Quaint, Exquisite: Victorian Aesthetics and the Idea of Japan by Grace Lavery (review)

Grace Lavery's Quaint, Exquisite: Victorian Aesthetics and the Idea of Japan is packed full of fascinating details, theoretical brio, and virtuosic close readings. (One of my favorites is of an ex libris card at the front of a rare book.) Quaint, Exquisite is many things: an innovative work of queer theory; a psychoanalytic reading of Immanuel Kant's theory of the aesthetic; an archival study of the Victorian "idea of Japan"; and a salutary contribution to the legacy of Edward Said that pluralizes Orientalism by showing how different parts of the so-called Orient—in this case Japan—had distinct roles to play in the Western imagination (x).

The titular terms "quaint" and "exquisite" are at once descriptors persistently used by Victorians for Japan and Japanese objects and theoretical paradigms invented by Lavery. That which did not fit Victorian notions of historicity was labeled "quaint," and Lavery appropriates the term to name her historiographic method, which moves between major and minor (figures, histories, texts), shifting our understanding of Victorian aestheticism to a wider geopolitical frame while also training it on lesser-known cultural players. "Exquisite" is defined by Lavery as an aesthetic category that combines "insuperable beauty" with "irresistible violence"; while often used to describe Japanese art, the exquisite is connected to the Western idea of the aesthetic more broadly (x). Japan was so intriguing to Victorians interested in aesthetics because views of Japan as essentially unknowable—an Other empire, modern yet distinct and distant from Western modernity—were related to a problem within Kantian aesthetics that Lavery labels "the melancholic condition of the subjective universal" (8). This is the quandary faced by the subject who, in passing aesthetic judgment, imagines "reciprocity for his own affective investments in objects" but who risks finding his judgment refused by the Other (11). As Lavery puts it, this melancholy manifests as "a series of apparent contradictions within the exquisite object: the exquisite can be (too) small, but it can also be (too) grand; (too) sublime or (too) beautiful; (too) close or (too) far away; (too) sadistic or (too) masochistic—it can be too too, as the late-Victorian period's mercurial pleonasm has it" (13). If the aesthetic was connected with Japan in Victorian writing, so too (too) was queerness, as the racialization of aesthetic eccentricity was used to characterize both Japanese migrants in the West and the perceived effeminacy of the aesthetic movement. The association of Japan with the aesthetic thus had to do both with the sexualization of subjectivity and with the limits of empire.

The book proceeds chronologically but unpredictably, beginning in 1853 with Admiral Matthew C. Perry's trade mission to Japan, which inspired new "interest in the literary and aesthetic possibilities afforded by the normalization of diplomatic relations with the Japanese Empire" (17). Chapter 1 takes on perhaps the period's most famous cultural reference to Japan, W. S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan's 1885 opera The Mikado, by intervening in the critical debate about whether or not it was actually about Japan. In fact, Lavery argues, it was and it was not. The opera makes reference to the real world without depicting it realistically—a form of representation she calls "queer realism" (37)—and in doing so asks, "What conditions of unknowing might construct the reality principle of a queer world?" (44). While Gilbert and Sullivan had already associated the Japanese with aesthetic queerness in Patience (1881) (Bunthorne is a "Japanese young man, / A blueand-white young man"), part of what makes the world of The Mikado queer is the criminalization of flirting, and hence of suggestive language (qtd. in Lavery 60). In its focus on "strategic evasions … around a desire punishable by death," the opera highlights its own historicity as a work staged in the same year that saw the passing of the Labouchère amendment: the culmination of a sex panic that famously led to the imprisonment of Oscar Wilde...