Hating and Loving Aesthetic Formalism: Some Reasons

The present essay starts from deeply felt concerns and deals with matters that are of the highest importance not only for the profession of humane studies but for human self-understanding in general. It tries to draw the reader's attention to gaping rifts in the studium generale, to define oppositions, and--in a way that may be less than usual--to take sides and vindicate one set of propositions against the other. This "judgmental" kind of argument has been imposed on me by the very state of affairs in the surrounding intellectual world: the open displeasure with and condemnation of aesthetic form, of the beautiful, seem to me frequent and categorical and deserve a forthright answer. A similarly clear-cut response should be given to widely expressed prejudices and severities. The discussion can start from a few specific questions: Why is René Girard the enemy of literary critics (even before he loudly declares himself to be)? ¹ Why is an innocent and peaceful scholar like the late René Wellek nowadays the object of such widespread adversariness (as he was in the last years of his life)? Why is a movement like "New Criticism" (as serene, quiet, and centrist as one could imagine) perceived as a dangerous foe by so many critical communities? ² These and many similarly enigmatic questions deserve more examination than they have received so far. They all have to do with the relentless hostility toward and fear of art and literature that pervade our societies even as these societies seem unable to exist without some aesthetic dimension.

First, we are struck by the very oddness of the contentiousness. A relatively minor issue produces an enormously overblown reaction. A few eccentrics choose to play with form rather than deal with the "serious matters" of life, as everybody else does, and this causes harsh anger. Huge machineries are set up to smash harmless butterflies.

Such issues must have bothered some of the principals themselves, because they invented all kinds of outlandish responses. One of the most frequent was the following: Aesthetic formalism is a seedbed of reactionary forces; it is the source of pernicious ideologies and indeed of the politics of traditionalism and fascism. It is a cunningly devised mask behind which malignant forces prepare hideous stratagems to stunt the collective happiness and luminous progress of humanity. Are we not entitled, then, to declare that form and meaning are fascist? This argument was most famously put forward by Thomas Mann in his novel Doktor Faustus, in which a lonely, apolitical, quiet, alienated, sick composer becomes (symbolically) the driving force behind the monstrosities of National Socialist politics and warmongering simply because he does not--do what, exactly? Join the mainstream of banal commodified life? Abandon his efforts toward musical innovation? Or is it because he casts doubt on the perfection of socialized existence?

With less talent but more ruthlessness, this line of argument was repeated dozens of times. ³ The trouble with the respective thinking is rather obvious. More than once we can observe some alignment between conservative views and the critical methodology of aesthetic formalism. However, we can count cases at least as numerous when equally aesthetic formalists advanced views that, in the ideological environment of their time, were left-wing, radical-democratic, liberal. It is not difficult to trot out examples of either kind. After all, the New Critics themselves had clearly affirmed that, ultimately, communism was preferable to fascism. In his turn, Girard spoke more eloquently against anti-Semitism, and even against the enemies of recent critical trends (including structuralism and psychoanalysis), than many others. Likewise, it would be hard to describe Jean Paulhan, Henri Bremond, or Paul Valéry as a rightist. The "Russian formalists" had gone out of their way to explain how their methods could be applied fruitfully to political texts, specifically to those of Vladimir Lenin, a Russian Soviet leader famous in the 1920s. ⁴

Nor is it at...