Speaking of Beauty
by Professor Denis Donoghue

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Book Reviews of Speaking of Beauty

Book Review: Beauty Disclosed
Summary: 5 Stars

The center of the book is the chapter "The Force of Form," in which Donoghue confesses, "I don't see any difference between beauty and formal perfection: whatever can be said about the one can be said with equal point about the other." Though some have grown suspicious of beauty as a "formal" matter, those who "want pure phenomena in which no act of mind is involved," Donoghue reminds us that our approach to a work (and our recognition of its beauty) is typically "formal," even if we do not acknowledge it as such. "Form" need be a four-letter pejorative only for iconoclasts; the rest of us may agree with Pierre Bourdieu that "a power must be affirmed that belongs to art to constitute everything aesthetically by virtue of form."

Although many writers, critics, and philosophers make cameo appearances in this work, two in particular seem to constitute the poles between which Donoghue shuttles so deftly. One is Paul de Man, who "regularly spoke of beauty and the aesthetic as his enemies, all the more sinister for their pretending to be innocuous," and who was "a grim reader, hostile as on principle to any sign of inventiveness, wit, the gypsy phrase, or memorable cadence." (Though Donoghue wisely avoids emphasizing de Man's checkered past, such as his pro-Fascist journalism during WWII, before he became a distinguished professor of comparative literature at Yale, the reader might wonder of what duration was de Man's opposition to beauty.) On the other side is beauty's former champion, John Ruskin, to whom Donoghue devotes his final chapter. For Ruskin, beauty was essential (in the sense of "essence") in life; yet he saw that the artist's achievement of beauty can be a complicated process, "an intrication of forms, reaching a state of rest in the end but only after conflicts of principle, good and evil, roses and cankerworms." Ruskin realized that to be receptive to beauty, one must have a special "disposition" ("dispositions which require to be created," as he wrote in his essay "The Mystery of Life and Its Arts"), a state of mind that is difficult for many to develop and maintain in our age.

In presenting the various ways that writers and critics have responded to beauty (as represented "form" and as idea), Donoghue reintroduces a discussion that has a lengthy history: he has achieved something about which he wrote in an earlier work, FEROCIOUS ALPHABETS,

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I want to replace a theory of communication with a theory of communion, and to argue that what writers want is the system of exchange which I have described as conversation.
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The conversation will continue . . . even if in the end we acknowledge that beauty remains mysterious: as Robert Frost wrote in "The Secret Sits,"

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We dance round in a ring and suppose,
But the Secret sits in the middle and knows.
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