Shakespeare and Impure Aesthetics by Hugh Grady (review)

This book is a labor of love. It is very clearly the work of many years reading and thinking, and of deep political commitment. In a very basic way—for all of Hugh Grady’s careful attention to intellectual history, his useful summaries of potentially unfamiliar aesthetic thinking, his assiduous consciousness of professional responsibility—this is a romantic book, fired by lifelong passion for humanistic Marxism and for the plays of Shakespeare. He feels that these passions are coordinate—perhaps that they must be coordinate, because both are so stirringly affirmative, pledged at once to penetrating diagnoses of present violence and ideology and to transformation in the name of freedom. The heroes of the book, Shakespeare apart, are Adorno and Benjamin, the Frankfurt School laureates of political aesthetics. In particular, Grady honors their understanding of dis-integral artistic form: unity is a lie, and the proper role of art in an age of fragmentation must be to generate its own materially-specific fragments that at once critique and look beyond their historical moment.

Grady’s disappointment with recent academic discourse is patiently borne, but also profound. In particular, he is frustrated by the turn to a kind of positivist historicism, “absolutizing, aesthetics-blind,” supposedly post-theoretical, sometimes even postpolitical, which more or less cravenly follows publishing fashion in writing look-alike books about things (“mirrors, bears, codpieces. …”) as though there is nothing at all unique about a work of art, or nothing any more so than can be found in a marketplace. This “new materialism” sometimes genuflects to Benjamin but with precious little of his theoretical acuity, offering examples of “commodity fetishism, not critiques of it” (39). In this closed world, according to Grady, the aesthetic is often “taboo” (38)—a proscription directly linked to a naïve dismissal of aesthetic thinking’s political and historical investments.

Grady uses his familiarity with the history of ideas to recover (and advocate) a much more sophisticated apprehension of how artistic form bears history; part of this is a delicate recognition that “context” is never simply coincident with works of art—or at least the works of art that still speak centuries after their first production. History does not all happen at a single speed. This perception is integral to Frankfurt School thinking, and it underpins Grady’s understanding of Shakespeare as a “proto-theorist of the aesthetic” (41). The discipline of aesthetics is an eighteenth-century thing (Grady has a nice section redeeming Kant’s aesthetics as a discourse of a “delightful ‘as if’” and “counter-factual” fictionality), a weather vane of the “modernity” that is more broadly Grady’s subject (9). Only some of the conditions of modernity were present in Shakespeare’s time, but Shakespeare’s plays are already “prescient” of what is to come, being classic instantiations of “impure aesthetics” (21). He calls his approach partly “presentist” and “not necessarily completely anachronistic” (48) (as though responding uncertainly to sceptical readers). But surely Grady’s unusually hesitant defensiveness here is unnecessary. His favored theorists have already offered eloquent vindication of so-called anachronism.

The bulk of the book is taken up with four case studies: A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Timon of Athens, Hamlet, and Romeo and Juliet. The first two plays are treated as broadly “meta-aesthetic”—reflecting upon the status and prospects of the art object—and the second two as “aesthetic”—structured around motifs of fragmentation and redemption. Grady’s chief model is Benjamin’s early work on the Trauerspiel, and in particular his novel theory of “allegory”: disjunctive, atomizing, fragmentary, disclosing a “world in decay” but showing “how the elements of decay can be re-born as new art in a new and different era” (152). Grady reads Hamlet as a “collection of allegorical fragments or signifying objects, each a small piece of a mosaic representation of a world of melancholy, empty of intrinsic meaning” (160): imagery of seed, waste, graves; spectral remnants such as the Ghost and...