Kirk Duval
G.K. Chesterton was born a Gemini on May 29th 1874. He was a contemporary of fellow Gemini George Bernard Shaw and Libra Oscar Wilde, and along with these artists and many other artists of that time, he represents a turning point. The century, the aesthetic, the science, the technology, and the art were all in flux and the artists that emerged from this period are forever remembered for shaping what is now contemporary thought. We are currently experiencing a similar paradigm shift in our society. I’d like to explore the ways in which G.K. Chesterton contributed to his culture, in order that I may better understand how to contribute to mine.
Chesterton is considered a member of the Avante-Garde for many reasons. By simply adjusting with and reacting to the times in which he worked, he is granted enormous credibility as regards his industriousness. He was able to see possibilities for expressing himself and for utilizing his skills in almost every medium of the time, many of which involved the written word. He didn’t limit himself to a specialized genre, but instead chose to follow his desires across various platforms, mastery be damned. Although, master many he eventually did.
His dexterity in function and form reflect importantly on his dexterity of thought. Coined “The Prince of Paradox,” Chesterton’s art lied in the way he could hold two opposing beliefs in his mind and turn each on it’s head while still examining the disparate truths of either and/or both. The paradox, or rather the spectrum of tensions created by paradox, was Chesterton’s artistic and intellectual fuel. He loved exposing the cultural hypocrisy that seems inevitable in a modern society.
This simple foray into differentiated aspects of culture and his diverse use of mediums is already very avant-garde. The established knowledge and popular wisdom of the time would suggest that specialized skills were highly valued. Hard work in one discipline was the gold standard. Professionals in every field were formalizing their profession. That period seems to be the time when people’s pursuits became more and more individualized. It was the study of this or that, not this and that. By overthrowing these traditions of popular culture in his work, Chesterton participated in a cultural liberation from the passivity that capitalism encourages.
In his weekly publication G.K.’s Weekly, and along with the poet and essayist Hilaire Belloc, Chesterton espoused the economic system of distributism. This system, a balance between the two poles of capitalism and socialism, is based on the idea of increasing the owners of production as much as possible. Whereas in capitalism the means of production becomes inevitably centralized, and in socialism it’s under the control of the state, distributism “seeks to ensure that most people will become owners of productive property.” This system reflects many of Chesterton’s artistic principles as well.
As owner and publisher of his own weekly magazine he produced and distributed his own artistic content at will. He provided an example for an emerging society of artists who had advanced technology and tools at their disposal. On politics he is quoted as saying, “The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of the Conservatives is to prevent the mistakes from being corrected.” Chesterton seems to be providing a creative blue print for the more typical modern man to make his own work. Become owner and producer of your own artistic property. Ignore the political polarization of popular discourse; it doesn’t affect all public points of view. There is no wrong or right way. “Mistakes” are welcome. It is dogma that seems to be the enemy; the mutual presence of contradictions is encouraged here.
Chesterton put into popular forms many complicated theories and philosophies, making them at once more accessible while also exposing their inflated importance. He said, “Oscar Wilde said that sunsets were not valued because we could not pay for sunsets. But Oscar Wilde was wrong; we can pay for sunsets. We can pay for them by not being Oscar Wilde.” And about George Bernard Shaw:
After belabouring a great many people for a great many years for being unprogressive, Mr. Shaw has discovered, with characteristic sense, that it is very doubtful whether any existing human being with two legs can be progressive at all. Having come to doubt whether humanity can be combined with progress, most people, easily pleased, would have elected to abandon progress and remain with humanity. Mr. Shaw, not being easily pleased, decides to throw over humanity with all its limitations and go in for progress for its own sake. If man, as we know him, is incapable of the philosophy of progress, Mr. Shaw asks, not for a new kind of philosophy, but for a new kind of man. It is rather as if a nurse had tried a rather bitter food for some years on a baby, and on discovering that it was not suitable, should not throw away the food and ask for a new food, but throw the baby out of window, and ask for a new baby.
He reconciled catholic thought with liberal thought. He addresses Kant, Darwin, Materialism, Orthodoxy, Ontology. “He was a literary and social critic, historian, playwright, novelist, Catholic theologian and apologist, debater, and mystery writer. He was a columnist for the Daily News, the Illustrated London News, and his own paper, G. K.'s Weekly; he also wrote articles for the Encyclopædia Britannica, including the entry on Charles Dickens and part of the entry on Humour in the 14th edition.”
Chesterton’s work in popular culture is one of the reasons he was more appreciated in his time rather than posthumously, as was the case with many of his contemporaries. Although, it is still curious as to why he’s not as studied as several other turn oƒ the century artists. Perhaps he was too uniquely of an age, perhaps too prolific and diverse to be studied in our traditional way. Maybe his temperament as a Gemini produced work that, though quotable and funny, seems superficial. And maybe still, his work, involving paradox, and his tongue in cheek turning of conventional wisdom on its head, might put the average reader ill at ease:
I have never managed to lose my old conviction that travel narrows the mind. At least a man must make a double effort of moral humility and imaginative energy to prevent it from narrowing his mind. Indeed there is something touching and even tragic about the thought of the thoughtless tourist who might have stayed at home loving Laplanders, embracing Chinamen, and clasping Patagonians to his heart in Hampstead or Surbiton, but for his blind and suicidal impulse to go and see what they looked like. This is not meant for nonsense; still less is it meant for the silliest sort of nonsense, which is cynicism. The human bond that he feels at home is not an illusion… But to travel is to leave the inside and draw dangerously near the outside.
As a student of astrology this subject, and his sense of humor about it, strike me as particularly funny. “Mercury is connected with travel because travel is a means by which one fills in the details of one’s map oƒ reality. Mercury signifies travel of the routine, day-to-day variety, however, not long journeys, which are discontinuous with normal experience and hence expand the mind.” Mercury is of course the ruler of Chesterton’s sun sign, Gemini. “Often underplayed in astrological writing... Mercury signifies the gap that exists between separate entities. The world as seen in normal human consciousness is a world of divisions. The first of these is the division between subject and object... We can never fully occupy another’s point of view, yet we are not wholly cut off. We can communicate, and communication is one of the chief mercurial functions.”
Still Chesterton seems content with the confusion he causes. Rather than explain himself, he lets the work speak for itself. And though it may appear so, his work is not easy. It unfolds and explains itself over “around 80 books, several hundred poems, some 200 short stories, 4000 essays, and several plays.” This idea of allowing not just the work, but also the whole body of work, to speak for itself seems very modern to me. We live in an age where very little that’s created in or for the public sphere is truly lost. This easy proliferation of easy product is becoming and has been becoming since Chesterton’s time it seems.
Nowadays, consistent and unfettered access to online materials seems to be promoting more and more the vision of art that Chesterton propagated. The means of production are more so than ever in the hands of the producer, and unlimited access to the art consumer allows for work that can endlessly refer to itself (or, at this point, even Others). In our digital age, Lady Gaga acknowledges this new system of distribution in her work by creating pieces that are layered, symbolic across levels, and that expand on a narrative begun with her earliest underground and online work in New York City. This system seems appropriate to our modern age and correlates nicely with what appears to be G.K. Chesterton’s point of view: everything exists on a spectrum between two poles, nothing exists without its opposite, the process is the product, and the paradox is the solution.
