[spellbanisher]

I generally distinguish between three kinds of "art." There is "art" that is meant to provide immediate gratification or pleasure and to be safe and comforting. I generally call this entertainment.

There is "art" that is instructive or critical. This is mostly self explanatory; these works seek to instruct, to teach, to compel. They can also critique society. Works such as 1984, The Jungle, And Uncle Tom's Cabin fall into this category, and perhaps could even be called propaganda. Most of Dickens works would fall into this category, because his purpose was to critique society. However, it could also be argued that Dickens was actually articulating his own worldview and philosophy which he thought were eternal truths, which fall into the three category which is

Works that strive for eternal truth or aesthetic bliss. In sense, these works attempt to expand our sphere of consciousness and reality, and to achieve aesthetic bliss is to reach a state of being or spirituality that is impossible to define and impossible to achieve through other activities. Great poetry and great music can fall into this category. I think linguistically experimental novels also fall into this category, because they push language to its limit, and language is the basis of human society, the way we communicate with others (sex is also how we communicate) and the way we define who we are, what we feel, and what we believe. To expand ones knowledge and mastery of language is to expand ones mental universe. Generally, I would say the works of Shakespeare, the metaphysical poets, the Romantic poets, and modernist novels like Ulysses, Mrs. Dalloway, and In Search of Lost Time (or Remembrance of Things Past) fall into the third category. Pure mathematics can also be considered a form of art. This might sound counterintuitive, but if you accept Leguin's definition that "art is that which attempts to express in words what cannot be expressed in words" then mathematics is art because it attempts to explain the truths of the universe.

Some works, of course, straddle the lines between categories. Comical novels for instance, are primarily made to make people laugh (thus making them part of the first category) by critiquing the foibles and follies of society (thus meeting the criteria for the second category). I guess if the novelist is skilled enough he could write a comical that is also linguistically experimental, but I suppose it would very difficult to write in a language that extraordinarily unusual yet still able to make people laugh.

I would also say that the great nineteenth Century Russian writer (Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Turgenev) are second/third category writers. All of them critique their society with their novels, but they also seek ultimate truth and answers to how man can achieve the good life.

Note that this is not a hierarchy. The third category is not superior to the first category, and vice versa.