Minor Aesthetics: On Helen DeWitt’s ‘The English Understand Wool’
Why is “minor” used so often in its most frustrating sense? “Oh, Sula is just a minor Morrison novel”—I imagine it spoken by a tweedy critic or the worst guy in a graduate-school seminar: people whose incontrovertible aesthetic opinions prioritize scope and magnitude, sheer power, as if they were picking dodgeball teams in gym class. If someone claims that your favorite novel or film or album sucks, that it’s total trash, that’s one thing. Blunt-instrument criticism is easier to dismiss as unsophisticated, or else as evidence of an incommensurable break between this person’s preferences and your own. But “minor” suggests a precision born of long experience, a worldly knowingness. And because of the way aesthetic attachment works, its tendency to mingle your identity with the object in question, this feels like a judgement passed not only on the object or your affinities, but on you. There’s a feeling of being carefully weighed and found wanting. Minor artworks for minor people—this is the implication.
Basically the issue is taste. Calling something minor lays claim to a taste honed and cultivated into sophistication (or its appearance). Critics like and have pointed out that taste is rooted in economic class, that it functions like capitalism’s matador cape, but nevertheless retainsthe reading, something invisible to others. This is why, irritating as they often are, people who project taste also possess an undeniable appeal.
