Our readings this week discussed the culture around art and isolation in Paris in the 19th century. Harvey stated that at the time “ennui was the mark of a distinguished sensibility and an elevated mind” (213).  He also discussed the romanticism of the social outcast, stating that “the new outcasts were in there own way visionaries, not unlike the jesters and fools who both entertained and troubled the princes of the Renaissance by their insights into human nature ” (219).

This romanticism of the unhappy outcast has, I would suggest,  been prevalent ever since in a slightly evolved form: the true artist needs suffering in order to achieve authenticity. The example that comes to mind is a phenomenon from the beat generation that Norman Mailer called the “White Negro”. This was the idealization and adaption of black culture (clothing, music, drug use) by young white artists as an attempt to break free from the middle class and gain a more “hip” lifestyle.  I have recently heard it argued that part of this cultural appropriation was motivated by a desire for what the beats considered the genuine suffering of the black man,  their historical suffering serving, in the eye of the white hipster, as an enviable kind of motivation towards artistic work.  Kerouac wrote in On the Road-

“At lilac evening I walked with every muscle aching among the lights of 27th and Welton in the Denver colored section, wishing I were a Negro, feeling that the best the white world had offered was not enough life, joy, kicks, darkness,. music, not enough nights.”

In certain ways this idea still exists, and I have wrestled with it to some degree when considering the lives and fates of my favorite authors. Sylvia Plath, Virginia Woolf, David Foster Wallace, all brilliant minds and writers who, it could be argued, achieved such success in writing because of their internal suffering. Although I understand that there are many counter-examples, I wonder if there is some truth in this old cliche. This idea that to suffer, to be an outcast, to experience deep inequality and unhappiness, somehow feeds the artistic soul.