The Aesthetic Afterlives of Mr. W. P.: Reanimating Pater in Twenty-First Century Fiction

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Notes

It should be noted from the outset that, in spite of the transgressive relationship between vampirism and historicism I am suggesting, one of the primal scenes of “New Historicist” criticism was clearly a moment of vampirism: Stephen Greenblatt's “I began with the desire to speak with the dead” (1988). The critical narrative which frames this vampire-historicism most clearly is, of course, Oscar Wilde's The Portrait of Mr. W. H., which recasts the history of the Enlightenment and Hellenist Idealism according to the narrative of a vampiric Shakespearean actor.

For an analysis of the complex relationship between aesthetic historicism and aesthetic autonomy in Pater's work, see Carolyn Williams's seminal consideration of Pater's aesthetic revivalism, Transfigured World, and specifically her reading of Pater's essay on “Leonardo da Vinci.”

Originally published in the Fortnightly Review (August, 1989), collected in Miscellaneous Studies.

It was Vernon Lee, most of all, who continued and extended Pater's form of Aesthetic Historicism, and her volume Hauntings (1890) might be regarded as the consummate achievement of a Gothic Aestheticism. This is articulated in the preface to Hauntings (1890) and, more extensively, in the essay “Faustus and Helena: Notes on the Supernatural in Art” (1880). Lee effectively announces a paradigm shift in the discourse of Aestheticism, the key features being the return of the sublime, the supernatural, and the uncanny. For an excellent introduction to Lee's Aesthetic Gothic, see Sondeep Kandola's Vernon Lee, especially her reading of “Oke of Okehurst,” which analyzes Lee's relationship with Pater under the idea of “Revenant Aesthetics.” Her subsequent reading of “Amour Dure” as a warning against the dangers of impressionistic aesthetic criticism is chastening for the present author. See also Angela Leighton, “Ghosts, Aestheticism, and ‘Vernon Lee.'” For a discussion of Pater and Lee's relationship, see Laurel Brake's “Vernon Lee and the Pater Circle.”

I put it to Marcus that surely a truly Foucauldian historicism had a necessary strategic role in recovering secret or repressed “micro-narratives,” particularly in the context of feminism and sexual identity politics, and that historicist Victorian studies were surely all the more urgent for their questioning of Empire. I felt worthy after this riposte, with a curious sense of expiation, but Marcus was unrepentant and increasingly began to see the literary academy as a conspiracy of “old historicists” against aesthetic engagement.

I was careful to suggest that Marcus should not read this text in Italy and recommended that he dispense with it immediately on the completion of his railway passage. Considering the proximity of Pater and Nietzsche's aesthetic concerns and Nietzsche's dominance of twentieth-century intellectual fashion, I felt it was wise not to show any allegiance to the legacy of a competing Dionysian Hellenist.

Marcus had often talked of writing as the art of shadows. Since his disappearance I have remembered a particularly animated dialogue in the late 1980s. This was conducted drunkenly in his bedsit above an antique shop in north Leeds, over innumerable cigarettes, with Aladdin Sane playing in the background. After Marcus had read Derrida for the first time he was briefly possessed with the idea of a “New Vampirology”—he lectured me extensively about textuality as shadowplay: a site of contagious reanimations, haunted “traces” and spectres. Considering the emergence of spectrality as a major theme in later Derrida, and the appropriation of these ideas by Victorianists such as Julian Wolfreys (Victorian Hauntings), Marcus's ideas seem prescient now, but even more so considering his own recent fate.

We might also add Michael Bracewell's Divine Concepts of Physical Beauty as a precursor to the work of the “New Beauticians.” Bracewell's novel begins with an acute pastiche of nineteenth-century aesthetic prose: “I hate Art students,” says Lucinda Fortune, “(whilst watching a wreath of cigarette smoke slowly strangle a demure spray of eidelweiss)” (3). This smoky suggestion of Dorian Gray introduces a symptomatic and parodic narrative of the aesthetic personality in the context of 1980s Britain.

The idea of “relief” is a recurring motif in Pater's work containing multiple registers. See McGrath (1986) and Williams (1989).

See Andrew Eastham's “Inoperative Ironies” (2006), which situates Hollinghurst's novel in terms of a broader dialectic of postmodern culture and Aestheticism.

There are numerous such moments in Adorno's work. In Aesthetic Theory Wilde, d'Annunzio and Maeterlinck are rejected as “preludes to the culture industry” (239). Yet prior to this, Adorno has instated a gothic Modernism which celebrates the quality of artistic beauty as “apparition”—the spectral “incandescence” of transient expressive appearance (80–84). His ignorance of Pater and his alternative construction of a gothic Aestheticism according to precisely these qualities is notable here.

The comparison with Rilke's second Duino elegy might be extended here: whilst the poem opens with the terrifying angel and the third stanza articulates a Paterian sense of evanescence, the elegy concludes with a longing for “einen unseren Streifen Fruchtlands” (“a pure, contained, human place” [161]). This sense of spatial belonging is suggested by the “self-mastered figures” of Attic gravestones. In the final lines, Rilke articulates a condition of aesthetic modernity which involves our habitual projection of this sense of repose and belonging into ideal self-sufficient bodies, a condition which bears close comparison with Pater's articulation of Hellenism in “Winckelmann.”

In “The Sublime and the Avant-Garde” (in The Inhuman), Lyotard stresses both the Kantian sense of the sublime as the undoing of representation and what he sees as a Burkean emphasis on the instantaneous event, the “here and now.” Two aspects of this analysis are particularly relevant for this reading: firstly, Lyotard stresses that this instantaneous rupture stalls any capacity for the artwork to take part in a sensus communis or “community of addressees” (104). Secondly, and more elliptically, Lyotard suggests that “there is something of the sublime in capitalist economy” (105).

See Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics (2004) and “The Aesthetic Revolution and Its Outcome” (2002).

Rancière makes a distinction between a “politics of the distribution of the sensible” and a politics of autonomy. The first conceptual operation of aesthetic revolution, where art is ultimately sublimated into the lifeworld, is exemplified by the Victorian Arts and Crafts movement and subsequently by the Bauhaus and the variety of twentieth-century avant-gardes. (It should be noted here that Rancière is rare amongst Continental aestheticians in recognizing the tradition of British Aestheticism and offers a forceful corrective to the anti-Victorian gestures of Adorno and his acolytes.) The second politics of aesthetics is derived from Schiller's ekphrasis of the Juno Ludovisi. The statue of the Greek goddess exemplifies the idea of play and a liberal demand for an autonomous life; “the self sufficiency of the Greek statue turns out to be the ‘self-sufficiency' of a collective life that does not rend itself into separate spheres of activities, of a community where art and life, art and politics, life and politics are not severed from one another. Such is supposed to have been the Greek people whose autonomy of life is expressed in the self-containment of the statue” (Rancière, “The Aesthetic Revolution” 136). Close readers of Pater will be aware that Schiller's Juno Ludovisi generated the most enduring image of his aesthetic prose: La Giaconda, “the presence that rose thus so strangely beside the waters” (Pater, The Renaissance 98). In Pater's Gothic Aestheticism the former Greek goddess has become spectral, the spirit of the vampire and the “symbol of the modern idea” (Pater, The Renaissance 99).

At the 2006 conference, “Walter Pater: New Questions, Latent Questionings,” held at Rutgers University, Vincent Lankewish described his attempts to teach Pater's “Conclusion” to high school and performing arts students in New York, using Ball's American Beauty to help articulate Pater's sense of transience and mortality, offering a powerful narrative of aesthetic education (Lankewish, “Walter Pater: Now Playing at Your Local High School”).

See William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, III, II, 20–25, where Juliet announces her vampiric intentions.

Adorno introduces the firework as the figure for aesthetic evanescence immediately after his theory of artistic beauty as apparition (see note 10).

My thanks to the Pater scholar Kate Hext for introducing me to McGregor's neo-Paterian debut.

See Regenia Gagnier's The Insatiablility of Human Wants, which takes its sweeping theoretical narrative of the shift in nineteenth-century economic and aesthetic discourses into the 1980s, suggesting a model for a neo-Victorian aesthetic criticism which is trans-historical, like the vampire Mr. W. P., rather than dogmatically historicist.

In “The School of Giorgione,” Pater describes an evolution of the aesthetic media according to a dialectic of modernity where the progressive alienation from context emancipates the work from embedded social relations. If all the arts aspire to the “condition of music,” the medium which figures aesthetic modernity is the genre painting—“those easily movable pictures which serve neither for uses of devotion, nor of allegorical or historic teaching” (The Renaissance 111). In this condition of relative detachment, Venetian painting exists in a liminal state in between architecture and music.

In The Afterlife of Property, Jeff Nunokawa has described how the Victorian novel tends to translate property into an idealized image of the private sphere in response to the exhibition and circulation of capital and the exhibition of property. In many of Nunokawa's examples it is the “angel of the house” that compensates for the transience and instability of the marketplace. This analysis of the spiritualizing of property might be extended through Hazel Hutchison's analysis of the ways that Victorian poetry frequently mimicked Swedenborg's discourse of the spiritualized house (Hutchison 2004).

Originally published in 1868, “Aesthetic Poetry” was reprinted in Appreciations (1889): 213–127.

In invoking the dialectical condition of Aestheticism I am echoing Adorno's famous diagnosis of aesthetic autonomy and popular culture as “torn halves,” in his letter to Benjamin of 10 Novermber 1938 (Aesthetics and Politics 123). These torn halves might be reformulated after Rancière as the politics of autonomy and the politics of the redistribution of the sensible.

In The Architectural Uncanny, Anthony Vidler has analyzed the sense of transience and estrangement typical of nineteenth-century urban modernity in terms of an uncanny experience of architecture and space. Vidler examines Pater's “The Child in the House” in the context of more general Paterian thematics of Hellenism, homesickness, and the relic (Vilder 57–62).

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Andrew Eastham

Andrew Eastham is an independent writer and teacher who specializes in Literature and Aesthetics from the Victorian to the contemporary. He is currently completing two monographs. Aesthetic Afterlives: Literary Modernity and the Concept of Irony (forthcoming with Continuum) examines the twentieth-century legacies of Aestheticism according to anxieties around aesthetic detachment and the cultivation of irony. Aestheticism and Theatricality: From Pater to the Fin de Siècle provides a new reading of performance and performativity in Aesthetic culture. His recent publications include articles on Henry James (Symbiosis, The Henry James Review), Samuel Beckett (Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd'hui), and Alan Hollinghurst (Textual Practice).