Art
for Art's Sake & Literary Life:
How Politics and Markets Helped Shape the Ideology and Culture of Aestheticism
1790-1990
Gene H. Bell-Villada
University of Nebraska Press, $45, $18.95 (paper)
Nominated for the 1996 National Book Critics Circle award in criticism,
this elegant volume tackles nothing less than the "concrete social, economic,
political, and cultural reasons for the emergence, growth, diffusion, and
triumph of l'art pour l'art" over the past two centuries. "To
associate Art for Art's Sake exclusively with Oscar Wilde," Bell-Villada
warns, "is to blind ourselves to the wider spread of aestheticist doctrines,
both past and present." This wider spread he traces from Schiller and
Kant to Paul de Man and beyond, by way of Poe, Pater, Latin American modernismo-and
the IRS's Schedule C (where writers and artists are classified under no. 9837,
"other amusement and recreational services"). Novelist and critic
Bell-Villada has an ear for the wry and the telling: In illustration of "authorial
deference" to wealthy patrons we learn that Lord Halifax thought nothing
of interrupting Pope's formal Iliad readings to suggest "poetical
improvements"; explicating the pressures of journalism and print technology
on writing, he informs us that Balzac sweated "twelve hours a day at
his desk, producing thirty pages per sitting," while Dumas pumped out
"100,000 lines a year at 1.5 francs per line." An engaging, erudite,
admirable study.
--Matthew Howard
Hell:
A Novel
Kathryn Davis
The Ecco Press, $22
Kathryn Davis's third book is, in a way, a mystery novel, its multi-leveled
narrative dilating around the death of a repellent child named Joy who seems
to have fallen from a dam (get it?) but whom, on the other hand, several people
might gladly have killed. Joy's death, coinciding with a hurricane in the
Philadelphia suburb of X in the 1950s, is Davis's rabbit-hole down into an
older kind of Mystery: the way mortality strings us up between the food we
consume daily and the haunted spaces in which our vitality is played out.
The nameless, tubercular narrator, Joy's grudging playmate, arranges the hapless
occupants of an inherited dollhouse (one-handed celluloid butler, clothes-pin
Dad, headless daughter, frayed mother) into horrific caricatures of her own
household's petty traumas. Their plight is intercut with that of Edwina Moss,
a nineteenth-century writer on domestic economy; the ruins of her ill-managed
house stare out at the neighborhood from amid the ash trees behind Joy's house.
Moss's mad obsessions, in turn, point back to the idyllic tale of Napoleon's
"culinary architect" Antonin Carème, whose tabletop creations
joined nourishment to beauty with an ease from which the book's other inhabitants
have been banished. What saves Hell from the empty Peter Greenaway-style
pageantry that would spell its death onscreen is an infinitely supple rhythm
in the writing, which conveys the eternal knotting-together of need and impossibility.
Davis's imagination propels itself like her own description of someone unseen
coming up Edwina's hall, with "a vague shuffling noise, lax yet oddly
precise, as if an approaching mummy's trying very hard not to trip over its
own unraveling feet."
--Joel Smith
The
Girl, Painted
Eve Shelnutt
Carnegie Mellon University Press, $9.95 (paper)
In her fifth collection of stories, Shelnutt weaves a corporeal silence
into words, fabric poetic in its elegance but nevertheless tethered to ideas-to
the "conundrum of time" and of loss-that force the reader to ask
questions of what in everyday life remains unspoken. Shelnutt masters strangeness
into consciousness; plot issues secondarily, as a matter of shocking but excessively
quiet happenstance: in one story, a boy is sent away to live with aunts, carrying
flowers and a note in his pocket, his mother thinking that "all words
were prophecy, announcements that kept fate tamed." In another, two women
depart for Nova Scotia under a sky filled with black birds, and confront sensuality
and difference in events bred by landscape. But it is Shelnutt's language
that most rewards the reader. For in a defiance against both minimalism and
sentimentality, she adheres to form, addressing incalculable underlying experience,
"absorbing the paradox" of both poised distress and fated contingency.
--Jennifer Anna Gosetti
Exile
And Creativity:
Signposts, Travelers, Outsiders, Backward Glances
Edited by Susan Rubin Suleiman
Duke University Press, $54.95, $18.95 (paper)
This collection of pieces exploring the world of the outsider-the emigré,
the exile, the expatriate, the refugee, the nomad, the cosmopolitan-restores
the worn scholarly notion of "otherness" to a lively particularity.
While some essays tend more toward the academic (for instance, Linda Nochlin's
look at exiles' art and John Neubauer's investigation of "homelessness"
as a foundational structure in literary theory), and others (such as Denis
Hollier's letters from Paris to editor Suleiman, explaining his resistance
to writing for this book, and Henry Louis Gates's personal reflections on
meeting Josephine Baker and James Baldwin) blur borderlines between scholarship
and art, most discuss the pain-and, often, pleasure-of foreignness with rare
subtlety and humanist solidity. National identity is a hot topic, but the
abstract rhetoric of much current work on it effaces a great deal of its interest.
Suleiman and her authors succeed by offering in-depth analysis via compelling
stories of exiles and their work: Shelley, Mickiewicz, Joyce, Hemingway, Conrad,
Ovid, Dante, Descartes, Hobbes, Dreyfus, Carrington, Kitaj, Tzara, Bréton,
Bakhtin and Lukács are but a few of the exiles encountered on this
readerly journey.
--Shelley Salamensky
Faithless
John L. Williams
Serpent's Tail, $13.95 (paper)
1994, Camden High Street, London. Punk is dead, a subculture shattered to
pieces. Not for Jeff, protagonist of Williams' tragicomic short novel. Still
emotionally entangled in the good old times, Jeff needs only a flash, a glimpse
of passing Frank (short for Francesca) to trigger off his version of the (post-)punk
scene of the early 80s. Looking back from the mid-90s, however, it's hard
for him to provide a coherent account. "You were just there, you
were a bystander," Jeff recalls Frank saying in a dream. Apparently her
judgement is right: still feeling for her, Jeff is unable to talk to her about
Ross, his former bandleader and her former lover. Passivity also best describes
his part in the blackmail they try to pull on Ross. Williams displays Jeff's
disposition in all its ambivalence: Mixing memory with desire, he feels the
need to romanticize the past, a self-imposed loyalty that is the source of
his inactivity. On the other hand, it is this slightly marginal position that
provides the distance he needs to give a honest description of the generation
that "came of age in the years between punk and Thatcher." In his
off-beat narrative drive, Williams catches the spirit of the times: Faithless
is a highly enjoyable fictional counterpart to the era's oral histories and
the more sociological approaches of Greil Marcus or Jon Savage.
--Carsten Schinko
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