Addison's Aesthetics of Novelty

Abstract

Addison's Aesthetics of Novelty SCOTT BLACK The history of eighteenth-century British aesthetics has been written mainly as an explication of two terms, the beautiful and the sublime, with critics generally taking as their starting point Burke's disqualification of "novelty" as a separate category of analysis. Only recently have some begun to account for the historical fact of this category before the Enquiry (1757).' In this paper I examine "novelty," not to correct Burke or to defend the pleasures of novelty, but to offer an account of its significance as one of three terms—great, beautiful, novel—in Addison's "Pleasures of the Imagination" (1712).21 argue that novelty is the central category of the "Pleasures," offering a self-reflection of both the Spectator itself and the dynamics of the civil society that the periodical essay was instrumental in articulating.3 For the last sixty years, Addison has been read as a precursor of the romantic sublime.4 Clarence DeWitt Thorpe (1937) concludes his study of novelty by saying that Addison helped "open the way to . . . phases of romantic critical philosophy," while Robin Dix more recently (1986) suggests that the category was a starting point for attitudes that were "more firmly established, and more fully developed, by the Romantic theorists."5 Neil Saccamano challenges the teleology of the sublime that underwrites such work, offering instead a discussion of the sublime's "logic" and "dy269 270 / BLACK namics" in the "Pleasures."6 For all the rigor with which he resists the telos of a sublime history, though, Saccamano structures his account by its terms, reading Addison with reference to Burke: "Unlike Burke, Addison neither defines a distinct aesthetic pleasure (delight) to cover this negative category [fear], nor considers terror the predominant sublime pleasure."7 But what Addison didn't do does not fully explain what he did do, and what he did do is perhaps best understood by entertaining his own terms. For instance , Saccamano says "the 'pleasing Astonishment' felt in surveying the infinite universe after reading the 'Theories' of 'the new Philosophy'" is "one of the moments entitling the 'Pleasures' to its place in histories of the Kantian natural sublime."8 In the paper to which this refers (S #420), Addison does write of things that will be explained by the sublime, but I don't think he writes of them in sublime terms: "The Understanding, indeed, opens an infinite Space on every side of us, but the Imagination, after a few faint efforts, is immediately at a stand and finds her self swallowed up in the immensity of the Void that surrounds us" (S, 3:576). Addison's response to this gap between the understanding and imagination is to wonder if the reason for "this Defect of Imagination" might be that there is not enough "room in the Brain for such variety of Impressions" (S, 3:577)—an empirical question that refers to a Lockean problematic. The sublime offers one model of reflection, but not the only one in the history of eighteenth-century aesthetic thinking. Discussing an example of Locke's imagery of the infinite, Jules David Law notes "there is no aesthetics of the sublime here; the sensation of failure (constitutive of the 'confused' comparative idea or the attempt to comprehend the negative as a positive idea) does not present itself as a dramatic solution to the tension between the knowable and the unknowable. We might say that the difference between Locke on the one hand and Burke or Kant on the other is that Locke refuses to thematize failure."91 think something similar is going on in Addison's explicitly Lockean aesthetics. Law describes such "empiricist reflection" as "a self-critical procedure, in which perpetual correction and revision (of impressions, of language, and of judgments) are more important that the establishing of permanent categories or conditions of knowledge."10 This equally describes the method of essay writing, and I argue that Addison develops the category of novelty in order to explain the effects of the essay. Novelty theorizes the pleasures of essays, and this offers an alternative to an aesthetics organized by the sublime. Michael McKeon has argued that aesthetics emerged as a field...