Critcism/John Banville: Beauty is something of an immovable feast. Certainly the further south one travels the more blurred become its attempted definitions, despite the fact that many of those definitions were first attempted in the sunstruck groves of ancient Greece.
A reading of Denis Donoghue's elegant new book, begun briskly in a chill northern August, became distinctly dog-eared amidst Provençal song and sunburnt mirth, not to mention beakers full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene. Stumbling after New York University's Henry James Professor of English and American Letters through a particularly finical passage on Yeats's late poem, 'Politics', one was inclined to paraphrase the poet and wonder How can I, that sun shining there, / My attention fix / On Rilke or on Ruskin / Or on Kantian aesthetics? Yes, travel does narrow the mind.
Yeats also makes an appearance at, or indeed before, the beginning of the book, in an epigraph taken from one of Ezra Pound's Cantos, ending with the line: "So very difficult, Yeats, beauty so difficult". In these pages Prof Donoghue is ever alive to that difficulty; for him also the definitions slip and slide. In the Introduction, however, he is characteristically exact and to the point. His theme, he tells us, "is the language of beauty: not beauty as such or a definition of the beautiful but beauty in its social manifestations, its discursive presence". He follows this with an even more characteristic disclaimer, to the effect that "I do not propose to be comprehensive: a few interventions will be, I hope, enough", a nicely calculated piece of false modesty, carrying as it does the implication that were comprehensiveness to be proposed, there would be no better man than he to deliver it.
Donoghue grew up in the handsome town of Warrenpoint at the foot of the Mourne Mountains, but for him in those days "the question of [the town's\] beauty did not arise". Even when he went to study Latin and English at UCD, and music under Brian Boydell at the Royal Irish Academy of Music, attending to the sonorities of Shakespeare and Virgil, Schubert and Bach, "the question of beauty was not mentioned".
If I did not think about beauty in those years, it follows that I never heard of its social and political implications. The people who ran art galleries and organized concerts in Dublin seemed to be mostly comfortable members of the middle class or upper middle class, so I was aware that in taking part in the musical life of the city I was rising above my origins. But that didn't trouble me, for the divisions of class were not severe. Or they could be mitigated by shared enthusiasms: music, painting, theater, sport. It did not occur to me that there was such a notion as "aesthetic ideology" or the idea that cultural achievements might be tools of the ruling class.
Speaking of Beauty began life as a response to the work of a major Victorian ideologue of aesthetics, John Ruskin. A professor of English in Venice - to whom we readers owe a debt of thanks - was arranging a conference, and had invited Prof Donoghue to give a talk on Ruskin's troubled relations with Venice and its decline. Accepting the invitation, he nevertheless "found the idea of decline hard to think about", being sceptical of the nostalgic pessimism of so many of the great Modernists: "There seem always to have been happier times, and cultures in better order". Not that Prof Donoghue is any kind of panglossian, only that he has a tragic sense of stasis combined with a messianic optimism which are the Christian's twin birthrights: the world has been ever and will continue thus, but in time, or in eternity, rather, all shall be redeemed.
Donoghue is concerned with the separation, which he considers to have occurred at the turn of the 19th century, between beauty on one side and the true and the good on the other. It was Kant, he believes, who did most to "establish the aesthetic as an independent value", by rejecting the notion that "the beautiful" could be recognised and judged according to rational principles; "by an aesthetical idea," Kant declared, "I understand that representation of the imagination which occasions much thought, without however any definite thought, i.e. any concept, being capable of being adequate to it; it consequently cannot be completely compassed and made intelligible by language". This sentence, Donoghue writes,
Has foundational value in the history of aesthetics because it released judgments of taste from their being determinable by concepts: it relieved aesthetics from the oppression of ontology, epistemology, and morality. In Kant, the beautiful is serious because it symbolises the good. But he kept them otherwise separate. If they were not kept separate, the beautiful (like the good) would be subject to moral and conceptual adjudication.
The "liberating moment" that Kant provided when he defined beauty as "the form of the purposiveness of an object, so far as this is perceived in it without any representation of a purpose", was also a moment of crisis for Western art, or at least for Western aesthetics. Cut free from reason and from concepts and conferred with the quality of disinterestedness, the beautiful object becomes autonomous, answerable only to itself and its own needs. Schiller, that profound aesthetician, declared "the Beautiful, and the mood into which it transports our spirit, to be wholly indifferent and sterile in relation to knowledge and mental outlook" and "realizes no individual purpose, either intellectual or moral"; the aesthetic, in other words, is wholly inutile, but this very inutility confers upon us, beholders of the aesthetic object, the greatest gift, which is freedom. In Prof Donoghue's formulation, Schiller insists that "\nly the aesthetic makes us free of our passions and predilections. We come to our freedom through beauty; beauty is 'freedom in its appearance'."
As a moment's reflection will show, these revolutionary declarations, like all such, have problematic implications. If the aesthetic is wholly autonomous - if, contra Keats, beauty is not truth, truth not beauty - where, as Henry James might ask, are we to find our moral ground, especially in a post-religious age? Is the Beautiful to be answerable to no one and nothing but itself? Who will set the rules of artistic endeavour, and if there are to be no rules, how is the artist to know how to proceed? - as the existentialist narrator of Gide's The Immoralist complains, "this objectless freedom is a burden to me". Perhaps the task of the artist and the receiver of art alike is to perform a Rilkean sublimation, an "inwarding" of external reality, "the transposition of an objective reality to a subjective reality" that Wallace Stevens saw as poetry's true purpose. Against this, however, Donoghue adduces Emmanuel Levinas's objection that art tends to "replace the object by its image and neutralizes what would otherwise be a 'living relationship with a real object'."
Beauty that has been made autonomous is "freed up" for use in areas other than the artistic. Prof Donoghue notes the return of the beautiful in areas such as advertising and sport - "the beautiful game" - in a travesty of the efforts of Victorians such as Ruskin and William Morris to introduce aesthetic values into everyday life. "The most immediate reason to talk about beauty," Donoghue writes, "is the hope of saving it from the mercenary embrace of TV and advertisements." On the other hand, he is no ivory towerist, either, and is as ready to discuss Julia Roberts's beauty as he is that of the Mona Lisa.
At the close of his long, final chapter on 'Ruskin, Venice, and the Fate of Beauty', Donoghue identifies a contemporary trend of resistance against the notion of art's essential inutility. Kant's "release of beauty from conceptual control was crucial to the development of an avant-garde in the nineteenth century," he writes, but "many contemporary critics evidently resent the independence of art and want to bring beauty under the rule of concepts again, especially political concepts", feeling that "the autonomy of art and beauty has been achieved at an exorbitant price". Donoghue sees the drive to re-posit a moral, cultural, social role for art - in On Beauty and Being Just Elaine Scarry suggests that an appreciation of beauty will make us into better citizens - as a regression, and a futile one at that: "It seems to me a poor defense of beauty to isolate it and then make it an instrument in the advance of other values".
This last is a fine example of Prof Donoghue's style of resistance to the new barbarisms that flaunt themselves under such rubrics as cultural or gender studies. His style is one of pensive mildness masking an inward glitter; one is reminded of a biding cat - somewhere claws are flexing, a tail tip is flicking. His favoured response to the wilder excesses of a Derrida or a Paul de Man - splendidly described as the "grim reader" - is a faintly pained deprecation, usually prefaced with an "I don't know . . . ", as in "I don't know which formalist critic de Man has in mind", or "I think I understand that assertion, but I don't know what to do with it". At moments, though, anger will out. Speaking of the new functionalists such as Fredric Jameson or Elaine Scarry, he wonders if perhaps "the sense of intrinsic value [of art\] and the sense of disinterestedness are lost not only in bourgeois society but in an academy that has resigned itself to making peace with its bourgeois masters". That disgraceful peace treaty deserves a book all to itself; perhaps Prof Donoghue will consider writing it.
Speaking of Beauty By Denis Donoghue Yale, 209pp. £15.95
John Banville's most recent book is Prague Pictures (Bloomsbury, £9.99)