One True Theory and the Quest for an American Aesthetic (review)

In this insightful reflection, drawing widely from literary, historical, and scientific sources, distinguished cultural historian Martha Banta poses "the burning question" of whether a distinctively American aesthetic is at work in the art and literature of the late nineteenth century. Her title invokes Emerson's prophecy, in the introduction to Nature, that "whenever a true theory appears" that can explain the creative and the spiritual as science explains the physical, "it will be its own evidence" and will "explain all phenomena." In the three long essays that compose this book, Banta seeks such a theory.

Comparisons between science and art became an obsession of America's leading intellectuals in the late nineteenth century. Science flourished under the banner of positivism, rejecting any claims without empirical warrant. "Modern man rejects the priest, the moralist, or the lawyer as his final arbiter," wrote Thorstein Veblen: to be modern, he insisted, is to be a man of science (1). Taking up this challenge, writers created new modes of literature embodying the spirit of empiricism. Banta offers a probing critical assessment of the work of Veblen, Zola, Henry James, Theodore Dreiser, and Frank Norris, placing them alongside contemporary literary and art criticism. Her analysis alternates with "fictive interjections" from characters who embody the tensions between science and art. In the novels she discusses, these characters confront the "anxieties of modernity."

Part Two, entitled "Capitol of Best Intentions," looks for a distinctively American aesthetic in the history of Washington, D.C. In this section—twice as long as the other two—she sets the "new Rome" against the "old Rome," from ancient monuments to Renaissance paintings and sculptures. Tracing a century of planning, construction, and reconstruction on the Potomac, she shows how Washington has symbolized American ambitions and achievements, and hence—so she argues—given concrete expression to the American aesthetic spirit.

The interpolated Italian parallels in this section are frequently strained, and a lengthy critique of twentieth-century war monuments takes us far off the main route. Returning to the nineteenth century, she closes with a fine analysis of why murals, especially those decorating government buildings, are the cultural equivalent of Europe's Old Masters. But she misses one delectable irony: the capital was built on the banks of Tiber Creek, its name grandly invoking the Roman original, but by the 1870s this watercourse had been channeled entirely underground.

Part Three examines the ability of art to answer scientific challenges in fictional characters who "define their lives (and with striking frequency, go to their deaths) as artists" (vviii). As examples Banta offers an eclectic assortment of novels by James, Norris, Dreiser, Norris, and Virginia Woolf—even Rudyard Kipling and Jack London. Here she is at her best, enriching careful textual readings with far-fetched but telling comparisons. In one virtuosic passage on ascending and descending stairways, she links Alberti's advice to painters, Canaletto's Venetian cityscapes, Piranesi's and Escher's enigmatic architectural drawings, and "the narrative architectures of James's The Golden Bowl" (223-225).

Banta's writing can be baroque in its richness, idiosyncratic in its style. She sometimes avoids using the authorial first person, for example, by referring to her book and its sections in the third person. ("Henry James's contributions leave their marks throughout One True Theory . . ." [xxviii]; "Part Three will lay out . . . . but first there is Part Two . . . ." [57].) Whether the three sections really form one project, as the introduction insists, is questionable. Part Three stops abruptly, with no review of what has gone before and no satisfying answer to the "burning question."

Yet Banta's gift for careful reading and her wide intellectual range bring to light parallels few others are equipped to discern. In showing how the arts sometimes sought to satisfy, sometimes to defy, the demands of a scientific age, Banta deepens our understanding of American history and culture.