Adonis, Anyone? - Review - book review

National Review, Sept 3, 2001 by Carol Iannone

Venus in Exile: The Rejection of Beauty in 20th-Century Art, by Wendy Steiner (Free Press, 280 pp., $26)

In his most recent book, From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life, 1500 to the Present, Jacques Barzun compares and contrasts two writers in a way that encapsulates the difference between the 16th and the 20th centuries-"between the dawn of a new culture and its close in disenchantment." Speaking of Francois Rabelais's bawdy narrative, Gargantua and Pantagruel, and James Joyce's Ulysses, Barzun observes that both show an interest in "exposing the grubbiest corners of society, parodying the professions," "insisting tonelessly on the body's needs and acts," and playing with language. But, Barzun declares, Rabelais "leaves one exhilarated, as one is after seeing a Greek tragedy," whereas "Ulysses leaves one depressed, as one is after seeing a modern play like Death of a Salesman."

The sense that much of 20th-century art is depressing, enervating, and ugly is precisely the subject that Wendy Steiner's new book sets out to explain and explore. In Steiner's view, "twentieth century modernism perpetrated a cultural deprivation from which we are only now recovering."

In contrast to earlier artists, the modernist saw himself as a countercultural figure, an alienated martyr charged with telling unpleasant truths and undermining conventional hypocrisies. For its part, the art-going public was caricatured as a sleepy mass of bourgeois philistines needing to be shocked out of comfort and complacency.

According to Steiner's idiosyncratic but intriguing explanation, this modernist stance grew out of aspiration to what Immanuel Kant called the "sublime," which he distinguished from the merely "beautiful." Modernists sought the sublime-the confrontation with a limitless unknown beyond the frontiers of everyday experience-while rejecting traditional notions of the beautiful, the charming, and the agreeable. This rejection in turn gave rise to an antipathy to the domesticating female often associated with such qualities. Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, with its brutal, fantastical, fragmented depiction of prostitutes on display, is a prime example of the modernist imperative to shatter ordinary expectations of beauty and conventional modes of perception, and to force confrontation with experience beyond the limits of social acceptability. While Steiner doesn't discuss Ulysses directly, it too belongs within this scheme of ideas, with its repudiation of normal novelistic technique and the usual pleasures of narrative, its non-judgmental portrayal of women operating outside the sphere of respectable behavior, and its imposition of an off-putting epic structure on everyday life. Ironically, however, in reaching beyond limitations, modernist artists often created something more recognizable as depressing (in Barzun's word) than sublime.

A clue to that irony can be found in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, which Steiner convincingly presents as an early warning about the dangers implicit in the sublime. In that paradigmatic study of defiant, overreaching human creativity, Shelley presents the effort to transcend ordinary reality as "monstrous." Steiner points out that Kant designated the Alps and the polar ice caps as archetypes of the sublime, and it is precisely to these locations that Shelley's alienated monster wanders in his lonely desperation. The story of Dr. Frankenstein thus makes clear that the longing for the sublime, by prompting us to reject everyday human experience, lands us in barrenness and isolation. Shelley's wise counsel, says Steiner, is "that we accept the humanizing pleasure of art, and thus reinstate" the relationship "between the moral and the aesthetic spheres."

Steiner's discussion meanders somewhat, being held together more by her interest in close explication of various works of art than by a systematic development of her thesis, but it yields insight and flashes of clarity. For example, through her eyes we can better understand one of the paradoxes of 20th-century art-how, for example, the dung-studded Madonnas and the urine-soaked crucifixes and the sadomasochistic photographs can claim to be liberating us from limitations, yet in actuality be dehumanizing and desolating. The reason is that, in modern art, freedom has been specifically defined as antithetical to the common affections.

Steiner does not take into account, however, the criticism modernism makes of itself. In Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita, for example, the protagonist bitterly regrets making an erotic ideal of his young stepdaughter, and acknowledges that this has led to the ruin of them both. In Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain, the Nietzschean character Pieter Peeperkorn brings his companions on an excursion to a waterfall, and holds them rapt with a discourse that is actually unintelligible due to the deafening thunder behind him-an ironic comment on just the sort of border-annihilating experience that Steiner contends is typical of modern art.