A response to Daniel Oppenheimer, Blake Smith, and John Pistelli on Dave Hickey's The Invisible Dragon: Essays on Beauty and Other Matters, edited by Gary Kornblau
Well worth the wait, Paul! And this I think does sum up my own view: "a perspective in which the beautiful and sublime are not distinct, but fused in one shocking, amoral force." Which, as you note, I somewhat ended up recruiting Hickey to malgre lui when I fused him with Lawrence, who, like Yeats in "Leda," textually becomes the women whose ravishment he describes or even advocates. (Currently reading, alongside A Vision, if I can be described as reading A Vision: The Plumed Serpent.)
This is delightfully a lot to think about! Probably better to discuss over email sometime, but reading this and seeing you and John's sometime discussions in comments elsewhere on Yeats make me want to look at some of the secondary literature (I love his poetry but don't know any of the scholarship), since he's so much in the background of the best author in American gay lit, Andrew Holleran...
Wow, Delicious essay. Such a pleasure to see someone focus on and complicate/criticize Hickey’s insouciant examination of the gender of works of art in the heretofore unexamined (after many hundreds of commentaries) third of his four essays on beauty. Thanks for that! Indeed, the forced nature of Hickey’s argument there—and elsewhere—was the primary reason I suggested that his original four essays on beauty are much better understood as a work of camp than a theoretical statement about beauty. It was actually written *against* theory, which bound and controlled contemporary art at the time. (In response, I cajoled and Dave conceived of the book during the nadir of the AIDS plague, when discussing beauty was in many ways an absurd thing to do. That subtext has been lost today.) I’m especially taken by your suggestion that what’s needed now—as then—may be a fusing of beauty and sublimity into a “shocking amoral force.” That simply must become someone’s manifesto. I’m anxiously waiting…
Well worth the wait, Paul! And this I think does sum up my own view: "a perspective in which the beautiful and sublime are not distinct, but fused in one shocking, amoral force." Which, as you note, I somewhat ended up recruiting Hickey to malgre lui when I fused him with Lawrence, who, like Yeats in "Leda," textually becomes the women whose ravishment he describes or even advocates. (Currently reading, alongside A Vision, if I can be described as reading A Vision: The Plumed Serpent.)
This is delightfully a lot to think about! Probably better to discuss over email sometime, but reading this and seeing you and John's sometime discussions in comments elsewhere on Yeats make me want to look at some of the secondary literature (I love his poetry but don't know any of the scholarship), since he's so much in the background of the best author in American gay lit, Andrew Holleran...
Wow, Delicious essay. Such a pleasure to see someone focus on and complicate/criticize Hickey’s insouciant examination of the gender of works of art in the heretofore unexamined (after many hundreds of commentaries) third of his four essays on beauty. Thanks for that! Indeed, the forced nature of Hickey’s argument there—and elsewhere—was the primary reason I suggested that his original four essays on beauty are much better understood as a work of camp than a theoretical statement about beauty. It was actually written *against* theory, which bound and controlled contemporary art at the time. (In response, I cajoled and Dave conceived of the book during the nadir of the AIDS plague, when discussing beauty was in many ways an absurd thing to do. That subtext has been lost today.) I’m especially taken by your suggestion that what’s needed now—as then—may be a fusing of beauty and sublimity into a “shocking amoral force.” That simply must become someone’s manifesto. I’m anxiously waiting…