Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Archive
Volume 5 Number 1, April 2004
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Donoghue,
Denis. Speaking of Beauty.
New Haven and London: Yale
University Press, 2003. Pps. 209,
ISBN: 0-300-09893-6. $24.95
(Hardback).
Reviewed by
Denison University, USA
Widely
prolific in the field of English and American literature, in his latest book,
Donoghue delivers a tour de force
about beauty and the language writers and philosophers as varied as Ruskin,
Pound, Yeats, Keats, Eliot, Baudelaire, Kant, Nietzsche. Woolf, Joyce, Barthes,
and DeMan (to give but a brief indication of the scope of the book) use to
describe this elusive but necessary element of the human condition.
It is a book that aims to recuperate aesthetics, to reestablish a venue
for the appreciation of form; in its understated and citational way, it is a
manifesto that argues for the retrieval of form over agenda, or, perhaps,
better, for “mak[ing the work of art] available to be appreciated—or
not—for its own sake” (76).
The
proliferation of “re-s” in the description of Donoghue’s project above in
fact suggests something of the paradoxical positioning of this book.
A book that begins with skepticism of the nostalgic tendency of modern
writers in essence pleads for a return
to formalism as a means of “saving [beauty] from the mercenary embrace of TV
and advertisements” (26). In
the case of literary studies, such a protective measure requires a disentangling
of the work of art—the text—from its historical, political, and cultural
context, promoting anew the Kantian “release of beauty from conceptual
control” (171).
The
two-pronged focus of this project—which begins with an analysis of how
those who choose to speak of beauty do so, is then bolstered by an examination
of why we must continue to speak of beauty—belies an anxiety
concerning the fate of literary studies, and, more generally, what would seem to
be a mounting concern that the gross consumerism of Western (most particularly
American) culture will eventually swallow up all vestiges of the sublime. We are
in the midst of a cultural crisis, Donoghue warns us with almost prophetic
force. We have a choice to make:
to opt for beauty as an independent value, as a concept valuable for its
transformative, transfigurative potential, or to pursue the division between
form and content to the point where we have rendered form, and with it, our
freedom to “transfigure what merely exists” (121), the handmaiden of
ideology. We have ventured
down the latter path, Donoghue suggests. Woe
to those of us who would seek to collapse the necessarily indescribable and
unsayable, but intuitive and experiential, to the level of the known and
knowable!
This
is not to suggest that Donoghue advocates for an aesthetics of passivity, an
aesthetics that would correlate to political indifference and apathy (though it
does remain unclear overall what kind of political stance the transfigurative
power of beauty would entail). To the contrary, Donoghue acknowledges, but ultimately
dismisses, the “common arguments” launched against formalism that would
imply such a stance: “that it
removes itself too quickly from the issues the poem deals with; that it
conspires with the totalitarian zeal of the eye, the gaze; that in literary
criticism it is so obsessed with the autonomy of the poem that it ignores the
tendency of words to sprawl beyond their formal limits; and that a concern for
beauty of form is an elitist satisfaction, morally disgusting while people are
dying of hunger and disease” (122). Rather,
an aesthetics that pursues the indescribable—in its indescribability—would
seem to promote tenacity and vigilance, an open-endedness, that expands the
possibilities for political engagement. The
way one reads, one views the work of art, then, provides an
indicator—and possible prescription—for how one would choose to
be-in-the-world.
Perhaps
the very open-endedness of such a way of reading—the commitment, that is, to
open-endedness—is too limited in terms of what it truly can prescribe?
I confess, as a reader thoroughly convinced by Donoghue’s claims to
beauty as an inherent good, as valuable because of the way in which it tugs at
us, the way in which it prods us to actively confront what we cannot subsume
linguistically, I am left to wonder how the imperative to sustain beauty
corresponds to the very real work we have before us to repair a world that must
become (again?) inhabitable before we can sit back and contemplate its beauty. I am reminded of Voltaire’s final, and thoroughly
ambiguous, prescription in Candide:
“il faut cultiver notre jardin.”
Cultivation need not be divorced from contemplation—and Donoghue by no
means asks us to choose between the two. In
the spaces of silence left open by the exhaustive citations Donoghue provides
(often without commentary), however, the danger lurks that there remains nothing
left to say, that past voices have weighed in on, and closed off, the
conversation. And with this lurks the attendant danger that we might come
to regard beauty as a given and not a challenge, that we will place our emphasis
on describing what we have agreed already exists, instead of striving to make
beautiful.