Art's Undoing: In the Wake of a Radical Aestheticism by Forest Pyle (review)

In his preface to Art's Undoing: In the Wake of a Radical Aestheticism, Forest Pyle reveals that the origins of his present study trace back to his previous work, since at the end of The Ideology of Imagination: Subject and Society in the Discourse of Romanticism, he felt a sense of incompleteness concerning his treatment of aesthetics and politics in Percy Bysshe Shelley's The Triumph of Life. With spectres of repetitive and belaboured analyses looming, such an origin for a subsequent study does not always augur well, but this is not the case for Pyle's current volume. Art's Undoing is a substantial exploration of Romantic aesthetics that offers a new way of thinking about aestheticism's presence, function, and effects throughout the nineteenth century.

Pyle's introduction covers much ground providing the expected overview of the chapters to follow, explaining and continuously expanding, with care and nuance, his concept of radical aestheticism. Pyle initially draws on a straightforward understanding of aestheticism's presence in the texts under consideration: they "must reflect on art and its effects, either literature itself or its 'sister arts' of music and painting or the relationships between them. Or the text aestheticizes the object of its reflection" (3). The selected texts necessarily include "the constitutive elements-the figures, images, semblances-that are at the root of any aestheticism" (4). The relationship of these texts to their contexts, moreover, to history or knowledge, or through the "ethical, political, or theological responsibilities" (3) that their sensuous aspects carry, is of prime importance, for the moment of radical aestheticism occurs when the context is subsumed into the "constitutive elements" of its text. Quoting from Paul de Man's interpretation of Romantic literature, Pyle points to his own interest

in what happens when "imaginative literature" of the Romantic tradition presents us at certain moments in certain texts with an aesthetic experience of art in which the object […] "arrests the senses" and "becomes the occasion for an expression of feeling" that not only happens "involuntarily," but that overwhelms the other "prevailing concerns"- whether this be politics, ethics, poetics, theology, love, even aesthetics itself-of these Romantic writers. Those events I call radical aestheticism.

(10-11)

From the outside, the "moment" of radical aestheticism appears as a kind of "black hole of imagelessness," but the interior view is of "a preponderance of untethered images" (4) that eliminates the awareness of an outside while destabilizing the sense of reliability in the inside. Pyle designates it "an interference […] that undoes the claims made in the name of the aesthetic-as redemptive, restorative, liberating, compensatory, humanizing, healing-claims that are […] often spelled out in their most compelling forms by the writers themselves" (5). Pyle's recognition and elucidations of this "undoing" deliberately circumvent traditional assumptions about aestheticism's function. He sees the occurrence of a radical aestheticism as a resistance to resolution. It is a return to the "radical," "to the roots of the aesthetic […] reduced to ashes [as in Shelley] or to sighs [as in Hopkins]" (xi-xii) before there is any hope of a fire kindling or a sound ensuing.

Pyle puts this theory of radical aestheticism into productive practice. In addition to Shelley, he devotes a chapter each to selected works by Keats, Dickinson, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Hopkins, and Wilde. In recognizing that the poetic "forms and figures" (4) of these writers belong to their own individual poetic idiom, he retains a flexibility of approach that resists the strain of imposed readings and strengthens his critical authority. Pyle's consistently rich analyses amply illustrate that rather than creating a clever framework for bringing together a spectrum of diverse texts, he identifies an important aspect of aestheticism's function that speaks to the doubts, fears, and uncertainties, whether personal or societal, informing and disrupting nineteenth-century experience.

In the discussion of each author, Pyle specifically invokes one, or sometimes several, twentieth- and twenty-first-century critical theorists. Walter...