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Reviewed by:
  • Speaking of Beauty
  • Richard Gilmore (bio)
Speaking of Beauty. By Denis Donoghue. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003. 209 pp. $24.95.

Denis Donoghue's Speaking of Beauty is a good book and well worth reading. There are many pleasures to be found in it and some things to be learned from it. It is, as he says, "a short book on the language of beauty" (1). It is short but quite dense, because it is so allusion- and reference-rich. His theme is "the language of beauty: not beauty as such or a definition of the beautiful but beauty in its social manifestion, its discursive presence" (3). For this reason, the book is "rife with quotations," and he says he wishes that there were more, that "everything I say in my own behalf could be given in footnotes" (23). The book is a celebration of beauty, and an attempt to recover the languages of beauty, as it were, deictically, by pointing to many examples of beauty.

That is not to say that the book is theory-free. There is, in fact, a considerable amount of theory. He is even perhaps a bit disingenuous with his early disavowal of theory, as he refers extensively to the aesthetic theories of Plato, Kant, Hegel, Adorno, Ogden and Richards, Bourdieu, Levinas, Derrida, Goodman, Gadamer, and Balthasar. His primary literary-critic touchstones are Eliot and Ruskin. References to theory tend to be more broad than deep; in a paragraph on pages 38–39, for example, he refers to Richards, Coleridge, Kant, Hazlitt, Joyce, Aquinas, Balthasar, Hopkins, Ruskin, Edward Casey, Henri Focillon, Leonard Meyer, Clive Bell, and Baudelaire, which feels like both a tour de force of theoretical bricolage and a theoretical eel. He does have a theoretical agenda beyond the celebration of beauty, and that is to champion the centrality of the idea of form in any understanding of beauty.

He sees a slackening of the politicization of beauty in the critical discourse and in the academy as an opportunity for this book. Donoghue says, "for whatever reason, there is more space for themes—beauty is one of them—which not long ago were held to be regressive" and that there is a new "consessiveness apparent in a good deal of the contemporary scholarship, the decision freely arrived at not always to insist" (8–9). This makes possible what is, for Donoghue, a welcome return of the discourse of beauty. All of this is related. Beauty was politicized by leftist critiques because of the class and gender issues encoded in the discourse of beauty. The insistence [End Page 198] on form seeks to de-politicize beauty by shifting the emphasis to something that seems to be inherent in beauty itself. This, of course, runs the risk of the return of those encodings of class and gender that exclude so many from the discourse of beauty. Class and gender become encoded via a certain difficulty, a certain inaccessibility, a certain something in a work of art that takes a great deal of erudition to perceive—in a word, form. Donoghue is quite aware of this tension, but chooses to go forward in his paean to beauty in spite of that. He says at one point, speaking of the slaves that built the pyramids and the Parthenon, "but I can't feel guilty. I didn't whip those slaves into their compulsion. Nor can I regret that the Parthenon has at least in part survived" (6). One cannot help feeling that the attitude being struck here by Donoghue seems culpably evasive. He may not have whipped the slaves, but there may continue to be issues of oppression connected with the creation of beauty that are worth considering.

One of the themes of Donoghue's book, proclaimed in an epigraph from Pound, is that "Beauty is difficult." This is the very heart of a formalist approach to art. Donoghue devotes an entire chapter, entitled "The Force of Form," to the consideration of form. In that chapter he makes a good point, as he addresses the critique that "a concern for beauty of form is an elitist satisfaction, morally disgusting while people are dying of hunger...

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