‘The conglomeration of flesh and cloth in a beautiful place’: the politics of aesthetics in Michiel Heyns’s Invisible Furies

Abstract

This article investigates the ideas related to aesthetics that are discussed explicitly in Michiel Heyns’s Invisible Furies (2012). These ideas are communicated in the novel by means of a variety of narrative situations, conversations and artistic reflections on various facets of the aesthetic – specifically on beauty and ugliness as examples of aesthetic properties. This article explores and contextualises Paris as a specific urban space as it provides a narrative frame that enforces knowledge and transformation in some characters. Furthermore, the focus is on beautiful characters that find themselves in the city (mostly exiles from different parts of the world), outer beauty and appearance, as well as beauty and social power. The relationships between beauty and morality, beauty and power, as well as Heyns’s new ways of projecting masculinity are also explored. Essentially, the article seeks to understand the role of beauty in contemporary culture as part of the more general theory of the politics of aesthetics.