The Forbidden Subject: How Oppositional Aesthetics Banished Natural Beauty from the Arts by Peter Quigley (review)

This book examines the reasons that the notion of beauty has come under such intense suspicion in the eyes of literary and cultural critics during the past several decades. Quigley sees these critics as taking up three outwardly disparate perspectives—modernism, Marxism, and postmodernism—which are nonetheless similar in their embrace of what he calls oppositional aesthetics, one constant of which "is hostility to beauty" (99). Quigley also observes, however, that in the last twenty years or so there has been a limited countermovement against this hostility, led by critics such as Wendy Steiner and Elaine Scarry, who seek to restore beauty as an important element to consider in the analysis and evaluation of art. Quigley's book is a lively and provocative contribution to this nascent effort.

Quigley does not seek to reestablish an unproblematic or politically naive notion of beauty but to help rehabilitate it as a useful and enriching tool in our engagement with the arts. He vigorously challenges the commonly asserted idea that everything is political, a notion he sees as incongruent with actual experience, as in fact a product of totalizing ideology. He asks tellingly: "How has it come about that the first lens dropped in front of the eye of the beholder when looking at the world is assumed to be political?" (40). He does not contest the undeniable and at times all-consuming power of the political but argues for what he sees as the equally undeniable importance of the aesthetic. The book is, in a way, an oxymoron—a passionate polemic on behalf of moderation and balance: "What if beauty, despite the assaults, is finally foundational for our very existence, our being, and for much of what has propelled us forward?" (210).

In his second and third chapters (out of five) Quigley traces the allure of Marx's call for a "ruthless criticism of everything existing" not only for Marxists but for modernists and postmodernists as well. While not denying the profound grotesqueries of history, which called both Marxism and Modernism into being, Quigley argues that the bitter antagonistic gestures generated by these movements have often become compulsive and self-destructive. In chapter 4 he takes up the impact of this pervasive negative stance on a movement, ecocriticism, that will be of special interest to readers of Western American Literature, since this journal provided an early home to ecocriticism's first wave. As ecocriticism has broadened its focus from concern with natural beauty, sense of place, and individual engagement with the wild to include environmental justice and global issues of sustainability, there have been losses, as well as gains: "Our critical focus must always include issues of justice and fairness where appropriate, but if we are deploying critical processes that make discussing beauty impossible, what have we accomplished?" (128). If one thinks, as Quigley does, that an appreciation of beauty is foundational to a meaningful life, that it is more than just what the Marxist critic Terry Eagleton (cited by Quigley) calls "gush about sunsets," then a great deal is at stake in debates about aesthetics.

While Quigley's book critiques oppositional aesthetics vigorously and in extensive detail, a reader might wonder what form of aesthetics he suggests in its place, or at least alongside it. Here the book turns toward four western writers of particular interest to Western American Literature's readers: Gretel Ehrlich, Edward Abbey, Terry Tempest Williams, and especially Robinson Jeffers. Quigley sees their work as conveying a sense of beauty not compromised by political myopia, romantic delusion, or historical blindness. Furthermore, their notions of beauty are strongly connected to "place," a heavily contested term that interestingly finds itself in the subtitle of this journal. Quigley notes the powerful influence today of a new wave of ecocritics typified by Ursula Heise, whom he says see concern with place as a "quaint, naïve perspective" that mistakenly emphasizes the personal, the local, and...