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The Aesthetics of Clarity and Confusion: Literature and Engagement since Nietzsche and the Naturalists PDF

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THE AESTHETICS OF CLARITY AND CONFUSION Literature and Engagement since Nietzsche and the Naturalists GEOFFREY A. BAKER palgrave studies in modern european literature Palgrave Studies in Modern European Literature Series Editors Shane Weller School of European Culture and Languages University of Kent Canterbury, United Kingtom Thomas Baldwin Centre for Modern European Literature University of Kent Canterbury, United Kingtom Ben Hutchinson Centre for Modern European Literature University of Kent Canterbury, United Kingtom Linked to the Centre for Modern European Literature at the University of Kent, UK, this series offers a space for new research that challenges the limitations of national, linguistic and cultural borders within Europe and engages in the comparative study of literary traditions in the modern period. More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/14610 Geoffrey A. Baker The Aesthetics of Clarity and Confusion Literature and Engagement since Nietzsche and the Naturalists Geoffrey A. Baker Yale-NUS College Singapore Palgrave Studies in Modern European Literature ISBN 978-3-319-42170-4 ISBN 978-3-319-42171-1 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-42171-1 Library of Congress Control Number: 2016956455 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the pub- lisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. Cover illustration: © ajcgoldberg / Stockimo / Alamy Stock Photo Printed on acid-free paper This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature The registered company is Springer International Publishing AG The registered company address is Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland P reface For approximately 150 years since they were chiefly codified, two views of what makes literature politically effective have dominated and enabled discussion of how literary texts can be political. These two views provide a sort of horizon, a set of extremes between which literary activism has often been articulated and negotiated. At one extreme is a critical realism premised on late-nineteenth-century scientific pretensions and exempli- fied by Émile Zola and the legacy of literary naturalism; its aim is to clarify problems so that they might be solved. At the other is an avant-garde experimentalism opposed to nineteenth-century realism and dubious of the scientific epistemology on which such realism claimed to be based. Articulated powerfully by Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy, this aesthetic’s aim is to work against clarity; to confuse its readership with challenging, even unintelligible works; and to champion the socially salu- tary effects of such confusion. The tension between realist and anti- realist political aesthetics has often been noted by studies of the intersection between literature and political engagement. However, the present proj- ect explores in new detail both the origins of this particular difference, the consistency with which it re-appears, and its often explicit influence on some of the most famously “political” writers operating in its wake. Borrowing terms from two of the figures most instrumental in elaborat- ing the division, Zola and Nietzsche, I name these opposed and often mutually reductive approaches the aesthetic of clarity and the aesthetic of confusion, words repeatedly mobilized by later writers with a surprising consistency that has not yet been acknowledged. The former hopes to alter the world by raising its readers’ awareness of political and social v vi PREFACE problems, the latter by altering readers perhaps more fundamentally by questioning their most basic confidence in knowledge, communication, and meaning. While exchanges over the relative merits of various political aes- thetics have flared up regularly since the late 1800s, as I demonstrate, these debates have often tended toward stereotypes of (and ideological assumptions about) each strategy, and they have often begun by taking sides either in defense of or in opposition to realism or anti-realism. That, however, is not my aim. Rather than argue for the superiority of one approach over the other, The Aesthetics of Clarity and Confusion instead explores the lingering influence of the opposition itself and the manner in which activist writers have felt it, used it, and challenged it. I describe the differing epistemologies underwriting the values of clarity and confusion, both of which stake out a certain relationship with scien- tific knowledge; the rival aesthetics based on these differing epistemolo- gies; the consequences this rivalry has on discussions of the potential of literature; and the role which the values of clarity and confusion play in the political conversions of numerous engaged writers in the late-nine- teenth and twentieth centuries. The Aesthetics of Clarity and Confusion thus provides a fresh examination of both the reductive division itself and an array of writers who chose to operate with and against its terms, from Thomas Mann and Simone de Beauvoir to J.M. Coetzee and Toni Morrison. Having laid out the brute basics of my argument, I ought to address some natural concerns a reader might have regarding its terms and scope. One might interject, for example, that the pairing of clarity and confu- sion is ruthlessly reductive, and that to name an aesthetic after confusion is already to have debased its potential and declared it the “loser,” so to speak, in this duo. On the first point, I am in full agreement, but with fundamental qualifications; on the second, I cannot agree at all, for a few reasons. All of this will become clearer in the ensuing chapters, but let me state briefly now just a few things that this book is not doing. First, The Aesthetics of Clarity and Confusion can take no credit for creating the reductive binary which it explores and complicates. As my first three chap- ters illustrate, that reductive binary has its origins in—even is an origin of—the debate itself. When Zola repeatedly champions clarity (clarté), as early as an 1867 preface to Thérèse Raquin, by specifically opposing it to confusion, and when Nietzsche describes the Dionysian four years later in terms of confusion (using various forms of Wirr-), specifically opposing PREFACE vii it to naïve Apollonian clarity (Klarheit), the oppositional terminology is set into motion. I identify it, explain it, and demonstrate the complex use to which later writers repeatedly put it and its accompanying values, in a surprisingly frequent adoption of its operating terminology. The terms themselves stem from Zola’s grounding of his political aesthetic on alleg- edly clear, scientific knowledge and Nietzsche’s contrary identification of the quest for clarity and knowledge as a problem in and of itself. So, this book describes but has not invented the reductions invoked by its title, even as it also emphasizes the many moments at which the opposition breaks or is deliberately broken down. Second, this book does not assert the superiority of realism. Despite what might be seen as pejorative asso- ciations to the word “confusion,” what I call the aesthetic of confusion is a strategy embraced by many avant-garde authors in the wake of Nietzsche. These authors articulate confusion (using precisely that word in vari- ous forms, as I show below) as a powerful antidote to a society they see mired in logic and instrumental thinking—traps from which confusion is a necessary liberation, authorities to which confusion is a fundamental challenge. Art that confuses makes productive provocations. To see the word “confusion” itself as an a priori losing term is to misunderstand why confusion marks such a persistently important position in debates over politicized literature. Those explanations offered in advance, this book has four main goals. First, I trace the roots of the aesthetic of clarity and the aesthetic of con- fusion back to the 1860s and 1870s, with particular focus on the figures who champion and codify them most influentially (Zola and Nietzsche). Second, I argue that these aesthetic disagreements both assume and rein- force an essentially epistemological disagreement between two rival views of the worth and limits of (especially scientific) knowledge and thus of aesthetic movements or modes, such as realism and naturalism, that were explicitly indebted to—even based on—(scientific) knowledge. Indeed, the epistemological schism on which these dueling aesthetics are predi- cated stems directly and historically from the increased profile and popu- larity of scientific thought in late-nineteenth-century Europe, as both Zola and Nietzsche claim. The difference between the aesthetics of clarity and confusion derives, ultimately, from the difference between a positiv- ist emphasis on our need and capacity for more and clearer knowledge, which was welcomed by the naturalists, and a countervailing increased wariness in the late nineteenth century toward the role of science and scientific thought in society. Third, I demonstrate the persistence and viii PREFACE complication of these specific aesthetics in generally theoretical argu- ments over the political relevance of literature, in writings from Matthew Arnold, Thomas Mann, and Julien Benda to contemporary theorists and intellectuals like Martha Nussbaum and Judith Butler. As the straitened budgets of universities worldwide continue to pique discussion of the role of the humanities, I hope to re-examine some of the sources of our current discourse on what literature can “do,” how it might “do” it, and why that conversation matters. Finally, I show how the epistemologi- cal and aesthetic split between clarity and confusion is rehearsed, com- plicated, or dissolved in the careers and literary output of three writers (who also happen to be prominent critics and theorists) from Bertolt Brecht to Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. All are frequently cited as politically engaged public intellectuals and authors, even if for some of them this commitment came belatedly. I read their literary and aesthetic outputs as productive complications and occasional resolutions of the tension between the demands of clarity and confusion in politically engaged texts. A brief conclusion then traces the lingering influence of this tension on contemporary literary engagements from beyond western Europe, with the specific examples of Peter Handke, Toni Morrison, and J.M. Coetzee. One more additional goal of this book deserves mention, and it per- tains especially to the introduction. The debates I document might seem familiar to those of us already invested in discussions of the political potential of literature. We might know that Zola and late-nineteenth- century poets clashed over matters of style, for example, or that Sartre and Theodor Adorno had divergent opinions in the mid-twentieth cen- tury as to how literature might change the world, or that contemporary literary theorists have pondered these same questions. More generally, we might know the contours of the debate between sponsors of critical realism and advocates of a politics that operates by challenging formal constraints—to put it in other words, we might know already that it has been argued by some that realism is politically effective, and by others that anti-realist experimentalism is politically effective. To those read- ers to whom this book’s themes might appear familiar terrain, I hope to offer both a particularly clear rehearsal of what we think is familiar in this realm and a questioning of some of the problematic assumptions we have made and continue to make. Most importantly, through this particularly clear rehearsal I intend to serve another sort of reader, as well, for I would like this book, and especially its introductory chapters, PREFACE ix to be genuinely useful as an introduction to thinking about and to the historical debates over political aesthetics, for readers for whom the dis- cussion of what literature might be able to do and how it might do it is not already simply a foregone conclusion or a supposed relic of academic arguments of past decades.

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What should literature with political aims look like? This book traces two rival responses to this question, one prizing clarity and the other confusion, which have dominated political aesthetics since the late nineteenth century. Revisiting recurrences of the avant-garde experimentalism versus crit
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