Why is Beloved So Universally Beloved?: Uncovering Our Hidden Aesthetic Criteria

It is obviously no coincidence that Toni Morrison's rapid entry into the canon occurred at precisely the same moment as the rise of political criticism in the academy. Just as scholars sought to foreground how literary works engaged various social, ideological, and racial issues, Toni Morrison provided a series of novels in which such engagements were explicit and unapologetic. And just as academics wondered how literature and their responses to it might either further or thwart the possibility of justice, Morrison gave them books whose unflinching portrayals of racism, sexism, and other kinds of oppression made reading itself feel like a socially responsible act. Yet even while a good portion of Morrison scholarship endorsed her texts on the basis, ultimately, of the strenuous political work they perform, it was impossible for anyone to ignore the dazzling salience of Morrison's style. And thus I want to make the counterintuitive claim that the decision of the newly politicized antiformalist scholars who achieved prominence in the 1980s and 1990s to embrace such an undeniably stylish author may also have been no coincidence.

Those calling for a return to formalism have characterized the last several decades as a period when scholars systematically disregarded aesthetic considerations.¹ While such complaints offer a fairly accurate description of the discipline's explicit priorities, I intend to examine the reception of Morrison's most celebrated novel, Beloved, in order to offer a slightly different picture.² Confronting this massive archive of scholarly work, one discovers not merely that plenty of critics directly consider questions of form, style, and narrative structure in Morrison's fiction, but also something more important, if less obvious. Namely, even those readers who appear to focus upon Beloved's political function continue to privilege specific kinds of aesthetic experiences, predicated upon implicit stylistic criteria, even when they seek to valorize those experiences in political terms. If Fredric Jameson helped to establish the still dominant mode of interpretation by arguing in The Political Unconscious (1981) that our satisfaction in apprehending the formal features of literary texts depends upon the invisible ideological work these texts perform, the analyses by literary scholars who operate now in a field fully oriented toward political concerns may well be predicated upon certain invisible or unconscious aesthetic criteria.³ And thus a useful first step toward reviving formalist analysis would be to bring these unacknowledged criteria to the surface so as to make them available for scrutiny and discussion.

It is easy to insist upon the importance of aesthetic experience to literature, but significantly harder to say exactly what the term aesthetic signifies. As Terry Eagleton observes, the concept's resistance to definition is partially responsible for its persistent power and appeal.⁴ In its initial formulation, he notes, in the work of Alexander Baumgarten, the term aesthetic primarily designated "human perception and sensation" as opposed to "conceptual thought."⁵ Although this distinction, when applied to literature, would seem to disregard the extent to which sensation and thought intermingle in any act of reading, perception obviously remains the central concern of aesthetics, whatever the object under consideration.

A focus on the aesthetic dimension of literature suggests a focus on the experience of perceiving a text and the pleasures or frustrations that arise during this experience. Aesthetic pleasure, as Kant famously argued, is disinterested. It is inseparable from, indeed synonymous with, the mere act of apprehending a beautiful object. It does not depend upon the object's instrumental capacity, its ability to serve a purpose beyond being observed and appreciated.⁶ For Kant, an object's power to produce this pleasure depended upon its form, and the majority of aesthetically oriented literary critics have also emphasized form—that is, the text's modes of expression, the style, the structure, the arrangement of words, and so forth. To be sure, literary works can yield satisfaction for many reasons in the moment that they being read. There are, in other words, many competing aesthetics. My central purpose here is to uncover the dominant aesthetic still at work in shaping the preferences and interpretive strategies of...