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Art’s Undoing: In the Wake of a Radical Aestheticism

2015; Duke University Press; Volume: 76; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00267929-3152864

1527-1943

Eric Lindstrom,

Irish and British Studies

This ambitious, intellectually captivating book gives appropriate conceptual form to a subject matter that is all but unbearable to represent. The subject of Art’s Undoing is an aestheticism that the Romantics and their successors did not espouse, commit, or undertake (3, 5, 6, 64, 148). Forest Pyle traces in art an intensity not compatible with its profession: “a radical aestheticism that offers no positive claims for art (either those based on ethical or political grounds or on aesthetic grounds, as in ‘art for art’s sake’)” and “provides ‘no transcendent or underlying ground’ for their validation” (4). Nor is Pyle’s concept of “radical aestheticism” understandable as the articulation of an oeuvre—the conduct of a writer’s professional project. An unthreaded sequence of alternately radiant and cindery moments provides the arresting features in this account, prized apart from the dominance of individual careers in ongoing motion and of literary history told as an intelligible, grand pattern (12).Despite its resistance to “major” narrative lines, Art’s Undoing will prove essential reading for scholars in Romantic and nineteenth-century literature and, by modeling a fascinating approach to problems of contemporary critical aesthetics, should win many admirers. The book spans from Percy Shelley to Oscar Wilde, rather than from the more familiar William Wordsworth to W. B. Yeats, Rainer Maria Rilke, or Wallace Stevens, and shuns the empty positivism that defines meaning by national histories or continuous century markers. (The poverty of such “secularism” is featured in Pyle’s last chapter, on “Wilde’s extravagance” in Salomé.) Without needing openly to declare his freedom from the template of comparative literature scholarship of a generation or two ago, Pyle reaps a “negative harvesting” of unapologetic Romanticism and post-Romanticism, under no compulsion either to modify or to fight the narrative of modernist ressentiment (the quoted phrase [106] is from Anne-Lise François [2008: 146] on Emily Dickinson).At the end of Pyle’s introduction, “From Which One Turns Away,” a reading of Théodore Géricault’s painting The Raft of the Medusa (1819) introduces the book’s core theme and sponsors a reading method for the study as a whole by analyzing and inducing the “Medusa effect” of critical “aversion” (21).1 According to Pyle, criticism typically turns away from “irreducible formal, rhetorical, and thematic elements” in texts, even while it shows itself answerable to art’s ethical aspects (21). Still, he is no formalist seeking closure for the aesthetic object. The perspective this book strives almost impossibly to maintain, despite the widespread “critical response of aversion,” is a reading motion Pyle vertiginously identifies as “a crisis or ‘turning point’” movement already (21). If most criticism turns away from catastrophe, by avoidance it formally repeats the traumatic antistructure of sudden overturning. By contrast, a Benjaminian poetics of the aura and flash (Aufblitz) performs the effect of holding the Medusa in view as combustion in Shelley (42, 58): a “state of emergency” that “takes and gives nothing back” (64, 65). For John Keats, the poetry of weakness, “laziness, idleness, indolence, and an aesthetic disposition” (74), yields a deixis that threatens with “terms that cannot be met in empirical time” in either the Hyperion poems or “This Living Hand” (83). Pyle also discusses the staggering “plunge from the front” (105) at the starting line of many of Emily Dickinson’s lyrics, the perception of being overtaken and overturned that forces readers to “consider the event-like status of these opening lines” and to “address the experience of their aftermath” (107). In Art’s Undoing Pyle gazes steadily on a collection of texts and “formal, rhetorical, and thematic elements” that petrify and dissolve their authors and speakers and that therefore transmit a sensation of désoeuvrement beyond the thematic level.A formidable collection of essays Pyle has edited traces much the same territory but (aligned with the influential special issue of MLQ “Reading for Form” [Wolfson and Brown 2000]) nominates its concern as that of “Romanticism and the insistence of the aesthetic” (Pyle 2005): “If we understand an aesthetic judgment as something which forces itself upon us without the grounding of concepts and which breaks the grip of the ethical, and if we approach aesthetic experience as something which does not deliver knowledge but which plays against the claims of knowledge, we gain a better sense of the power, force, and even violence of aesthetic insistence.” Art’s Undoing takes the mysterious “something” even further in claiming that “something quite unexpected and unsettling may result from an aestheticism that is radicalized” (10). So it was when Colonel Higginson wrote in the 1890 foreword that Dickinson’s Poems “will seem to the reader like poetry torn up by the roots” (119).Thus from its title on, Art’s Undoing offers no insistence at all on a propositional level but instances a negative challenge to the fundamental poetics of making. On a lower level the introduction suspends the operative principle of the working turns of “verse.” Pyle’s method of analysis at once multiplies and renders insuperable, singular, the conventionally understood turnings away of apostrophe in the lyric. His account of a poetics of the “spell” in Shelley is not a rendition of the powers of apostrophe, because (as he finely shows of “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty”) that kind of answer or answering voice “would require the poem to speak in the name of the spirit” (30), in terms of which Shelley can only voice his own commitment as a power of “vacancy” (31). Similarly, Pyle finds that Keats’s “This Living Hand” evokes an uncanny resistance to the (already weird) effects of the lyric figure of prosopopoeia: “Beneath the reverberating pathos of the poem’s address and inextricable from its productions, the poem points, metonymically, to the source of poetry in the hand of the scribe,” thus “linking poetic language not with the voice, but with the hand” (86).Throughout Art’s Undoing Pyle represents radical aestheticism by an antiprogrammatic, nonrepeatable set of “undoing” figures that precipitate spent acts of reading: the black hole; kindling and ash in Keats and Shelley; Shelley’s “shape all light”; Keats’s “living hand,” alike weak and threatening; Dickinson’s poetics of “zeroing in” and “zeroing out”; Gerard Manley Hopkins’s apostrophic sighs of inspiration, aspiration, and expiration; D. G. Rossetti’s insistently “flat” and “shallow” painterly and poetic surfaces; Wilde’s theater of consuming expenditure; and (though not given its own chapter) the “singable residue” (singbarer Rest) of the poetry of Paul Celan (5; also see 152, 162). Counting the introduction, six of the seven chapters offer focused, nigh-sumptuous stretches of apposite critical reflections on visual art; indeed, Pyle notes this “prominence of ekphrasis” (3). Literary and critical theory figures throughout the book in illuminating “constellations” alongside the arc of Romantic and post-Romantic writers (75): Shelley with Walter Benjamin; Keats with Roland Barthes; Dickinson’s iterative poetics as read through Jacques Derrida’s idea of the “event-machine” (here and elsewhere there is an uncanny “reading-motion,” and the pressure of an infratext, through the work of Paul de Man [254n37]); D. G. Rossetti with Slavoj Žižek and Michael Fried; Wilde and the unrestricted sacred expenditures of Georges Bataille.Disclaiming all sanction for attributing a definitional grounding to the literary texts he considers, Pyle himself must rely on an analogous critical mode of sheer force to test his interpretive claims. He positions his efforts broadly in a post–Frankfurt School genre of critical aesthetic analysis. His writing can hold the spellbinding fascination one associates with Benjamin, Theodor W. Adorno, and their best commentators. As a writer of critical prose, Pyle maintains that “what I hope to perform . . . is a practice that is reflective and careful enough to identify the rhetorical processes at work in these texts (and thereby contribute local insights into our understanding of them) while simultaneously venturing into intimacy with the text and its radiances that might at times appear to be reading’s opposite” (21). Occasionally the repelling of direct thematic statement leads to a kind of dancing around avowal in the critical prose and approaches a tic. In a repeated rhetorical gesture of specification and indeterminacy or withdrawal at once, it is only in “certain moments of certain texts” that we encounter the radical aesthetic (1, 5). Pyle offers this prose “refrain” as a reminder that “a radical aestheticism is not a constitutive feature of textuality as such, not another name for the ‘materiality of the signifier’ or a ‘permanent parabasis’ or a constitutive ‘disequilibrium.’ Nor is it a generic feature of Romanticism, canonical or otherwise” (13). One may sense a negative theology at hand, just kept at bay by this countering chant. An anti-Platonic disowning of the idea, the move is a ritual warning that responds to the whiff of generalization allergically: it would be a mistake to abstract the argument of this study with confidence onto a literary-historical plane.If only because through the encounter with Pyle’s work I have begun to search for this constellation, I find a passage from Barthes’s (1985: 160–61) late essay on Cy Twombly woven throughout Art’s Undoing, though it never appears in the book:Of writing TW [Twombly] retains the gesture, not the product. . . . What is a gesture? Something like the surplus of an action. The action is transitive, it seeks only to provoke an object, a result; the gesture is the indeterminate and inexhaustible total of reasons, pulsions, indolences which surround the action with an atmosphere (in the astronomical sense of the word). Hence, let us distinguish the message, which seeks to produce information, and the sign, which seeks to produce an intellection, from the gesture, which produces all the rest (the “surplus”) without necessarily seeking to produce anything. . . . Thus in gesture is abolished the distinction between cause and effect, motivation and goal, expression and persuasion. . . . The subject wakens to a radical negativity (which is no longer a negation). . . . Writing no longer abides anywhere, it is absolutely in excess. Is it not at this extreme limit that “art” really begins, or the “text”—all that man does “for nothing,” his perversion, his expenditure?By its mere ostension the Barthes passage refers to you the stunning nonempirical knowledge of Pyle’s distinctive—often thrilling—book. Pyle has gotten many such instances into his book, even as, in lavish expenditure, the professional labor was consumed to the point of residuum.