Intensity, understood as the quality of “heightened” experiences, has long been celebrated as an ethical and aesthetic ideal. Think of Walter Pater, calling us to wring from each passing moment its “highest quality” and recommending art as the arena most able to deliver this vitality. Or recall Henry James, who in a crux of The Ambassadors has Lambert Strether advise Little Bilham, “Live all you can; it’s a mistake not to,” and who then, in his preface, names “the grace of intensity” as his paramount aim as a novelist. You can probably multiply examples of your own, because intensity—as I will argue in this paper—is one of the most central yet undertheorized concepts of modern aesthetics, an aesthetic category that for well over a century stood as the aesthetic category: the sign that art has happened and that, in some way, it is good.
Yet in the past fifteen or so years, aesthetic judgments of intensity have taken on a more ambivalent tone. “That’s intense”: these days, the phrase is used less as praise than as a warning: there’s something affecting here, it seems to say, something that will shape your experience. . . but you might not like how it feels. I’ll show how this colloquial use of intensity has analogues in the work of contemporary U.S. novelists, who in different ways have struggled to reckon with both the twentieth-century legacies of aesthetic intensity and with the increasingly “intense”—as in, exhausting—nature of contemporary life. With an eye towards recent Marxist theorists of aesthetic categories, and a glance at the long history of aesthetic intensity, I’ll consider novels by Ben Lerner, Patricia Lockwood, and Ottessa Moshfegh to gauge the range of meanings and attitudes congealed in the aesthetic category of intensity.
