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

This is a passionate book about a passionate subject; in fact, the experience of reading this text comes close to replicating one aspect of the central dynamic it describes: "how the literary representations of aestheticization can in certain circumstances result in an aestheticism powerful and extreme enough to deliver us to the roots of the aesthetic" (xi–xii). Forest Pyle reads Romantic and post-Romantic texts in a white heat of critical engagement, an appropriate stance for a critic who sets himself the task of staring into the heart of a radical aestheticism, one that he defines as art reaching its own fever pitch, by which the putative claims of the aesthetic are undone: "At certain moments in certain texts by each of these writers we encounter a radical aestheticism, one that undoes the claims made in the name of the aesthetic—as redemptive, restorative, liberating, compensatory, humanizing, healing—claims that are not only an irreducible aspect of the legacy of Romanticism, but are often spelled out in their most compelling forms by the writers themselves" (5). The radical of the aesthetic in Pyle's hands becomes a vacant luminosity, one that we occupy with a silent, wild surmise.

Pyle's Romanticism, then, is highly self-reflexive and postdeconstructionist, with some cultural materialism serving as warm side notes. Radical aestheticism is an experience of an interference that negates, or rather undoes, the claims of knowledge that are putatively related to art. At the same time, the experience of such radicalization is emphatically not a tacit claim for art's autonomy. This is no valorization of art for art's sake. Precisely because what Pyle terms radical aestheticism offers no redemptive claims for art in the arena of ethics, politics, or aesthetics, the encounter with it is often registered as an unmaking or as combustion or as flaring. Pyle observes several criteria to meet the designation of radical aestheticism. The first will be most familiar to students of close reading: the text "must reflect on art and its effects" (3). The text must "pose or present questions about art's relationship to history or to knowledge, and on the relationship between art's sensuous aspects and its ethical, political, or theological responsibilities" (3); "and finally, a text can be understood as succumbing to a radical aestheticism the moment it finds itself and its representations of the aesthetic at its vacating radical" (4, emphasis in the original). What we have, then, is a view of a highly self-reflexive literature that owes a great deal to Walter Benjamin's theory of the "aura" but also to Paul de Man's textual disarticulations. Pyle indeed cites several canonical twentieth- and twenty-first-century theorists throughout his chapters, and he reads them as a sort of parallel text to the Romantics. Read alongside Shelley, Keats, Dickinson, Hopkins, and Wilde are Benjamin, de Man, Barthes, Derrida, Agamben, Lacan, Bataille, and others. Pyle is not claiming that we need one to understand the other, and he is certainly not reducing such parallel reading to the domain of "influence"; rather, he seems to be modeling different approaches to critical distance even as he draws ever nearer to the heart of the texts' catastrophes. In this, he is trying to clarify a dynamic of reading and of writing that calls out for rigorous conceptualizing. There must be several access points into this complicated and complicating process of understanding a text's negation of its own project. One of the delights of this text is the scrutiny of authors' manipulations of their formalist and generic inheritance. Pyle performs close readings of his authors' formalist power, readings that are themselves theorized.

Pyle is insistent that he is not positing a totalizing theory of Romanticism. He repeats over and over again that the dynamic he studies is something that occurs only "at certain moments in certain texts." This is a phrase very self-consciously reiterated throughout all...