Less Light: The End(s) of Aestheticism in Pater, Ondaatje, and Sebald

[W]e do not live in the first chapter of Genesis. We live . . . after the Fall . . . in a world of suffering, in which evil is rampant, a world whose events do not confirm our Being, a world that has to be resisted. It is in this situation that the aesthetic moment offers hope.

—John Berger, "The White Bird"¹

[H]e listened with a pleasure because she was singing again, but this was quickly altered by the way she sang. Not the passion of her at sixteen but echoing the tentative circle of light around her in the darkness. She was singing as if it was something scarred, as if one couldn't ever again bring all the hope of the song together. It had been altered by the five years leading to this night of her twenty-first birthday in the forty-fifth year of the twentieth century. Singing in the voice of a tired traveller, alone against everything. A new testament. There was no certainty to the song anymore, the singer could only be one voice against all the mountains of power. . . . The one voice was the single unspoiled thing. A song of snail light.

—Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient²

[T]he endemic perversion of cruelty inherent in the history of mankind is always described [in the work of Dante and of Peter Weiss] in the hope that the last chapter in that horror story will be written, and in a better time posterity will be able to look back like the blessed souls in heaven. . . . The purpose of representing cruelty thus outlined, as we now know, has never been fulfilled and probably never can be, since our species is unable to learn from its mistakes. Consequently such arduous cultural efforts can no more come to a conclusion than the pain and torment they seek to remedy. The torture of those never-ending efforts is the true wheel of Ixion on which the creative imagination is always binding itself again, so that it can at least be absolved in doing penance.

—W. G. Sebald, "The Remorse of the Heart: On Memory and Cruelty in the Work of Peter Weiss"³

The Last Chapter

In an essay on Jean-François Lyotard, "Modernism and the End of Beauty," Calvin Bedient raises the vital question of the place of aestheticism in our dark age. He asks what art has lost in the postmodern era; specifically, he asks whether the notion of beauty based on "a Hellenic ideal of a harmony of the mind and senses" (prescribed by Arnold and Pater and "revived, in however altered a manner," by modernist writers) is plausible after the death camps.⁴ Bedient connects that idea of beauty with eros and, paradoxically, with the death drive, as the presence of the sublime—of what we might, perhaps, call epiphanic moments—cannot be unlinked from death. (It is this pairing that Bedient deftly calls the "jack-in-the-box terrorism of eros" ["MEB," 109]). And indeed, a return to the origins of this particular ethos in modernism (the epiphanic ethos, which eroticizes the sudden discovery of meaning in a wider context of ultimate meaninglessness) together with a closer engagement with its early proponent, Walter Pater, suggest an unmistakable, decadent preoccupation not just with death in the abstract, but with corpses and ghosts. That preoccupation seems both ironic and prescient in retrospect, after a corpse-strewn century in which it is hard to imagine an experimental literature not haunted by bodies.

Epiphany, by definition, emerges from darkness. But how is the darkness of a writerly sensibility half in love with easeful death (a sensibility which knew nothing of industrialized warfare, let alone atomic or mechanized killing) in any traceable or meaningful way linked to the darkness of the world itself? What is its connection with the resultant miasma inhabited by any would-be aesthete, in the postmodern era? How can dead bodies, eroticized by Pater, still be aestheticized by any writer of conscience, no matter how in love with Renaissance art? The noted Holocaust scholar Laurence Langer poses...