Some Notes on Beauty

Elaine Scarry’s "On Beauty and Being Just"; also: a class on writing sex

Jacob Jordaens, Odysseus and Nausicaa (1630-35)

A few quick notes:

• In January, I’m offering an online craft class on writing sex. I think I last offered this online seminar in 2021; since then I’ve continued thinking about the subject, not least through two graduate seminars at NYU last year. We’ll ask some big questions about the how and why of sex writing, and then see how theory compares to practice in close readings of texts by D.H. Lawrence, Kathy Acker, James Baldwin, Raven Leilani, Miranda July, and several others. I’d love to have you join us. Two two-hour sessions, recorded for those who can’t attend synchronously. Limited scholarships are available on a rolling basis (apply soon). Full info and registration here.

• I’m very happy to see Small Rain on Best Books of 2024 lists from The New Yorker, Publishers Weekly, The New Statesman (where it was chosen by Eimear McBride), Kirkus, and Vulture (where Isle McElroy wrote a beautiful comment for the book).

• For The Guardian, Eva Wiseman wrote a beautiful column about Small Rain and her own experiences in the hospital. “It’s gorgeous what Greenwell does in this book, his narrator monitoring himself being monitored, his mind and memory slipping in and out of the clean small room with its rotating cast of medical staff, slipping away to his lover, his father, his poetry, a storm. It captures the boredom, humiliation and anxiety of life in a body in a hospital with such precision and grace I dreamed myself back into those rooms most nights that I read it.”

• Speaking of The Guardian, I was very happy to contribute to their “Books of My Life” series. Click through to read about my love for Harold and the Purple Crayon, Mercedes Lackey, and Saint Augustine, among others.

• A couple of weeks ago, I had the chance to talk with my dear friend Mark Armijo McKnight at the Whitney Museum, where Mark’s show Decreation is up through the first week of January. If you weren’t able to join us, you can now watch that conversation on YouTube. It was a very happy way of ending the Small Rain tour.

• And one more conversation that I enjoyed very much, with

  Jordan Kisner
  for
  The Thresholds Letter
  podcast. You can listen to that here.

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Toward the end of the old essay I shared in my last newsletter, “On Beauty and Distance”—my first “creative” or “aesthetic” prose, which set me on the path to writing fiction—I mention a book that I responded to so negatively in graduate school that I threw it across the room. The book isn’t named in the essay, but it’s identifiable: several people reached out in the intervening weeks to ask if their hunches were right. It was still new-ish when I first read it, but had already established itself as a point of reference; it has remained beloved since. The copy I recently read, which I bought from Prairie Lights in 2020, is from the twenty-second printing. (I’m always buying new copies of books that were part of an earlier library, which I dissolved—mostly by giving books away to students—before moving to Bulgaria.)

This feels like a build-up to a big reveal, which isn’t my intention: the book is Elaine Scarry’s On Beauty and Being Just, a little essay in aesthetic theory that has had an outsized impact, at least in certain circles, over the past twenty-five years. I’ve been meaning to reread it for a while; I finally got around to it on the invitation of my friend Mark, who was teaching it to his graduate students. I wondered if I would hate it as much as I hated it back in graduate school, when I often hated books, something that doesn’t happen so much these days. I’ve mellowed with the decades, maybe, and I’m less certain of my own responses. If something feels wrong to me its wrongness doesn’t become the Urgent Event it was in graduate school, I don’t feel the same pressure to argue back. In general, after a childhood in an attorney’s house and a very argumentative adolescence and young adulthood, I’ve mostly lost my taste for argument, at least of the aggressive kind, the kind with winners and losers; I don’t think it results in very interesting thinking. (Finding an alternative to adversarial thinking is the subject of another book I want to reread, this one because I loved it: Roland Barthes’ The Neutral, which I first read in the lead-up to the 2016 election and often think of longingly.)

Alas, I did still hate Scarry’s essay, and I found myself arguing with it a lot—maybe just atavistically, because I was reading it for a graduate seminar. Whatever the case, I’m going to share my arguments here. The book seems to me fundamentally unserious; I don’t understand why people have treated it so seriously. (If you’re one of the many people who love it, please share your reasons in the comments. I would like to be convinced!) I didn’t throw it across the room this time, but I did feel the impulse, and at the same moment. When I wrote “On Beauty and Distance,” it had been seven or eight years since I had read Scarry’s book, and I didn’t have easy (or any) access to a copy in Sofia. I was relieved, returning to it, to find that my account of that particular passage was more or less right.

Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just (Princeton University Press, 1999)

It comes early in the book, in the part titled, “On Beauty and Being Wrong” (more on wrongness in a bit), and it concerns the passage in Book 6 of The Odyssey where Odysseus, shipwrecked and washed up on shore, meets Nausicaa. Well, “meets” is a way a putting it. Nausicaa is among other young women washing clothes by the sea. (How young they are is conveyed by the childish games they play while they wait for the clothes to dry.) Odysseus, who has been sleeping in the woods, wakes to their human voices; as he rushes, naked, from the trees, he’s compared to a hungry mountain lion scenting prey, “attacking the flocks in the strongly-built fold.” The young women scatter; only Nausicaa stands firm. Scarry doesn’t mention this, but there’s nothing natural about her courage; it has been placed there by Athena, scheming to get Odysseus the aid of Nausicaa’s parents, the king and queen of Phaeacia.

Scarry doesn’t mention the fact that Nausicaa’s courage is divinely inspired, and so exceptional, because she needs to universalize the episode; she wants to read it as revealing “the structure of perception at the moment one stands in the presence of beauty.” That “structure of perception”—the language evokes phenomenology, Husserl’s “transcendental” abstraction—involves at once a sense of the beautiful being unprecedented (“I have never laid eyes on anyone like you,” Odysseus says) and an urge to search for precedents (she reminds him of a young palm tree he once saw at Delos). This doesn’t seem exactly true to me—I think lots of beauty has precedents, and is beautiful in part for what it recalls—but whatever.

Scarry then abandons the “structure of perception” conceit to take hold of the vehicle of Odysseus’s simile, that palm tree (which serves, she claims, to “clarify and verify” Nausicaa’s beauty), claiming that it reveals “three key features of beauty”—not our experience of beauty but beauty itself, as a phenomenon. Those features are: 1) Beauty is sacred; 2) Beauty is unprecedented (that this feature is discussed in the context of a precedent, the palm tree Nausicaa reminds Odysseus of, is unproblematic, Scarry claims, because “the feature of unprecedentedness stays stable across the two objects.” Ok.); and 3) Beauty is lifesaving. How the palm tree is lifesaving is not exactly clear; Nausicaa is lifesaving because Odysseus needs her help.

Again, this doesn’t seem true to me, or it’s so vague as to be meaningless (what does “sacred” mean?), but let’s keep going. What made me throw the book across the room, all those years ago, even though I’m not a book-thrower, was the use to which Scarry puts these claims, the way she makes Homer’s episode an allegory for the experience of beauty. Having set aside the idea of a “structure of perception,” she picks it back up:

Here again Homer recreates the structure of a perception that occurs whenever one sees something beautiful; it is as though one has suddenly been washed up onto a merciful beach: all unease, aggression, indifference, suddenly drop back behind one, like a surf that has for a moment lost its capacity to harm.

Scarry presents this without argument, merely as a fact, one confirmed by Homer’s account. And my initial rejection of this isn’t an argument, either, but an instinct: this is simply not my experience of beauty. Beauty often, maybe almost always, makes me uneasy; much of the art I find most beautiful feels possessed of a supreme indifference to my response; aggression seems to me a not-uncommon response to beautiful things. I don’t quarrel with Scarry’s account as a possible experience of beauty, or a personal one; but it is presented here as universal, axiomatic: that’s precisely the force given it by the phrase “structure of perception.”

Still, I think I made it one more paragraph before hurling the book away (“as if at once to protect myself from it and to do it some entirely unscholarly injury,” I wrote in my essay). Scarry extends and intensifies her claim, making it not just about the perception of beauty, our response to it, but instead a property of the beautiful thing itself, which, she claims, welcomes us:

At the moment one comes into the presence of something beautiful, it greets you. It lifts away from the neutral background as though coming forward to welcome you—as though the object were designed to “fit” your perception. In its etymology, “welcome” means that one comes with the well-wishes or consent of the person or thing already standing on that ground. It is as though the welcoming thing has entered into, and consented to, your being in its midst. Your arrival seems contractual, not just something you want, but something the world you are now joining wants.

This is just wild. First, what is she describing here as the beautiful? Something “designed to ‘fit’” our perception? If we’re talking about beautiful art, I never feel that, or almost never: always (almost always) the beautiful in art presents a challenge, something that demands an alteration in me: it buzzes just below my habitual frequencies, or swamps the usual channels of perception. I have to come close, or step back. I do not feel, certainly not always, that I am joining a world that desires to enter into a contract with me. I don’t want to deny that some art offers that feeling of welcome, including some great art; but in no world I can imagine is this built into the experience of beauty in art.

And Scarry isn’t just talking about art, which is where the problems get more intense. Throughout the book, as explicitly here (“the person or thing”), Scarry insists that her arguments apply across the field of the beautiful—whether we’re talking about made things or natural things, including those natural things that are people. I don’t think this makes sense; it seems to me that our response to beauty in art is in crucial respects decidedly distinct from our response to beauty in people. I’ve long argued that the erotic is properly an aspect of aesthetic experience—something acknowledged in many of our stories around art: think of Pygmalion, or of the wonderful scene in A Fairly Honourable Defeat where Simon and Axel fall in love via Greek statue. Even so, while art might turn us on, our response to this, speaking generally, is not to want to fuck it, or even (that Murdoch statue aside) to touch it. And so aesthetic response to art is not morally perilous in the way that erotic response to a person can be, it isn’t (even if only potentially) a threat to another’s sovereignty. To borrow an adjective from the catechism, aesthetic response is not so easily disordered as erotic response; it doesn’t have such potentially disastrous consequences.

With this in mind, surely Scarry’s claims are outrageous. A beautiful person, a beautiful land: built into our encounters with these things is a welcome? Built into the encounter is the assurance of the “well-wishes or consent” of the beautiful? I wonder whether Scarry has revisited these claims (she may well have) in the wake of #MeToo; even when I first encountered the book, sometime in the early 2000s, this argument felt to me queasily assimilable to a justification for sexual misconduct of all kinds, or at least for the presumption that underlies such conduct.

Of course I don’t think Scarry intended anything of the sort; I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that the possibility it might be read in this way didn’t occur to her. If that’s so, it’s because throughout the book her arguments depend on what seem to me like a radically unwarranted optimism about human nature—or at least an unwarranted confidence in her own ability to assign certain responses to beauty structural, normative weight and consign others to the eccentric or perverse.

Scarry acknowledges that beauty might, in certain instances, in certain people, have negative effects. One effect of beauty might be “a contagion of imitation, as when a legion of people begin to style themselves after a particular movie starlet,” a peculiarly anodyne description of the ravages of American beauty culture, say. But Scarry waves this away, as “just an imperfect version of a deeply beneficent momentum toward replication.” So too with “material cupidity and possessiveness.” “If someone wishes all the Gallé vases of the world to sit on his own windowsills, it is just a miseducated version of the typically generous-hearted impulse” built into the “structure of perception” of beauty.

Really? Is acquisitiveness (along with all it implies: aggression, status, hierarchy) so easily dismissed from the response to beauty? Only, I think, if we imagine it as easily dismissed from the human apparatus altogether. Again, Scarry makes no arguments here, just assertions; I see no reason to buy them. At times her off-hand claims about human beings make me catch my breath—in horror or hilarity, as the case may be. Consider this:

Persons, too, though often beautiful, cannot be said to exist for the sake of being beautiful, even if we must grant that at the moment the parents conceive a child, each wishes the beauty of the beloved, already in the world, to enter the world a second time.

It’s a nice idea—but how could one ever take this seriously as a claim about life as it is lived? I would love to live in such a world, in which every child was conceived between beloveds rapt with each other’s beauty. But that world is not ours, and Scarry’s coercive rhetoric (“even if we must grant”) cannot make it so.

Things don’t get any better as Scarry’s argument expands toward the ethical and finally the political. Scarry positions herself as defending beauty against attacks it came under in the 1990s, maybe particularly what she calls the problem of “lateral disregard”—the claim, still very much with us, that beauty takes up a finite resource, our attention or our care, and so impedes our ability to attend to things with greater, generally ethical, claims on that resource. Beauty is a distraction from justice, such arguments go; the care we extend to beautiful objects and persons reduces the care we have to extend to everything else. I think there is a strong version of this argument that is genuinely difficult to answer, but only weaker versions make an appearance in Scarry’s book. Scarry’s initial rejoinders seem reasonable enough: maybe attention isn’t finite in quite the way we imagine; maybe attention to beauty in art, say, can train us toward greater attentiveness when we turn from art to the world.

Fair enough. But then Scarry makes stronger claims, and again they seem to me, just prima facie, absurd. When she says, “attention to any one thing normally seems to heighten, rather than diminish, the acuity with which one sees the next,” I might trot along beside her contentedly enough were it not for that “normally.” If attention to beauty primes us for more or better attentiveness to things other than the beautiful, I think that happens as the result of a process of education and discipline; it doesn’t just happen “normally.” But Scarry takes it to be so axiomatic that to presume the opposite is just silly. Consider her counterfactual:

If I was about to place a vase on a wide safe ledge and then, finding one more beautiful, I consigned the first vase to a careless spot, we might have a case. But it seems more likely that the concern demanded by the perfect vase or god or poem introduced me to a standard of care that I then began to extend to more ordinary objects.

Anyone even slightly acquainted with reality will immediately see that Scarry’s counterfactual is in fact just the settled state of things. In my house growing up, my mother kept regular plates in the cupboard, where we kids could get our grubby hands on them; the fine dishes were in a special display case, with locked glass doors. (I’m not sure they were ever used.) We build secure, climate-controlled environments for art; we call them museums. Regular objects remain in their “careless spots.”

But this idea: that beauty just naturally makes us not only more attentive to non-beautiful things, but also more careful of them, is one of the pillars of Scarry’s claim that beauty makes us just. I’m skipping over a particularly curious step in Scarry’s argument, which is that the care we extend toward beautiful things is demanded by a weird kind of animism, a way we have of conferring “lifelikeness” to (nonliving) beautiful objects, like paintings and vases.[1] Do we? In any event, she asserts that beauty is “a reciprocal, life-granting pact,” and that beautiful objects then pressure us “toward extending the same standard laterally. This pressure toward the distributional is an unusual feature of beautiful persons or things.” Again, this is just bizarre on its face, especially when it is applied to persons:

… one’s daily unmindfulness of the aliveness of others is temporarily interrupted in the presence of a beautiful person, alerting us to the requirements placed on us by the aliveness of all persons … What has been raised is not the level of aliveness, which is already absolute, but one’s own access to the already existing level of aliveness … Beauty is, then, a compact, or contract between the beautiful being (a person or thing) and the perceiver.

Literally nothing in my experience of the world suggests that beauty works this way. Anyone who has attended a social gathering as an unbeautiful person might question the suggestion that the presence of beautiful people has trickle-down benefits in this way.

The other pillar of Scarry’s argument about the moral force of beauty is even weaker, I think; it depends on argumentation that strikes me as little more than wishful or magical thinking. She begins from an idea with a long pedigree: that the beautiful and the just resemble each other in important respects. Symmetry, for instance. Scarry argues that symmetry is, if not a universal, at least a frequent feature of the beautiful; she connects this to Rawls’s definition of justice, in which symmetry plays a crucial role. Here’s a summary of her claims, which she calls “almost self-evident”:

beautiful things give rise to the notion of distribution, to a lifesaving reciprocity, to fairness not just in the sense of loveliness of aspect but in the sense of “a symmetry of everyone’s relation to one another.”

Beauty and justice are similes for each other, Scarry argues, and so can reinforce each other. And the beautiful, in being concretely available to our senses, in being something we can embodiedly experience, is immediately available to us in a way that justice is not, and is also immediately pleasurable; and so beauty can point us toward, can entice us toward, justice, which is at once more difficult to perceive and offers less immediate satisfaction: “For the symmetry, equality, and self-sameness of the sky are present to the senses, whereas the symmetry, equality, and self-sameness of the just social arrangements are not.”

Scarry is echoing Iris Murdoch echoing Plato here; I don’t think these claims are ludicrous. The idea that the beautiful is an aspect of the good, and perhaps the only aspect of the good to which we are drawn instinctively, untutoredly, is more or less compelling, I think. But, as Socrates knew, there’s nothing that naturally leads from responsiveness to beauty to a commitment to justice; quite the contrary. Beauty can perfectly well lead us astray; the erotic impulse toward beauty can lead as easily (more easily) to tyranny as to philosophy. What hope we have of training eros toward the good depends on a very strenuous education; and the peril of that process, the fragility of it, is written into the drama of Plato’s great dialogues on love and beauty: the Symposium ends with Alcibiades, Socrates’s brilliant, impetuous student, bursting in, all disastrous unbridled eros; Phaedrus—subject of Socrates’s most beautiful teaching on the erotic—will flee Athens after profaning the Eleusinian mysteries.

But Scarry doesn’t just claim that beauty and justice resemble each other; she makes a kind of magical fetish of analogy:

In the absence of its counterpart, one term of an analogy actively calls out for its missing fellow; it presses on us to bring its counterpart into existence, acts as a lever in the direction of justice. An analogy is inert and at rest only if both terms are present in the world; when one term is absent, the other becomes an active conspirator for the exile’s return.

This is just silly, a drastic overstatement of beauty’s force; it makes beauty not just an enticement to embark on a project of justice but an active protagonist in somehow magically calling justice into being. It’s a cute idea, that analogous terms call each other into existence; but why in the world should we believe it? Again, even the most glancing, the most superficial survey of real-world evidence scuttles Scarry’s claims. Think of the great artistic flourishings: was Renaissance Italy a society bent toward “a symmetry of everyone’s relation to one another”? Was the Athens of the great tragedians? (It was a slave state, as was ancient Egypt.) These were societies obsessed, in their different ways, with beauty; such an obsession is perfectly compatible with a commitment to injustice.

None of this is to suggest that beauty is morally inert; I don’t think it is. But Scarry, trying to defend beauty against attack, flattens it out, and so makes it uninteresting. The very tradition Scarry draws on refutes her claims. Beauty offers us welcome, beauty is lifesaving? Wild to make such a claim based on Odysseus’s encounter with Nausicaa and not discuss the Sirens—whose rapturous singing welcomed sailors to their deaths. To look at aesthetic and philosophical traditions of thinking about beauty is to find radical ambivalence. Think of the vanitas motif; think of La belle dame sans merci or Lamia. The teaching of such texts is that beauty is not safe, and neither are we. Reading Scarry’s claims that beauty inspires protectiveness, I kept thinking of the Bower of Bliss episode in Spenser’s Faerie Queene, the beautiful garden Sir Guyon destroys. (It’s the bower of the witch Acrasia.) Stephen Greenblatt reads this episode as an allegory of colonial conquest, brilliantly juxtaposing Spenser’s poem with accounts of colonial exploration. It gives a particularly bitter taste to Scarry’s claim about the contract between beauty and perceiver: “Your arrival seems contractual, not just something you want, but something the world you are now joining wants.”

The most interesting element of Scarry’s argument comes early in the book, in the idea that beauty at once offers us “a sense of conviction,” “a wordless certainty,” but also acquaints us with an experience of error. Our aesthetic judgments change all the time: we discover beauty in art we have resisted; things that seemed beautiful to us in adolescence sometimes repulse us later in life. This leads to my favorite part of the book, a series of charmingly naïve sketches (presumably made by Scarry herself) of Matisse paintings; it serves as a meditation on the beauty of palm trees, which Scarry was long in realizing. Scarry’s strongest claim hints at the possibility of what might have been a very different book:

It is not that a poem or a painting or a palm tree or a person is “true,” but rather that it ignites the desire for truth by giving us, with an electric brightness shared by almost no other uninvited, freely arriving perceptual event, the experience of conviction and the experience, as well, of error.

I wish the book developed these themes more deeply; I wish it made a shuttling between conviction and error central to its understanding of beauty and its place in our moral lives. Instead Scarry shuts down what seems to me a very useful tension, landing on a questionable claim for certainty: “The beautiful, almost without any effort of our own, acquaints us with the mental event of conviction, and so pleasurable a mental state is this that ever afterwards one is willing to labor, struggle, wrestle with the world to locate enduring sources of conviction—to locate what is true.” This passes too blithely over “labor, struggle, wrestle,” I think, to land on a too easy relationship between “conviction” and “what is true.” It is not at all clear to me what the relationship is between conviction and justice; it seems to me that conviction is very often morally suspect.

There’s more to say, especially about Scarry’s very superficial reading of the tradition of aesthetic / ethical thinking from which she draws, and in important respects her betrayal of that tradition. At one particularly dispiriting moment, she offers a sonic analysis of the first sentence of the Declaration of Independence—an analysis not charmingly but embarrassingly naïve—claiming that “its sensory features reinforce the availability of the principle to perception.” I nearly threw the book across the room again when this becomes a claim that sound is a guarantee of truth:

The sentence scans. The cadence of its opening sequence of monosyllables shifts suddenly forward to the polysyllabic ‘self-evident,’ the rapidity of completion adrenalizing the line, as though performing its own claim (it sounds self-verifying).

It sounds self-verifying? In a book that gestures so often to Plato and the tradition of thought descending from him (Weil and Murdoch are the book’s modern heroes), it is wild not to acknowledge that such a claim must make Socrates—so distrustful of rhetoric, of the ability of language, precisely through “its sensory features,” to manipulate and mislead us—spin in his grave.

Again, I’m sympathetic to Scarry’s desire to defend beauty against attack. I felt that impulse myself talking with those graduate students several weeks ago, some of whom were hostile to the idea of beauty, sometimes along the lines Scarry lamented in writing her book. I support her attempt to place beauty, our response to beauty, our desire to make beauty, at the heart of human meaning. But for beauty to claim a place at the heart of human meaning it has to be as complex as that meaning, as morally ample and indeterminate as we ourselves are. Instead, Scarry everywhere seeks to neutralize that complexity.

It is not a good book.

As always, thank you for reading—

G.

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[1] “…the fact that something is perceived as beautiful is bound up with an urge to protect it, or act on its behalf, in a way that appears to be tied up with the perception of its lifelikeness.”