Consciousness, Literature and the Arts

Archive

Volume 5 Number 1, April 2004

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Donoghue, Denis.  Speaking of Beauty.  New Haven and London:  Yale University Press, 2003.  Pps. 209, ISBN:  0-300-09893-6.  $24.95 (Hardback).

Reviewed by

Beth Hawkins

Denison University, USA

Widely prolific in the field of English and American literature, in his latest book, Donoghue delivers a tour de force about beauty and the language writers and philosophers as varied as Ruskin, Pound, Yeats, Keats, Eliot, Baudelaire, Kant, Nietzsche. Woolf, Joyce, Barthes, and DeMan (to give but a brief indication of the scope of the book) use to describe this elusive but necessary element of the human condition.  It is a book that aims to recuperate aesthetics, to reestablish a venue for the appreciation of form; in its understated and citational way, it is a manifesto that argues for the retrieval of form over agenda, or, perhaps, better, for “mak[ing the work of art] available to be appreciated—or not—for its own sake” (76). 

 

The proliferation of “re-s” in the description of Donoghue’s project above in fact suggests something of the paradoxical positioning of this book.  A book that begins with skepticism of the nostalgic tendency of modern writers in essence pleads for a return to formalism as a means of “saving [beauty] from the mercenary embrace of TV and advertisements” (26).   In the case of literary studies, such a protective measure requires a disentangling of the work of art—the text—from its historical, political, and cultural context, promoting anew the Kantian “release of beauty from conceptual control” (171).

 

The two-pronged focus of this project—which begins with an analysis of how those who choose to speak of beauty do so, is then bolstered by an examination of why we must continue to speak of beauty—belies an anxiety concerning the fate of literary studies, and, more generally, what would seem to be a mounting concern that the gross consumerism of Western (most particularly American) culture will eventually swallow up all vestiges of the sublime. We are in the midst of a cultural crisis, Donoghue warns us with almost prophetic force.  We have a choice to make:  to opt for beauty as an independent value, as a concept valuable for its transformative, transfigurative potential, or to pursue the division between form and content to the point where we have rendered form, and with it, our freedom to “transfigure what merely exists” (121), the handmaiden of ideology.   We have ventured down the latter path, Donoghue suggests.  Woe to those of us who would seek to collapse the necessarily indescribable and unsayable, but intuitive and experiential, to the level of the known and knowable!

 

This is not to suggest that Donoghue advocates for an aesthetics of passivity, an aesthetics that would correlate to political indifference and apathy (though it does remain unclear overall what kind of political stance the transfigurative power of beauty would entail).   To the contrary, Donoghue acknowledges, but ultimately dismisses, the “common arguments” launched against formalism that would imply such a stance:  “that it removes itself too quickly from the issues the poem deals with; that it conspires with the totalitarian zeal of the eye, the gaze; that in literary criticism it is so obsessed with the autonomy of the poem that it ignores the tendency of words to sprawl beyond their formal limits; and that a concern for beauty of form is an elitist satisfaction, morally disgusting while people are dying of hunger and disease” (122).  Rather, an aesthetics that pursues the indescribable—in its indescribability—would seem to promote tenacity and vigilance, an open-endedness, that expands the possibilities for political engagement.  The way one reads, one views the work of art, then, provides an indicator—and possible prescription—for how one would choose to be-in-the-world. 

 

Perhaps the very open-endedness of such a way of reading—the commitment, that is, to open-endedness—is too limited in terms of what it truly can prescribe?  I confess, as a reader thoroughly convinced by Donoghue’s claims to beauty as an inherent good, as valuable because of the way in which it tugs at us, the way in which it prods us to actively confront what we cannot subsume linguistically, I am left to wonder how the imperative to sustain beauty corresponds to the very real work we have before us to repair a world that must become (again?) inhabitable before we can sit back and contemplate its beauty.  I am reminded of Voltaire’s final, and thoroughly ambiguous, prescription in Candide:  “il faut cultiver notre jardin.”  Cultivation need not be divorced from contemplation—and Donoghue by no means asks us to choose between the two.  In the spaces of silence left open by the exhaustive citations Donoghue provides (often without commentary), however, the danger lurks that there remains nothing left to say, that past voices have weighed in on, and closed off, the conversation.  And with this lurks the attendant danger that we might come to regard beauty as a given and not a challenge, that we will place our emphasis on describing what we have agreed already exists, instead of striving to make beautiful.