Why Does No One Care about the Aesthetic Value of Huckleberry Finn ?

My title is an overstatement, and it is double-edged. On the one side, in my recent book “Huckleberry Finn” as Idol and Target I have argued against the nationalistic and messianic claims made for Twain’s work by scholars, teachers, and journalists for over half a century. Given all that stuff, better if people would limit themselves to the scrupulous attention required for aesthetic appraisal. On the other side, the main line of academic and public discussion of literature in the English-speaking world since the nineteenth century has not been primarily or fundamentally aesthetic. What upsets me in the state of discussion concerning Huckleberry Finn is simply a bad case of what overall I accept and practice, in the company of Matthew Arnold and Lionel Trilling among others. The essay that follows works its way along these edges.

As soon as we start to talk about the aesthetic, we begin to forget things that everyone knows. The aesthetic has been much in the news recently, and it is treated as if there were no more to aesthetics than the beautiful. The Chronicle of Higher Education, for instance, ran a feature entitled “Wearying of Cultural Studies, Some Scholars Rediscover Beauty” ¹ ; its subtitle explains that these scholars “seek renewed attention to aesthetic criteria in criticism.” The Chronicle’s general academic readership, as well as many of the literary and philosophic scholars it interviewed, have apparently forgotten that it has been a long time since beauty was enough for aesthetics.

Even before the founding of New Literary History, as long ago as 1966, the German Poetics and Hermeneutics group—not a cultural studies crowd—devoted a symposium to Die Nicht Mehr Schönen Künste. In introducing translations of selected essays from this project (under the rubric “The No Longer Fine Arts”), Victor Lange observed that “modern” developments meant that “‘beauty’ is no longer an adequate criterion” in judging works of art. He meant modern in its largest sense, for he had in mind especially “two periods in the European history of consciousness”: first “when the anti-esthetic mainspring of Christian art disavows its classical antecedents,” and then in the nineteenth century when new practices made “the ‘ugly’ a creative dimension of indubitable esthetic legitimacy.” ² But we need not rely on academic literary historians and theorists. In his Romantic manifesto of 1827, Victor Hugo hailed Shakespeare as “the culminating point of modern poetry.” Shakespeare announced “the literature of today,” which “combines in one breath the grotesque and the sublime, the terrible and the absurd.” ³

The most profound critics and scrupulous scholars cannot bring the German discourse of the aesthetic into anglophone conversations without producing confusion, which arises when they recognize the need for a richer conceptualization. Witness the baffling range of usages in Geoffrey Hartman’s deeply serious and often illuminating The Fateful Question of Culture. The book defines its occasion as a troubling historical turning point, a “shift” from “aesthetics” to “culturalism.” Aesthetics is “art studied within its own institutional history,” while culturalism is art studied so as “to diagnose or affirm particular cultures.” ⁴ Yet the institutional boundaries that make art its own, that grant it, in Hartman’s scrupulously diminishing qualification, “some autonomy,” are sufficiently porous that art can “reach” people and “move” them (FQ 1). Do we indeed leave our particular cultures for another realm when we allow ourselves to be reached by art? Because Hartman’s guiding concern is the power of art “to put into play a sympathetic imagination,” he then defines aesthetics as “a science of the feelings” (FQ 1, 158). ⁵ I cannot see, and I do not think Hartman has tried to demonstrate, how a science of feelings is identical to a study of art within its own institutions.

My reading of anglophone literary critics from Arnold through Woolf, Leavis, and Trilling, on through Edward Said in Culture and Imperialism, would suggest that Hartman has incisively identified a constitutive tension within that tradition. That is, the struggle between what he calls aesthetics and culturalism has been endemic, rather than a “shift...