Contemporary Novelists and the Aesthetics of Twenty-First Century American Life

Alexandra Kingston-Reese

• Publisher: University Of Iowa Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781609386757
• eBook ISBN: 9781609386764
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Contemporary Novelists and the Aesthetics of Twenty-First Century American Life gives us a new way to view contemporary art novels, asking the key question: How do contemporary writers imagine aesthetic experience? Examining the works of some of the most popular names in contemporary fiction and art criticism, including Zadie Smith, Teju Cole, Siri Hustvedt, Ben Lerner, Rachel Kushner, and others, Alexandra Kingston-Reese finds that contemporary art novels are seeking to reconcile the negative feelings of contemporary life through a concerted critical realignment in understanding artistic sensibility, literary form, and the function of the aesthetic.

Kingston-Reese reveals how contemporary writers refract and problematize aesthetic experience, illuminating an uneasiness with failure: firstly, about the failure of aesthetic experiences to solve and save; and secondly, the literary inability to articulate the emotional dissonance caused by aesthetic experiences now.

ONE

ENSTRANGEMENT

Let’s start at the end. In the final pages of Zadie Smith’s On Beauty (2005), Howard Belsey wordlessly clicks through the images in his PowerPoint, lingering on each: “A picture came up. He waited a minute and then pressed it once more. Another picture. He kept pressing. People appeared: angels and staalmeesters and merchants and surgeons and students and writers and peasants and kings and the artist himself. And the artist himself. And the artist himself” (442). In the accumulation of images, the noiseless display of images appears as deliberate and evident curation: “The man from Pomona began to nod appreciatively. Howard pressed the red button. He could hear Jack French saying to his eldest son . . . You see, Ralph, the order is meaningful” (442). Then, finally, he zooms in on one painting until a “woman’s fleshiness filled the wall” (443). And, in the face of the overwhelming surface detail, as Smith observes in her author’s note, “Howard has nothing at all to say” (445).

Even though we know this performance is intended to stall for time—Howard has forgotten his lecture notes in the car—this ineffability points to what Peter de Bolla calls “the distinctive aspect of aesthetic experience” (4). Ineffability as a sign of wonder might even deem this experience as sublime: as Philip Shaw notes, it is sublimity that specifically “refers to the moment when the ability to apprehend, to know, and to express a thought or sensation is defeated” (3). Indeed, in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce described this effect as “[t]he instant wherein that supreme quality of beauty, the clear radiance of the esthetic image, is apprehended luminously by the mind which has been arrested by its wholeness and fascinated by its harmony is the luminous silent stasis of esthetic pleasure” (179). In this “spiritual state,” Howard’s intellectual mind has quieted due to “the enchantment of [his] heart” (Joyce 179). Attending to the peculiarity of this not-so-peculiar response to art, de Bolla undermines the conventional explanation of inarticulacy as cognitive failure after the perceptual experience—that “since affective experiences do not lie within the realm of the cognitive, there is nothing, as it were, to communicate”—to suggest that it comes down instead to linguistic failure: “a fault in our language” (4). Here, Howard suffers a failure of both cognition and language: though his well-worn spiel does not come readily to mind, and he seems to have forgotten the very systems of art historical response his training has afforded him, for the first time in the entire novel Howard is overcome by intense aesthetic feeling.

This ineffability is an odd paradox of the very technique of ekphrasis, from the Greek ek (out from) and phrasis (to speak).¹ But having nothing to say is a familiar trope in On Beauty. Its characters’ relationships tend to falter or come undone after failed or missed attempts at communication. So why start with an affective state that seems to fulfill the intensity of feeling that aesthetic experiences purport to engender? This moment in On Beauty is unusual in how it imbues art with the quality of intensifying perceptual and emotional effects, rather than perpetuating the exhausted aesthetic state in which the rest of the novel operates. “The new artistic immortality,” as Michael Clune argues, doesn’t desire “the survival of an object across chronological time” but “pits the survival of subjective intensities against the operation of habit, which turns time into space, lived experience into objects” (“Make It Vanish” 248). Because the recognition that the novel celebrates in its final pages erodes the vivacity of the experience or object, flatlining the possibility for new observations, “[t] oday’s literature severs” the “bond” of recognition (248). Because reading backward from this point illuminates quite how much On Beauty negates the optimistic view of aesthetic experience. When this structure of trying and failing to speak occurs inside the aesthetic experience, it suggests less a mute wonder after seeing the image than a state of affective alienation.

This moment of aesthetic speechlessness is faithful to the common thinking that art releases the eye from the slow erosion of perceptual and sensory slackening caused by habit. Feeling like the humdrum of daily life is getting you down? Go and spend some time in a gallery or read a book; take time out and slow down. Reacquaint yourself with the act of looking. When you finish, you might just see things afresh. For Viktor Shklovsky in “Art as Device,” the category of art is peculiarly immune to the fading vibrancy of other activities or mental processes, “exist[ing] in order to restore the sensation of life, in order to make us feel things” (3). Usually these experiences of lower aesthetic power amount to everyday activities and interactions, like doing the washing; usually the surfaces of paintings provide us with new ways of looking and feeling; usually, art becomes a technique for “intensifying the impression of the senses” (3).

But what happens when the art object occupies this lower register? When it is the art object that becomes desensitized? When the work of art is what is familiar, banal, and even boring? Smith doesn’t like to be bored, and this is what worries Smith’s novelistic and critical work. In “Fail Better,” an essay published in 2007, Smith upended several failures of the prevailing literary culture, lambasting the cliché as “the simplest denomination of literary betrayal.” Because “you have pandered to a shared understanding, you have taken a short-cut, you have re-presented what was pleasing and familiar rather than risked what was true and strange.” Saying it fresh does not just yield to arguments about newness, but relying on a cliché “is an aesthetic and an ethical failure: to put it very simply, you have not told the truth.” For Smith, “writers have only one duty,” and that is “the duty to express accurately their way of being in the world,” without “all the dead language, the second-hand dogma, the truths that are not your own but other people’s, the mottos, the slogans, the out-and-out lies of your nation, the myths of your historical moment.” With these removed, “what you are left with is something approximating the truth of your own conception,” or at least “one person’s truth as far as it can be rendered through language.” Failing to do so risks not only repeating the small clichés like “somebody ‘rummages in their purse’” in every novel (as Smith herself does), but because of what it suggests of stylistic ambition: “[t]o rummage through a purse is to sleepwalk through a sentence—small enough betrayal of self, but a betrayal all the same.” Relying on “old, persistent friend[s]” through “laz[iness] and thoughtless[ness]” and other unideal states attenuates the literary self toward the worst kind of literary failure: inauthenticity.

“Old,” “persistent,” and “friend”—seeking their opposites ironically risks recycling the familiar modernist dictum of making it new again. This emphasis on the intensification of aesthetic experience calls into question the assumption that the category of art is immune to the fading vibrancy of other activities or mental processes—over time “becom[ing] habitual” and “automatic” (“Art as Device” 4, 5), “[s]o eventually all of our skills and experiences function unconsciously” (5). Though William James, too, emphasizes that “[t]he moment one tries to define what habit is, one is led to the fundamental properties of matter,” its grounded materiality is beneficial for higher aesthetic states of mentation or feeling: “[t]he more of the details of our daily life we can hand over to the effortless custody of automatism, the more our higher powers of mind will be set free for their own proper work” (“Habit” 102). This chapter seeks to address these questions with regard to a novel that doesn’t rebel against the inevitability of this process of habit, but succumbs to it.

While Jesse Prinz has shown that familiarity from repeated exposure of artworks “induces positive affect, and positive affect increases preference” (73), such habits of looking are vulnerable to the fade of flattening aesthetic effects. So, while aesthetic experiences are often drawn on as sources of profound comfort and consolation, my sense of aesthetic affect encompasses a wide range of negative affects. Negative or equivocal affects, such as disappointment, disgust, envy, irritation, or anxiety, as Sianne Ngai demonstrated in Ugly Feelings (2005), can hold equal sway over experiences of art. Although aesthetics might proclaim to prepare us for the ideal, she notes, “most of our aesthetic experiences are based on combinations of ordinary feelings” (Interview with Jasper). As I show throughout this chapter, Smith’s On Beauty’s aesthetic experiences often feature disquieting moods and undercut their sublime ambitions, instead searching for ordinary feelings that might on occasion preference “ambivalent” or “non-cathartic feelings that index situations of suspended agency” over aesthetic intensity (Ngai, Interview with Jasper). Such aesthetic experiences that are “grounded in equivocal affects . . . on feelings that explicitly clash” can nevertheless wield surprisingly equal critical and aesthetic power (Interview with Jasper).

Here, habit gets a thorough airing—as repetition, as critical or literary training, as routine—as Smith negotiates the affective contingency of contemporary aesthetic experience. Remembering that art forms part of a daily experience is a significant motivating factor for Smith as she depicts situations where art has undergone the process of automatization, where it may be intellectually stimulating but lacks any emotive power. Never a quality of the object itself, however, this dilemma of seeing is attributed to the viewer’s own affective deficiencies. On Beauty builds through repetition a drop-off effect, whereby experience over time leads to an increasing sense of emotive dissociation. Though Smith courts enstrangement formally, stylistically, and experientially, suggesting novelistic strategies for overcoming desensitization once it has occurred, never is this structure of disassociation preempted or foreclosed. Over the following pages, I take my cue from this simple realignment of values: what really matters about contemporary writing is the way it avoids the economy of institutional habit to instead express a desire for art to create something more intrinsic to aesthetic experience in ordinary life.

TURNING AWAY

After the psychological dynamics of the novel’s modes of aesthetic ambivalence, perception is foregrounded as a remedy by the end of the novel. During the procession of images, “the lights begin to go down, very slowly, on a dimmer, as if Howard were trying to romance his audience”—indeed, looking out into the audience, he finds his soon-to-be ex-wife, Kiki, “in her face, his life” (442). The atmosphere is heavily expectant; lines of vision intersect palpably in the room as he pauses on the painting he later zooms in on, Rembrandt’s Hendrickje Bathing (c. 1654, also known as Woman Bathing). First, between the audience, the painting, Howard, and Hendrickje, the woman in the painting:

On the wall, a pretty, blousy Dutch woman in a simple white smock paddled in water up to her calves. Howard’s audience looked at her and then at Howard and then at the woman once more, awaiting elucidation. The woman, for her part, looked away, coyly, into the water. She seemed to be considering whether to wade deeper. The surface of the water was dark, reflective—a cautious bather could not be certain of what lurked beneath. (442)

Even Hendrickje is expectant, “coy,” and “cautious” and the water “reflective.” But the suspense in the room is driven by the audience’s desire for Howard to start speaking, to provide intellectual “elucidation.” Even more anticipatory is the second intersecting triangle of vision, between Howard, Kiki, and the painting: Howard “looked out into the audience once more and saw Kiki only. He smiled at her. She smiled. She looked away, but she smiled. Howard looked back at the woman on the wall, Rembrandt’s love, Hendrickje” (443).

This turn of the head, glance away, turn away is the action of the afterimage, where images of Hendrickje, Kiki, Howard, and the audience imbricate on top of one another. This action follows the general line of Henri Bergson’s reflexive perception as an accumulation of “images photographed upon the object itself” (125). While some perceptions “are dissipated as soon as received,” what Bergson calls “attentive perception” instead “involves a reflexion, in the etymological sense of the word, that is to say the projection, outside ourselves, of an actively created image, identical with, or similar to, the object on which it comes to mold itself” (102). It is in this moment of reflexion, turning “our eyes abruptly away” after “having gazed at any object,” that “we obtain an ‘afterimage’ of it” (102). By overlapping image upon image, the afterimage describes both the immediate effects of looking and its attenuating affects over time, but as this process of perception continues, burgeoning “memory-images” start to complicate matters as they are “but the echo” of what has preceded (126, 125). If the afterimages produced in the immediate aftermath “are identical with the object” or scene, “there are others, stored in memory, which merely resemble it.” Behind even them, are those “which are only more or less distantly akin to” the original. Nevertheless, in the moment of perception, “[a]ll these go out to meet” it “and, feeding on its substance, acquire sufficient vigour and life to abide with it in space” (103). In this convergence,

Memory thus creates anew the present perception; or rather it doubles this perception by reflecting upon it either its own image or some other memory-image of the same kind. If the retained or remembered image will not cover all the details of the image that is being perceived, an appeal is made to the deeper and more distant regions of memory, until other details that are already known come to project themselves upon those details that remain unperceived. And the operation may go on indefinitely; memory strengthening and enriching perception, which, in its turn becoming wider, draws into itself a growing number of complementary recollections. (123)

But if Bergson’s double take is intensified, Howard’s memory-images lack the “sufficient vigour” needed to refresh “present perception”—the overlapping of image upon image upon image (from memory, resemblance, echo) instead deadens and falls away.

In the first class of the academic year, Howard turns to The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp (1632), one of the most recognizable paintings of the Dutch Enlightenment. Although “Howard had a long shtick about this painting that never failed to captivate his army of shopping-day students, their new eyes boring holes into the old photocopy,” his own experience of The Anatomy Lesson is marred by the humdrum repetition of habit (144). If we are to follow Shklovsky’s argument that “[t]he purpose of art is to lead us to a knowledge of a thing through the organ of sight instead of recognition” (Theory of Prose 9), then Howard’s experience is failing horribly. That the original perceptual experience fades over time, afflicted by the imperfections and rituals of memory, raises significant questions about art’s transformative potency. According to Michael Clune, too, “[t]ime poisons perception. No existing technique has proven effective at inoculating images against time. The problem itself is familiar. The more we see something, the duller and feebler our experience of it becomes” (Writing Against Time 3). If art is subject to the same erosion of our sensorial faculties, “[c]an art reliably return us to the intense duration of the first impression”? (11).

In On Beauty the answer is a hard no: the artwork is the object that the eye recognizes, and experiences of art can become devoid of all affective power. Rembrandt’s cultural status is so well known and his paintings so ubiquitous that his aesthetic power has been thoroughly depleted. Here, the reproduction of the painting is itself “old”; Howard’s “long shtick” is worn material, repeated year upon year, we presume, because of its success in charming prospective students who, by contrast, listen to his speech each year for the first time. In fact, “Howard had seen it so many times he could no longer see it at all. He spoke with his back to it, pointing to what he needed to with the pencil in his left hand” (144). As Bergson argued, “habit is formed by the repetition of an effort; but what would be the use of repeating it, if the result were always to reproduce the same thing?” (111). If “the true effect of repetition is to decompose, and then to recompose” (Bergson 111), Howard is stuck at the first hurdle: decomposition of perception. Even earlier remnants of radical thinking—Howard considers myths of “Art” to be “[n]onsense and sentimental tradition” and is writing a book, Against Rembrandt, whose arguments are expressed “along these almost automatic lines” (On Beauty 118)—have stalled. Habit has exhausted his affective perception to the point of apathy.

Howard presents Rembrandt as indicative of the false reassurance of aesthetic power over perception:

He had offered them a Rembrandt who was neither a rule breaker nor an original but rather a conformist; he had asked them to ask themselves what they meant by ‘genius’ and, in the perplexed silence, replaced the familiar rebel master of historical fame with Howard’s own vision of a merely competent artisan who painted whatever his wealthy patrons requested. Howard asked his students to imagine prettiness as the mask that power wears. To recast Aesthetics as a rarefied language of exclusion. He promised them a class that would challenge their own beliefs about the redemptive humanity of what is commonly called ‘Art’. (154–55)

Howard’s art historical sensibility is firmly rooted against the consoling and fictionalizing features of familiarity, even if herein also lies the joke: “‘Art is the Western myth,’ announced Howard, for the sixth year in a row, ‘with which we both console ourselves and make ourselves’” (155). Does the yearly repetition of such aphorisms not form Howard’s own comforting myth upon which he constructs himself? Smith makes Howard the butt of the joke: he attempts to make students cast aside what they know about The Anatomy Lesson in order to really see it.

The novel offers a specific painting in which these lines intersect. Consider the traditional view of a Rembrandt painting, such as his 1662 painting The Sampling Officials of the Drapers’ Guild, or The Staalmeesters. One conventional reading might suggest that Rembrandt has caught each of the six officials in a “moment of cogitation,” encapsulating on each of their faces exactly “what judgement looks like: considered, rational, benign”—a moment spurred on, some think, by a question from an unseen audience member (383). When looking at the digital image of this painting on his computer screen, however, Howard scoffs at such a sentimental project of critical benevolence:...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• Introduction: The Aesthetics of Contemporary American Life
• 1: Enstrangement
• 2: Slant Rhyme
• 3: Synesthesia
• 4: Transcription
• 5: Suspension
• Afterword: Politics of Aesthetic Experience Now
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index
• Series List