Reading in Detail: Aesthetics and the Feminine by Naomi Schor

Abstract

L ’E s pr it C r éa te u r Antigone to their Oedipus, which seems an appropriate substitution, for she not only puts the meaning of burial into question, but is also the ardent inheritor of their gift of speech. M a r t h a N o e l E v a n s Mary Baldwin College Naomi Schor. R e a d in g in D e t a il : A e s t h e t ic s a n d t h e F e m in in e . New York: Methuen, 1987. Pp. 184. Naomi Schor’s new book is divided into two parts, the first entitled “Archaeology,” the second “ Readings,” each of which offers the reader particular pleasures and insights, while the relation between the two may well appear a bit puzzling, even frustrating. In her Intro­ duction Schor explains that the essays that form Part II were written before the chapters that constitute Part I and that their largely formalist preoccupations with the detail as aesthetic category were gradually put aside as Schor “ became aware that the detail. . . had gained legitimacy only after a prolonged and hard-fought struggle that had broad socio­ political ramifications” (p. 4). Part I was written to explore this struggle and especially to reveal the way its terms were gendered in aesthetic debates since the mid 18th-century. Here there is a story to be told, a fascinating one, and despite Schor’s telling it in modernist fashion—she freely admits that there is “ a certain intermittence in the argumentation” (p. 5)—the reader follows a broadly articulated set of themes and ideas through the five chap­ ters, each of which focuses on what are arguably pivotal texts in the critical career of the detail from Idealism to Post-Modernism: Reynolds’s Discourses on Art, Hegel’s Aesthet­ ics, the debate about the association of details with decadence, Freud’s analysis of the process of displacement, and Barthes’s desublimating aesthetics. Beginning Part II, the reader expects to find new episodes in the narrative he or she has just found so engaging and enlightening but instead is confronted by a series of critical acts that do not seem to be aware of the feminist (master) plot within which they are written. The story of the detail, which Schor has shown to be highly politicized, is buried within each of these chapters (on the link between paranoia and hermeneutics in Dali and Freud, on persecution, madness, and interpretation in Zola, on fictional characters as “ interpretants” in James, Proust, and Kafka, on Duane Hanson’s uncannily naturalistic sculptures, and on Balzacian realism), but the reader has to use the archeological tools Schor has provided in Part I to uncover it. The author does not foreground her critical plot. Not until the outset of her last essay, on Balzac, does Schor explicitly acknowledge the place of any of the essays in Part II within the framework of her book as a whole. In short, this book has a quite untraditional structure. It rewards the reader most richly who suspends certain expectations (“ congenial to male epistemological models” [p. 5], Schor might say) and enjoys the work’s pluralistic hermeneutics. The questions that Schor sets out to explore are consistently stimulating, her writing, a model of clarity, is informed by a sophisticated understanding of feminism, psychoanalysis, and philosophy, and she is one of the best close readers we have. I will comment here only on Part I, which is the book’s core. The first chapter analyzes the association of neo-classical idealist aesthetics with the discourse of misogyny: the detail, like woman, is considered by neoclassical writers such as Reynolds to be mired in natural contingency. It/She gets in the way of male abstrac­ tion and, by anarchically multiplying ornamental particulars, subverts the concentrated effort to create the Sublime. In her brilliant reading of Hegel, Schor shows how the philoso­ pher both adopts the traditional neoclassical position in regard to the detail, and breaks out of this framework. His modernism, she argues, derives from his allowing the “ definalized” 98 S p r i n g 1989 B o ok...