European Aestheticism and Spanish American Modernismo: Artist Protagonists and the Philosophy of Art for Art’s Sake by Kelly Comfort (review)

Many scholars of modernismo will agree that the last decade’s reconstruction of critical narratives of the period to incorporate the main insights of postcolonial and transatlantic optics is still lacking in thorough comparative readings of exchanges between literary fields on both sides of the Atlantic. European Aestheticism and Spanish American Modernismo takes a step toward filling this gap: the book carves out a primary focus on the way artist protagonists representative of the two areas examined test the boundary between life and art, specifically insofar as their defense of art expresses the variety of social and political tensions—between “aesthetics and economics, production and consumption, center and periphery” (5)—operative in turn-of-the-century literary fields. Its six chapters are accordingly divided by pairs into three parts, each dedicated to a variation of the Aestheticist mantra of “art for art’s sake,” which respectively detail how artist protagonists “avoid ‘art for life’s sake,’ protest ‘art for the market’s sake,’ or promote ‘life for art’s sake’” (5). Together, they comprise a veritable thematic catalogue of the range of responses to the late nineteenth-century mercantilization of art. Indeed, the study’s overtly thematic orientation does much to account both for its more lucid exegetical moments and for its missed opportunities: on one hand it models a comprehensive physiognomy of the literary apologist for art on a transatlantic scale; on the other, the preoccupation with the diegetic figuration of art for art’s sake tends to isolate the domain of the text from the total grid of material processes and discourses of the literary field, thus interpreting literature as a transparent reflection of the social realm rather than as an active site for its determination.

In part one, centered on the trope of the “artist as [impressionist] critic,” Comfort locates comparable patterns of thought in the conclusions of Oscar Wilde’s essays “The Decay of Lying” and “The Critic as Artist,” discussed in chapter one, and in José Asunción Silva’s De sobremesa, the subject of chapter two. She argues that Wilde’s eccentric reversal of Plato and Aristotle to affirm with Walter Pater that art, far from imitating or impacting life, has the sole function to inspire new creation in its receptors, gives us a fresh angle for interpreting José Fernández’s reticence to create for a consuming public in Silva’s novel: his rejection of the market is consummated in the creation of unconsumables, a labor of art as impression and reception whose “products” Comfort identifies in the fantasy muse Helen and the ornate house Fernández names after her. This reading of Silva opens up some fascinating prospects concerning the formal slippage of the parameters of the proper “work” of art as production and as aesthetic entity. Comfort highlights, for example, the way José’s search for Helen cites a series of feminine subjects of Pre-Raphaelite painting, inspired in the portrait of her mother by the unknown artist J. F. Siddal: by adding the protagonist’s initials to the name of the famous Pre-Raphaelite muse Elizabeth Siddal, Silva suggests a superimposition of (fictional) authorship and real-life production, so that Helen’s creation seems to be an exercise in the reception and recycling of existing art, an impressionist criticism. The pairing of De sobremesa with Wilde’s essays, based on what Comfort deems Aestheticism’s “unnamed” influence on the novel, nonetheless fails to carry this creative rethinking of art’s mode of intervention in social matters to stubborn notions about Latin American modernity’s copying or appropriation of European cultural developments: the connection between the two writers, despite the lack of any documentable influence, is characterized as Silva’s “appropriation of Wilde’s impressionistic or artistic critic for his protagonist,” a “transplant” of Aestheticism to Spanish America (55).

Part two, “The Artist Protests ‘Art for the Market...