Anthony Uhlmann - Thinking in Literature: Joyce, Woolf, Nabokov

The term aesthetic has been criticized in recent years, and not without reason (see, for example, Eagleton 1991; Connor 1999). The substance of the critique rests, first, on the view that the term has taken on so many, often incompatible, meanings that it has itself become meaningless, and second, that the term has been used largely for social and political purposes: to buttress certain kinds of artistic practice and generate cultural capital.

While the force of this critique needs to be acknowledged, I do not agree with the contention that the term itself needs to be abandoned. The term aesthetic is not alone in being a site of contestation; it is not alone in being used in many ways; it is not alone in being made use of for social and political agendas. In short, rather than having to be abandoned, it needs to be used with care.

In this study, the term aesthetic will be used in line with its original meaning, as it was developed by Alexander Baumgarten in his 1735 study, Reflections on Poetry : that is, related to the kind of perceptual cognition, or thought, developed through sensations and perceptions. The kind of thought, that is, which Baumgarten felt had been excluded by the discussions of thought developed by the seventeenth-century rationalists (in particular Descartes and Leibniz). While much of Baumgartens system has dated and he clearly considers the perceptions of the senses simply inferior to the faculty of logic, his distinction remains useful. He offers the following definition:

The Greek philosophers and the Church fathers have already carefully distinguished between things perceived [] and things known []. It is entirely evident that they did not equate things known with things of sense, since they honored with this name things also removed from sense (therefore, images). Therefore, things known are to be known by the superior faculty as the object of logic; things perceived [are to be known by the inferior faculty, as the object] of the science of perception, or aesthetic. (Baumgarten 1954: p. 78)

One might argue with Baumgarten in suggesting that the dichotomy is too stringently defined here; in suggesting, with Deleuze, Nussbaum, Damasio, and others, that logic is implicated within sensory perception. Yet, the distinction remains useful because it allows us a space in which to claim an importance for creative expression in literature and the other arts: while they too might well make use of certain kinds of logic, the logic they develop is, properly speaking, a logic of sensations, a logic of perception.

In short, then, I will understand aesthetic to refer to understandings of perception, and aesthetic method to refer to the manner in which writers (here, more specifically, Modernist novelists, though I also touch upon dramatic and critical writings by these authors) make use of these understandings and of sensations and perceptions in developing their works as meaningful expressions. To put this another way, I am interested in how writers develop works which can be used to think through sensation and perception, and which, further, shed light on the nature of perceptual thought itself.

Understood in this way a consideration of aesthetic method involves the examination of what a work of literature (especially the novel) can do. Here the question will be narrowed further, to consider specific works within a specific period: the Modernist era, here confined to a period from about 1910 to the mid-1930s. This was a period of great achievement and exploration in the form of the novel, and it has been chosen in part because of this, and because the question of the nature of thought itself was an overt concern for the major writers I have chosen to consider in this study: James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Vladimir Nabokov.

Early and extremely influential receptions of the Modernist fiction developed by Joyce, Woolf, and others such as William Faulkner, linked these works to the representation of cognitive perception, through the concept of the stream of consciousness. This term was adapted from the American philosopher William James (see James 2001: pp. 1843), and particularly emphasized the strong interest in interior monologue apparent in certain of the works of Joyce and Woolf in particular (see, for example, Humphrey 1954; Kumar 1963; Freidman 1955). The term has atrophied over the years, and it is fair to claim that the concept of the stream of consciousness has born little fruit recently, or for many years. This is in large part because the concept itself is reductive: it simply does not adequately account for the various elements brought to bear in these novels, which, for the most part, do not exclusively limit themselves to the mode of interior monologue.