By Matt McDermott

Part One: Acquinas and Joyce

In a key work of modernist literature, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,” James Joyce has his alter ego, Stephen Dedalus engage in a series of debates on the topic of beauty. It was important for Joyce to ground his famous epiphany of the primacy of the individual vision of the artist within a philosophic basis. Specifically, Joyce had Stephen Dedalus struggle with the question of whether the individual vision could be consistently conveyed to the reader.

He famously turned to St. Thomas Acquinas’s statement: “Pulchra sunt quae visa placent,” (Summa Theologica, 1a. 5,4) translating it as: “Beauty is the apprehension of that which pleases.” Joyce leaned heavily on the word apprehension in our modern sense: understanding. He defines apprehension as “esthetic intellection.” In other words, Joyce needed to tie his subjective vision to the intellect in order to believe he was justified in following his unique literary voice. Ironically, apprehension in Acquinas’s time meant “to grasp” or “to come to understand,” both very modern in the implication that beauty is not something easily perceived or defined.

Both Joyce and Aquinas were not concerned with beauty in our contemporary movie star sense. They were concerned with defining the esthetic experience (beauty), understanding how it occurred (apprehension), and what object or experience can cause it (that which pleases). They wanted a solid basis for their aesthetics and where essentially saying: “The experience of art lies in an intellectual/esthetic perception of a definable art object.”

Why revisit Acquinas and Joyce? From the early twentieth century until and including the present, the arts have significantly concerned themselves with analyzing, redefining and deconstructing the three parts of the above statement, namely aesthetic experience, perception, and the art object. Joyce’s own concerns are reflected in the century of manifestos and cultural theory that have as an external intellectual justification of the arts much in the way he looked to Acquinas.

Joyce forces his character to go through a process of questioning before he allows him to embrace his famous epiphany to follow his inner artistic voice. The persistence of cultural modernity lies in this process of analytic questioning, with even the embrace of the irrational bearing now, with history’s hindsight, a certain character of empirical observation. The era of justifying manifestos may have been surpassed long ago by the era of cultural theory, leading now to a certain intellectual barrenness and repetiveness - which interestingly has not halted the production of compelling artistic work.

Two thousand years ago, Pliny the Elder wrote two letters on the villa in which he contrasted the life of the city and the life of the country. Seeing both as necessary for the full development of the person, he nonetheless wrote of a tension between the two and the difficulty in finding a balance. It is a debate that goes on with new vocabulary but the continuity of the dialogue over 2,000+ years is indisputable. Can then a medieval monk’s musing on what constitutes the art object, our perception of art, and what we perceive from an artwork then not lay waiting for a pioneer of modern literature and be interjected into the continuity of cultural modernity?

Part Two: Pirandello

Admittedly the choice of Joyce as an introduction lays an emphasis on individuality for a historical period also replete with collectivist art movements. That said, to pose cultural modernity as the ongoing disassembling of Leonardo’s famous drawing of a man has a compelling and defensible logic that sits easily in an era when narratives no longer supersede each other but join a pluralistic stew.
One of the greatest writers of the twentieth century, Luigi Pirandello put humanity, society, and the conventions of the novel and the stage under a strong lens and pick each apart into pieces before winning the Nobel Prize. Many may know his Six Characters in Search of an Author, in which he famously broke through the “fourth wall,” uniting character with audience and laying bare the artifices of theatrical convention.

In 1907, Pirandello wrote his esthetic manifesto, L’Umorismo. Pirandello’s esthetics and literary writing are the basis for Twentieth century Theater: a necessary precursor to Beckett and Ionesco, for example. Pirandello revolted against Acquinas and Joyce. He hated the idea of a neat correspondence between the person experiencing an artwork and the work of art. He sought instead to strip away the reader’s remove from the work, his comfortable distance. He sought not to make the reader aware of contradiction but to position the reader within the contradiction.

For Pirandello, the word is characterized by unstable shifting meanings and identities. One tactic he developed to reflect this were digressions from or interruptions of the main narrative. He writes that the “humoristic” artist seeks to “decompose the subject into its disparate parts” as he sees “our knowledge of the world and ourselves [as] a continual illusory construction.”

Pirandello is a contemporary of Joyce but rejects Joyce’s “esthetic intellectualism.” He is instead a literary pioneer of a Nietzschean analytic deconstruction of man, his world and his own artistic forms. He defies convention by using his native Sicilian in literature. He critiques and investigates the social masks – both those we chose and those forced on us – he lays bare the conventions of the stage, he seeks to place us in the character’s shoes. Pirandello challenges what language he can write in, our concepts of identity, our expectations from the theatrical experience and emotional relationship to the art work.

This is the turmoil of cultural modernity. Joyce and Pirandello are widely disparate contemporaries and they both leave a lineage of followers behind them to this day. Pirandello departs from Joyce to re-examine received wisdom about the form of the art work, the art experience, how we perceive art and the social influence on us and art. For this reason he would seem to be a better prototype for positing an idea of the continuity of cultural modernity. Yet, Joyce’s “rules-based” approach for exploring his artistic vision continues to be influential. And it would be an error to forget that the writer behind “Stephen Dedalus” was also the author of Finnegan’s Wake with its playful, punning dissolution of language. A chaotic dissolution and subsequent regrounding may be the best description of the cyclicality of cultural modernity.

Think of Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross. The powerful use of language binds us to the characters. The intensive analysis of the character’s identities makes us painfully feel their desperation - it is not experienced at a remove. We are shaken by the world that has produced these lives and unable to escape identifying that world with our own. Mamet is also a master of the dramatic form and uses it directly to powerful effect – his is not a formal innovator in structure. History being messy, he borrows from both our examples, a perfect example of contemporary continuity.