Aesthetic Bearings

Abstract

I recently received an education in how to look at morally significant paintings of plural human activity. The historians and critics I read asked why artists handled crucial details the way they did and made the compositional choices that they made. By “morally significant” I mean paintings that clearly wish to relay precise, terrible predicaments amid life’s plenitude and that cultivate a sense of how benevolence and malevolence work in this world. Such paintings care to represent how things can be for other people. How might such paintings communicate signs of rightness and wrongness, or something having gone wrong, if that rightness and wrongness, their timing, their magnitude, and their real plausibility are not very clear? This artcritical education comes in handy for reading absurdist, postmodern literature that has clearly not forfeited morality or truth-telling. The reader of this kind of literature is put inside rudely incoherent, informationally confusing plots and asked to keep tabs on what’s happening, who is doing what to whom, and in what sequence. Overloaded and overstimulated, these literary worlds also “warn [us] that our (reading) lives depend upon our not missing something” (Cavell 148). My literary test case is the work of Can Xue, a contemporary Chinese writer fixated on exerting this effort of depiction within absurdist, postmodern literature. Global and provincial insanity are written into every layer of her fictions. Her readers, navigating