance a work’s artistic value? That is Eaton’s view: “moral flaws of a particular kind can make a significant contribution to a work’s aesthetic value.”

The first task is to explain how a work of art can have a moral flaw at all. No painting or novel can pick my pocket or break my leg. Eaton claims (following Noel Carroll and Berys Gaut) (i) that a work of art can “manifest” attitudes like admiration or sympathy (Catcher in the Rye manifests affection for Holden; Pride and Prejudice manifests disapproval or Lydia’s behavior), and (ii) that manifesting an attitude can, sometimes, be a moral flaw, as when a work manifests admiration for an evil character or evil act. After all, the idea goes, admiring an evil person is a moral flaw in a human being; so, surely, manifesting admiration for an evil character is a moral flaw in a work of art.

Go back to (i): how does a story “manifest” admiration? Not by undergoing whatever I undergo, in my mind, when I admire someone. Eaton’s answer: a story manifests admiration toward a character when it gives that character features with the aim of “stimulating and eliciting” admiration for the character in its readers. (But wait, can readers really admire non-existent fictional characters? What about the paradox of fiction? It may be set aside here.)

At halftime, then, here is the score: manifesting admiration (or sympathy, or endorsement—other attitudes Eaton mentions) for an evil character is a moral flaw in a work; and, Eaton wants to argue, sometimes this is also an artistic virtue, or merit, in a work.

What is her argument? Eaton’s central example is the “rough hero”: