Inoperative ironies: Jamesian aestheticism and post-modern culture in Alan Hollinghurst's the line of beauty
2006; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 20; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/09502360600829008
ISSN1470-1308
Autores Tópico(s)Cultural Studies and Interdisciplinary Research
ResumoClick to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1 G.W.F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T.M. Knox, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), vol. 1, pp. 64–69. 2 Hegel, Aesthetics, vol. 1, p. 65. 3 Regenia Gagnier, Idylls of the Marketplace: Oscar Wilde and the Victorian Public (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1986). 4 Hans George Gadamer, Truth and Method, second edition, trans. revised by Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (London: Shed & Ward, 1989); Pierre Bourdieu The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1992). 5 The most sustained recent account of James's relationship with Aestheticism is Jonathan Freedman, Professions of Taste: Henry James, British Aestheticism, and Commodity Culture (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1990). 6 Henry James, The Figure in The Carpet, and Other Stories, ed. Frank Kermode (London: Penguin, 1986), p. 38. 7 The Figure in The Carpet, p. 34. 8 Henry James, The Tragic Muse, ed. Philip Horne (London: Penguin, 1995), p. 474. 9 The Tragic Muse, p. 1. 10 Alan Hollinghurst, The Line of Beauty (London: Picador, 2004). All references are included in the text. 11 See 'Winckelmann' (1868), in Walter Pater, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry, ed. Donald Hill (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1980), pp. 141–85. 12 One of the functions of James in Nick's life is to deflect any definite sexual interpellation of his Aestheticism, and in this sense it is surely significant that Nick never reveals any interest in Pater or Wilde. Nick's Aestheticism is mediated through James before queer readings of James had proliferated in the 1990s, and before a queer Aestheticism had been articulated in books such as Richard Dellamora's Masculine Desire: The Sexual Politics of Victorian Aestheticism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990). 13 This is also an important subject of The Swimming Pool Library (London: Penguin, 1989), where the narrator William Beckwith cultivates a 'careless, almost cynical detachment' (p. 84). This is partly to negotiate multiple sexual opportunities but Beckwith's reflections on his grandfather's life suggests that ironic detachment is borne of the necessity for concealment (p. 120). 14 See Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), chapter 1. 15 The idea of a radical performative was suggested to many by the conclusion to Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (London: Routledge, 1990), but Butler herself recognised the problematics of this kind of critical knowledge: see, for example, her remarks on 'the conceit of autonomy' in Bodies That Matter (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 228. For a compelling account of this critical problem and its relevance to nineteenth century cosmopolitan values, see Amanda Anderson, The Powers of Distance: Cosmopolitanism and the Cultivation of Detachment (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2001). 16 Absence of irony characterises many of the Thatcherite characters in the novel, such as aspirant MP 'Polly' Tomkins, with his look of 'unironic excitement' (p. 65), Bertrand Ouradi, and the brutal homophobes Maurice Tipper and Barry Groom. Gerald is a significant exception to this rule, and knows how to use an ironic performative when needed (pp. 70–1), which may account for his friendship with Nick. 17 René Girard's theory of imitative desire also contains a theory of snobbery, particularly in his readings of Stendhal and Proust, where he asserts that 'the snob is also an imitator', Deceit, Desire and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure, trans. Yvonne Freccero (Baltimore and London: John Hopkins University Press, 1965), p. 24. 18 Clearly Aestheticism can to some degree be read as a discourse of an emerging consumer society. One of the strongest cases for this reading is Regenia Gagnier's argument that a simultaneous shift from production to consumption models occurred simultaneously in late nineteenth century economics and aesthetics. See The Insatiability of Human Wants (Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 2000) 19 Hal Foster, Design and Crime (London: Verso, 2002), p. 19. 20 The Marxist modernist critique of Aestheticism is encapsulated in Adorno's scattered remarks on 'lart'pour l'art' and 'jugendstil', which he criticizes for 'the beautification of life without its transformation; beauty itself thereby became vacuous and, like all abstract negation, allowed itself to be integrated into what it negated'. Theodor W.Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 257–8). Peter Bürger continues a similar analysis in Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Michael Shaw (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), where he defines Aestheticism as the culmination of the Kantian conception of aesthetic autonomy in bourgeois society. The limitations of Bürger's account in relation to the complex dynamics of Victorian Aestheticism are noted by Regenia Gagnier, Idylls of the Marketplace (p. 6), and Jonathan Freedman, Professions of Taste (p. 13). 21 Martin Amis, Money (London: Jonathan Cape, 1984). 22 See Kenneth Powell, Lloyd's Building: Richard Roger's Partnership (London: Phaidon Press, 1994), p. 25. 23 Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide (London: Macmillan, 1986), p. 182. 24 After the Great Divide, p. 182. 25 Barbie Campbell Cole and Ruth Elias Rogers (eds), Richard Rogers + Partners (London: Architectural Monographs, Academy Editions, 1985). The ideal of public space was later consolidated in the diagnostic manifesto developed by Richard Rogers and Mark Fischer in A New London (London: Penguin, 1992). 26 Richard Rogers + Partners, p. 19. 27 For an account of the relationship between Thatcher's government and the arts focused on theatre, see D. Keith Peacock, Thatcher's Theatre: British Theatre and Drama in the Eighties (London; Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1999). 28 'What National Socialism has done to the Arts' in Theodor W. Adorno, Essays on Music selected by Richard Leppert (London, Berkeley, Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2002), pp. 373–87, 379. 29 For an account of this tendency in Symbolism see Dee Reynolds, Symbolist Aesthetics and Early Abstract Art: Sites of Imaginary Space (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 30 In Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life & Other Essays, trans. and ed. Jonathan Mayne (London, New York: Phaidon, 1964), pp. 111–46. 31 The Painter of Modern Life, p. 117. 32 The Painter of Modern Life, pp. 116–17. 33 Paul de Man, Romanticism and Contemporary Criticism: The Gauss Seminar and Other Papers, eds E.S. Burt, Kevin Newmark, Andrej Warminski (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins Univeristy Press, 1993). 34 Alistair Stead has made a similar point about the lure of altitude in Hollinghurst's The Folding Star, suggesting that Edward Manners' encounter with Symbolist art concentrates his 'pilgrim's aspiration' towards the sublime, which is constituted through a 'dreamy rhetoric of verticality'. See 'Self-Translation and the Arts of Transposition in Allan Hollinghurst's The Folding Star', in eds. Shirley Chew & Alistair Stead, Translating Life: Studies in Transpositional Aesthetics (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1999), pp. 361–86, 370. 35 'The George-Hofmannstahl Correspondence, 1891–1906', in Theodor W. Adorno, Prisms, trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1981). 36 Colm Toibin, Review of The Line of Beauty, The New York Review of Books, 52.1 (13 January 2005). 37 L.C. Knights, 'Henry James and the Trapped Spectator', in Explorations (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1946), pp. 162–75. 38 Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady, ed. Geoffrey Moore (London: Penguin, 1984), p. 622. 39 Walter Pater, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry, ed. Donald Hill (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1980), pp. 186–90.
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