The Importance of the Ordinary

The Whitney Museum of American Art is about to open a major retrospective on the art of Andy Warhol, probably the world's most well-known practitioner of Pop Art and a man who perhaps most notably brought to life the beauty and aesthetic integrity of the ordinary. Cans of soup, boxes of cleaning pads.

That came to mind when I was reading "The Pastons and Chaucer," the first chapter of Virginia Woolf's collection of essays known as "The Common Reader." About Chaucer, she had the following to say:

"For among writers, there are two kinds: there are the priests who take you by the hand and lead you straight up to the mystery; there are the layman who imbed their doctrines in flesh and blood and make a complete model of the world without excluding the bad or laying stress upon the good. Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelly are among the priests; they give us text after text to be hung up on the wall, saying after saying to be laid up on the heart like an amulet against disaster --

                   Farewell, farewell, the heart that lives alone

                          He prayeth best that loveth best
                          All things both great and small

-- such lines of exhortation and command spring to memory instantly.  But Chaucer lets us go our ways doing the ordinary things with the ordinary people. His morality lies in the way men and women behave to each other."

And, further:

" … the pleasure he gives us is different from the pleasure that other poets give us, because it is more closely connected with what we have ourselves felt or observed. Eating, drinking and fine weather, the May, cocks and hens, millers, old peasant women, flowers -- there is a special stimulus in seeing all these common things …"

Moreover, Woolf says, Chaucer goes on "to mock the pomp and ceremonies of life."

If Chaucer put great stock in ordinary life, so did Woolf, herself.  With the exception of "Orlando," a transgender, time-wharp phantasy said to be a love letter to Vita Sackville-West, all of her novels deal with ordinary people living ordinary lives. So, too, does the vast majority of the writing of James Joyce.