a radical aesthetics?

reflections on intermezzo and sally rooney at the southbank

Beware: Contains very mild spoilers for Intermezzo. Although it is not really a review at all, more a rambling and slightly feverish series of reflections on the novel and Rooney’s 25th September in-conversation at the Southbank.

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At a dinner party the other week B. and I started an impassioned argument about truth and beauty. It started — as it has before — with a discussion of the Barbican. He cannot abide it, thinks Brutalism is ugly. I, a Londoner by-birth, albeit a non-committal one constantly in the process of running away, feel both sentimentally and politically defensive towards it. Is Brutalism beautiful? For him, no, it is soulless, grey, and depressing as London rain. For me, almost, in its honesty, its solidity, the sheer assertiveness of it, particularly as it sprung up in the aftermath of the Second World War. And — in the case of the Barbican, at least — how it seeks to provide life-affirming features such as gardens and community arts venues amidst the urban sprawl. (Not that I think all Brutalist architecture is beautiful, or well-maintained, to be clear).

The crux of the argument was whether beauty is solely a product of context, or something else entirely, and therefore, what the relationship is between beauty, truth, and the good. Is beauty objective or subjective? Is beauty always good, or vice versa? Can we escape the emotionally and historically freighted aesthetics of the past, and can we ever separate the aesthetic and the political? Indeed, should we? At some point we drunkenly roped another couple into the conversation and shifted to the spiritual, whether what is beautiful comes from God, or the universe perhaps. I think at some point I confidently stated that The Answer Is The Soul. The answer to what? All of Western philosophy? I can’t remember. It was just classic aperitif conversation, you know. More people should invite me round for dinner. I’m fun.

These questions — what is beauty? where can we find it in our modern society, in our dying world? how does it relate to God, and the good? — are also questions which preoccupy the novelist Sally Rooney, whose eagerly awaited fourth novel, Intermezzo, released last week. There’s been plenty of discourse about Rooney on Substack and Twitter in the run-up to Intermezzo’s release and subsequently, some of it balanced and thought-provoking, some of it less-so.¹ Prior to this week, I had told myself I wouldn’t write about Rooney, just as I’d previously told myself that I wouldn’t write about Brat Summer, and just like I’ve more-or-less censored the name ‘Joan Didion’ from my online repertoire. I knew that Substack would be swamped with hot takes and cold takes and lazily lukewarm takes, and I didn’t really want to be involved. I had my one literary discourse moment in the sun earlier this year, and it left me burnt. And after all, I’d written about Rooney before. My first post on Twenty-First Century Demoniac — the reason I set up this blog at all — was written partially in response to a viral article claiming that Rooney’s ‘waif girl’ heroines were unrealistic at best and harmful at worst, an assertion which has returned in force post-Intermezzo.²

So I wasn’t going to write about the new Sally Rooney. I was going to read the book, and digest the book in my own time and my own space, and then put it on my shelf and move-on, avoiding wading into any discourse to protect my inner peace.

That, however, was before I read Intermezzo, and before I went to hear the author herself in-conversation with Merve Emre at the Southbank Centre, her only on-stage interview in the UK to celebrate the new novel. If you were also at the event — which, knowing my mutuals, you probably were — and heard someone sneeze six times in a row from the back of the auditorium, that was my contribution to proceedings. So waif girl of me, is all I’m saying (joke it’s a joke). The Southbank conversation was full of wisdom and insight, from Rooney’s powerful opening acknowledgement of the ongoing genocide in Palestine, to her remarks on Wittgenstein’s theory of language, analysis of sibling relationships, and wry regret that the title ‘Normal People’ has robbed her of a vital part of her everyday lexicon. I spent the whole event wishing I’d bought a notebook to scribble down nuggets of wisdom to ponder the next morning, particularly during the audience questions period, when the conversation turned to the very topics I’d been discussing over dinner just a few days before.

Asked how we can find or create beauty in a world filled with ugliness and suffering, Rooney responded that as well as striving for a radical politics, she believes we also ought to imagine a radical aesthetics, one which acts to fuel and fire those politics.³ This radical aesthetics should seek and imagine new forms of beauty. For her, such an aesthetics must be anti-capitalist, opposed to the abhorrent excess of production and consumption in which we are constantly engaged, with its superfluity of disposable consumer goods. The constantly multiplying stuff which is drowning us and killing the planet. As is evident in her novels (and as her critics constantly stress), beauty is an important value for Rooney, but she is clearly striving towards beauty of a sort which looks beyond our current socioeconomic constraints, our inherited values, and our presumed ideals. A beauty which is new and different and radical, which is valued and taken seriously. This is the politicisation of aesthetics, not the aestheticisation of politics, as Emre noted, in reference to Walter Benjamin’s theory that fascism transforms politics into an aesthetic spectacle, feeding the masses style and narrative rather than substantive change.⁴

I felt myself nodding along. Did Rooney’s suggestion provide, if not a clarifying solution, then a guiding light in the darkness of the puzzle we’d been arguing over at dinner? That the beautiful and the political can coexist in some way, both as independent, important entities and yet entangled, like people in love? That art can be meaningful not just for its political argument, nor just as art for arts sake?

The characters in Intermezzo are also working through this puzzle; methodically, in the case of chess-player Ivan, and with an element of free-wheeling philosophical chaos for Peter. For Ivan, God is a kind of aesthetic system which provides order, meaning, and perhaps purpose:

Listening to certain music, or looking at art. Even playing chess, although that might sound weird. It’s like the order is so deep, and it’s so beautiful, I feel there must be something underneath it all. And at other times, I think it’s just chaos, and there’s nothing….But when I experience that sense of beauty, it does make me believe in God, Like there’s a meaning behind everything.

This aesthetic experience of order-in-chaos, of deep-meaning, of mundane beauty coupled with a sudden sense of spirituality, also surfaces in moments of sexuality, which Rooney often describes as animalistic, intuitive, operating on a level below, or perhaps above, the imposition of human language and convention. Perhaps Rooney’s sex scenes are saccharine, as her critics suggest, (does anyone ever really come at the exact same time?) but on one level they operate as a metaphor for the kind of mutual connection and meaning which can emerge out of private, animal intimacy, but which grows to incorporate the whole world. There’s something of Benjamin’s ‘aura’ here, and Freud’s ‘oceanic feeling’, though I am also reminded of John Donne’s The Ecstasy, with its image of two souls suspended and intermingling above a pair of static bodies:

This ecstasy doth unperplex,

         We said, and tell us what we love;

We see by this it was not sex,

         We see we saw not what did move;

But as all several souls contain

         Mixture of things, they know not what,

Love these mix'd souls doth mix again

         And makes both one, each this and that.

Or as Ivan observes a few pages later: ‘In nature, he thinks, there is no such thing as ugliness. It’s like he tried to tell Margaret in the car, beauty belongs to God, and ugliness to human beings, though he couldn’t explain himself very well'.’ Nature (slash God, slash the universe) is neither producer or consumer, product nor profit. The Good, not a good. Rooney’s engagement with Christianity is ‘less-often remarked on, but far more prevalent’ than her Marxism, as Ryan Ruby suggests in his NLR review of Intermezzo, and her’s is ultimately a spiritual worldview. At the Southbank, Rooney suggested that Christianity but not capitalism can be rehabilitated, albeit not Christianity in its oppressive, institutionalised forms. All religious traditions still have something to teach us, she noted, and they can provide solace and connection, whereas capitalism today is so inherently destructive. I agree. Beauty, for me, is that which nourishes the human soul. Though perhaps a similar definition could be applied to faith. (The Answer Is The Soul).

So where can we seek it, this radical aesthetics? As a novelist, it is Rooney’s role to open up questions, rather than provide clear answers. But for her, I think, this radical beauty — this beauty which is good — emerges from connection, intimacy, what she and Emre discussed as ‘mutuality’. As Ivan says to Margaret, he experiences the beauty he calls God in art, music, chess, but also ‘when I’m with you’. These sexual experiences lead him to place more value on the body, as well as the brain, realising that ‘he should be humbled not only by his brain, but by his body also, a complex and beautiful system for the sustenance of life itself’. In the case of his brother Peter, a chaotic romantic trajectory ultimately leads to a more balanced, integrated valuation of both the intellectual and sensual aspects of lived experience.

In Rooney’s novels it is obstacles or disruptions to the state of mutuality, through miscommunication or missed connection, which drive the drama. That miscommunication is so often a product of social and economic factors — most notably in Normal People, where Connell and Marianne’s efforts to communicate their feelings for one another constantly stumble across their class divide, but also between Naomi and Peter in Intermezzo — is one of the strongest recurring aspects of her work, as well as the place where her political principles find expression.

Mutual entanglements — messy, unclear, at times transgressive (Intermezzo features a three-way romance and two notable age gaps, as well as a splintered sibling relationship) — are the source of pressure and pleasure for their players. At times, it seems inconceivable that another loved and cherished being can cause one such pain, at others, the demands exerted by the relationships themselves and the contexts in which they operate become near unbearable. And yet the different pressures people exert on one another are a source of beauty through intimacy, which turns a micro lens on the macro and has the capacity to expand our understandings of ourselves and one another. ‘The demands of other people do not dissolve; they only multiply’, thinks Margaret, considering the social ostracisation she fears she will face as a result of her relationship with the younger Ivan. ‘More and more complex, more difficult. Which is another way, she thinks, of saying: more life, more and more of life.’

This is one of my favourite lines in the novel, as well as the quote which features on Intermezzo’s back cover, at least in the UK. It speaks to what I read as Rooney’s philosophy, and reflects mine too, that what is beautiful, what nourishes the soul, is born of love, and that love is a kind of work we do. Some sort of intermingling of ‘mix’d souls’ in the creative process — something which, incidentally, Artificial Intelligence can never replicate. Margaret’s line about ‘the demands of other people’ reminds me also of Simone Weil’s argument in The Need For Roots that obligations, not rights, are the cornerstone of human relations. Weil’s is an argument I’ve been thinking about a lot lately, particularly as it pertains to environmentalism in a time of climate collapse and social fragmentation. Whether we can continue on as we have, immured in the cult of individuality and constant accumulation of profit, denying the common threads which bind us to each other and the planet. In Rooney’s impassioned call for a radical aesthetics of beauty is an acknowledgements of these tangled threads — the demands, the obligations — rather than the clear cut certainty of individual rights and self-assertion. At least, that’s how I read it.

Climate collapse hovers in the background of Intermezzo, more so than in Rooney’s previous work, though it is still very firmly in the background.⁵ Particularly, there is a hinted-at push and pull between beauty and environmental principles. Peter and Ivan are both horrified by the profligate consumption habits of their mother and her new family; Ivan equally by his brother’s show of wealth, which also manifests in the expensive material gifts Peter buys Naomi. The novel begins with Peter’s condemnation of the ugly suit Ivan wears to their father’s funeral, which he imagines purchased ‘in some little damp-smelling second hand shop for the local hospice, paid in cash, rode it home on his bicycle crumped in a reusable plastic bag’. A cruel portrayal, but yes, later on we learn that Ivan shops only second hand for environmental reasons, and will not wear synthetic fabrics (I read the latter as an expression of his presumed neuroatypicality). Is there a kind of beauty in this ugliness? Whose definition of beauty is the correct one? Can we reconcile our lofty ideals with the fact that in reality pursuing ‘beauty’ so often equals the avaricious acquisition of material stuff, and that such stuff has proved so environmentally catastrophic?

Towards the end of the novel there is a callback to Susan Sontag which made me laugh, slipped into the sort of quick-talking, quasi-mocking intellectual debate which is common both in Rooney’s novels and my own relationships:

Aesthetic nullity of contemporary political movements in general. Related to, or just coterminous with, the almost instantaneous corporate capture of emergent visual styles. Everything beautiful immediately recycled as advertising. Sense that nothing can mean anything anymore, aesthetically. The freedom of that, or not. The necessity of an ecological aesthetics, or not. We need an erotics of environmentalism. Stupidly making each other laugh.

An erotics of environmentalism, an ecological aesthetics. Suggestive; a tantalising thread to follow. What might that look like? ‘Beauty and brains’, Peter and Ivan are described as early in the novel. Or perhaps, body and mind. Can we reconcile the two? Rooney’s ending hints at it, but little is certain. What is required is perhaps an escape from the socioeconomic workhouse of capitalism, in which new styles are subject to ‘corporate capture’ and art is ‘recycled as advertising’, or replaced by content, or slop. When you mix too many paint colours together, you always end up with greige. This is how I, at least, see the outcomes of late-stage consumer capitalism. Greige slop. Rooney maybe too: that ‘aesthetic nullity’, the fear that ‘nothing can mean anything anymore, aesthetically’. No beauty anywhere. No radicalism, either.

Do her characters escape their oppressive social prison? On one level no. Rooney may be a Marxist writer, but she is not a writer of revolution, at least not the sort which occurs on a vast scale, which dismantles the fundamentals of the social system and tries to put them back together in a new configuration. And why should she be? She is a writer of love stories. And yet on another level, yes they do, through the experience of love, the realisation of the demands that love places upon them, and the commitment to pursue that love even when it leads them outside of ‘normality’.

I suppose this is the crucible where praise and critique of Rooney’s work intermingle. Praise, because her intricately drawn relationships reveal the influence of socioeconomic factors on our understandings of sex, romance, and intimacy (in Intermezzo familial as well as platonic and romantic), and suggest that perhaps we can form new relational modes under and against capitalism. Critique, because ultimately the novels still operate on the level of the heterosexual couple and the family unit, reaffirming rather than dismantling those oppressive structures.

And then of course there is the elephant in the room, or perhaps the cat in the branded tote-bag: ‘everything beautiful immediately recycled as advertising’. Advertising — like an Intermezzo tote bag or a Beautiful World, Where Are You bucket hat, or a knock-off gold chain hung around the neck of a Paul Mesc— sorry, Connell Waldron wannabe. I think Rooney is profoundly uncomfortable with her status as a cult icon and an object of consumption. It certainly seemed that way, when she repeatedly criticised the commodification of the book-object at the Southbank, a wry note in her voice. I have to wonder, though, how she will escape this bind. Perhaps the only way out, as she seemed to joke with Emre, is by announcing her own retirement.

Rooney is just one novelist, and yet she is often called the voice of a generation, a heavy burden placed upon her shoulders. Does she succeed at furthering a radical aesthetics in her work? Has she broken the novel and put it back together, or not? Has her fame enabled or hindered her? I can’t answer those questions, just as Rooney can’t possibly fulfil all the competing expectations flung at her by her fans, critics, and the media. One person can’t, at least not by themselves. Beautiful things, beautiful ideas, beautiful worlds, these are created and searched for and puzzled over together, not alone. Isn’t that, after everything, the point?

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If you made it this far, I’d love to hear what you think of Intermezzo, or Rooney’s other work. Let me know in the comments and notes!

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1. If you want to read a decent anti-Rooney piece, I recommend Becca Rothfield’s essay on Normal People. For something more up to date, I found the objections raised by Ann Manov on the TLS Podcast compelling, if perhaps a little ungenerous. And for more balanced / positive criticism, I recommend Ryan Ruby in the NLR, or the excellent essays by

Grace Byron

and

Sam J

.

2. I am always pro examining the body politics of a given media and I do think there’s value in interrogating Sally Rooney in this manner — see the Manov-TLS conversation above for one. However, I think this particular discourse, at least this time around, is tired and rests on a misreading of Rooney’s novels which mistakes character for author, observation for romanticisation.

3. To note, I am paraphrasing heavily due to the aforementioned lack of notebook. If I am horribly misrepresenting this, I am sorry!

4. Listening to Rooney and Emre, I was reminded not just of Benjamin, but of Kandinsky’s view that art is a crucial part of our ‘spiritual life…a complicated but definite and easily definable movement forwards and upwards’, about which I wrote some months ago. For Kandinsky, art ‘springs…from contemporary feeling, but is at the same time not only echo and mirror of it, but also has a deep and powerful prophetic strength’.

5. I know she has faced criticism for this sublimation of the political into the personal, but in a sense, isn’t that the difference between writing fiction and theory / politics / philosophy, especially fiction which is so in tune with the history of the novel? Coming into Intermezzo directly off the back of finishing Anna Karenina certainly drove this home for me at least!