Nathan Wainstein interviews Bryan Counter, author of Four Moments of Aesthetic Experience
Nathan Wainstein: At the outset of the book, you say that it ‘will approach aesthetic experience with a focus on life’. I find this interest in immediate or actual life, as opposed to the more curated encounters that we have with individual artworks, really fascinating. Do you think it’s important for scholarship to address actual life?
Bryan Counter: Absolutely. I think that’s something that we forget about often. It feels somewhat obvious to point it out, but everything that happens happens in life. We even see that appearing in a more nuanced way in each of the texts that I write about. This is part of why I think the pairings of the novels and the ‘four moments’ are interesting because on one hand, with what I call the positive moments, Proust and Cusk, the protagonists are people who are concerned with creating art, specifically writing. But even if you are concerned with creating art, you still have a life that not only partly encompasses that artistic impulse but also exceeds it. And that’s where those characters have these experiences: in their everyday lives. Whereas with Huysmans and McCarthy, the protagonists are more interested in curating their experiences and yet, even within that there’s this thing called life that kind of irrupts into their experiences and winds up giving them the experience they were looking for but in a way that they weren’t looking for it. I think life is always a useful thing to foreground.
Nathan Wainstein: The attempt to examine aesthetic experience outside of a simple subject–object relation is part of what motivates your attention to literature rather than pure philosophy. Can you explain why you don’t see the literary text strictly as an aesthetic object?
Bryan Counter: I think this is one of the paradoxes I try to explore throughout the book – and this is partly why the introduction is called ‘An Aesthetic Paradox’ rather than ‘The Aesthetic Paradox’, because there are so many. The paradox pertaining specifically to literature that I think about often is that its discursivity is quite different from philosophy’s discursivity. On one hand, we hand-pick and circumscribe works of literature and even particular scenes of literature; we take them out of their context and close read them. But at the same time, they can’t be examples in the way that we might consider a philosophical example. Because literature is narrative and discursive, because it’s telling a life, some lives, rather than just something about life, it can’t just be paraphrased. It needs to be read for what it is. Any attempt to use it as an example, while necessary, will always be compromised. A rose in a work of literature is different from the rose as Kant discusses it in the third Critique because it’s encountered singularly in a way that is mirrored in our reading experience. Reading is connected so closely to the everyday, and this everydayness is what I’m so intrigued by. When something happens to a character, no matter what it is, it happens to them in their daily life – as opposed to the eternity of philosophy, where examples seem to function outside of time. But this difference in itself is productive.
Nathan Wainstein: In the chapter on Proust, you make this beautiful point that our experience of a literary text is often just as much an experience of the atmosphere of reading or the environment of reading as it is of the text itself. In fact, when we think back on our memories of a text, we may actually simply remember our life when we were reading, not so much the content of the work. I wonder if this central point about the atmospheres of reading is underpinned or inspired by any of your own personal experiences of reading.
Bryan Counter: I’m glad you asked that, because now I have a chance to shout out to my mom, who’s a nurse. One winter when I was younger, I have this vivid memory that I think about all the time. I was reading Infinite Jest and there was this big snowstorm one weekend. And my mom worked these long 12-hour shifts at the hospital on Saturdays and Sundays. So one Saturday night I was up late reading, past midnight, listening to music in my bedroom. And every hour, or every so many pages, I would take a break, bundle up, put my boots on and go shovel our long driveway to make sure my mom could get out early the next morning for work. Of course, I have plenty of memories of reading that are like this – both Proust and Kant were big first-time reads that stuck in my mind. I wonder if it’s the memory that made me love them so much or if I remember them so vividly because of how much I love them. Anyway, I always turn to this Infinite Jest example because this night-time, winter, silent scene of reading both seems to signal my interest in literature and keeps showing up in the things I read: interestingly, there are some nice examples of this kind of reading specifically in the Huysmans and the Proust.
Nathan Wainstein: It’s striking how large a role paradox plays in the book: both in the title and the focus of the introduction, as well as the texture of the individual close readings, which are so often about these knotty tensions or contradictions, or indeed paradoxes. I was wondering about what relation you see between paradox and the aesthetic – if there is a kind of necessary or constitutive relation between paradox and the aesthetic.
Bryan Counter: I think there has to be, but maybe we can only address it when we are in the moment of critical attention, whether in writing or just in recollection. For example, there’s a moment in Proust that I write about where the narrator is re-narrating his experience to himself because he wants to convince himself that he’s having an aesthetic experience. On one hand, that is already a paradox, which he acknowledges a little bit later. He says: the fact that I was doing this, trying to convince myself I was having an aesthetic experience, kind of proves that there’s no way I was having an aesthetic experience. But there’s another level of the paradox. What happens later on during that same day is that he does have an aesthetic experience, despite the fact that he was trying to have an aesthetic experience. This is something that I tend to continually point out because I think it’s really important. I think this is what Kant means when he’s talking about aesthetic judgment. There are not certain objects in the world that will give us aesthetic experiences, just like there aren’t certain artworks. We can’t just make it happen. You can read Proust and be totally unmoved; you can read some piece of trash and have an amazing experience. You can go to the museum and not feel anything; you might say ‘I like that painting’. But saying ‘I like that painting’ is not an aesthetic experience. When you have an aesthetic experience, you can’t say anything, maybe. This is why I think Hannah Freed-Thall’s book Spoiled Distinctions is really good on this, where she talks about these moments in Proust where the narrator is just kind of exclaiming or babbling because he’s having an experience that’s on one hand so mundane given the materials of it, but on the other hand so intense that he can’t even say anything about it – he’s just moved. There are these interconnected paradoxes that just get deeper and deeper, and when we look at them critically, we begin to see how they work. It’s important to look at literature because it has this temporality that complicates our attempts to just pull out examples. We are forced to look at these passages that play out over periods of time.
Nathan Wainstein: Another valence of paradoxes that I had in mind reading the book is its centrality to New Criticism and the discipline of close reading, which has not always historically been the most harmonious partner to philosophical discussion or examination. I’m struck by the predominance of close reading in your analysis of these literary texts. These are intense, careful, detailed, illuminating close readings. I’m curious if you seek to establish a particular kind of relationship between philosophy and close reading.
Bryan Counter: That’s a great question. Personally, in my own academic or reading practice, I do think so. When we take things as a whole, with Marxist criticism for instance, we can understand the role of art and philosophy in society today. But as far as thinking about something like aesthetic experience, which I think has a timeless quality, I think there’s a limit to how culturally determined it is. Or, whatever extent it is culturally determined is unconscious, and by making it conscious, we can make some other point. But I don’t think it’s a point about aesthetic experience necessarily. So to say something about aesthetic experience, I do think that it is important to take things and bring them momentarily out of context through close reading. We try to sit in that moment of the text and draw something out of it. And this is the privilege that we have when we look backward at things. Only retrospectively in life can I sit there and look at my aesthetic experiences and think about them critically. At the moment, they are just passing by. It’s worth saying that oftentimes aesthetic experiences can really only be recognised after the fact or in memory. This is one of the beautiful things about Proust: some aspect of our experience is illuminated only when we are brought back to it later. And it’s not necessarily a straightforward kind of knowledge. It’s an experience. Huysmans has a proto-Proustian insight about this when he writes about travel, saying that it’s only after the fact that we get the things that stay with us.
Nathan Wainstein: Your last point about the necessary retroactive temporality of aesthetic experience, in certain cases, adds new poignancy to the concept of a ‘moment’. I know you mean this in the Kantian sense, but I think there’s an emphasis on time throughout many of your close readings that unlocks or recharges this temporal valence of the term as well. I think it’s a beautiful title: Four Moments of Aesthetic Experience. And I just wondered if these four are exhaustive, or if there are other moments that you might consider later or that one might use your book as a kind of framework to analyse separately.
Bryan Counter: Excellent question. No, I don’t think they’re exhaustive. Kant’s four moments (disinterest, universality, purposiveness without purpose, and necessity) are actually in pairs: disinterest and purposiveness without purpose; universality and necessity. And the more that I think about it – though I’m careful to mention that they’re not meant to be equivalent with his four moments, and not meant as determinations – I do think that if we take this into consideration, my four moments are also paired and might be considered as just different ways of getting at his four. So while they aren’t meant to be exhaustive by any means, I think they can be compared with Kant’s. They are certainly related. At the same time, I’ll be transparent in saying that my four moments are derived from reading literature but also (and mostly) reflecting on aesthetic experiences that I’ve had. They seem united in this way. They were not where I was looking for them; they surprised me; they were involuntary; they fell into place in a certain way that exceeds description. If there are more moments, they should be approached like I did here: in the context of one’s own personal experience and insights taken from reading. They’re not logically derived, in other words.