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Monday, July 25, 2005

Position-taking on the Aesthetic

The Reading Experience is a great blog, devoted to serious discussion of aesthetic responses to fiction.

The blog’s writer, with whom the Chicago School of Aristotelians would have been comfortable, takes it as a first principle that there is a unique, valuable, and describable mode of human expression called “the novel,” and that the novel prompts in readers a unique, valuable, and describable response.

This response has primarily to do with the aesthetic power of novels, and secondarily to do with the ideas and arguments that novels convey. He writes:


[T]he aesthetic response should be [our] initial response [to a novel]. Otherwise why bother with the "art" at all? Why fool around with the formal manipulations and the fancy writing in the first place when we can just leap headlong into the "content"? If the aesthetic is a "peculiar mode of appreciation," why not demand that the artist stop tempting us with it? By all means discuss the content. Just don't do so as if the artist had made it available to us in the same way as the essayist or the polemicist.



The defensive tone here is about the writer’s attempt to deal with the content-driven, aesthetics-disdaining attitude of a fellow blogger, who writes:


The aesthetic: A peculiar mode of appreciation that wishes to place in brackets or disavow the obvious content of a work and stress instead form and symbolism.



Notice that the aesthetic brackets the “obvious content” of a novel. There are literal, pressing meanings in novels -- meanings which can help liberate us from our mental chains -- but these are being shunted aside in favor of figurative and vague possibilities…

My favorite expression of this popular academic notion comes from the art critic T.J. Clark, who writes:


The bourgeoisie has an...interest in preserving a certain myth of the aesthetic consciousness, one where a transcendental ego is given something appropriate to contemplate in a situation essentially detached from the pressures and deformities of history. The interest is considerable because the class in question has few other areas (since the decline of the sacred) in which its account of consciousness and freedom can be at all compellingly phrased.



Bourgeois reactionaries, groping after the self-flattering metaphysical certainties they lost with the decline of religion, glomb onto the novel (or the painting) because it jollies them into thinking that they have a complex and free consciousness. The reality is that they’re held in a ideological vise by repressive capitalist states, but they can’t be allowed to see that. They have to be jollied into a kind of blind complacency by works of art which suspend all the important questions about social reality and display mere prettiness.

This is the familiar politically fixated take on the novel -- a take which has dominated the academy for a number of decades, though it’s now being challenged. There isn’t an “aesthetic response” at all; there’s just a degraded spiritual response. And like all spirituality it makes us (to quote Timothy Shortell) moral retards.



Another recent Reading Experience post drew a response from the New Republic critic James Wood which states exactly the opposite point of view about aesthetic experience -- that it makes us ethically keener.


Why should we have aesthetics OR the moral? (The moral, of course, meant in its largest sense, to mean something like 'meaningful human conduct and the discourse about that'.) Why not both? The aesthetic is a human product, and so it will always have a moral dimension.

…Chekhov is a great writer because he is a great stylist, and because of certain qualities of his style he is also a great humanist. Flaubert gives rise to moral doubts, at times, on the part of readers, because his style seems to incarnate a kind of hatred of his subjects; he longed, famously, to write a book about 'nothing, with no external attachment', and there are times when his aestheticism seems to want to do away with matter altogether, to pulverize the human subject.

To call something, in a derogatory way, 'mere aestheticism' is to make a moral judgment about certain kinds of aesthetic decisions. (This isn't being only a moral critic; it is being a moral and an aesthetic critic: what other kind could there be?) Chekhov, for me, is so miraculous because an absolute perfection of form -- he instructed the journal editor of 'The Bishop' not to change a single word -- co-exists with the opposite of Flaubert's misanthropy. Style, for Chekhov, seems not to have been in any necessary conflict with the humane. He is the great stylist and the great humanist.

Henry James … exactly showed, in his critical comments on Flaubert and others, that a great interest in the moral and a great interest in the formal can and should co-exist. Truth and beauty together, not separated. I thought all this was pretty obvious.

…Surely when ideas take fictive form, as they do as soon as a narrative of any seriousness is essayed, they become indistinguishable from aesthetics? This is what an idea or an argument IS in fiction: it has taken a form which it could not exactly have taken outside this particular fiction; it has an aesthetic shape; it has been irrevocably modified by aesthetics.

It was Eliot … who best said this in his famous words about how Henry James's mind was so fine that no idea could violate it. He didn't mean that James wasn't thinking; he meant that James thought fictively.



Humanism, the human subject… For the political critic, Wood merely deepens the offense by defending a traditional understanding of us as autonomous, actively conscious, volitional beings for whom the best novels are not those with obvious political meanings, but those whose presentation of human consciousness shows it to be deep and complicated and enterprising and conflicted.