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

286 Pages·2016·1.88 MB·English

by  Geoffrey A. Baker (auth.)

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
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School of European Culture and Languages
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Thomas Baldwin
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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
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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.