The Problem with Pleasure: Modernism and Its Discontents by Laura Frost

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Problem with Pleasure: Modernism and Its Discontents by Laura Frost Saikat Majumdar (bio) The Problem with Pleasure: Modernism and Its Discontents, by Laura Frost. New York: Columbia University Press, 2013. x + 292 pp. $75.00 cloth; $25.00 paper. Is there such a thing as a difficult pleasure, or is that a contradiction in terms? Hiding behind this apparently innocent question is a more insidious one—what exactly is an easy pleasure? Is the difference between ease and difficulty simply ideological, or does it become ideological the moment we step outside of strictly bodily indices of pleasure? Is it simply a less obvious form of naiveté to assume that bodily pleasures are free of ideology? After all, biologists and psychologists disagree on the mutual limits of the body and the mind, and some of the stormiest of cultural debates, such as nature-versus-nurture, are rooted in the very fuzziness of these limits. Of all aesthetic discourse, literature poses a problem on this front, due to its very medium. Language is the only aesthetic medium that is wholly artificial; that is, it does not involve a direct appeal to the senses. Since the relation between the linguistic signifier and signified is created entirely by social consensus, literature appears naturally at a remove from the body and is, in a way, the most intellectual of the arts. Does that mean that of all the arts, literature’s relation with pleasure is the most tenuous? It certainly does look that way if we define pleasure primarily in terms of the bodily experience. Inasmuch as its medium is removed from the immediacy of the body, even the easiest of the pleasures popular literature might offer—the thrill of a thriller, the romance of a romantic novel—appears rooted in ideology rather than spontaneous, bodily sensations. Some of the body-mind, nature-nurture debates play out here from time to time; how much of the swooning over romance novels is the work of ideology, and how much of that of the hormone oxytocin? Laura Frost’s commendable project is to restore difficulty to the experience of pleasure. This is praiseworthy because such a restoration [End Page 532] reveals that a difficult pleasure is not an oxymoron at all but a pleasure of a richer, more complex kind. Surely pleasure is no more opposed to complexity than it is naturally allied to simplicity, though we wonder how much of the mature enjoyment of things such as wine or dark chocolate, rather than juice and lollipops, is a matter of the biological maturation of taste buds and how much is ideological bildung over the culture of taste; this question might well be fodder again for the battle between biologists and social psychologists. Some of the most illuminating moments of The Problem with Pleasure focus on the gray zone between the body and the mind, the mysterious nature of pleasure emergent there, and the ambivalent status of such pleasures in aesthetic history. Such is the reputational grayness of smell: “Western philosophy has always ranked vision at the top of the sense hierarchy, along with hearing, above smell, taste, and touch” (35). Vision and hearing, as, in fact, the cultural punch packed in the words denotes, are thought of as being not merely physical but as carrying a load of desirable cerebral baggage with them: “Smell, by contrast, was thought to be somatically reflexive and so not subject to the higher mechanisms of the mind” (35). It is not surprising, therefore, that vision and hearing had a higher aesthetic status, as do visual arts and music, the arts devoted to their function. But olfaction enjoyed no such canonicity, nor does it have an art form devoted to itself; “perfumery was . . . not thought to constitute a disciplined or principled artistic activity” (35). That was true until the modernists entered the picture. The legend of Marcel Proust’s madeleine might have been powerful enough to make nostalgia-inducing smells permanently earn the epithet “Proustian,”1 but Frost reminds us that the true champion of literary olfaction, and the most democratic, is James Joyce, in whose work “horse piss and rotten straw” are as soothing to Stephen Dedalus...