Art and Enchantment

Published in a series entitled contemporary liminality, this erudite and passionate study sheds light on both enchantment and disenchantment in art, with many specific examples from painting, music, fiction and poetry. Patrick quotes Cyril Connolly to the effect that one cannot serve both power and beauty, while insisting that enchantment is an indigenous human experience that nourishes us from within with a sense of presence. He examines the nature of enchantment through the figure of Hermes, metaphor, concrete magic, wildness, crafts, and what he calls 'essensuality.' He is dismayed by the insistence on relevance, paralleled in applied science contra blue sky research. We now live in a largely disenchanted milieu dominated by the 'Megamachine' and the ethos of modernism that derides art for art's sake. Patrick makes an important distinction between moderns and modernists, where the former extend tradition while the latter despise it.

The chapters that follow containing illuminating discussions of artists in relation to the theme, including Monet, Matisse, Bonnard (scorned by Picasso for his sensibility), and Klee in the more general context of colour and beauty – with an interesting discussion of Chinese landscape painting. The second chapter on this theme is more focused on abstract art, including Picasso, Mondrian, Kandinsky, Magritte, Duchamp and Damien Hirst as the ultimate artist of disenchantment (John Ruskin vs Walter Benjamin). Moving on to music, Patrick emphasises the role of the body and the refinement of its intangibility and ineffability, including the silences in between (c.f. light and darkness). Equally, there are disenchanted forms of music in Schoenberg and Cage (popular music is also extensively treated from both angles, with enchantment represented by the Incredible String Band, Fairport Convention and Leonard Cohen). There is a wonderful contemporary description of an extraordinary performance by Mozart in Prague on 19 January 1787 (p. 139).

I liked the distinction between reading and 'deep reading' as 'slowly, considered, and potentially life changing reading, based on being alone with the book, and thence with its author' (p. 175) – while the enemies of deep reading seek to distract and fragment our attention. Patrick sees the e-book – 'a mere tool for reading' – as 'the disenchanted ghost of a book.' He is surely right that the impulse of jargon-ridden knowledge-as-power endangers 'true freedom of thought, non-instrumental creativity, inherent mystery, and wisdom that transcends mere information.' The fiction and poetry chapters are equally wide-ranging and perceptive, including the magical Sir Patrick Leigh Fermor, Tolkien, Bulgakov and Lampedusa. I very much appreciated Robert Frost's observation that 'a poem begins in delight and ends in wisdom… the figure is the same for love.' (p. 227) As a whole, the book is a significant cultural contribution, reminding readers of the price of loss of enchantment in terms of quality of life and, worse still, that disenchantment has become the norm – while enchantment itself needs no further justification.