The Aesthetics of Space in Nineteenth-Century British Literature, 1843-1907, by Giles Whiteley

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Aesthetics of Space in Nineteenth-Century British Literature, 1843–1907 by Giles Whiteley Isobel Armstrong (bio) The Aesthetics of Space in Nineteenth-Century British Literature, 1843–1907, by Giles Whiteley; pp. xiv + 290. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020, £85.00, £24.99 paper, $110.00, $29.95 paper. In The Aesthetics of Space in Nineteenth-Century British Literature, 1843–1907, Giles Whiteley provides a deeply researched and imaginative study of nineteenth-century spaces, with a virtuosic prologue that demonstrates the originality of his critical method. Whiteley follows Joris-Karl Huysmans's character Jean des Esseintes, from À rebours (1884), through the spaces of Paris, eating, shopping, loitering. Only it is not wholly Paris, as he shows: in Huysmans's text, Paris is elided with London, the Seine with the Thames, the Rue de Rivoli with the Thames Tunnel, the Boulevard d'Enfer with the Metropolitan Railway. Charles Dickens, James McNeill Whistler, Thomas De Quincey, all reading and rereading one another, are conjured intertextually and collectively superimposed. This is not just a question of allusion, or even a metonymic slide. Whiteley deftly establishes an intimate relation between widely separated spaces in what we might loosely call a chiastic technique, by bringing them together and assimilating them so as to demonstrate their affinity and difference. Dickens's London and Huysmans's Paris resonate with and critique one another, as do the London of late Dickens and John Ruskin's Venice. This convergence, Whiteley claims, is what the figures under discussion in his book—Ruskin, Dickens, Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde, and Henry James—achieve in order to explore the quintessential nineteenth-century space: the metropolitan. In his highly particularized readings, one space generates and mutually changes another. The prologue sets out what Whiteley sees as "a new kind of aesthetics of space" developing in the period, which he theorizes through Walter Benjamin's ideas of dream space and the phantasmagoria of the city, as well as Benjamin's signature poet, Charles Baudelaire, and other postmodern critics (15). It is a political and psychic space, shaped by modern capital. Henri Lefebvre's classic The Production of Space (1974) is central to the discussion, and his distinction between representational space and the representation of space is particularly important to Whiteley's study: des Esseintes, for instance, encounters that celebration of Napoleon, the imperial Arc de Triomphe, and seeks out maps and guides to London. Both the arch and maps are ideological objects, but the first is intentionally so, whereas maps and boundaries are not produced with deliberate intent to alter consciousness even when they do so. Through des Esseintes and his sensory life, Whiteley introduces the antithetical binary that shapes his book: Ruskin's distinction between Theoria and Aesthesis—that is, an opposition between an ethical and moral reading of space and its history, related to the realist tradition, and an account of space that is read through the sensoria. Through Aesthesis, metropolitan spaces act on both the body and language, understood through a Friedrich Schelling-like sensuous cognition and issuing in a release of the unconscious that manifests itself in a range of affects and images, from desire to melancholia and even madness. The category of Aesthesis implicitly extends and consolidates Benjamin's dream space. This Theoria/Aesthesis opposition is the dialogue of the book, but Aesthesis becomes the dominant voice. Ruskin initiates the discussion. His commitment to ethical reading is introduced through the famous attack on Whistler and consolidated by his understanding of a [End Page 358] "conceptive" truth (56). The deterministic psychological realism of the eye rigorously governs perception in a sublime Platonic account of the body: there is a morality of the body that becomes social morality. Ruskin read Venetian architecture through the moral order of its governing power, but Whiteley argues that Aesthesis frequently invades Ruskin's theoretic readings of Venice with the attraction and repulsion of Decadence and its erotics. London and the reterritorialized space of the modern railway finally invade Venice as the two spaces converge, calling out not a theoretic but an aesthetic response. And Ruskin's Venice haunts all subsequent writers. Dickens is another figure for whom there is a conflicting response to the...