The Future of Beauty

The Future of Beauty in Theatre, Literature and the Arts

Edited by

Daniel Meyer-Dinkgräfe

CAMBRIDGE SCHOLARS PRESS

The Future of Beauty in Theatre, Literature and the Arts, edited by Daniel Meyer-Dinkgräfe

This book first published 2005 by

Cambridge Scholars Press

15 Angerton Gardens, Newcastle, NE5 2JA, UK

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Copyright © 2005 Daniel Meyer-Dinkgräfe and contributors

All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or

otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner.

ISBN 1-904303-59-5

CONTENTS Chapter One: John Danvers, In Beauty I Walk: Beauty, Nature and the Visual Arts ........................................1

Chapter Two: José Manuel Marrero Henríquez, Poetics of Beauty in a Virtual Millenium............................................................12

Chapter Three: Amy Ione Is Plato's Philosophy Relevant Today? Mimesis to Virtual Reality ..................................................................................18

Chapter Four: Maurizio Vito Does Beauty have a future?.................................................................................32

Chapter Five: Marcus Verhaegh A Defense of Kant’s Beauty Centered Account of Art .......................................45

Chapter Six: Steve Mason On Fractal Logic, and the Fractal Aesthetic ........................................................70 Chapter Seven: Harold Schweizer The Future of the Aesthetic in the Particular: Reflections on Elizabeth Bishop's “Poem”..........................................................91

Chapter Eight: Brian Martin Corporal Affairs: French Military Fiction and Masculine Beauty, 1870-1918 ....................................................................103 Chapter Nine: Jennifer Walden “It’s extraordinary, how beautiful your skin is” ...............................................123

Chapter Ten: Yana Meerzon Hamlet as Beauty ..............................................................................................131

Chapter Eleven: Daniel Meyer-Dinkgräfe, The Future of Beauty in Theatre .......................................................................146 Chapter Twelve: Sreenath Nair Saundarya: the Concept of Beauty in Indian Aesthetics....................................154

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List of Contributors ...........................................................................................164 Index..................................................................................................................167

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This collection of essays took its origins as a workshop / panel at the 7th International Conference of ISSEI (International Society for the Study of European Ideas), held in Bergen, Norway, in August 2000. Ione, Verhaegh, Mason, Nair and Gritzner wrote their chapters specially for the book. Harold Schweizer’s essay With Sabbath Eyes: The Particular and the Claims of History in Elizabeth Bishop’s “Poem” was previously published in Journal of Modern Literature 28. 2 (Summer 2005).

INTRODUCTION Much of what is going on in the arts and in literature is not what I would call

beautiful. I find the heritage of realism and naturalism of the 19th century problematic if it inspires yet another delving into the abyss of human psychopathology. To argue with German theatre director Gründgens: it is eminently easy to write, direct, and perform in such a way that it is ugly, or that it causes a scandal. Gründgens’ words about the theatre are true also for the other arts and literature. This is a personal, subjective view, and there is a problem here, which boils down to the catch phrase “beauty is in the eyes of the beholder”: beauty is somehow intangible, very subjective, beyond objective (and that means, scientific) means of gaining knowledge which dominate, and are thus favoured by, the current (western) mind-set.

This mind-set, however, shows indications of change: in the booming debate on human consciousness, for example, an Internet-based seminar, extending over two weeks, and generating some 500 pages of text in printout, was specifically devoted to establishing ways of dealing scientifically with the subjective realm of the emotions, and there is basic research into neurophysiological correlates of beauty (i.e., changes of neurophysiological parameters when a subject is shown pictures deemed beautiful or not by the experimenters). Research has also shown that regarding the beauty of faces, universal patterns seem to exist: statistically speaking, we tend to agree overall whether a face shown to us at random is beautiful or not, independent of our own age, gender, race, culture, etc., or that of the individuals on the photos.

Common sense would suggest that although beauty is predominantly associated with things we see, it is not limited to that one sense, or sensual experience altogether. We may well describe sounds as beautiful (classical music, for example), or the smell or taste of a favourite meal, or the touch of a specific fabric. For some of those, most languages have developed more sense-specific terms, such a “delicious” for taste, but the ultimate characteristic implied by those terms is the same. Intellectual stimulation can be called beautiful, or the creative acts, say, of writing a paper, a poem, or play, or of composing, painting, etc. Beyond all those manifest objects of beauty, Plato would locate the form of beauty, beauty as such. It is beauty itself, of itself, with itself, uniform, and of eternal being. All expressions of beauty have part in this form of beauty, and all expressions of beauty exist to enable the direct experience of the form of beauty, as the ultimate goal. Is Plato’s philosophy relevant for us today, does it have a role in the future?

The majority of chapters in this book are based on papers presented at the seventh international conference of ISSEI (International Society for the Study of European Ideas), held in Bergen in August 2000. The remit of the panel on The

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Future of Beauty in the Arts and Literature was to provide a broad basis for a thorough reassessment of the European traditions of beauty in the arts (fine arts, performing arts, media arts), and in literature, not as a return to some distant, and allegedly ideal past, but as a constructive means of realising the potential of the arts for the 21st century.

John Danvers considers beauty as a mode of engagement, a function of a particular kind of relationship between subject and object, rather than as a quality inherent in particular objects or as a transcendent ideal. His paper comprises two parts: the first consists of notes about beauty grounded in the processes and structures of experience, perception and nature; the second, employs a more poetic discourse to explore similar territory. Instead of stepping back from beauty to define or categorise it, Danvers tries to explore qualities of beauty from a close vantage point. In a small way he suggests a revisioning of beauty as a mode of being and doing, rather than as an aesthetic category, or mode of passive reception. This reconfiguring of the meanings of beauty and the beautiful should be seen as arising from his reflections as an art practitioner rather than as a theoretician.

José Manuel Marrero Henriquez provides a brief survey of ideas about beauty from Plato via the Romantics to G.M. Hopkins, concluding that there should be a new place for beauty in discussing literature, enabled by approaches that acknowledge that beauty may never be measurable through scientific procedures. Amy Ione takes the discussion of Plato further: she first engages with the question of why, despite his own artistry, Plato questioned the value of artistic contributions. The discussion then counterpoints Plato’s view with contemporary art projects that deal with beauty, emotion, illusory reality and other forms of deception. Widening the debate to include not only Plato but also Kant, Maurizio Vito first of all provides a very short background about beauty in Platonic and Kantian philosophy; he then draws some extreme consequences of that history as it developed over the last century, understood from an aesthetical viewpoint. On that basis Vito examines some changes beauty has assumed according to how three modern artists (Jorge Luis Borges, Marcel Duchamp, and John Cage) managed it; this section deals with the peculiar features Music, Literature, and Painting acquired in the last century, pointing out their new relationships with beauty, and asks whether or not it survives. In his defence of the Kantian approach to art, Marcus Verhaegh argues that good art must be beautiful art, in Kant’s sense of “the beautiful.” His focus is twofold: showing the roominess involved in Kant’s account of beauty; and suggesting that art which falls outside this extraordinarily roomy conception will be tasteless, dull, and awful. This dual project leads him to criticize readings of Kant that paint him as offering an overly-formalistic aesthetics, such that a Kantian is left unable to explain the artistic value of works that violate traditional Western expectation concerning proper sources of aesthetic pleasure. He concludes that our positive aesthetic reactions to art-objects can

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always be considered to involve judgments of beauty, where this perspective upon the reaction has a definite explanatory power, in that it places the function of art within Kant’s general and quite powerful account of the proper uses of the theoretical and moral faculties. Steven Mason describes the complexity of enduring works of art in terms of their inherent fractality. Fractal logic is epistemologically prior to general rationalization, insofar as it operates beyond dichotomous semantics. Thus Mason posits fractal logic as a connexion of nonlinear processes, a methodology, rather than a theoretical structure to which the complexity of natural phenomena is readily attributed. The future of aesthetics, like its past, is beset by the problem of presupposition. By exhibiting those presuppositions inherent in its very discourse, we can at least begin to articulate modes of aesthetical concepualization beyond dichotomous interpretation - conceptualization that mirrors the very complexity found in other non/human realms. With Harald Schweizer’s essay, we move from the broad field of the fine arts to literature. When the German philosopher Theodor Adorno wrote in one of his aphorisms in Minima Moralia: “The whole is the false” (1974, 50), he expressed his increasing disenchantment with the totalitarian claims of what he called the “moral terrorism” of politically motivated art (1990, 98). “No gaze attains beauty,” he adds in another aphorism, “that is not accompanied by indifference, indeed, almost by contempt, for all that lies outside the object contemplated” (1974, 76). The particular object is dialectically opposed to “all that lies outside.” All that lies outside is the whole that is false. Schweizer demonstrates that Elizabeth Bishop’s aesthetic exemplifies both Adorno’s scepticism about totalitarian claims and his advocacy for the particular object. Brian Martin writes about the militarization of France between the Franco-Prussian War in 1870 and the beginning of the First World War in 1914, which produced a new kind of uniform manhood, where every male citizen-soldier possessed a strong muscular body and a fierce patriotic loyalty to his comrades and nation. But this new military masculinity could neither protect the bodies of French soldiers from the ravages of newer and deadlier technologies, nor prevent their affections from developing into homosocial intimacies with their fellow soldiers. French literary representation from Zola’s La Débâcle to Proust’s Le Temps retrouvé confirms that militarization ironically brings the simultaneous development of male beauty and destruction, masculine hatred and love. Attempts to clothe the male body in the illusion of muscular strength will not prevent it from mutilation and death. Similarly, many men who are trained to kill an enemy will displace the horror of such violence onto the desire to love a comrade. Of course, these lessons are not new; they can be traced in the French literary tradition back to the twelfth-century Chanson de Roland, and in the Western literary tradition back to the Iliad. But as the world enters a new period of global violence and militarization in this opening decade of the twenty-first century, these lessons and

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texts demand repeating and rereading. If not, they will soon be echoed by future texts on the destruction of life, beauty, and human relationships by new military technologies and even more violent wars.

Jennifer Walden addresses beauty in film, with reference to touch displacing vision in Alain Resnais’ Hiroshima mon Amour. Marguerite Duras, who wrote the screenplay, stated in the scenario to the film, that one of its “principal goals” is “to have done with the description of horror by horror, for that has been done by the Japanese themselves, but to make this horror rise again from its ashes by incorporating it in a love that will necessarily be special and “wonderful”, one that will be more credible than if it has occurred anywhere else in the world, a place that death had not preserved.” The final three chapters deal with beauty in theatre. Yana Meerzon focuses on two aspects of the 1911 Moscow Art Theatre’s staging of Hamlet directed by Gordon Craig, with Vasily Kachalov as Hamlet, as they came to be the defining characteristics of the 1998 Peter Stein’s Hamlet, presented in Moscow with Evgeny Mironov as the protagonist. In both productions, one at the beginning and the other at the end of the 20th century, the directorial treatment of the literary text and approach to the image of Hamlet reflect the dichotomy of Plato-Aristotelian views on beauty in its aesthetic function as beauty of form, and in its ethic function as beauty of good. Accordingly, Meerzon considers the aesthetic function of Hamlet embodied in the notion of beauty of text, represented by visual effects in its 1911 staging and by word as action in the 1998 one, as Aristotelian. She associates the Russian ethic vision of the figure of Hamlet as a tormented, suffering intellectual, going through a spiritual journey in order to “set right” the time that is “out of joint”, as Platonian. This Hamlet’s inner journey is the essence of the spiritual beauty of each Hamlet’s stage figure discussed here, from Vasily Kachalov (1911) to Evgeny Mironov (1998). Daniel Meyer-Dinkgräfe finally addresses general issues concerning the future of beauty in the context of theatre, while Sreenath Nair provides am analysis of the origin, development, understanding and contemporary practice of the term Saundarya in Indian aesthetics.

Bibliography

Adorno, Theodor. W. 1974. Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life. Trans. E.F.N. Jephcott. London: New Left Books.

---------. 1990. “Commitment.” In Literature in the Modern World. Ed. Dennis Walder. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1990.

CHAPTER TWO

JOSÉ MANUEL MARRERO HENRÍQUEZ

POETICS OF BEAUTY IN A VIRTUAL MILLENIUM The idea that the true nature of art is intransitive and non instrumental has

dominated in modern criticism and theory. Carried to its extreme, this conception of art allowed Valéry to relate poetry to dancing and prose to walking, for “walking, like prose, has a definite aim, [...] it is an act directed at something we wish to reach, while dancing is a secondary use of [...] movement [that] admits of an infinite number of creations and variations of figures” (1958, 70). Considerations similar to these are behind the analytical procedures of the Russian formalists and of the American new critics, and they have formed the base to create a science of literature in which the first postulation is always the same: poetical function is the one that calls attention to the message, as Tzvetan Todorov has already pointed out (1982).

Lyrical poetry is considered the most literary and artistic of the genres of literature as a consequence of the decay of the Aristotelian conception of art that kept mimesis as a fundamental reason to have tragedy as the best and most exemplary of the genres until the emergence of Romanticism. Renaissance and Baroque efforts of scholars such as Minturno, Escaligero or Cascales to introduce a non-mimetic genre as lyrical poetry within Aristotle’s Poetics ended up diminishing the power of mimesis to justify what makes a text artistic. On the way to consider art as an expression of a subject and as a sublime experience, mimetic criteria lost its authority. Gérard Genette (1982) and, most recently, Gustavo Guerrero (1998) have shown with great clarity this process of forced misinterpretation of Aristotle’s Poetics.

During the 18th century a new conception of literariness began to dominate. John Dennis, for example, in The Grounds of Criticism in Poetry (1704), classified the most elevated poetry in the epic, the tragic and the great lyrical, and erased centuries of Aristotelianism when he affirmed that a “poet ought to contrive every thing in order to the moving of Passion, that not only the Fable, the Incidents and Characters, but the very Sentiments and Expressions, ought all to be designed for that” (1999, 338). And a few years later, Joseph Trapp, in his Lectures on Poetry (1711), affirmed, “as to the Nature of the Lyrical Poem, it is, of all kinds of Poetry,

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the most poetical, and is as distinct, both in Style and Thought from the rest, as Poetry in general is from Prose” (1711, 303).

By the end of the 18th century, and with the complicity of one of the ancients, Longinus´ On the Sublime (first century A.D.), this new conception of literariness is so powerful that it will become necessary to justify, not the lyrical poetry, but the Aristotelian theory, for, as William Jones pointed out in “On the Arts Commonly Called Imitative” (1772) “the assertion of Aristotle that all poetry consists in imitation [...] has been so frequently echoed from author to author, that it would seem a kind of arrogance to controvert it” (1777, 191). From King David to Petrach, Jones considered that the true poetry had always been an expression of passions, that the true poetry had always been lyrical, for “the finest parts of poetry, music and painting are expressive of the passions and operate on our minds by sympathy [...and] the inferieurs parts of them are descriptive of natural objects and affects us chiefly by substitution” (1777, 207). Romantic subjectivity expressing its passions gave way to a new conception of literariness in which the expression found a reason to be in its own right. By stressing the interplay of words within the page, the subject was left behind, and the text became an autonomous object of art. Stéphane Mallarmé, for example, broke with Romantic expressivism and he was also far from considering poetry as imitation. Reality was in the poem itself, it may “exist in a piece of paper”. Beyond the author, lyrical poetry led through French symbolism to the contemporary idea of the objective nature of the poem in much of the twentieth-century criticism.

Far from the subject, far from reality, literature has ended up forming a reality apart from reality, a virtual reality, and one more virtuality among the virtual realities humankind has been surrounding itself with. Jean Baudrillard has commented on this cultural situation as an emptying process of the referential contents of the images, from the image that reflects a basic reality to the image that “bears no relation to any reality whatever: [the image that...] is its own pure simulacrum” (1988, 170). Reality is at stake, affirms Baudrillard, and abstraction “is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror or the concept [...] it is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal” (1988, 166).

It is necessary to preserve the abstraction’s magic to save reality from oblivion. For it is the difference between the real and the simulation models what “forms the poetry of the map and the charm of the territory, the magic of the concept and the charm of the real” (1988, 166-67). In a hyperreal environment, reality and poetry need each other to exist, and bringing the Platonic idea of Beauty back into literary criticism clearly contributes to the survival of both.

Perception of Beauty in literature is not a solipsistic act, it depends to a large extent on the emotive, referential and utilitarian aspects of everyday languages and lives, and it was no frivolity that Plato in his Hipias Major linked the idea of Beauty to the idea of Good, and also to the idea of Will. A worthy space to

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transitivity as an aesthetic category should be open. Entering a new millennium, full of virtual realities, the deep values shaping both Classical rhetoric and the Humanist idea that grew from it deserve the intent.

If literature is linked to Beauty, its analysis and interpretations have to take into account not only styles, figures and generic structures, but also moral, psychological, ideological, historical, political and sentimental factors, all of them difficult to measure, but without doubt bearers of aesthetic meaning. The confluence of agents that take part in the perception of Beauty is so overwhelming that Socrates himself failed to define it.

The Hipias Major dialogue enhances the Socratic search of the idea of Beauty that is present in all things that are perceived as beautiful. But after a long and subtle conversation, no conclusion is reached; rather, the proverb “all that is beautiful is difficult” is brought to light. That is the result of the inquisition about Beauty.

Located at the end of the Hipias Major, such proverb is not a simple consolation, nor is it a frivolous way of hiding an obvious failure, but praise of the will that any person wishing to reach a certain grade of excellence must have.

Will is also one of the basic topics in The Symposio, where it appears under the name of Love. Love is the impulse toward “the perpetual possession of Good”, an impulse different from its own finality but, at the same time, and in the light of Hipias Major, part of it. For in Love there are involved intellectual and spiritual motives that are far away from the mere physical beauty of things, and close to the beauty that exists in sublime activities, institutions, feelings and ideas.

Will (or Love) is the impulse, and Beauty (or Good) its final goal. Will is the reflection of Beauty that is in any human being that is seriously engaged in the apprehension of the Ideas. Apprehending and searching are beautiful actions with ethical and moral consequences, for they contribute to the healthy development of the Republic.

In 1865 G. M. Hopkins wrote a platonic dialogue devoted to the idea of Beauty. Here it is not a proverb that forms the resigned final solution to the enigma. In contrast to Socrates, the master in Hopkins´ dialogue succeeds in describing some of the characteristics of the beautiful objects of nature and the arts. Features such as numerical symmetry of elements, or gradation in colours, define Beauty. The master goes on from symmetry to regularity, from regularity to irregularity and their combination, to conclude that Beauty results in a relation, and its perception implies the apprehension of a comparison. In brief, Beauty involves the idea of elements in harmony in the frame of a composition.

However, none of the speakers in the dialogue is satisfied with the abstractions that the master uses to expose what the nature of Beauty and the conditions of its perception are. Criticism, particularly that of poetry, cannot be judicial --de gustibus non est disputandum-- nor should it be reduced by logic or common sense.

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There is a plus, a mystical plus located beyond poetry considered as a “mathematical thing, measured by compasses”, that keeps awaiting comprehension. Questioned about this plus, the master calls the attention of the speakers to the tea, and all of them enter to have a cup. That is the end of the dialogue. This plus keeps reverberating as an interrogation. Hopkins called it “mystical”, but it could have also been called “lyrical”, “transcendent”, “symbolic”; and, if following Socrates´ moral approach to Beauty, it could have also been called “engaged”, “social” or “realist”.

If related to the nature and perception of Beauty, Valéry´s opposition between “dancing” and “walking”, “poetry” and “prose”, Jones´ opposition between the “superior expression of passions that operates by sympathy” and the “inferior description of natural objects that operates by substitution”, Mallarmé´s opposition between “the piece of paper” and “the world”, and the oppositions between the words “mystical”, “lyrical”, “transcendent”, “symbolic”, “poetical” and the words “materialist”, “comic”, determinist”, “realist”, “prosaic” vanish. Perception of Beauty in literature is influenced by such a multitude of factors and of such varied and obscure affiliations, that any literary criticism with scientific goals has no other choice than to ignore Beauty or dump it in a dark shed with all that offers resistance to be measured.

As a beautiful experience, the experience of literature is an inexplicable phenomenon, far more complex than any intent to reduce it to any mystical, structural, symbolic, realist or engagé approach. Lyrical experience of literature itself is beyond the so called lyrical genres and the structural and stylistics features of lyricism. And social experience of literature is beyond the narrative genres and the structural and stylistic features of Realism. As much as it is an obstacle to any scientific enquiry about literature, Beauty is also an obstacle to any theory of interpretation that bases the literary prestige of texts exclusively on their higher anagogical interpretations. Reasons enough had Socrates to link the idea of Beauty in the forms of handicrafts, nature, feelings and institutions to the idea of Good, and also to the ideas of Will and Love.

Nothing should be an obstacle in reorienting literary criticism to the possibility of opening an honourable space to transitivity as an aesthetic category. For in any writing there is an aesthetic motivation that can be understood as the unavoidable transitivity by means of which writing refers to itself while referring to the world. It could also be affirmed that in writing there is nothing but transitivity, a direct one, the one that by saying of the world says of itself, and an indirect one, the one that by saying of itself says of the world. It could even be affirmed, taken such contradiction to an extreme, that whenever a text says more of itself it is saying more of the world, and when it says more of the world, more it is saying of itself.

At orienting the message on the emissary letting the receiver know about him, poetical function cannot avoid being emotive, nor can it avoid being connative

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when orienting the message on the receiver implying him in the message, nor referential, when orienting the message on the reality, nor phatic, when orienting the message on the canal of transmission (purifying it of noises), nor metalinguistic, when orienting the message on the code to clarify its peculiar rules. If poetic function is understood this beautiful way, criticism, that can do little more than concentrating its attention on the text, has no obligation to dissociate language from its human condition to satisfy the necessity of having an object of linguistic research, nor has it to assume such a plain consideration of literature that makes of the texts not objects of beauty, consolation, pleasure, commitment, evasion or meditation, but lab entities or bones to apply carbon-14 dating.

Beauty and Will are unstable concepts and both have been ruled out of the works that intend to determine textual and human behaviours. But if being human is a linguistic condition more than a biological or zoological one, Beauty and Will must go hand in hand in an aesthetics of transitivity, since transitivity means critically linking literature with its human condition to constantly remind that language, once emptied of its human content, is merely senseless jangle in a void.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Aristóteles. 1981. El Arte Poética. México: Espasa Calpe. Baudrillard, J. 1988. Selected Writings. Poster, Mark (ed.). California:

Stanford University Press. Dennis, J. 1939. Critical Works. Baltimore: The John Hopkins Press. Genette, G. 1982. Figures of Literary Discourse. New York: Columbia University

Press. Guerrero, G. 1998. Teorías de la lírica. México: Fondo de Cultura Económica. Hopkins, G. M. 1985. “On the Origin of Beauty: A Platonic Dialogue”. Poems and

Prose. London: Penguin Books, 92-104. Jones, W. 1777. “On the Arts Commonly Called Imitative”. Poems Consisting

Chiefly of Translations from Asiatick Languages. London: W. Boyer and J. Nichols.

Mallarmé, S. 1956. “The Book: A Spiritual Instrument”. Mallarmé: selected Prose, Poems, Essays, and Letters. Baltimore: The John Hopkins Press.

Platón. 1986. Diálogos I. Apología. Critón. Eutifrón. Ión. Lisis. Cármides. Hipias Menor. Hipias Mayor. Laques. Protágoras. Madrid: Editorial Gredos.

---. 1989. Diálogos III. Fedón, Banquete, Fedro. Madrid: Editorial Gredos. Todorov, T. 1982. The Poetics of Prose. Ithaca and London: Cornell University

Press. Trapp, J. 1747. Lectures on Poetry. London: Printed for C. Hitch and C. Davis

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Valéry, P. 1958. The Collected Works of Paul Valéry. Vol. vii. Princeton: Princeton University Press.