[This transcript is automatically generated and may contain errors.]

Robert Carson: When you enjoy looking at something, what is the source of pleasure? Is it the object itself? Your judgment of its quality or the experience of looking at it? And doesn't make any difference if this experience is caused by an artistic object or by an everyday occurrence. These are the kinds of questions posed in this episode of the Virtual Jewel Box featuring Bryan Counter, author of the new book, four Moments of Aesthetic Experience Reading Huysmans. Proust McCarthy and Cusk. Joining him is Nathan Wainstein from the English Department here at Utah.

Nathan Wainstein: So Bryan, it's incredibly exciting to chat with you today about four moments of aesthetic experience, which was published by Anthem Press, uh, April of 2025. This is a project that obviously I've followed closely throughout various iterations of, throughout the whole writing process, but it is pretty amazing now to sit down and just read through the finished work and I'm.

Convinced you know that this is gonna be an essential, uh, touchstone work of scholarship for anyone interested in aesthetics and questions of philosophical aesthetics, as well as the aesthetics of literature or aesthetic perspectives on literary works. I wanted to start with a thought about that, that last part, about what's sometimes been called the aesthetic turn in literary studies.

This is something that by my understanding, is a kind of renewed interest in questions of aesthetic pleasure, aesthetic judgment, or what you call more neutrally, and I think complexly and interestingly aesthetic experience, so we'll talk about that in a bit. But in literary studies, the aesthetic turn has often meant specifically a kind of a, a renewal of interest in and commitment to aesthetic judgment.

And often that means aesthetic judgment about. Literature about style or narrative, right? Or form what you're arguing for. I in four moments of aesthetic experience is a version of the aesthetic that's not. So much centered on judgment. Right? You in a way, in some ways, your introduction especially, but the book as a whole is the kind of, almost feels like a polemic against centralizing judgment on the one hand, and then also centralizing the object, like again, the form, the literary itself, the work itself on the other.

For you experience seems to be something that mediates between these two poles or strikes a sort of. An open, complex space of play between these two more conventional ways of thinking through the aesthetic. So could you say a little bit about what experience means for you specifically in the context of the aesthetic?

Bryan Counter: Thank you for that very generous intro. It's not a mistake that all the examples I use, my literary examples, Huysmans, Proust, McCarthy, and Cusk, all the moments I'm looking at are moments within the text. That are concerned with aesthetic experience, even if they don't name them as such. So I'm not so much concerned with aesthetics in the sense of, as you said, like style or form in a certain way.

I'm not necessarily reading the novel as a whole. I am, and I'm sure we'll talk about this, but I am pretty invested in close reading and really cutting out these little small sections that seem to demonstrate something about experience that maybe is mirrored in the experience of the reader, but is.

Primarily something that's undergone within the kind of twists and turns of the narrative itself, right? Whether it's a character, either having an aesthetic experience, reflecting on aesthetic experience more broadly, or even not having an aesthetic experience, right? Having a frustrated aesthetic experience and.

This is maybe a, a little bit of an anecdote, but I was just presenting at a conference on Aldous Huxley and Flann O'Brien, which I coauthored with Toby Harris, who's a Flann O'Brien scholar. My paper made this argument very much stemming from the book that, that both Huxley and O'Brien are Proustian in a certain way, because precisely there are these kind of moments of quietness, right?

The way that. Maybe it's reading Proust against Proust, or trying to read Proust by the letter in a certain way that doesn't necessarily always square with the kind of larger image of his narrator's aesthetic theory, which is often taken to be his aesthetic theory. Right? Which I'm not arguing that's false, but I do see that the way that experience works for Proust at least.

Is something that can't be summarized or placed into categories, right? There are these moments that fall outside of that theory, whatever that theory is, right? There are always gonna be moments that can't necessarily be so easily recuperated, and even if they can, the recuperation of them or the summary of them in terms of a larger theory will leave something out, right?

And so somebody asked a question. About one of Huxley's other novels, I guess. I think it was ISIS and Gaza, where one of the characters states that he hates Proust. Right. So the question was like, how is Huxley, and this was a generous question. This wasn't like. This wasn't going against what I was saying, it was actually like complicating it a bit, but the question was how can Huxley be Proustian if his characters hate Proust?

And the thing that immediately came to mind is Beckett, right? Like Beckett in terms of style is almost, I would say like the opposite of Proust, right? His style, the style of his writing is so different, so divergent from Proust, and yet he's still. Some of the most, he's written the most kind of in my mind, insightful essays on Proust ever still.

Right. His early, long essay on Proust sets the groundwork for a lot of what I think about Proust and what a lot of other thinkers have done with Proust. And so I think that if we get caught up in questions of style, we do tend to obscure the experience that these authors are trying to get at. So I'm just using the example of Proust, but I think experience is something that.

It does speak to us. It occurs in discrete moments, but it can also speak to us across vast differences in culture or time periods or things like that. And so I think with literature, especially as a sort of discursive, linguistic, medium, whatever you want to call it, there's a lot more space for us to.

Turn things around to bracket form or bracket judgment or whatever. Right. Even if I don't like a novel, I can see something in it that's really saying something about experience. Right.

Nathan Wainstein: That's super interesting and you've added one more. Term to the mix here. So again, like I feel that what you're doing in this book partly is theorizing aesthetics or the aesthetic without putting a great emphasis on either the aesthetic object, you know, what better that'd be a work of art or work of literature or something we find in nature on the one hand, and on the other hand, aesthetic judgment in the subject.

So this what you describe as a subject object relationship, and you're situating experience somewhere. In between them or somewhere else. But you're also, you just added a third term, which is theory itself. You know, and I feel like this is a book that could be classed, it might have as it's on the website, like it might have.

Aesthetic theory as one of its tags. So I'm also wondering where theory fits into what you're calling experience like maybe is this for one is theory, is that operating or residing more on the side of like subjective judgment or the objective work? Or is it something like experience or, or is it, is it kind of the framework through which we group these three things together?

Like again, judgment, object, and experience.

Bryan Counter: That's a great question. I'm not sure if I have the best answer. I would say that I think if, if there is a theory, of course I'm, you know, I'm drawing from in the introduction, there's Kant, there's Schopenhauer, there's nietzche, there's also, it's not necessarily like a very I'm not the best red Dian, but I think there is like certain, there are certain moments in Delos that really appeal to me and that really resonate with this idea of.

Chance, which is another big part of my book, right? The whole, his whole idea of what thought is and what brings about thought as a sort of. Potentially violent event that is imminent, right? It's not something that we get concepts and we fit things into them. It's actually something that arises from the ground up through experience.

I guess that's what I would say, right? If there is a theory, it's a theory that's arising from, on the one hand, reading these texts, right? Reading philosophy, reading literature, trying to make sense of, of squaring those things in a way that doesn't feel like one is prioritized over the other. But it's also just a simply like having aesthetic experiences, right?

I've still, I love, I really love to read Kant actually the third critique. It was a really monumental text for me, and I return to it often, and it's part of my thinking all the time, and yet I, I don't necessarily hold. Aesthetic categories or I think the beautiful and the sublime are obviously very important categories to, to have in one's mind when one is confronting any kind of work of art or experience.

But I also think that there's a way we merge those or look beyond them, or again, bracket them. Bracketing is a term that I think about a lot when I'm trying to conceive of what this project was, right? When you're confronted with an aesthetic experience, it's not something that fits into. Fits into categories, right?

I think this was partly, it's something that's there in con already, right? It's not that we go out and we, we see something and we immediately say, oh, this is beautiful. Right? Beautiful is the name for the thing that we experience when we judge something to be beautiful, right? It's something that can be only really.

Retroactively or retrospectively applied to an experience or an object. And so in that sense that's, I guess that's why I'm like, I'm trying to not do away with judgment. That's certainly not my project, but I. At least in this book and in this kind of mode of thinking, I'm trying to approach these texts with a little bit of a more blurry boundary between, as you have already noted, like subject and object, right?

I, I don't consider myself sitting down and reading a text and judging whether it's beautiful or not or whatever, right? I'm, I'm more interested in moments where characters are struggling with that very capacity, I guess is maybe what I'd say.

Nathan Wainstein: So is there an element of time involved here? Like would you say that experience, aesthetic experience, again, to use the central term of the book, is that something that often precedes judgment, like a kind of unformed.

Complex, paradoxical, or maybe to cite another of the key terms from your book, like an atmospheric state. I don't wanna just repeat the word experience, but a state evoked by an aesthetic object, but not reducible to the object itself. Does that question of sequence enter at all into your conceptualization?

Bryan Counter: Absolutely. Yeah. I think that before we judge anything, right, we have to experience it. And I think that this is where there is an opening, I think to, to thinking about questions of the canon. You know, I mean this is something that I think Proust already problematizes. This is why I have a little part of the introduction, is a section called something like Proust Writing Against Taste, or Proust Against Taste or something like that.

Because I do think that, of course his novel is full of moments where. The narrator, but also other characters are so concerned with taste, right? But taste in that world threatens to be, to become something more sociological. And I think that that's already deviation from even what Con was aimed at, right?

Or at least what's compelling to me about Kant is that sure, we can all gather together and agree that this or that thing is good, or it's in good taste to enjoy this music or this painting or this writer, but. The example I think about all the time is going to museums, right? I've been to plenty of specifically the MFA in Boston, right?

Been there so many times and from time to time, each discreet time that you go, you'll be struck by maybe a few paintings, right? There are may be a few paintings that you actually have to. Stand there and look at, you know, they, they cause you to think something or they cause some kind of thought in you, right?

Maybe it's a contentless thought. I think this is partly what, what Con is thinking about when he talks about the beautiful, right? The beautiful, the way that he thinks about the faculties is that there's a kind of contentless thought without end, right? It's this kind of process, and that's an experience, right?

Thought is an experience. But that's not guaranteed, right? It's not that I'm gonna go and, and see a painting by Titian or a painting by El Greco or whatever, right? And every single time have the same experience. And so I think it's a really complex question. I haven't, you know, gotten to the end of it or anything.

I'm not sure there is an end to it. But I do think that trying out some of these texts in this kind of lens, I guess that I have, has helped me work through some of those problems of what is the reason that we judge this? To be beautiful or sublime or whatever in the first place. And I think that always has to come back to experience because otherwise we're just taking concepts that have existed before us and trying to fit them right.

I don't think that's really what happens when we have a real kind of engagement with the work.

Nathan Wainstein: Yeah. Yeah. So is experience then, in this conceptualization, does it require a kind of, I hesitate to use this word, but it's the only one that occurs to me like a ki a kind of authenticity, or is experience for you value neutral?

Is it simply just a fact of life? I wanna talk about life in a moment, because that's one of the things that I'm obsessed with in this book, but is it, is experience just simply something cognitive that just it, it happens, you know, when we look at art or when we're when, or maybe when we're looking at atmosphere, like when we're looking at mist or light or something, or the quality of a room and we can have an aesthetic experience of it.

Is that necessarily for you, like a more authentic kind of experience, or is it just a just a neutral process that's gonna happen no matter what?

Bryan Counter: That's a great question. It's one I think about a lot, but it's also a really hard question because the idea just in general of authenticity has become. I think like problematized over the years and even to say what is authentic or not is something that's really thorny and difficult to work out.

I guess my answer is, I don't know. I think this is after all a book of my own there. There's a lot more of me in this book than maybe is let on, due to the academic kind of nature of it, though, I did try to. Avoid too much jargon when writing it. But I dunno. I guess an example from the book that I could use is, the two kind of negative moments that I have are quote unquote negative moments.

Right? Because that itself is already a hard question, but Huysmans and McCarthy, I guess maybe I'll specifically talk about McCarthy for a moment. This is a remainder, is a novel where the narrator is obsessed with having an authe authentic experience. Right. And how does he do that? He hires actors, he hires handlers.

He has this whole economic. Project basically that depends on him winning this large sum of money as a settlement for being in an accident that we never really fully understand, right. Within the novel itself. And so for me, that that seems to be, and this is also a sort of thing that I'm really fascinated with.

We see it in Proust, we see it. Basically in all the examples, I use this question of somebody who's hell bent on having an aesthetic experience or an authentic experience, like I don't think he ever really uses the term aesthetic experience, but that's how I choose to understand it. That seems in advance to disqualify that sort of experience happening, right?

This is a paradox that I'm interested in, but then he still has one, right? Huysmans's narrator still seems to have an aesthetic experience despite the fact that he's trying. With all his might to have an aesthetic experience. And so what that says about authenticity, value neutrality, I'm not really sure.

I'm not sure if it's a dialectical thing that's happening or if it truly is neutral. It's not as if we can walk around in our lives being surprised by everything all the time and always regarding objects as totally foreign to us with no concept. Right. That would seem to be, if there is a kind of. Maybe if I can put it in a kind of perverse way, like that would maybe be the way to always be having an aesthetic experience.

But obviously that just doesn't, nobody can do that. Right. But at the same time, we are struck by things. I mean, it might be something familiar to us, right? There's a, there's something that happens even. In your own house where you see something, you see the light through the window or fog or mist or whatever atmosphere.

'cause atmosphere is also a big part of my focus that does for a moment at least, defamiliarize things and seems to open up. And here's another paradox, seems to open up a moment outside of time or outside of narrative, even though that's impossible. So it's, it's a kind of. I don't mean this to be a way to square the whole thing and kind of resolve it.

'cause I don't think it can be resolved. But there is, we have these moments that are in time, right? We're in, there's, the clock is still ticking, but there may be, there's a sense of timelessness about them or a sense that they don't really fit with our normal, not just time, but our normal way of experiencing and thinking about the world.

Right? Because for con, aesthetic experience is not useful, right? It's. Useless, but that's not a bad thing. Right. This is something that also interests me here.

Nathan Wainstein: Yeah. What you're saying about authenticity is actually getting more interesting to me than even, than it was when I like glibly throughout the concept, because I feel that in, maybe this is a bit like on a crude or plane than what you're working at in the book, but authenticity in art is often seen as a disposition on the side of the artist, but even down to fallacious distinctions, authentic whatever, like.

Versus like inauthentic kind of commercial form, conventional music, adhering to sort of pre-established models or forms and that distinction to me is, again, always been fallacious, but for you it's like you're totally changing. It seems like you're totally changing the point of emphasis to saying it doesn't really matter how or why or in what manner the object was produced.

If it was produced at all. 'cause again, maybe it's something it's an object of nature or an atmosphere. If there is a sense of authenticity, it's happening on the side of the subject, on the side of the person who's, again, having the experience. You refer your book. This is woven around what you call, again, like the central or an aesthetic paradox, the title of your introduction, the paradox in my understanding being what happens when those of us who care about art, right, who care about literature, become interested in having aesthetic experiences.

And start seeking them out or manufacturing them or producing them. And a museum, just to retrace what you were saying would be one, is one of your key examples or canonical example, it's like a museum is a device, a form for producing aesthetic experiences. And the idea would seem to be that therefore because it's formalized, right, made into a sort of social architectural cultural convention that would actually be contrary to.

Aesthetic experience as, because it doesn't involve elements of chance, right? Of contingency or paradox or even surprise. But there's no reason why something formalized and standardized or seemingly dead couldn't still evoke an authentic experience of the aesthetic. It just, it demands a kind of re-injection or a recurrence, right?

Because I think maybe taking out the element of intentionality or will is important. But a recurrence of contingency right, of randomness and chance and surprise on the part of the viewer or the audience member. Or the reader, totally irrespective of the form formalization or lack thereof of the, of whatever is evoking the experience.

Does that, is that right?

Bryan Counter: Yes. I think part of what I'm hearing, or part of what I'm, you're making me think of is there's a quote from a donno that I think I. In the context of the We Man chapter where he says that museums are where art goes to die, which is obviously an exaggeration. I would agree though.

I think I would agree partly because I think that even at the museum as I. Kind of already stated, right? There's still chance, right? There's still, we're not, we're still embodied. We still have, I just think maybe it's thinking about the other variables that are at play, right? I think it's, if we totally reduce works of art to objects that can cause us aesthetic experiences, then we're forgetting that there's a subject on the other side who.

I don't know is having whatever kind of day or was thinking about this or that or is in this kind of moment or has this kind of attention. 'cause I think K uses the term that's translated as attunement, right? Like attunement. We have to have aesthetic attunement to, to have these experiences. And yet I think that attunement.

Sure there is such a thing as an aesthetic education. We can think about taste, but we can also think about ways to contemplate or reflect on our experiences that maybe make us a little bit more attuned. But I also think that's a little bit, uh. I would push back against that a little bit too, because I do think that some of the most salient and intense aesthetic experiences happen when we're just not prepared, right?

We're not attuned, actually. And so thinking about specifically something dead to touch again on the We Man chapter, right? There's, he gets this kind of tortoise, gilded and beed, and then the tortoise eventually dies under the weight of all, its kind of all these. Precious gems and everything on its back.

But while that's happening, right, I mean the narrator does this in order to have the experience of the tortoise kind of moving around on his carpet and reflecting the light in a certain way, right? So it is a very highly curated moment. But while that's happening, we have this really brief description of the snow falling outside.

He's looking out the window. He has like a almost proto Proustian. Involuntary memory of actually like a pretty unpleasant memory where he has to go get like a tooth pulled or whatever. Right. But there's this brief description in the text where it's not really clear where it's coming from, right? It's just a neutral description of the snow falling and how everything is crystallized outside.

And that, I would say, is a different way of conveying how. Even the museum still leaves open this chance right there. There's no way to get rid of the chance. Just like there's no way to guarantee that we will have an aesthetic experience by, for instance, going to the museum or basically making your house into an aesthetic palace as Luis Mons narrator does.

Nathan Wainstein: Yeah, I mean, again, like you're so. Compelling, I think in the way that you decenter like the judging subject and the experienced object. Especially to speak to the latter, like there's this often this conception and it may partly just arise out of the sort of. Conventional form of expository or scholarly writing about works of art, but this kind of omnipotence or primacy of the object of the painting of the novel such that it's we're having, when we, even when we're conceptualizing experience, for instance, in like reader response theory or phenomenologies of reading on the literary side, it's very often an attention to the specific experience that's being evoked by the artwork, even by particular sentences, you know, in someone like.

A critic like Stanley Fish will write, be very rigorous about the kind of unpacking the temporality of reading as it arises, quite specifically out of individual formal decisions or writerly decisions made by the author. For you. Again, it's a more capacious. Thing, concepts, right? State idea that involves all valances of our encounter with a work very often involving simply like the quality of our, like how our body feels, how the room feels, the light that's coming in, the sort of circumstances by which we find ourselves in that, in the presence of a certain object, if again, if there is even an object.

This brings me to what I alluded to earlier, is my favorite aspect of this book, something we've talked about in other venues before, but the way in which you are positioning this book as a, an account of aesthetic experience, as you say, with a focus on life. And I'm just really intrigued and compelled by what you mean by life here.

And I want you, I would love to hear you speak more. Broadly about how life plays into this book, but I'll just venture one sort of way that I read it, which is again, like less about artworks or the canon, less about like our own capacities for judgment and more just about stuff that happens to us, like out in the world.

It's about being out in the world. You have this amazing point that you draw from Proust in the Proust chapter and in the introduction, which is that our aesthetic experience of. A book is very often actually the aesthetic experience of reading the book. It's not of the former content of the book itself.

It's almost totally independent of whatever is in the book, let alone its form. It's about. Sitting by an open window on a day in late September in like upstate New York and the light falling in a certain way, right? And a certain kind of silence or quietness that allows a kind of physical sort of environmental engagement with this very delimited object.

But the experience far. Surpasses right or exceeds what's our specific relationship to the object. And if I can just make one more connection to literary scholarship, 'cause that's the angle that I'm coming at this from. Of course. This is also an interesting reversal of the way that close reading or reading literature often works in literary scholarship because it's, I would say that in many.

Certainly in many, um, readings of, or some of the readings of Proust that I know or scholarship on Proust, who again, is the central figure in a lot of ways of your book, but also other writers. Like it's a common, it is common to see a literary critic take a passage that's about, uh, describing some kind of experience.

The protagonist is having an experience, again, of atmosphere or the environment or space, right. Or a building or of their body and reading that as. Actually a kind of aesthetics of literature itself. So in for someone like Paul Deman as an allegory of reading, that wherever we look in, we're so used to today reading criticism and finding, and the critic finding everywhere in a book about whatever topic, allegories of literature itself or of aesthetic judgment about literature or of beauty, right?

Or of the sublime. That is to say like descriptions of life. Books, which is of course like actually what books are about. Books aren't actually about art. Like on the surface, books are usually about life, sorry, novels to be crude. The description or account of life becomes transmuted into a theory of art.

But what you're doing is saying, actually no, the only way for us to attend to art is for us to be very serious. About the description of life, like to actually centralize the description of life and what that's saying about what it means to be a person in the world, and that's your avenue through which you theorize the aesthetic, or even theory, theorize maybe the wrong term through which you explore.

Or discuss the aesthetic.

Bryan Counter: Sure. I really love that. That's, I think you've said something about my work that I hadn't really thought about before, but I think that's totally true. I know I already spoke about bracketing style when looking at literature. I'm not too interested in tracing out somebody's sentences or whatever.

Right. I've deliberately tried not to focus. Except for moments where it's fits in with my agenda of looking at the logic of these experiences. I really tried not to get too bogged down in the style of any of these authors, but I, yeah, I think that what we should not bracket, or at least strive to not bracket is this kind of discreet.

Singular experience that we have of engaging with the work or just with the object. Right? For Kant, again, just to bring it back to Kant for a second, his discussion of the beautiful and the sublime begins with nature, right? Which just objects that we would encounter in the world, right? And of course it would be a very ideal world if we found a beautiful painting in the woods or found a book in the woods and just sat down and naively just started reading it and had this beautiful experience with it.

But obviously we don't have that, right? We. So we have this constant tension between trying to experience things as if they were, and again, this is another Conent point, as if they were not engineered or fashioned by an author or a creator, and yet we, we know somewhere that they were right. Obviously, I.

Whatever author labored over this text for decades potentially. And there are all these drafts we can compare and that's its own kind of avenue of criticism. But when the book comes to us, you know, and as PRUs says, right in his intro, the introduction to his translation of Ruskin, he, he says, I. That Oftentimes when we think back about those books that we read during childhood, we don't remember the plots.

We don't remember the characters. What we remember are the days of reading, the days that we read them, the interruptions we had. I think he cites a bumblebee. He says, oh, a friend is calling us to come play. All these things that actually bring our eyes up from the page, those are the things that are ingrained in our our memory.

Right? And that's life. That is life. And we see. Maybe kind of in a regressive kind of mis on a beam fashion. These are things that I'm interested in these texts themselves. Right? So there's a mirroring. This is why I said again, it's no accident where that, the examples I use concern characters who are asking this very same question, right?

I don't, and there, there is a trouble with that, right? Because I could just continue accumulating examples of that where I just have a bunch of examples of characters who are interested in aesthetics and there are just. Endless examples. Right? But I think that in each case, I'm I'm hopefully trying to show that when they're asking these questions, when they're interested in aesthetics, they're not simply interested in whether or not a text is good or a painting is good or worth looking at or worth citing in order to prove that you have good taste.

They're actually. They're running up against this tension between an idea of taste on the one hand, or an idea of this kind of experience they want and the actual experience that happens, right? For instance, with Proust, there's the moment where the narrator. Has a failed aesthetic experience because he basically re narrates the scene that he's taking part in to himself in order to explicitly, he says, in order to endow it with an aesthetic character, or something like that.

Right? And that failed. That failed to say that, oh, I'm gonna just redress this scene in order to make it more aesthetic. As if that's a broad category of things, which it's not. I think that's partly my point, is that. It's not that we have certain things that are aesthetic, right? It's certain experiences that are irreducible, right?

Whether they're value neutral, whether they're depend on authenticity, they're irreducible. We can't pretend. We can pretend, but we're not having one. And yet there's a moment. Just beyond that scene that I, that's not in the book, but I've written about it elsewhere where he does actually have what I would describe as an aesthetic experience in a slightly different kind of context.

But it's during the same day. Right? So it's like after he is really trying to have an aesthetic experience realizes that disqualifies him from having one, he then goes on to actually accidentally have one. And I think that's at the heart of what I'm thinking about here.

Nathan Wainstein: Yeah, that's great. I just find this all so fascinating and I want to, as a thought experiment.

Put a little bit of pressure on the, this, again, this idea that, that our aesthetic of experience of a book may very often be an aesthetic experience of the atmosphere of reading and the experience of reading and not, and have, almost have very little to do. The former content of the book itself. This is again from Proust's preface to his translation of Sesame and Lilies By Ruskin, by John Ruskin.

And, but it's, I feel like it's a foundational example for your book, for four moments of aesthetic experience and contributes a lot to the way that you're conceptualizing what, again, what you call a sort of an account of the aesthetic with a focus on life. So my question here would be. I agree with this that like that our experience or aesthetic experience of reading is often simply of reading and not of reading something in particular.

Is there something specific about reading though, that I. Occasions. This kind of experience beyond the sort of practical fact that it often involves solitude, it often requires quiet and a certain comfortability or comfort and space. Another way of asking this would be, let's imagine some other activity that involved a lot or necessitated a lot of the same environmental.

Qualities as reading. Let's try to think of an example. This is gonna be a kind of silly one or maybe a bad one, but it's the first thing that came to my mind. So what if, what if someone had a particular ritual that they had to follow whenever they ate lunch? And I'm trying to think of like the least aesthetic food.

What's the least aesthetic food? Or maybe like a can of tuna fish. And so their way of eating tuna, the canned tuna would be to. Painstakingly separate each individual bits of the tuna on a plate and then eating them one by one. And they had to do this by a window because that was just a requirement, like a kind of dispositional requirement for how they consume lunch.

And it would always take at least an hour. I feel like a lot of the same environmental factors could intrude or beco could become really significant as what Proust is describing in this. It's like aesthetic experience of a book, a bumblebee flying into your room would be a salient detail. The temperature of the room, the quality of the light coming through, the quality of the noise, whether it's noisy outside the house or quiet and quiet inside the house, or maybe noisy.

Inside the house and really quiet outside the house or the room or what space you're in. And so could you, could one simply substitute reading in this case for eating and have an analogous experience? Or again, is there something more particular to the act of reading that makes. The book version of this environmental atmospheric aesthetic experience more interesting, more, more richer, more worthy of analysis and discussion.

Bryan Counter: That is a very interesting thought experiment. I would certainly say. Then basically, I. Any activity you could think of for this thought experiment? My answer would be, sure. You could totally have, and I'm sure people do have not every single time, right? Just like not every single time I sit down to read, I have an aesthetic experience, but you could have one if you're separating out tuna or if you're, if you're editing, if you're coding, if you're doing something.

I think partly it's, it's attention to detail. I mean, reading, maybe this is a new thought that I, I haven't really. I don't really talk about this in the book, but reading is a slow thing to do, right? It's a slow, methodical, as you said, solitary. I think that's part of it as well. But there is a kind of slowness and an attention to detail that it just demands of you just if you do have a really precise ritual or if you are.

I don't know. I could imagine practicing scales on the guitar could, this could happen, right? It's just repetition or it's tedious, right? So there's maybe that kind of element to it. But as far as what it is about reading, I think that's a great question. I mean, reading demands not only slowness, but there is another maybe.

Paradoxical or contradictory thing about it where we're getting out of ourselves a little bit 'cause we're getting into the text in a certain way, but it's also all internal, unless you're reading out loud, I guess. But when you sit down to read, you're looking at a bunch of thousands of words that are printed within the covers of a book and you're imagining scenarios, you're reading something.

I do think that in reading too. Whether or not you're reading something for the first time. But I'd also say this still happens when you're rereading. There is an element of surprise about it that, that, that can strike you in a certain way and maybe can lead to some of these experiences, right? I mean, reading a new book for the first time is uncharted territory.

Even though all the words are already there, you still have to temporarily get to them. So I think there's the quietness, there's the slowness, there's the solitude, but then there's also this kind of. Margin of whatever, you know, margin of accident or chance where you don't know what necessarily is going to happen on the next page, what you're gonna be asked to entertain mentally in terms of the plot or even the description, right?

Sometimes you come across a description that seems out of place or seems perfect, right? Sometimes you come across a description that seems like, uh, I don't know if you have this experience, but. This happens to me maybe more often with music, but sometimes with reading where I feel like something is speaking just like directly to me.

That is a thought that I've had before or an idea I've felt before or some experience that seems to be familiar, even though I've not encountered it before. And I think that's one of the things, one of the beautiful things about reading that can open us up to this kind of experience.

Nathan Wainstein: Yeah. I love this conception of reading as.

A vehicle for chance, which is something that, again, it's a key claim of your introduction and of your readings of Proust. And I feel like I've neglected my duties here to just mention the fact that you have this fascinating span of authors in, in each of your chapters. You have two French authors from the beginning of the 20th century and Proust, and, and then you have two British authors, English authors from the early 21st century in Tom McCarthy.

And. Really intriguingly a Rachel Cusk. But to go back to this question of chance, I feel that literature, right, and art is often understood as actually a machine for appreciating or a vehicle for appreciating necessity because it's something that was intentionally produced. Every word was intentionally placed.

And when we I've often thought that in some ways, like art demands necessity, like we art is unthinkable without necessity, but. I, there is a, I feel like you're surfacing a way in which both can be true. You know, you don't have to accept my claim just now, but if one did, like the very necessity of art is what makes it such a powerful vehicle for experiencing chance.

Because the object is always precisely 'cause The object is always the same. The weather is often a model of chance or contingency because it's constantly changing. But of course, the fact that it's constantly changing means that our experience of it. Can be our, the sort of contingency of our experience of the weather could simply be reduced to the changing fact of the object of the weather.

But in our experience of a necessary stable object like a book. There's no like the buck stops at the subject. It's like it's us who's having the contingency, the chance filled experience of the same words. Even if we read the book before we even could read them again and have a completely different reaction, whether due to cognition, right to the quality of our thinking or the accidents of our thinking, or.

To the accidents of our body. Like reading is so embodied, it require and so sensitive to bodily orientation and comfort and positioning, an atmosphere, your environment again, and so it's the very stability of the literary object in con, canonical, or conventional cases. That all allows us to crystallize the workings of chance in our encounter with the literary.

Does that track with what you're suggesting?

Bryan Counter: It definitely does, and I would say I do agree about the necessity question, but as you have just acknowledged, there's still chance on the other side and actually even on the other side, right from the side of the artist or the author, there's still plenty of chance as well.

We have to not to flatten out the experience of the artist and the. Spectator or whatever. Right. I think this is a question I try to, I talk about a little bit in the introduction and try to keep in mind they're both still coming at the work of art with this, with experience. With experience in mind.

Unless I guess you're writing a novel for money or something like that, or trying. Explicitly to write a bestseller. But even then, going back to my example of museums, you would still accidentally have some aesthetic experiences with that, I'm sure. But just to touch quickly on the weather and atmosphere, this is a point that I think is really important, and I know I've, I try to hammer this point home, but the passage from Proust that, that I think is really at the center of that chapter is this passage where the narrator.

Has this experience simply through, just through being in his room and hearing the sounds from outside and also experiencing the weather around him. And yet it's narrated in the iterative tense, right? So it would, he's not saying, oh, this one day this happened. He says, on certain days the weather was so cold, the room was in such communication with the street, right?

So he is saying that this is something that repeats over time and yet. It's only sometimes that this experience arises, right? If he's simply, he only really describes that the weather is cold. That's basically it, and he hears certain sounds from the street. That doesn't mean that every time it's cold out, he has the exact same experience, right?

He's talking about specific instances that do repeat, but they repeat at random by chance, just like we might say. Today, if I walked outside and it was raining out, I might say, oh man, this is awful. I had these plans. I have something that I need to do. So the rain is annoying to me, but if I'm inside for the day and I want to sit down and read and it starts raining, I'll say, I.

Perfect. Right? Like that's actually what I want in this moment. So that's again, coming back to within a text, right? Within a specific literary example. I draw from a character who has that happening or a narrator who has that kind of experience, which I think is, speaks to what happens with us, right? This is what.

Life is. So even whether it's a book that you know is necessary, it's not gonna scramble its words when I close it. So it's illegible next time. It's always gonna be the same. I'm gonna, especially if I reread it, I'm gonna react to different passages in a different rereading or certain moments that I've thought were exciting, just are boring next time or whatever.

Right? Just like that. Same thing with the weather and same thing I think with atmosphere more broadly, which isn't just weather, right? It's our, just kind of our ambient surroundings.

Nathan Wainstein: Yeah. Yeah. That's great. And Bryan, I thought maybe we could end then with, if you're willing to share maybe a memory just sort of return to the specifics here and share a memory in which you know, you yourself had an aesthetic experience of reading that may.

Be someone independent or to transcend the object of reading itself. I'm specifically curious if there are any of the of said experiences that were foundational for the book.

Bryan Counter: Yeah. One, one that that comes to mind is actually the first time I read Ks third critique when I was in college. I remember specifically I had a, I had a room.

My own room with a loft in an on-campus apartment. I remember I was upstairs in the loft that had this ladder or whatever, and I had this. Really felt like a makeshift desk. Basically. The desk was not great, but I was like, I had the book and I was standing reading it. Right. I was reading, I think I had maybe gotten through some of the introductory stuff and got to maybe the analytic of the sublime say, I don't remember exactly.

Sorry. The analytic of the beautiful, I don't remember exactly where it was, but, and there was something like, of course, on the one hand, content wise, I felt that was an experience for maybe the first time where I. Felt just a big connection between some of the kind of formless thoughts I'd had about experiencing works of art and experiencing the world with a canonical text like I had read, probably.

In the wrong order. I'm sure I'd read certain like deconstruction stuff and in 20th century specifically, like French and German thinkers. And then I went back and I was reading Kant in an independent study. And I remember like, I picked up the book and just, and this actually maybe concurs with other moments in Prce that Hannah Free Bell talks about in her.

Her book Spoiled Distinctions. I remember like walking around, like pacing around reading the book and just being like excited, like maybe I was like saying, wow, yes. Or something like that, right? Because there were these moments in Proust where the narrator just like exclaims something like meaningless, right?

I. And yet it was a deeply meaningful experience. And also like I'll just mention too, like the most dense formal translated from the German, right? Like the way that Kant writes is so everything's slotting in which I think is maybe another, this is something for another time or a different project. But I do also think there's something that can happen with aesthetic experience where it is that necessity, right?

It happens by chance, but it feels like things are maybe in their right place and that can happen. Of course with a text when you read something, even if it's so mechanical feeling or so verbose and yeah, that, that's the example I would use. Right. I was like very excited by reading Cons. Third critique for the first time, which sounds ridiculous, but it was an actual experience I had where I was just like so excited about it and it was one of those solitary moments of reading that just stays with me.

Nathan Wainstein: Yeah. Thanks Bryan. That's a great note to end on. I'll echo your excitement in a way and that I'm really excited for people to read for moments of aesthetic experience. Maybe in the near future, some kid in the dorm will have an analogous experience of reading your chapter, say on Tom McCarthy. And although maybe that again would be a too curated a moment, it's like the repetition of the moment then creates formalizes it and makes it more difficult for a chance to occur.

Who knows? But in any case, this has been. Really fascinating, and again, I love the book. Thanks for coming on. It's been a pleasure to shout. Yeah, thanks a lot, Nathan. I appreciate it.

Robert Carson: The aesthetic experience you've been having is an episode of the Virtual Jewel Box, the podcast of the Tanner Humanities Center at the University of Utah . Views expressed on the show do not reflect the views of the center or the university. You can find out more about the center's programming at tanner.utah.edu. We leave you now with the perfect aesthetic experience of Jelly Roll Morton’s Perfect Rag.