Review of Catalin Avramescu's An Intellectual History of Cannibalism (The Weekend Australian, 25/07/2009)

Catalin Avramescu, An Intellectual History of Cannibalism
Translated by Alistair Ian Blyth
PUP; $55.95; 350pp

It’s a funny thing, this business of coincidence. On the very day that Catalin Avramescu’s An Intellectual History of Cannibalism was thrown against the side of my house by an overburdened postal worker, the website Arts and Letters Daily linked to a story in the London Observer, the subject of which was a recent discovery of a Neanderthal jawbone in southwest France. This jawbone, it appears, had been butchered by humans: cut marks consistent with those found on deer bones suggested the use of stone cutting tools. For Fernando Rozzi, of the National Centre for Scientific Research in Paris, the find was nothing short of momentous: ‘For years, people have tried to hide away from the evidence of cannibalism, but I think we have to accept it took place.’

Rozzi’s comments notwithstanding, the suggestion that early humans were cannibals is unlikely to cause any real apprehension in a public largely reconciled to the scientific view of life. In the not-too-distant past, however, the discovery of the butchered jawbone and the implications that flow from it would have had enormous consequences for our view of the world and of ourselves. But how did this shift in our thinking take place? How did the cannibal go from being a powerful figure of otherness to a scientific curiosity? In so far as this question is a philosophical one, Avramescu’s book attempts to answer it.

It is thus the story of a slow extinction, not of a species but of an idea. Avramescu’s cannibal is a theoretical creature, one that challenges and qualifies particular lines of philosophical enquiry. Once a widely recognised symbol of the boundaries of civilisation – one that throws the very idea of civilisation into relief – the cannibal is now, argues Avramescu, one of the ‘great forgotten figures of philosophy’. The image of man in a state of nature has ceased to serve as the philosophical backcloth against which modern man takes the stage, with the result that the cannibal has ceased to haunt the audience’s imagination.

An assistant professor of political science at the University of Bucharest, Avramescu shows how the cannibal makes frequent appearances in ancient literature, usually as a sort of quasi-monster of which the dog-headed cynocephalus is only the most exotic example. However, it was the discovery of the Americas and the subsequent explosion of travel literature – much of it highly sensationalised – that caused the cannibal firmly to enter the collective western imagination. It is easy to imagine the effect that this literature had on discussions of natural law, on which civil law was assumed by many to be morally and philosophically founded. If it is true that morality is innate, that our knowledge of moral norms is inborn, then how does one account for the cannibal? Is he subhuman, or merely a pervert? If neither, then what does that tell us about ourselves? Thus does the cannibal, argues Avramescu, expose the law of nature in two ways: ‘first of all negatively, as a deviation from it, and then positively, as the representative of it. The paradox is the royal road whereby the cannibal enters the history of philosophy.’

Needless to say, he also enters the history of theology. Indeed, he raises important questions about the nature of God Himself. Should the cannibal prove amenable to religion, ‘then this would obviously illustrate the general and benevolent will of God’. Should he prove unamenable to it then that would seem to suggest that God has earmarked some of his creations for sin. Of course, these issues did not exist in isolation from the world of events. They were employed in order to justify or attack the notion of natural slavery by which Europeans sought to subjugate and treat as chattel colonised peoples. Furthermore, the debate about cannibalism also served to throw certain teachings of official religion into relief, in particular the concept of transubstantiation by which the bread and wine of the Eucharist are said to become the body of Christ. Could it not be said, argued some, that Christians were in fact no better than cannibals?

Avramescu takes a thematic approach, the effect of which is to make his argument difficult, and at times impossible, to follow. Shuffling the pack of Hobbes, Locke, Montaigne, Rousseau and many others, he leaves the reader impressed but confused and, for that reason, on his guard against philosophical sleight-of-hand. Then there is the problem of his prose – a rather bland accompaniment to what is, or should be, a juicy subject. ‘Because the presence of the cannibal results in the material absence of other men, the anthropophagus plays the role of a negative operator in the political arithmetic of population.’ This is not a picturesque style. Indeed, it’s trying very hard not to be a style at all. After 350 pages of it I was ready to throw myself out of the window, thereby reducing the political arithmetic of population by precisely one.

Style is the physiognomy of the soul, and the style in this instance is only the reflection of a far more worrying aspect of this book: its indebtedness to postmodern theory. Clearly enamoured of Michel Foucault, An Intellectual History of Cannibalism is more than a little reminiscent of his pitiful Madness and Civilization. (Foucault begins with the Ship of Fools, Avramescu with the ‘raft of cannibals’.) Just as in the latter book Foucault seems to regret that insanity has gone from being a sign of otherness to something that can and should be cured, so in Avramescu’s book the pre-Enlightenment cannibal is seen as something beneficial to mankind’s ‘moral imagination’. The cannibal is ‘a subversive image of the subversion of the moral order’ and his disappearance from philosophical discourse is, for that reason, to be regretted. But the cannibal (as our author well knows) has also been invoked historically to justify horrendous crimes. That anthropophagy is now the preserve of scientists in southwest France and not of the moral imagination strikes me as a sign of progress.

Avramescu makes some interesting points in An Intellectual History of Cannibalism and his knowledge of philosophy is obviously profound. But his central idea that the world is worse off without the ‘radical alterity’ of the cannibal borders on the preposterous. I’m afraid that not even fava beans and a nice Chianti can induce me to swallow it.

Review of Margaret Drabble's The Pattern in the Carpet (The Weekend Australian, 11/07/2009)

Margaret Drabble
The Pattern in the Carpet: A Personal History with Jigsaws
Atlantic Books; $49.95; 350pp

‘It isn’t an art. It isn’t a hobby. It isn’t even a craft.’ Thus does Margaret Drabble describe the recreation of the jigsaw puzzler in her delightful book The Pattern in the Carpet, which could itself be negatively described as not an autobiography, not a history of jigsaw puzzles, and not a meditation on life, the universe and everything. I imagine it’s the kind of book that people who work in bookshops fear, not because it’s hard to sell but rather because it’s hard to find. Perhaps there should be a special section for authors who take a hobby or pastime as the starting point for personal reminiscence or philosophical speculation. ‘Hmm let’s see’, says your local bookseller, running his finger from right to left: ‘Haruki Murakami, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running. Simon Garfield, The Error World. Ah yes, here we are! Margaret Drabble, The Pattern in the Carpet. You’ll like it. It’s about …’

What is it about? Drabble never explains her title but I suspect it comes from Thomas Hardy, who wrote, in 1882,

As, in looking at a carpet, by following one colour a certain pattern is suggested, by following another colour, another; so in life the seer should watch that pattern among general things which his idiosyncrasy moves him to observe …

The ‘colour’ that Drabble’s ‘idiosyncrasy’ moves her to observe in this instance is her love of and interest in jigsaw puzzles. But – and this is Hardy’s point – in exploring that particular topic, a larger pattern suggests itself, a pattern combining childhood memories, England’s changing social landscape, questions of taste and authenticity, and a pervasive existential anxiety. In particular, it allows the author to explore her relationship with Phyllis Bloor, her mother’s younger and only sister, to whom the book is dedicated. (It was with Bloor, or Aunty Phyl, that Drabble began to do jigsaws in earnest.) And, of course, there’s the fact that Drabble, like Hardy, happens to be a novelist.

This contrast – one might almost say conflict – between the novelist and the jigsaw enthusiast lies at the heart of The Pattern in the Carpet. For there is, is there not, a sense in which jigsaws are antithetical to creativity. More often than not, a jigsaw puzzle is a disassembled work of art. The artist reinterprets reality; the puzzler merely reassembles the artist’s reinterpretation. Moreover, artists, like high-end novelists, tend to work from the inside out, not, like the puzzler, from the outside in. They begin, as Hardy implies, with the particular, discovering the limits of their subject as they go. By contrast, puzzlers begin with the borders and work to a predetermined design.

So what is a writer of literary fiction doing in such a neighbourhood? The first answer is the obvious one: she’s taking a break from literary fiction. Drabble likes doing jigsaw puzzles because, as she says, they can’t be done badly. By contrast, ‘The novel is formless and frameless’ and can be done very badly indeed. Needless to say, there’s an irony here which has to do with the fact that Drabble has sought to explore her jigsaw habit with the very tools from which it is an escape. But the fact withstands the irony. For Drabble, jigsaws are a vacation from the verbal.

The Pattern in the Carpet, Drabble tells us, was conceived as the sort of potted history that one might find in a museum gift shop. Having morphed into something altogether different, the book retains this historical element, though there is, I should say, nothing potted about it: the evolution of the jigsaw is explored in detail. One of Drabble’s principal findings is that this evolution had as much to do with education as it did with fun. The first jigsaws were dissected maps, composed not of interlocking pieces but rather of county or country-shaped chunks. Drawing on an impressive range of sources, Drabble traces the jigsaw’s development from an amusing educational tool to an incidentally educational amusement, proving, as she goes, that the jigsaw puzzle can be a source of aesthetic illumination. One would have to get awfully close to, say, Bruegel’s Children’s Games, and stare at it for a very long time, in order to gain the kind of insights that Drabble has clearly gained about it, simply by reassembling it one piece at a time.

About halfway through The Pattern in the Carpet, Drabble has a jigsaw epiphany. In London to visit the British Museum, a taxi driver convinces her to widen her search to include mosaics. The result is a starburst of associations. Tapestries, the restoration of churches, the physical remnants of the True Cross, the Earth’s tectonic plates, the Big Bang – all seem to fall within her brief. So too, indeed, do people themselves, composed as their characters are of experiences, which, if they could only be recovered, might allow us to piece them together rather as one pieces together a puzzle. To what extent, Drabble seems to be asking, can people be reconstituted in words?

It is here, of course, that Drabble’s enthusiasm for those herniated cardboard squares melds with her creative life. As I’ve said, the book is dedicated to Phyllis Bloor, the author’s aunt, and Drabble’s aim is to give this woman – a peculiar mix of stoicism and complaint – a literary afterlife. In so doing, she hopes to recover her own childhood, and, indeed, the vanished England against which it was, as it were, played out. ‘I see some of those childhood scenes at Bryn [Bloor’s house] in bright colours and clear blocks, like the large pieces of a child’s wooden jigsaw.’ Past times and pastime come together. Referring to the dissected maps from which the modern jigsaw derives, Drabble blends them beautifully, with a little help from A. E. Housman: ‘The “lost county” is a recurrent motif in jigsaw lore. It is the little land of lost content.’

That other great poet, Philip Larkin, wrote: ‘At death, you break up: the bits that were you / Start speeding away from each other for ever / With no one to see.’ It is one of high art’s highest aims to provide a stay against such oblivion. Perhaps this, and not the jigsaw puzzle, is what The Pattern in the Carpet is really about.

Review of Jeff Sparrow's Killing (Sydney Morning Herald, 11/07/2009)

Jeff Sparrow, Killing: Misadventures in Violence
MUP; $34.99; 288pp

Beginning with an incident that took place in May 2002, when a man deposited the mummified head of a Turkish soldier at a Victoria police station, Jeff Sparrow’s new book is a meditation on various kinds of lethal violence. Occurring at a time when the Anzac legend was beginning to re-assert itself and not long after the invasion of Afghanistan, the discovery of the ‘Gallipoli head’ was a grisly reminder of the horrors of war, but it also set the author thinking: what kind of mental realignment or moral rewiring is necessary in order for one man to kill another?

It is to the killing of animals that Sparrow turns initially in his search for clues as to the nature of homicide. First, he spends a night in the Bush shooting kangaroos with Demetri, a self-employed hunter in rural Queensland. Then he arranges for a special viewing of the killing floor of a local abattoir. Both experiences suggest that killing is easier in particular contexts. In the case of the roo-shoot, it is partly peer pressure – fear of letting Demetri down – that causes Sparrow to suppress his disgust, while the killing floor bears powerful witness to the importance of the division of labour in keeping the killer’s emotions in check. Specifically, it is the fact that cattle are stunned before their throats are cut that allows individual employees to maintain an emotional distance from the kill. The employee who administers the shock knows he is merely stunning the animal, while the employee who slits its throat is saved from feelings of ultimate ‘guilt’ by the fact that the beast is old cold when he does so.

This latter point proves fundamental to all manner of killing situations. For example, when Sparrow travels to the US in order to interview prison officers charged with executing prisoners on Death Row, he finds that the dividing up of tasks insulates individual functionaries from feelings of ultimate responsibility. Similarly, soldiers in the Second World War showed less reluctance to fire at the enemy when manning crewed weapons than when firing small arms. The lesson is simple: if you want men to kill, allow them to share the moral burden.

Sparrow goes about his research in a muddled and rather ad hoc way, a fact which, despite the gravity of the subject, gives his book considerable charm. Thus we find him spectacularly failing to make himself understood on the phone, missing meetings, losing his way, getting into the wrong side of a car and generally being a bit of a twit. He does, however, manage to elicit some very interesting points in the interviews, not the least of which is one prison officer’s delineation of the ‘executioner’s dilemma’: ‘If you going to take a life – a human life – but this person hasn’t done anything to you, well, if it don’t affect you, something’s wrong with you and you should get out. But if it do affect you, you should get out, too. You see?’

The major problem with Sparrow’s book is its unmistakable political bias. Sparrow does most of his research in the US and the reader could be forgiven for thinking that he sees officially sanctioned killing as a peculiarly American occurrence. Of course, the US is as good a laboratory as any in which to study the phenomenon, but that Sparrow’s motivation stems from his opposition to the war in Iraq is glaringly, blaringly, wearingly obvious. To be sure, he entirely ignores the violence perpetrated by the so-called insurgency, choosing to concentrate almost entirely on the violence committed by US troops (he interviews a number of soldiers). You don’t have to be a supporter of the war to regard this lacuna as the elephant in the room, or, to put it another way, the elephant’s head above the mantelpiece. After all, we do begin with a beheading.

Still, this book is often fascinating and its principal insights hard to contest. I only wish Sparrow had paid more attention to the phenomenon of religious violence, especially in the Islamic world. There was no prior stunning or division of labour when Abu Musab al-Zarqawi went about his murderous work.

Do Not Burn! (Australian Literary Review, July 2009)

Ruth Maier and Jan Erik Vold (ed.), Ruth Maier’s Diary: A Young Girl’s Life Under Nazism (Harvill Secker; $34.95; 413pp)

Shlomo Venezia, Inside the Gas Chambers: Eight Months in the Sonderkommando of Auschwitz (Polity; $52.95; 202pp)

Sydney Child Holocaust Survivors Group, The Words to Remember It: Memoirs of Child Holocaust Survivors (Scribe; $35; 346pp)

The relationship between anti-Semitism and conspiracy theory has always been a strong one. From The Protocols of the Elders of Zion to the current crop of lurid theories linking the Jews and Israel to the global economic meltdown, the Jews, it seems, are condemned to dwell in the most squalid ghettoes of the human imagination. Indeed, it seems only natural – though none the less offensive for that – that anti-Semites at home and abroad now make such a strenuous effort to remove from the historical record the genocide perpetrated by their ideological forebears, a genocide that was itself the climax of centuries of paranoia and credulity. For what is Holocaust ‘revisionism’ if not a gigantic conspiracy theory? The Holocaust deniers ask us to consider the logistical implausibility of putting an entire people to death. But what of the implausibility of making such a story up, of fabricating the evidence and enjoining everyone involved to silence? Precisely how much does one have to swallow in order not to swallow the Shoah?

The answer is, of course, ‘a lot’. One would, for example, have to ignore, explain away or present as lies many of the revelations set out in the three books under review. Taken together, they allow us to chart in terrible and meticulous detail the catastrophe that befell the Jews between 1933 and 1945. Needless to say, it’s a harrowing journey but one the world must continue to make if those other journeys – those real journeys from towns and cities all over Europe – are never again to be undertaken.

Ruth Maier made her journey in 1942 and did not live to tell the tale. She is one of what has been called the ‘absolute victims’ of the Holocaust and as such her story has a special resonance, a resonance that Ruth Maier’s Diary, sensitively and thoughtfully edited as it is, manages to amplify. Maier has been described as ‘Norway’s Anne Frank’ but such a comparison is inappropriate, not because either girl suffers by it but because it robs both of their individuality, and individuality, even more than human evil, is what these diaries exist to affirm. When Stalin said one death is a tragedy but a million deaths is merely a statistic, he was voicing a subjective truth at the expense of an objective one. The objective truth is that a million deaths are, at least, a million tragedies. Documents such as Ruth Maier’s diaries serve to remind the world of this fact, while underlining the lethal cynicism at the dark heart of Stalin’s dictum. When Uncle Joe said a million deaths, what he really meant was a million murders.

Maier was born in Austria on 10 November 1920. Consequently, her eighteenth birthday coincided with Kristallnacht, when the persecution of German Jews, hitherto largely social and economic, erupted into open violence. Sensing the worst, Maier fled to Norway, where she stayed until 1942. In that year she was arrested and deported to Poland. She died in Auschwitz on 1 December 1942. She was twenty-two.

‘Make yourself small’ was the advice often given by Jews to Jews in these terrible years. It’s the advice Maier herself gave to her sister, Judith. But if one thing emerges from the eight books of diaries and fifty or so letters collected in this volume, it’s that her own character precluded any such strategy. ‘I think I’m obsessed by greatness’, she wrote in 1934 (she was thirteen years old). Reading Maier, one has the sense of a great creative energy looking for something on which to alight. Sometimes it was politics that fed her hunger. More often it was love and sex. Possessed of an omnivorous sexuality (‘I’m hypnotised by anything in trousers’), Maier was rarely out of love, and never out of lust, with someone. Her father, Ludwig, died when she was twelve and the older men to whom she was drawn were clearly substitute father figures as well as objects of sexual desire. It is, however, to Gunvor Hofmo, the great Norwegian modernist poet, that Maier was most profoundly committed. They met in the women’s labour service in Norway in 1940 and the diaries leave little doubt in my mind that the ensuing relationship was a sexual one.

Maier was a gifted writer, and while it feels a little inappropriate to assess the diaries in literary terms, her writing was so fundamental to her character that not to mention their literary quality would be to radically misrepresent them. Just how accomplished a writer she was is very easy to demonstrate. For example, at one point she writes: ‘There’s no more touching or tragic sight than that of a ski descending a slope. All on its own.’ That second sentence – which isn’t strictly a sentence – is a little stroke of genius. And what kind of literary instinct is it that compares the sound of machine gun fire to sand being thrown against a window even as those guns draw nearer? The answer, I think, is a very great one, and we can add to the list of Nazi crimes the fact that they deprived us of it.

That other great diarist Victor Klemperer described the Jews as ‘a seismic people’: they feel the tremors of future catastrophes. In the 1930s and 1940s, the Jews stood at the epicentre of a human earthquake of unimaginable proportions. That Maier was able to register this event in so assured and intelligent a manner – her pen, I imagine, scratching frantically like the needle on a seismometer – makes this an indispensable document. Interestingly, as the diaries proceed it becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish their tone from that of the letters. No doubt this has to do with the fact that the diaries too became a letter – a letter to posterity. And not just a letter, but a warning as well. ‘Skal ikke brennes!’ she wrote on the front of the diary commencing 1940. ‘Skal ikke brennes!’: ‘Do not burn!’

Maier’s diaries were not burned. Her body, however, almost certainly was, along with those of countless others, and Shlomo Venezia is here to bear witness to this final act of desecration. Between April and October 1944 Venezia worked in the crematoria of Auschwitz, preparing his fellow Jews for the gas chambers and ‘mining’ the corpses for hair and gold before disposing of them in the crematorium ovens. Inside the Gas Chambers is his story, and a uniquely harrowing story it is too.

I say ‘uniquely harrowing’ and I use those words advisedly. For the Sonderkommando, or ‘special detachment’, for which Venezia volunteered, in the hope of a bit of extra bread and in ignorance of its precise function, was subject to frequent murderous purges as the Nazis tried to cover their tracks. Consequently, Venezia’s testimony is, according to Simone Veil, the fullest eyewitness account we have from a survivor of the Sonderkommando, and enormous care has been taken by the publishers to ensure that all the salient facts from this darkest of stories are brought to light. Augmented with historical notes from Marcello Pezzetti and Umberto Gentiloni, the book is in fact an interview conducted by Béatrice Prasquier, who is clearly mindful of the various canards put about by the holocaust deniers. Again, however, and as with Maier, the significance of Inside the Gas Chambers is only partly historical. For in bearing witness to the horrors of Auschwitz, Venezia is also bearing witness to a unique personality under appalling conditions.

Born into the Jewish-Italian community of Thessaloniki, Greece, in 1923, Venezia, like his compatriot Primo Levi, was a relatively late arrival in Auschwitz. Despite the late arrival, however, and unlike some of the Jews from the ghettoes, Venezia and his fellow deportees had little idea of what was in store for them. In volunteering for the Sonderkommando, Venezia ensured that his ignorance was short-lived. His first assignment was at Bunker 2. Ordered to remove dead bodies from the gas chamber, he watches as more experienced men lay the corpses out in ditches in such a way as to facilitate their cremation. ‘If the bodies were packed in too densely,’ he writes, ‘the air couldn’t get through and there was a risk that the fire would go out or fade in intensity.’ He continues:

The ditches sloped down, so that, as they burned, the bodies discharged a flow of human fat down the ditch to a corner where a sort of basin had been formed to collect it. When it looked as if the fire might go out, the men had to take some of that liquid fat from the basin, and throw it onto the fire to revive the flames.

Coming as it does at precisely the moment that Venezia becomes aware of his involvement in the greatest crime of the twentieth century, this passage may strike us as grimly symbolic, a metaphor for forced complicity. But of course we don’t need a metaphor in order for such a description to hit home. The facts are enough, and the facts are what matter. Perhaps that is what Adorno meant when he said that there can be no poetry after Auschwitz.

Poetry may have no place in Auschwitz, but there is a telling linguistic reversal on the dust jacket of Inside the Gas Chambers. ‘This is a unique participant’s account of everyday death and life’, it says. It may seem a little trite to say it, but that sense of existential inversion is what comes across most strongly in this book, more strongly than even Primo Levi’s greatest work can quite convey. Prasquier asks Venezia if he ever saw anyone emerge alive from the gas chambers of Auschwitz. Yes, he replies, there was one case: a baby girl insulated from the gas by the fact that she was suckling at her mother’s breast. When the guard discovered her, he shot her dead. Venezia relates this incident in detail and I’d describe it as unbearable, were it not for the fact that Venezia has been bearing it, and bearing witness to it, for over sixty years.

The problem of finding an appropriate language in which to register such experiences is, no doubt, a familiar one to the members of the Sydney Child Holocaust Survivors Group, whose individual testimonies go to make up The Words to Remember It. The majority of them, I have to say, put most professional writers to shame, perhaps because they have no need to absorb the principal ingredient of good writing, which is to have something you need to say. Here, that lesson grows naturally from the subject matter. For no subject matters more than this one, and that the people who know the subject best are quickly disappearing from the world make projects such as this one more urgent than ever.

That everyone has something extraordinary to impart is itself a kind of testimony to the murderous efficiency of Nazi Germany, to the fact that anyone who escaped its clutches was firmly in the minority. Here, for example, is Halina Robinson, who escaped the Warsaw Ghetto on foot even as it was being liquidated. And here is Mark Spigelman (cousin of Art Spiegelman), who spent the entire war dressed as a girl. (‘[I]n Poland, a boy could be easily identified as Jewish – you just pulled his pants down.’) Here, indeed, is Peter Rössler, who, when instructed to go ‘to the left’ by Dr Mengele, the ‘Angel of Death’, ignored him and followed his brother to the right – an act of instinctive (and unnoticed) defiance that almost certainly saved his life. (To be sent to the left on arrival at Auschwitz meant immediate extermination.)

In Vienna’s Judenplatz there is a Holocaust memorial – a ten-by-seven-metre block into which the ghostly simulacra of countless books has been indented. These are the books that were never written, the narratives that were never narrated. Now more than ever it is important to tell such stories as can still be told. In this regard, these books are a welcome, if deeply distressing, addition to the library.

Beauty Contest (Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, June 2009)

Susan Johnson, On Beauty; MUP; $19.99; 91pp
Roger Scruton, Beauty; OUP; $32.95; 221pp

The first thing to say about these two books is that both are very nice to look at. Of course, in any other context this would be a rather shallow observation, and even in this one may strike the reader as falling some way short of profound. But since the subject dealt with in these books is that quality or combination of qualities that goes under the nebulous heading of ‘beauty’, perhaps I may be forgiven for judging them, to some extent at least, by their covers.

I doubt Susan Johnson would forgive me for so doing. The thrust of her little book, On Beauty, is that beauty is a subjective quality, having less to do with surface appearances than with some deep connection between subject and object. Whether she manages to maintain this thrust, or follow it through to its logical conclusion, is a question I want to come to shortly. But for now let’s just say that Johnson’s argument essentially boils down to the view (which she maintains is a ‘complicated truth’ but to me sounds more like an uncomplicated truism) that ‘beauty is in the eye of the beholder’.

The meat, as it were, of Johnson’s essay is a contemplation of the human body. This is a very promising subject and Johnson tackles it with wit and honesty. ‘The disintegration of my features’, she writes, ‘is both fascinating and terrifying.’ Citing Susie Orbach’s Bodies, she suggests that our bodies have become a form of work, ‘something we manufacture through the gym, diets and, increasingly, surgery’. Johnson, by contrast, is determined to meet death ‘looking like my unmade self’. She is very funny about Madonna’s ‘new’ arms, ‘which do not look like they are the arms of a young woman but like the arms of a middle-aged woman who spends four hours a day in the gym’.

It is towards the end of Johnson’s book that her argument begins to show signs of stress. Citing John Carey’s What Good Are the Arts?, Johnson suggests that ‘there is no irrefutable way of declaring this is “beautiful” and that is not.’ In using Carey’s argument, however, she opens the door to the shortcomings of her own. For Johnson, unlike Carey, cannot quite rid herself of the idea that beauty is an intrinsic quality rather than something imposed from without, and this leads her into some philosophical confusion.

This confusion is apparent in her attitude towards art – in particular to Jake and Dino Chapman’s infamous exhibit Insult to Injury, which Carey regards as no less legitimate than the Goya etchings of which it is a despoilment. Johnson, by contrast, is furious with the Chapmans for vandalising Goya’s work. ‘I wanted to spit on them both,’ she writes, ‘transgressively, and quite unbeautifully.’ The problem is that her argument is couched in terms of beauty versus ugliness as opposed to simple decency. However, if Johnson was sincere in her belief that beauty is in the eye of the beholder there’d be no call for her moral outrage, since I could claim that the Chapmans’ actions have enhanced the beauty of Goya’s original. (Others have claimed precisely that.)

No stranger to moral outrage himself, the British philosopher Roger Scruton takes a more intellectually rigorous approach to the subject of beauty in his new book. Beauty, indeed, shows Scruton at his best. In a field where many specialists glory in ambiguity, Scruton is content to say one thing at a time and allow such ambiguities as arise to do so naturally, of their own accord. He’s a deep thinker but a very clear one.

For Scruton, the appreciation of beauty is deeply connected with human morality and involves what he calls ‘disinterested interest’. By this is meant the process by which (uniquely) rational human beings set themselves at a certain distance from a beautiful landscape or work of art in order thus to contemplate it. Again it is the human body, and specifically the depiction of it, that illustrates this thesis best. A pornographic photograph demands our interest, pure and simple, for nothing is more interested, in Scruton’s terms, than sexual desire. By contrast, Titian’s Venus of Urbino does not excite our interest in this way but demands that we regard it from a distance. ‘The Titian nude neither provokes nor excites, but retains a detached serenity – the serenity of a person, whose thoughts and desires are not ours but hers.’

This is grossly to oversimplify Scruton’s highly nuanced treatise. However, and even in this little snapshot, we can discern both the strength and the weakness of his argument. For in trying to connect aesthetic taste and morality, Scruton’s reasoning becomes slightly circular. This painting is beautiful because it is moral, or treats of immorality in a moral way, and we know what true morality is partly because it can be so rendered. Of course, Scruton never puts it this bluntly. But for me that is what his thesis comes down to, and for this reason I find it unconvincing.

Nevertheless, his book is stimulating, as indeed is Susan Johnson’s. Perhaps it was rather flippant of me to begin this review in the way I did. Then again, and as Oscar Wilde once said, only a superficial person refuses to judge by appearances.