Previous articleNext article FreeBook ReviewNancy Yousef. The Aesthetic Commonplace: Wordsworth, Eliot, Wittgenstein and the Language of Every Day. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022. Pp. xiii+196.George J. LeonardGeorge J. LeonardSan Francisco State University Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreThe shortest road into Nancy Yousef’s new book is through the chapter “‘When We Feel the Truth of a Commonplace’: Form and Inflection in Eliot and Wittgenstein.” In it, Yousef considers George Eliot’s “most memorable, even haunting” passages (107)—and therefore most famous and most difficult about which to say anything profound. Yousef helpfully quotes passages at length, knowing that Eliot’s star has inexplicably dimmed. Philosophers and even literary critics in Yousef’s audience may not have read Middlemarch recently.In an early climax of the heroine’s plot, Dorothea’s painful disillusionment with her marriage is disclosed in one of the most dazzling passages in Middlemarch, a memorably dense figuration of the book’s aspirations and of the poignance and humility of its boldest speculations.Nor can I suppose that when Mrs. Casaubon is discovered in a fit of weeping six weeks after her wedding, the situation will be regarded as tragic. Some discouragement, some faintness of heart at the new real future which replaces the imaginary, is not unusual, and we do not expect people to be deeply moved by what is not unusual. That element of tragedy which lies in the very fact of frequency, has not yet wrought itself into the coarse emotion of mankind; and perhaps our frames could hardly bear much of it. If we had keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. (103)George Eliot is a tough act to follow, but Yousef takes up the challenge of continuing the great passage by enumerating more fully the casual cruelties inflicted by our “perceptual limitation.” Yousef writes, “Being coarse when sensitivity is called for, being stupidly obtuse when one might be thoughtfully attentive, being apathetic when another is keen: these are all ordinary enough reactions to the pull of (for example) another’s enthusiasm, or need to be heard, or desire for reassurance: ordinary enough failings that might well leave another in tears, weeping like Dorothea. If these insensitivities seem too obvious to be remarkable, too unremarkable to merit the effort of analysis and reflection, they nevertheless are also too important to lose sight of” (107). That is quite beautiful. Her cadences echo the Eliot. What’s more, Yousef has just told us the larger goal of paying attention to the “commonplace” that underlies George Eliot’s book, the moral goal of Wordsworth, Eliot, and Wittgenstein’s attempt to find language that would open us to “keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life.” Seeing it, feeling it, would make us care, as Yousef puts it, about “a tragic dimension in commonplace discontents” (103).This tragic current is the obverse of the mystical current that runs from Wordsworth and Constable through the impressionists and Kandinsky (see his “Concerning the Spiritual in Art” [1911]) up through John Cage’s satori Zen, and Warhol’s Brillo Boxes; the mystical current that philosopher Arthur Danto termed The Transfiguration of the Commonplace, and literary critic M. H. Abrams (following Thomas Carlyle), Natural Supernaturalism. He shall make poetry from ordinary language, the youthful Wordsworth claimed, in the passage he called his “Prospectus” and the “key” to his work, to help us find “Paradise … a simple produce of the common day” (preface to The Excursion [1814], in The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, 2nd ed., ed. Ernest de Selincourt and Helen Darbishire, vol. 5 [Oxford: Clarendon, 1959], available in the appendix to M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature [New York: Norton, 1971], 465–67).A noble goal—but there’s not a whole lot in it about seeing tragedy in a young wife weeping, herself montaged by Eliot with the poor little squirrel and its pounding heart. “We do not expect people to be deeply moved by what is not unusual” (106). George Eliot and Nancy Yousef would not have us awaken to the youthful Wordsworth’s “Paradise” in the “common day,” but to the pain, the “element of tragedy which lies in the very fact of frequency.” Wordsworth, in his maturity, came to agree with Eliot that it is “the human heart by which we live,” and not “the splendour in the grass” (“Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood,” lines 201, 179, in Poetical Works, vol. 4 [Oxford: Clarendon, 1952]).This is Yousef’s third book about that tension. In her titles you can spot this thread—Isolated Cases: The Anxieties of Autonomy in Enlightenment Philosophy and Romantic Literature (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004), succeeded by Romantic Intimacy (Stanford University Press, 2013), and now the present book. Her method has been remarkably consistent. In her first book’s first pages she declares, “My approach has been shaped, in part, by the ‘diagnosis’ of traditional philosophical concerns undertaken in Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations and its extension in Stanley Cavell’s studies of philosophy and literature” (16). Cavell is quoted endlessly in all three books. In the coda at the end of the last book, after seeing George Eliot through Wittgenstein, she writes in a section titled “‘The River between,’ or Where Cavell Stands” that (though she has told us Cavell passed in 2018) “when I follow the stresses and inflections of Wittgenstein’s writing, I am always hearing the voice of Stanley Cavell as he read certain passages aloud” (167). His many admirers will want to read Yousef’s books. She begins as Cavell’s disciple and becomes his successor.Any nineteenth-century literary scholar will see familiar authors afresh in her books. I have tried to give a taste of how she works, tackling at great length a few of their most canonical passages (much like the philosopher-poet David Antin) until abruptly they yield new meanings. In Isolating Cases, for instance, there is a fascinating shpritz about Frankenstein’s monster, then a Dickensian chapter on John Stuart Mill poignantly titled “Mill Alone.” Romantic Intimacy analyzes line by line the pivotal moment in Pride and Prejudice when Lizzy rebuffs Mr. Darcy’s first proposal. I myself, after reading The Aesthetic Commonplace, look forward with renewed pleasure to rereading George Eliot.Just a thought. Any literature student would welcome a full book about George Eliot, written by an unusual philosopher who really knows Romantic literature, and who can really, really write. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Ahead of Print Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/724115 Views: 70Total views on this site HistoryPublished online February 02, 2023 For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.