Guilty Aesthetic Pleasures by Timothy Aubry (review)

Reviewed by: Guilty Aesthetic Pleasures by Timothy Aubry Tim Lanzendörfer Timothy Aubry. Guilty Aesthetic Pleasures. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2018. Pp. 288. US$42.00 hardcover. Timothy Aubry's Guilty Aesthetic Pleasures can be situated within contemporary debates about the nature and purpose of literary studies and the return of aesthetics to the fore of critical consciousness. But Aubry's book does not plead for attention to the aesthetics of works of art; rather, it is a historical investigation of how aesthetic considerations have shaped literary criticism, and specifically the form now usually shorthanded as "critique." Guilty Aesthetic Pleasures thus, in part, takes the familiar [End Page 470] form of a critique of critique. While critique has sought to banish the aesthetic from consideration, and recent efforts at rethinking literary studies have sought to return it, Aubry argues, in fact, that "political critique" is "aesthetic criticism, but in covert fashion" (3).1 Aesthetic pleasure, Aubry says, "has served as [the] unacknowledged motive" for "literary scholarship" even when it has professed a "political or ideological focus" (4). Aubry makes his case—or one of his cases; see below—over five chapters that fall into two conceptual clusters. The first three chapters investigate questions of methodology, specifically those that "have provided many of the governing assumptions and critical methods […] over the past eighty years" (27): New Criticism, deconstruction, and the New Historicism. Chapters Four and Five then foreground the academic reaction to two specific texts: Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita (1955) and Toni Morrison's Beloved (1988). Here, Aubry addresses the academy's complicitness in the production of these novels' "'greatness'" (28), novels which to Aubry respectively signpost how an aesthetic criticism is nonetheless invested in discovering an ethical or political core, as in Lolita, or in which a manifest political purpose nonetheless is tied to aesthetic pleasures, as in Beloved. An expansive conclusion expands these arguments to a discussion of contemporary methodological replies to ideology critique, so-called "surface" and "distant" reading. Aubry, as he notes, understands his purpose not as "identify[ing] the existence of a secret illicit agenda on the part of the scholars I examine" but as "simply trying to reveal what I see as a function that literary criticism performs, or, to put it in another way, an experience it promises to academics and students" (29-30). What I understand Aubry to be arguing here is a dual aesthetic dimension to literary criticism—and, coincidentally, also a dual political dimension. First, literary studies in its post-New Critical turn to ideology critique has not in fact evacuated literature's aesthetic dimension from its considerations; it has always been invested in understanding its texts as aesthetically pleasing, even if such aesthetic pleasure has been masked by other categories, such as the resistant, the subversive, and so on. Second, the very act of criticism itself is bound up in an aesthetic experience, an experience of making that produces aesthetic pleasure and an experience of intellectual stimulation in reading that is itself appropriately termed aesthetic. In Aubry's book, in other words, "aesthetic pleasure" appears as something that critics have in the encounter with the writing of other critics—or presumably, in their own work—as well as in the texts they choose to discuss. I find Aubry's claims both perfectly acceptable and somewhat haphazardly argued. There seems, to me, nothing objectionable to the claim that literary studies has never not cared for the aesthetic experience of a text. I also find nothing particularly puzzling about the argument that a well-made argument is stimulating. But there are at least two issues with this, both, I think, firmly tied to the question of what Aubry means when he says. Much about Aubry's book hinges on whether one agrees with him on the choice of terms that express what his thesis is, and that includes the question of how pressing [End Page 471] its claims are. What is most important here, somewhat obviously, is the term "aesthetic," and its various cognates—aesthetic experience, aesthetic pleasure, aesthetic judgement, and aestheticism, most importantly. Aubry's introduction to these terms begins as though it wants to give us a rundown of their history...

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