Epic of Gilgamesh and the Intentionality of Art

Must art be intentional?  If you'd asked me two weeks ago, I'm pretty sure I would've answered with an unequivocal yes--the whole point of art, its whole raison d'etre, I probably would've claimed, is that someone has intentionally presented some artifact as art.

I would've cited Marcel Duchamp's "Fountain" and so forth, wherein a urinal is intentionally presented as art, instead of as a mere urinal.  You may not like "Fountain," you may not find it particularly pretty or even clever, but "Fountain" is still art, because the urinal was presented as art.  Bad art if you wish, but still art.  Duchamp merely calls attention to the fact that art is what ever we present as art--and therefore art must be intentional.

The wonders of nature I probably would've provisionally classified as "beautiful," even "sublime"-- even exceeding the works of art by man in beauty and sublimity--but still not art, for it's not obvious that nature is presented as art.  (Now, one might argue then that God is an artist and nature is his highest creation, but that's a discussion for another day).  Beauty, then, is received and interpreted by the subject, while art is presented by the artist.  With intention.

My simplistic (and provisional) classification of art as "intentional," however, was thrown out of whack last week when I finally read the Epic of Gilgamesh, the impossibly-ancient Sumerian poem from 4,000-odd years ago.  It is quite possibly the oldest surviving work of literature in the world; it predates Homer by centuries.

It was originally written on clay tablets because, well, the Egyptians still hadn't invented paper yet.  As such, it has come down to us only in fragments (we still do not have the entire Epic of Gilgamesh in other words)--a fragmentation that was surely un-intentional on the part of writers.  Any scholarly edition of Gilgamesh (I read the most recent Penguin edition) is filled with editorial asides that mark where there were breaks in the tablets and certain lines have been lost.  Yet this fragmentation is, at least for me, now part of the whole aesthetic experience of the Epic.

Without getting into plot summary, the Epic concerns the friendship and various adventures of Gilgamesh and Enkidu, and Gilgamesh's great grief when Enkidu falls ill and dies.  Upon Enkidu's death, Gilgamesh goes in search of Utnapishtim, the Babylonian Noah, to try to learn the secret of eternal life (he fails, btw).  The Epic's main preoccupation, then, is the fear of death--and it's rather sobering to contemplate that 4,000 years and countless technological innovations later, we are still no closer to resolving this fear of death than our most distant forebearers.

This preoccupation with death is really brought home during Enkidu's grand death-bed soliloquy, as Enkidu decries the unfairness of it all, how he longs to have died gloriously in battle rather than ignobly with sickness, and how time touches and ruins and destroys everything, and how none can escape--

And then there is another break in the tablets.  "The next thirty lines are missing" informs the Penguin editor.

I had to put down the book for a moment there.  My interest in Gilgamesh up till then had been mainly academic (hey, oldest book ever, why wouldn't I read it?), but that break caught me off guard.  Not the text mind you, the break.  For here's Enkidu soliloquizing of how all is lost to time, and then his soliloquy itself is lost to time.  The sheer tragedy of Enkidu's death could not have been better underlined than by that break, even if the writer had intended it.

Which he most assuredly had not!

You see what I'm getting at?  The Epic of Gilgamesh became infinitely more profound, tragic, and pathos-ridden for me because of that unintentional break, not despite it.  But there was no intention behind that break--it was just the sheer random happenstance of chance and time that these particular fragments survived than others!  And yet that very unintentional randomness is part of what gives the tragic pathos of Gilgamesh its peculiar power and heft. 

Who knows, maybe things aren't as random as they sometimes seem, maybe God or some force beyond us created that break, which could not have been more tragically fortuitous than if it had been planned--but whether or not that be so, it is for sure that the ancient, forgotten-to-us writer of Gilgamesh did not plan, did not intend for that break to appear!

Something un-intentional underscored that work of art.  What else is art without intention?  The question of just what is art is more complex than ever for me.