A Sensuous Love of the Unseen: Beauty and Ordinary Life in the Works of Gautier, Pater, Proust, and Bellow

Abstract

This dissertation traces the ambivalent relationship between art and ordinary life in the works of Théophile Gautier, Walter Pater, Marcel Proust, and Saul Bellow. I specifically look at the representations and discussions of art, the artist, and ordinary life, and view these in relation to the mode of thought reflected in the style of each writer. I argue that the artist passes from a proud and heroic ideal type in Gautier to an out-of-place neurotic in Bellow. A shift occurs also in which ordinary life passes from being an object of scorn, derided as opposed to art, to becoming the supreme generator of value in life generally. Moreover, I present a view of the work of art as epiphanic, as a form that cannot be understood but through the peculiar “intoxication” it provides. As a way to reconcile this view with the arguments I discuss, I write essayistically and sometimes ironically to better capture, if obliquely, such elements in the works that depend on epiphanic perception.

My first chapter focuses on the French writer Théophile Gautier, who first popularized the slogan “art for art’s sake” in the preface of Mademoiselle de Maupin. I argue that Gautier creates a triumphalist image of himself and of the artist generally as a virtuosic handler of the sublime and as a consummate and convincing judge of taste. Despite this apparent lionizing of the artist, aesthetic experience is often presented in his stories as hopelessly short-lived, with the vague evil of ordinary life eventually regaining its primacy.

My second chapter focuses on Walter Pater and the idea he develops of an “aesthetic education” in Marius the Epicurean and his aestheticist reading of Plato in Plato and Platonism. Rather than viewing aesthetic experience as necessarily an adversary of quotidian experience, Pater focuses on how life could be lived aesthetically. The education he proposes involves the internalization of artists and writers who serve as possible ideals of meticulously self-created personalities, distilled in their works of art. I argue that this maintenance of aspirational ideals, together with the promotion of a habitually self-reflexive state of mind, disposed to maintain dialogue with itself, accounts for Pater’s vision of how to become an artist and how to live life aesthetically.

In my third chapter I argue that Marcel Proust views the past and our relationships with our pasts as the foundation of aesthetic experience in our lives. In his style as well as in the content of his novels, he most fully absorbs ordinary life in a vision of art. In articulating our lives in narrative form we discover and create interpretations of ourselves by means of substantively contextualizing who we are and what we were. Nevertheless, Proust views the artist as apart from above ordinary society. In my fourth chapter I argue that Saul Bellow does not view the artist as a heroic martyr, as Gautier does in his casting the artist in the quicksand of ordinary life, or as an idealized personality, in the manner of Pater, but as an unwilling eccentric, a real-life neurotic particularly ill-equipped to deal with the problems of “ordinary life.” Instead, I claim that he redeems ordinary life as the determiner of our attachments and values, independent of what value art does or does not attribute to it.