Standards of Beauty

At around the same time I heard that NPR segment about chic headscarves, someone posted this on Facebook:

There's so much wrong here that it's difficult to know where to begin.  I can't argue with "don't be a white supremacist," but the rest is garbage.

Are non-Eurocentric standards of beauty any better than Eurocentric ones?  I don't know any reason to think so.  What would they be, anyway?  The footbinding of Chinese women, ended by the Eurocentric Chinese Communists, was one such, but I hope this writer doesn't want to bring it back.  As for "cisheteropatriarchal beauty standards," the transgender beauties I hear about adhere to them absolutely, and they are celebrated by transgender allies. 

Not that it matters much, because standards of beauty are inherently harmful.  Their only function is to set a bar that most people in any culture, of any gender, will not be able to reach.  As a result people will put a lot of energy into trying to reach them anyway, and when they fail they'll feel bad about themselves.  At best such standards aren't totally unrealistic in that no one could possibly meet them, but most people can't, and there's no reason why they should.

One of the stumbling blocks is the confusion of "beauty" with "sexual desirability," though there is no valid standard of sexual desirability either.  I think I was in junior high school when one of the photographic newsweeklies did a story on the politician Barry Goldwater, who was also a skilled amateur photographer.  The article included a full-page photograph of an elderly Native American woman, with a face as wrinkled as W. H. Auden's or Mick Jagger's.  The caption quoted Goldwater's opinion that she was totally beautiful.  

I don't think he meant that he wanted to copulate with her, though who knows?  But the remark made an impression on me: beauty doesn't equal sexual desirability.  People use "beautiful" for everything from sunsets to flowers to babies to old ladies, so that insight shouldn't be surprising, but it seems to surprise many.

I don't remember when I began -- it might have been a result of Goldwater's comment on his photograph -- and I don't believe I made a conscious choice, but when I'm looking at people I try to see what beauty they have on their own terms, rather than measuring them against a standard that is designed to exclude them in advance.  I fail more often than I succeed, but that's the goal.  Erotic desire is only part of it, though it's certainly part of it.

Contrariwise, sexual desirability doesn't equal beauty, though given the elasticity of "beauty," you could argue otherwise.  I do: the men I'm most attracted to aren't conventionally good-looking, but they inspire in me the deep thrill that means "beauty" to me.  Most people who don't conform to white-supremacist, cisheteropatriarchal standards of beauty still find sexual partners who want them, and who themselves may not conform to those standards.  Given that reality, why bother with standards at all?

The gay photographer Tom Bianchi thinks otherwise, and has belabored the point for decades, notably in a small book called In Defense of Beauty (Crown, 1995).  Bianchi has often been criticized for the narrow range of men he photographs.  Among the authorities he cites in his defense are Oscar Wilde, Edmund White, Stephen R. Covey (think The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People) and Deepak Chopra.  Bianchi sets out his position early on:

I am no longer surprised when I hear the charge that the people in my pictures are "too beautiful" or "only the most perfect bodies," for I have come to see the mistake in perception from which these comments come. The implication is that I am elitist, or as one friend suggested, the new word is lookist.  But people who find fault with beauty, who trivialize it by assuming a negative quality in it, diminish themselves.  The ability to appreciate beauty in others is a prerequisite to express it in oneself [8].

I might concede that Bianchi's critics are wrong about his work, but Bianchi has his own "mistake in perception."  He assumes that the kind of men who populate his photographs -- gym queens, in a nutshell -- are beautiful, with "the most perfect bodies," members of an elite.  He defines "beauty" to mean such men, and only such men.

Now, I disagree that his models are beautiful, let alone "too beautiful."  I don't think that these overmuscled bodies are beautiful or perfect, and their faces (which to me are at least as important as the body below the neck) are quite unattractive, either grimly serious or with tight, anxious grins. This is of course a matter of taste, but that's the point: there is no universal standard of male (or female) beauty.  Bianchi relies, I believe, on the ancient Hellenic model, which is fine, but other cultures had very different ideas about the beauty of men.  In East Asia, for example, sculpted muscles were of no interest, though the advent of European imperialism changed that to a great extent.

Bianchi would probably charge me with "find[ing] fault with beauty," with "trivializ[ing] it by assuming a negative quality in it."  I would deny it, because physical beauty is very important to me, though it's not the only human quality that matters.  I just find beauty in people whose beauty Bianchi would deny, because he lacks the ability to appreciate them.  We could agree to disagree, but Bianchi's stance leaves him no room for greater inclusivity.  Beauty is what he says it is, and nothing else; it doesn't seem to occur to him that it could be otherwise.  He's entitled to his taste, of course, but it seems impoverished to me.

I'm reminded here of the far-right Christian pundit Rod Dreher, who has complained that modern Americans, especially the young, "have more generally lost our receptive capabilities to things numinous."  It would be more accurate to say that Dreher is unreceptive to things numinous from any tradition other than the one he has chosen. Likewise, I'm not not hostile to beauty, only to a narrow conception of beauty.  But I have to admit that I'm not receptive to the beauty of Bianchi's models either; the difference is that I'll recognize that he and other people find them so.  The eye of the beholder, anyone?

All Critics Are Equal, But Some Critics Are More Equal Than Others

I hope I can wiggle out of having to read this book, and even more I hope I can wiggle out of having to buy it.  I suppose I can just request that the library get a copy...

What I'm talking about is something called This Thing We Call Literature, by one Arthur Krystal, published earlier this year by Oxford University Press.   It got a laudatory review from Micah Mattix at The American Conservative, and you know, slogans like "In Defense of Great Books" are a red flag for me.  So for the moment, I'm just reviewing the review.  If Mattix misrepresented Krystal, I beg pardon, but the position sketched out here is one I've encountered before.

According to Mattix,

... Krystal’s main concern is not to chop individual writers down to size and extol others—though he does do some cutting—as much as it is to defend the value of hierarchical thinking with respect to literature. “The prevailing mood,” he writes, “regards hierarchies with suspicion: Who’s to say who is worth reading and who isn’t?” While a willingness to include “formerly disenfranchised artists and writers” in the canon is a good thing, “the fact that writers are all entitled to a fair hearing doesn’t mean that they are equal.”

I wonder if Krystal actually backs up the insinuation there, that "the prevailing mood" is that all writers are equal.  It sounds like he's buying into the widespread if not prevailing notion that equality means sameness.  The quotations indicate a fondness on his part for the gaseous cliché and le mot injuste, but then you don't have to be a good writer yourself to appreciate good writing by others.

Maybe I got it wrong, but I always had the impression that the call for reconsidering "formerly disenfranchised [not really the right word, Arthur] artists and writers" was motivated not by the belief that they were all equally good, but by the very reasonable belief that some good writers had been ignored because they had chosen to have the wrong skin color or genitals.  Granted, in the heat of the politicking, some people probably overstated the virtues of the artists they championed, but it's not as if that didn't happen with the usual white male suspects as well.  And the racism and sexism of the literary establishment was never really a secret; in the good old days, white men could and did openly dismiss work by women and Negroes and homosexuals and the Irish, just because they were women and homosexuals and Negroes and Irish.

I admit, I "regard hierarchies with suspicion," and I think that "Who's to say who is worth reading and who isn't?" is a fair question.  From Mattix's review I am not sure Arthur Krystal is one to say it.

Unfortunately, Krystal doesn’t help his case—which I think is almost entirely right, by the way—by often failing to demonstrate in detail how canonical writers are actually better than the minor writers who were forgotten ... But in these first two essays, he mostly lists writers and critics or turns to ex cathedra pronouncements—“War and Peace is objectively greater than The War of Words”—which are rarely very satisfying, however correct they may be.

When he does get more specific, things can get a little thorny. Is it true, for example, that great novels “rely more on accuracy of characterization than on the events that their characters react to”? I suppose it depends on what “rely more” and “accuracy” mean. Without further explanation, questions abound: Is Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment accurate? Does the novel rely more on characterization than events? How about in classical drama? The Iliad and The Odyssey? Pamela and Jane Eyre?

... Krystal notes in passing that some fiction that goes by the name “literary” isn’t, but he doesn’t explain why, give examples, or offer even a brief analysis of the failures of literary fiction.

I feel about the claim that some works just are great rather the way I feel about claims about objective reality: yes, I can go along with that, but how do you tell what's really great, and what's really real?  In the case of art, we're talking about value judgments rather than measurements, and those judgments must function within traditions.  They also change over time.  The canon, which both Mattix and Krystal admit has "sociological roots," changes.  Krystal says that those roots don't mean the aesthetic judgments are invalid, but how can you tell?  He invokes "a credible, if not monolithic, consensus among informed readers," which is plausible, except that informed readers disagree with each other and change their minds over time.  Numerous authors who used to be canonical aren't anymore.

Mattix's questions might well be supplemented by others about different artistic traditions, such as Chinese poetry.  Much if not most poetry doesn't translate well, and I still regret not having stuck with Russian long enough to read Pushkin in the original.  Mattix quotes Krystal's lament that today's poetry lacks "music."  Music is generally the first thing you lose in translation.  Which is true of prose too, if less so.

An interviewer asked Gore Vidal about his claim that, "when it comes to matters of prose and of fiction at this time and in this place, I am authority."  Whence, she inquired, comes this authority?

It is earned, mostly, but it is also a matter of temperament. The critic must know more than either writer or academic. He must also value experience and have a truth-telling nature. I think I have that. In their youth most people worry whether or not other people will like them. Not me. I had the choice of going under or surviving, and I survived by understanding (after the iron- if not the silver- had entered my soul) that it is I who am keeping score. What matters is what I think, not what others think of me; and I am willing to say what I think. That is the critical temperament. Edmund Wilson had it, but almost no one else now does, except for a few elderly Englishmen. 

I still agree with Vidal, but I'd add that he wasn't the only authority.  Others would disagree with him about the value of different writers, and I disagreed with him about some of those he recommended -- Italo Calvino, for example.  But still, the job of a critic is to persuade, by explaining why and how he or she thinks this particular work functions and succeeds (or fails).

One thing that seems increasingly important to me is that a critic, who reads widely and deeply, may forget that most people don't.  As Edmund White has said, "A canon is for people who don't like to read, people who want to know the bare minimum of titles they must consume in order to be considered polished, well rounded, civilized. Any real reader seeks the names of more and more books, not fewer and fewer."  And, I'd add, a real reader in this sense isn't all that concerned with greatness, though he or she won't be undiscriminating or non-judgmental either.  But most people aren't, and never will be, "real readers" in this sense.  It's up to teachers to try to guide as many of their students as they can toward a sense of what reading, or Literature with a capital L, has to offer.  (I wonder, though, how many teachers really know that themselves?)  If greatness is a thing, then it should be detectable by any reader, not declared ex cathedra.

It sounds as if Arthur Krystal lacks the capacity to do the critic's job, at least in Vidal's league.  Maybe I'll read some of his other work.  This Thing We Call Literature is only a little over a hundred pages long.