Aesthetics

There are two really great articles available at The New Republic right now that I feel should be mentioned before they cycle off the front page. Fortunately, both are available free to non-subscribers.

The first is a reproduction of the 1922 book review for Ulysses run in The New Republic. As those who know me are usually aware, I look upon Ulysses as the single greatest accomplishment in the English language - ever. This is largely due to a feature that Mr. Wilson aptly summarizes:

[I]n Joyce you have not only life from the outside described with Flaubertian virtuosity but also the consciousness of each of the characters and of each of the character's moods made to speak in the idiom proper to it, the language it uses to itself.

The entire review is excellent, and a worthy enticement to engage the full book. It's one of my great regrets that I have yet to find the words to express this book's power. "Poor Bloom, with his generous impulses and his attempts to understand and master life, is the epic symbol of reasoning man, humiliated and ridiculous, yet extricating himself by cunning from the spirits which seek to destroy him." I couldn't have put it better myself.

His criticisms are stinging, and fair. Though I disagree with him mightily about the appropriateness of literary parody in Ulysses - a book which portrays the epic of the Western Mind as a literal analog of the pre-eminent epic of Western Literature would fail to make its point if it did not rigidly track the literariness of thought - I do concede that the book is often tedious, and often deliberately so. What can we say of James Joyce other than that he expects his readers to work at their own satisfaction. Though the expectation can be exasperating, it can also be seen as a compliment. As in life, the tedium of Joyce's world is so often redeemed by some retrospective insight (most markedly illustrated in his short story "The Dead" from Dubliners).

Far more engaging is this lively account of Rochelle Gurstein's hunt for the vanished aesthetic sensibility of our Classicist forebears. What was it that they saw in the mysterious evanescent beauty of the Venus de' Medici? How did a work that was once universally acknowledged as a masterpiece, and violently defended against criticism by its protagonists fade so completely from the canon of aesthetic accomplishment? How did it slide from a gateway to sublime contemplation of beauty to a commonplace, a piece of stone in an old museum passed with barely a note of registration by most viewers?

It's a fascinating piece, and I recommend it highly. It reminds me of a book I once read by Anthony Grafton called New Worlds, Ancient Texts about the gradual change in our perception of future and past. His thesis, as I seem to remember it, was that we live in an age where alienation from the past is taken for granted. But the great pioneers and innovators of previous ages felt far more at home in the traditions of antiquity, and saw their efforts as a fulfillment of the past, rather than a challenge to it. Well worth the read.

Update

Over at Slate there's a discussion of Ulysses going on. It's an interesting intermixture of searing insight with the jaw-droppingly asinine... ("The question for us is, what shape is the bourgeois parlor in now? Should we mess it up some more? Kick a few more holes in the door, shatter the windows?") I'd recommend it as well...