Proustian Moments and the Politics of Aesthetic Pleasure in Literary Fiction

In the afterword to his thematically controversial 1955 novel, Lolita, Vladimir Nobakov makes an assertion equally as, or even more contentious than the novel itself. Widely regarded as one of the most misinterpreted novels in the Western canon, Lolita opens the door to discussions on language, deception and aesthetic appreciation. The Russo-American writer observes: “There are gentle souls who would pronounce Lolita meaningless because it does not teach anything. I am neither a reader nor writer of didactic fiction (…) Lolita has no moral in tow. For me a work of fiction exists only insofar as it affords me what I shall bluntly call aesthetic bliss, that is a sense of being somehow, somewhere, connected with other states of being where art (curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy) is the norm.” (Nabokov, Lolita, 314).Within this context, Nobokov’s advocacy of aesthetic autonomy and readerly pleasure renders his novel part of a larger project; a project both anticipatory of criticism and yet somewhat immune to it. An exploration of Marcel Proust’s 1913 novel Swann’s Way - In Search of Lost Time demonstrates an antecedent sympathy of Nabokov’s assertion. Both literary works can be seen to enact a politics of aesthetic pleasure— a value system privileging perception, memory, and beauty over moral instruction. To situate Nabokov’s autotelic notion of art within a wider frame of aesthetic philosophy is to question whether literary fiction should serve ethics or remain self-sufficient. Drawing on a unique confluence of continental and analytic philosophies, the purpose of this essay will be to assess this question in detail, demonstrating how these nuanced literary sites explore and challenge the power imparted on aestheticism and the possibility of literary pleasure.

Aesthetic Judgement and Disinterested Liking

Who is to say that a particular string of sentences can’t evoke the same sensibilities as a perfume you wore during a summer holiday years ago, or perhaps a particular sweet you ate in childhood but had long since forgotten. The sensory manifolds and involuntary memory resulting from readerly appreciation speaks to an untraceable synthesis of one’s imagination and empirical understanding of the world. The prominent enlightenment philosopher, David Hume emphasised the intrinsic subjectivity of beauty. Rather than residing in an inherent property, a person’s perception of beauty is primarily rooted in individual taste. Judgement therefore is refined by the reader’s experience, sentiments and imagination. The sensual texture of Nabokov and Proust’s prose relies on a reception that is shaped by exactly that; a reception both contemplative and perceptive. The idea of literary pleasure being contingent upon cultivated sensibility rather than an objective moral value is widely recognised in aesthetic theory. A notable example, and arguably the most commonly expressed principle in contemporary aesthetics, comes from Immanuel Kant’s theory of “disinterested liking”. The theory of disinterested liking postulates that a liking for the beautiful is disinterested insofar as the satisfaction of one’s desire does not depend on the existence of something that pleases according to a law or rule.

Attending his theory of disinterested liking is Kant’s broader claim thataesthetic judgements are not determinate but reflective. As he writes, “only liking involved in taste for the beautiful is disinterested and free, since we are not compelled to give our approval by any interest, whether of sense or of reason.” (Kant, 210, Critique of Aesthetic Judgement). A determinative judgement is conceptual from the outset and judges an object based on an already established empirical abstraction. In contrast, a reflective judgement takes the object without any pre-established properties and makes attempts to add an appropriate concept. Using this metric, a determinative judgement would go as follows: this is a lamp. A reflective judgement adds to this object and the concept (lamp) already attending it, by making the additional judgement that: this is a beautiful lamp. In this example, the ascription of beauty cannot be proven, precisely because it is disinterested. A reflective aesthetic judgement isn’t adulterated by any ulterior desire, utility or moral value in the normal sense. Instead, this kind of judgement is the product of pleasurable contemplation induced by the object itself. This disinterestedness is what makes aesthetic judgement autonomous: it cannot be reduced to desire or ordinary concepts. This belief is at the core of aestheticism itself which holds that art neither requires justification nor ought to serve a didactic function.

The Function of Language

However, aesthetic pleasure is neither purely sovereign nor purely subjective but mediated by language itself. Indeed, one can’t talk about aesthetics within literary fiction without the exact thing enacting the aesthetic pleasure in the first place. Language, the associations we make to particular words and their semantic coherence, is the cornerstone of literary pleasure. Ludwig Wittgenstein viewed language as being a fundamentally socially objective structure which is, in its essence, historically generated. Paradoxically, Kant posits that aesthetic pleasure derived from language is shaped by a priori categories of cognition. While Kant argues that the structure of experience depends on the mind, Wittgenstein rejects this isolated conception in favour of a communal approach to language. However, an idealist application of aesthetics married with an analytic framework of language can help situate aesthetic pleasure as both an independent and universal experience; herein navigating the politics of aesthetic pleasure within a framework hospitable to both analytic and continental philosophy. Wittgenstein’s analytic approach to language is in stark contrast to Kant’s practice of continental philosophy. While the former is generally systematic and formal, the latter is usually more interpretive and interdisciplinary. However, these differing approaches to language can help crystallize the value system placed on literary pleasure and meaning. While there is an apparent difference between linguistic meaning and literary pleasure, both are collateral to the written word. Applying them within the context of Wittgenstein’s philosophy of language affords a more comprehensive geography of aesthetic reception and contemplation.

The function of language in Proust’s series Swann’s Way is particularly striking in its treatment of prose. Critical engagement with the text attracts polarizing views of mundanity and bliss. With a style that is viewed as either tiringly ornate or richly depictive, the text carries the reader through a multifaceted and nuanced treatment of memory and time. Blurring the lines between meaning and sensation, the novel routinely demonstrates how memory is awakened not by abstract ideas but by the textures of language, rhythm and vivid description. In doing so, the text exemplifies how literary pleasure is not merely something added to meaning after the fact, but something generated through the very movement of style itself. Proust’s narrator, upon tasting a madeleine dipped in lime-blossom tea, is finally struck with long dormant memories of his childhood in provincial Combray. The famous madeleine sequence illustrates how a sensory experience can, without one’s active consciousness, provoke an involuntary recollection or reminiscence. In Wittgensteinian terms, the madeleine scene signifies how private nostalgia is a phenomenon that can only gain meaning through socially inherited language and forms of life. When the narrator recalls, “But at the very instant when the mouthful of tea mixed with cake crumbs touched my palate, I quivered, attentive to the extraordinary thing that was happening in me” (Proust, In Search of Lost Time, 47), he shares the inexplicable essence of the sensation— first appearing in isolation of sense, eluding stable description. The narrator’s pleasurable ambivalence and attempts to name the sensation dramatises a classic Wittgensteinian theme: sense isn’t afforded in private sentiment but rather provided in the mastery of public criteria for what counts as memory, recognition, and return (Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 1958). Wittgenstein would argue that Proust’s experience can’t be considered “nostalgia” until it’s inserted into a network of words, names and narratives reflective of our shared grammar of time and place. When the narrator lingers over place-names like “Combray” or “Guermantes,” the words themselves become charged with feeling. Proust’s achievement is that he turns this social life of language into an aesthetic experience, demonstrating how a shared vocabulary can create a fertile fiction and welcome readerly pleasure.

The Proustian Moment and Universal Sentimentalism

In his analysis of aesthetics, Kant discerns a distinctive feature in the manner humans perceive and articulate aesthetic judgements: individuals not only respond to beauty as a matter of personal taste, but also make an ascription of beauty as though it were universally applicable and somehow binding for all. This phenomenon exposes how aesthetic appreciation is often incommensurable with intellectual abstraction. Simultaneously, this sense of universal sentimentalism supports Wittgenstein’s communal approach to language as shared, structural and context-dependent. In believing that aesthetic appreciation is a disinterested judgement, free from desire or utility, Kant allows for a universal understanding of beauty and draws a deep connection to our shared human condition. A disinterested judgement of Proust and Nabokov’s works would contend that a raw and organic appreciation of their respective prose must neglect moral adjudication and first and foremost engage in aesthetic contemplation. In this way, Kant’s theory of disinterested liking is not to be misunderstood as cognitive triviality. On the contrary, the approach may be passive and involuntary but for this same reason it’s also deeply mediative.

The Proustian moment is the poster child for involuntary memory. It can be understood as the aforementioned synthesis of memories; our own internal archive. In Swann’s Way, Proust’s narrator attempts to put the moment into expression: “All those memories added to one another now formed a single mass, but one could still distinguish between them— between the oldest, and those that were more recent, born of a perfume, and then those that were only memories belonging to another person from whom I had learned them— if not fissures, if not true faults, at least that veining, that variegation of colouring, which in certain marbles, reveal differences in origin, in age, in ‘formation’ (Proust, In Search of Lost Time, 186). Capturing the sensory experience, the narrator’s mind tries to grapple with what should be a single recollection but morphs into a palimpsest of past impressions. Thus, revealing that the nostalgia of the Proustian moment is amorphous and almost painfully so. One can’t situate the pleasure of the Proustian moment within a metric of one’s private memories. Similarly, the reading mind can’t always discern what it is in particular that makes a string of words evoke pleasure. For this precise reason, a disinterested liking for Proust and Nabokov’s prose exalts visceral pleasure over intellectual import. As Kant suggests, “For if someone likes something and is conscious that he himself does so without any interest, then he cannot help judging that it must contain a basis for being liked that holds for everyone” (Kant, Critique of Aesthetic Judgement- Part 1, 53-54). The reading mind thus accepts the evocative sorcery some sentences can cast, even when their source evades explanation. In Proust’s Swann’s Way, one is transported to Paris, rural France, summer resort towns and 20th century salons. In Lolita, Nabokov takes the reader on a road trip through rural America, under a blistering hot sun and dust gathering on the dashboard. When a judgement moved by pleasure or displeasure is accorded to literature it is devoid of all interest; it’s a free judgement of disinterested liking. Yet, as Kant’s formulation implies, a judgement moved by pleasure is also a claim to subjective universalism, as though what moves one reader ought, in some sense, to be shareable by all.

Hermeneutic Indifference and Unethical Aesthetics

In both novels, the Kantian frame of aesthetic appraisal is similarily adhered to and challenged. In Lolita in particular, unethical aesthetics take the front seat, forcing the reader to come to terms with the novel’s unreliable narrator. Although Kant’s theory of disinterested liking is amenable to Nabokov’s embrace of aesthetic bliss and autotelism, the author does not advocate hermeneutic indifference— understood here as a complete passivity in interpretation. Rather, while aesthetic bliss is best facilitated by an autotelic reception free from personal interest, Nabokov avoids prescribing a complete critical disengagement from the ethical dimensions of the text. Autotelism, the belief that a work of art possesses autonomy as an end in itself— independent of moral or didactic purposes, supports the pursuit of aesthetic bliss. The invocation of involuntary memory and moments of aesthetic arrest in Lolita and Swann’s Way epitomises this form of appreciation free from utility and morality. However, as much as Proust and Nabokov are sensible of aestheticism, they also demonstrate a weariness of its distortion. Elements of the aesthetic attitude, which privileges perception over judgement; pleasurable contemplation over criticism, are respected and yet reproached. Swann’s aesthetic pleasure is inseparable from erotic fixation, and Humbert Humbert’s aestheticism is inseparable from coercion and self-exculpation. As such, both authors can be seen to expose a less than wholesome deployment of aestheticism. Their respective narrators abuse language, and the literary pleasure to be derived from it. The eloquence and artistry both these prominent authors put into their prose manipulates language and abstracts the reader from the subject matter— erotic, violent and ethically unstable motives of the characters. Through their lyricism and evocative first-person narration, Proust and Nabokov seduce the reader into complicity. Yet beneath the surface of both texts lies a subversive design. Proust and Nabokov demonstrate how they are both devoted to aestheticism and wary of its distortions— an ambivalence the reader is encouraged to share.

Through their prose, Proust and Nabokov are shedding light on the tenuous and morally taxing ties between aestheticism and hedonism in literary tradition. Nabokov’s use of an unreliable narrator is particularly significant in this regard. Humbert Humbert reflects a self-consciousness in the novel, exposing the limitations of a purely-pleasure based approach to literature. Despite promoting literary pleasure and aesthetic bliss, Nabokov deploys his unreliable narrator, Humbert Humbert, as a means of exaggerating and abusing aestheticism. In doing so, he affords a necessary example of how literary beauty can serve unwholesome aesthetics while still eliciting readerly pleasure. From the very beginning of the novel, the opening lines function as both the narrator’s confession and the author’s caution: “You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style” (Nabokov, Lolita, 9). Herein, Humbert Humbert’s confession can also be interpreted, within the lens of aesthetic theory, as Nabokov’s self-reflexive authorial intrusion allows him to criticise and distance himself from the Bohemian art-for-art’s sake doctrine, which divorces art from all social values and utilitarian purposes. Within the context of aesthetic literary theory, Lolita emerges as a work that anticipates criticism while resisting reduction to it.. Ultimately, Nabokov calls for an appreciation of aesthetic autonomy without endorsing hermeneutic indifference. He invites aesthetic bliss while also demanding critical awareness, especially when that pleasure begins to blur the boundaries between morality and aestheticism. Invoking both fascination and disgust, Lolita is a masterclass in how a fancy prose style can seduce the reader into forgetting the unsettling nature of the story. The manipulation of language in Lolita is such that it causes the reader to set aside the perversity of the plotline in favour of literary pleasure; revealing the substance of the novel as one critic aptly understood it, “Lolita is comedy, subversive yet divine” (Martin Ames, Observer).

The profundity of Proust and Nabokov’s respective literary works lies in its aesthetic treatment of the prosaic narrative. The power of Lolita and Swann’s Way doesn’t so much reside in its engagement of controversial themes or a polarizing literary style but in its special ability to evoke memory and elicit aesthetic bliss. To isolate moral judgement from aesthetic experience, therefore, is not to deny ethics but to preserve art’s autonomy and its ability to generate complex emotional perception. In this light, aestheticism in literary fiction encourages the consumption of art in a manner unadulterated by anything other than the immediate perception. Advocating for an absence of extraneous engagement with the text in favour of an autotelic embrace of the work. Aestheticism invites an organic reception of the text and a deeper appreciation for the opacities of the prose style and its evocative power to please.