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Aesthetics
and Politics II |
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Recent accounts of eighteenth century culture have argued that elite authors established their high status by "bidding farewell to the street" and the "dirty" commercial culture associated with it, embracing instead a putatively disinterested aesthetic position. By playing off of Gay's epigraph "We know these things to be nothing" and looking closely at his use of a genre often dismissed as "nothing"--the ballad--I argue in this paper that this model adequately explains neither the relationship of 'high' to 'low' nor the aesthetic to the political during this era. Gay
sets his revision of the ballad against two other forms: the spectacle
of execution at Tyburn, where aesthetics and politics are indistinguishable
with deadly results, and the confections of opera, where elite viewers
can enjoy the same noble sentiments in art they traduce in the political
sphere. In place of these flawed forms, which fall short of what
the play calls "strict poetical justice," Gay uses the
ballad to articulate a new vision of the discursive field in which
aesthetics is inextricable from but not simply reducible to politics.
Because the ballad has a remarkable power to elicit sympathy even
for the play's rapaciously self-interested characters, it leads
the audience to imagine themselves as equally 'low.' Through the
aesthetic interest (rather than disinterest) that the ballad generates,
Gay leads his audience toward a "we-who-know," a collective
that may be able to grope toward a more-democratic politics barely
glimpsed in the play's many negations. And because the ballad is
so thoroughly commodified, it short-circuits any attempt by the
audience to use it in order to draw invidious social distinctions.
In other words, the answer for Gay lies not through a "farewell
to the street" but rather a calculated embrace of it; and the
ballad opera, while it sells very well, does not quite sell out.
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