In Praise of the Obscure

Indeed. Art should be about working to understand someone else’s world, not having that person work to explain yours to you.

The universalist approach, that is, invites us to extrapolate or identify some easily communicable, generic element—unequal power relationships, existential anxieties, or some key idea central to all human life—and tells us that this is what matters about the work of art, not the nature of its engagement with its culture of origin, with the colors of the rooms, the furnishings, the things people wore, or habitual body postures of the time. So in Koch’s novel we would be dwelling on the inevitable tension between family loyalty and respect for society’s rule of law, or for humanitarian ideals—something understandable all over the world—rather than savoring, from within the experience of Dutch culture, exactly where these families were coming from, how they recall or don’t recall things Dutch readers recognize in their Dutch lives.

But what if the quality of some fine works of art is exactly in their relationship with the local and the contemporary, with the life that it has been given to them to experience here and now? . . .

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