Beauty in Literature . . . Or, When Google and Art Collide

Such a boring vision of beauty.

Today I asked Google what was the most beautiful book ever written.  My first page (after dismissing titles of books called The Most Beautiful Book) was a collection of best designed covers.  All of which are lovely, in their own way (and none of which are particularly artistic).  But that left my question unresolved.

It’s been a question haunting me for a little while, ever since finishing The Pure and the Impure by the French writer Colette.  Initially, I was attracted to the book because of a quote I saw on Tumblr:

As that word “pure” fell from her lips, I heard the trembling of the plaintive “u,” the icy limpidity of the “r,” and the sound aroused nothing in me but the need to hear against its unique resonance, its echo of a drop that trickles out, breaks off, and falls somewhere with a plash.  The word “pure” has never revealed an intelligible meaning to me.  I can only use the word to quench an optical thirst for purity in the transparencies that evoke it—in bubbles, in a volume of water, and in the imaginary latitudes entrenched, beyond reach, at the very center of a dense crystal.

The book is semi-autobiographical, and told in brief, barely interrelated portraits.  It begins in an opium den: “The door that opened to me on the top floor of a new building gave access to a big, glass-roofed studio, as vast as a covered market.”  Here, Colette the narrator watches with a keenly descriptive eye as men smoke away their cares.  The details are deeply intimate, but Colette takes care never to lapse into a the kind of voluptuousness of American modernism.  Instead, her descriptions are tactile, sensual, warm without quite revealing the source of that heat: “Just then a woman’s voice was raised in song, a furry, sweet, yet husky voice that had the qualities of a hard and thick-skinned velvet peach.  We were all so charmed that we took care not to applaud or even to murmur our praise.”

The book is filled with descriptions like this, and she somehow manages to keep them restrained, even as they gallop toward hyperbole.  She is fixed on the immediate.  Her subject is erotic love, between men and women, between two women, between men. 

A book like hers could easily transgress literature and topple into erotica, but her restraint allows one to examine the deeply intimate emotions surrounding love and sex, like an eclipse by the moon will allow one to look into the atmosphere of a star.

Since reading The Pure and the Impure, I’ve been on a sort of quest.  I wanted to replicate the feeling I had reading Colette’s book for the first time.  I read some of her other works, Chéri, Gigi, a collection of her short stories and journalism.  The early stuff especially was gaudy, filled with youthful exuberance.  But there were hints of the later beauty that would emerge with the temperance of age.

Expanding my quest, I read Zola’s Nana, Robert Musil’s Young Torless and The Man Without Qualities.  For a time, mistakenly, I thought the secret was in Colette’s examination of eros, so I read The Story of O, Melissa P.’s (rather surly) One Hundred Strokes of the Brush before Bed, Anais Nin, and The Sexual Life of Catherine M.  These were bawdy and unreflective.  Mechanical.  The dowager antecedents of E.L. James.

That led me to a fundamental question I’d never thought to ask.  What is beautiful in literature?  Or rather, where do I find beauty in writing? 

It cannot be simply the writing, though that is important, as well.  Kafka writes beautifully “Country Doctor” and some of his longer works.  I’ve known Updike and Beckett—even Joyce—to occassionally glimmer. David Foster Wallace, even at his most erudite, was never beautiful—his was the absent-minded poetry of an engineer, who saw beauty in parts that fit well together. 

What all of these authors lack, to my mind (for surely you or others will protest) are living characters.  Men and women who inhabit the pages, who seem to have an inner life and a multiplicty of loves and hatreds that don’t quite fit the story.  Characters who are self-contradictory and spiteful.  Characters who genuinely love.  Characters who infest a world and whose bonds with other characters form a unique web that in the real world we would interpret as community. 

These are women like the Wife of Bath, Hero, and Lady MacBeth; men like Jack Falstaff, and Iago, and Hal.  The narrator of Dante’s Comedy was as pernicious as he was pious, who equally despised the men who had slighted him and (ever a devout heretic) worshipped Béatrice before Yahweh. 

Where, I wondered, are characters as richly self-deluded as Milton’s over-reaching Satan?  Why was it so difficult to create worlds inhabited by creatures as heart-achingly rendered as in Dickens?  In the modern world, it would be impossible to place pride besides prejudice.

The question I posed to Google was as much an existential question as a literary one.  Socrates believed (so we’re told) that the good life was composed of beauty, justice, and truth in equal measure. 

So when I asked my question, I was looking for a book that was just: It allowed the real heartbreak and joy of the world their versimillitude.  I also demanded from the book truth: a narrator and author who keenly saw the order of the world, for good and ill. And beauty: a book which harmonizes wit and poetry into a graceful whole.

I haven't found the most beautiful book, yet.  Like the perfect french fry, and the perfect ginger ale, it eludes me.  But I'll keep looking, keep judging according to simple measurements: how truthful was it, how just was it, how good was it?  I'll let you know what I find.

In the meantime, down below in the comments, let me know what the most beautiful book you ever read was.