Art and Life in Aestheticism (review)

Questions concerning both the definition and the value of aestheticism, as well as discussion of its chronological parameters, are central to the wide-ranging essays in this volume. Reflections on “de-humanizing” and “re-humanizing” within aesthetic movements give the volume a thematic unity. In her comprehensive introduction, Kelly Comfort draws on Ortega y Gasset’s famous formulation of the “dehumanization of art” as well as on Theodore Adorno and Peter Bürger to sketch out a theory of de-humanization as, among other things, “the drive to free art from human utility or usefulness (4)” and re-humanization as the subjective experience of engagement with art. The last essay in the book, Ben De Bruyn’s “Art for Heart’s Sake,” analyzing a trend from Kierkegaard through Pater through Iser, perhaps charts most clearly the trajectory from de-humanizing to re-humanizing, viewed in terms of relations between aesthetics and ethics.

Grouped more or less chronologically, the essays deal with nineteenth-century aesthetes or adherents to the doctrine of l’art pour l’art such as Gautier, Baudelaire, Huysmans, and Rosetti; turn-of-the-century figures including Pater, Wilde, Stefan George, and Nietzsche; modernist writers such as Joyce and Nabokov; and later twentieth-century theory in Adorno, Iser, Susan Sontag, and Roland Barthes. Robert Archambeau’s “The Aesthetic Anxiety” effectively compares surrealist poets from the 1920s to language poets of the 1970s around the question of each group’s ultimately unsuccessful attempt to claim political significance for the pursuit of art for art’s sake. “True art,” André Breton claimed in 1925, “cannot be anything other than revolutionary” (150). It would have been of interest to mention that Italian fascists, around the same time, were making almost identical claims for the relevance of “true” (non-propagandistic) art to the revolution viewed from their end of the spectrum. Discussion of the relations of aesthetics and politics in Italian writers such as D’Annunzio and Marinetti would have been a useful addition to the book. Benjamin’s “aesthetics of politics,” mentioned several times, was after all originally a comment on Marinetti.

The scope of the essays is nonetheless quite broad. Ileana Marin does a fine analysis of what she calls “aesthetically saturated readings” in the relations between Dante Gabriel Rosetti’s poetic and painterly works. Margueritte Murphy also compares visual and verbal art in her consideration of Baudelaire’s “aesthetic of the bizarre.” Andrew Eastham convincingly elucidates the relationship between irony and the de-humanizing process of “aesthetic vampirism” in works by Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde. Paul Fox’s perceptive reading of Huysman’s A Rebours highlights the novel’s own reading of Dickens while arguing that it makes a statement on the power (rather than the isolation) of aesthetic imagination. Analyzing from the perspective of reception rather than from that of “pure” art, Yvonne Ivory shows the de-humanizing tendencies of the poets around Stefan George against the rehumanizing tendencies in Pater. In what he calls Nietzsche’s “physical aestheticism,” Karl Ashbaugh traces overlapping relations between art and nature as theorized in The Geneology of Morals and The Gay Science. In his essay on Adorno, Charles B. Sumner argues against any re-humanizing potential of l’art pour l’art or aestheticism, showing how Adorno valorizes ugliness and putrefaction against the cult of impassive beauty. Sarah Garland, on the other hand, in an interesting comparison of Sontag and Barthes, demonstrates the continued vitality of aestheticism in the works of the two mid-century writers, arguing with considerable subtlety that the undermining of the “natural” or the mimetic is not necessarily de-humanizing.

The most readable of the essays is undoubtedly that of Gene Bell-Villada, who abandons the usual academic prose style for a vivid personal narrative of his own engagement with American aesthetics during the cold war and with the works of Vladimir Nabokov. Bell-Villada gives a fascinating account of aestheticism in the works of American modernist writers, abstract expressionist painters, and new critics in relation to anti...