et’s start with something beautiful. In 1971, at the huge Van Gogh show at the Brooklyn Museum, I stood as close to Starry Night as I was allowed. The paint, the brushstrokes, the color, the personality of Vincent. As if he was next to me! I had no doubt that I was experiencing beauty.
Van Gogh's The Starry Night (1889), by kind permission of Moma, the Museum of Modern Art, http://www.moma.org.
In The Question of the Aesthetic, edited by the renowned Victorian scholar George Levine, beauty is worried over by twelve academics whose profession is to interpret works of art and to uphold the importance of art itself. Besides promoting the human impulse to make art, the scholars tackle aggravating questions like whether aesthetics and beauty are even relevant topics for study and whether universities should pay them to teach this. Clearly, beauty is under attack on their campuses. The professors defend their vocation on two fronts. First, they face the question, should there be or have ever been a standard for beauty that “we” agree on? This involves questioning the Western Canon, but it is linked to a more general question: can there ever be an assumed “we” encompassing us all? In a book club, a university, a country or in humanity, can we search together for the same thing?
The second front is that the professors feel they and the humanities are being marginalized and bullied. As the global system of competition and profit brings its insistence on utility and instrumentality to campus, tuitions rise quickly so that a large proportion of students must go into long-term debt to “obtain” competitive educations. Voila, administrators begin to question philosophical reflection and the liberal arts as not relevant, not useful, unprofitable. But a pillar of aesthetics and beauty is their supposed inutility, and Levine not only supports this Kantian notion but turns it on its head to make his opening point: “The aesthetic...represents at least imaginatively, possibilities and satisfactions beyond the limits of immediate usefulness, and in so doing becomes variously and powerfully useful.” The book is an argument for “artistic education.” Levine’s writers believe in “the urgency of the beautiful” and want to show that “the aesthetic matters to human, psychological, social and economic flourishing.”
Since contention is the heart of academic work, the contributors come ready to throw light on these questions with skill, emotion and pride. I am not an academic, I am an independent scholar and an artist, but I believe that beauty is inspiring, delightful and sustaining for everyone. I hear about the turf wars on campus, and I know dissension when I see it, and it’s all over this book. The writers are fighting a good fight, as Helen Small says in her summarizing chapter, determined “to explain why critical studies of the arts and humanities deserves economic and political support.” Yet as Levine presents his opening argument, I imagine him looking over his shoulder because the wolves are at the door.
Along with addressing their anxiety about higher education as a big business, the contributors respond to protests from their colleagues which boil down to this: aesthetic studies are an extraneous pursuit allowing scholars to ignore global economic and political inequities and thus support oppression by elites around the world. In her chapter about the current state of her discipline, “What We Do, The New This and the New That,” Isobel Armstrong laments that some literature scholars are bowing to this criticism and turning their backs on traditional methods, refusing to dig into texts in search of political, psychological or symbolic meaning. They focus on a text’s surface and allow it to speak without their (evidently biased) intervention. At first this image of texts as unexplored planets seems beautiful (aesthetic), but Armstrong is disappointed to see her colleagues giving up the tradition of mining depths and hidden influences. It disappoints her that they prioritize using “databases and machine intelligence” to evaluate and compare texts. She is emphatic that this amounts to “a quiet extirpation of the aesthetic.” She quotes another contributor, Derek Attridge, who criticizes this tendency as “insular” and science based. And then she delivers her final put-down: it’s evidence of a distressing campus competition for “cultural capital”, a self-interested “attempt to gain a foothold in the marketized technocracy of today’s neoliberal university [and] .... a response to the decline in numbers enrolling for literary courses and to the privileging of [Attridge again] ‘money and utilitarian training’.” All the contributors here argue for a more traditional principle: beauty and its history are part of being human anywhere all the time.
In her section, “Aesthetics and Politics,” Josephine McDonagh helps us consider the controversy about whether scholarship that analyzes oppressive politics and economics is more important than the study of aesthetics by presenting “politically engaged art,” in this case about the dangerous experiences of global migrants. McDonagh is serious and engaged and so are the artists. Is the aesthetic in play here? In McDonaghs’s descriptions it is. Far from the Western Canon, the artists and the critic struggle to express a deadly situation and call for solutions. And as I see it, the migrants themselves are on a life and death search for a universal form of beauty, a whole and secure life. As for the artists, though they are not in the boats, their mission is “to retrain spectators to reposition their gaze and look elsewhere in order to see things differently.” In her film, Drift (2014), filmmaker Caroline Bergvall braids the words of African migrants from Libya with inventive representations of their routes in the open sea to send us a distress signal. It also should not be assumed that Bergvall or McDonagh the critic, though presumably safe on land, are “safe.” The filmmaker weaves a “complex and demanding amalgam of poetry, performance, commentary, drawing, photography, documentation and translation [around the ancient] figure of the shipwreck,” and she includes her own experience of drifting and trauma in a presumably privileged life. It should not be hard to see that her depiction of struggle and McDonagh’s reflections are akin to Van Gogh’s struggle to give viewers his human experience. There is risk everywhere. The critic responsibly notes possible flaws in the artwork: Bergvall’s work “might be accused of being an act of appropriation and anesthetization,” yet “narrowly avoids exploiting the spectacular violence.” Overall, McDonagh sees “integrity.” And ironically, her use in her critique of the word “spectacular” alludes to the shock and high drama of the migrants’ stories and thus to aesthetics.
There is emotion, wonder and care throughout the book as the writers defend Levine’s idea of the aesthetic: “knowledge with affect, knowledge tinged with moral energy.” He insists this is not useless but contributes a valuable “humanizing force” because of “the integrity of relation it effects among hitherto atomized facts.” As I was reading, I was thinking: the power of beauty is not experienced by a group, at least not at first; it is personal and attached to who you are and what you have been through. Jonah Siegel captures this power: beauty “engrosses the senses without providing the mind with reasons for that fascination,” and he gives examples of everyday epiphanies:
...the line of a cheekbone or the arch of an eyebrow appears at the edge of your vision. The timbre of a voice or the notes of a bird song stop your progress. A piece of poetry keeps coming back to you, troubling or comforting you for reasons not fully related to the evident content of the line.... The shifting clouds in a clear sky call out for attention, or a pair of bridges on a river with the light falling a certain way beneath them. You look and look again.
Siegel explains that highlighting these personal impressions is part of his scholarship: “It is that which reflections on the aesthetic attempt to explain, which formal claims work to organize,” This is why art and aesthetics must be taught in schools. They relate to all of us, independent of politics or viewpoints. Each author here is touched deeply by beauty, and I assume they inspire the experience in one student at a time.
Ringmaster Sleary and his daughter Josephine on the title page of Chapman & Hall's Household Edition of Hard Times.
Two Victorian writers, Dickens and Tennyson, make memorable impressions as artists discovering the power of beauty as they go about their daily work of wondering about life. Levine insists that Mr. Sleary’s, “People mutht be amused” in Hard Times will not go out of style because his circus stands “against the utilitarian emphasis of early Victorian industrial culture,” and, further, that the “beauty” of Hard Times is to provide readers with “a means....to engage the very serious questions of industrial life in ways outside the calculations of political economy [my italics] and outside our modern versions of that field.”
There are poignant lines by Tennyson, specifically about beauty or simply beautiful. He shines in chapters by Jonah Siegel and Herbert Tucker. Tennyson’s choice to dig within himself for non-discursive mysteries in order to say what he needed to say begs us to differ with those critics Isobel Armstrong holds at arm’s length, the ones who choose to focus on a text’s surface. Siegel and Tucker contemplate the haunting qualities of Tennyson and are convincing that certain lines were not written by rational cognitive planning but streamed to the poet’s page from a deep place where understanding of the beautiful was mixed with fear and even shame, producing an effect of authentic struggle. Siegel gives us Tennyson’s image of the artist’s soul abandoning her Palace of Art because of her too-intense love of beauty but hoping as she leaves that, in Siegel’s words, “she may return again when she has cleansed herself of the guilt she has accrued for taking up residence where one is not supposed to live...” Siegel is adamant that beauty’s power can be too much for people to handle, and he is thinking of Tennyson but also of his own colleagues. He brings in the companion poem to "The Palace of Art" in which an artist is punished for disrespecting the soul’s injunction that Beauty, Knowledge and Good (ethics) absolutely must be balanced and taken in equal proportions. For lusting after beauty, Tennyson’s offender is branded “A glorious Devil” and “shall be/Shut out from Love, and on her threshold lie/Howling in outer darkness.” Siegel sees Tennyson facing “the challenge of beauty” and backing down, as if, in 1843, the soon-to-be poet laureate was intuiting the freedom of expression that would characterize modern art but was unable to reach it. Of course, fear of frankness and the public display of emotion is a well-documented Victorian experience. But to some extent it applies to everyone.
In the next chapter, Herbert Tucker says that in In Memoriam, beauty “scared the poet half to death.” He quotes the lines,
This round of green, this orb of flame,
Fantastic beauty, such as lurks
In some wild Poet, when he works
Without a conscience or an aim.
and calls this “a horrified vision [of] mindless, reckless, pointless creation.” He feels the “wild Poet” is Tennyson’s “inner demon that this control freak needed to find and face down...” Still, Tucker is impressed that “in doing so he effected one of his elegy’s hard-won reconciliations to what, in spite of himself, he had to concede were the realities inspiring and constraining aesthetic experience [my emphasis].” Siegel would agree that the poet’s shame made expulsion from the Palace of Art mandatory, and he echoes an important point in this book when he insists the fear of beauty is still alive and well. He says today, beauty “has been banished from the affections of modern criticism, only allowed to return under strict supervision by...Knowledge or Good at either side holding her... in the custodian’s firm grip.” He says the requirement that all of us must balance three phenomena — “attraction [Beauty], knowledge and moral judgment [the Good]” —in life but also in scholarship is now “characteristic of the aesthetic,” but must be analyzed for troubling unconscious undertones. The need to control beauty comes from, “confusions of the affective life where we so often discover all those elements irresolvably at play.” Siegel warns us that just as “Tennyson might fear our humanity is at risk if we allow ourselves to be dominated by a love of beauty,” so do we. Tucker shows that in 1855 Robert Browning pinpointed an important part of this problem in his poem, “Popularity” which, Tucker says tracks “beauty all the way down to its erotic root.” The question again is, How much of beauty but also of campus politics or any politics is personal?
In her chapter “Tennyson’s Tears, Brooks’s Motivations,” Susan Wolfson looks at the personal too when she ponders critic Cleanth Brooks’s mid-twentieth century preoccupation with Tennyson’s song in The Princess, “Tears, Idle tears, I know not what they mean/ Tears from the depth of some divine despair/Rise in the heart, and gather to the eyes...” She says that in book after book, Brooks interrupted and thwarted his famous formal critique by mentioning his attraction to this song. This is not something a formalist New Critic should do, especially when he claimed parity for poetry “with the sciences.” To introduce her thesis, Wolfson presents her personal experience: “There are texts I don’t teach because I know I’ll tear up”; her tears “are not for classroom display, even as I put both heart and mind into my teaching....” So, the question is again before us: is Beauty a personal issue? Wolfson says it was too much so for Brooks; he should have hewed to his formal line. Siegel might tell both of them, Go for it, let the personal shine if that’s how you feel.
Wolfson points out that Cleanth Brooks praised Tennyson’s lines as a textbook example of paradox, for those tears are anything but idle. Brooks asked, “Are they idle tears? (his italics) Or are they not rather the most meaningful of tears? Does not the very fact that they are ‘idle’ (that is tears occasioned by no immediate grief) become in itself a guarantee of the fact that they spring from a deeper, more universal cause?” Brooks’s “fondness’ for the song is “overwrought,” says Wolfson, and his “investment” leads him astray, marring his objectivity. For context, we learn of a possible motivation for the poem, “the sudden death of his beloved friend and champion Arthur Henry Hallam in 1833,” at age twenty-two. This reminds us of the poem’s line, “So sad, so strange, the days that are no more,” and Wolfson reminds us that in his memoir Tennyson writes of the “‘passion’ that ‘all young people’ including himself ‘when he was a youth’ may experience ‘for that which seems to have passed away from them forever.’” But Wolfson is determined to call Brooks’s reading over-determined when he feels the “intimate presence of what is irrevocable beyond reach,” “tantalizingly vivid and near.... precious because of the very hopelessness.” Wolfson herself adds the descriptor, “eternal desire and torment” so it’s not just Brooks. But we are reminded that she has told us that when she teaches “the miracle of words as agents of visceral response” she has a rule to avoid her own tears.
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First editions of Darwin's immensely influential books.
I have saved for last Charles Darwin’s importance in The Question of the Aesthetic, especially his change of direction from the Origin to The Descent of Man. Contributors celebrate Darwin’s studies during the ten years that separated these two books, a period of reflection which produced his discovery of non-utilitarian aspects of natural selection, in other words of the influence of the beautiful and as Levine would say the “useless” on the lives of species. Levine “invokes ‘nature’ for support of a cultural argument” and insists the “aesthetic...is built into the human.” Richard O. Prum, the ornithologist and evolutionary biologist, gives impressive examples of “arbitrary” and “non-adaptive” behavior in sexual selection. This phenomenon “operates against the pressures of utility” that drive natural selection and appear on every page of the Origin. Levine feels that the attraction of one individual to another is an example “of purposeless purpose in nature itself....an apparently counter-utilitarian development in excess of what was necessary.” Levine salutes his contributor: “As Prum describes it, the attraction of one mate to another, usually, as with birds, of female to male ...cannot be tied to the usual evolutionary explanation that it is driven by the adaptive forces that lead to survival and reproductive success.” Instead, “it is driven by the whims of desire.”
Here is the connection between science and the humanities. Though for obvious reasons we dwell on the human when discussing beauty, it is hopeful to end with George Levine’s ode to that other part of nature and our world, the non-human: “The birds are not aiming toward greater adaptiveness, not aiming toward the development of a new species: they are aiming at the beautiful.”
Bibliography
Levine, George, ed. The Question of the Aesthetic. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022. 275 pp. List price $100/£70.00. ISBN: 978-0192844859
Created 23 October 2024