Reflecting Senses: Perception and Appearance in Literature, Culture and the Arts [Reprint 2011 ed.] 9783110889444, 9783110145809

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Reflecting Senses

W G DE

Reflecting Senses Perception and Appearance in Literature, Culture, and the Arts

Edited by

Walter Pape and Frederick Burwick

Walter de Gruyter · Berlin · New York 1995

® Printed on acid-free paper which falls within the guidelines of the ANSI to ensure permanence and durability.

IJbraty of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication

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Reflecting senses : perception and appearance in literature, culture, and the arts / edited by Walter Pape and Frederick Burwick. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 3-11-014580-4 (alk. paper) 1. Aesthetics, Modern. 2. Illusion (Philosophy) 3. Illusion in literature. 4. Representation (Philosophy) 5. Information theory in aesthetics. I. Pape, Walter. II. Burwick, Frederick. BH151.R44 1994 121'.3-dc20 94-37129 CIP

Die Deutsche Bibliothek - Cataloging-in-Publkation

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Reflecting senses : perception and appearance in literature, culture and the arts / ed. by Walter Pape and Frederick Burwick. - Berlin ; New York : de Gruyter, 1995 ISBN 3-11-014580-4 NE: Pape, Walter [Hrsg,]

© Copyright 1994 by Walter de Gruyter & Co., D-10785 Berlin. All rights reserved, including those of translation into foreign languages. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Printed in Germany Camera-ready copy: Ralf Dank, Köln Printing: Gerike GmbH, Berlin Binding: Lüderitz & Bauer GmbH, Berlin Cover design: Sigurd Wendland

Contents Introduction

1

Appearances and the Semiotics of Culture K . LUDWIG PFEIFFER

Suggestiveness or Interpretation: O n the Vitality of Appearances

15

DAVID WARREN

From Maps to Cityscapes: Reactions to Modes of Spatial Representation

33

MARIAN H O B S O N

What Is Wrong with Saint Peter's? Or, Diderot, Analogy, and Illusion in Architecture

53

Visual Perception and Verbal Representation in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Literature HELMUT J . SCHNEIDER

The Staging of the Gaze: Aesthetic Illusion and the Scene of Nature in the Eighteenth Century .

77

WALTER PAPE

"Die Sinne triegen nicht": Perception and Landscape in Classical Goethe

96

FREDERICK BURWICK

Reflections in the Mirror: Wordsworth and Coleridge

122

REGINALD A . FOAKES

Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Illusion

141

THOMAS VOGLER

Seeking the Visible World: Wordsworth's Real Illusions

160

VI

Contents

Sensory and Illusory Effects in Art, Music, and Dance ELINOR S . SHAFFER

The Death of the Artist and the Birth of Art History: Appearance, Concept, and Cultural Myth

189

BARBARA MARIA STAFFORD

Instructive Games: Apparatus and the Experimental Aesthetics of Imposture

223

WAYNE SLAWSON

Forked Tongues: Structural Illusions in Music

250

DIANNE S . H O W E

Outside In: The Movement from Exterior to Interior Illusions in Dance

. . . .

264

Visual Metaphors and Textual Shadows DONALD G . MACKAY a n d T O S H I KONISHI

The Selection of Pronouns in Spoken Language Production: An Illusion of Reference

279

MURRAY KRIEGER

The Anthropological Persistence of the Aesthetic: Real Shadows and Textual Shadows, Real Texts and Shadow Texts

.

301

Bibliography Primary Sources Secondary Sources

315 315 326

Notes on Contributors

343

List of Illustrations

349

Index

353

Introduction

In "search of instances where the American imagination demands the real thing, and, to attain it, must fabricate the absolute fake,"1 Umberto Eco set forth on his "Travels in Hyperreality." Included in his tour of "absolutely fake cities" was Knott's Berry Farm near Los Angeles, California. [...] the levels of illusion are numerous, and this increases the hallucination [...]. F o r example, the village school, reconstructed with hyperrealistic detail, has behind the desk a schoolmarm wearing a bonnet and an ample checked skirt, but the children on the schoolbenches are little passing visitors, and I heard one tourist ask his wife if the children were real or 'fake.' 2

David Lowenthal comments on the compounding of illusion in Eco's example: "Real ones would be simulated oldtime kids; actual tourists are 'fakes.'"3 Once the "absolute fake" has been granted its authenticity, it becomes the measure of "the real thing." In a cultural environment which tends to ignore (no longer bothering to oppose, deny, or "demystify") the notion of hierarchical values or the possible differences between "high art" and "popular entertainment," spontaneous pleasure suffices as justification enough for art. Having razed the old structures of an aesthetic based on mimesis and the dedoublement of illusion, postmodernism has erected a theme park dedicated to a "faith in fakes." The doctrine of mimesis, of course, is still employed, but the means and ends of representation have been redefined. Whether artists have taken it as their task to imitate nature, to imitate how the mind beholds and responds to nature, or, more boldly, to imitate the very creative processes of nature itself, their accomplishments tend to be accounted for, and evaluated by, some standard of representation, some scale of admiration for the sheer difficulty of what they have done. Yet technological advances of the last two hundred years have made possible such stunning reproductions that it is often impossible to tell reproduced from real object, or to tell 'original' reproduction from counterfeit reproduction, a Vermeer from a 1 2 3

Eco: "Travels in Hyperreality," in Faith in Fakes, pp. 3-58; here p. 8. Ibid., p. 42. Lowenthal: "Counterfeit Art: Authentic Fakes?", p. 94.

2

Introduction

van Meegeren. Stage effects, cinematic effects, digital processing of image and remastering of tapes, have added to the dazzling performances of professional magicians or illusionists to insert layers of uncertainty - the sense impressions are real, but what of the status of the perception? Just as at the level of object, Eco's children are real children, but fake denizens of Knott's Berry Farm since they are not tour guides dressed up in nineteenth century costume. Neither definite nor definable, the random 'stimuli' which confronted visitors to Lyotard's exhibition, "Les Immateriaux," at the Centre Pompidou in the spring of 1985, successfully undermined, as Murray Krieger has acknowledged, any aesthetic which presumes to ground itself in the perception of "material" phenomena. 4 Contemporary critical expectations concerning perception and representation have been radically altered by the scientific repertory available to the artist. During the early decades of this new era of reproduction and commodification, Coleridge sought to reaffirm the special province of art by discriminating between 'copy' and 'imitation'. 5 A 'copy' merely replicates an object; an 'imitation' reveals the transforming presence of the artist's mind. At the Lyceum in London, 1802, Madame Tussaud's exhibition of waxen effigies competed with the Phantasmagoria projected by Paul de Philipstal's latema magica. The former were so lifelike that suspicions were aroused, and are still nourished by horror films of recent years, that the figures were actually embalmed human bodies. The latter produced such convincing supernatural apparitions that "the spectators were not only surprised but agitated, and many of them were of the opinion that they could have touched the figures." 6 Before the end of the 1820's Sir David Brewster had devised an apparatus with a large concave mirror for projecting a virtual image of a person onto the stage, where, with appropriate lighting, the phantom image would appear as palpable and real as any actor or actress - except that image would be impervious to any attempt to hack it to bits with an axe or sword. 7 4

Kriegen Ekphrasis, pp. 193-5; see also: "A Conversation with Jean Francois Lyotard," pp. 32-5; Burwick: "The Embattled Krieger and the Illusionary Legions."

5

Coleridge: Lectures 1808-1819 On Literature vol. 1, pp. 83-4,223-5,231,349-50, 494,518; vol. 2, 115, 120, 220, 257,264-5, 277, 440, 512; Biographia Literaria vol. 1, p. 76; vol. 2, pp. 72,212.

6

Altick: The Shows of London, pp. 333, 217-8.

7

Brewster: Letters on Natural Magic, pp. 85-9; see also Burwick: "Romantic Drama: from Optics to Illusion," pp. 167-208, and "Science and Supernaturalism: Sir David Brewster and Sir Walter Scott," pp. 82-114.

Introduction

3

Fake reality has been getting better and better ever since. According to a recent report on devotees of cyberspace, "harmless escapism" lapses easily into "deep, dark addiction." Those who leave behind Real Life (RL) to explore the alternate realm of Multiple User Dimensions (MUD) may spend 40 to 60 hours a week wandering among a computer generated landscape of catacombs or castles. N o t only do they prefer M U D to RL, heavy users confess that M U D experiences tend to spill over and influence the ways in which they react to RL experiences. Julie, a theater historian who was interviewed by the reporter, confessed that cyberspace is "my hallucinogen of choice. [...] I love being able to slip into another body, another persona, another world." 8 The postmodern 'faith in fakes' has become the credo of a sophisticated audience grown so accustomed to the optical ingenuity of the media that they anticipate sensory bewilderment as a basic attribute of 'entertainment.' Postmodern versions of the old huckster games, where illusion succeeds in perpetrating delusion, now seem to be the expected and accepted norm rather than some insidious trick played upon the naive and credulous. While one faction denounces the plans to erect Disney's America, a theme park adjacent the Civil War battlefields of Virginia, another faction welcomes the effort as educational and patriotic.' Just as Williamsburg already offers a splendid example of American ingenuity in creating an "absolute fake" of the historical past, the Disney site will undoubtedly become another prominent landmark on Eco's map of hyperreality. The hyperrealistic village school described by Eco is not only a useful example of the complexities of postmodern authenticity, it also illustrates, as Marian Hobson put it, "the deep and mysterious way we connect together what we perceive."10 Kant posed as a cardinal question how we position an object for our ideas ("Vorstellungen") 11 . For perceptions to become ideas, the perceiver must generate some kind of mental narrative. There are always several kinds of stories within us that guide our perception. In a world where many people feel their favorite television characters to be more 'real' than their friends and neighbors12, the 'right' story might well be at odds with external circumstances. Because illusion vies persuasively with reality, the simple perceptual sequence 8

Birch: "Just a Little Too Tangled Up in the Internet," pp. 1, 3.

9

Giles and Murr: "The Ride Gets a Little Rougher," p. 43.

10 11

Cf. her essay in this volume p. 53-74. Kant: Kritik der reinen Vernunft - Gesammelte Schriften (Akademie Ausgabe) ser. I, vol. 4, p. 133 (A 197).

12

Lowenthal: "Counterfeit Art: Authentic Fakes?", p. 94.

4

Introduction

that informs idea and representation may be derailed. We may no longer worry about distinguishing MUD from RL, fake from authentic, the object from its artificial replication. As one postmodernist critic has observed, "It is only an atmosphere of theory which differentiates artworks from other things." 13 Whether the 'virtual reality' generated as a techno-speculative phenomenon 14 might actually be mistaken for reality is not the crucial issue for those who have found themselves addicted to the alternative experience it affords. In a cartoon by Til Mette (Figure 1), housing shortage has been happily solved by the expansion of a single room through the alternate reality of cyberspace; yet even in this alternate reality a mother's care for her children may be distressed by technological malfunctions. The perception of reality is confounded by the perception of cyberspace. Taking up Kant's account of "given representations in a judgment" as empirical, and consequently aesthetic,15 Goethe praised the scientific and aesthetic attributes of "intuitive judgment" ("anschauende Urtheilskraft"). 16 For Goethe the real cannot perish, for "we are not deluded by our senses, but by our judgment." 17 As Kant had cautioned, we do not perceive logically but analogically. The way of perception still seems to be "an art concealed in the depths of the human soul, whose real modes of activity nature is hardly likely ever to allow us to discover."18 Nevertheless the essays in this volume try to detect the perceptual process by which sensory data are integrated into a mental gestalt or transformed into a verbal or visual representation. The continuing influence of Nietzsche's critique of language has effectively undermined every contemporary effort to argue a similarity between signs and objects; nature can no longer be regarded as "un jeu des signes et des ressemblances."19 If signs - whether "natural signs" such as pictures or arbi13 14 15

16 17 18

19

Crowther: Critical Aesthetics and Postmodernism, p. 180. Puttri: "Virtual Reality Comes Into Focus," pp. 56-59; see also Hobson: p. 70 and 72. Kant: Kritik der Urteilskraft, p. 38 (§ 1) - Kant: Gesammelte Schriften (Akademie Ausgabe) ser. I, vol. 5, p. 204: "Gegebene Vorstellungen in einem Urtheile können empirisch (mithin ästhetisch) sein." Goethe: Collected Works vol. 12, p. 31-2 - Goethe: Werke (Weimarer Ausgabe) ser. II, vol. 11, p. 54-5. See Walter Pape's essay in this volume, p. 98. Ibid., vol. 42, 2, p. 259 (= Maximen und Reflexionen, p. 248, N o . 1193). Kant: Kritik der reinen Vernunft - Gesammelte Schriften (Akademie Ausgabe) ser. I, vol. 4, p. 101 (A141,B 180-1): "eine verborgene Kunst in den Tiefen der menschlichen Seele, deren •wahre Handgriffe wir der Natur schwerlich jemals abrathen und sie unverdeckt vor Augen legen werden." See Marian Hobson's essay, p. 73. Foucault: Les mots et les choses, p. 46.

Figure 1 Til Mette: "Housing shortage is relieved by cyber-space, but new problems arise."

trary signs such as words- can no longer be said to represent objects, if artistic imitation deals in unreality rather than reality,20 artistic representation must obviously be accounted for in terms of some other rationale than the referentiality of signs and the replication of objects. Nevertheless, the current "faith 20

Crittendon: "Reference and Nonexistence in the Twentieth Century." Crittendon: Unreality: The Metaphysics of Fictional Objects, pp. 1-30.

6

Introduction

in fakes," in spite of prevailing skepticism among postmodernist critics, has noticeable similarities to the faith in the magic interrelation of sign and object that came about during the romantic period in the wake of the rejection of intuition ("Anschauung").21 In response to these similarities, many of the essays in this volume focus particularly on the period between 1750 and 1820 when the discussion of sensory perception and representation reached its first pinnacle. During the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, music and landscape painting were deemed capable of overcoming the "uncertainty about language, about its representational and expressive competence."22 In his novel Ardinghello und die glückseligen Inseln (1787) Wilhelm Heinse discusses the deficiencies of the arts in regard to their signs: In nature we have, of course, everything together, and the various arts divide themselves in nature. Each one must therefore recognize its defects, its limitations. Painting has no real movement, only the appearance of movement, signs; poetry, which can present to the senses no figure, no beauty, remains to its misfortune forever blind; and music is in and of itself without expression and only a handmaid of the muses. 2 1

Well aware of the argument Lessing had set forth in Laokoon; or, On the Boundaries of Painting and Poetry (1766), Heinse nevertheless argued conscientiously in behalf of the imaginative liberation of the painterly ideal: If I were a landscape painter [...], I would paint for a whole year nothing but winds and clouds especially sunsets. What magic, what infinite melodies of light and darkness, and cloud-shapes and bright blue! It is the poetry of nature. Mountains, castles, palaces, pleasure-gardens, ever new pyrotechnics of light beams, giants, war and battle, flaming trails interchange with new enticements, when the star of day descends in glowing flames. 24 21

Taylor: "Magical Language and Poetic Analogy." Taylor: Magic and English pp.38-63; see also Liede: Dichtungals Spiel vol. 1, p. 249.

Romanticism,

22

Cf. Barry: Language, Music and the Sign: A Study in Aesthetics, Poetics and Poetic Practice from Collins to Coleridge, p. 178.

23

Heinse: Ardinghello, p. 187. "In der Natur haben wir freilich alles beisammen, und die verschiednen Künste teilen sich nur in sie. Jede muß dagegen ihre Mängel, ihre Schranken erkennen. Die Malerei hat keine wirkliche Bewegung, nur den Schein davon, Zeichen; die Poesie kann keine Gestalt, keine Schönheit für den Sinn darstellen, bleibt ewig unglückselig blind; und Musik an und für sich ist ohne bestimmten Ausdruck und nur eine Magd der Musen."

24

Ibid., p. 195. "Wenn ich ein Landschaftsmaler wäre [...], ich malte ein ganzes Jahr weiter nichts als Lüfte, und besonders Sonnenuntergänge. Welch ein Zauber, welche unendliche Melodien von Licht und Dunkel, und Wolkenformen und heiterm Blau! Es ist die Poesie der

Introduction

7

In this presentiment of an abstract and yet synaesthetic painting "winds and clouds" ("Lüfte") still seem to represent things. Ludwig Tieck in his novel Franz Stembalds Wanderungen has the friend of his hero plead for an art without "meaning in the conventional sense": It was evening: a beautiful heaven was aglow with its wonderful, brightly colored cloudscapes above them. "Look," Rudolph continued, "if y o u painters could present me something like that, I would often pardon you for your moving histories, your passionate and confused representations with all their countless figures. M y soul should delight and content itself with these bright colors without connection, these airy images gilt with gold; I would gladly surrender plot, passion, composition, and all [...]. Oh, my friend, if you could only capture in your paintings this wonderful music which the heavens are today composing! But you have not the proper colors, and meaning in the conventional sense is the condition of your art.

Novalis, too, declares in his Allgemeine Brouillon the effect of such a " Wolkenspiel - Naturspiel" to be a free association of ideas and "extremely poetic" ("äußerst poetisch"); art may thus be liberated from ape-like imitation ("Der Stümper [...] ahmt affenmäßig nach").26 The very effort to achieve absolute fidelity in artistic imitation brought about increased reliance on mechanical rules governing perspective. Landscape and portraiture, no less than architectural design were sketched as if governed and confined by gridded space. Subjected to such methods of graphic design, the representation of nature was bereft of precisely those haphazard elements that made the scene itself appear natural and the artist's rendition contrived and artificial. To restore natural freedom, Alexander Cozens proposed A New Method of Assisting the Invention in Drawing Original Compositions of Landscape

25

26

Natur. Gebirge, Schlösser, Paläste, Lusthaine, immer neue Feuerwerke von Lichstrahlen, Riesen, Krieg und Streit, flammende Schweife wechseln mit neuen Reizen ab, wenn das Gestirn des Tages in Brand und Gluten untersinkt." Tieck: Franz Stembalds Wanderungen - Werke vol. 1, p. 907. "Es wurde Abend, ein schöner Himmel erglänzte mit seinen wunderbaren, buntgefärbten Wolkenbildern über ihnen. ,Sieh', fuhr Rudolph fort, ,wenn ihr Maler mir dergleichen darstellen könntet, so wollte ich euch oft eure beweglichen Historien, eure leidenschaftlichen und verwirrten Darstellungen mit allen unzähligen Figuren erlassen. Meine Seele sollte sich an diesen grellen Farben ohne Zusammenhang, an diesem mit Gold ausgelegten Luftbildern ergötzen und genügen, ich würde da Handlung, Leidenschaft, Komposition und alles gern vermissen [...]. Oh, mein Freund, wenn ihr doch diese wunderliche Musik, die der Himmel heute dichtet, in eure Malerei hineinlocken könntet! Aber euch fehlen Farben, und Bedeutung im gewöhnlichen Sinne ist leider eine Bedingung euerer Kunst.'" Novalis: "Das allgemeine Brouillon" - Schriften vol. 3, p. 452 (no. 966) and "Ankedoten," ibid. vol. 2, p. 591 (no. 281).

8

Introduction

(1785/86). A landscape, he suggested, might be more effectively composed "by staining a piece of paper or by working with blots," for these blots would provide the "vague and indeterminate" attributes of nature itself.27 The fascination with the "vague and indeterminate," with winds and sunsets, with light dispersed through clouds and haze, persist in early nineteenth century painting and become the very imprimature of J. W. M. Turner. 28 Artists, in spite of Tieck's critique that "meaning in the conventional sense" was the condition of their art, pursued modes of representation which defied the constraints of physical and material representation and meaning. Was Tieck, then, guilty of charging the artist with his own sins as poet, critic, and wordsmith? The challenge of 'absolute' art, after all, was first recognized as a literary dilemma: the verbal arts, hidebound in the meaning of words and the regimen of syntax, seemed to confront even greater impediments than the visual arts in seeking to escape the bondage of mimesis as defined by eighteenth-century critics. Thus Coleridge was among those who still endorsed "the notion of music as the most ideal of the arts insofar as it is least impeded by its medium of empty signs."29 Plato, we remember, ridiculed the dilemma of the material representation in his account of the painter whose representation of a bed would always fall short of the ideal bed, or even the bed made by the carpenter {Republic X, 596-598). But Plato also upheld "the notion of music as the most ideal of the arts." The formal elements of composition - order, rhythm, harmony, balance, proportion - all derive from the ideal. The mimetic arts - music, dancing, poetry, drama, painting, sculpture - are essential to learning and understanding because they reveal the beauty of form (Laws, 397a-b, 400d-401a). Plato has listed the arts in descending order of their capacity to realize the mimetic function. Painting and sculpture become preoccupied with material appearances and thus cannot succeed as fully as music and dancing in the representation of ideal form. Music, foremost among the mimetic arts, most completely reveals in its informing principles the good, true, and beautiful (Laws, 653s-655a; 664e-665e). The capacity of art to represent ideal form is what Novalis defined as "hieroglyphistic," the primal art from which all other arts derive: 27

Quoted from Barry: Language, Music and the Sign, p. 184. See also Werner Busch: "Die Ordnung im Flüchtigen - Wolkenstudien der Goethezeit." Schulze ed., Goethe und die Kunst, pp. 519-27, here p. 520-21.

28

Cf. ibid.; see also the cloud and wind pictures from Luke Howard to Joseph William Mallord Turner, ibid., pp. 528-70. Barry: Language, Music and the Sign, p. 134.

29

Introduction

9

T h e first art is hieroglyphistic. T h e art of c o m m u n i c a t i o n , reflection, o r language, the art of representation, cultivation, o r p o e t r y , are still all one. O n l y later d o e s this raw m a s s divide - then arise the art of naming, language in its p r o p e r sense p h i l o s o p h y - and fine art, the art of creation, p o e t r y in general. 3 0

Novalis's hieroglyphs apparently combine the signifier and the signified, thus escaping the postlapsarian division of ideal and real that has left artists with mere imitation and empty signs. Coleridge's intention to establish "the Affinity of the Fine Arts to each other, and the Principles common to them all" 31 was based on the conviction that all arts incorporated non-representational signs. Music could be considered "a major force in weakening mimesis" 32 only if the Platonic ground of mimesis were utterly dismissed and the materialist version of mimesis as "representation of reality" were accepted in its stead. Despite denying material representation and striving for an autonomous art, the artist must refer the signs of his particular medium to perception. Once referred to perception, signs also inevitably refer to perception. The reflecting senses always mediate the work of art, whatever its mimetic and representational claims or denials. The essays in this volume, produced in 1991 by a collaborative research group at the Humanities Research Institute of the University of California, Irvine, explore that mediation in music and dance as well as in literature, architecture, and art. Music, as Wayne Slawson argues, may implicate structural illusions not unlike the image/reality bifurcation of the visual and verbal arts. Music, that is, may generate solipsistic doubles or multiples. What is referred to or what is expressed is contained within the musical work itself. A sound having one apparent musical function or structural meaning is heard over, typically, a larger context to take on quite a different function or structural meaning. In her study of dance, Dianne Howe shows how the elements of space, time, and force are manipulated in dance to conjure illusions beyond the facts of the physical movement. She traces in the history of dance a paradigm shift from the objective to the subjective: classical ballet focused on creating the illusions of external reality: time, place, and character; modern dance concerned itself with transforming one's inner experiences, as their own reality, into readable illusions. 30

Novalis: "Anekdoten" - Schriften vol. 2, p. 571-2 (no. 214). "Die erste Kunst ist Hieroglyphistik. Mittheilungs, Besinnungskunst oder Sprache, und Darstellung!, Bildungskunst, oder Poesie sind noch Eins. Erst später trennt sich diese rohe Masse - dann entsteht Benennungskunst, Sprache im eigentlichen Sinn - Philosophie - und schöne Kunst, Schöpfungskunst, Poesie überhaupt."

31

Coleridge: The Friend vol. 2, p. 18 - cf. Barry: Landtage, Music and tbe Sign, p. 141.

32

Neubauer: The Emancipation of Music from Language, p. 7.

10

Introduction

Music and dance, deemed by Plato to be the mimetic arts most capable of revealing ideal form, are presented in this volume as conditioned by the very same strategies of self-reflexive referentiality as practiced in literature, painting, and even architecture. Although the two classical concepts of mimesis Plato on the representation of ideal form; Aristotle on the representation of the human action of responding, deliberating, and choosing - were seemingly overwhelmed by a subsequent tradition that sought to define mimesis as the representation of reality, all of the arts throughout the past two centuries reveal the bifurcations and tensions of referentiality. In the visual arts, as Barbara Maria Stafford demonstrates, once physical science appeared upon the Enlightenment stage as edifying amusement, its visual pedagogics influenced, indeed merged with, the experimental aesthetics of the age. In her account of illusion in architecture, Marian Hobson turns to the analogical reasoning of Diderot. Hobson documents Diderot's familiarity with unpublished papers on Soufflot's construction of Sainte Geneviöve (now the Pantheon), and she relates Diderot's discussion of perspective proportion to the perception of 'virtual reality' in cyberspace. The essays devoted to visual perception in literature demonstrate: "impossibile nobis esse, ut sermonem nostrum ab hoc oculorum sensu abstrahamus" (Johannes Kepler). 33 The same relationship must persist between speech and the perception of music, even though Nietzsche may well have been right in asserting that "language can never adequately render the cosmic symbolism of music." 34 T o be sure, there can be no confirmation of physical reality prior to perception, but it is equally true that no picture can be perceived without language, no sound can be heard without associating a metaphorical meaning 35 ; there are "inner determinations of our disposition" 36 that guide our perception of objects. In spite of the primacy often granted to visual experience and the supposed "despotism of the eye," 37 language (not mere 'words'!) and the visual arts are intimately connected: "In the representational word there is always contained a reference to a quasi-pictorial sensory appearance; 33

Kepler: Nova Astronomia - Gesammelte Werke vol. 3. p. 28: "it is impossible to alienate our speech from this sense of our eyes."

34

Nietzsche: Die Geburt der Tragödie - Sämtliche Werke vol. 1, p. 51: "Der Weltsymbolik der Musik ist eben deshalb mit der Sprache auf keine Weise erschöpfend beizukommen [...]."

35

See e. g. Lawrence E. Marks: "Synaesthesia: Perception and Metaphor." Burwick and Pape, eds., Aesthetic Illusion, pp. 28-40.

36

Kant: Kritik der reinen Vernunft - Gesammelte Schriften (Akademie Ausgabe) ser. I, vol. 4, p. 133 (A 197): "innere Bestimmungen unseres Gemüths." Barry: Language, Music and the Sign, p. 182.

37

Introduction

11

in the representational picture always reference to a postulate of meaning that can be achieved only by a word. Within the word dwells an obscure picture, within the picture a silent word." 34 The once sought for 'absoluteness' of art lies buried, alongside the Greek kalon and other relics of the aesthetic past, in the vast graveyard adjacent to that site where now stands the theme park of postmodernism. Coleridge, who felt himself witness to the failure if not the demise, formulated this consolation: T h e mind always feels itself greater than aught it has done. It begins in the act of perceiving that it must go beyond it in order to comprehend it." 3 '

38

Willems: "Kunst und Literatur als Gegenstand einer Theorie der Wort-Bild-Beziehungen", p. 423: "Im darstellenden Wort ist immer der Bezug auf einen quasi-bildlichen Sinnenschein, im darstellenden Bild immer der Bezug auf eine nur durch das Wort zu leistende Bedeutungssetzung beschlossen. Dem Wort wohnt ein verdunkeltes Bild, dem Bild ein verstummtes Wort inne."

39

Coleridge: Philosophical Lectures, p. 166 (lecture iv).

Appearances and the Semiotics of Culture

Κ . LUDWIG PFEIFFER

Universität-Gesamthochschule Siegen

Suggestiveness or Interpretation: On the Vitality of Appearances Abstract: Traditional beliefs in the significance of phenomenal appearance have been greatly shaken by successive stages in the development of the sciences, philosophy and in particular the criticism of ideology. Even the arts, long thought to be the guardian of appearance, have subverted its status. On the other hand, postmodernism has been described as the period in which phenomena have resurfaced - as, indeed, the surface of things beyond which, in spite of all the sound and fury of meanings, we can hardly go. The essay is looking for a third position. The concept of style, not limited to its aesthetic usage, but reactivated for cultural and behavioral contexts as well, is seen as the embodiment of a suggestive vitality beyond mere appearance and before deep meanings. Welch Schauspiel! Aber ach! ein Schauspiel nur! / Wo faß ich Dich, unendliche Natur? (Faust) Grau, teurer Freund, ist alle Theorie, / Und grün des Lebens goldner Baum. (Mephistopheles) A blue thing sometimes looks green, and may become red. In such a simple statement lie rich opportunities for confusion. (Nelson Goodman) Am farbigen Abglanz haben wir das Leben.

(Faust)

Lift not the painted veil which those who live / Call Life: though unreal shapes be pictured there, / And it but mimic all we would believe / With colours idly spread, - behind lurk Fear / And Hope, twin Destinies [...] (Percy Bysshe Shelley)1 1. Appearances, the proverb has it, are mostly deceptive. The times are past when allegory reached out for the invisible - the soul and its layers, history and its

1

Goethe: Werke (Weimarer Ausgabe) ser. I, vol. 14: Faust. Erster Theil, p. 30, v. 454-455; p. 95, v. 2028-29; vol. 15,1, p. 7, v. 4247 ("What a spectacle! But oh! only a spectacle! Where do I grasp you, infinite Nature?," "Grey, dear friend, is all theory, / But green is life's golden tree," "We receive life in its colourful brilliance"); Goodman: Appearance, p. 93; Shelley: Works, p. 569.

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meaning - by catching its essence in orderly visualizations; when, on another level, rigid, rigidly enforced dress codes denoted social status, outlined scopes of human character in succinct visible forms. Such correspondences, in which appearance and essence seemed to coalesce, have become rare. The Greeks invented what has been called the First Science whereby theorems could be logically deduced from postulated axioms. The Renaissance then produced the Second Science which systematized the process of experimentation. In the 20th century, the Third Science analyses the basic nature of the material (?) world in terms radically different from anything we can experience.2 In the media age, as its prophets want us to believe, appearances are manufactured, without controlling, essential or real correspondences, mainly on all kinds of screens in treacherously suggestive forms. Since there is no accessible reality by which they might be judged, an expression like "theatre of war" takes on a desperately literal meaning. We may have opinions on, but no referential controls for, the literal or metaphoric screens through and in which we 'see'. In Othello, old yearnings for "ocular proof" may have found, in symbolic form, their first prominent victim. But if science and literature have, in various ways, pierced appearances and, in their stead, explored dimensions of depth, of decreasing vividness and increasing abstraction, literature at least also seems to continue to play the advocate of appearances. In one of Ivy Compton-Burnett's novels we run into the following sentence: "Appearances are not held to be a clue to the truth [...]. But we seem to have no other." In Harold Brodkey's Stones in an Almost Classical Mode we may be puzzled by statements of various sorts: "I think that obsessions and theories are only useful if they add passion to a work that already has a formal structure." Or, stronger still: "To see her in sunlight was to see Marxism die [...] It seemed to me Orra was proof that life was a terrifying phenomenon of surface immediacy."3 And if Othello experiences the treacherousness of the visible, he also incarnates the fallacies, indeed the madness of interpretation, of theoretical or, generally, 'semantic' systems with which the failings of appearances are supposed to be remedied. In an article called "In praise of appearance" Alain made a pointed remark to that effect: "Intelligence throws itself at the 'why,' and always too fast. We have to bring it back to the object present, not the object as we think it is, but as it shows itself."4 The panoply of theories, interpretations, criticisms of ideology, 2 3 4

Cf. Waddington: Behind Appearance, pp. 1-2. Cf. Compton-Burnett: Manservant and Maidservant, p. 5; Brodkey: Stories, pp. 49,163. Alain: Propos, p. 543. Cf. pp. 175-6, 544.

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methodologies and experiments, mobilized, at least in Western thought perhaps since Francis or, indeed, Roger Bacon, to get at the bottom of persons and things whose appearance is no longer to be trusted, have, in the wake of the fall of appearances, suffered from an analogous lack of credibility. The 19th century seems to have experienced that revenge of degraded, because downgraded appearances on the overbearing claims of theory and methodology, a revenge to which the theoretical relativism of modern constructivist or systems theory has but given euphemistic names. F. H . Bradley is caught in that deadlock in which appearances do no longer convey, but in which theory does not see into the heart of things either. For Bradley, illusion takes over as soon as we leave a mode of "immediate experience" in which we do not make distinctions between our awareness and that of which it is aware. As soon as we talk the language of things, qualities, relations in order then to proceed to thoughts, judgments and truth claims, as soon as we abandon the emphatic appeal of primary appearances, we stumble, paradoxically, into 'mere' appearance. This process is operative in simple sentences like "Sugar is sweet." As an identity claim, the sentence cannot be sustained, because sugar has many qualities which can neither be described as a unity nor as a mere conjunction of qualities. The process is operative in sentences like "There is a wolf," because the sentence does not do justice to the perceived phenomenal dynamics of the situation. Relations, as the linkage of qualities, provoke these problems in a particularly obnoxious, almost counterintuitive form when applied to the self. Individual selves - poststructuralists take note! - are no more than "phenomenal adjectives," bundles of differences without a "solid principle of stability." The immediate experience, in its turn, drawn as it is into all kinds of constructions, may have a name, but hardly a local, real habitation. To catapult himself out of this dilemma, Bradley invents the idea of an Absolute as an all-inclusive and superrelational experience. But this, as he admits, is an idea we can try to form, but no longer understand. 5 In a modern philosophical classic devoted to that topic, the apparent conflict between appearance-oriented (e. g. phenomenalist) and, let us call them, methodologically (theoretically, experimentally) committed approaches finishes in a draw. Nelson Goodman denies claims of "epistemological priority" to both the phenomenalist and (e. g.) physicalist bias. Significantly, though, The Structure of Appearance is primarily concerned with phenomenalist approaches, even if it does not espouse phenomenalism as a foundationalist 5

Bradley: Appearance, pp. 69, 73, 96-9, 102-4, 226-7. Cf. Passmore: Philosophy, pp. 62-9, 159-161.

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doctrine. This means that appearances can hold their ground, although no "optimum theory" (demanding, e.g. daylight or similar 'optimum' conditions of perception) can regulate the perception of even simple properties like colours. One can reasonably talk about the "presentations" of things (and presumably persons) - presentations "momentary and unrecallable," yet "comparable in that they contain repeatable and recognizable qualia." In cases of choice, we do have "an instinctive feeling of hitting the mark"; "we favour the decree that makes necessary the least adjustment in the body of already accepted decrees."4 I am alluding, in simplifying ways, to sophisticated arguments. That sophistication, while it may just add final touches to long traditions of thought, remains strikingly modern when compared to postmodern fashions. In an uncharitable vein, one might debunk their claims of newness as the simplification of older philosophical problems under the cultural pressure of contemporary media. In those, appearances as a general trend towards spectacle and 'show,' as the rule of 'simulacra' without controlled and controlling depth, of simulations without underlying realities (or whichever commonplaces we may choose) seem to sway command. Jean Baudrillard opens his Fatal Strategies with the assertion that 'things' have found a way to escape a dialectics of meanings and significance which they have grown tired of. In hyperrealities, suggesting undecidably both reality and illusion, in simulation as the ecstatic and only celebration of the vanished real, the old distinctions between reality, appearance and illusion are continuously blurred. In an age of the "transpolitical," 'content' - the ideologies of yore - does not 'really' count. We are, instead, attending varieties of spectacle: the violent spectacle of (meaningless) change in the United States (epitomized in advertising, fashion, Wall Street, prestige technologies on the one, drugs and violence on the other side), the morose simulation of life in France (because of a more acute sense of cultural loss), and its cheerful variety, on all levels, in Italy. A tacit consensus incites a ruling passion for illusion which takes the place of, but is also almost tantamount to, reality.7 Hyperrealities, that is their oscillations between the indeterminate poles of reality and illusion, converge in a passion for precious surfaces, for a culture of superficiality, in which, like in American TV, serious meanings are barely touched.

6 7

Goodman: Appearance, pp. xxiv (Introduction), 95-101. Baudrillard: Strategien, pp. 7,10,12, 29-31, 89-92.

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2. Appearances, however, were never 'mere' appearances. In Baudrillard himself, as well as in the intense repoliticization in poststructuralism, one may detect cognitively conservative yearnings for lost authenticities. One may detect an obsession, almost metaphysical in nature, with possibilities to speak meaningfully about evil or experience. The semantic scope, the epistemological status and the historical efficiency of the cultural semiotics of appearances may thus still range from an index for, a symptom of truth (although this meaning seems to have, as the OED will tell us, almost died out) to the desolate relics of "saving the appearances." The latter expression, in particular, pitiably illustrates the decline of an old and noble, indeed theoretical effort into the manipulation of sorry social fagades. "Salvare apparentia," from antiquity to the Middle Ages, aimed at the satisfactory theoretical explanation, but also preservation, of the data shown by the phenomena themselves And yet it is possible that we continue to remain under the spell of various appearances to an extent we would not care to admit; that we may be tacitly looking for emphatic forms in ways stigmatized by theory as obsolete or immature, or both. In any case: Some time before the advent of postmodernism (presumably in 1965), Owen Barfield, a humanist trained as a lawyer, tried to stem the adverse tides which had been threatenting, for a while, to engulf the appearances. H e defined, in a book called Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry, idolatry as the valuing of images and representations "in the wrong way and for the wrong reasons." He denounced idolatry as the tendency "to abstract the sense-content from the whole representation and seek that for its own sake." Against that, he pitted the appropriate participation in appearances. "Original participation is [...] the sense that that their [sic] stands behind the phenomena, and on the other side of them from man, a represented which is of the same nature as man." To be intensely aware of participation is to feel the centre of energy in oneself "identified with the energy of which external nature is the image."9 Barfield seeks to apprehend, in a non-mystical, but also non-scientific, non-theoretical way, an appeal in and of appearances, which may not be unrelated to, but is not totally dependent on, the reality status of the subject or object from which it irradiates. Appeals are normally initiated, but not exhausted by surface. They go beyond or through surface, but do not 8 9

Cf. Mittelstrass: Phänomene. Barfield: Appearances, pp. 110-1. For a somewhat ecologically framed commentary on Barfield see now Schenkel: "Eine Geschichte der Phänomene."

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turn into explicit interpretation. Terms like 'charisma,' 'aura' (pace Benjamin), 'halo' preserve, in whatever haphazard fashion, the drive of Barfield's original participation as the imposing suggestiveness of appearance. This is not methodological intervention, theoretical distancing or the nonchalant stance of the observer in systems theory who blithely accepts that s/he cannot see what s/he cannnot see. It is appearance beyond mere appearance (taken as "sense-content"), but remains on this side of discursive interpretation. Are there hopes, in spite of dominating theory trends, for a historical, cultural 'logic' of appearances, however sketchy, which neither totally de- nor overly remystifies them? Let us assume that, once upon a time, people responded - and to respond does not mean to observe or to interpret - to the power of appearances; that response implied a drive toward successful or fatal action. Let us also assume that we find a relatively pure world of pregnant appearances, summoning persons to action, in Homer's Iliad. Let us finally assume that this world did not completely vanish. Rather, we are entangled in the co-existence of different, differently useful, partly competing, partly incompatible modes of cognitive and affective operation and the relative worlds which they call forth. One of them certainly remains a world of suggestive appearances to which we respond. The trouble is that it has become, in itself, fairly incoherent. Can we yet single out some contemporary leftovers (hangovers as it were) and stylize them into a more coherent picture? One might adduce, for that purpose, the language of theatrical spectacle in Erving Goffman's sociology of interaction developed, again, long before the advent of postmodernism. It is comparable to what Wesley Trimpi has called the "strangely haunting reply" of Plato, in the Laws, to a group of tragic poets who have asked permission to perform their tragedies in his state: Respected visitors, we are ourselves authors of a tragedy, and that the finest and best we know how to make. In fact, our whole polity has been constructed as a dramatization [...] of a noble and perfect life; that is what we hold to be in truth the most real of tragedies. Thus you are poets, and we also are poets in the same style, rival artists and actors, and that in the finest of all dramas, one which indeed can be produced only by a code of law - or that least is our faith. 10

The idea - to literally see the meaning in the appearance, in the spectacle - is alive in behavioural, but not necessarily behaviouristic theories. Those are frequently grounded in, but not determined by, biologically oriented theories of human evolution. In its popular version we find this in authors like Desmond 10

Quoted in Trimpi: Muses, p. 60.

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Morris; in controversial fashions, the whole discipline of human ethology is permeated by it. Disputes rage between biologically and socially oriented explanations of behaviour. But the interesting questions, in our context, arise rather with respect to the transformations, or transpositions, of inherited and learned behaviour into patterns of appearance-like manifestations. This idea ekes out a more or less miserable existence also in manuals of practical psychology. Here we are dealing with do-it-yourself courses in the visibility of human character. Older theories like physiognomy (to say nothing of phrenology), more recent ones like psychiatric theories on the impact of physical constitution (Kretschmer and others) use appearances to bolster up abstract theory with concrete cues, to help out where science seems unable to touch base with ordinary perceptions of human reality. In a very different domain, literary 'portraits,' techniques of 'painting' in literature have always struck a precarious balance between a sense for appearances and incursions into the invisble or intangible. In philosophy, one may perceive a disastrous split in Kant. In the transcendental perspective, Kant bars us from going 'really' beyond appearances. But he also invests great energies - a procedure denounced as his great contradiction by Schopenhauer - in order to master, to overpower them for higher purposes. Science and morality assert themselves as major instruments in this enterprise. The sovereignty of the human mind shines in particularly glorious form in the subduing of the sublime: Although we seem powerless against their overwhelming appearance, sublime phenomena cannot really defeat the mind. But the price Kant has to pay for the demotion of appearances is high. The immediate, often pressing presence of human beings, including manifestations, bodily and otherwise, of one's own person, cannot be handled that way. Appearances, again, take revenge. Kant, in his 'pragmatic' anthropology and elsewhere, practises an obsessive pathology of the perceptible. He subjects the manifestations of his own (non-sexual) physique to incessant and, seen in the light of his 'critical' philosophy, downright superstitious observations. Flatulence, emaciated buttocks, digestion and constipation, stomach pains and headaches, haemorrhoids, thin legs, muscle atrophy etc. etc. - Kant talks tirelessly about these in himself and in friends. His flat and narrow chest leaves little space for the activities of heart and lungs; it therefore has laid, he thinks, the basis for his 'naturally' hypochondriac bent.11 If critical philosphy, then, breaks the power of appearances, through the transcendental, scientific, moral or generally autonomous powers of the mind, the repressed returns by spreading itself out in 'uncritical' forms of discourse. 11

See the descriptions and quotes in Böhme, Böhme: Vernunft, pp. 391,452.

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3. Others, less driven than Kant to exorcise the ambivalences of 'enlightenment,' drew consequences which Kant would not yet foresee: "Die wahre Welt haben wir abgeschafft: welche Welt blieb übrig? die scheinbare vielleicht?... Aber nein! mit der wahren Welt haben wir auch die scheinbare abgeschafft!"12 Before Nietzsche, Schopenhauer had revolted against what he considered as Kant's blatant contradiction. The categories, on the one hand, were to be employed only with respect to experience in order to 'spell' the world of appearances. On the other hand, the appearances were assumed to have an intelligible cause which is not appearance ("Erscheinung"). In Schopenhauer, the revolt provoked what might be called a peculiar philosophy of pregnant appearance. The cognitive, including emotional movements between dimensions of perception ("Wahrnehmung" and "Anschauung"), ideas ("Vorstellung") and conceptual knowledge ("Wissen") spring from the vital powers of the "will." But the will also, and more fundamentally, continuously objectifies, indeed often visualizes itself into the perceptible action of the body. The body is not directly accessible or immediately communicative. It is, like everything else, transformed into "Vorstellung." Yet the body can also claim a less mediated status. The interaction of bodies may not always translate into a readily readable semiotics. But it remains a prerequisite of knowledge. Stronger forms of interaction - those producing blushing, faster heartbeat, perspiration, forms of easy or strained movement - do indeed yield the basic elements of a bodily grounded cognition: "Jeder wahre, ächte, unmittelbare Akt des Willens ist sofort und unmittelbar auch erscheinender Akt des Leibes" (my emphasis). This why modern, biologically grounded theories of human behaviour have frequently claimed Schopenhauer as their predecessor. Of course: Not every motion of the will results in bodily perceptibility. But the drive towards appearances remains remarkable particularly in its negative form. All inner movements, which are tied to concerns of conceptual knowledge only, will have no productive influence on the organism. The exclusive activity of the intellect will rather tire the brain, exhaust and, in the long run, undermine the organism (a diagnosis Schopenhauer applied with particular glee to Kant's early senility). This, once again, confirms "daß das Erkennen sekundärer Natur [ist], [...] nicht aber den inneren Kern unseres Lebens ausmacht."13 12

13

Nietzsche: Götzen-Dämmerung - Sämtliche Werke vol. 6,p. 81: "We have abolished the true world: which world remained? an illusionary one perhaps?... But no! We have abolished the illusionary with the true world." Schopenhauer: Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung - Werke in zehn Bänden. Züricher Ausgabe

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Talking of an inner core, Schopenhauer seems committed to a central metaphor of the dualistic tradition he tries to unhinge. But his case is different: The inner core of living organisms expands into an urge towards appearance. Arnold Gehlen is probably right in describing one of Schopenhauer's ultimate concerns as "die Intuition der lebenden organischen Form, der Physis, des stummen Daseins des Gestalteten. Wer in der Anschauung eines Tieres, eines Blattes schon einmal von der ratlosen Verwunderung ergriffen wurde, daß es so etwas gibt, hat eins der Urerlebnisse Schopenhauers verstanden."14 Nietzsche, in his turn, extolled "those Greeks" who lived prior or indifferent to the 'philosophical' movement initiated by Socrates. He praised them for their ability to 'live,' seeing shapes as unities of being and appearance: Oh diese Griechen! sie verstanden sich darauf, zu lebenl Dazu tuth noth, tapfer bei der Oberfläche, der Falte, der Haut stehn zu bleiben, den Schein anzubeten, an Formen, an Töne, an Worte, an den ganzen Olymp des Scheins zu glauben! Die Griechen waren oberflächlich, aus Tiefe ... Und kommen wir nicht eben darauf zurück, wir Waghalse des Geistes, die wir die höchste und gefährlichste Spitze des gegenwärtigen Gedankens erklettert und von da aus uns umgesehen haben [...] , 15

There is evidence to justify these claims, to some extent. The order of the real, in Homer's Iliad, is dominated by the dynamics of appearing and vanishing situations. They are grasped in a language of holistic images and similes. In such a context, terms like psyche designate vital powers like blood and breath; nous appeals to the intimate connection between the perceiver and the field of perception to which the perceiver responds. These terms are not caught in the dichotomy of perception and knowledge, externals and deeper, or higher, intrapsychic or rational worlds. There are, of course, oppositions; but they are

14

15

vol. 1, p. 144: "Each true, genuine, immediate act of the will is, immediately and unmediatedly, also an appearing act of the body." Über den Willen in der Natur. Ibid. vol. 5, p. 228: "[...] which proves again that knowing is of a secondary nature, [...] but does not constitute the inner core of our being." Cf. also vol. 1, pp. 49,143. Haffmanns, ed.: Uber Arthur Schopenhauer, p. 272: "[...] the intuition of the living organic form, the physical, the silent being of what has been given shape. Whoever was gripped, in looking at an animal, a leaf, by the perplexed wonderment that something like this exists, has understood one of Schopenhauer's prime experiences." A. Rupert Sheldrake's concept of morphogenetic fields and resonance can be seen as a modern biological effort in that direction. See his books like The Presence of the Past. Nietzsche contra Wagner - Sämtliche Werke vol. 6, p. 439: "Oh those Greeks! they knew how to live. For that, it is necessary to stay bravely with the surface, the wrinkle, the skin, to worship appearance, to believe in forms, sounds, words, in the whole Olympus of appearance... And are we not returning to this, we daring spirits who have climbed to the most elevated and dangerous top of contemporary thought and have looked around from there?"

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differently organized. Soma, for instance, is opposed to psyche in that it refers to dead bodies or their members. Tbymos, a central term later narrowed down to mean an emotionalized soul, aims at life as movement, agitation, activity, excitement. In the Odyssey, dualistic shifts of the better-known kind begin to assert themselves. But they have to coexist, in whichever unstable relationships, with the older 'phenomenological' orientation. This structure, in different concrete shapes, will keep its hold on Western cultures.16 N o t surprisingly, a large part of the articles in this volume concentrate on the 18th and early 19th centuries (see in particular the articles by Pape, Stafford, and Vogler). The middle and later 19th cenrury, by contrast, is perhaps the first period, in which texts, undermining appearances, seem to hold a kind of imperialist cognitive sway. It plunges into more radical forms of depth interpretation - psychoanalysis being perhaps the most striking one. The dualisms we have grown accustomed to grow quasi-imperative in the spreading culture of writing. A technology whose cognitive potential was kept at bay by economic controls with the Phoenicians, by religious constraints in other early Eastern cultures, now keeps invading, in Greece, most domains of life. Writing, in a society, as the inevitable stereotype will have it, exposed to pressures of social and political diversification, in fact helps to create some of the new cultural domains: Philosophy and rhetoric, democracy and tragedy (to say nothing of the Olympic Games) come finally into full existence during the fifth century. Theoria itself, as Eric Havelock surmised, may owe its new rank to the effects of peering at, deciphering and interpreting the written page.17 Greek writing operates in situations with diminishing direct social, economic, religious or personal control; its 'irresponsibility* - the writer cannot really be taken to account - motivates one of Plato's strong criticisms of the new tool. Writing creates a different kind of appearance: the impression, or idea, that there are meanings to be ascertained and expressed. This idea, as we have become painfully aware, is plausible, misleading and deceptive all at once. In any case: There are now backgrounds to the dynamics of appearing situations. The relation between treacherous surface and problematic depths must, from now on, be continuously negotiated. Writing contributes to the erosion of appearances as situational dynamics and ritualistic enactment. It does not destroy, however, situational pregnancy 16

Cf. Reucher: Weltsicht, pp. 7-8; Jaynes: Origin of Consciousness, pp. 69-73,255-291; Snell: Entdeckung des Geistes, pp. 17-42.

17

Havelock: Muse, p. 111. My remarks on writing are further based on and extrapolated from some standard studies like Gelb: Writing, but also on somewhat diverging views like Harris: Writing. I do not take here Derrida's concept into account.

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and suggestiveness. Havelock has drawn attention to its strong presence in tragedy" - although tragedy is the new art in which the catastrophic discrepancies between appearance, reality and illusion are exploited to the full. Hans Blumenberg, in what has become a classic essay in Germany, has asserted that Plato's doctrine of archetypes - entities accessible only in a strangely invisibilizing vision - still takes realities as self-presenting presences for granted. H e defined these as realities of immediate evidence.19 Wesley Trimpi has offered detailed analyses of how Plato, in the Sophist, tried to maintain, or to establish, distinctions between images as realities and imitative, representational or fantastic images. The Eleatic Stanger recognizes that reality cannot be reduced to invariant principles of Being nor to simple phenomena always in the process of Becoming. Phenomena, in the emphatic sense, go beyond what one can see, touch or 'handle'. For that, they must exercise their power of affecting others or being affected themselves. The main distinctions between realities and imitations, between accurate and fantastic images are, however, still stated in terms of "practical optics" concerned with distance, perspective, light - a kind of optimum optics which Goodman, without thereby getting rid of appearances, does not trust any more.20 Aristotle saves appearances, reconciles them with theory in different ways. Universal things, or principles are hard to grasp, because they are far removed from the senses. Yet there is hope. A built-in tendency drives perception, memory and experience toward the universal. We perceive things as members of species and classes. However: The threatening alternative of a "mystical vision" for higher principles and a "natural empiricism"21 for ordinary things opens wide scopes for negotiation. In Aristotle's Physics, for instance, the ambiguities infesting matter and form leave "the scientist, the student of nature in the strict sense, with a world the variety and structure of which is subject to no metaphysical limitations." "Forms in matter," in the end, gain definite qualities only if their practical functions can be made clear.22 In the Poetics, there is no distinction between the fine and the useful, 'practical' arts; moreover, mimesis is not restricted to art at all. The instinct of 'imitation' is implanted from childhood; we learn our earliest lessons through it. In situations or ordinary complexity, it is difficult to distinguish originals from 18

Ibid., pp. 94-7.

19

"Wirklichkeitsbegriff," pp. 10-1.

20

Trimpi: Muses, pp. 106-14.

21

Ibid., p. 102. Cf. pp. 90-1,103-5.

22

See the very detailed commentary by Charlton in Aristotle: Physics, pp. 70-9,95-9,137-8. Cf. also Schmitz: Piaton und Aristoteles, pp. 400-37.

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imitations. Butcher, in his renowned commentary, claims that the original, for art, is "human action and character in all their diverse modes of manifestation. "But since action and character are themselves products of manifold imitations, we are approaching a Goffmanesque world of universal mises-en-scbies. Conversely, classical Greek tragedy may be functionally interpreted less as an imitation, than an original way of promoting new behavioural patterns under changing political circumstances. In architecture, of course, a building as an organic whole does not call up any image of a world outside itself at all. And what about music, passed over, by Aristotle, in near-silence?23 Complications do not end here. In an almost psychoanalytic move, Aristotle locates the source of our most intense sense of the real in the dynamic enchainments between perception (aisthesis), phantasia and action. Phantasia does not of course refer to some unconscious. It is, perception-based, a mode of critical distinction. In contrast to nous or theoria, the disciplined and institutionalized, but contemplative ways of knowledge, however, in contrast also to doxa as social prejudice, phantasia feeds on freer images which propel toward action. That drive toward action (orexis) makes for an intimate connection between the images of phantasia and a sense of the real. Here, appearances - as images saturated with both perceptual density, affective energy and implicit action - are invested with an intensity of the real hardly matched elsewhere.24 Tragedy enacts the projection of phantasia into the sociopolitical domain. It is aesthetic above all in that its form of enactment is highly defined; it is an illusion only in the sense that the pressure in 'real' political situations is more distinctly, immediately felt. Western thought, then, finds itself in a split situation. A vital and universalized experience of vision is no longer possible. Its place is usurped by strategies to present, in various ways and media, problems as 'meaningfully,' but also as 'brilliantly' as possible. In the ambivalence of significance and brilliance, appeals to appearance, from hard evidence to dazzling illusion, may adopt the most diverse forms. For Plato and Aristotle, ideas are necessary; otherwise there would be no aspect (eidos in a literal sense) under which something could present itself in sufficient definiteness. But Aristotle also brings genos into prominent position. Genos manifests the immediacy of typical differences between appearances in a striking way. In Plato, finally, the doctrine of archetypes and shadows coexists with semiotic appeals to the pregnancy of bodily beauty.25 23 24 25

Cf. Aristotle: Theory of Poetry and Fine Arts, pp. 15-6, 118-9,138, 148-9. I am drawing conclusions from chap. 3 (pp. 104-26) of the detailed analyses of Cessi: Erkennen und Handeln. Cf. Landsberg: Platonische Akademie, pp. 20-7, 42-9, 57-9.

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4.

Plato and Aristotle prefigure the scope of problem variation to the present day. This looks like, and is meant to be, an analogy to assertions that the major epistemological impact of writing in the West takes effect when the Greeks take over and develop the Phoenician system (Gelb, Havelock); that Western philosophy, in the main, consists of footnotes to Plato (A. N . Whitehead). Radical positions linking artificial intelligence, information and media theory today, often end up, indeed, with electronic versions of the power of appearances in pre-writing times. Grassmuck, in particular, traces the circle from "animism to animation." Between the two, roughly from the 13th to the 20th centuries, periods of depth interpretation unfold... and peter out. Screens, our (sometimes painted) veils, have assumed the quasi-autopoietic power of situational appearance. In both cases, the question of what is behind may be asked, but does not lead very far. George Meredith, in The Shaving of Shagpat (1856), had already written the allegorical obituary of the search for truth: That search, posing as a plunge into depth, emerges, in the end, at the surface again. Certainly it has always been difficult to hold on to the emphatic, substantial connotations of things as res. In an age of screens, the seeming transparency of surfaces may have lost all ground. Even so, these surfaces may be enjoyed, in pleasure, in the exercises of taste, and in excess, like the appearances of yore - or so it seems. Grassmuck fears that the heightened immateriality, the glossy elusiveness of postmodern surfaces, have increased epistemological (and other) depression. These surfaces do not offer the resistance, from which, in a more recalcitrant world, traditional melancholy may have sprung. Depression takes over when the tension of wrestling with recalcitrance has evaporated, when the paltry traces of what still seems real turn out to be mere spin-offs of hyperinformation. 26 These tales, though not told by idiots, may not be the whole story. Certainly: Phainomena, in the old emphatic sense, have largely disappeared. But if the negotiations between appearance and significance have become more difficult, they have also become less important. Where they still seem paramount - as they do in many contemporary problems called political - , their pathological obsolescence, and not their pertinence, tend to strike the observer. In another domain, suspicions grow that distinctions between, say, aesthetic illusion and realities are plausible, sometimes imperative, but still conventionalized decisions. Aesthetic illusion, indeed, may be predominantly 26

Grassmuck: Vom Animismus zur Animation, pp. 12, 16, 18-9,22, 55.

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a hangover from and in literary theory. Literature, according to Hegel and others, is that general art of language which seems capable of representing, illusionistically, or expressing almost anything. But even literature may sometimes behave less as illusionistic representation than as vital response to that power of things which Locke thought epistemologically basic, though philosophically unanalyzable. We may, therefore, have to take more seriously efforts like those of Maurice Lefebve, which try to describe, in a way comparable to Barfield, the "fascinating image" as the "unreal" one. The fascination of the image arises from aesthetic or metaphysical contemplation, not through sheer physiological stimulation. In that, it leads back to the magic image. Magic is produced when the mind subjects things by doubling them with images. Schopenhauer, from whom this seems far removed, may have neglected the necessities of arrangement and perspective, in which appearances, as variously constructed images, establish ties between 'people' and the 'world' much more effectively than 'ordinary' perception. 27 We are dealing, that is, with the cultural semiotics of appealing appearances. For those, oppositions between nature and screen, surface and depth, immediacy and interpretation may be contextually, but not fundamentally relevant. Perception is felt, very early, less to register what seems given, but rather to exercise constructive qualities of its own. Aristotle finds it hard to establish reliable distinctions between perceptual and memory images. A memory image does represent; but it is also itself a living presence (zoon), for which the criterion of similarity does not unproblematically obtain.28 In baroque traditions, the flood of images, somehow pointing mysteriously to each other, but not to some archetype or reality, cannot, in any strong sense, be referentially controlled. Finally, in Adorno's aesthetic theory, the aesthetic certainly partakes of illusion ("Schein"). But to mobilize, and thus simultaneously to isolate, neutralize the aesthetic as illusion becomes important only to the degree in which human behaviour, in the social domain, as Hamlet has it, loses the name of action, too, does not engage any more, that is, the vital powers of human beings. We get enmeshed, first in a bourgeois, then a general form of universalized illusion, for which art and worldly behaviour illustrate only different functional domains. Art as a system of illusionistic conventions makes limited, socially tolerable allowance for the vital powers of aesthetic, 27 28

Lefdbve: L'Imagefascinante, pp. 22-3. Cf. Peri mnemnes kai anamnesos. I am indebted here to an unpublished paper by Renate Lachmann.

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29

that is appealing forms of appearance. In order to preserve these powers to at least a limited extent, though, the dilution of aesthetic structures and forms of 'expression' into mere illusion must not be carried too far. Thus, for Adorno, the system of art is interwoven with forms and procedures which erode its aesthetic conventionalization. Procedures of 'deaestheticization,' then, assert themselves in the very domain of art itself. They squeeze out, from somewhere, impulses which suggest that possibilities of immediate and emphatic life, or liveliness, have not completely died out. Adorno turns out as an advocate of an almost vitalistic core of the aesthetic. It ensures its affinity with the archaic. This explains, for instance, why the sublime, as the uniquely powerful mode of appearance, has retreated from the world ('nature,' where Kant still found plenty of it), into art. The sublime does no longer irradiate from a nature stereotyped in postcards, pouring itself forth, at best and at worst, in 'natural' disasters. That development, for Adorno, takes a crucial turn in what is called, vaguely enough, the bourgeois era. In feudal periods, 'art,' in its many forms, tends towards a visualized performance, more precisely, an enactment, not just a representation of political-personal power. Power, in the absence of modern invisibilizing structures, must be incarnated, demonstrated, if possible, strikingly and brilliantly. The transition of strongly aestheticized power machineries into more elusive, partly invisible, but efficient networks of social control, may have characterized the development of Louis' XIV reign in France. Louis tried to stage the state as a 'spectacularly' overpowering machine, using 'art' in many forms, including those provided by Moli£re and Lully; using also the king's body as a magic machine, as a surface of continuously, ritualistically enacted and symbolically suggestive inscriptions. The petrification of these rituals, the severing, from power, of the aesthetic occur in the wake of religious and political shifts. They impose stronger distinctions between political background and aesthetic foreground, with the former operationally real and the latter illusionistically weak.29 In the bourgeois era, art epitomizes the beautiful less as living presence, but as specialized, if still stimulating forms of illusion. With Schiller, the split took the form of serious life and an aesthetic culture of play, of dignity superseding grace - an interiorized moral attitude getting the better of the captivating appearance of beauty in movement. 19th century art pays homage to the reality standards of society ('realism') - or breaks into transitory and harmless savagery. In "phantasmagorias" (Adorno),phantasia's drive toward action smoulders on in 29

Cf. Apostolidfcs: Le roi-machine.

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both wilder and less 'real' forms. In its supreme forms, though, art may still rid itself of illusion. Its elements then, with Beethoven (Beckett might be a modern example), impose themselves as magnificent nothingness ("großartige Nichtigkeit"). Illusion, it is true, cannot be totally obliterated. But aesthetic experience feeds on vital appearance, if only negatively, in its radical discontinuity. Discontinuity approximates aesthetic experience and the archaic, even the sexual; it creates havoc among current notions of aesthetic canons, traditions, and systems. 30 Paradoxically, declarations of aesthetic appearance as some higher form of illusion come to the foreground in periods in which concepts of reality are themselves epistemologically damaged. Then, the aesthetic is isolated in order to control, but not to dispel altogether, its seductive presence. Kant, again, can be called in as the prime witness. F o r him, the aesthetic experience is a gift of nature, although nature can no longer pose as an epistemologically valid concept. The aesthetic experience is cultivated as unique, but is disentangled from human as psychological or social relevance. Kant's 'anaesthetizing,' indeed asceticizing of the aesthetic, however, was only partly successful. Vital functions of aesthetically strongly defined appearances - as a kind of optimized perception - have been re-cognized particularly in theories of human evolution. Human ethology has insisted on the importance of visual clues triggering parts of our behavioural patterns. It will not do to denounce this as 'biologistic'. Sophistication in handling appearances as triggers, refining them into suggestive c(l)ues, is a cultural task which philosophy seems to have become aware of again. Hans Blumenberg, criticizing Plato's cave parable, has offered some resistance to one of the notorious turns of Western thought. In an evolutionary vein, Blumenberg asserts that caves turned into a provisional refuge once human beings had to abandon the close-distance-environment of the virgin forest. F o r a while, caves supplied protection and comfort. Then, life in the savannah, walking upright, visually handling varying distances und their unstable implications, enforced continuous negotiations of appearances, traces, and clues. Under advanced conditions, 'rationality' and 'madness,' controlled behaviour and risky adventure, the various shades of cognitive and behavioural orientations in between, come into play. In the more 'leisurely' spaces between the struggle for life and survival, culture - as the more graceful management of appearance and, later, the necessity of its interpretation - gains ground. Humans, though, remain visible and visual people; they keep oscillating between demands for more light and defences against excessive 'enlight30 Adorno: Ästhetische Theorie, pp. 102-13,262-4, 513-19. Cf. also Zimmerli: "Schein," p. 159.

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enment'. Blumenberg, like Goodman, does not support options for the phenomenal or any other world as the real one. But for him, too, the grip of the phenomenal remains strong.31 Iconoclasms - Jewish, Puritan, philosophical, scientific or other - , attacks, that is, against appearances and their certainly problematic aspects, thus never stood much of a permanently successful chance.12 Iconoclasms were always heavily paid for. Appearances, it is true, may be brushed aside by detailed rules of behaviour, or its interpretation; it is significant that the Hebrew words for truth insist on constancy, reliability, those for error on sin or losing one's way.33 Some forms of Protestantism have tried to replace appearances by personalized inner evidence; the confirmation of that evidence, however, being handed over to economic productivity which itself normally translates into a new visibility of success. The price, in new forms of severe stress, depression or anxiety, to be paid for the mopping up of appearances, is hard to ignore. To crush appearances with rational, scientific evidence remains ambivalent, too. The ambivalence is exemplified, from the outset, by the yoking together, in Francis Bacon, of a medieval language of light with a new experimental violence. Here, too, the question of costs in their manifold forms, cannot be warded off. As far as human behaviour and its appearances is concerned, we are no longer prepared, perhaps to our detriment, to accept Hume's demand that the "social virtues," as distinct from deceptive mummeries, must exhibit "a natural beauty and amiableness," valeurs, that is, of both seemingly natural and refined, elegant and emphatic appearance. Nietzsche's claim that human beauty, that grace and goodness of human gestures are the product of long cultural work, might strike contemporaries as even more unpalatable. Yet there is more than the witty paradox to Oscar Wilde's famous dictum that, in matters of grave importance, style, not sincerity, is the vital thing. Appearances are suggestive, but not conclusive. Style, however, is the result of a sustained suggestiveness of appearances. That suggestiveness of patterning over time does not overcome, but may circumvent the annoying habit of playing off depth interpretation against 'mere' appearance. Distinctions between foreground and background, deception and 'being the case' are not rendered superfluous. But their cognitive imperialism is weakened. The ability to pit, in a hard and ineluctable way, notions of fact or truth against the sustained 31 32 33

Blumenberg: Höhlenausgänge, pp. 25-6, 32-3, 55-8. Cf. also Morin: Leparadigmeperdu. For a sketch of some iconoclastic movements see Bolz: Schein, pp. 17-33. Soden: Bibel und Alter Orient, pp. 105-6.

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suggestiveness of style must be possibly reserved to semiotic specialists, partly scientists, partly detectives. Apart from those, it is difficult to see how theory might still get the better of stylistic suggestiveness. Appearances are salvageable, when character and truth, neither self-sufficient nor simply deconstructible, expand into enactments of style.54

34

Cf. my article: "Funktion des Stilbegriffs." See also Hume: Enquiries, p. 214; Nietzsche: Götzen-Dämmerung - Sämtliche Werke vol. 6, pp. 148-9.

DAVID Η . WARREN

University of California, Riverside

From Maps to Cityscapes: Reactions to Modes of Spatial Representation

Abstract: I have two major goals in this paper. The first is to examine features of maps that tap various cognitive processes and analyze how variations in these features make maps easier or more difficult to use. The second is to explore relationships between maps and landscape paintings as forms of spatial representation. Landscape painting have station point, perspective, scale, representation of environmental features, and so on, just as maps do. I argue that there are no clear distinctions between maps and landscapes, but rather that these forms of representation are simply variations along a continuum that ranges from conceptual simplicity to perceptual realism.

1. Introduction The first printed map was published in the late 15th century, very shortly after the introduction of Gutenberg's printing process. Maps had been made long before their appearance in printed form, however. The first map was very possibly a scratching of marks in the dirt by one person in order to show another person the way to some goal. More durable maps were created at least by the third millenium B C : the earliest known example is a clay tablet from early Mesopotamia. 1 Throughout their history, maps have been as varied in their materials as in their functions. They have been made from materials as diverse as twigs tied together, marks on paper, arrays of light points projected on a surface, and everything in between. Their uses have ranged from personal wayfinding in the environment to the recording of exploration routes to maintaining tax records to representing conceptions of the structure of the universe. Indeed, maps need not be functional at all: some beautifully illustrated maps were constructed 1

Harvey: History of Topographical Maps, p. 49.

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for purely aesthetic purposes. Naturally, made of such varied materials and for such varied purposes, there is a great diversity in the appearance of maps. Despite all this diversity, maps have in common as an invariant characteristic that they are topologically organized representations of spatial layouts. Every map represents some region, whether it be a small local area, the entire face of the earth, or indeed the galaxy. As a representation, every map evokes some properties of the physical world at some level in the perceptual-cognitive experience of the person who views the map. The viewer of the map need not have experienced the represented part of the physical world; indeed, a map may represent an imaginary portion of space rather than a real one. (It should be noted that there is much room for disagreement about the definition of what is and is not a map - Keates2, for example, takes a much more conservative view of what may be called a map than I do.) I have two major purposes in this chapter. The first is to explore the interactions between the features of maps and the characteristics of map-users. I will begin by identifying the major variables of maps and exploring similarities and differences among different types of maps. After this, I will identify and discuss the human perceptual and cognitive abilities that are involved in using these map characteristics. Next, I will consider how perceptual and cognitive factors may interact with map characteristics to make different kinds of maps more or less difficult to use successfully. The second major purpose of the chapter is to explore the boundaries of the map concept and, by way of contrast, to consider another mode of representation of the spatial environment, the depiction of landscape in painting, and in particular the cityscape. In doing so, I will examine whether the interactions between features of maps and characteristics of map-users that have been identified in the case of maps might also apply to the perception of the landscape as a form of spatial representation.

2. Map Features and Their Variation Maps vary in many ways, but several important dimensions of variation are especially important. Spatial representation. The most fundamental characteristic of a map is that it is a spatial representation. That is, it contains elements which represent features that exist in the environment, and on the map, those elements are 2

Keates: Cartographic Design and Production.

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arranged in a set of spatial relationships that corresponds to the spatial relationships of the features in the actual environment. We can refer to a set of spatial relationships as a spatial layout; thus the notion of representation is that the spatial layout of the map corresponds to the spatial layout of the environment. This does not mean that all maps use the same rules of correspondence - indeed, there are major variations in this, to which we will turn presently. But whatever the details of how it is done, every map contains a layout that represents a layout in the physical environment, and it is the task of the user of the map to perceive, understand, and make use of that representational correspondence. Scale. The term "scale" is synonomous with reduction - that is, the map is reduced to a proportion of the real environment, and this proportion is represented by the scale. Maps are almost invariably smaller, by some factor, than the physical environment which they represent. A scale of 1:100 means that an extent of one centimeter on the map represents an extent of 100 cm, or one meter, in the actual environment, whereas a scale of 1:1,000,000 means that the same one cm extent on the map represents 10,000 m, or just over six miles, in the environment. There are clear implications of the map's scale. Most obviously, for purely practical reasons the size of a portable map is limited to perhaps 1 meter square. If the intent is to represent an environment the size of a university campus, perhaps 3 km on a side, then an appropriate scale would be 1:3000, where one map cm would represent 30 meters in the environment. If the surface of the earth were to be represented on a map of the same size, then the reduction would be even more dramatic - one map cm would represent a distance in the environment of about 400,000 m, or about 250 miles. Another implication of scale is the potential for representation of detail. In general, the greater the reduction, the less the detail that can be practically represented - the location of a house might be depicted on a map of scale 1:1000, but certainly not on a map of scale 1:1,000,000. Scale consistency. Generally it is the case that maps have a scale that is consistent over the entire extent of the map. That is, one cm in one part of the map represents the same distance in the environment that one cm in another area of the map does. However, this need not necessarily be so. Consider two examples. First, the Mercator projection of the earth's surface, in projecting a spherical surface onto a flat rectangular map, greatly expands the scale toward north and south in comparison to the scale at the equator. If one cm at the equator represents 400 km, then one cm at the arctic circle represents about 160 km. This lack of scale consistency may have dramatic effects on our geographic

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understanding - many people think that Greenland is huge, based on their experience of it from viewing the Mercator projection of the earth's surface, whereas in reality Greenland occupies about 840,000 square miles, or only about 23% of the surface area of the United States. Second, think of a map of a large region in which "blowup" insets appear for the major cities. The scale of these insets is typically very different from the scale of the overall map, and in fact different insets may have different scales from one another. The map as a whole thus includes different scales, and the general principle of consistent scale is violated for quite utilitarian reasons. The needs of the map-user for detail are different in the countryside than in the city, and in order for the map of the city to show more detail, it must be constructed on a different scale. The use of larger-scale insets is not a modern invention - examples of city insets occur at least by the late-15th century. A dramatic example is a map, dated 1486, of the Holy Lands, with the Red Sea, the Nile, Alexandria and Cairo represented, and with a dramatically enlarged insert of the city of Jerusalem. 3 Station point. The term station point refers to the viewpoint from which a map is constructed. A common station point is directly above the environment. Map A is constructed from an overhead station point and shows four buildings arranged at the intersection of two streets. This type of map, representing only the floorplan outlines of environmental elements, is called a plan map. Alternatively, the station point may deviate from directly overhead toward one side of the environment, resulting in what is called an oblique map. Map Β is of the same environment as Map A, but Map Β is constructed from a station point that is rotated 60 degrees downward from the vertical (that is, elevated 30 degrees above the ground plane). Note that information about the relative heights of buildings may be included on such maps. The angle of obliqueness may vary, of course. In fact, we may consider the angle of the station point to be a continuous variable, ranging from only a slight deviation from overhead to considerably oblique angles. There are certain consequences for map construction of the location of the station point, and we will discuss these as we proceed. Perspective. The term perspective is closely related to scale and has to do with how distances are treated. Isometric perspective refers to the case where the scale is consistent throughout the entire map: one cm on the map represents a fixed distance in the environment, and that scale relationship is the 3

Harvey: History of Topographical Maps, pp. 82-3.

Warren: From Maps to Cityscapes: Reactions to Modes of Spatial Representation

Figure 2 Map A

37

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same everywhere on the map. Maps A and Β are examples of isometric perspective. Vanishing point perspective refers to the situation in which a given environmental extent in the distance occupies a smaller extent on the map than the same environmental extent in the foreground. Map C shows the same view as Map B, except that Map C uses vanishing point perspective rather than the isometric perspective of Map B. Vanishing point perspective is much more commonly found in paintings of spatial environments than in maps, but the geometry of distance/viewing relationships is the same. In the case of an oblique station point, the cartographer has the choice of isometric (e.g., Map B) or vanishing point (e.g., Map C) perspective. From an oblique station point, it might be thought more natural to use a vanishing point perspective, since this would conform to the laws of geometric optics and thus would simulate the effects of real sight. However, this approach does not retain a consistent scale across the entire map, and generally speaking, an isometric scale is used even with an oblique station point, as in Map B. This choice retains a consistent scale, though violating the laws of optics. The use of vanishing point perspective has an effect on vertical as well as lateral extent. Two buildings of the same actual height, one in the foreground and one in the background, are not depicted as of equal height - the building in the foreground must be higher than the one in the background in order for the two to be of equal height in perspective. Orientation. Many maps have features that contain an inherent orientation. One category of such features is verbal material, either words printed on the map itself to identify elements or words and numbers that form a legend off to one side of the map. If such verbal material is all printed in a single direction, then the map can be said to have that primary orientation, whereas if the verbal material is printed in different directions, then the map is not given an orientation by the verbal material. Many maps contain pictorial elements that help to identify features in the environment. If all of the pictorial elements have a consistent direction, then the map itself may be said to have that orientation. Of course, picture elements, like words, can be arranged in various directions, in which case the map does not take a consistent orientation from the pictorial information. Consistently oriented verbal information coupled with consistently but differently oriented pictorial information produces a conflict, such that the map seems to have two or more competing orientations. Another source of map orientation is geographic direction. Often maps are constructed so that north is indicated to be at the top of the map and south at the bottom, but there is no inherent reason for this orientation and indeed

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Figure 5 Map D

many maps are constructed with a different geographical orientation (e.g., with east at the top). Of course it is possible, though in practice rare, to construct a map with no inherent orientation - no verbal material, no pictorial elements, and no geographical directionality. In fact, Map A is an example of such a map, with the exception of the letters denoting geographical directions.

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Feature representation. Environmental features may be represented in various ways on a map, ranging from very realistic to very abstract. On the realistic end of this continuum, an environmental feature may be portrayed by a highly realistic representation. On the abstract end, the same environmental feature might be represented by a symbol that bears no resemblance whatever to the actual feature - for example, a church may be represented by a circle. Often some intermediate choice is made, such as representing an airport by a tiny airplane, or a government building by a flag. Map A represents the four buildings in a relatively abstract way, whereas Map Β adds some pictorial detail; Map D adds still more pictorial detail to the configuration illustrated in Map C. Of course, the addition of color allows another level of realism in feature representation.

3. Psychological Factors Involved in Using Maps With all of the variation in types of maps, it is not surprising that varying demands are placed on the map-user. In this section, we will identify these psychological demands and discuss them briefly, and in the next section, we will explore the relationships of these demands to the characteristics of maps. The concept of representation. Beyond any doubt, the most fundamental psychological factor in the use of maps is the concept of representation. This concept is so basic to the typical adult's understanding as to seem trivial, but for children or for members of cultures which do not typically experience pictures, photographs, or models, the concept is far from trivial. It is a legitimate question whether a young child regards a picture of his or her mother as representing the mother, or whether a member of a culture which does not see photographs interprets a snapshot of a person as having any relationship to the actual person. In order to understand the very concept of a map, the user must understand that one event (in this case a spatial layout in the environment) may be represented by another event (in this case a map). If a person does not have this basic concept of representation, then it does not matter how welldesigned a map is - the person will not be able to make any functional use of the map at all. The concept of scale transformation. The concept of scale relationships is almost as important as the concept of representation. As noted earlier, a map is almost invariably smaller than the environment which it represents - a small distance on the map represents a larger distance in the actual environment. In order to use a map successfully, a map-user must understand the concept of scale.

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Perception of elements in the environment. It goes without saying that a map-user must, in order to be successful, be able to perceive those elements in the environment which are represented on the map. Consider the situation of a person using a map to determine his or her location in an unknown environment. The person must perceive those features in the environment (e.g., buildings, streets, towns, mountain ranges) as a prerequisite for identifying the representations of those features on the map. Obviously a very near-sighted person would have difficulty with this demand. The task of perceiving environmental features is ordinarily more complex than this, however. Buildings differ in their configurations, streets differ in their names and other characteristics, towns differ in size, mountain ranges differ in their size and height. If these variations are not represented on the map, then their perception in the environment is not relevant to map use. If for any reason the variations in the environment are beyond the user's discriminatory capacities, then it does not matter how perceptibly the differences are represented on the map. Perception of elements on the map. It is equally evident that the map-user must be able to make relevant discriminations on the map. For example, it may be that building shapes are finely differentiated and depicted by the mapmaker, but if the nuances of depiction are indiscriminable to the map-user, then they cannot be effective in mediating successful map use. Correspondence between elements of environment and map. In addition to being able to make discriminations among environmental elements and among map depictions, the successful map-user must be able to establish the relationships between these two domains. The amount of detail in the environment is invariably far greater than the amount of detail depicted on a map, and the map-user's task is thus to ignore irrelevant detail in the environment, while focusing on the features of the environment which are depicted on the map. Again the cartographer has choices to make, and if those choices are made in the context of knowledge about map-user's perceptual and cognitive capabilities, map use will be facilitated. If a map portrays elements of the environment which are not salient to the map-user, then these elements will not only not be useful, but may indeed be counter-productive by distracting the map-user's attention. If a map does not portray environmental elements which are very important to the mapuser, then the map-user may search in vain for the representations of those elements on the map and again be distracted. The issue of the manner of map depiction of environmental elements is also relevant here. A pictorial symbol, such as an outline of an airplane to denote an airport, is generally more effective than an abstract symbol (e.g., a

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dot), but the use of a contradictory pictorial symbol is counterproductive - as for instance the use of an outline of a ship to denote an airport. Similarly, the use of blue to denote a body of water trades on a natural assumption that water is blue (even though water is not typically perceptually blue when perceived in the environment); the depiction of a body of water as red would typically be counterproductive. Otherpsychological operations. Besides the perceptual and cognitive factors noted above, other psychological operations are also involved in map-use. Memory is an obvious example. In the case of a map that is carried along while traversing an environment, very short-term memory is involved when the map-user looks at the environment, picks out an element (such as a building with a particular shape), and then looks at the map to try to find the representation of that element. In the case of a you-are-here (YAH) map, which is fixed in place, the memory demands are greater: looking at the map, the map-user must identify a set of map features and their spatial relationships and must remember those features and their relationships while negotiating the physical environment, establishing correspondence between the perceived features of the environment and the remembered features of the map. The ability to perform mental transformations of map images is an equally important cognitive factor. Consider a Y A H map. Having studied the map in its fixed orientation, the map-user must then not only remember the spatial relationships of the map elements, but must, upon executing turns in the environment, be able to perform some cognitive operation that in effect maintains the alignment between the remembered image of the map and the changing perception of the environment. N o matter how well the map image is remembered, if the map-user cannot effectively reorient that image as he or she negotiates turns in the environment, performance will suffer.

4. Interaction of Map Characteristics and Perceptual-Cognitive Abilities We turn now to the interactions between characteristics of maps and the perceptual and cognitive abilities that people bring to their use of maps. Some of these issues have been touched upon in preceding sections, and some arise here. Manner of representation. The features of the environment may be represented in different ways on maps, ranging from completely abstract to highly pictorial. On the abstract end, a mountain may be represented by shading and a church by a dot; on the pictorial end, the mountain and the church may be depicted realistically by their particular silhouettes. Intermediate choices are

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also available: the mountain may be depicted by a triangle and the church by a cross. Here, the map elements are not pictorially realistic, but they evoke a conceptual meaning. The cartographer's choice has implications for the perceptual-cognitive demands that are placed on the map-user. If completely abstract symbols are used, they must be explained in a legend. The map-user must refer to the legend to understand the map symbols, and memory and at least a minimal capacity for abstraction are involved. At the pictorial extreme a legend may be unnecessary, but a different problem is created. A building has a different silhouette when viewed from different vantage points in the environment, and while a highly realistic map depiction is ideal when the map-user is at one location in the environment, it is counter-productive from other locations because of the need to imagine what the element would look like from a different vantage point. In general, pictorial representation on maps is best left at a conceptually evocative rather than a pictorially realistic level. ScaleI perspectiveIstation point. There is a complex interaction among map scale, perspective, and station point which places significant perceptual-cognitive demands on the map-user. Consider first the case of a map which is constructed from directly overhead, with isometric perspective and a consistent scale (cf. Map A). O n such a map, scale is consistent, so that a given extent represents the same distance in the environment anywhere on the map. Because distance is represented by a consistent representational rule, conceptually the map should be easy to use. However, in our visual perception of real environments, distances do not have this equality of scale: two elements that are in fact equally distant from one another are not perceptually equidistant if they are near and if they are far from us. Nearby, the image of their separation on the retina of the eye is great, whereas far away, their separation is smaller. Conceptual equivalence on a map does not equate with perceptual equivalence in the environment. Curious though it seems, it is technically possible to introduce vanishing point perspective in an oblique map that gives only floorplan information. This is illustrated in Map E. Size-distance relationships on the map correspond to their perceptual experience in the environment if the map-user is at the south side of the environment. However, if the environment is viewed from any other direction, then the size-distance relationships on the map are contradictory to those which are seen in the environment, and the use of vanishing point perspective is counterproductive. Map A, by contrast, is equally useful from any approach to the environment. Consider second the case of a map which is constructed from an oblique station point. Map Β differs from Map A in that it is constructed from an

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Figure 6 Map Ε

oblique station point. The departure of the station point from the overhead conveys a substantial advantage, in that it allows the third dimension to be represented. Specifically, the relative heights of the buildings can be shown. This is clearly a potential advantage for the map-user in that additional information is available on which the map-user can base perceptual matches. At the same time, there is a potential disadvantage in that the map may not be as useful in alternative orientations: this can be seen by rotating Map Β in either direction. Complexity. It seems intuitive that the more environmental information is represented on a map, the more useful the map should be. This is true to a degree, as can be seen by comparing Map D with Map C. However, it is also true that too much detail on a map can render it difficult to use. From a purely practical point of view, the more information a map contains, the more tightly that information must be packed onto the map, and at some point, the increased difficulty of discriminating and sorting through the detail becomes disadvantageous to practical map use. A good example is a small scale street

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map, where the streets are packed tightly and where street names add further to the information density. Map alignment. When carrying a map around in the physical environment, the map-user must make choices about how to hold the map. Most maps contain some information, such as a legend, other verbal material, or pictorial elements, that gives the map an inherent orientation. That is, it must be held in an upright orientation with respect to the user, so that the orientation-specific information can be easily processed. However, there is another form of map orientation that is equally if not more important. When a map is oriented in such a way that directions on the map are congruent with directions in the environment, then the map is said to be aligned to the environment. We align a map when we turn it so that the north arrow is actually pointing at north in the environment, but alignment can be accomplished in reference to physical elements in the environment as well as to geographic direction. As the map-user travels in the environment, he or she has the choice of maintaining the map in a congruent relationship to the environment (called map/environment alignment), or with the verbal and pictorial information upright (map/user alignment). These two orientations only occasionally coincide; more often the map-user must choose between them. The cost of maintaining map/environmment alignment is that the verbal and pictorial information must be used upside down or sideways: this is a perceptual cost. The cost of maintaining map/user alignment, and therefore violating map/environment alignment, is cognitive. That is, some cognitive operation must be performed in order to generate correspondence between the layout of the map and the layout of the environment. An appropriate cognitive operation would be mental rotation of the map's image (although there is debate within the psychological literature whether spatial images are necessarily involved). The need to perform such a cognitive operation is not a problem unless an error is made. Research shows that large errors in performance are frequently made when maps are not aligned with the environment, and furthermore that these errors are a result of employing an inappropriate cognitive operation/ Furthermore, given the choice, most map-users do spontaneously choose to maintain map/environment alignment at the expense of map/user alignment, at least for simple maps.5 4 5

Rossano and Warren: "Misaligned maps." Warren, Scott, Medley: "Finding locations."

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Appearances and the Semiotics of Culture

For more complex maps with much pictorial information this issue becomes much more problematic for the map-user. The advantage of pictorial information is at least twofold. First, it lessens the map-user's need to deal with abstract map symbols, and thus it lessens the cognitive load. Second, and probably more importantly, pictorial information allows the map-user to make use of a perceptual correspondence between the features of the environment and their representation on the map. Consider Maps A and B. The building in the northwest corner is taller than that in the southwest corner. Map A does not represent this information, whereas Map Β does show the relative heights of buildings. In contrast to Map C, Map D contains additional pictorial information about the numbers and locations of windows and doors, thus giving the user yet another kind of information to help establish map-environment correspondence. However, consider a map-user who is entering the environment from the east. In order to achieve map/environment alignment (and thus to avoid possible cognitive operation errors), this person should turn the map 90 degrees clockwise. Maps B, C, and D are strange when so turned and may be more difficult to use, whereas Map A, without any orientation-specific pictorial information, is equally useful in any orientation. The issue of map orientation also arises in relation to vanishing point perspective. Compare Maps Β and C. Map Β uses isometric perspective whereas 3 uses vanishing point perspective. When the observer is at the south side of the environment, Map C may be more effective because it shows relative distance relationships as the user sees them in the environment. However, if the user enters the environment from the east, the perspective information of Map C is not only not useful, but contradicts the user's perceptual information about the environment. Furthermore, the map-user would be handicapped in estimating environmental distances from the map, since the map does not use a consistent scale for distance. In sum, both pictorial information and perspective serve to make identification of map/environment correspondences easier when the map is held upright, in map/user alignment. But if the map is held upright when the user is in any but one orientation to the environment, then the principle of map/environment alignment is violated and the user is forced to make cognitive adjustments. If the map is rotated to achieve map/environment alignment, in order to avoid cognitive demands, then pictorial and perspective information are less useful or even counter-productive. The sense of being within the environment. Several of the map-design features that we have discussed also bear on the sense that the user has of being within or outside of the environment that is represented.

Warren: From Maps to Cityscapes: Reactions to Modes of Spatial Representation

Figure 7 Map F

• II

Figure 8 Map G

Figure 9 "Map H "

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47

48

Appearances and the Semiotics of Culture

In general, the lower the station point, the greater is the observer's sense of being within the environment. For example, as we progress from Map A to D to F to G, our sense is increasingly of entering the environment. Similarly, the more pictorial information is added, the greater is our sense of being within the environment as opposed to looking at an abstract representation: consider the progression from Map C to D to H . The addition of vanishing point perspective is another such factor: Map C generates a greater sense of being within the environment than Map Β does. All of these factors conspire to convey a sense of being within the environment by virtue of their directionality. They make the viewer feel within the environment by establishing his or her place in that environment. Yet, ironically, each of these factors also works against the utility of the map when it is viewed in other than an upright orientation to the user, which the user must do in order to maintain map/environment alignment.

5. Maps and Cityscapes: Same or Different? The reader may be wondering at this point what these issues have to do with aesthetics and illusion, the theme of this volume. But the same reader would surely have no such question if my topic were landscape or cityscape painting. The quest of painters to evoke in the viewer an experience, while viewing a painting, that is as comparable as possible to the experience of viewing the environment itself, reached its zenith in the Renaissance. Gombrich, 6 among others, refers to this highly refined capability as illusion. If realistic cityscape depiction is illusion, then is not the depiction of environments by maps also potentially illusion? My thesis is that the same psychological principles operate in the use of a map and the viewing of a cityscape painting. I suggest that maps and cityscape paintings should be considered not as qualitatively different modes of environmental representation, but rather as varying modes of representation which differ in how they engage a common set of perceptual and cognitive capabilities of the viewer and/or user. Let us test the case for common principles by examining each of the factors that are potential candidates for making firm distinctions between maps and cityscapes. 6

Gombrich: Art and Illusion.

Warren: From Maps to Cityscapes: Reactions to Modes of Spatial Representation

49

Station point. As a very general rule, the station point tends to be higher for a map than it is for a cityscape painting. Many maps are constructed from the directly overhead station point, or from a station point that represents just a few degrees departure from straight overhead. However, some maps are constructed from a relatively low station point; for example, the station point for Map Β is only 30 degrees above the horizontal. Similarly, although landscapes and cityscapes tend to be done from a lower station point, some use a very elevated station point. Whether by cityscape painting or by map, and other things being equal, the environment depicted from a high station point does not convey a sense of the viewer's inclusion in the environment, whereas decreasing the elevation of the station point gradually introduces a sense of inclusion for both maps and cityscapes. It is worth noting that paintings which are done from a markedly elevated station point often enhance a sense of inclusion, which would otherwise be weak because of the elevated station point, by the device of bringing the foreground sharply up to the viewer. Nor is this device restricted to paintings: for example, there is a late 15th-century "picture-map" of Florence which shows the artist in the foreground, sitting on a hill that rises sharply to include the viewer. The hill does not exist in reality, but it serves to bring the artist, and by extension the viewer, into the scene. Perspective. As a very general rule, maps are constructed with isometric perspective. In contrast, paintings in the European cityscape painting tradition typically use some form of vanishing point perspective. But this distinction on the basis of perspective does not hold up. Some relatively pictorial modern maps do convey a sense of distance by a recession of scale. This is not a modern invention: the cityplans that were commonly produced in the 16th century and thereafter often reduced size with distance, representing items lying further from the viewer on a smaller scale than items in the foreground. It may be noted that such maps did not necessarily couple vertical size-reduction with the use of a vanishing point perspective: examples exist in which size reduction of pictured elements occurs (i.e., a building in the distance is represented as shorter than a comparable building in the foreground), even when isometric rather than vanishing point perspective is used. The depiction of spatial environment was not prevalent in European painting before the 15th century, and in fact it is not unusual to find the background of a painting covered by a solid color (often gold) rather than containing any environmental depiction. Nevertheless, early paintings that did include environmental depiction show that vanishing point perspective is not a prerequisite for painting cityscapes. Such work looks primitive to the modern

50

Appearances and the Semiotics of Culture

eye, and indeed the early Renaissance painters bent their efforts to conquering the problem of representing distance effectively on the flat surface. Departing from the European tradition, we quickly realize that vanishing point perspective is not a universal value of painters - indeed the very motivation to create a truly representational depiction of a spatial environment need not be a driving force in the construction of a painting. In short, there are maps with vanishing point perspective and cityscape paintings with isometric or other perspective, and so the presence or absence of a particular kind of perspective is not a reliable way of deciding whether some representation is a map or not. With respect to perspective, the same kinds of perceptual-cognitive factors must be operating across the spectrum of forms of spatial representation. Vanishing point perspective tends to engender a sense of the viewer's inclusion in a map as well as in a cityscape painting. Pictorial realism. As a very general rule, cityscape paintings, almost by definition, contain realistic pictorial information. That is, there is some perceptual resemblance between elements painted on the canvas and the elements that exist in the environment. Indeed, within the representational tradition the degree of this perceptual resemblance is one (though only one) measure of the painter's skill. But as painters mastered the techniques of pictorial representation, they often moved beyond, to experiment with alternative representation of space and the things that occupy space. And as the depiction of a scene becomes more abstract, the cognitive, as opposed to the perceptual, faculties of the viewer are increasingly engaged. So it is with maps as well. Some maps have a great deal of pictorially realistic detail, such that the user's task in ascertaining relationships between map elements and elements in the environment is highly perceptual; others symbolize environmental elements on the map and thus require an additional level of cognitive translation. If both maps and cityscapes vary in the pictorial realism of their depiction of environmental elements, then this factor, too, fails to differentiate the two. Amount of detail. Nor do painters always rely on a great deal of pictorial detail - a very vivid sense of spatial layout can be created by just a few brush strokes, in dramatic contrast to the highly detailed paintings of Canaletto. Similarly, cartographers constantly face decisions about the amount of detail to include on the map, steering a course between an easy-to-read map with too little detail to be useful and a map that is so cluttered with detail that it, too, is useless.

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51

Generally the cartographer's decision has more to do with utilitarian and the painter's with aesthetic issues, but whatever their motivation, their products vary in corresponding ways from minimalist to detailed. The skyline. As a very general rule, maps do not depict the skyline, and cityscape paintings do. However, there are significant exceptions. In a cityscape painted from a very high station point, and viewing sharply down into a scene, the expanse of the environment may extend beyond the border of the picture, leaving no room for a skyline. A map, constructed from a relatively low station point and consequently including environmental elements extending well out into the distance, may have room in the depiction for a skyline, and the cartographer may choose to include the skyline. In the case of the map, at least, the psychological effect is dramatic: since, psychologically, the sky is "up," it seems to the user to make no sense whatever to achieve map/environment alignment if this means that the skyline becomes vertical, or worse, upside down. The skyline is, in short, yet another element which, if it is included, tends to make the environmental depiction regarded as more perceptual, more realistic, less abstract. And less useful as a map.

6. Conclusion Figure 9, like all of the other diagrams, is a depiction of the same environment that is represented by Map A. Whereas Map A is constructed from a very high (indeed overhead) station point and is maximally abstract and orientationfree, Figure 9 has exactly the opposite characteristics. We would never call Map A a picture or Figure 9 a map, but the reader can, by progressing from Map A through the intervening maps to Figure 9, see that these two depictions of the spatial environment are the end points of a regular variation. So it is not at all clear that we can distinguish between maps and cityscape paintings based on these factors - both vary in similar ways, both engage the same set of perceptual and cognitive abilities in the viewer, and both vary dramatically in the extent to which they bring the viewer into the depicted environment. Despite the availability of a common set of factors, the cartographer and the painter may use these factors in different ways and for different purposes. To simplify the issue, if the painter's goal is to evoke the illusion of perception, the experience of realistic representation of an environment of which the viewer feels a part, then the choice will be of a low station point, vanishing point perspective with accompanying variation in scale with distance, and

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pictorially realistic depiction of elements in the environment. Finally, the painter may include a skyline. If the cartographer's goal is to create a map that will have maximum flexibility of use (including specifically the ability to be turned around to achieve map/environment alignment), then different choices will be made: the station point will be high, the scale will be isometric, environmental elements will be portrayed not pictorially but conceptually, and there will certainly be no skyline. Thus, to achieve their separate goals, the painter and the cartographer will make virtually opposite choices on all of these major factors that govern the representation of spatial environments.

MARIAN H O B S O N

University of London

What Is Wrong with Saint Peter's? Or, Diderot, Analogy and Illusion in Architecture

Abstract: The article relates the problem of the so called "digressions" in Diderot's writing to questions of analogy. He uses the term in the Salon de 1767 to suggest the way in which different experiences are linked. In that way he might be considered to be preparing Kant's "analogies of experience." The question occurs particularly in Diderot's discussion of proportion and of architecture. The paper shows that Diderot was very well aware of contemporary architectural discussion, to the extent of having access to unpublished papers connected with Soufflot's construction of Sainte Genevieve (now the Pantheon). The article briefly relates the discussion and problems of 'virtual reality'. D i d e r o t was famous f o r his digressions: a satirical review in the journal the Mercure f o r 1779 describes his moving f r o m a plan for new legislation t o plans for plays to Tacitus and ancient architecture. 1 T o w a r d s the beginning of his greatest piece of art criticism, the Salon of 1767, he makes a kind of dare to his editor and friend G r i m m : Even if you should compare me to those hunting dogs, which have no discipline and run after all kinds of game which they start without any discrimination, since I've started this one, I'm still going to go on.2 H e proceeds to make a brilliant preambule to his actual account of the paintings, the Salon itself, a preamble which is a central development of his later aesthetic, but which is conducted in the m o d e of a slightly inspired, slightly breathless digression. H e describes how over centuries artists have worked o n the true line, the line of beauty, 3 how gradually they have elaborated the ideal model, working and refining visual experience by slow trial and error towards 1

Mercure de France, 1779 pp. 172-5.

2

Diderot: Le salon de 1767, p. 56: "Dussiez-vous, mon ami, me comparer i ces chiens de chasse, mal disciplines, qui courent indistinctement tout le gibier qui se Ιένβ devant eux; puisque le propos en est jette, il faut que je le suive [...]."

3

A term he borrows from Hogarth.

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Appearances and the Semiotics of Culture

an idea which, though deriving from nature, is no longer something in nature. This process of experience, this tact, taste, instinct, inspiration in reforming the "animal system" as he calls it, has itself an important reform, or reformulation, in the shape of a marginal addition to the ms.: "By the underground, secret notion of analogy acquired by an infinity of successive observations whose memory is effaced, and whose effect remains."4 This paper is going to end by suggesting that Diderot's digressive practice may be deeply related to this notion of analogy; that he is developing a notion of analogy which moves beyond the vague to become precisely what links experience in a synthesis (and is possibly a preparation of Kant's concept in the Critique of Pure Reason of the "analogies of experience"5). This analogy will both regulate the artist's treatment of the beautiful and anchor it to notions of the objective and of the functionally dynamic. But - like Diderot this paper will first move through what seems a digression about a digression by Diderot on architecture, it will ask what the relation between the ideas he is chasing can be, and why he harps on about the great church of Saint Peter's in Rome (and is an illustration incidently of how by starting from the marginal, as these researches literally did, from something that seems an offshore island in a text, the configuration of the textual geography may be changed).

The Saint Peter's Problem At the end of the Essais surlapeinture (Essays on Painting), 1766, there are two last chapters, jokily called My piece on architecture and A little corollary of the preceding - which true to their depreciating titles, state at their beginning that they aren't going to say very much. They are, we read, merely going to show that it is architecture, the art which has followed no existing model, which has given the imitative arts their origin and their progress. This 'proof' turns out to be the rather banal proposition that the arts of painting and sculpture originated as decoration. Then Diderot tells us that he will end his chapter there. But he doesn't - he proposes the problem of the size of Saint Peter's in Rome, which is said to be so perfectly proportioned that it does not seem as 4

Salon de 1767, p. 60: "notion sourde, secrette [sic], d'analogie acquise par une ίηίίηύέ d'observations successives dont la n^moire s'iteint et dont l'effet reste."

5

Kant: Critique of Pure Reason, p. 208: "The principle of the analogies [of experience] is: Experience is possible only through the representation of a necessary connection of perceptions."

Hobson: What Is Wrong with Saint Peter's?

55

big as it is. At this point it should be remembered that the word "proportion" translates the Greek "analogon," and that the notion fundamental to both is that of ratio. Diderot goes on to recount a discussion of illusion in proportions in architecture. Is it better to make the building seem bigger than it is? Which may lead to disillusion - you may be disappointed when you realise that the building is actually smaller than your perceptions of it. O r is it better rather to allow the proportions to work harmoniously together and to allow the comparison which the spectator will infallibly make with his own size to cause a gradual realisation of the true vastness of the building? In a way typical for him, Diderot ties the problem in a chiasmus: 6 is it better for the edifice to seem huge, with the risk of coming down in estimation and size once the true proportions are understood, or is it better for the building to seem harmonious and for the spectator only to realize its size when for instance he compares himself with the size of one of the statues. So the Saint Peter's problem, as I shall call it, is that of an overall harmony which impedes general effect, versus a defect in harmony which makes the whole seem extraordinary and imposing. Diderot himself points to the social source of his discussion: this is the quarrel of gothic and Greek architecture put forward in all its force, he says {Essais sur lapeinture, p.732). N o w he gives the answer, but no modern critic asked the question: there was a quarrel about gothic architecture, it was concerned both with questions of illusion and proportion, and with questions about the relation between the stability of the dome of Saint Peter's and its proportions. Moreover, Diderot certainly knew about it. H e was dining weekly at this time - in the mid 1760s - in company with architects and engineers, and was well placed to know about the theories of Soufflot (the architect of what is now the Pantheon) and to tap the engineering knowledge of Soufflot's aide Perronet. Soufflot in fact was trying to understand the principles of gothic construction in order to use them for buildings which might be classical in design, but lighter in look and more extreme in their dimensions. But this is looking forward. First let us turn back to the Essais sur la peinture. Diderot got into this question because he started by claiming that if architecture was the founding structure for painting and sculpture, in return it was to these arts that architecture owed its perfection, because the sense of proportion could only be 6

Cf. Essais sur la peinture, pp. 724-5 for another example; for the figure of the chiasmus in Diderot see Jean Starobinski: "Sur l'emploi du chiasme dans Le Neveu de Rameau," and for the aesthetic significance of this structure of argument, Marian Hobson: "Genres and Limits: Fielding, Sterne, Diderot."

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Appearances and the Semiotics of Culture

formed by the practice of drawing, which is how an artist forms his eye - and Diderot had claimed the example of Michael Angelo, who was a great draughtsman before he became a great architect. After the digression on illusion of size in architecture he goes back to the question of proportion, in figure painting particularly, comparing the problem with the respective value of proportion and line, or colour and illusion in painting; the assimilation he operates between line and classical architecture, and colour and illusion of space is very revealing. Diderot argues that in the same way as architecture has been impoverished by a concern for modules, when it should only recognize "the infinite variety of conventions [la ν3ΐΐέιέ infinie des convenances]" (p. 734), that is social function, so the same concern for proportion in the human figure has erased the concern for the characteristic, the traits that individualize and particularize, the traits that show "the habitual functions": The figure will be sublime, not when I notice the exactness of its proportions; but when on the contrary, I see a system of difformities completely connected together and made necessary. 7

Diderot here, as elsewhere, insists that the smallest defect can influence the whole; a hunchback is a hunchback all the way down to his feet, not just in his back. And the symmetry applied in proportion is called conventional. But the next chapter in the Essais shows the problem: is not such a view of art relative? Does not Diderot's phrase, "the infinite variety of conventions" give away that there would be no common rule to such an art, merely a fitting to circumstance? "Apage Sophista" he cries, and insists as he does so many times elsewhere: "The good the true and the beautiful hang together very closely" (p. 736). H e starts from what he considers a physiological fact: if taste is caprice, then, he asks "where do those delicious emotions come from, which rise so suddenly, so involuntarily, so tumultuously from the bottom of our souls, which dilate them or crush them and which force from our eyes tears of joy, of sorrow, of admiration?" There follows a reverie in front of a lanscape which allows both a meditation on nature and on man (and on man's pleasure in imagining) to lead to a new definition of taste. "What then is taste?" he asks: "It is a facility acquired by reiterated experiences to seize the true or the good with the circumstance that makes it beautiful, and to be promptly and strongly touched by it."8 And this facility, when it is unconscious, so that the experiences 7

8

Essais sur la peinture, p. 734: "La figure sera sublime, non pas quand j'y remarquerai l'exactitude des proportions; mais quand j'y verrai, tout au contraire, un systime de difformitis bien liies et bien nicessaires." Ibid., pp. 734-8: "Si le goüt est une chose de caprice, s'il n'y a aucune rfcgle du beau, d'oü

Hobson: What Is Wrong with Saint Peter's?

57

which enabled the judgment are forgotten, is instinct. The example given is again Saint Peter's in Rome. Michael Angelo creates the most beautiful possible form for the dome; when the French mathematician La Hire measures it he finds that its outline is the curve of greatest resistance (the optimum line of thrust in modern terms). Michael Angelo was inspired by the experience of the play of dynamic forces in everyday life, says Diderot: the master carpenter will find the correct angle to prop up a crumbling wall as well as the greatest living mathematician Euler. Likewise, experience will inspire the workman to find the optimum angle for the sail of the windmill. - O n e can recognize here Diderot the editor of the Dictionary of Sciences, Arts and Trades the subtitle of his great Encyclopedic edited with the mathematician d'Alembert. N o w Diderot had exercised these ideas once before - at least - in a letter written in 1762, and where, like the Essais sur lapeinture, it is not clear at first sight what is linking the ideas together for him. Instinct, he says in the letter, is the result of: A n infinity of small experiences which had b e g u n f r o m the m o m e n t we o p e n e d our eyes to the light, right u p to the one where, guided secretly by t h o s e assays, trials, which we n o longer recollect, we p r o n o u n c e that s o m e t h i n g in particular is g o o d or bad, beautiful or ugly. 9

And in apparently the same higgledy piggledy manner, Diderot trots out the example of the curve of the dome of St. Peters, the strut for the wall, and the angle of the sail of the windmill, though we get here a delightful verbal picture of the child Michael Angelo fighting and discovering what angle his body needed to be at, so as best to resist his antagonist - the line of thrust, or in eighteenth-century terms, the line of greatest resistance. In the letter, it is the notion of function which seems to enable Diderot to link the beautiful to the true and the good. The form which is the m o s t economical and strong for a certain purpose will be the one instinctively felt as "right" in both moral arid aesthetic senses, he says. And again as in the Essais sur la peinture, Diderot will link this to the characteristic, to those alterations viennent done ces emotions delicieuses qui s'elevent si subitement, si involontairement, si tumultueusement au fond de nos ames, qui les dilatent ou qui les serrent, et qui forcent de nos yeux les pleurs de la joie, de la douleur, de l'admiration [...]. Qu'est-ce done que le gout? Une facility acquise, par des experiences reiterees, ä saisir le vrai ou le bon, avec la circonstance qui le rend beau, et d'en etre promptement et vivement touche." 9

Diderot: Correspondance vol. 4, p. 125: "Cette infinite de petites experiences qui avoient commence au moment oü nous ouvrimes les yeux ä la lun^re, jusqu'ä celui ou, diriges secrettement par ces essais dont nous n'avions plus la memoire, nous prononcions que telle chose £toit bien ou mal, belle ou laide [...]."

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Appearances and the Semiotics of Culture

of feature which express "soul," the moral character. He puts a female face through characteristic variations10 - if you put the eyebrows higher up, she will look supercilious. But once again, the problem of arbitrary taste is there: for if you apply these ideas to architecture, then solidity is like good health, and relation to social usages will be like the expression of natural or work-induced distortion in human beings. But this means that, in architecture, taste will vary according to sociopolitical circumstances - gates are low in the despotism that is Turkey. Likewise in taste in human beauty - and here is an example repeated in Le Neveu de Rameau (Rameau's Nephew), in the passage at the beginning when Moi is seated in the park: the libertine will like the comehither mouth and upturned nose of the prostitute in the Palais Royal, Moi in the letter as in the Nephew, will prefer the modest and decent young girl. How then are these themes, connected in Diderot's mind since they turn up twice together, to be connected: tiny experiences; in the case of architecture, physio-dynamic experiences of space within which one is moving; then the problem of taste, and its relation to factors like social organisation which may seem to make it dependent on human convention; then the question of proportion, and whether it is numerical and stable, or whether it varies according to the same factors as taste. The answer must start, as did the section of the Essais sur lapeinture, with Saint Peter's. Michael Angelo was accused of terrible lapses in decorum in his frescoes of the Last Judgment in the Vatican.11 He was compared usually and frequently and unfavourably with Raphael,12 and the frescoes were said to be unbalanced, vigorous but unseemly, disproportioned. Yet the architecture of Saint Peter's was thought to be perfect. And French travellers - I have yet to come across the same remark in Italian commentaries though I do not doubt it is there13 - since the seventeenth century traditionally commented on the perfect proportions of the basilica, and the paradoxical impression this produced in he visitor, given its huge size. Misson, in his Nouveau voyage d'ltalie (1687) says: 10

Cf. Stafford: Body Criticism.

11

Richardson: Traitide lapeinture vol. l , p . 49; Marsy: Lapeinture, p. 254-60,283 for example.

12

By J C Thiollifcre, "curi en Saintonge," in the journal Le Mercure de France, June, 1754, to give a humble example; by Diderot: Correspondance vol. 4, p. 152 (letter of September 1762). See also Thuillier: "Polimiques autour de Michel-Ange au XVII® sifecle"; Dörken: Geschichte des französischen Michelangelobildes.

13

I have as yet found no trace in the Italian guide-books, although Cochin in 1771 says it is a great subject of Italian pride. Carlo Fontana, author of the great Templum Vaticanum 1694, makes no mention of this, although he has detailed descriptions and quantities of plans.

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59

A t first one doesn't find anything particularly striking; the s y m m e t r y , the well-observed p r o p o r t i o n s of the architecture have put each thing in its place to such an extent that this arrangement leaves the mind at rest; but the m o r e one considers this vast building, the m o r e o n e finds oneself engaged in a necessary admiration. 1 4

And this is found in other guides, such as Labat, as well. It is probably the two Presidents - Montesquieu and de Brosses - who gave these cliches more currency among their contemporaries and more meaning. Montesquieu noted his comments in his journey notebook, (Journal du voyage de Gratz ά La Haye) and then reused them for his article Gout (Taste) which he wrote for the Encyclopedic. He goes beyond the remark that the proportions of the basilica hide its size at first because we have no point of comparison, to remark on the surprise the sense of tension creates as the realisation dawns that it is enormous; for Montesquieu it is this "progression of surprise" which brings discovery and pleasure together. Montesquieu compares it to pleasure in mountains, that is, to the continuous sense of failure to measure exactly what one is seeing. This is not I think so much an example of the "sublime avant la lettre," as a manifestation of the eighteenth century love of walks - love of walks, not just as the procurers of visual sensations, but as creating a consciousness of dynamic physiological changes in a sense of relation to external space and to internal body space, such as can be seen in Rousseau's last writings, Les Reveries du promeneur solitaire {Day Dreams of the Solitary Walker). Yet the link between this kind of continuous movement of adjustment to what is seen and the sublime becomes apparent when Montesquieu speaks not of the proportions but of the dome of Saint Peter's. Here he says there is a contradiction between the sensations of mass and those of lightness. He enjoys the "porte ä faux," the sense of mass which is too big to be sustained on the columns. This pleasure, he says, is one the soul can't quite understand, when it sees something completely different from what it knows is there. "The soul remains then uncertain between what it sees and what it knows" (article Taste). (It is indicative that in the notebooks he goes onto compare the impression of the proportions of Saint Peter's, with the work of Raphael, whose work "at first creates no surprise" and the work of colourist painters, whose effect surprises first and then diminishes, a comparison that Diderot uses as we have seen.)15 And finally Kant later, in the Analytic of the 14

Misson: Nouveau voyage d'ltalie vol. 2, p. 49: "D'abord on ne trouve rien qui paroisse fort etonnant; la Symmetrie et les proportions bien observees de l'architecture ont si bien mis chaque chose en son lieu que cet arrangement laisse l'esprit dans sa tranquillite; mais plus on considdre ce vaste batiment, plus on se trouve engage dans la nicessiti d'admirer."

15

Montesquieu: CEuvres completes, p. 850, p. 267 (in the second quotation I have corrected an

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Sublime of the Critique of Judgement (§ 26) of 1790, referring to such reports, will omit all reference to the proportions of the church; he argues that the impossibility of the imagination's taking in the whole IS the sublime, and that the surprise strikes the spectator immediately. De Brosses brings in a factor which pushes this enquiry on one step: he speaks of the admirable proportion which means that at first sight the basilica is not striking, because everything is in place, and admirably proportioned: unlike, he says "a pointed vault in gothic style, or bold arches taken in an oval diameter."16 The comparison with gothic architecture is in Diderot's mind, we have seen, and in others as we shall see. De Brosses uses the examples of statues to show what he means. He recounts that the sculptor Slodtz had just done a statue of Saint Bruno for the basilica and he criticizes it as mean and paltry: "Yes, says the poor sculptor, I recognize this, now, but this church is so deceptive - 1 made the angel eleven feet tall." One of the implications of the anecdote is that the rococo and the taste for the gothic are related, both being a reaction to the perfect proportion of classicism, and in fact, an appreciation of gothic architecture develops through the century, in France as in other countries. More important, these texts begin to raise the question of illusion in space. And behind it, and which will weigh for Diderot, is the question of the nature of proportion. The size of statues in buildings is the usual clue to the size of building in the opinion of eighteenth century critics. Cochin - engraver, friend of Soufflot and Diderot - for example, attacks the notion that one way to make a building seem larger is to place statues which are too large in places where they can only be seen at a distance. Cochin has a complex view of aesthetic illusion17 - an actual mistake about size can only happen momentarily, he says, because the spectator soon learns to evaluate the real distance between himself and the statue. And he moves on to attack Saint Peter's: T h e Italians, w h o b o a s t about everything they p o s s e s s with a kind of fanaticism, w o u l d like t o persuade us that it is one of the great merits o f this edifice only t o obvious misreading or miswriting, s'aprennent for surprennent). It seems very likely, that either there is a joint source, or that Diderot had seen the manuscript journal. 16

de Brosses: Lettres vol. 2, p. 159.

17

Hobson: Object of art, p. 63-7. The discussion of the right relation of the size of statues to size of building is complex, and cannot be dealt with here: besides Cochin and Briseux (see below), boffrind: Architecture deals with it: p. 44; also Blondel: Decoration. For the relation to perfect proportion see Girard Audran: Proportion du corps bumain\ Jombert: Mitbode pour apprendre le dessin.

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present s o m e t h i n g like the appearance of an ordinary church, and t o cause astonishment only as one walks round the huge area. 18

Cochin asks in the style of an accountant: What is the point of spending millions to build a church which only looks at first glance as if it cost fifteen or twenty thousand? It is much cleverer to be like the builders of gothic buildings and do the opposite. 19 Saint Peter's has colossal statues, proportioned to look like human figures within the same space. What should have been done, says Cochin, is to make smaller figures, grouped and not single as in Saint Peter's, and thus to give the impression that the space they are in is huge. The decoration of such a large space should not resemble that of a smaller space, only scaled up in proportion. The reason is that the onlooker always sees shape in relation to his own size, and this should be used by the architect to make the space seem its true size.20 So the perfectly proportioned but huge basilica at first appears smaller, but after the spectator has moved within the space, and unconsciously compared it to his own body size, he or she comes to understand its true size. Whereas gothic architecture immediately overwhelms with proportions which signal their incommensurability with man. De Brasses saw in Rome a painting by Panini of the interior of Saint Peter's. 21 One can wonder if Panini isn't commenting on this problem of the perception of size of the basilica, for his figures seem abnormally small (Figure 10). The question of the relation between proportion, the size of statues, and the psychological basis for our perception of size in architecture is discussed, in rather wearying fashion by an architect, (not a very successful one according to the Correspondance litteraire), Briseux in 1752. In his discussion of the Italian architect Serlio, he asks whether the statues at higher levels than the first should be larger or smaller or the same. H e shows that Serlio's answer is not adequate - based on the false assumption, he says that things seen under the same angle look the same height. And he suggests a process of trial and error to scale the statues. But that position does not stop him attacking Perrault, the main architect of the Louvre, for a view of proportion based on the idea that common sense corrects the optical image. Briseux prefers proportions 18

Cochin: Recueil vol. 2, p. 90.

19

Ibid., p. 91: O ü seroit le merite de faire paroitre une grande chose petite? [...] II y auroit bien plus d'adresse a faire paroitre un edifice plus grand qu'il ne l'est en effet; & c'est ce qu'on croit appercevoir dans plusieurs eglises gothiques."

20

Diderot's correspondance with the sculptor Falconet deals with the same subject.

21

There is one in the Norton Simon Museum, Los Angeles, and also one in the National Gallery, London. See Michea: "Le President de Brosses en Italie: les sources de son erudition et de son esprit."

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Appearances and the Semiotics of Culture

to optics as a basis for architecture, because of the two-way use of optical arguments: are you to allow for the corrections made by the eye or not? Proportion, because it stays the same, because it is a relation between two sizes, always has the same effect, from wherever it is seen. And he adduces the sphere on the dome of Saint Peter's, which if its diameter had been determined by the rules of optics would have appeared monstrously big. Briseux in other words thinks that proportion can regularize the deceptiveness of appearances, and provide a basis for aesthetics which is not subject to the arbitrary whim of nation or fashion. H e is working with a theory which verbally, anyway, is close to the terms in which Diderot discusses beauty at precisely the same time, in the article Beau (Beautiful) for the Encyclopedic published in 1751, as well as in his work on acoustics dating from 1748 - "la perception des rapports," the perception of relationships, or rather perhaps, ratios.22 Briseux was influenced, he implies, by Rameau's discoveries about the nature of sound, and about the acoustical basis of the rules of harmony. His work made enough noise for d'Alembert to promise in the Encyclopddie article Consonance to give an acount of his theories in the article Proportion, a promise only kept to warn that the analogy between music and architecture should not be pushed too far. Briseux is thinking of the connection made between the tone and the proportion of the lengths of the plucked string. He suggests that this formal proportion is in the sensation itself and is the source of pleasure in consonance. Likewise he says, there is a sort of natural trigonometry which creates pleasure in architecture. He implies that there is one principle at work in our constitution for both senses, of sight and of sound. Both Rousseau and Kant will admit this kind of pleasure in formal proportion but will argue that it is "merely" formal, that it has no moral content. 23 Briseux particularly attacks Perrault for his insistence on the arbitrariness of taste in beauty - Perrault had argued that there was "No other foundation than chance and the caprice of workers who have not sought out any reason for guiding them when they determine things whose precision isn't of any importance" (p. 10). Briseux insists on the contrary that the perception of relationships in 22

Briseux: Traits du beau, p. 45: "Le plaisir de l'Ouie et de la vue consistent dans la perception des rapports harmoniques comme £tant analogues 1 notre constitution et que ce principe a lieu, non seulement dans la musique mais encore dans toute les productions des Arts." ("Pleasure in hearing and in sight consists in the perception of harmonic relationships as being analogous to our constitution not only in music but also in the whole of the productions of the arts."); Diderot: "Mimoires de mathimatiques", p. 236: " [...] le plaisir musical consiste dans la perception des rapports des sons."

23

Hobson: "Kant, Rousseau et la musique."

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Appearances and the Semiotics of Culture

sounds is the source of the judgement of beauty; sensation is not its cause, but its occasion. Now Diderot's idea of the "perception des rapports" has always caused some Diderotistes trouble - and in the past some queried whether the article Beautiful was written by him. But Jacques Chouillet 24 found enough traces of it elsewhere in Diderot's work for it to be difficult to neglect. I am going to suggest that the contact with architects in the 1760s, the thinking about proportion, gives a depth and a physiological content to the idea which will enable him to escape from the static formal idea of proportion that is in Briseux, and which may have been his own in the Encyclopidie article, towards a more dynamic conception of sensation traces and memory. "Rapport," "realtionship" will move, I suggest, from proportion to analogy, so that it can be linked with epistemology, with our organisation of experience; in this way it will point towards Kant's analogies of experience.

Diderot and the Basis of Architecture Diderot was fascinated by the problem of proportion in paintings, and why it should be that a small painting might make things look big, whereas a big painting might only make things look small. (That Watteau, for instance, excels at this kind of transformation, seems evident). It is certainly not accidental, though it is neglected by modern critics, that the great discussion of proportions in statuery in the "Salon" of 1765 takes place in his review of a painter, Servandoni's work, which in that "Salon" is essentially "des dessus de p o n e s " - pictures designed as decorative panels over doors. In other words, the discussion of proportions in statuery is embedded in what is really a discussion of illusion. Precisely the question in Diderot's discussion of the paintings is how you obtain a sense of the colossal, even if the figure of Hercules is not oversize. The whole, he says, must be treated as a system but not a proportional one: on the contrary the alterations and distortions will be compact in some parts, and spread out in others. And Diderot finishes his aside with a comparison that will be important to understanding the scope his argument is developing - he compares this process in the artist to the way horse breeders work towards a particular relation of muscle strength and weight when they select horses for particular purposes. 25 - The same concern 24 25

Chouillet: La formation des idies estbtiiques de Diderot. Diderot: Le Salon de 1765, p. 115-7.

Hobson: What Is Wrong with Saint Peter's?

65

with system as a dynamic relation of mass and thrust to be found in his account of how Michael Angelo designed the curve of the Saint Peter's dome. For this second anecdote connected with Saint Peter's is not in art critics other than Diderot. The anecdote about the geometer La Hire and his assimilation of the profile of the dome of Saint Peter's to the curve of greatest resistance (the line of thrust) does not for example appear in the great work by Carlo Fontana on the basilica, though he does compare very carefully the interior and exterior profiles of the dome. In fact, the dome was actually constructed by Giacomo A. della Porta, who, it is now believed, modified the Michael Angelo models. It is interesting in the argument I am developing that he is said to have eliminated certain features in which Michael Angelo seemed to have been moving towards a fusion of classical and medieval forms - that is the opinion of James Ackerman, who points out that della Porta took out from Michael Angelo's designs the distinction between horizontal or circumferential accents and vertical or radial ones. But however that may be, it does seem as if Diderot, or his informant, had understood the fundamental sense of dynamism achieved in the building, where according to Ackerman, there was a deliberate suggestion of muscular power.26 In fact it seems likely that his informer was an engineer familiar with La Hire's memoir on the construction of vaults in buildings. La Hire was a son of a painter; he was also an engineer and an important mathematician.27 He was interested in the practical application of his maths to machines - the theory of epicycloids for instance to cog machines. His Traite de mechanique (Treatise on Mechanics) works on both the shape of arches and on the shape of windmill sails, the first close to one of Diderot's examples, the second identical; and his published articles show that he was also interested in the kind of practical knowledge of dynamics that construction workers had. Here of course Diderot would have recognized a precursor (La Hire died in 1718, and had a series of important engineering pupils, some of whom collaborated, or their pupils collaborated, on the engineering articles in the Encyclopedic1*). The three examples Diderot gives, dome, buttress, and windmill, are all for the century what the eighteenth century mathematicians called "la composition des mouvements" - resultants in present day mathematics.; the calculation of what happens when forces are not simple, but are operating in 26

Ackerman: Micbaelangelo,

27

See Goujet; and especially Heyman: Coulomb, p. 82-4, for La Hire and his importance. In all that follows I owe a great deal to the advice of my colleagues the engineers Jacques Heyman and Chris Morley, and the architect Nicholas Ray. See Kafker: The Encylopedists as Individuals.

28

pp. 98-101.

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Appearances and the Semiotics of Culture

different directions to different degrees. The considerable mathematical as well as practical importance this had for the time is clear from the great mathematician D'Alembert's contribution to the Encyclopedic article Moulin, (Windmill), which is precisely concerned with "the composition of movements." Now Diderot in the first half of the 60s was dining weekly with people whose importance has not always been appreciated. Soufflot, the architect of the new church of Sainte Geneviöve now called the Panthion, which was in the very early stages of being built, is of course well known. But Trouard, Blondel, were also considerable architects and are also named in the correspondence as guests of Monsieur and Madame Le Gendre, brother-in-law and sister of Sophie Volland, Diderot's friend and probably mistress. Le Gendre himself was an engineer; at his table Diderot met, and made friends with the important engineer Guillaume Viallet, who with Bossut published a work on the safety of dykes.29 Above all in importance there is a name that readers of Diderot's correspondance recognize as an unwelcome perturber of Diderot's probably too familiar relationship with his mistress's sister, Perronet. Perronet was on the road to becoming an internationally famous engineer, one who radically changed the possibilities open to the constructors of bridges, in a way, we shall see, that must have affected Diderot. It is at this point that we rejoin the quarrel announced by Diderot in his Essais sttr la peinture between classic and gothic architecture. Soufflot, with the aid of Perronet among others, was working on the structure of vaults, and attempting to find methods of construction of domes that would be lighter and less costly. He studied gothic architecture for this purpose: a civil servant points out that in his work for Sainte Genevieve: "His principal object has been to unite, in one of the most beautiful forms, the lightness of construction of gothic edifices with the magnificence and purity of Greek architecture."30 The name of Sainte Genevieve in the present day, the Pantheon, takes on more meaning when one knows that Saint Peter's was itself supposed to be the modern and improved version of the Roman building and was designed in part to rival the great antique feat of engineering. For the givers of the commission in Paris in the mid 1750s - building starts in 1756 Sainte Genevieve is designed to bring together references to both the magnificence of classic architecture and to the great days of French Christianity, those of the saint herself, of King Clovis - the public are said to have wanted 29 30

Heyman: Coulomb, p. 77. Quoted Monval: Soufflot, p. 423.

Hobson: What Is Wrong with Saint Peter's?

67

a subterranean chapel like a Merovingian basilica. A commentator in 1778 promises for instance that "the view from the portico will give the illusion of the Roman Pantheon"; 31 but this was to be done using an entirely new method of support for the dome, based on gothic architecture, and not using the traditional classic methods of building. It is clear from other architects, or writers on architecture, that the motives behind this were not merely economic, though they all claim for Soufflot's design that it will be much cheaper to construct than if traditional methods were used. (The royal treasury was in a parlous state, and if the church took so long to be completed it was because of the slow arrival of funds.) Their principal argument is in fact aesthetic: gothic architecture precisely pleases because of the illusive effect of its loading, of the sense of thrust and dynamism created by the relation between the height, excessive from a classical viewpoint, and the fragility and complexity of the supporting pillars and buttresses. In this, it was obviously felt to be quite different from the static effect given by classical proportion in the Greek manner. How had the gothic architects done this, using thin pillars to create tall buildings which were still standing? How had they got their buildings to stay up? Soufflot from early on in his career in a memoir from 1741, shows interest in the technical questions of how the gothic cathedral supported its mass, and admiration of the daring of the building skills it showed. In the 1741 memoir he wheels on the comparison between the gothic cathedral and Saint Peter's: in the gothic cathedral, often three times as high as it is wide, we are immediately struck because "our eyes are deceived by the proportions," whereas in Saint Peter's, we believe it much smaller because there is perfect equilibrium in the proportions. Our judgement of appearances is deceived by the relationships between the dimensions: Soufflot gives the example of a medium sized man, but slim, who will, he says, appear taller than one who is actually taller but also fatter. (Diderot probably had this unpublished memoir in front of him when he wrote the Essais surlapeinture, but he adds a functional argument). 32 Other reasons for this illusion of size are the number and restricted spacing of the piers, which makes us feel that only a large space could contain them, and the lack of the cornices which interrupt the upward gaze in classical architecture. 31 32

Ibid., p. 441. Diderot: Essais sur la peinture, p. 731. The functional argument, not present in Soufflot, is this: man, unlike a building has a wide variety of purposes, and therefore the exactitude in proportions is more appropriate, since this makes him more adaptable to the different functions.

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Appearances and the Semiotics of Culture

These discussions about the nature of the effect of gothic architecture, and the constructional means used in its buildings, go back some way. An engineer named Le Blanc in 1733 contrasts the deceptive beauty of the gothic pillar, which can be so narrow because it is not in fact carrying the weight it appears to be "en porte ä faux," and classic architecture which is straight and honest "which explains all its beauties in relying on good sense and nature." 33 As has been seen above, these are the very terms in which Diderot will later pose the quarrel between classic and gothic architecture. Le Blanc's work is discussed in the equivalent of the Washington Post, the Mercure de France, by an engineer named Fr£zier, who did important work on the collapse of arches through the formation of hinges.34 Frezier is interested not just in modes of construction but in the aesthetics of building, and discusses the dimensions of Saint Peter's and the theories of proportion; his journal articles contain a defence of gothic architecture both as solid buildings and as works of beauty.35 There seems to have been round Soufflot, after the attribution of the commission for Sainte Genevieve, in the early 1760s "a concerted campaign to convince members of the Academy [of Architecture] of the practicability of [carrying a complex system of vaults and domes on elegant columns and light piers]";36 this campaign was conducted by men with whom Diderot was regularly dining - Soufflot, Cochin, and Perronet. It is precisely on this point, the loading of the dome, that Soufflot is attacked in 1769 by an old enemy of Diderot's, Pierre Patte. Patte claims that the building will not be able to support the dome (in fact the pillars did crack, but not for the reasons given by Patte - see Heyman 37 ). The proponents of gothic construction say that studying it could be of the greatest utility to prove: t o w h a t an extent w e have abused t h e use of materials in t h e c h u r c h e s built in Paris in t h e last t w o centuries and make us d r o p t h e prejudice w h i c h m o s t architects h a d and seem t o have that o n e can only build c h u r c h e s with h u g e square pillars and

33

Middleton: Viollet le Due vol. 2, p. 38. My work owes much to the unpublished thesis of Robin H . Middleton, who discusses in detail the development of the appreciation of gothic architecture in France.

34

Heyman: Coulomb, pp. 175-6.

35

Mercure 1734, pp. 1494-1515; 1754, pp. 7-59.

36 37

Middleton: Viollet le Due vol. 1, p. 75. Jacques Heyman: "The crossing piers of the French Panthion." The cracking was actually caused by inadequate workmanship in the preparation of the bedding faces of the stones. Patte's real disagreement with Soufflot was over the problem of the allowance that should be made in constructions in "porte ä faux" for overhang, where there is lateral thrust as well as gravity loading.

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arcades, w i t h thick walls and considerable side walls, f o r lack p r o b a b l y o f having sufficiently examined N o t r e D a m e and o t h e r churches of that type. 3 8

Patte on the contrary used traditional methods for estimating loading and concluded that the dome of Sainte Genevieve would not be adequately supported; whereas Soufflot and his aides had carried out over a period of about twenty-five years very careful measurement and scaled drawings of different gothic buildings, which suggested radically different methods of distributing load in buildings. In the struggle for power which followed Patte's attack, Perronet wrote two remarkable letters in defense of Soufflot, letters which throw a great deal of light on the context in which Diderot was working on his own aesthetics: Perronet points out that the weight of Soufflot's dome is not resting on the pillars, but is carried by a system of side buttressing; an elegant and economical mean between gothic and classic construction has been chosen: The solidity of an edifice must depend m o r e on the relation of active forces t o those that are to resist them than on the size of the pillars o r the walls and the d i s p r o p o r tionate thickness of the vaults which in fact tends to make them collapse. 3

In other words it is not necessarily mass that gives the margin of safety in building, but the systems of thrust and counter thrust that the building sets up. The notion of action and reaction, as Diderot or Buffon would call it in their scientific writing, is here at work. But Perronet develops in his argument a remarkable comparison, that Diderot must have loved: The magic of these edifices consists principally in having constructed them so to say in imitation of the structure of animals, the high weak columns, the ribbing, the double arches, the ogives and tiercerons can be compared to animals' bones, and the little stones and voussoirs which are o n l y f o u r o r five feet in thickness of cut to the flesh of these same animals. These edifices can subsist like a skeleton, or the carcass of ships which seem to be constructed according to similar models. In imitating nature thus in our constructions, w e can with far less material make v e r y lasting buildings; columns o r ribbing weak in appearance, but f o r t i f i e d b y abutting pillars of the same kind, easily hold up light vaults and domes which are in p o r t e ä faux, which are n o t harmful here. 4 0

Perronet points out that he is using the same principles to construct bridges, in particular the famous Pont de Neuilly (alas destroyed in 1958). Diderot 38 39 40

Monval: Soufflot, pp. 446-7. Ibid., p. 454; see Mathieu: Patte, p. 400. Ibid., p. 453.

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"gets himself invited," as he says, in 1769 to see the bridge, designed to close the perspective from the Champs Elysees laid out by Soufflot, and which was built on new principles (Figure ll). 4 1 This remarkable analogy makes of the gothic cathedral a dynamic complex of thrusts and counter thrusts, and suggests that he has been applying such principles to considering living animals' distribution of weight. It is a engineer's view. But put with Diderot's remarks in the Salon de 1767 and the Essais sur la peinture, the play of forces in engineering and architectural constructions becomes linked to human perception of spatial appearance. What is now at stake is not objective and static proportion, perceived merely by the eyes, but an illusion created by the eyes' exploring and the mind's translating what they see into internal sensation, and sense of dynamic counterpoise. Beauty becomes linked to a relating of the internal sensations together by analogy, a possibility we acquire from instinct and experience. The view of an object or a building then leads for us to a complex sense of function united in form, to a harmonious unification of little sensations of push and thrust, and to a relation constituted by feeling the active forces of strain and counterpoise in a building. The constructors of computer driven simulators have in the twentieth century attempted to simulate three dimensional architectural environments - the techno-speculative phenomenon 42 known as "virtual reality." First, the manipulation of photography by the development of processes of digital imaging has made possible the undetectable (so far) 43 redrawing of existing photographs. And second, the use of supercomputers to compute exhaustively the paths of lines of sight and light rays has meant that "unreal" (not 41

42

43

Diderot: Correspondance vol. 9, p. 125; cf Heyman: The Masonry Arch, p. 62: "[...] the advance first taken fully by Perronet, in which the internal piers are drastically reduced in thickness. For a multi-span bridge with more or less equal spans, the internal piers carry little more than vertical forces, the horizontal thrusts from adjacent spans being roughly selfequilibrating." Perronet's advance in construction was to build the arches simultaneously, and to remove their coffering all at the same time - a dramatic event witnessed by the King (see illustration, Figure 11). The commercial forces behind this innovation are these: the machines have been largely developed on the one hand by the aircraft industry (flight simulators) and on the other by Nintendo (computer games). The term is bracketed in because reasons why technical advances in illusionistic techniques are quickly caught up by consumers' habituation have been very little examined. For instance, the models in the film Star Wars which seemed amazing at the time (1977) now appear decidedly out of date, and it is probably not just their increasing divergence in shape from the actual craft sent into space, but also a technological datedness which cause this effect.

H o b s o n : W h a t Is W r o n g with Saint Peter's?

71

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photographic) images of objects can be projected with "startlingly" real texture and shading. 44 The use of video goggles relaying slightly different images to each eye, the tracking of the viewer's supposed motion through the building, changing the view accordingly, the development of the "data glove" which permits manipulation of the "virtual objects," by sensing the flexing of fingers, all these have, apparently, enabled the creation of extraordinary illusion. The later Diderot's account of illusion in architecture becomes the more interesting, for it seems to suggest ways in which our perception of the appearances of a building are not derived purely from visual sensation, but from memories of an "infinity of small experiences" which are also dynamic and muscular. And if the artist's experience is an acute version of ours, then the "secret notion of analogy" enables us to relate sensations of space (temperature, echo, distance the body is covering) to what we see, which is probably not merely optical lines, but lines of direction and thus of force. The problem for the virtual reality simulators becomes then that of the nature of the interrelation between sensations - whether different types of sensations can be mapped onto each other without loss, or whether one type of sensation triggers links with others through complex interconnections, both experientially and physiologically based, which are not at present understood. 45 There is, moreover, with present technology, still a considerable lag between the time needed to generate enough screen information to create an appearance of an existing object and the (much shorter) probable time required for realistic response in the image to swift changes of supposed position. N o w these problems may not be results merely of technical shortcomings nor merely of our lack of knowledge. Kant's third "analogy of experience": "all substances, in so far as they can be perceived to coexist in space, are in thoroughgoing reciprocity" {Critique of Pure Reason, A 211, Β 256) is precisely concerned with how our perception of spatial coexistence can be grounded in the object when the appearance of the latter is necessarily composed of representations that follow each other temporally in the subject. For objects to be apprehended as coexistent, we need a "pure concept" of reciprocal sequence. O u r perception of space is thus based on the relation of influence, where "each substance reciprocally contains the ground of the determinations of the other" (A 211, Β 258). This he calls "commercium" 44

Nugent: "Virtual Reality." I am much indebted to Rich Doyle for information used here.

45

This may explain the defects reported so far of "virtual reality": the lack of physical senation of touching a solid object; the sensation of being totally alone in the world in spite of being surrounded (outside the headpiece) by people watching - see Raitt: "The Electronic Library Manager's Guide to Virtual Reality"; Puttri: "Virtual Reality Comes Into Focus."

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Hobson: What Is Wrong with Saint Peter's?

" c o n t i n u o u s influences in all parts o f space [...] lead our senses f r o m o n e o b j e c t t o a n o t h e r " (A 213, Β 2 6 0 ) . T h i s is part of his examination o f the " s c h e m a t i s m , " that is the relation o f the conditions o f possibility o f any experience, the categories, t o the validity o f these conditions within experience. I n the particular case, then, the relation of "reciprocal influence" grounds t h e sensations when perceived as space. It m a y be that this has been lacking in the analyses o f perception which are built in, as it were, to the "virtual reality" equipment, into the very machines that generate the simulations. A n d with this remark we return t o one o f the classic quandaries o f illusionistic t e c h niques: should they take account o f the mind's processing o f perception, o r should they aim t o supply causes reconstructed b y techniques and reasoning and mimicking " r a w " sensations? 4 6 In fact, the effect o f the Kantian analogies o f experience is perhaps to t h r o w doubt on the c o n c e p t o f "raw s e n s a t i o n . " Kant here has dug, as is t o be expected, methodologically deeper than D i d e r o t : in the Critique

this reciprocity is one o f the principles o f synthesis

which are dynamical, that is relating t o the existence o f what is being t h o u g h t , but it is n o t itself empirical. T h e reciprocal influence which is the p e r c e p t i o n o f coexistence in space is n o t actual but " t h e condition o f the possibility o f the things themselves as o b j e c t s o f experience" ( A 2 1 1 , Β 2 5 8 ) . Kant's c o n c e p t i o n o f the three analogies o f experience (substance, causality, coexistence) is that we are obliged t o link our perceptions dynamically in relation t o time, t o temporal determination. T h e s e links are regulative, in that t h e y help us see relationships between the already given; t h e y are called analogies because t h e y do n o t constitute the logical and general unity o f the c o n c e p t (in D i d e r o t ' s terminology, the Idea) but give us "a priori" knowledge o n l y o f relation, n o t o f the elements related. T h e y are part of the deep and mysterious way we c o n n e c t together what we perceive, not logical but analogical, "an art c o n cealed in the depths o f the human soul, whose real modes o f activity nature is hardly likely ever t o allow us t o discover" (A 141, Β 1 8 0 - 1 ) .

Now for the Buffon of the Maniere d'etudier l'bistoire naturelle (Manner of Studying

Natural

History)

( 1 7 4 9 ) and perhaps for the D i d e r o t o f the

sur ['interpretation de la nature (Thoughts on the Interpretation 46

Klein: La forme

et l'intelligible,

of

Pensees

Nature)

p. 272: "[The Renaissance was first conscious of] the eternal

dilemma of any illusionistic and scientific representation of space. It can be formulated thus: if visible appearance presupposes the subjective transformation of impressions, should one faithfully render in art the results of this process - optical illusions, for example - or should one paint the 'causes' reconstructed by reasoning, leaving to the eye the task of operating on the elements which have been put forward by this means the same transformations as on the sensible data coming from the model."

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(1754) analogy is a mode of active cognition; in the Essais sur la peinture it has become the result of an unconscious memory which structures activity. Diderot has moved towards what will be Kant's position. For both are reflecting on the interconnectedness of our experience. But a further point must be made. I want to argue, I have argued, that in some of Diderot's writings on aesthetics, the question of connection is both an intellectual and a practical problem: that just as Diderot holds that the mind explores connections when it perceives the beautiful, his very writing explores the underlying relations between his different examples. In both cases, in his theory as in his praxis, what is going on is a working by analogy.

Visual Perception and Verbal Representation in Eighteenth an Nineteenth Century Literature

HELMUT J . SCHNEIDER

Universität Bonn

The Staging of the Gaze: Aesthetic Illusion and the Scene of Nature in the Eighteenth Century Abstract: This article argues that there was a crucial paradox underlying eighteenth century aesthetics of illusionism which postulated an unmediated representation of 'nature* which, however, was always already positioned towards the beholder. The privileged object of the intuitive or painterly image, the landscape, was designed to conceal its inherent manipulative arrangement and function as an immediate revelation of the world, a secularized substitute for the biblical gift of creation. Thus, from Addison through Goethe and Kant, the aesthetic object defined as image constitutes a 'scene' in which modern man attempts to subvert his dominating role vis-ä-vis a reified nature and present to himself her pure givenness: nature's representation as her gracious present.

1. Goethe's epistolary novel Die Leiden des jungen Werther (1774) starts with an exclamation of relief when the traveling hero writes to his friend back home: "How happy I am to be gone!" 1 Werther has left behind him his home town, his mother, his past, his duties. He chooses to stay in another small town to which he has been led by chance, and on his strolls in the surrounding lush spring landscape he discovers a village which he significantly dubs "Wahlheim," "home of choice." Finally he comes across a lone cottage in the woods where he meets his Lotte, the mother phantasma for whom he develops an all-consuming passion that will eventually destroy him. Werther arrives in the realm of aesthetic illusion, more precisely: he adopts himself into a world of images which for him represent the true reality, truer than anything he left behind. The name he gives to that reality is 'nature'. What on the one hand appears as an act of blatant escapism - the flight from all 1

Goethe: Sufferings of Young Werther, p. 13 - Werke (Weimarer Ausgabe) ser. I, vol. 19, p. 6: "Wie froh bin ich, daß ich weg bin!"

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societal obligations into an irresponsible dreamworld - is on the other hand conceived as a quest for the essence of things, the authenticity of self, the immediacy of self-fulfillment. All of this, however, remains an elusive vision for Werther's soul. He strives to become part of something from which he remains forever, and fatally, excluded. Werther wants to "grow himself"2 in the presence of a "nature" which he can only (visually and mentally) represent to himself. By trying to collapse vision and reality, image and nature, representation and presence into one, he only widens the gap between the two poles. Goethe's sentimental hero and the novel demonstrate a constellation which emerged in the early 18th century and which was decisive for the formation of the aesthetics of illusionism. As this aesthetics strove for a pure representation of the world without interference from any signifying medium, which was simply forgotten or absorbed in the immediate act of aesthetic intuition, 'nature' became the privileged formula for its content. Nature was to present herself as her own image, her presumed self-sufficiency unmarred by any conscious effort at (productive or reproductive) representation on the part of an intruding, foreign beholder. But at the heart of this constellation lay a deep paradox: it was after all merely an image, a re-presentation of nature that offered itself to the spectator who, by claiming to be caught unawares by it, turned it into a hidden spectacle for his surprised eyes. Words like "Szene," "Schauspiel" or "Schauplatz," frequent in Goethe's text, attest to the theatrical character of the constellation. Nature's unmediated appearance was part of an arrangement, of a scene which contradicted the antitheatrical claim of illusionist aesthetics. It is this paradox of a staging of nature that I wish to pursue on the following pages. My thesis is not only that the aesthetic illusion relied on a secret arrangement of its immediacy, but also that this arrangement served a specific function within a larger historical framework. This historical function can be outlined in a preliminary way by a fundamental ambivalence in the 18th century concept of 'nature'. While nature for the Enlightenment on the one hand represented the object of scientific exploration and economic exploitation, it also rose to an all-encompassing metaphysical entity which inherited essential qualities of the traditional God. Illusionist aesthetics reflected this ambivalence in a dual character of the image which we may call its objectifying (reifying) and its revelatory quality respectively. It is the latter quality which accounts for the specific achievement of the aesthetic. In a secularized version 2

Ibid., p. 16; "sich anbauen" here simply means to 'attach one's dwelling next to others'; but there is also the paradox connotation of "growing oneself" (like growing plants).

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of what once was an act of God's grace, illusionist seeing received the world as a gift, i.e. as something that was given to man without his effort, that graciously and spontaneously revealed itself before his3 eyes. Before I elaborate further on this thesis, let me illustrate with a few examples from Goethe's novel what I call here the "scene of nature." Wertbers Leiden, I believe, marks that scene very prominently, to a point where its theatrical character becomes self-reflexive and threatens to deconstruct itself. In one of his first letters Werther relates his discovery of Wahlheim to which he is instantly attracted. "Per chance" he finds the village square deserted in the afternoon sun; only two young boys are sitting on the ground, the older one holding the younger between his legs, serving as an armchair. Werther writes: I found the sight charming: I sat down on a plough across the way and sketched this brotherly posture with great enjoyment. I added the nearest fence, a barn-door, and some broken wheels, all of it just as it stood there, and after the lapse of an hour I found that I had completed a well-disposed, very interesting drawing, without putting in the least imaginary detail. This strengthened me in my resolve to keep henceforth exclusively to nature. Nature alone is infinitely rich, and she alone forms the great artist/

The stillife arrests the eye of the idle stroller who quasi unconsciously copies it only to "find out after an hour" that he has drawn a neatly arranged composition. The absorption of the unwitting artist into the sujet corresponds to the latter's self-contained character and to the absorbed preoccupation of the figures with themselves.5 Werther, attracted to the picturesque scene precisely for its appearance of self-sufficiency, duplicates it in order to be part of it, to enclose himself in it, to remove himself into its isolated "absence" 3

4

5

As will become clear in the course of the argument, the historical claims that I make about the 18th century apply to a recipient predominantly conceived as male; indeed, the constellation of the 'gift' that I sketch is emphatically genderized. This explains the predominant use of the masculine pronouns. Goethe: Sufferings of Young Werther, p. 23 - Werke (Weimarer Ausgabe) ser. I, vol. 19, p. 17: "Mich vergnügte der Anblick: ich setzte mich auf einen Pflug, der gegenüber stand, und zeichnete die brüderliche Stellung mit vielem Ergetzen. Ich fügte den nächsten Zaun, ein Scheunenthor und einige gebrochene Wagenräder bei, alles, wie es hinter einander stand, und fand nach Verlauf einer Stunde, daß ich eine wohlgeordnete, sehr interessante Zeichnung verfertiget hatte, ohne das Mindeste von dem Meinen hinzuzuthun. Das bestärkte mich in meinem Vorsatze, mich künftig allein an die Natur zu halten. Sie allein ist unendlich reich und sie allein bildet den großen Künstler." Cf. Fried: Absorption and Theatricality who traces the connection between popular sujets in French painting since the middle of the 18th century which stress the self-engrossment of the figures and their apparent obliviousness of any beholder.

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which, paradoxically, radiates with the promise of a rich motherly presence. A telling indication of his desire to enter this "absence-presence" is his error some letters later when he speaks of the "plow which I have recently drawn"'' - it was of course the plow that he sat on while drawing but which he now 'draws into' the picture, thus making the position of the observer an integral part of the whole scene. For all its simplicity, the genre picture also holds a programmatic value and an ideological appeal. 7 It is presented as an example for the only valid model of aesthetic representation to which the artist vows to remain faithful. 'Nature' here means reality in its autonomy, regardless of any beholder, user, intruder. Of course, to follow this appeal and "hold on" to nature without "adding" anything to it can logically only mean to leave it alone - something the tourist-artist Werther violates at this very moment. Werther continues by decrying the rules of art as well as those of "bourgeois society," but soon admonishes himself to return to the natural simplicity of the picture and his engrossment in "painterly feeling" ("ganz in mahlerische Empfindung vertieft") 8 from which he has strayed into "Verzückung, Gleichnisse und Deklamationen" 9 , i.e. into a rhetoric which responded to the inherent normativism of the representation. There is something in the (seemingly) self-presenting image which contradicts its "purity"; all the more so, since Werther describes the scene - in the twofold sense of the picture itself and the event of its drawing - in the medium of language. Werther now feels his earlier report ("mein gestriges Blatt," with an ambiguity of writing or drawing paper) delivered the whole picture in an unsatisfying "chopped up" manner ("sehr zerstückt"), and he hastens to the next scene which is the description of the childrens' mother who joined him after he had finished drawing and tells him the worries of her simple life. Again, the absorption of the woman in her narrow circle instills a certain calmness in the mind of the spectator (listener) because it makes him forget himself; but again also, the image's use for an ideological or therapeutical purpose taints its purity: I tell you, dear fellow, when m y senses are strained to the limit, all the tumult within m e is s o o t h e d by the sight of such a creature, w h o moves within the narrow round o f her existence in happy tranquillity, gets along s o m e h o w f r o m one day t o the next, and, seeing the leaves fall, is not moved to think anything but that winter is coming. 1 0 6

Goethe: Werke (Weimarer Ausgabe) ser. I, vol. 19, p. 22.

7

For this aspect of the tableau cf. Barthes: "Diderot, Brecht, Eisenstein."

8

Goethe: Werke (Weimarer Ausgabe) ser. I, vol. 19, p. 19.

9 10

"raptures, parables and oratory" (Goethe: Sufferings of Young Werther, p. 24). Goethe: Sufferings of Young Werther, p. 25 -Werke

(Weimarer Ausgabe) ser. I, vol. 19, p. 20:

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That Werther is at least half-conscious of the paradox that the sheltered scenes into which he tries to "absent" himself are constituted through a willful act on his part, is shown in the next letter which begins with a general reflexion on artistic representation: Today I experienced a scene which, written down as it was, would produce the finest idyll in the world; but of what use is poetry, scene, and idyll? must we always start tinkering when we are supposed to share in a phenomenon of nature?11 Yes, is the answer; Werther must craft and tinker with what appears to present itself in unimpaired simplicity but which assumes its natural beauty only in and through the mediating act of representation. There is no "pure copying;" if anything, there is, rather, purity through copying. Werther fancies himself to be a sudden and inadvertent witness of these precious self-enclosed moments which his letters attempt in vain to make present and intuitive ("anschaulich," in the same letter). The most remarkable of these moments is his first glance of Lotte as she cuts bread for her younger siblings to whom she is a mother: there "my eyes encountered the most charming spectacle I have ever seen."12 This of course is the scene that will hold the accidental voyeur in its grip for the rest of the novel, the scene of all scenes, Werther's primal scene which may well betray the source of his obsession with nature and its representation. For this is the "phenomenon of nature" which Werther can only represent to himself by being present in it, by being part of it - in short by being Lotte's child. The scene of nature ultimately as the scene of our origin from which we are forever banned and which we desire to make ever present? I will return to this large question briefly at the end of the paper. In the following two sections, I will sketch first the "painterly style" as the core of illusionist aesthetics (2) and then the aesthetic experience of nature as its principal concretization which also brought out its inherent paradox (3).

"Ich sage dir, mein Schatz, wenn meine Sinne gar nicht mehr halten wollen, so lindert all den Tumult der Anblick eines solchen Geschöpfs, das in glücklicher Gelassenheit den engen Kreis seines Daseins hingeht, von einem Tage zum andern sich durchhilft, die Blätter abfallen sieht und nichts dabei denkt, als daß der Winter kommt." 11

12

Ibid., p. 26 - ibid., p. 21 (my emphasis): "Ich habe heute eine Scene gehabt, die, rein abgeschrieben [!], die schönste Idylle von der Welt gäbe; doch was soll Dichtung, Scene und Idylle? muß es denn immer gebosselt sein, wenn wir Theil an einer Naturerscheinung nehmen sollen?" Ibid., p. 30 - ibid., p. 26: "fiel mir das reizendste Schauspiel in die Augen, das ich je gesehen habe."

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2. Eighteenth century aesthetics revived the traditional postulate of the "imitation of nature" which it interpreted in a stricter mimeticist sense than the previous centuries. Art was to copy faithfully objects of the natural world as it was apprehended by our senses and governed by the internal laws of causality and teleology. The historical thrust of this mimesis postulate, however, was not so much to advocate 'realism' against the vagaries of a free-wheeling imagination (this is how the Romanticists viewed and condemned it), but to set an illusionist style of representation against the rhetorical-allegorical style of the humanist and baroque tradition. Aesthetic representations had to be at once immediately intuitable and universally accessible. While the an of the humanist centuries depended on a sophisticated deciphering requiring knowledge of its topological repertoire, Enlightenment aesthetics aimed at sensible representations whose subject matter was part of the natural and human world known to everybody and therefore did not present any obstacles to understanding and identification on the part of the recipient. This capacity to engulf the recipient's imagination and move his or her emotions as directly as possible was the touchstone of the new aesthetics of "Anschaulichkeit" or intuitiveness.13 It is in the same polemical context against the exclusivity and intellectuality of humanist art that the age-old utpictura poesis-principle assumed its specific new meaning. The self-explanatory evidence of visual perception rose to a universal aesthetic norm. The painter's picture became the paradigm for an aesthetic intuition which poetry had to achieve through its own verbal medium. Poetic language was to produce an illusion for the "eye of the soul"14, the imagination or "Einbildungskraft," which was tantamount to actual seeing. The verbal image was often even deemed superior to the visual image in its ability to arouse the feeling and the imagination. Nevertheless, the criterion for the most vivid aesthetic effect on the reader remained visual. The "poetic painter's art" ("poetische Mahler-Kunst") which succeeded in "moving" ("rühren") the reader to the depth of her soul did so through a complete visualization not just of physical objects, but also of emotions and actions. The poet, as the Swiss theoretician Breitinger - the most important German authority on this subject - put it, "copies" his pictures by means of words "into the reader's imagination," he "imprints" the reader's soul with them so that the latter sees them before her and cannot help but be captivated by them. 15 13 14 15

Cf. Willems: Anschaulichkeit, pp. 272-3. Breitinger: Critische Dichtkunst vol. 1, p. 53. Ibid., p. 30: definition of the "poetische Mahler-Kunst" which "eben so lebhafte, Hertz und

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The visualist criterion consistently tied representation back to the objective world whose primary witness among the human senses is sight. The aesthetic illusion let the reader look through its medium at the referential object "as if it were the thing itself," a thing, that is, from the real, generally known and accepted world. The painterly image was even truer to objective reality than the immediate sense impression, and could serve to open the eye to it. But in order to accomplish this, the illusion had also to move away from the given reality which it replaced so efficiently, it had to detach itself from the 'worldly' matter and become, so to speak, transparent to itself. A text from the early century by the German physico-theological poet Barthold Heinrich Brockes provides a good example of the relationship between the illusionist picture and reality. Brockes describes in his moral weekly Der Patnot (1722) a walk out into the surroundings of his home town Hamburg. He falls asleep on a bench and dreams of a landscape which displays itself before him in all its minute details as if seen "through a cut crystal glass." The dreamer-seer is spellbound in a transfixed gaze. But when he finally wakes up he must recognize that the hallucinated landscape is no other than the one he has actually before him. A friend to whom he tells his dream thinks the scene must be from some fantasy land, until the author leads him to the place and points out the physical original of his vision "piece by piece" ("von Stück zu Stück mit Fingern zeigte"). The moral upshot is an attack against the damaging force of tyrannical routine, which by virtue of its inherent inattentiveness deprives us of all present happiness and weakens the strength of our soul, to the degress that we have eyes and ears but are not able to see or hear. 16

The distinct biblical allusion points to a spiritual rebirth through the revelation of the senses, a secular awakening towards the beauty of the world. Mimetic Sinnen rührende Bilder in die Phantasie der Menschen einpräget, als diejenigen sind, so die Kunst des Mahlers dem sinnlichen Auge, und dadurch dem Gemüthe vorleget, die auch öfters unsere Sinnen mit solcher Kraft rühren, und entzüken, daß wir meinen, wir sehen die Sachen selbst gegenwärtig vor uns." ("The poetic painter's art imprints images on man's imagination which move soul and senses just as vividly as those which the art of painting proper presents to the physical eye, and through it to the soul; these paintings can move our senses with such power, and delight us in such a way, that we think we had the objects themselves present before us.") - Significantly, Breitinger devotes the first two chapters to a comparison between painting and "poetic painting" ("poetische Mahlerey"); cf. also the subtitle of his work. 16

Der Patriot vol. 1, pp. 197-8 (no. 23, June 8 1724): "die schädliche Gewalt der Tyrannischen Gewohnheit, welche uns aller gegenwärtigen Glückseligkeit beraubet, indem sie, durch die von ihr herrührende Unachtsamkeit, die Krafft [!] unserer Seele dermassen schwächet, daß wir zwar Augen und Ohren haben, jedoch ohne zu sehen oder zu hören."

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seeing is elevated by the visionary narrative to more than normal seeing. The new and secular cardinal sin for Brockes consists in inattentiveness ("Unachtsamkeit") caused by "prejudicial wont" ("schädliche Gewohnheit"). In order to overcome it, seeing had to break away from actual sight (and habitual seeing), as Brockes' text signals it by the closing of the eye, and reconstruct itself within a displacing frame. This act of aesthetic estrangement (to use a modern critical term) brought seeing into its own, that is, made it a truthful mirror of the beauty of the (this) world (nature). The shaping of seeing into the distanced and displaced 'picture' of illusion - often made directly thematic in Enlightenment texts through a number of various framing devices17 - was also the result of an internal rationalization, a spiritualization of the raw sensual data. Illusionist seeing imposed a unifying perspective on the diffuse multitude of sense impressions, organizing them into a whole which was apprehensible in a single glance. Again, this spiritual integration of the sensual manifold was better achieved within the more intellectual medium of poetry than in painting proper. Language was already once removed from the obscure materiality of the physical world in which the sense of sight remained entangled. On the other hand poetic language, identical with the "painterly style," did not embark on the painful process of conceptual abstraction and did not lose sight of its sensual basis. The aesthetic intuition grasped the unity within and through, not above or beyond the manifold, and in this manner brought the rational order of the world to immediate light. In the words of Breitinger, the poetic image "recollects the eye of the soul out of the dispersion (distraction)" of the physical chaos ("das Auge des Gemüthes aus der Zerstreuung sammelt") without turning it away from the world, as religious contemplation had traditionally done and as philosophical abstraction would do in turn. The religious (Pietist) suggestion in Breitinger's formulation is no less accidental than it was in Brockes. The "poetic painter" 17

The mimetic illusion received in a dream vision is a common device for this secular awakening, cf. in Der Patriot no. 96 where the narrator experiences how the fog lifts itself from his soul and the landscapes he dreams: "Kurtz: dieß alles, das ich bisher, seiner Nähe ungeachtet, nicht wahrgenommen, füllete mir meine nunmehr aufmercksamen Sinne in solcher Masse, daß mein gantzes Geblüt sich auffs neue belebet fühlte, und ich dadurch gleichsam ein gantz anderer Mensch wurde. Mitten in solcher Anmuth wachte ich auff, und erinnerte mich, daß von dieser herrlichen Gegend viele Stellen mir würcklich bekandt waren [...]." ("In short, everything of which I had previously, despite its proximity, not taken any notice, filled my heightened senses to such a degree that I felt rejuvenated; as a result, I became a new person. Amidst such grace, I awoke and recalled that many places in this gorgeous area were quite familiar to me.") Ibid. vol. 2, pp. 358-9. - For the device of framing in 18th century culture cf. Langen:

Anschauungsformen.

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redeems the soul from its exile in sensual exteriority and guides it from the physical fragmentation of actual sight (cf. Brockes' "piece by piece" demonstration of his dream hallucination) towards the inward intuition of an intellectually guided insight.18 Framing, displacement (estrangement) and spiritualization together gave the poetic image the transparency which accounted for its illuminatory, indeed revelatory power over reality. The rationalist premises of the aesthetics of intuition - what August Langen has referred to some time ago as the "Rahmenschau" of rationalism19 - transcended themselves in this ability of the illusionist image to flash on the mind with the impact of a religious illumination. To be sure, as the whole of Breitinger's passage makes clear from which the last quote was taken, the acclaimed superiority of the verbal image is primarily the result of a rationalist didacticism which distrusts the physical eye as well as an uncontrolled imagination: For this artful painter, w h o with each word like a new stroke of the brush realizes his painting in the imagination of the reader and steadily adds one idea to the other, does not leave the reader any liberty to idly roam about with a superficial and indistinct eye of the soul; rather, this painter directs the reader's attention to the prominent features whose purposeful coherence he demonstrates to him in the correct order, and he also occasionally applies short but useful teachings, which necessarily lend light and clarity to the idea [...]. 20

Breitinger's main reference here - as indeed for large parts of his Critische Dichtkunst - is the descriptive poetry of the first half of the 18th century. This popular European genre combined minutely detailed depictions of the exterior world, primarily landscapes, with equally elaborate didactic sections on moral issues. For the modern reader, most of the individual examples of this genre are rather pedantic accumulations of laborious tableaus and rambling thoughts. But the underlying philosophy of the descriptive mode is far-reaching; 18 19 20

For this discussion as well as on Enlightenment aesthetics of intuitiveness in general, cf. David Wellbery's seminal study: Lessing's Laokoon. Langen: Anschauungsformen, pp. 11-44: "Das Prinzip der Rahmenschau als psychologisches Grundgesetz im deutschen Rationalismus des 18. Jahrhunderts." Breitinger: Critische Dichtkunst vol. 1, pp. 22-3: "Denn indem dieser künstliche Mahler mit einem jeden Worte, als mit einem neuen Pinsel-Zuge, sein Gemähide in der Phantasie des Lesers vollführet, und immer einen Begriff an den andern hinzusezet, so läßt er demselben keine Freyheit, mit flüchtigem und ungewissem Gemüths-Auge müssig herumzuschweifen, oder sich in der Vermischung des Mannigfaltigen zu verirren; sondern er bindet seine Aufmerksamkeit auf das Absonderliche, dessen künstliche Verknüpfung er ihm der Ordnung nach vorweiset, auch zuweilen kurtze, aber nützliche Unterrichte miteinfliessen läßt, wodurch nothwendig Licht und Klarheit in dem Begriff entstehen muß [...]."

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it makes the genre arguably the most significant literary contribution of the early Enlightenment. The descriptive poem propagated the message of enlightened reason by projecting it literally as 'nature,' and conversely by reading physical nature as a moral postulate. The genre aimed at nothing less than the convergence of nature and reason, of seeing and reading, of intuition and intellect, foreshadowing the idea of reconciliation in later classical aesthetics. Reflections were t o assume the sensual evidence of physical nature, and the exterior phenomena were to become intellectual wholes by their 'reflection' in the mind. F o r all its didacticism, then, the poetic image as the core of descriptive poetry was to constitute an ideal natural language in which the rational gained the intuitive clarity of the sense impressions and the objective world revealed its inherent rationality. The idea of an immediate visualization of the abstract had already been articulated by Joseph Addison at the beginning of the century, when he recommended for poetry in general images taken from nature: By these Allusions a Truth in the Understanding is as it were reflected by the Imagination; we are able to see something like C o l o u r and Shape in a N o t i o n , and t o discover a Scheme of Thoughts traced out upon Matter. And here the Mind receives a great deal of Satisfaction, and has two of its Faculties gratified at the same time, while the F a n c y is busie in copying after the Understanding, and transcribing Ideas out o f the Intellectual World into the Material. 21

T h e remarkable statement, which appears to anticipate Kant's "schematism of the imagination," is made in the context of a sharp polemic against the traditional rhetorical trimmings of poetic language. Against the incriminated artificiality of humanist rhetorics, Addison advocated a new kind of poetic figuralism which was to restore to language its visual evidentness ("evidentia") and objectivity and erase its symbolic sign function. 22 Indeed, the distinction between poetic imagery (in the rhetorical sense, what Addison here calls "allusions," such as similes or metaphors) and mimetic descriptions proper of the outside world has become meaningless; both provide intuitable images in 21

Addison: ["On the Pleasures of the Imagination"] (The Spectator nos. 411-421) - Addison, Steele, et. al.: The Spectator vol. 3, pp. 276-309, here p. 304-5 (No. 421). - Robert Montgomery: "Addison" has shown in detail how Addison's polemic against the symbolic function of (traditional) poetic language readmits figuralism for the sake of intuitiveness. The Lockean ideal of scientific clarity of language (which the philosopher directed against the "artificial and figurative application of Words" in the "Art of Rhetorick") is now realized in a poetic language which achieves the intuitive clarity of natural images.

22

Cf. Montgomery: "Addison."

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which the natural and the intellectual world present themselves in their unmediated, unadulterated purity. With Addison's essay "On the Pleasures of the Imagination" (1709) we have come full circle, since it represents not only an early and influential document of the aesthetics of intuition, but also a milestone in the aesthetics of nature, or landscape. We now have to ask more specifically about the affinity between the latter and illusionist aesthetics. 'Nature,' and particularly nature in her exterior, physical appearance, i.e. landscape, was the preferred object of the intuitive image, just as it was the latter through which the modern discovery of the landscape found its articulation. In order to explore this connection I want to look at the category of the image, or picture, from yet another perspective.

3. In his essay "Die Zeit des Weltbilds" ("The Age of the World Picture"), Martin Heidegger claims that modernity ("Neuzeit") did not just develop another picture of the world as distinct, say, from the medieval or classical "Weltbild," but that it was the first age to see the world as picture. For Heidegger, this concept implies the objectification of being which found its prominent expression in modern science and technology. Being is positioned and presented ("vorgestellt") to man who in and through this same act emerges as subject in the first place. "Here to represent means to bring what is present at hand before oneself as something standing over against, to relate it to oneself, to the one representing it, and to force it back into this relationship to oneself as the normative realm."23 Putting the world thus 'in perspective' - setting it up as a picture for a beholder - is tantamount to mastering it. Heidegger declares categorically: "The fundamental event of the modern age is the conquest of the world as picture."24 The fact that the world becomes, through the picture, a manipulable object, is for Heidegger a global apriori of modernity which constitutes the "scene" of a subject versus an object: 23

Heidegger: "The Age of the World Picture," p. 131; "Die Zeit des Weltbildes," p. 89: "Vor-stellen bedeutet hier: das Vorhandene als ein Entgegenstehendes vor sich zu bringen, auf sich, den Vorstellenden zu, beziehen und in diesen Bezug zu sich als den maßgebenden Bereich zurückzwingen."

24

Heidegger: "The Age of the World Picture," p. 134; "Die Zeit des Weltbildes," p. 92: "Der fundamentale Prozeß der Neuzeit ist die Eroberung der Welt als Bild."

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Visual Perception and Verbal Representation But in that man puts himself into the picture in this way, he puts himself into the scene, i.e., into the open sphere of that which is generally and publicly represented. Therewith man sets himself up as the setting in which whatever is must henceforth set itself forth, must present itself, i.e., be picture. 2 5

The modern discovery of the landscape demonstrates the relevance of Heidegger's thesis. Since the early Renaissance, and reaching a peak in the 18th century, the aesthetic appreciation of exterior nature, that is her perception in the form of an aesthetic picture, accompanied her scientific reification and economic exploitation. Both were processes of 'objectification' ("Vergegenständlichung") and closely interrelated: Only a domesticated nature was able to please, and the aesthetic distancing formed an active part of the overall scientific attitude towards her.26 The systematic connection between the technological domination of nature and her aesthetic enjoyment is particularly discernible in the early Enlightenment, while the later, more nostalgic and mystical conception of developed Romanticism tended to obfuscate it. Addison's essay is a prime example for the Enlightenment conception. Addison propagates the visual sense as the main source of our aesthetic pleasure which is derived either from direct sense impressions or from their "secondary" recollection and reproduction by the images of the imagination. The essay begins with the praise of sight as "the most perfect and most delightful of all our senses" capable of bringing the outside world in the quickest and easiest way within the perceptive reach of man: It [sight] fills the Mind with the largest Variety of Ideas, converses with its Objects at the greatest Distance, and continues the longest in action without being tired or satiated with its proper Enjoyments [...]. O u r Sight [...] spreads itself over an infinite Multitude of Bodies, comprehends the largest Figures, and brings into our reach some of the most remote Parts of the Universe. 2 7

Sight, the most refined and abstract human sense, is also the sense that has been historically privileged by the modern process of civilisation and ratio25

26

27

Heidegger: "The Age of the World Picture," p. 131-2; "Die Zeit des Weltbildes," p. 89: "Indem aber der Mensch dergestalt sich ins Bild setzt, setzt er sich selbst in die Szene, d. h. in den offenen Umkreis des allgemein und öffentlich Vorgestellten. Damit setzt sich der Mensch selbst als die Szene, in der das Seiende fortan sich vorstellen, präsentieren, d. h. Bild sein muß." Cf. the classical article by Ritter: "Landschaft" for this systematic connection. Ritter conceives of the aesthetic perception of nature as a compensation for the loss of the old cosmos contemplation ("theoria") brought about by its technological reification. - Cf. also Schneider: "Utopie und Landschaft." Addison: ["On the Pleasures of the Imagination"] - Addison, Steele, et al.: The Spectator vol. 3, p. 276 (No. 411).

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nalization.28 Addison's introductory paragraph invokes the insatiable appetite which makes seeing the ideal instrument and symbol of the appropriative productivity of the emerging capitalist society; "it gives" man, Addison says, "a kind of Property in every thing he sees, and makes the most rude uncultivated Parts of Nature administer to his Pleasures."29 The narrative underlying Addison's theoretical remarks is a stroll in the landscape where the "spectator" has all of nature displayed before her eyes and takes in view after view, storing the images in her memory for future "secondary" use and enjoyment. The landscape walk will soon become the basic motivational device for the descriptive poem, and the metaphor of the imagination as a big storehouse of nature's phenomena from which poetic images are selected is all too common around the middle of the century. The emphatically modern (civilisational, technological, capitalist) origin of these figures is obvious: Nature as landscape is the symbolic space in which the modern subject celebrates his (shall we also say her?) desire for an infinite progressive mastery of the physical world. The world lies so to speak at man's visual fingertips: "It is but opening the Eye, and the Scene enters." 30 But as this last quote suggests, there is more to the perception of nature in images than the blatant accumulative objectification reflecting her capitalist exploitation (and perhaps compensating for it). The viewer's gaze into the open landscape did not exhaust itself in the appropriative (and phallic) activity of 'image hunting'. It also aimed beyond the mere reification of nature in a kind of self-transcendence through which nature revealed and offered herself to the receiving subject. This is not to say that nature became a communicative partner answering to human emotional needs, as Romanticism would later have it. But there is, within the constellation of viewing subject and viewed nature, a potential moment when the exterior, the "in-itself" of the objective world suspends the command of the mastering subject and, as it were, turns towards him. Through the intuitive image and its instantaneous totality, the world offered itself effortlessly to the human beholder as in a dream. This is what happened to Brockes who, outside the walls of Hamburg, did not aim for specific sights, but became the recipient of an involuntary vision - an apparition of his home town which struck his mind and his eye. 28

Cf. Jonas: "Nobility of Sight." - For a more critical account of the implications of that development which removes sight from the context of the body and the lived world, cf. Romanyshyn: "Despotic Eye." 29 Addison: Addison: ["On the Pleasures of the Imagination"] - Addison, Steele, et al.: The Spectator vol 3, p. 278 (No. 411). 30 Ibid., p. 277.

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The same could be shown with many of Brockes' popular descriptive poems. They stage the moment when the poet's eye is suddenly hit by the sight of a natural phenomenon; his gaze rivets itself on the object and becomes more deeply drawn into it as he translates it into his own words. In Brockes as in other descriptive nature poets, the outside object exudes an overwhelming appeal to which the poetic subject responds with a fascination that is not all warranted by the interest in scientific exactness and religious (physico-theological) edification. These poems narrate an encounter with the physical world which holds (for a moment) the subject in the grip of a translucent image where gaze and object merge. "My gaze was fixed, my reason halted"31 is Brockes' frequent formula for this momentarily overpowering experience. It is the moment when nature is not just descriptively dissected, categorized, catalogized for the sake of rationalist objectification; it is the moment when nature happens, happens in the eye of her beholder. But is this not also the moment when nature is staged, more precisely when the scene is set for nature to happen ? Does not the mobile and curious eye of the spectator - the open eye of modernity, we may say - which Addison, Brockes, Breitinger and others celebrate, only refine its acquisitive appetite by letting nature happen? The insatiable gaze opens up a field, rather posits itself within a field or, in Heidegger's still more radical formulation, sets itself "as a scene* ("setzt sich selbst als die Szene") where it lets nature come towards, and act upon itself in order to reassert its ultimate superiority over her. Nature is freed from the grip of the analytical, dominative subject and allowed to give herself to the beholder - but only to a beholder who has granted her that freedom in the first place and who now rewards him/herself with the gift of her all-inclusive intuition. Heidegger's formulation of a "scene" of the modern representation of being suggests an overarching arrangement in which the subject plays a role transcending - or veiling - his conscious control. Before we denounce this arrangement as blatantly theatrical, however, the notion of the gift which is of extreme importance here needs further explanation. In it resides the simple fact that the world is given to us and that we are after all always already on the receiving side before we attempt to master it. However, the gift presupposes a giver; and who is the giver here? In Brockes as well as in other poets under the influence of physico-theology, the traditional Judeo-Christian-Lutheran paradigm of God's creation given to man to be cultivated and enjoyed is still 31

Brockes: Auszug, p. 240: "[Es] erstarrete mein Aug', es stutzte der Verstand," from "Der lehrende Schmetterling."

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strong enough not to let this question emerge in a troublesome way. Nature's dignity and autonomy vis-ä-vis man rested in this absolute origin as it was narrated in the biblical scene of creation and re-enacted in each poetic encounter with an individual natural object. But what if God gradually vanishes into the background - as He already began to in Brockes, judged by the dogmatic tradition - and finally disappears? When, as Heidegger sees it, nature becomes more and more the object of man's manipulation, the sense of her 'givenness' fades away and leaves "homo faber" all on his own. Owing everything to himself and not feeling dependent on that Other which is outside his control, he also loses the susceptibility to nature's gratuitous offering. This is the problem which 18th century Enlightenment had to cope with; Enlightenment understood here as the crucial historical stage when modernity reached the level of its own self-reflection. How could a world which had been stripped of its metaphysical priority and been transformed into a potential product of man be given back its metaphysical substance, or the equivalent thereof? To do exactly this, I submit, constituted one of the main functions of the aesthetic, and especially the aesthetic illusion as it was concretized in the representation of nature. It was here in the aesthetic image that nature was supposed to present herself, and now we can say: to give herself as a present to man, a present being that which is not the result of our intentional work and achievement, but which is graciously and undeservedly bestowed on us. It might be a fascinating task to write the history of modern aesthetics in general as such a history of the "present." Recent critical theory has focused much attention on the concept of the sublime as developed during the 18th century. 32 In the sublime, nature made her presence felt through a catastrophic clash with the human subject whose apperceptive faculty broke down under the powerful onslaught of her blatant "givenness." At the same time, in classical aesthetics, this defeat of the rational subject was turned into his ultimate triumph. The world asserted its overpowering contingency only to reinstate man to his dominance. The precondition for this was a carefully controlled aesthetic arrangement which shielded man from the full existential impact of this shattering experience. If the sublime breakdown before the world's incommensurability was thus aesthetically cushioned - framed after all, however removed the frame was - conversely, the experience of "the beautiful," in the sense in which 18th century aesthetics distinguished it from the sublime and defined it by the harmony between man and nature, was 32

E.g., Lyotard: "The Sublime."

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marked by a moment of chance and risk. The message of the beautiful was that nature confronted us accidentally, surprisingly as if she had been made for us. Whether in the sublime or in the beautiful, then, the aesthetic experience was the result of a surprising and basically unwarranted "gift" of the world, be it positive and beneficial or negative but indirectly beneficial. (The threatening character of that which is simply given to us, which stresses the moment of contingency, is indicated in the German meaning of the same word "Gift," poison). Open, uncultivated nature was the favored field where the incommensurable O t h e r ' presented itself to the unexpecting mind, coinciding or clashing with it. In the terminology of the 18th century we can also speak of a confrontation of nature and art ('art' comprising all cultural activities); their difference was suddenly removed by taking one for the other. Thus, for Addison the pleasure in a natural sight is intensified by "such a Variety or Regularity as may seem the Effect of Design in what we call the Works of Chance," and, conversely, art pleases more if it appears as a work of chance as nature. 33 Man savours the otherness of nature with the (hidden) consciousness of her conformity with our own purposeful production, lest she be of a tbreateningforeiginess to us; just as, on the other hand, our own production is represented as originating outside and independent from us, lest we be captured in a world totally of our own making - the modern nightmare that will haunt the romantic imagination. A nightmare that also will, however, bring to the fore the theatrical arrangement which lurked behind this scene all along and which amounts to a transcendental fraud: nature and art each masquerading as the other, the conceitful human subject presenting him/herself with the "gift" of an accomodating world. How deeply ingrained in 18th century culture and thought this theatrical figure is of 'letting the world (nature) happen and coincide with the mind,' can finally be shown with a brief glance at Kant's Critique of Judgment (as a matter of fact, Kant's exposition of the aesthetic experience inspired much of the preceding discussion). For Kant as well, the experience of the (beautiful) aesthetic object strikes the mind with a surprising - and, in his system, transcendentally unwarranted - harmony between its own structure and the world. That the world as it is given to us should actually conform with our cognitive apparatus is nothing but a fortuitous circumstance which, raised to consciousness in the aesthetic event, may lead us to the elevating thought that a Creator has made the two for each other, a mere possibility of which we 33

Addison: ["On the Pleasures of the Imagination"] - Addison, Steele, et al.: The Spectator vol. 3, p. 285 (No. 414).

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have no certain knowledge whatsoever. All we experience is the blissful momentary feeling when the world appears favorably inclined towards us. The experience of the beautiful in nature, Kant states, is "a favor (grace) which nature has had for us" ("eine Gunst, die die Natur für uns gehabt hat"). 34 Like Addison, Kant privileges the "beautiful of nature" over that of art because it removes us from our own purposefully created world where there can be no surprise or gift, and conversely demands that true aesthetic art appear 'as nature'. The aesthetic quid pro quo of nature and art provides the Kantian ontological dualism with the only - random - meeting place between the mind and the world as it is "in itself." But since it is only here that the subject's transcendental structuring of the world is suspended without a breakdown of order as such, rather where, through this suspension, the world seems to confirm its favorable structure with respect to human receptivity, the fear looms all the more dreadfully that this adventitious moment of "purposeless purposiveness" could just have been staged. Kant himself gives the example of the nightingale's beautiful singing enjoyed by the unsuspecting listeners which then proves to be artificially produced by an innkeeper catering to his sentimental guests.35 The "favor or grace of nature" is a cheap commodity, the chance event has been bribed. The most symptomatic arrangement of the scene of nature - and perhaps the most symptomatic cultural achievement of the 18th century - is the landscape garden. Similar to the illusionist image, this innovative garden type set nature up in a way that it looked 'like herself' and presented herself spontaneously, without the interference of human artifice. Nature became a staged wilderness (already Addison speaks of the "artificial Rudeness" 36 ) organized according to the painterly principle as a gallery of pictures in which the walker-beholder was perpetually overtaken by unanticipated sights and perspectives. The world, as presented in the landscape garden, struck man's eye with an infinity of vistas that offered themselves as infinite gifts. Its space was most elaborately designed for man to confront the open world in a manner both challenging and reassuring to his perceptive and representative faculties. But because the garden's nature scene, which became part of the collective consciousness of the century, was so perfectly staged, it also contributed to 34

Kant: Critique of Judgment, p. 244 (ch. 67). Cf. also the title of ch. 45: "Schöne Kunst ist eine Kunst, sofern sie zugleich Natur zu sein scheint" ("Beautiful Art is an Art to the Degree that it also Appears to be Nature").

35

Ibid., pp. 154-5 (ch. 43).

36

Addison: ["On the Pleasures of the Imagination"] - Addison, Steele, et al.: The Spectator vol. 3, p. 286 (No. 414).

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the demise of that scene. On the stage of her self-presentation, nature appeared dominated not only through her scientific and technological reification but through the manipulation of her autonomy and spontaneity. Supreme spectacle and supreme fraud: the all too powerful human subject, the maker of the objective world even made it give itself to him; he produced and controlled - supreme paradox - his own exposure to its contingency.

4.

Werther's escape from his habitual, imposed environment into the open space of nature repeats the century's quest for a new seeing of the simple beauty of this world which was also the conquest of a world of one's own making and choice: Wahlheim. Wandering through the images that nature presents to him and attempting to make them his home, Werther must experience that 'home' is exactly that which has been given, has been imposed on us and which in vain he tries to impose on himself, more precisely: tries to make nature herself give to him. He will soon discover - his letter from August 18th is the famous testimony - that nature will not allow her spontaneity and the 'gift' she is supposed to bestow to be tinkered with. To the son who sought to force and manipulate her gracious embrace she will show the face of the all-devouring evil mother. Werther's failure, which is also the failure of illusionist aesthetics as I have tried to sketch it, has much to do with the fact that he has a body and expresses bodily desires. Early on he is not content with only seeing his images, he wants to physically embrace them. The illusionist image was destined only for the visual sense and its intellectual counterpart, intuitive reading and understanding. Once the body in its blatant materiality got in the way of the spiritual eye, these images lost their immediate transparency and effortless revelatory power. When Werther revisits the village square of Wahlheim whose "pure" picture he had drawn earlier, he will find it sullied by the blood of a murder committed out of erotic jealousy - an event symbolic, of course, for his own fatal desire. But why is it that the body interferes with pure unadulterated vision in the first place? Goethe's hero drives the moment of the gift or "givenness" which stood behind the aesthetics of intuition to its logical extreme. For in the last instance, the givenness of the world is the givenness of our existence, of our body - the event of our birth. This primal event can by definition not be experienced because it makes experience possible to begin with; it has happened behind our back and remains forever behind our back; it is the unrep-

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resentable event, the event which can not be seen. Even more, it is the blind spot of the enlightenment quest for autonomy and self-determination, the fundamental threat to the ideal of a self-transparent reason. One important way to deal with this threat was to replace the blind spot of our physical birth with rehearsals of a second and rational birth. For the historical Enlightenment, the spiritual awakening of the subject towards a new seeing, the conscious opening of the eye, symbolically represented this second gift of cultural life - as it was the symbol for what I have called here the revelatory dimension of Enlightenment illusionist aesthetics. Weither is a radical enlightenment hero who sets out for a new beginning of his life which is an aesthetic rehearsal of his first beginning. He surrounds himself with images of a benevolent Mother Nature who quickly assumes shape in a real maternal body, Lotte. Not content with the visual-spiritual limitation of his intuitive dream-world - the only place where he could make the world conform to his wishes and make nature give herself to him without reservation - but bent on a fuller, more encompassing, quasi-corporeal recovery of that blind spot, Werther reaches back to the first scene of origin, the very origin of givenness - only to experience the breakdown of representation and the collapse of his existence. Werther's "Leiden," "passions/sufferings" point to a 'passivity' of the human condition which is more fundamental than could be dealt with by its enlightened staging.

WALTER PAPE

Universität zu Köln

"Die Sinne triegen nicht": Perception and Landscape in Classical Goethe

Abstract: The predominance of the eye both in Goethe's artistic and scientific work reflects his attempt to protect aesthetic perception and thus poetry from a threatening decline in the hierarchy of 'Erkenntnis.' His idea of perception ("my perception itself is a thinking, and my thinking a perception") is discussed, and the influence of the Italian journey upon his idea of perception is demonstrated in his concept of landscape and in his poem "Amor als Landschaftsmaler." Goethe's Wahlverwandtschaften and Novella provide appropriate texts for explicating the strategies of landscape description: here Goethe reduces the means of expression to an absolute minimum and repeatedly engages a hermeneutic 'tour' through the landscape. Goethe's art of the eye turns out to be (in modern terms) very subjective, concerning the idea, the "Bild," very objective concerning the means of its representation, of illusion, and appearance.

1. The Perceptions of the Object "Es ist Gotteslästerung zu sagen: daß es einen optischen Betrug gäbe." ("It is blasphemy to say: there is an optical delusion") 1 . This definite curse upon the subjectivity of perception Goethe confided but to a small slip of paper. But on the occasion of the discussion of Robert Waring Darwin's On the Ocular Spectra of Light and Colours in his Farbenlehre, Goethe translates Darwin's ocular spectra into Augengespenster, decisively rejecting Joachim Dietrich Brandis' ( 1 7 6 4 - 1 8 4 6 ) translation Augentäuschungen: "The word optical illusion we would like to see banned once and for all. The eye is incapable of illusion; it acts according to laws and thereby transforms into reality that which one is 1

Goethe: Werke (Weimarer Ausgabe) ser. II, vol. 5,2, p. 21. - The title of this essay ist taken from one of Goethe's maxims: "Die Sinne triegen nicht, das Urtheil triegt." ("We are not deluded by our senses, but by our judgment.") - Ibid. vol. 42, 2, p. 259 ( = Maximen und Reflexionen, p. 248, No. 1193.)

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justified, in word but not in essence, in calling a spectre." 2 Browsing through the various statements Goethe made during his life on (visual) perception and the eye, one can confirm a continuous effort to preserve a naiveti in sensual, especially visual perception; there have been scientific attempts t o attribute this to the special quality of his eye, e.g. his extraordinary capacity in distinguishing contrasts, or his almost eidetic memory. All this granted, the predominance of the eye both in Goethe's artistic and scientific work 3 reflects his attempt to protect aesthetic perception and thus poetry from a threatening decline in the hierarchy of 'Erkenntnis'. 4 C o n s e quently Goethe's approach to nature and objects both as a scientist and an artist are basically the same. When he was grappling with the conceptions of contemporary philosophy, especially Kant, he was focussing his interest on one question: to what degree, namely, we may look upon an object presented to us through experience, as an object-in-itself, or must see it as our own work and property. For when one pursues the matter carefully, one sees that not only the objects of art, but even the objects for art, have a certain inherent ideality; for insofar as they are observed in regard to art, so are they immediately altered by the human mind.5 But Goethe did not agree with a critical idealism whose claim was aloof from all empiricism. H e proceeds, therefore, not from a creation (Erschaffung), but from a metamorphosis of the object through perception. It is important, he asserts, " t o express ourselves so clearly that we may be generally understood, 2

Ibid. vol. 4, p. 245 (Zur Farbenlehre. Historischer Teil): "Das Wort Augentäuschungen [...] wünschten wir ein für allemal verbannt. Das Auge täuscht sich nicht; es handelt gesetzlich und macht dadurch dasjenige zur Realität, was man zwar dem Worte aber nicht dem Wesen nach ein Gespenst zu nennen berechtigt ist."

3

On the platonic tradition of the predominance of the eye and the sensory problem in the late 18th and early 19th centuries see Utz: Das Auge und das Ohr im Text: Literarische Sinneswahrnehmung in der Goethezeit (includes a detailed bibliography on the discussion of the senses). Cf. also Mattenklott: Der übersinnliche Leib: Beiträge zur Metaphysik des Körpers, pp.47-77: Kalte Augen; 78-102: Das gefräßige Auge oder: Ikonophagie.

4

Cf. Burwick: The Damnation of Newton: Goethe's Color Theory and Romantic Perception, p. 6.

5

Reise in die Schweiz 1797 - ibid. ser. I, vol. 34, 1, pp. 438-9 ( = unmailed letter to Schiller October 1797, 25) = ibid. ser. IV, 12, pp. 449-51: "[...] in wie fern wir nämlich einen Gegenstand, der uns durch die Erfahrung gegeben wird, als einen Gegenstand an sich ansehen dürfen, oder ihn als unser Werk und Eigenthum ansehen müssen. Denn wenn man der Sache recht genau nachgeht, so sieht man, daß nicht allein die Gegenstände der Kunst, sondern schon die Gegenstände zur Kunst eine gewisse Idealität an sich haben; denn indem sie bezüglich auf Kunst betrachtet werden, so werden sie durch den menschlichen Geist schon auf der Stelle verändert."

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so that we can properly designate in an appropriate manner the difference between object and usage, which tend to merge so thoroughly." 6 In a short sketch on "Empirical Observation and Science" ("Erfahrung und Wissenschaft," 1798)7 he grapples with subjective perception. For him there obviously is a "pure phenomenon" ("reines Phänomen") which the observer never sees with his eyes; but instead of observing, measuring, weighing, and describing the "Individualität des Phänomens" (the English translation "the individual aspect of the phenomenon" does not give the meaning properly, because Goethe refers merely to what he calls the empirical phenomenon), a scientific phenomenon has to be created "by representing ['producing' in the English translation is misleading] it under circumstance and conditions different from those in which it was first observed." In the light of a Kantian, or a modern epistemological critique, or even a postmodern epistemological scepticism, such optimism is certainly problematic, but it is nevertheless the fundamental condition for Goethe's literary endeavor; for the process leading from the empirical to the scientific and further to the pure phenomenon according to Goethe is not speculative but achieved through "the practical and self-distilling processes of common human understanding" ("die praktischen und sich selbst rectificirenden Operationen des gemeinen Menschenverstandes"). This is nothing but a Goethean "analogue to Kantian thought" (as he himself would call it 8 ), conscious or unconscious, for Kant in the preface to his Critique of Judgment terms this faculty "so necessary and universally required" that nothing else but the "sound understanding" ("der gesunde Verstand") is meant 9 . Using Kant only as a defender of judgment through intuitive perception ("anschauende Urtheilskraft" 10 ) once more exhibits an 6

7

Ibid. ser. I, vol. 34,1, p. 439: "uns so deutlich auszudrücken, daß wir allgemein verständlich sein können, und daß wir auf eine geschickte Weise den Unterschied zwischen Gegenstand und Behandlung, welche beide so sehr zusammenfließen, schicklich bezeichnen können." Cf. also Maximen und Reflexionen, p. 284, No. 1376: "Alles, was im Subject ist, ist im Object und noch etwas mehr. Alles was im Object ist, ist im Subject und noch etwas mehr." "Everything that is in the subject is also in the object as well as something more. Everthing that is in the object is also in the subject as well as something more."

Goethe: Collected Works vol. 12, pp. 24-5 - Goethe: Werke (Weimarer Ausgabe) ser. II, vol. 11, pp.38—41. 8 Ibid., p. 28-30: "The Influence of Modern Philosophy," here p. 30 - ibid., pp. 47-53: "Einwirkung der neuern Philosphie," here p. 52. 9 Kant: Gesammelte Schriften (Akademie Ausgabe) ser. I, vol. 5, p. 169 - Kant: Critique of Judgment, p. 4. On Goethe's reading of Kant see now Molnär: Goethes Kantstudien. 10 Goethe: Collected Works vol. 12, p. 31-2 - Goethe: Werke (Weimarer Ausgabe) ser. II, vol. 11, p. 54-5.

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unphilosophical Goethe utterly dependent on Anschauung. As he confesses in a letter to Schiller: "for me philosophy destroys poetry [...] because it forces me toward the object. However I never can comport myself in a purely speculative way, but must immediately seek a perception in every sentence, and therefore must flee at once into nature." 11 And thus in 1817, when he tried to delve deeper into Kant's Critique of Judgment, he declared that "a wonderful period arrived" in his life: "Here I found my most disparate interests brought together; products of art and nature were dealt with alike, esthetic and teleogical judgment illuminated one another." 12 Actually, it was Kant's characterizing of "given representations in a judgment" as empirical, and consequently aesthetic13 that fascinated him. But for Kant, unlike Goethe, there was no ideal in landscape, because landscape is not grounded on any idea of reason: "An ideal of beautiful flowers, of a beautiful piece of furniture, of a beautiful view, is inconceivable."14 The irritation caused by his discovery of entoptic colors was soon overcome; Frederick Burwick sums up: "In Purkinje's research, Goethe discovered the physical objectivity of physiological subjectivism."15 It is astonishing that there is little development or elaboration in Goethe's notion of sensory organ16 in his conception of the eye as the most powerful sense17. A deviation occurs only in Goethe's early years, when - in the context of his study of Herder and the discussion of Diderot's Lettres sur les aveugles - he is temporarily motivated to devaluate the eye as the "coldest" among the sensory organs; but only because "knowledge is its feeling."18 Neither here nor 11

12

13

14 15 16 17 18

Ibid. ser. IV, vol. 16, p. 43, 19.2.1802: "[...] die Philosophie zerstört bey mir die Poesie [...] weil sie mich ins Object treibt. Indem ich mich nie rein speculativ verhalten kann, sondern gleich zu jedem Satze eine Anschauung suchen muß und deshalb gleich in die Natur hinaus fliehe." Goethe: Collected Works vol. 12, p. 29 - Goethe: Werke (Weimarer Ausgabe) ser. II, vol. 11, p. SO: "Hier sah ich meine disparatesten Beschäftigungen neben einander gestellt, Kunstund Natur-Erzeugnisse eins behandelt wie das andere, ästhetische und teleologische Urtheilskraft erleuchteten sich wechselweise." Kant: Critique of Judgment, p. 38 (§ 1) - Kant: Gesammelte Schriften (Akademie Ausgabe) ser. I, vol. 5, p. 204: "Gegebene Vorstellungen in einem Urtheile können empirisch (mithin ästhetisch) sein." Ibid., p. 69 - ibid. ser. I, vol. 5, p. 303 (§ 17): "Ein Ideal schöner Blumen, eines schönen Ameublements, einer schönen Aussicht läßt sich nicht denken." Burwick: Damnation of Newton, p. 77. Cf. article "Auge," in Goethe-Wörterbuch vol. l,cc. 1048-67, here c. 1048. See also Rupprecht Matthaei: "Auge." Zastrau, ed., Goetbe-Handbuch vol. 1, cc. 454-77. Cf. Keller: Goethes dichterische Bildlichkeit, p. 238. Fragments eines Romans in Briefen - Goethe: Werke (Weimarer Ausgabe) ser. I, vol. 37, p.

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elsewhere does Goethe share the scepticism toward the reliabilty of the eye so often expressed during the eighteenth century.19 In his Italian Journey, Goethe claims for poetry a definitive province as the art of the eye, the art of knowledge by intuition, the art of exact imagination20. Aesthetic illusion or 'bedeutender edler Schein' for the classical and the late Goethe can only be reached in a language filled with concreteness, and only then "Schein" for Goethe comes very near to the concept of 'idea,' as he told Riemer in 1809: "Illusion [Schein] is closely akin to ideality. It is as it were an image, a picture of the ideal. In fact it is the ideal itself, embodied or revealed in a minimum of reality."21 In spite of his own position as "Stockrealiste" (ultra-realist)22 Goethe thus attempts to appropriate Schiller's Kantianism. His words to Riemer are the serious version of his sarcastic reply to Schiller who commented on Goethe's "Urpflanze": "Das ist keine Erfahrung, das ist eine Idee" ("That's no experience, that's an idea"): "Das kann mir sehr lieb 62. See also Utz: Das Auge und das Ohr im Text, pp. 90-9, on young Goethe and the discussion of the senses in the Frankfurter Gelehrten Anzeigen. 19 On the discussion of the predominance of other senses like the hand (Buffon, Herder) or the ear (Herder) see Utz: Das Auge und das Ohr im Text, pp. 19-25. See also: von Einem: "Das Auge, der edelste Sinn," esp. p. 17, who points out that Goethe's frequently quoted maxim on the relation of the five senses (from Wilhelm Meister's Wandering Years-Maximen und Reflexionen ed. Hecker, No. 744, p. 166) is nothing but a quotation from an English book of aphorisms {The Koran: or Essays, Sentiments, Characters, and Callimachies ofTria Juncta in Uno, Wien 1798); the original version reads: "Sight is by much the noblest of the senses. We receive our notices from the other four, through the organs of sensation only. We hear, we feel, we smell, we taste, by touch. But sight rises infinitely higher... It is refined above matter, and equals the faculty of spirit." Quoted from von Einem. 20

Keller: Goethes dichterische Bildlichkeit, p. 261. Cf. also Göres: ""Wie wahr! Wie seiend!' Reflexionen zu Goethes Italien-Reisen," p. 24. On Goethe and his Italian Journey, especially on the aesthetic context and the idea and representation of landscape: Ilse Graham: "Der Bildner als Vollstrecker der Natur. Goethes Italienische Reise und ihre Nach wehen"; Barnen "Altertum, Uberlieferung, Natur. Über Klassizität und autobiographische Konstruktion in Goethes 'Italienischer Reise'"; Gerstenberg: "Goethe und die italienische Landschaft"; Müller Landschaftserlebnis und Landschaftsbild, pp. 101-25: "Klassische Landschaft. Goethe (2)." See also the older study of Beitl: Goethes Bild der Landschaft, esp. pp. 148-245 on the 'Style of language.'

21

Goethe to Riemer, February 20,1809 - Conversations and Encounters, p. 78 - Gespräche vol. 2, p. 20: "Der Schein ist mit der Idee nahe verwandt. Er ist gleichsam das Bild, das Gemälde von der Idee. Ja er ist die Idee selbst mit dem Minimo von Realität verkörpert oder daran offenbart." Letter (concept) to Schiller No. 3784a, April 27 or 28, 1798 - Werke (Weimarer Ausgabe) ser. IV, vol. 18, p. 79. See also Friedmar Apel: "Der lebendige Blick: Goethes Kunstanschauung." Schulze, ed., Goethe und die Kunst, pp. 571-8.

22

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sein, daß ich Ideen habe, ohne es zu wissen, und sie sogar mit Augen sehe." ("I do like having ideas without knowing about them and even seeing them with my eyes."23 Goethe here is substantially in accordance with the original and «(»«philosophical meaning of 'idea': ιδεα denotes the visible appearance (Gestalt) of a person or a thing as well as a deceptive appearance (Schein)24. In quite a similar way 'theory* (θεωρία) is connected with the visible world, originally meaning to view something (Anschauen). Goethe was in full accordance with Johann C. F. A. Heinroth's appraisal of Goethe's way of thinking; Goethe's thinking works objectively. Here he means that my thinking is not separate from the objects; that the elements of the object, the perceptions [Anschauungen] of the object, flow into m y thinking and are fully permeated by it; that m y perception [Anschauen] itself is a thinking, and m y thinking a perception [Anschauen].2

And Goethe explicitly asserts the analogy of this "objective thinking" ("gegenständliches Denken") to his "objective poetry" ("gegenständliche Dichtung")26. But this way of arguing ought not to be mistaken as naive or merely confounding subject and object. For Goethe a long process has to take place in order to purify the perception. If there is such a thing as a right way of seeing, it could only be achieved by overcoming the subjectivity of perception. That seeing has to be learned like a language, is an idea very familiar in eighteenth century discussions of the eye.27 Learning the right way of seeing involves for Goethe a long process of educating the eye, where perception through art (paintings, drawings, or engravings) plays the major role, for "obviously the eye is formed by the objects it beholds from childhood on, and so the Venetian painter must see everything more clearly and brightly than other people"; the northerners "cannot independently develop such a cheerful eye."28 Thus Goethe claimed the purpose of the journey to Italy to examine, 23

24 25

26

27 28

Goethe: "Glückliches Ereignis." Werke (Weimarer Ausgabe) ser. II, vol. 11, pp. 13-20, here pp. 17-8. - See also Schmidt: Goethes herrlich leuchtende Natur, pp. 13-56: "Goethes künstlerische, wissenschaftliche und philosophische Aneineignung der Natur"; this chapter is a modified version of Schmidts "Goethes Wissenschaftsbegriff." Η. Meinhardt: "Idee (antike)." Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie vol. 4, cc. 55-65, here c. 55. - Cf. also Pfeiffer's essay in this volume. "Significant Help Given by an Ingenious Turn of Phrase" - Goethe: Collected Works vol. 12, p. 39-41, here p. 39; "Bedeutende Förderniß durch ein einziges geistreiches Wort" - Goethe: Werke (Weimarer Ausgabe) ser. II, vol. 11, p. 58-64, here p. 58. Ibid., p. 40 - ibid., p. 60. - Cf. also Barner: "Altertum, Überlieferung, Natur. Über Klassizität und autobiographische Konstruktion in Goethes 'Italienischer Reise'," pp. 79-81 and Willems: Anschaulichkeit. Cf. Utz: Das Auge und das Ohr im Text, p. 21 refers to Berkeley, Condillac, and Diderot. Goethe: Collected Works vol. 6, p. 73 - Goethe: Werke (Weimarer Ausgabe) ser. I, vol. 30,

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whether his eye is clear, pure, and bright ("licht, rein und heir) 2 9 . In the paralipomena of his Farbenlehre, Goethe asserts what might seem, at first glance, simply a commonplace eighteenth-century variation on Aristotle's concept of μιμεσις: "Painting is for the eye more true than reality itself. It presents what man wants to see, and should see, not what he usually sees."30 Goethe does recall Aristotle indeed here, but truth for Goethe is gained through a long purifying process of learning to perceive; learning both through deliberate viewing and through examples of those, like the artists of ancient Greece and the painters of modern Italy, who already have gone through this process. Thus art becomes a means to purify, to clear human perception; an art-educated eye can perceive reality more truly than an eye whose perception has been obscured and misguided by inadequate objects: "And so our eye is gradually attuned by artistic works to become increasingly receptive to the presence of nature, and increasingly open to the beauties it offers." 31 . Goethes way of perception thus illustrates the classic notion of the ideal which is more closely linked with reality than post-classic aesthetics may suggest32 - or according to Walter Benjamin's words: Goethe's scientific studies of nature take the place which usually is occupied by traditional aesthetics.33

2. Landscape as a Text Writing to Herder from Naples (May 17,1787), Goethe reports that upon his return one will be able to judge "how he has observed." His manner of objective perception has been confirmed: "My old habit of always adhering p. 132-3: "Es ist offenbar, daß sich das Auge nach den Gegenständen bildet, die es von Jugend auf erblickt, und so muß der venezianische Maler alles klarer und heiterer sehn als andere Menschen. Wir, die wir auf einem bald schmutzkothigen, bald staubigen, farblosen, die Widerscheine verdüsternden Boden, und vielleicht gar in engen Gemächern leben, können einen solchen Frohblick aus uns selbst nicht entwickeln." 29 30

Ibid, p. 25 - p. 34 (September 11,1786). Goethe: Werke (Weimarer Ausgabe) ser. II, vol. 5, 2, p. 12: "Die Mahlerey ist für das Auge wahrer, als das Wirkliche selbst. Sie stellt auf, was der Mensch sehen möchte und sollte, nicht was er gewöhnlich sieht."

31

Goethe: Collected Works vol. 6, p. 323 - Goethe: Werke (Weimarer Ausgabe) ser. I, vol. 32, p. 90, September 1787: "Und so wird uns durch künstlerische Arbeiten nach und nach das Auge so gestimmt, daß wir für die Gegenwart der Natur immer empfänglicher und für die Schönheiten, die sie darbietet, immer offener werden."

32 33

Cf. also Frank: Idealbegriff und Landschafismalerei zwischen 1750 und 1850, p. 312. Benjamin: "Goethe." Gesammelte Schriften vol. 2,2, pp. 705-39, here p. 719.

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and clinging to objects has given me an incredible ability to sightread, as it were, and I consider myself quite fortunate to have the great, beautiful, incomparable idea [Gedanken = thought] of Sicily so clearly, completely, and purely in my soul."34 This capacity to retain visual images is still a source of pride for Goethe forty years later, when he tells Eckermann: "I have never observed Nature with a view to poetical production," said Goethe; "but, because my early drawings of landscapes, and my later studies in natural science, led me to a constant close observation, I have gradually learned Nature by heart to the minutest details - so that, when I need anything as a poet, it is at my command; and I cannot easily sin against truth."35 In magnitude (the thought of Sicily) as well as in particularity (nature even in its most minute details), Goethe believed that he had comprehended and mastered nature and landscape as pure phenomena. It is not surprising that Goethe grants the same ability to Claude: "Claude Lorrain knew intimately the real world even in its minute detail, and he used it as a means for expressing the world of his beautiful soul."36 Thus seeing has a semantic structure like a text.37 The autodidactic program of disciplined perception must naturally be tried and tested in poetic representation. Precisely in this sense Goethe in his Italian Journey must counter the earlier account of landscape perception given in Werther. In the crucial letter of May 10, Werther describes his response as artist to the natural scene: I am alone and feel the joy of life in this spot, which was created for souls like mine. I am so happy, my dear friend, so absorbed in the exquisite sense of tranquil existence, that I neglect my art. I could not draw at all now, not a single line, and 34

Goethe: Collected Works vol. 6, p. 255 - Goethe: Werke (Weimarer Ausgabe) ser. I, vol. 31, p. 237: "Daß ich sonst so an den Gegenständen klebte und haftete, hat mir nun eine unglaubliche Fertigkeit verschafft, alles gleichsam vom Blatt wegzuspielen, und ich finde mich recht glücklich, den großen, schönen, unvergleichbaren Gedanken von Sizilien so klar, ganz und lauter in der Seele zu haben."

35 To Eckermann, January 18,1827 Conversations with Eckermann, p. 125.-Goethe: Gespräche vol. 3, p. 327: "Ich habe, sagte Goethe, niemals die Natur poetischer Zwecke wegen betrachtet. Aber weil mein früheres Landschaftszeichnen und dann mein späteres Naturforschen mich zu einem beständigen genauen Ansehen der natürlichen Gegenstände trieb, so habe ich die Natur bis in ihre kleinsten Details nach und nach auswendig gelernt, dergestalt, daß wenn ich als Poet etwas brauche, es mir zu Gebote steht und ich nicht leicht gegen die Wahrheit fehle." 36 To Eckermann, April 10, 1829 - Goethe: Gespräche vol. 4, p. 101: "Claude Lorrain kannte die reale Welt bis ins kleinste Detail auswendig, und er gebrauchte sie als Mittel, um die Welt seiner schönen Seele auszudrücken.." 37 Cf. Utz: Das Auge und das Ohr im Text, p. 15.

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Visual Perception and Verbal Representation yet I feel that I was never a greater painter than in such moments as these. When the lovely valley teems with mist around me, [...]; and then, my friend, when the world grows dim before my eyes and earth and sky seen to dwell in my soul and absorb its power, like the form of a beloved - then I often think with longing, Oh, if only I could express it, could breathe onto paper all that lives so full and warm within me, that it might become the mirror of my soul, as my soul is the mirror of the infinite God! 3 8

F o r t h e classical G o e t h e all subjectivity - t h e internalized v i e w o f t h e w o r l d , t h e landscape as mirror o f t h e s o u l - m u s t give w a y t o a decisive objectivity. W h e n o n his Italian J o u r n e y at C a s t e l G a n d o l f o - during his s e c o n d s t a y at R o m e in O c t o b e r 1 7 8 7 - he fell in l o v e w i t h a beautiful Milanese, h e learned o n l y after a f e w days that she s h o r t l y was t o be married; he t h u s e s c a p e d a W e r t h e r - l i k e fate in R o m e , as he h i m s e l f called it. In c o n n e c t i o n w i t h this R o m a n e n c o u n t e r G o e t h e relates t w o v i e w i n g s o f t h e s a m e landscape: o n e b e f o r e h e learns t h e girl is a bride, the o t h e r directly afterwards. E v e n in t h e first v i e w i n g he t r a n s f o r m s the actual landscape i n t o a picture: Towards evening, as I was looking for the young women, I found the older ones in a pavilion which offered the most magnificent of views; my gaze wandered around it, but what passed before my eyes was something other than the picturesqueness of a landscape. The area had become suffused with a color tone that could be ascribed neither to the sunset nor the evening breezes alone. The glowing illumination of the high points, the cooling blue shadows over the depths, seemed more splendid than they ever could be in oils or watercolors; I could not get enough of looking at that, yet I felt that I would like to leave this^tlace and do a homage to the last gleam of the sun in a small, sympathetic group. 3

38

39

Goethe: Collected Works vol. 11, p. 6 - Werke (Weimarer Ausgabe) ser. I, vol. 19, p. 7-8: "Ich bin allein, und freue mich meines Lebens in dieser Gegend, die für solche Seelen geschaffen ist wie die meine. Ich bin so glücklich, mein Bester, so ganz in dem Gefühle von ruhigem Dasein versunken, daß meine Kunst darunter leidet. Ich könnte jetzt nicht zeichnen, nicht einen Strich, und bin nie ein größerer Maler gewesen. Wenn das liebe Thal um mich dampft, [...]; wenn's dann um meine Augen dämmert, und die Welt um mich her und der Himmel ganz in meiner Seele ruhn wie die Gestalt einer Geliebten; dann sehne ich mich oft und denke: ach könntest du das wieder ausdrücken, könntest du dem Papiere das einhauchen, was so voll, so warm in dir lebt, daß es würde der Spiegel deiner Seele, wie deine Seele ist der Spiegel des unendlichen Gottes." Goethe: Collected Works vol. 6, p. 341 - Goethe: Werke (Weimarer Ausgabe) ser. I, vol. 32, p. 126: "Gegen Abend die jungen Frauenzimmer aufsuchend, fand ich die älteren Frauen in einem Pavillon, wo die herrlichste der Aussichten sich darbot; ich schweifte mit meinem Blick in die Runde, aber es ging vor meinen Augen etwas anders vor als das LandschaftlichMahlerische; es hatte sich ein Ton über die Gegend gezogen, der weder dem Untergang der Sonne noch den Lüften des Abends allein zuzuschreiben war. Die glühende Beleuchtung der hohen Stellen, die kühlende blaue Beschattung der Tiefe schien herrlicher als jemals in Ol

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This is a Wertherian landscape only at first glance, for the perception of this landscape after his erotic dreams are destroyed turns out to be even better; Goethe returns t o nature as to a neglected love: I quickly turned again to the natural landscape, which I had meanwhile neglected, and I tried to reproduce it as faithfully as possible, but my real success was in seeing it better. The modicum of technique I possessed was scarcely adequate for the most unpretentious sketch, but the opulent corporality offered us by that area in the form of rocks and trees, inclines and declines, placid lakes, and lively brooks, was more perceptible to my eye than almost ever before, and I could not hate the pain that was able to sharpen my inner and outer senses to such a degree.40 Both happiness (love) and pain heighten the sensibility of Goethe's perception, his inner and outer eye; the emotion does not romantically flow into, properly speaking, the landscape, but instead renders it even more objective. A modern literary critic would draw the borders between subject and object in a different way. Nevertheless the works of the classical Goethe present a landscape that is not suffused by subjectivity, but render the objects of nature in a clear, distinct light; for, as Goethe remarks of Palladio's architectural creations, the great poet has the power "to take truth and lies [Wahrheit und Lüge] and out of them frame a third entity, whose borrowed existence [geborgtes Dasein] enchants us 41 ." In connection with his experience with the Milanese girl and the Roman landscape Goethe wrote a self-reflexive poem which gives an image of his classical approach towards landscape and nature inspite of its rococo attitude: Amor als Landschaftsmaler42. oder Aquarell; ich konnte nicht genug hinsehen, doch fühlte ich, daß ich den Platz zu verlassen Lust hatte, um in theilnehmender kleiner Gesellschaft dem letzten Blick der Sonne zu huldigen." 40 Ibid., p. 342 - ibid., p. 12829: "Ich wendete mich abermals rasch zu der inzwischen vernachlässigten landschaftlichen Natur und suchte sie so treu als möglich nachzubilden, mehr aber gelang mir, sie besser zu sehen. Das wenige Technische, was ich besaß, reichte kaum zu dem unscheinbarsten Umriß hin, aber die Fülle der Körperlichkeit, die uns jene Gegend in Felsen und Bäumen, Auf- und Abstiegen, stillen Seen, belebten Bächen entgegenbringt, war meinem Auge beinahe fühlbarer als sonst, und ich konnte dem Schmerz nicht feind werden, der mir den innern und äußern Sinn in dem Grade zu schärfen geeignet war." 41

Ibid., p. 48 (September 19, 1786) - ibid. ser. I, vol. 30, p. 77.

42

Goethe: Collected Works vol. 1, pp. 98-101 (translated by ChristopherMiddleton)-Goethe: Werke (Weimarer Ausgabe) ser. I, vol. 2, pp. 182-4. - S. Aschner cites (not very convincingly) an Italian popular song in Platen's (!) translation as the source of the painting Amor - Aschner: "Amor als Landschaftsmaler." Now see also Norbert Millen "Der Dichter ein Landschaftsmaler." Schulze ed., Goethe und die Kunst, pp. 379-407, esp. pp. 381-2.

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Saß ich früh auf einer Felsenspitze, Sah mit starren Augen in den Nebel; Wie ein grau grundiertes Tuch gespannet, Deckt' er alles in die Breit' und Höhe.

Sat upon a rocky peak at daybreak, Staring fix-eyed through the mist before me; Stretched like canvas primed with gray it mantled Everything on either side and upward.

Stellt' ein Knabe sich mir an die Seite, Sagte: Lieber Freund, wie magst du starrend Auf das leere Tuch gelassen schauen? Hast du denn zum Mahlen und zum Bilden Alle Lust auf ewig wohl verloren?

A little boy now came and stood beside me: Friend, he said, I wonder what you're up to, Peering, supine, at that empty canvas. Might you have lost for now, if not for ever, Pleasure in painting, shaping out an image?

Sah ich an das Kind und dachte heimlich: Will das Bübchen doch den Meister machen!

Glancing at the child, I thought in secret: Perhaps the boy thinks he can act the master.

Willst du immer trüb' und müßig bleiben, Sprach der Knabe, kann nichts Kluges werden: Sieh, ich will dir gleich ein Bildchen mahlen, Dich ein hübsches Bildchen mahlen lehren.

If you sit there, sullen, doing nothing, Said the boy, no good will be the outcome. Watch, I'll paint a smidgeon of a picture Now, for you, a pretty one to learn from.

Und er richtete den Zeigefinger, Der so röthlich war wie eine Rose, Nach dem weiten ausgespannten Teppich, Fing mit seinem Finger an zu zeichnen:

Then he lifted up his index finger, Which was quite as rosy as a rose is; Pointing to the fabric stretched before him, N o w the boy began to trace a picture.

Oben mahlt' er eine schöne Sonne, Die mir in die Augen mächtig glänzte, Und den Saum der Wolken macht' er golden, Ließ die Strahlen durch die Wolken dringen; Mahlte dann die zarten leichten Wipfel Frisch erquickter Bäume, zog die Hügel, Einen nach dem andern, frei dahinter; Unten ließ er's nicht an Wasser fehlen, Zeichnete den Fluß so ganz natürlich, Daß er schien im Sonnenstrahl zu glitzern, Daß er schien am hohen Rand zu rauschen.

At the top a beauteous sun he painted, I was almost blinded by the dazzle; Borders of the clouds, he made them golden, Rays of sun to perforate the cloud mass; Painted then the delicate and tender Tops of freshly quickened trees, with hillocks Touched into place and freely grouped behind them; Lower down — water he put, and plenty, Drew the river, as it is in nature, So much so, it seemed to glint with sunlight And murmur as it rose against the edges.

Ach, da standen Blumen an dem Flusse, Und da waren Farben auf der Wiese, Gold und Schmelz und Purpur und ein Grünes, Alles wie Smaragd und wie Karfunkel! Hell und rein lasirt' er drauf den Himmel, Und die blauen Berge fern und ferner, Daß ich ganz entzückt und neu geboren Bald den Mahler, bald das Bild beschaute.

Ah, beside the river flowers had sprouted, And the meadow was a blaze of color, Gold, enamel sheen, a green, and crimson, All aglow like emerald and carbuncle. Bright and clear, above, he glazed the sky in, Mountains, blue, receding in the distance., So that born anew I looked, ecstatic, N o w upon the painter, now the picture.

Hab' ich doch, so sagt' er, dir bewiesen, Daß ich dieses Handwerk gut verstehe; Doch es ist das Schwerste noch zurücke.

You'll admit, says he, I've demonstrated This is a handiwork I have some skill in; The hardest part is still to come however.

Zeichnete darnach mit spitzem Finger Und mit großer Sorgfalt an dem Wäldchen, G'rad an's Ende, wo die Sonne kräftig Von dem hellen Boden wiederglänzte, Zeichnete das allerliebste Mädchen,

Then, with pointing fingertip and very Solicitously, by the little forest, Right on the brink of it, where sunlight gathered To be reflected off the shining humus, He traced the loveliest girl you could set eyes on,

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Wohlgebildet, zierlich angekleidet, Frische Wangen unter braunen Haaren, Und die Wangen waren von der Farbe, Wie das Fingerchen, das sie gebildet.

Pretty figure, and a graceful garment, Cheeks a fresh complexion, all around them Tawny hair, and more, the cheeks were tinted Like the tiny finger that had shaped them.

Ο du Knabe, rief ich, welch in Meister Hat in seine Schule dich genommen, Daß du so geschwind und so natürlich Alles klug beginnst und gut vollendest?

Little boy, I now exclaimed, what master Can it be who took you as a pupil, That your designs should be so swift, so clever, And finished, as by nature, to perfection?

Da ich noch so rede, sieh, da rühret Sich ein Windchen, und bewegt die Gipfel, Kräuselt alle Wellen auf dem Flusse, Füllt den Schleier des vollkommnen Mädchens, Und, was mich Erstaunten mehr erstaunte, Fängt das Mädchen an den Fuß zu rühren, Geht zu kommen, nähert sich dem Orte, Wo ich mit dem losen Lehrer sitze.

Even as I'm speaking, look, a zephyr Gently stirs, it agitates the treetops, Ruffles all the river into wavelets, Fills the filmy robe that she is wearing, The perfect girl, amazed I am, and more so When she starts to set her feet in motion, And she moves, she walks, she's coming this way To where I sit beside my wicked teacher.

Da nun alles, alles sich bewegte, Bäume, Fluß und Blumen und der Schleier Und der zarte Fuß der Allerschönsten; Glaubt ihr wohl, ich sei auf meinem Felsen, Wie ein Felsen, still und fest geblieben?

N o w everything, but everything was moving, Trees, the flowers, filmy robe, the river, Delicate feet of the girl in all her beauty Do you think I sat so calm and steadfast Rocklike on my rock a moment longer?

These lines are no mere playful ironic verbalization of one of the charming eighteenth-century allegories, like those by Boucher, showing amor or amorettos in human occupation, like the allegories of art which Boucher painted for the castle of Amalienbourg (1757), though the imagery of the poem unquestionably was prompted by them. The poem, a deliberate variation on the Pygmalion motif, offers its own transparant creation as symbol of Goethe's objective art. The point of the poem is not the realism of a piece of art deluding the spectator.43 Goethe in his essay Myron's Cow deliberately denies that it was "Myron's goal to achieve a realism that vies with nature." Only dilettantes would extol the "statue's remarkable realism." Spurning all evidence of appraisal of that kind, Goethe declares: " [...] we dare say that it was the Μίνείέ of the concept, and not the naturalism in execution, which delighted all of antiquity."44 43

Cf. Schröder: "Goethe, Amor als Landschaftsmaler," pp. 167-8, where he gives several examples of paintings and sculptures deluding the spectator through their apparent reality.

44

Goethe: Collected Works vol. 3, pp. 23-9, here 24 and 27 - Werke (Weimarer Ausgabe) ser. I, vol. 49, 2, pp. 3-15, here 4 and 8: "Wir aber äußern hier ohne Bedenken die Behauptung, daß die Naivetät der Conception und nicht die Natürlichkeit der Ausführung das ganze Alterthum entzückt hat."

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Comparing Amor als Landschafrsmabler with the narration in the Italian Journey we notice that Goethe has altered the time of the day: The poem begins in the early morning with the artist's gaze into (not i^rowgA as Christopher Middleton puts it) the fog. Nebel is one of Goethe's Urtropen45; it not only denotes a disrupted relation to the external, but, as connected with the ordinary perception of the northerner, symbolizes the state of a troubled perception and an excited imagination, the veil out of which the true image will emerge; in his diary, describing Palladio's structures in Venice and his change of perception when looking at the engravings in Palladio's I quattro libri dell' Arcbitettura, Goethe gives a similar image for this way of perception: "I saw in Verona and Vicence what I could see with my own eyes; when I came to Padua I found the book; now I study it, and it is as if my eyes were opened for the first time; the mists parted and I recognize the objects." 46 Hence the landscape-painting Amor certainly is the symbol of true perception; Amor's creation - in a literal sense - uncovers the interaction - not flowing together - of empathy, love, creation, perception, and reality; but the image does not give diffuse and dark presentiment (Ahnung) but clear and distinct presence. This is symbolized also by the sudden and yet scarcely noticeable change of time from early morning to high noon: Amor paints the sun "at the top." The shift from the description of the Τ perceiving the fog being "like canvas primed with gray" towards the symbolic objectivation of the fog being the empty canvas is done with such effortless ease, with no visionary preparation, no irritating memory, no romantic "Erinnerungsträume" afflicting the eye from the inside47, that this poetic technique may be well described in Goethe's own words: "The poet's task is to represent. The highest aspect of which is when it competes with reality, that is, when its inspired descriptions become so vivid that they seem present to everyone. Upon its highest peak poetry seems completely external; the more that it retreats into the internal, the more it is on its way to sinking."48 It is crucial to translate this precisely for 45

See especially Keller's Ausführungen in his Goethes

46

Goethe: Werke (Weimarer Ausgabe) ser. III, vol. 1, p. 250, 30. 9. 1786 to Frau von Stein: "Ich sah in Verona und Vicenz was ich mit meinen Augen ersehen konnte, in Padua fand ich erst das Buch, jetzt studier ich's, und es fallen mir wie Schuppen von den Augen, der Nebel geht auseinander und ich erkenne die Gegenstände." Goethe bought in Padua the 1770/80 edition of Palladio's work (originally: Venice 1570).

47

Cf. on "Erinnerungsträume" disturbing perception Keller: Goethes p. 217.

48

Maximen und Reflexionen ed. Hecker, No. 510, p. 110: "Der Dichter ist angewiesen auf Darstellung. Das Höchste derselben ist, wenn sie mit der Wirklichkeit wetteifen, das heißt, wenn ihre Schilderungen durch den Geist dergestalt lebendig sind, daß sie als gegenwärtig

dichterische

Bildlichkeit,

dichterische

pp. 109-14.

Bildlichkeit,

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we then find erscheint and äußerlich being almost synomyms; but actually, here and in the poem Amor als Landschaftsmaler again Schein becomes the notion of idea, poetry being the borrowed existence [geborgtes Dasein], an image of presence. There is a telling symbol within the symbolic-allegorical tale, that hints at this ideal identity of perception, image, and reality: Amor draws everything with his tiny finger, but only the girl's cheeks are of the same color as the finger49 that has shaped them (gebildet; the translation is misleading, for Goethe uses this word deliberately only for the girl). Through this Bild motion now comes into the painted image, and "now everything, but everthing was moving" the outward motion becomes an inward emotion - not vice versa. Amor als Landschaftsmaler - in its ideality no doubt also a homage to Claude Lorrain50 - therefore provides us with a deeper notion of Goethe's concept of viewing. For him there were disparate degrees and disparate ways of viewing: "the eyes of the mind have to operate in vivid connection with the eyes of the body, because otherwise one runs the risk of seeing but missing the object."51 Goethe's Amor als Landschaftsmaler as well as the whole Italian Journey were part of the anti-romantic program of his later years that opposes the romantic subjectivizing of landscape.

3. Hierarchy of Senses, Hierarchy of the Arts But certainly, poetry is made out of words, and poetic images and painted pictures actually have different qualities. As to Goethe's comprehension of painting, I can confine myself to one single essay of his, which is not only linked quite obviously with one of my topics, Goethe's Novella, but which für jedermann gelten können. Auf ihrem höchsten Gipfel erscheint die Poesie ganz äußerlich; je mehr sie sich in's Innere zurückzieht, ist sie auf dem Wege zu sinken." 49

Schröder: "Goethe, Amor als Landschaftsmaler," p. 169, quotes from several other poems where Goethe uses the image of the 'creative' finger or fingertip and draws the lines back to Michelangelo's Adam and to the old topos of "God as a painter," cf. Curtius: European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, pp. 561-2.

50

Cf. Ziolkowski: Die Natur als Nachahmung der Kunst hei Goethe. Ziolkowski is right in focussing the context of 'nature as imitation of art,' but he seems to be wrong in his efforts to identify a particular painting by Claude being described by Goethe. O n Goethe's relation to Claude see Varenne: "Goethe et Claude Lorrain."

51

Goethe: Schriften zur Naturwissenschaft vol. 9 (Morphologische Hefte), p. 78: "[...] daß es ein Unterschied sei zwischen Sehen und Sehen, daß die Geistes-Augen mit den Augen des Leibes in stetem lebendigen Bunde zu wirken haben, weil man sonst Gefahr gerät zu sehen und doch vorbeizusehen."

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also is Goethe's deliberate attempt to influence romantic landscape painting in accordance with his own ideas52. In 1816 Goethe in Cotta's Morgenblatt für gebildete Stände published a report on three paintings by Jacob van Ruisdael in the Royal Saxon Collection (.Dresdener Galerie): The Waterfall, The Convent, and The Jewish Cemetery. Goethe titles his essays "Ruysdael als Dichter" ("Ruisdael as a Poet") 53 . Already in the first paragraph he declares that he is meant to consider him as "a thinking artist, even as a poet" ("als denkenden Künstler, ja als Dichter betrachten"). And in the next paragraph he likewise deliberately speaks of the paintings as "gehaltreicher Text." Goethe's main interest in these paintings pertains to "the representing of the past in the present, [...] bringing into the most intuitive, vivid connection [anschaulichste Verbindung] the dead and the living"54. His description then highlights the various anschaulichste Verbindungen of ruin, trees, and the present use of nature and buildings alike, in one word: the story, the history the poetic artist gives us. Consequently Goethe finds the most important idea providing also the greatest picturesque impression in Ruisdael's Jewish Cemetery·. T h e collapse of immense walls seems to have filled up or obstructed a gently flowing brook, diverting it from the original course, and now it is rushing past the graves in search of a way in this wilderness. A beam of light struggling through the rain shower illuminates a few upright, already damaged tombstones, a gray tree trunk and a stump, but especially the gushing water of the brook cascading over rocks, and finally the foam in the foreground. 5

We will find an almost identical conception of landscape when we look at the Novella, which to a certain extent may be called a poetologic text; there the water-symbolism is replaced by the "trunks and roots twisting among the masonry." 54 In any case, landscape painting for Goethe is sound and acceptable 52

53 54

55 56

For a thorough discussion of Goethe's "Ruisdael as a Poet" see Osterkamp: Im Buchstabenbilde: Studien zum Verfahren Goethescher Bildbeschreibungen, pp. 321-56; see also Frank Büttner: "Abwehr der Romantik." Schulze, ed., Goethe und die Kunst, pp. 456-77, esp. pp. 459-60. Goethe: Collected Works vol. 3: Essays on Art and Literature, pp. 62-6 - Werke (Weimarer Ausgabe) I, 48, pp. 162-8. Goethe: Werke (Weimarer Ausgabe) I, 48, p. 164: "im Gegenwärtigen das Vergangene darzustellen, [...] das Abgestorbene mit dem Lebendigen in die anschaulichste Verbindung gebracht." - The English translation by the Nardroff's - Goethe: Collected Works vol. 3, p. 63 - destroys the original meaning. Goethe: Collected Works vol. 3, pp. 65-6 - Werke (Weimarer Ausgabe) ser. I, vol. 48, p. 168. Ibid, vol. 11, p. 267-ibid. ser. I, vol. 18, p. 319: "die verschiedenen Stamm-und Wurzelarten zwischen das Mauerwerk verflochten."

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only if its objective appearance conveys a symbolic meaning; any romantic ambiguity beyond intuition ("Anschaulichkeit") is rejected.57 In the hierarchy of senses in Goethe indisputably the eye takes the first rank; in the hierarchy of arts, the mostly un-visual poetry does. This paradoxical idea might be - despite of the generic difference - most clearly gathered from Goethe's discussion of Shakespeare in 1815 {Shakespeare und kein Ende!): The eye may be called the most perceptive of our senses, and hence the most effective means of communication [!]. But the inner sense is even more perceptive, and it is to this sense that the word speaks most directly. After all, it is the word that comes to our aid when the object which our eyes perceive is strange and incomprehensible. Shakespeare addresses our inner sense, which immediately activates our creative imagination and brings about a total effect which is inexplicable to us. And that is the cause of the delusion I referred to, the impression that everything is happening right before our eyes. 58

The semantic structure of viewing is crucial: visual art only reaches its perfection when semantically structured like a text; literature on the other hand already has this structure: directing the reader's inner eye more directly to the appearance created by the words.

4. Ideal Landscape, Death in Arcadia, and Paradise Regained With this in mind it is worth looking both at the descriptive parts of the poetical landscapes in Goethe's Novella and Elective Affinities and their function for the non-descriptive parts; the clear inner sense, of which Goethe speaks, is animated through the poetic word. Landscape description, as he stipulates in Maximen und Reflexionen, must be "so enlivened through the mind that everyone might consider it present."59 To achieve such presence in his Novella and Elective Affinities, Goethe relies on two poetic strategies: in 57 58

Osterkamp: Im Buchstabenbilde, p. 337 and 332. Goethe: Collected Works vol. 3, pp. 166-74, here p. 166 - Werke (Weimarer Ausgabe) ser. I, vol. 41, pp. 52-71, here pp. 53-4: "Das Auge mag wohl der klarste Sinn genannt werden, durch den die leichteste Uberlieferung möglich ist. Aber der innere Sinn ist noch klarer, und zu ihm gelangt die höchste und schnellste Überlieferung durch's Wort: denn dieses ist eigentlich fruchtbringend, wenn das, was wir durch's Auge auffassen, an und für sich fremd und keineswegs so tiefwirkend vor uns steht. Shakespeare nun spricht durchaus an unsern innern Sinn; durch diesen belebt sich zugleich die Bilderwelt der Einbildungskraft, und so entspringt eine vollständige Wirkung, von der wir uns keine Rechenschaft zu geben wissen; denn hier liegt eben der Grund von jener Täuschung, als begebe sich alles vor unsern Augen."

59

See note 48.

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describing the landscape he reduces the means of expression to an absolute minimum, and he repeatedly engages a hermeneutic 'tour' through the landscape. The reader thus becomes intimate with the specific details of the verbal landscape, and may recall them with greater ease than those of the visual landscape, especially since the latter yields but unspecified memory prompts. Only through memory and imagination can the viewer assemble the combination necessary to an ideal landscape.

Elective Affinities At the very beginning of Elective Affinities the reader is provided with a picture of the manor and gardens and landscape60 by the gardener himself: "Over in the new gardens," replied the gardener [to Edward's question concerning his wife]. "The moss hut she is building in the cliff face opposite the house will be finished today. It has turned out very nicely and is sure to please you, your lordship. You have an excellent view; the village down below, the church, whose spire you hardly notice from up there, a little to the right; and opposite, the manor-house and the gardens. [...] Then [...] the valley opens up to the right and you can see over the vast expanses of trees clear into the distance. The climb up the cliff is very prettily arranged. Her ladyship knows h o w to do these things; it's a pleasure to work for her."

It is no accident that the first description of the landscape is given by a gardener: the shaping and reshaping of an estate park and environs require a special staging of landscape perspective. In the gardener's description the actual landscape ("the valley opens up to the right and you can see over the 60

61

On Goethe and landscape garden see Neumeyer: "The Landscape Garden as a Symbol in Rousseau, Goethe and Flaubert," esp. pp. 197-9. See also Finney: The Counterfeit Idyll: The Garden Ideal and Social Reality in Nineteenth-Century Fiction, esp. pp. 53-8: "The History and Literary Reception of Landscape Gardening" and pp. 58-74: "Goethean Classicism and the Traditions of Self-Cultivation and Humanity"; cf. also Hielscher: Natur und Freiheit in Goethes "Die Wahlverwandtschaften," pp. 87-137. Collected Works vol. 11, p. 93 - Werke (Weimarer Ausgabe) ser. I, vol. 20, p. 3-4: "Drüben in den neuen Anlagen, versetzte der Gärtner [auf Eduards Frage, ob er seine Frau nicht gesehen habe]. Die Mooshütte wird heute fertig, die sie an der Felswand, dem Schlosse gegenüber, gebaut hat. Alles ist recht schön geworden und muß Ew. Gnaden gefallen. Man hat einen vortrefflichen Anblick: unten das Dorf, ein wenig rechter Hand die Kirche, über deren Thurmspitze man fast hinwegsieht; gegenüber das Schloß und die Gärten. [...] Dann [...] öffnet sich rechts das Thal und man sieht über die reichen Baumwiesen in eine heitere Ferne. Der Stieg die Felsen hinauf ist gar hübsch angelegt. Die gnädige Frau versteht es; man arbeitet unter ihr mit Vergnügen."

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vast expanses of trees clear into the distance") is framed by the immediate circumstance that Charlotte is in the process of modifying it, and the words of the gardener thus provide a tableau from which the reader is twice removed: The "excellent view" described by the gardener is beyond the present view. Also, in speaking to the Baron, who obviously knows the scene well, the gardener resticts himself to the prominent components of the view: village, church, manor-house, gardens, valley, expanse of trees, clear distance. N o coloring adjectives, no penetrating subjectivity are allowed to disarrange the pure phenomenon of the ideal landscape: "Goethe usually describes scenes without adjectives or with only very generalized ones, so that the entire emphasis is upon the visual image and not upon the emotion reflected in the adjective." 42 In contrast to Amor als Landschaftsmahler, which, appropriate to the poetic genre, makes use of splendid color images ("grau," "röthlich," "golden," "Farben auf der Wiese, / Gold und Schmelz und Purpur und ein Grünes, / Alles wie Smaragd und wie Karfunkel!," "blaue Berge"), here the slightest suggestions, as Bernard Buschendorf has formulated it, call forth "the impression of distant perspective, sfumato, and infinitude," and seek thereby "to satisfy the prime requisites of 'ideal landscape' as generally recognized by art historians and of which Goethe himself was conscious." 63 Having been told two possible approaches to the moss hut 64 , Eduard then seeks his way through the rearranged park. At the door of the moss hut, Charlotte greets her husband, "she asked him to sit down so that he could take in at a glance the various scenes that showed the landscape as if framed by the door and window." 65 In the course of the following chapters (1, 2, 3, 6, 7), the reader is led on several walks through this landscape, guided by each of the major characters. Through this repetition the reader soon knows every feature by heart. 66 The 62

Neumeyer: "The Landscape Garden as a Symbol in Rousseau, Goethe and Flaubert," p. 201. - See also Buschendorf: Goethes mythische Denkform, pp. 66-79: Ideale Landschaft. For a detailed study on colors in Goethe's landscape descriptions also see Beitl: Goethes Bild der Landschaft, pp. 198-218 on the Wahlverwandtschaften.

63 64

Ibid., p. 71. O n the origins of the picturesque moss hut see Neumeyer: "The Landscape Garden as a Symbol in Rousseau, Goethe and Flaubert," p. 203.

65

Goethe: Collected Works vol. 11, p. 9 4 - W e r k e (Weimarer Ausgabe) ser. I, vol. 20, p. 4: "und ließ ihn dergestalt niedersitzen, daß er durch Thür und Fenster die verschiedenen Bilder, welche die Landschaft gleichsam im Rahmen zeigten, auf einen Blick übersehen konnte."

66

Cf. also Staroste: "Raumgestaltung und Raumsymbolik in Goethes Wahlverwandtschaften," p. 211, where he speaks of empirical spaces being repeated as 'leitmotifs.'

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landscape reveals itself as thoroughly aesthetic, that is, as a landscape, whose beauties "the new pathways had brought to light and enhanced."67 The function of a practical landscape is totally subordinated; the painterly views are repeatedly described, as appropriate, from an elevated perspective, where "the view is freer and there's more air to breathe."68 The basis and the pre-condition of aesthetic pleasure, however, are self-sufficiency, autarky of person and possession: on their first walk with the Captain, Edward and Charlotte do not ascend the highest point merely for the sake of the view, but also to reveal the extent of their estate: "so that he [the Captain] won't have the impression that our property is limited to this narrow valley."6' The awareness of property, however, remains imperfect without clear knowledge: "Edward saw his estate taking shape on paper like a new creation. He felt that he was seeing it now for the first time; and for the first time it really seemed to belong to him."70 That the pure pleasure in landscape as a work of art is possible only after the Captain's cartographic survey and mapping, and the plans for reshaping in accord with "illustrated English estate descriptions,"71 effectively returns us to the three steps in Goethe's account of the scale of perception: empirical, scientific, pure phenomenon. The self-sufficiency of an ideal landscape as closed space is further emphasized through typical Goethean irony. In the second part of the novel, during Edward's absence and the deceptive idyll of Ottile and Charlotte, Goethe permits an English traveller, a connoisseur of parks and gardens, to visit with the women and reanimate their pleasure in the landscape: "His trained eye saw every effect afresh, and his pleasure was even greater because he had not known the area before and could hardly distinguish what they had created from what nature had provided."72 This altered and artificial nature, however, is his principal preoccupation, "for he spent most of the day capturing the picturesque view 67 68 69 70

71 72

Goethe: Collected Works vol. 11, p. 104 - Werke (Weimarer Ausgabe) ser. I, vol. 20, p. 28: "durch die neuen Wege erst sichtbar und genießbar geworden." Ibid., p. 105 - ibid., p. 30: "der Blick wird oben freier und die Brust erweitert sich." Ibid. - ibid.: "damit er [der Hauptmann] nicht glaube, dieses beschränkte Thal nur sei unser Erbgut und Aufenthalt." Ibid., p. 106 - ibid., p. 32: "seine Besitzungen auf das deutlichste aus dem Papier wie eine neue Schöpfung hervorgewachsen. Er glaubte sie jetzt erst kennenzulemen; sie schienen ihm jetzt erst recht zu gehören." See also Ziolkowski: Natur als Nachahmung der Kunst hei Goethe, p. 245. Ibid., p. 124 - ibid., p. 75: "die englischen Parkbeschreibungen mit Kupfern." Ibid., p. 221 - ibid., p. 315-16: "Sein geübtes Auge empfing jeden Effect ganz frisch, und er hatte um so mehr Freude an dem Entstandenen, als er die Gegend vorher nicht gekannt und, was man daran gethan, von dem, was die Natur geliefen, kaum zu unterscheiden wußte."

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of the gardens with a portable camera obscura or sketching them to preserve for himself and others the happy produce of his travels."73 What Goethe has here introduced ironically into the sequence of multiple images is nothing other than the process of aesthetic perception, of the education of the eye through art and nature. For us, as readers today, such irony arouses scepticism, a sign of the fictionalization of our reality through, as Jean Baudrillard has expressed it, the "precession des simulacres"74 compared with reality: "Reality has its demise in hyperrealism, in the exact replication of the real, preferably on the basis of another reproductive medium [...], and from medium to medium the real evaporates."75 For Goethe the real cannot perish, for: "The senses do not lie." ("Die Sinne triegen nicht.") The apparent replication of the world in art Goethe sees ironically, to be sure, but not skeptically. Relevant here is Goethe's pronouncement on the relation between landscape and art, nature and art: "Precisely that which uneducated people take to be nature in the work of art, is not nature (from without), but human (nature from within)." 76 The aesthetic pleasure in this beautiful world, however, is not undimmed for readers and figures; indeed, the clarity and ideality of the landscape as art achieves its symbolic quality only in passing through the dark underground. Even in the very first walk which Edward and Charlotte take together, we read that it led Edward through the churchyard "which he usually avoided": "But how amazed he was when he saw that even here Charlotte had provided for sentiment. With the greatest care for the old monuments, she had ordered and arranged everything so that it seemed to make a pleasant spot on which both eye and imagination might happily dwell."77 Thus conscious of death, completely in accord with the 73

Ibid., p. 222 - ibid., p. 316: "die mahlerischen Ansichten des Parks in einer tragbaren dunklen Kammer aufzufangen und zu zeichnen, um dadurch sich und andern von seinen Reisen eine schöne Frucht zu gewinnen." 74 Jean Baudrillard: "La pr£cession des simulacres." Baudrillard: Simulacres et simulations, S.9-68. 75 76

77

Baudrillard: Der symbolische Tausch und der Tod, pp. 113-14. Maximen und Reflexionen ed. Hecker, No. 1076, p. 224: "Gerade das, was ungebildeten Menschen am Kunstwerk als Natur auffällt, das ist nicht Natur (von außen), sondern der Mensch (Natur von innen)." Goethe: Collected Works vol. I I , p. 101 - Werke (Weimarer Ausgabe) ser. I, vol. 20, p. 21-2: "den er sonst zu vermeiden pflegte. Aber wie verwundert war er, als er fand, daß Charlotte auch hier für das Gefühl gesorgt habe. Mit möglichster Schonung der alten Denkmäler hatte sie alles so zu vergleichen und zu ordnen gewußt, daß es ein angenehmer Raum erschien, auf dem das Auge und die Einbildungskraft gerne verweilten."

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example of the English landscape-garden, access to Arcadia is granted; death, to be sure, is not actually integrated, but rather aestheticized. As successful as is the Arcadia in the gardened landscape, to that very degree the attempt of the characters to live together remains problematic. The dark, ungovernable underground of this park landscape (one of the more ambivalent symbols is the lake, where Charlotte's child is drowned), the demonic, in the Goethean sense, which drives the characters in the novel to their death, lies beyond my theme, which concerns, rather, the question of perception and how perception is represented. For, as Goethe stated in his Amor als Landschaftsmabler: not the representation of landscape but of man and the human body is the "hardest part" ("das Schwerste").78.

Novella The Novella (1827) provides what might almost be considered a Utopian counterpart to the tragic Elective Affinities (1809); Goethe himself spoke of the "romantic hunt."79 If, in Elective Affinities, the political and historical, comprehended as landscape symbols, are left unresolved in the tension between the regularity of the formal French garden and the freedom of the English garden 80 , so, in the Novella,

the political Utopia is immediately a

reality, for it is announced at the very beginning: "The Prince's father had lived to see the time when it became common conviction that all members of the commonwealth should pass their days in equal industry and, each in his own way, produce, earn, and enjoy."81 Landscape garden and landscape, cultivated or wild, both in the novel and the Novella are symbols of human relations and history, personal and social; they are not expressions of emotions, no "Seelenlandschaft" as in many romantic novels82, but symbols of structures, which also counts for there obvious soberness. 78

See e.g. Goethes letter to Johann Heinrich Meyer, letter no. 2745, April 27, 1789: "Nach meiner Uberzeugung ist die höchste Absicht der Kunst menschliche Formen zu zeigen, so sinnlich bedeutend und schön als möglich ist." Werke (Weimarer Ausgabe) ser. IV, vol. 9, p. 109.

79

Diary, January 15, 1827 - ibid. ser. III, vol. 11, p. 8.

80 81

Cf. also Finney: The Counterfeit Idyll, p. 64-74. Goethe: Collected Works vol. 11, p. 265 - Werke (Weimarer Ausgabe) ser. I, vol. 18, p. 315-16: "Des Fürsten Vater hatte noch den Zeitpunct erlebt und genutzt, wo es deutlich wurde, daß alle Staatsglieder in gleicher Betriebsamkeit ihre Tage zubringen, in gleichem Wirken und Schaffen, jeder nach seiner Art, erst gewinen und dann genießen sollte."

82

Cf. e. g. Hillmann: Bildlichkeit der deutschen Romantik, pp. 59-64: "Landschaftsgefühle."

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The story begins with a very long exposition: the Prince, married only for a short while to his beautiful Princess, leaves for a hunting party early in an autumn morning. The Princess stays at home, her uncle Friedrich and the young Honorio as equerry and page being with her. Uncle Friedrich explains to her several drawings with views of the ancient family castle; the Princess decides to ride up to the old castle, where they restrict their visit to the lower parts, because the castle itself ought to be looked at only after the uncle has refined the relation between ruins and nature. O n their ride they pass the market place, full of tradesmen during a fair, and they also see the building of a menagerie, a wild animal show, announced not only by the earsplitting roar of a lion, but also by huge, garish paintings. They continue their ride along the gentle flowing river, reach the first and the second viewpoint and, looking back, they recognize a fire in the town. The uncle hurries back to the castle, Honorio and the Princess follow slowly because of the bad ground. Suddenly the tiger appears, Honorio kills him. Then the owner and keeper of the animal, a woman in a gaudy and strange costume with a dark eyed and black-haired boy show up, lamenting the murdered animal. (Animals and fire are symbols for elemental powers.) Then the Prince himself with his hunting party appears, attracted by the clouds of smoke, "contemplating this strange and unheard-of incident" 83 . Suddenly a man forces his way into the circle, "tall and dressed in the same curiously gaudy manner as the woman and the child," 84 completing the most oriental scene in the midst of the Thuringian forest 85 . The whole family joins "in sorrow and dismay." 86 The man reports that the lion is loose too, but pledges for his life: the child will save everybody; the Prince agrees reluctantly, taking precautions to kill the lion in the last resort. But the child begins to play his flute, "everyone seemed enchanted by these melodious passages," and his father begins to speak "in a curiously dignified and exalted manner" (i.e. biblical manner) 87 about natural and social order. Then the child sings, while the father is playing the flute; the father's former speech and the child's song are full of biblical associations: Daniel in the den of lions is remembered, the child sings about the prophets, angels, Love, Faith and 83 84 85 86 87

Goethe: Collected Works vol. 11, p. 275 - Werke (Weimarer Ausgabe) ser. I, vol. 18, p. 337: "vor dem seltsamen, unerhörten Ereignis." Ibid.: "groß von Gestalt, bunt und wunderlich gekleidet wie Frau und Kind." Cf. Staiger: "Goethe: 'Novelle'," p. 157. Goethe: Collected Works vol. 11, p. 275 - Werke (Weimarer Ausgabe) ser. I, vol. 18, p. 337: "Schmerz und Überraschung." Ibid., p. 276 - ibid. p. 340: "die Umstehenden schienen wie bezaubert von der Bewegung einer liederartigen Weise"; "mit anständigem Enthusiasmus."

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Hope, Eternal Rules, Lions and Lambs, Paradise regained and the Lord. Finally with its flute-melodies the child brings back the lion who had fled into the inner court of the ancient castle, the lion "had lain down close to the child" which finally has to take an Androclean thorn from his paws, triumphantly singing. - Indeed, "an ideal, even lyrical closure," as Goethe himself named it88. Both according to the relation between 'real' exposition and ideal closure and the structure of the real exposition itself, the structure of the novel reflects the relation between the inner and the outer eye, the inner and the outer sense: for if we look at the various landscapes of the exposition, and even at the fire and the wild animals, we find that every view and each event except the final one are told or looked at at least twice; everything is anticipated: the various landscape-views either by looking through a telescope or by drawings, the ride through the town through the narration of the Princess's husband, the wild animals by the posters, the fire by the memory of the uncle and the narrator himself - the description of the actual fire indeed is replaced by the account of the remembered fire the uncle once experienced. So finally nothing but the lyrical conclusion and the divine child strike and surprise the reader. Let us take a close-up view: when the Princess is left alone, she retires "to the rooms at the back of the castle which commanded a free view towards the mountains." Like this view the others are taken from a certain height, the ideal point to create and view a landscape. The telescope she uses now, had on the previous evening been used to look at the ancient family castle. She distinctly perceives "the fall colors of those many kinds of trees which had struggled up between the stones, unhindered and undisturbed through many long years."89 This description reminds us of the Ruisdael-paintings discussed above, "the representing of the past in the present, [...] bringing into the most intuitive, vivid connection [anschaulichste Verbindung the dead and the living."90 And we are not surprised when in the next scene various drawings of this vivid connection of the castle and nature as well as the drawings of the planned 88

89

90

Goethe: Gespräche vol. 3, to Eckermann, January 18, 1827 (my translation), p. 325: "ein ideeller, ja lyrischer Schluß" - Conversations with Eckermann, p. 124. - Benn, just slightly recovering from his falling in love with Nazi-ideology and the germanic Herrenrasse, in a letter to Oelze (January 17,1936) puts a curse on this gentle Novella·. "Kann denn aus diesen Deutschen etwas werden, wenn ihre Heroen das Leben so harmonisch, gutartig u. 'im Grunde' so nett u. lieblich u. symbolisch ihnen darstellen?" - Benn: Bnefe an Oelze, p. 104. Goethe: Collected Works vol. 11, p. 266 - Werke (Weimarer Ausgabe) ser. I, vol. 18, p. 317-18: "in die hintern Zimmer, welche nach dem Gebirg eine freie Aussicht ließen"; "die herbstliche Färbung jener mannichfaltigen Baumarten, die zwischen dem Gemäuer ungehindert und ungestört durch lange Jahre emporstrebten." See note 54.

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enhancement of the place are represented to the Princess's outer and the reader's inner eye - both unable to distinguish, "where nature ends and art and craftsmanship begin." Exactly as in Ruisdael's Convent or in his Jewish Cemetery, it is "a wilderness unlike any other, a unique place, where you can see traces of the long-vanished power of man in tenacious struggle with the ever-living, ever-working power of nature."91 Examining this and all other landscape-descriptions, we find exactly as in the Elective Affinities, that they are presented to us in a very sober language, economic in the use of metaphors92 and - an already noted feature of Goethe's landscape-descriptions - of color-attributes. On the one hand, this is due to a genre-specific difference in the use of colors in Goethe {Faust too is a most 'colorful' text), but here it is Goethe's resistance to colorful description that renders the landscapes 'natural' and 'cool'. In connection with landscape in the Novella Goethe uses color-attributes only three times in the whole text: in the 'realistic' exposition the "herbstliche Färbung jener mannigfaltigen Baumarten" ("fall colors of those many kinds of trees") and "ein grüngekrönter Gipfel" ("the green-crowned summit")93 are the only colors of nature that are mentioned in the exposition. The second, oriental part of the Novella, compared with this austerity, is inundated with colors: we are also prepared for the increasing colorfulness by the "bunten kolossalen Gemählde" with their "heftigen Farben" ("colorful huge paintings" in "violent colors")94, then by the red flames, so that the "bunte und seltsame Kleidung" ("gaudy and strange [...] costume") of the oriental woman and her child, as well as the man's being "bunt und wunderlich gekleidet" ("dressed in the same curiously gaudy manner"), doesn't surprise us, nor does the "buntbelaubten Bäume" ("autumn tinged trees") and the boy's "buntseidenes Halstuch" ("silken handkerchief")95. In accordance with common notion of colorfulness Goethe prepares us for the ideal, lyrical oriental finale. In his conversations with Eckermann he gives 91

92 93 94 95

Goethe: Collected Works vol. 11, p. 267 - Werke (Weimarer Ausgabe) ser. I, vol. 18, p. 319: "wo die Natur aufhört, Kunst und Handwerk aber anfangen"; "Es ist eine Wildniß wie keine, ein zufällig-einziges Lokal, wo die alten Spuren längst verschwundener Menschenkraft mit der ewig lebenden und fortwirkenden Natur sich in dem ernstesten Streit erblicken lassen." See also Keller: Goethes dichterische Bildlichkeit, pp. 114-5. Goethe: Collected Works vol. 11, p. 266 and 270 - Werke (Weimarer Ausgabe) ser. I, vol. 18, p. 317 and 327. Ibid., p. 269 (Victor Lange translates "huge, garish posters") - ibid., p. 325. Ibid., p. 274, 275, 279, 280 - ibid., p. 335, 337, 347. Victor Lange translates the six 'bunt'-attributes, which are all connected with the oriental scenery, very differently and thus destroys the continuity of Goethe's imagery.

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a simile for the dual structure of his Novella, calling it a "green plant [...] at last terminating in a flower": "The flower is unexpected and startling, but come it must - nay, the whole foliage has existed only for the sake of that flower, and would be worthless without it."96 The shift from the realistic austere landscape-descriptions to the vivid and more elemental symbolic part of the novel also heightens the symbolic significance of the serene scenery of the 'realistic' exposition, where everything is 'well' ('wohl'): "well tended fruit and pleasure gardens," "well developed region," "well constructed upper part of the town," "well founded" - everything and everybody is so well, only because the fire and the wild animals of passion are kept away.97 So we are well prepared for the final setting, the "Zauberschloß" (magic castle) - which it actually is not - for the romantic reader again is misled: this notion is deliberately set against a the reader's perception of something magic going on there, for the Prince continue his sentence: "the magic castle which the place is to become through Prince Friedrich's taste and talent."98 Only when the child begins to play his flute, everyone seems (not is) enchanted. Not visual, but auditory perception mediates the magic. Goethe here uses music in order to make also this scene more real, for though music itself does not arise from "Anschauung," music is able to bring within range of our feelings what cannaot be conceived or even imagined99. Thus, as Goethe puts it: "The green foliage of the extremely real introduction is only there for the sake of this ideal, and only worth anything on account of it. For what is the real in itself? We take delight in it when it is represented with truth - nay, it may give us a clearer knowledge of certain things; but the proper gain to our higher nature lies alone in the ideal, which proceeds from the heart of the poet."100 So, after 96

Goethe: Conversations with Eckermann, January 18, 1827, p. 124 - Gespräche vol. 3, p. 325: "ein grünes Gewächs, das [...] zuletzt mit einer Blume endet. Die Blume war unerwartet, überraschend, aber sie mußte kommen; ja, das grüne Blätterwerk war nur für sie da und wäre ohne sie nicht der Mühe wert gewesen."

97

Goethe: Collected Works vol. 11, p. 270; Victor Lange again only gives one 'wohl' as 'well': "well-tended fruit and pleasure gardens," "thickly settled countryside," "the upper part of the town," "solid" - Werke (Weimarer Ausgabe) ser. I, vol. 18, p. 326 and 327: "wohlversorgte Frucht- und Lustgärten," "wohlbewohnten Gegend," "wohlgebauten höhern Teil der Stadt," "wohlgegründet."

98

Ibid., p. 276 - ibid., p. 340: "zu dem Zauberschlosse [...], wozu es Fürst Friedrichs Geist und Geschmack ausbilden will."

99

" [...] die Musik, die freilich dem Gefühle alles anzunähern vermag, was dem Begriff und selbst der Einbildungskraft fremd bleibt" - Goethe to Zelter, letter No. 399, January 18, 1823: Goethe/Zelter: Briefwechsel vol. 2, pp. 196-7. - Cf. Staiger on the role of Music in Goethes Novella - Staiger: "Goethe: 'Novelle'," pp. 149-50.

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all, Goethe's art of the eye turns out to be (in modern terms) very subjective, concerning the idea, the "Bild," very objective concerning the means of its representation, of illusion, and appearance. Thus the old Goethe can declare, in a mirror reflection of his former principle, but in accordance with the special interdependence of subjective perception and the object modelled by perception and vice versa: "Seek within yourselves, so you shall find all, and take joy when out there, however you might call it, there lies a nature which says Yea and Amen to all which you have found in yourselves."101

100

101

Goethe: Conversations with Eckermann, January 18, 1827, p. 124-5. - Gespräche vol. 3, p. 325: "Und das grüne Blätterwerk der durchaus realen Exposition ist nur dieserwegen [der überraschenden Blume des Schlusses wegen] da und nur dieserwegen etwas wert. Denn was soll das Reale an sich? Wir haben Freude daran, wenn es mit Wahrheit dargestellt ist, ja, es kann uns auch von gewissen Dingen eine deutlichere Erkenntnis geben; aber der eigentliche Gewinn für unsere höhere Natur liegt doch allein im Idealen, das aus dem Herzen des Dichters hervorging." "Maximen und Reflexionen über Kunst" - Goethe: Werke (Weimarer Ausgabe) ser. I, vol. 48, p. 204: "Suchet in euch, so werdet ihr alles finden, und erfreuet euch, wenn da draußen, wie ihr es immer heißen möget, eine Natur liegt, die Ja und Amen zu allem sagt, was ihr in euch gefunden habt."

FREDERICK BURWICK

University of California, Los Angeles

Reflections in the Mirror: Wordsworth and Coleridge Abstract· By suggesting that mental reflection was merely a repetition in the mind of images received through the senses, the mirror, as metaphor for the creative process, might seem to affirm the empiricist denial of innate capacities of the mind. Rather than simply reflect an external object, according to Wordsworth, the poetic image should reveal as well the alterations imposed by the perceiver. What had invalidated the mirror as metaphor was not the rejection of the mimetic principle, perse, but only the notion that the mirror might be deemed, kindred to the Lockean

metaphor of the tabula rasa or camera obscura, an instrument capable of recording

only the external data of the physical world without contributing any modifying peculiarities of its own. To avoid these passive connotations, the poet might insist on the dynamic attributes of the reflecting medium. In order to animate mimetic reflection, the poet need only reveal the magic in the glass. The trick could still be performed with mirrors. Thus Wordsworth and Coleridge endeavoured to endow their metaphors of mirroring and reflecting with peculiar properties capable of exposing or even transforming a mere world of appearances.

In explaining the shift from art as imitation to art as expression, Μ.Ή. Ab rams began his chapter on "Romantic Analogues of Art and Mind" by citing Wordsworth's definition of poetry as "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings." Abrams was certainly right in arguing that Wordsworth's metaphor revealed the new emphasis on creativity as the expressive "overflow" of the mind. Unfortunately, one of the consequences of Abrams's profound and influential The Mirror and the Lamp (1953) has been the tendency to presume that once the lamp began to glow the mirror was shattered. Although it was not his intent to ignore the subtle interplay of imitation and expression by positing only an either/or possibility, Abrams did stress the ways in which the claims of mimetic objectivity were compromised and subordinated in Romantic poetry by the insistence on the primacy of mind and emotion. When Wordsworth declared, for example, that "I have at all times endeavored to look steadily at my subject," Abrams opposed what he considered the mistake in accepting this statement as the poet's "recommendation for objective accuracy and particularity."1 Although Wordsworth ranked observa1

Abrams: The Mirror and the Lamp, p. 53.

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tion and description first among "the powers requisite for the production of poetry," he nevertheless relegated passive observation to subservience. Attention to the particular object of the sense should assist, not usurp, the mind's active and transforming powers. After praising faithful description, Wordsworth went on, Abrams reminded us, to limit its use: the ability to observe with accuracy things as they are in themselves and with fidelity to describe them, unmodified by any passion or feeling existing in the mind of the describer [...] though indispensable to a Poet, is one which he employs only in submission to necessity, and never for a continuance of time: as its exercise supposes all the higher qualities of the mind to be passive, and in a state of subjection to external objects.2 As metaphor for the creative process, the mirror implied an unwarranted and restricting passivity. By suggesting that mental reflection was no more than a repetition in the mind of images received through the senses, the mirror metaphor seemed to affirm the empiricist denial of innate capacities of the mind. Rather than simply reflect an external object, according to Wordsworth, the poetic image should reveal as well the alterations imposed by the perceiver: "objects [...] derive their influence not from properties inherent in them, not from what they are actually in themselves, but from such as are bestowed upon them by the minds of those who are conversant with or affected by those objects." 3 "To hold, as 'twere, the mirror up to nature," as Hamlet requested of the players (III.ii.25), was rendered artistically suspect because it might restrict representation to mere surface reflections. What had invalidated the mirror as metaphor was not the rejection of the mimetic principle, per se, but only the notion that the mirror might be deemed, kindred to the Lockean metaphor of the tabula rasa or camera obscura, as an instrument capable of recording only the external data of the physical world without contributing any modifying peculiarities of its own. T o avoid these passive connotations, of course, the poet might insist on the dynamic attributes of the reflecting medium. In order to animate mimetic reflection, the poet need only reveal the magic in the glass. The trick could still be performed with mirrors. For the purpose of Abrams's investigation, art as imitation is said to be promulgated by an objective and empirical philosophy, while art as expression is seen as an effort to fulfill the expectations of a subjective and idealist 2

"Preface* to the Poems 1815 - Wordsworth: Literary Criticism, p. 150; see also: pp. 18,165, 185. 3 To Francis Wrangham, 18 Jan 1816; William and Dorothy Wordsworth: Letters vol. 3,2: The Middle Years, p. 276.

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philosophy. Acknowledging the radical opposition between these two philosophical positions, Coleridge also observed their essential relationship. Philosophers, he wrote in the Biograpbia Literaria, either begin by positing the mind, and then must pursue the task of accounting for the world of things; or they begin by affirming things, and then must explain how we come to have ideas about them4. Coleridge, it will be recalled, proposed a reconciliation of these Platonic and Aristotelian traditions by beginning with the moment of cognition, the coincidence of subject and object. Were such a philosophical union possible, the barrier between "imitation" and "expression" might well collapse. One reason that critics have dated the decline or even the demise of mimesis from the end of the eighteenth century is that the poets of the romantic period displayed little confidence in the rationalist strategies of representation.5 Indeed, their poetry is often about the instability of representation. Even if it explores subjectivity, an arena of experience for which most languages offer only a meager vocabulary, poetry requires objective referentiality. That the subject-matter might be as limited as the vocabulary prompted Goethe's observation that "a subjective nature has soon talked out his little internal material."6 In Biograpbia Literaria and "On Poesy and Art," Coleridge sought to reassert the leverage of mimetic objectivity in romantic subjectivity and to reinstate imitation within the activity of imagination. Once the reliability of representation had been called into doubt, many poets began to scrutinize the fallibility of perception and the fragility of subjective experience. Far from being neglected, the tropes of "imitation" and the "mirror" were brought forth as key witnesses in interrogating the claims of mimesis. One characteristic of romantic poetry, then, is the tentative nature of representation and the instability of images. Yet there is a remarkable persistence in their instability. When Coleridge, for example, thematizes the mimetic act in "The Picture, or the Lover's Resolution,"7 the very act of denying images 4

Coleridge: Biographia Literaria vol. 1 , 1 3 2 .

5

Boyd: The Function of Mimesis and its Decline (1968/1980), pp. 3 0 2 - 7 ; Prendergast: The Order of Mimesis (1986), pp. 1-23; Wellek: History of Criticism. II. The Romantic Age, p. 2, links "the rise of an emotional concept of poetry" to "the implied rejection of the imitation theory." Terryl Givens: "Blind Men and Hieroglyphs: The Collapse of Mimesis," (1991), pp. 6 1 - 8 0 .

6

Goethe to Eckermann, 29 Jan 1826-Gespräche vol. 3, p. 253: "wogegen aber eine subjektive Natur ihr bißchen Inneres bald ausgesprochen hat." English Translation: Bate, ed., Criticism: The Major Texts, p. 403.

7

Coleridge: The Complete Poetical Works vol. 1, pp. 369-74.

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seems to render them more tenable and certainly not less vivid. The love-lorn narrator seeks refuge from his self-torment in the wild depths of the woods: here will I couch my limbs, Close by this river, in this silent shade, A s safe and sacred from the step of man As an invisible world - unheard, unseen, [...]*

Even in this "invisible world" he is pursued by the very images that he strives to negate. The breeze, that visits me Was never Love's accomplice, never raised The tendril ringlets from the maiden's brow, A n d the blue, delicate veins above her cheek; Ne'er played the wanton - never half disclosed The maiden's snowy bosom, scattering thence Eye-poisons for some love-distempered youth,

Coleridge's strategy is to reaffirm mimetic presence while insisting upon its absence. To abjure is to conjure, a dilemma also experienced by the lover in "Lewti, or The Circassian Love-Chaunt."10 The "eye-poisons" of wanton images arise in spite of disclaiming their truth. The stream, too, is said not to reflect the teasing images which torment the fictional lover, who, of course, is not the narrator. The absent images are nevertheless described in attentive detail: no pool of thine, Though clear as lake in latest summer-eve, Did e'er reflect the stately virgin's robe, The face, the form divine, the downcast look Contemplative! Behold! her open palm Presses her cheek and brow! her elbow rests O n the bare branch of half-uprooted tree, That leans towards its mirror! [ . . . ] "

So insistent is the mind's mimetic projection that lover cries out, "Behold!" As if it were not enough to delineate the very look and gesture of the image that is not there, he has the phantom image return his gaze and then teasingly cast flowers into the water, dispelling her own non-existent presence: 8 9 10 ' 11

Ibid., p. 370,11. 51-4. Ibid., p. 371,11. 58-64. Coleridge: Poetical Works vol. 1, pp. 253-6, here p. 254; "Lewti," as Kathleen Coburn has suggested, may be Coleridge's revision of some earlier lines by Wordsworth; Notebooks, 3708, 315n, 218n. Coleridge: The Complete Poetical Works vol. 1, p. 371,11. 72-9.

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he now With steadfast gaze and unoffending eye, Worships the watery idol, dreaming hopes Delicious to the soul, but fleeting, vain, E'en as that phantom-world on which he gazed, But not unheeded gazed: for see, ah! see, The sportive tyrant with her left hand plucks The heads of tall flowers that behind her grow, Lychnis, and willow-herb, and fox-glove bells: And suddenly, as one that toys with time, Scatters them on the pool! Then all the charm Is broken - all that phantom-world so fair Vanishes, and a thousand circlets spread, And each mis-shape the other. [...]12

The love-lorn poet, like a mime who manipulates imaginary objects, has played with images which he has mentally projected onto the surface of the pool. The image of the maiden, too, becomes a mime whose gesture, plucking "the heads of tall flowers that behind her grow," acts out the beholder's desire for her touch. Since she exists here only as image of his unrequited love, she naturally reenacts the lover's recollected experience of a "sportive tyrant" who even as a merely mental phenomenon disrupts his image of her. The poet advises his alter ego, the "poor youth" who has witnessed his dream dashed, to wait and watch. The stream will soon renew its smoothness, soon The visions will return! And lo! he stays: And soon the fragments dim of lovely forms Come trembling back, unite, and now once more The pool becomes a mirror; [...]13

The "half-uprooted tree" and "each wild-flower" reappear as inverted images, but the image of the maiden is no longer there. Although neither she nor her image were present in the first place, only now does the lover confront the visual evidence of her absence: "He turns, and she is gone!" As if she had just at this moment fled through the "woodland maze," he runs off to seek her vanished form in vain. His fictional counterpart, the poet declares, may well devote his "mad love-yearning" to the vacant pool, which will no doubt requite his "sickly thoughts" with a bewitching image of his beloved, "her shadow still abiding there, / The Naiad of the mirror!" (11. 110-11) 12 13

Ibid., p. 371-2, II. 81-94. Ibid., p. 372,11. 96-100.

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At the close of this digression, the narrator repeats his denial of its truth: "Not to thee, / Ο wild and desert stream! belongs this tale." (11.111-12) The stream, as reflector of images, thus becomes a personified poet. Since the wild stream has had "no loves," it could scarcely be guilty of generating false images. This denial not only continues the imaginary projection, it also strangely implicates narrator's own love-lorn lot. At this point in his poem, Coleridge has by no means played all his verbal games with the paradoxes of reference and negation. Before examining what final twists he has in store, let us define the dimensions of paradoxicality thus far implicated. Thomas McFarland has distinguished between the mimetic and meontic: the former imitates what is there, the latter what is not there.14 A simple example is Hughes Mearns's well-known "Anti-gone." The play with negation makes fun of the very illusion, or delusion, it pretends to describe. A s I was going up the stair I met a man w h o wasn't there. H e wasn't there again today. I wish, I wish he'd go away. 15

Apparently written in response to one of his pupils having mispronounced "Antigone," Mearns exploits in "Anti-gone" the same paradox that enabled Lichtenberg to refer to a "handleless knife without a blade."16 Coleridge, in his annotations to Böhme, called attention to the ambiguous functions of negation and the difference between vere non ens and non vere ens ("really notbeing" and "not really being").17 Negations are purely conceptual: they do not refer to occurrences in reality. Yet they are necessary in language because language trades in references to things that are not there. If Coleridge had written a more conventional poem, he might simply have described the maiden casting her flowers into the pond then leaving her lover alone in the woods. To narrate the same events as seen reflected in the water might well call attention to the mimetic description. The latter strategy, even as metaphor for poetic representation, could nevertheless reinforce, rather than undermine, the claims of visual presence. The phenomena of reflected images, after all, could effectively enhance descriptive verisimilitude. The poet 14

McFarland: Romanticism and the Forms of Ruin.

15

Hughes Mearns: "Antigonish" (27 March 1922). Adams, ed., Innocent Merriment: An Anthology of Light Verse (1942), p. 239.

16

Lichtenberg: "Verzeichnis einer Sammlung von Gerätschaften, welche in dem Hause des Sir H. S. künftige Woche öffentlich verauktioniert werden soll.* Lichtenberg: Schriften und Bnefe vol. 3, pp. 451-57, here p. 452: "Ein Messer ohne Klinge, an welchem der Stiel fehlt." 17 Coleridge: Marginalia vol. 1, pp. 565, 574; Coleridge: Notebooks 3861.

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might thus have it both ways. And Coleridge certainly does retain this double advantage even when he proceeds to negate the entire scene and all of its participants: there is no lover, no mistress, no reflection, no river. A positive narration presents absences as if they were present. Coleridge presents absences and insists upon their absence. The net result, as Coleridge well knows, is much the same: we "believe" the latter neither more nor less than the former. The negation, however, deftly calls attention to that process of indulging illusion which Coleridge referred to as "the willing suspension of disbelief for the moment which constitutes poetic faith." 18 A s he distinguished it from delusion, illusion involves self-awareness. B y allowing his fictional lover to lapse into "sickly thoughts," he thematizes both illusion and delusion. Having unfolded and refolded the redoublings of the absent image, Coleridge goes on in this poem to reaffirm the illusions of presence. "This be my chosen haunt," he declares, "emancipate / F r o m passion's dreams." 1 9 The river inside his text is now said to be real, and inside his text he commences to "trace its devious course" as if the traces were the thing itself. N o t surprisingly, his tracing leads him through a terrain in which the supposedly objective representation is transformed by subjective response. The reflection of a " s o f t water-sun" is said to be "throbbing" as if it were "heart at once and eye" of the imagined river. Overshadowed by clouds, the reflected images become "the stains and shadings of forgotten tears, / Dimness o'erswum with lustre." The river is then described as running through a "circular vale," with a cottage "close by the waterfall." Here the poet claims to discover at his feet a picture of the very scene he has just described. B u t what is this? T h a t cottage, with its slanting c h i m n e y - s m o k e , A n d close beside its p o r c h a sleeping child, H i s dear head pillowed on a sleeping d o g O n e arm between its f o r e - l e g s , and the hand H o l d s l o o s e l y its small handful of wild-flowers, U n f i l l e t t e d , and of unequal lengths. A curious picture, with a m a s t e r ' s haste S k e t c h e d o n a strip of pinky-silver skin, P e e l e d f r o m the birched bark! [...] 2 0

The ekphrastic description of the "curious picture" is more minutely detailed than the poet's description of the "original" scene in the lines immediate 18 19 20

Coleridge: Biographia Literaria vol. 2, p. 6. Coleridge: The Complete Poetical Works vol. 1, p. 372,11. 118-19. Ibid., p. 373,11. 152-61.

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preceding. Coleridge thus makes the painted image seem more real than reality, in marked contrast to the emphatic unreality of the phantom reflections in the imaginary river. The depicted image is no will o' the wisp, and the painting itself is a palpable object. Yon bark her canvass, and those purple berries Her pencil! See, the juice is scarcely dried On the fine skin! She has been newly here; And lo! yon patch of heath has been her couch The pressure still remains! [...]21 Reversing his rhetorical tactic, Coleridge affirms the picture as strongly as he previously had denied the reflection. Yet even this latter image is revealed amidst absences and traces. Only the signs remain behind. The poem ends with the poet, now with picture in hand as well as image in mind, in quest of a maiden who still is no longer there.22 Coleridge's flexiloquent play with its multiple meanings reminds us that reflection is a word caught up in redoubling: it refers to the internal processes of perception, memory, and meditation as well as to the external physics of light and energy; and, were this doubling not in itself a potential source of confusion, either mode of reflection also repeats some prior act of flexion. Something is bent or changed, then altered or modified once more.23 Coleridge was by no means the only poet of the period to be fascinated with the metaphorical redoubling of mental and optical reflection. Wordsworth, too, often reflects upon reflections. A recurrent motif in Wordsworth's Guide through the District of the Lakes, indeed in all his writings, is how scenes of nature work their "influence upon the mind of the spectator." The Guide was intended, Wordsworth wrote, as a "Companion for the Minds of Persons of taste, and feeling for Landscape, who might be inclined to explore the District of the Lakes with that degree of attention to which its beauty may fairly lay claim."24 His reader may be a stranger to the Lakes, but not to the beauties of nature. A stranger to the Lakes, as it turns out, has certain advantages. Wordsworth calls attention to these advantages when he introduces into his description unusual optical phenomena. 21

Ibid., p. 374,11. 162-67.

22

Coleridge: Poetical Works vol. 1, pp. 369-74; Coleridge: Notebooks 3708, 3995, 4227.

23

The Oxford English Dictionary cites from Chaucer both the reflexion of mind and the reflexion of light: House of Fame (1384), 1.22; Squire's Tale (1386); cf. flexion (grammar, calculus).

24

Wordsworth: The Prose Works vol. 2, p. 155.

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Reflections often prompt us to ponder both the internal and external aspects of visual experience. Often, too, they reveal possible connections between mimetic description and poetic invention. "Walking by the side of Ulswater," Wordsworth recollects, he once saw "deep within the bosom of the lake, a magnificent Castle, with towers and battlements." Perhaps more telling than the perceptual phenomenon are the contradictory elements of his response. His "delight" is disrupted by "regret." The "regret" is the consequence of knowledge intruding upon illusion and exposing its apparent magic. after gazing with delight upon it for some time, as upon a work of enchantment, I could not but regret that my previous knowledge of the place enabled me to account for the appearance. It was in fact a pleasure-house called Lyulph's T o w e r - the towers and battlements magnified and so much changed in shape as not to be immediately recognized. In the meanwhile, the pleasure-house itself was altogether hidden from m y view by a body of vapour stretching over it along the hill-side on which it stands, but not so as to have intercepted its communication with the lake; and hence this novel and most impressive object, which, if I had been a stranger to the spot, would, from its being inexplicable, have long detained the mind in a state of pleasing astonishment. 2 5

Wordsworth's own familiarity with the place prevents him from sustaining the mysterious illusion of a castle in the depths of Ulswater. One not intimate with the terrain could not possibly have been able to determine that the castle in the lake had been reflected beneath the cloud cover from the unseen tower on the opposite shore. In the Kantian sublime, the uplifted sense of joy (.Ergießung) passes into the dejected sense of one's incapacity to comprehend what one beholds (Hemmung). Wordsworth's response is essentially the opposite, for it is the very comprehension that inhibits the delight in the mysterious grandeur of the vision. For the stranger, the causes of the illusion would remain inexplicable and thus continue to intrigue and delight. Such appearances, Wordsworth states, might easily have stimulated the poets of a more credulous age to invent their "stories of subaqueous palaces, gardens, and pleasure-grounds - the brilliant ornaments of Romance." Optical illusions may thus provide the mimetic source for what might otherwise seem the fanciful invention of romantic imagination. More astonishing than the illusion of a castle submerged in Ulswater was the second island that he once witnessed alongside what he had previously known as the solitary island in the Lake of Grasmere. Again he claims the optical illusion as a potential source for poetic imitation. Because art may reflect the peculiarities of nature reflecting 25

Ibid., p. 2 3 7 .

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itself, this "extraordinary phenomenon [...] will shew how other elegant fancies may have had their origin, less in invention than in the actual processes of nature." 24 What is astonishing about this particular reflection is that its image does not appear inverted. Thus he introduces it in contrast to the "inverted scene" he has just described in Ulswater. About eleven o'clock on the forenoon of a winter's day, coming suddenly, in company of a friend, into view of the Lake of Grasmere, we were alarmed by the sight of a newly-created Island; the transitory thought of the moment was, that it had been produced by an earthquake or some other convulsion of nature.

New though it seemed to be, its rocky surface was already "speckled with snow, and sprinkled over with birch trees." Wordsworth describes in detail its appearance, dimensions, and position relative to the old, familiar island. The new island, which he knows cannot be real, nevertheless appears optically "more distinct" than its neighbor. Marvellous was the illusion! Comparing the new with the old Island, the surface of which is soft, green, and unvaried, I do not scruple to say that, as an object of sight, it was much the more distinct. " H o w little faith," we exclaimed, "is due to one sense, unless its evidence be confirmed by some of its fellows! What Stranger could possibly be persuaded that this, which we know to be an unsubstantial mockery, is really so; and that there exists only a single Island on this beautiful Lake?" At length the appearance underwent a gradual transmutation; it lost its prominence and passed into a glimmering a dim inversion, and then totally disappeared; - leaving behind it a clear open area of ice of the same dimensions. We now perceived that this bed of ice, which was thinly suffused with water, had produced the illusion, by reflecting and refracting (as persons skilled in optics would no doubt easily explain) a rocky and woody section of the opposite mountain named Silver-how.

The knowledge which informs his own response is once again contrasted with the response which he attributes to a stranger. Although he confesses that he was momentarily baffled, he quickly perceives that it was a phantom image. So natural was its appearance, however, that a stranger, not knowing that the lake hitherto had but one island, could not have detected that it was an illusion. While Wordsworth was perplexed only at its appearance, the stranger would have been utterly amazed at its disappearance. The trick of its appearance and disappearance, Wordsworth reveals, was simply a matter of a sheet of ice, drifting at a tilt and mirroring a second image of Silver-How below the image already inverted in the water. The trees reflected in the water seemed to rise 26 27

Ibid., p. 238. Ibid.; see also Foakes' essay p. 154-5, and Vogler, p. 185.

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upright above the rocky ground mirrored in the ice. As the ice floated once more level with the surface, the upright illusion "lost its prominence and passed into a glimmering and dim inversion, and then totally disappeared." Far from adhering to the philosophical argument that knowledge is a repetition in the mind of images received through the senses, Wordsworth cites the complexity of optical reflection to demonstrate how mental reflection rises to the challenge to interpret the external world. When he and his companion declare the evidence of "one sense" must "be confirmed by some of its fellows," they are in this instance calling upon the corroboration not of touch or hearing, but of the internal capacities of memory and reason to resolve the bafflement of the eye. In deferring to "persons skilled in optics" to explain the angles of reflection and refraction, he would no doubt have recollected his own studies of optics at St. John's, Cambridge, and the work of James Wood, his college tutor. 28 Wordsworth's argument on behalf of imitating "the actual processes of nature" is not a belated deliberation on the possibilities of representing optical phenomena in poetry. When he states that such phenomena may provide a rich source for "elegant fancies," he has the confident assurance of an abundant use of optical illusion in his own poetic 29

practice. The two epic similes of the Prelude both evoke optical illusions as a means of accounting for the capacities of the mind. In Book 8, his own unsettling adjustment to the "vast metropolis" is compared to a traveller whose eyes gradually accommodate to the darkness of a cave (711-41). In Book 4, as simile for the elusive processes of memory he describes the visual experience of "one who hangs down-bending from the side / Of a slow-moving boat." To elaborate his comparison between reflections in the mind and reflections in the water, Wordsworth describes a viewer who, gazing into a still water, solacing himself W i t h such discoveries as his eye can make Beneath him in the b o t t o m of the deeps, Sees many beauteous sights - weeds, fishes, flowers, G r o t s , pebbles, roots of trees - and fancies more, Y e t is o f t e n perplexed and cannot part The shadow f r o m the substance, rocks and sky, Mountains and clouds, f r o m that which is indeed The region, and the things which their abide

28 29

Burwick: The Damnation of Newton, pp. 176-209: "Wordsworth: An Auxiliar Light"; on James Wood, pp. 183-84. Robin Grove: "Reflection on Water."

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In their true dwelling; now is crossed by gleam O f his own image, by a sunbeam now, And wavering motions sent he knows not whence,

[...] (4,249-60)

T o review the images of memory, the poet has similarly pursued his office "Incumbent o'er the surface of past time / With like success." Just as the eye may confuse surface reflections with images seen in the depths, present perceptions may be confounded with past recollections. Even one's own image may get in the way. In narrating Peter Bell's discovery of the corpse in the river, Wordsworth projects this same inability to distinguish "the shadow from the substance" into a mind more credulous and less discriminating than his own. Just as he conjectured how a stranger to the Lakes might respond to the optical illusions wrought upon their mirroring surfaces, he here lends the confusion of surface and depth to the selfish and superstitious mind of Peter, whose confounding of reflected and refracted images engenders a grotesque melange that frightens him out of wits, even out of his wicked ways. For in the pool a startling sight Meets him, among the inverted trees. Is it the moon's distorted face? The ghost-like image of a cloud? Is it a gallows there portrayed? Is Peter of himself afraid? 0

The face of the drowned man beneath the surface seems to peer through "the moon's distorted face" and through the reflection of Peter's own face when he bends for a closer look. H o w Peter might have interpreted the shimmering composite of blindly staring faces, Wordsworth suggests with a rapid catalogue of horrid images: fiend, imp, grisly idol. Equating the mesmerizing hold of visual and verbal images, much like Coleridge telling of the Mariner's "glittering eye" and the Wedding-Guest who "cannot choose but hear," Wordsworth tells us that Peter "cannot choose but look; / Like some one reading in a book - / A book that is enchanted." 31 It is not enough to acknowledge that the metaphors of mirroring and reflecting contribute to a poetry that is mimetic. They result, in fact, in a poetry that is about the mimetic process. The self-reflective gestures by which 30 31

"Peter Bell. A Tale" - Wordsworth: Poetical Works vol. 2, pp. 331-82, here p. 353,11.499-504. Ibib., p. 354,11. 518-20.

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the poet may thematize mimesis can be deceptively simple, subtle, spontaneous. That they appear natural, of course, is perfectly in keeping with Aristotle's claim that "imitation is natural to man from childhood" (Poetics 1448b.6) For Wordsworth, too, the mimetic instinct of the child has profound ramifications for the mature poet. In "There was a Boy,"32 Wordsworth traces a progression of mimetic thought without departing from the natural setting. The mimetic action, which commences with the boy blowing his "mimic hootings to the silent owls," is anticipated with an economy of details. The poet introduces the "cliffs / And islands of Winander" in the opening lines, a dozen lines before they are called upon in the mimic game. The poet who ranked observation and description first among "the powers requisite for the production of poetry" has not neglected to watch the sky. He defines the time of day as that twilight moment "when the earliest stars began / To move along the edge of the hills, / Rising or setting." Nor could a stranger to such games want a better depiction of how to play than the poet provides: "with fingers interwoven, both hands / Pressed closely palm to palm and to his mouth / Uplifted." The boy imitates the owls "That they might answer him." His skillful mimicry provokes a manic redoubling: A n d they would shout A c r o s s the watery vale, and shout again, Responsive to his call, - with quivering peals, A n d long halloos, and screams, and echoes loud Redoubled and redoubled; c o n c o u r s e wild O f jocund din!

There follows, however, a silence "such as baffled his best skill." The owls no longer respond, but the mimetic action does not cease. Rather, the boy becomes witness to a redoubling more vast and profound: T h e n sometimes in that silence, while he hung Listening, a gentle s h o c k o f mild surprise H a s carried far into his heart the voice O f mountain-torrents; o r the visible scene W o u l d enter unawares into his mind W i t h all its solemn imagery, its rocks, Its w o o d s , and that uncertain heaven, received I n t o the b o s o m of the steady lake.

32

Wordsworth: Poetical Works vol. 2, p. 206.

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Absorbing the mere externality of optical reflection, "the steady lake," as if it were responsive human body, receives the "solemn imagery" of the vale and sky into its bosom, in precisely the same way as the boy receives the same imagery "into his mind," or the re-echoing of distant torrents "into his heart." His mimic dialogue with the owls disrupted, the boy participates in the silent dialogue between the lake and the "uncertain heaven." Having thus internalized reflections on reflections, Wordsworth concludes his tale at the boy's grave. The boy - a former self, an image of his own childhood - is dead.33 As the boy once on summer evenings "hung / Listening" for the redoublings from across the lake, the man confesses that he has "stood / Mute - looking at the grave in which he lies." In the sonnet, "Composed by the Side of Grasmere Lake,"34 Wordsworth again calls attention to mimetic replication in "waters steeled / By breezeless airs to smoothest polish." The "vivid repetition of the stars" conjures an illusion of water transformed into a threshold through which we may behold "the nether Sphere / Opening to view the abyss in which she feeds / Her own calm fires." It is a multi-stable illusion in which the water is hardened, "steeled," into an impermeable surface, which immediately become invisible, so that there seems to be no surface at all, but only a vast opening into an interior cosmos. The confounding of above and below, exterior and interior, is also invoked with tragic implication in the River Duddon sonnet xxii35, which recounts the fate of a "love-lorn maid" who met her "hapless doom" grasping for an unattainable blossom: The starry treasures from the blue profound She longs to ravish; - shall she plunge or climb The humid precipice and seize the guest O f April, smiling high in upper air? Desperate alternative! what fiend could dare T o prompt the thought?

The multistability here involves not just the external reflection and the confounding of the two blossoms. The blossom also reflects the maid's internal plight. Her only choice seems to be the suicidal "alternative": whether she seeks to grasp the reality or the illusion, the enticing promise of the blossom is deceptive, its ravishing fatal. 33 34 35

The Prelude 1799, 1805, 1850, p. 492, gives from MS JJ the original version of There was a boy' (lines 389-413), written by Wordsworth in the first person. Wordsworth: Poetical Works vol. 3, p. 127. Ibid., p. 255.

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Reflected images, as a special and peculiar province of mimesis in romantic literature, involve a meticulous verbal account of visual details, and typically implicate, as well, details of the perceptual and psychological response. This latter movement, rather than retreating into the purely subjective consciousness of the beholder, takes advantage of the dedoublement of reflection to represent both the objective and the subjective. Optical reflection, as we have seen in the poetry of Coleridge and Wordsworth, is a model for visual perception as well as an analogue for mental reflection. Wordsworth, however, assumes that misrepresentation cannot be avoided, that it will intrude even upon the most conscientious effort at mimetic representation. Misrepresentation is unavoidable, not necessarily evil, perhaps even informative and beneficial. If properly pondered, rather than simply ignored or futilely opposed, the inevitable misrepresentations in art may help expose, rather than insidiously propagate, the misrepresentations in life. Wordsworth thus maintains a bemused recollection of his Cambridge education as a mock-show, "played / By wooden images": here in dwarf p r o p o r t i o n s were expressed T h e limbs of the great world - its goings-on Collaterally portrayed, as in a m o c k fight, A tournament of blows, s o m e hardly dealt T h o u g h short of mortal c o m b a t - and whate'er M i g h t in this pageant be s u p p o s e d t o hit A n artless rustic's notice, this way less, M o r e that way, was not wasted u p o n me. A n d yet the spectacle may well d e m a n d A m o r e substantial name, no mimic show, Itself a living part of a live whole (3, 6 1 6 - 2 5 )

While the misrepresentation which he here represents may not be his own, but that of the university, he also acknowledges that he participated in its illusions. H e likens himself to one who "rather makes / Than finds what he beholds" (548-9). But Cambridge was "a privileged world / Within a world, a midway residence / With all its intervenient imagery" (553-5). The inclinations of his own "visionary mind" is thus encouraged by the "artificial life" of the place. Tolerance of misrepresentation, however, does not mean acquiescence to error. Confessing his own visionary habits at the time and the uncertainty of his memory after many years have elapsed, Wordsworth enhances his own ethical credibility as one who is striving for accuracy in his reflections as well as in his representations. In the Prelude, no less than in the Guide to the Lakes, Wordsworth rejects that reversal of the mimetic order which, in the name of the picturesque,

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assumes that nature must imitate art. But even here, Wordsworth confesses his own culpability as one who has been seduced by "superficial things, / Pampering myself with meager novelties / Of colour and proportion" (12, 116-18). The cult of the picturesque encouraged superficiality: "disliking here, and there / Liking; by rules of mimic art transferred / To things above all art" (110-12). The fault here is neither nature nor art, but a false set of "rules prescribed by passive taste" (154). The optical reflection of surface details must be complemented by active mental reflection on "the depth of things" 084). By retracing the ways in which external reflections stimulate internal reflections, Wordsworth claims to reveal a truth which may well reside in illusion but is nevertheless the truth of reciprocity between mind and nature. Optical illusions provide dramatic moments for such revelations, as when the "huge cliff, / As with voluntary power instinct," seemed to pursue the boy in a borrowed boat (1, 406-10); or when, stopping suddenly in his ice-skating, the "solitary cliffs" seemed still to wheel by, "as if the earth had rolled / With visible motion her diurnal round" (1, 484-86); or when, ascending "up the lonely brooks," he sees suddenly before him a shepherd, "In size a giant, stalking through the fog, / His sheep like Greenland bears" (8, 400-02). H e admits, of course, to his own wilful intervention in sustaining the truth of such fragile revelations. In Book Eight, for example, he recounts his imaginative response in reflecting upon the light which reflected upon a rock some distance from his cottage door. There was a copse, An upright bank of wood and woody rock That opposite our rural dwelling stood, In which a sparkling patch of diamond light Was in bright weather duly to be seen O n summer afternoons, within the wood At the same place. Twas doubtless nothing more Than a black rock, which, wet with constant springs, Glistered far seen from out its lurking-place As soon as ever the declining sun Has smitten it. Beside our cottage hearth Sitting with open door, a hundred times Upon this lustre have I gazed, that seemed To have some meaning which I could not findAnd now it was a burnished shield, I fancied, Suspended over a knight's tomb, who lay Inglorious, buried in the dusky wood; An entrance now into some magic cave,

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Visual Perception and Verbal Representation O r palace f o r a fairy of the rock. N o r would I, though not certain whence the cause O f the effulgence, thither have repaired Without a precious bribe, and day by day A n d m o n t h by m o n t h I saw the spectacle, N o r ever once have visited the spot U n t o this hour. T h u s s o m e t i m e s were the shapes O f wilful fancy grafted u p o n feelings O f the imagination, and they rose In w o r t h accordingly. (8, 5 5 9 - 8 6 )

After arguing Wordsworth's concern with revealing truth, I do not intend now to undermine my argument by calling the disclaimer in this passage disingenuous. But how are we to interpret his denial that he neither knew "the cause / O f the effulgence, [...] / N o r ever once [...] visited the spot / U n t o this hour"? H e might seem to resort here to that mode of reasoning in "Yarrow Unvisited": "We have a vision of our own; / Ah! why should we undo it." But clearly the sequence of this passage would indicate something closer to the situation in "Yarrow Visited": "I see - but not by sight alone, / [„.] / A ray of fancy still survives - H e r sunshine plays upon thee!" In "Yarrow Unvisited" the internal vision is described in competition with the external sight. In "Yarrow Visited," the "ray" of internal "sunshine" is not obscured but reflected upon the "genuine image." This complementation, in spite of his assertion that he would not visit the spot "Without a precious bribe," already informs his awareness of "the shapes / O f wilful fancy grafted upon feelings / O f the imagination." Even if he has not visited this glistering rock hidden in the dark copse, he has observed others like it and thus already knows the source of its "diamond light." Indeed, he knows "the cause / O f the effulgence" well enough to describe with scientific detail the complex conditions necessary to produce its singular effect: the black rock, wet by constant springs, provides the proper mirroring surface; only during the summer months do the late afternoon rays of the sun strike the rock at the correct angle to reflect the light toward the cottage door; the rock itself is otherwise concealed in the dark copse. Before the reflective imagination is called into play, the poet has fully explained the causes of the optical reflection. The tension between the two modes of perception, it is worth recalling, is precisely the same that he sets up in the Guide to distinguish his own intimate knowledge of the lakes from the stranger's awe at the apparent magic at the optical illusions which reflected upon their surfaces. Yet in "Yarrow Visited"

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and in this retrospect from the Prelude, Wordsworth allows himself to be the stranger, to sustain, that is, a naive perception and to encourage the fancy and imagination. In probing the ways in which art may be said to imitate nature, the romantic poets not only confirmed Aristotle's notion that human beings are born with a mimetic instinct, they also observed nature itself stimulating an awareness of the mimetic activity. While the child may spontaneously engage in games of mimicry, nature itself often enters into that activity, revealing its possibilities, guiding its attainments. The adult artist may imitate nature, but only after nature has taught the child how to imitate. While the theme of tutorial nature dominates much of Wordsworth's poetry, Coleridge, even as he endeavors to bestow the blessings of nature on the infant Hartley in "Frost at Midnight," 16 recollects a very different set of influences on his own creative sensibility. As a poet capable of gazing often and long upon the mysterious lustre until his fancy becomes as restless as what he beholds, Wordsworth shares a capacity of self-mesmerizing contemplation that is perhaps more often indulged by Coleridge. The movement, of course, is the same as Coleridge describes in "Frost at Midnight," when he gazes at the fluttering ash upon the hearth and allows it to make a toy of thought. Both poets evoke an interchange of optical and mental reflections in poetic description. In describing artistic imitation, Coleridge praises the "magic mirror" precisely because it reflects the internal as well as external: Who, like a second and more lovely Nature, By sweet mystery of lines and colours Changed the blank canvas to a magic mirror, That made the absent present, and to shadows Gave light, depth, substance, bloom, yea, thought and motion. 3 7

For Coleridge, as we have seen, the mimetic illusion that makes the absent seem present is always only an illusion. This praise of Titian's art as "a second and more lovely nature," in its original context in Remorse, contributes to Coleridge's thematization of illusion. Because she cherishes the illusion that Alvar, her absent lover, still lives, Theresa is thought to be deranged or mad. Her mental illusion, however, is 36 37

Coleridge: Complete Poetical Works vol. 1, pp. 240-2. Ibid., vol. 2, p. 842: Remorse, Act II, scene ii, lines 42ff. These lines, praising "the famous Titian," were omitted from the first edition, and restored in Coleridge's note in subsequent editions.

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true. The painting, to be revealed by a flash of gunpowder in a stunning coup de theatre, falsely depicts Alvar's death. Just before the play enjoyed its successful run at Drury Lane, Coleridge had commenced his lectures on Shakespeare at the Surry Institute. His auditors were informed that the true nature of dramatic illusion, in contradistinction to optical effects of stage illusion, resides in the mental reflection.38 Those who then joined the audience at Drury Lane were able to witness a bit of Coleridgean irony when he has Alvar, disguised as the moorish sorcerer in the magic scene, tell Theresa that she is right to walk out on such false theatrical display. The two principle concepts of mimesis - Plato's imitation of ideal form, Aristotle's imitation of the processes of thought - both persist in the romantic period. Both accounts of artistic "imitation" are metonymic: they refer only to the means. The same is no less true of "expression." As soon as we begin to ask how, or what, to "imitate" or "express," we become aware that these terms do not explain artistic production. They are mere tropes for something that is presumed to happen in the creative process. Perhaps its was in their effort to overcome the spare abstraction of mimetic theory that prompted the romantic poets to thematize reflection. Whatever their motives, the evidence is abundantly clear: the descriptive attention to mirror surfaces provide apt occasion in their poetry to implicate their own imagery in the moment of redoubling and reflecting.

38

Lectures 7 and 8 (15 Dec and 22 or 29 Dec 1812), Coleridge: Lectures on Literature vol. 1, pp. 491-2, 494-5. The lectures at the Suriy Institute continued from 3 Nov 1812 to 26 Jan 1813. Remorse opened at Drury Lane on 23 Jan 1813.

REGINALD A . FOAKES University o f California, Los Angeles

Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Illusion

Abstract: This essay starts by seeking to describe confusions in Wordsworth's claims in his poetry about the nature o f seeing or vision. T h e various assertions he makes about the operation o f the eye are difficult t o relate to what is seen by the "mind's eye." T h e primary mode of unmediated perception of nature is often obliterated or transfigured by a secondary mode, and it is not clear how these modes relate to "visionary power" found both in nature and in "the mystery o f words." T h e s e confusions help to explain some o f Coleridge's complaints about Wordsworth's poetry in Biographia Literaria, especially about matter-of-factness. Coleridge saw a failure o f illusion, a failure to allow images to work by their own force, not affirming or denying anything. But Coleridge, too, was confused, in a different way, since for him the inner eye was the eye o f reason as applied to motives o f conduct, or the eye o f conscience. Hence his inability to comprehend the end o f Wordsworth's "Daffodils," which seemed trivial to him, because the 'inward eye' there merely registers pleasure ("And then my heart with pleasure fills"). Coleridge's idea o f illusion, formulated in relation to dramatic illusion, was basically aesthetic, but his idea of poetry was that it should be moral; hence the contradictions in his response to Wordsworth's poetry.

Wordsworth published the first version of his Guide to the Lakes in 1810 as the introduction to the Reverend Joseph Wilkinson's Select Views in Cumberland, Westmorland, and Lancashire. He intended it to "furnish a Guide or Companion for the Minds of Persons of taste, and feeling for Landscape" who might explore the district.1 Wordsworth wrote about the Lake District in terms of landscape painting, and articulated his response to its scenery by means of a vocabulary derived from the cultural and aesthetic norms of the period when his taste was formed.2 So he observes that the atmosphere "as in 1

Wordsworth: Guide to the Lakes, p. 1. The textual history of Wordsworth's Guide is very complicated, and is detailed in The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, ed. Owen and Smyser vol. 2, p. 136-49.

2

See Liu: Wordsworth: The Sense of History, Chapter 3, "The Politics of the Picturesque," for a fascinating account of the poet's reaction to landscape, primarily in relation to his early poetry, but also with relevance to his later writings.

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every country subject to much rain, is frequently unfavourable to landscape," especially when keen winds produce "an unmeaning or repulsive detail; in the distance." Mists and clouds animate the scene, and by comparison the "cerulean vacancy" of Italy is a "sad spectacle,"3 even if the fleecy clouds that rest on hilltops are "not easily managed in picture."4 He likes warm tints; a defect in the colouring of the Lakes is "an over-prevalence of a bluish tint," 5 and he called on the support of William Gilpin's Observations on the Picturesque in protesting that houses painted white disfigure a mountain scene, because white destroys gradations of distance.6 He argues that the Lake District has a more delicate blending of colours than is found in the Alps, which explains why Poussin and Claude, who knew those mountains, did not paint them; but then he qualifies his evaluation in terms of painting by continuing: "I should be sorry to contemplate either country in reference to that art, further than as its fitness or unfitness for the pencil renders it more or less pleasing to the eye of the spectator, who has learned to observe and feel, chiefly from Nature herself."7 Evidently Wordsworth did not appreciate the degree to which, as an adult, he saw nature through painting, and through earlier poetic descriptions.8 Although the poet implicitly renewed here a claim to have learned from Nature to "observe," the evidence of his poetry, like that of his Guide to the Lakes, suggests otherwise. So, to take a familiar example, in his "Lines written a few miles above Tintern Abbey," what the poet "beholds," "views," or "sees," is not what Nature taught him to see, but rather a carefully composed scene: O n c e again D o I behold these steep and lofty cliffs, Which on a wild secluded scene impress Thoughts of a more deep seclusion; and connect The landscape with the quiet of the sky. The day is come when I again repose Here, under this dark sycamore, and view These plots of cottage-ground, these orchard-tufts, Which at this season, with their unripe fruits, Among the woods and copses lose themselves,

3

Wordsworth: Guide to the Lakes, p. 46.

4

Ibid.

5

Ibid., p. 78.

6

Ibid., p. 80.

7

Ibid., p. 104.

8

As documented by, for example, by Jacobus in Tradition and Experiment in Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads 1798, pp. 104-30.

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Nor, with their green and simple hue, disturb The wild green landscape. Once again I see These hedge-rows, hardly hedge-rows, little lines Of sportive wood run wild; these pastoral farms Green to the very door; and wreathes of smoke Sent up, in silence, from among the trees, With some uncertain notice, as might seem, O f vagrant dwellers in the houseless woods, Or of some hermit's cave, where by his fire The hermit sits alone.' Marjorie Levinson has shown that Wordsworth excluded from the "scene" what the guidebooks of the period noted, the poverty of the area, and the scarring of the land by a huge ironworks, and by charcoal smelting, making for at least one observer a "scene of desolation." 10 The description with which the poem opens combines two other groups of images: 11 the poet sees steep cliffs, a wild green landscape, a wild secluded scene, woods run wild, houseless woods, vagrants, and a hermit's cave, all standard properties o f picturesque painting; and these elements are combined with pastoral plots of cottage-ground, orchards, copses, hedgerows, pastoral farms, smoke from cottages. The landscape is perceived as simultaneously wild and tame, as a mountain fastness with a hermit's cave, and as settled and farmed; as both savage and cultivated. The whole picture is held together by the pervasive colour green, and by the way the sense of wildness passes into cultivation and tameness, and vice-versa (as in "little lines / O f sportive wood run wild; these pastoral farms, / Green to the very door"). Wordsworth was composing the scene very much as contemporary artists did, which is to say that he beheld it with an eye tutored in a visual language he had acquired through reading and through seeing paintings. The combination of rough grandeur with a humanising pastoral domesticity was a feature of much picturesque painting. William Gilpin prized the combination of "beauty and deformity, grandeur and horror, mingled together" that he found in the lakes and mountains of Cumberland, 12 and Philip de Loutherbourg found at Lake Windermere a mixture of "wild and romantic" with "the softer scenery of nature" which appealed to "admirers of the picturesque." H e found 9 10

Wordsworth: Poetical Works vol. 2, pp.59-60, lines 4-22. Levinson: Wordsworth's Great Period Poems, p. 31; the phrase is quoted from William Gilpin's Observations on the River Wye (1792).

11

Ibid., pp. 38-9.

12

Gilpin: Observations, Relative Chiefly to Picturesque Beauty, p. 122.

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similar qualities at Tintern, 1 3 and indeed, picturesque landscapes tend t o l o o k alike. W o r d s w o r t h himself observed, " W h e n the Landscape was intended principally t o impress the mind, figures, o t h e r than such as are general, such as m a y a thousand times appear, and seem accidental...are injurious t o the effect. 1 4 If the figures were "general," so was the scene itself, and if it were n o t f o r the title, the setting o f the " T i n t e r n A b b e y " lines could be any suitably picturesque spot. W o r d s w o r t h ' s was never an innocent eye. 1 5 H e writes in The Prelude

(1805

version) 1 6 o f the child's eye as " u n t a u g h t , " but even for the child, at the age o f eight at any rate, acquaintance with literary r o m a n c e could transfigure the experience o f seeing a dead man, a "spectre shape," fished o u t o f a lake, for my inner eye had seen Such sights before among the shining streams O f fairyland, the forests of romance. (5, 475-7) s o that what he n o w saw was hallowed with "decoration and an ideal grace," if his a c c o u n t can be believed. Leaving aside the issue o f repression o r disingenuousness in these lines, 17 t h e y represent the "inner eye" as controlling the 13

Loutherbourg: Romantic and Picturesque Scenery; pages not numbered.

14

As recorded in Farington's Diary vol. 4, p. 129, and cited in Liu: Wordsworth The Sense of History, p. 80.

15

Some critics continue, however, to write as if it were, as if Wordsworth's perception of nature was simply "immediate, visual and sensuous" in contrast to the picturesque view of the natural world as "pictorial and emotionally literary" (Salvesen: The Landscape of Memory, p. 69). Owen: "Wordsworth's Aesthetics of Landscape," Brennan: Wordsworth, Turner and Romantic Landscape, and Sharrock: The Figure in a Landscape, all seem to think that the poet rejected the picturesque totally by 1800, and Owen argues that Burke's concept of the sublime was the only serious influence on Wordsworth's Guide to the Lakes. But a formal rejection of the picturesque is not the same thing as shedding habits of mind. Wordsworth constructed the scenes he describes according to the ways in which he had learned to see them, and the formative influences on him remained strong. He echoed Gilpin in the "Tintern Abbey" lines, as noted by Mary Moorman: William Wordsworth A Biography: The Early Years, pp. 402-3, and cited him in his Guide to the Lakes. - For different and more philosophical perspectives on the rich topic of perception and illusion in the writings of Wordsworth and Coleridge, see the chapters by Frederick Burwick, especially pp. 127-32, and Thomas Vogler, especially pp. 170-85.

16

All quotations from the Prelude will be from the 1805 version as presented in Wordsworth: The Prelude 1799,1805,1850, identified by Book and line number. In his autobiography, Warrenpoint, pp. 131-32, Denis Donoghue comments incisively on this passage: "there is something distasteful in Wordsworth's way of distinguishing his sensation from vulgar fear: distasteful, too, in his explaining the self-possession by distinguishing the eye from 'my inner eye.' Besides, what his inner eye saw - 'such sights' -

17

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poet's response to an external "sight." It is true that when Wordsworth came, from 1799 onwards, to rationalise his childhood experiences in the "spots of time" episodes included in The Prelude, he often wrote in terms of "presences" in nature working on him through a "ministry," so moralising in quasi-religious terms his early "unconscious intercourse" with "eternal beauty," as in the boat-stealing episode, where "mighty forms" move through his mind, morally admonishing him. 18 Even as he records his "subservience to external things," he acknowledges that an "auxiliar light / Came from my own mind (2, 387), and he celebrates the "holy calm" of times when I forgot That I had bodily eyes, and what I saw Appear'd like something in myself, a dream, A prospect in my mind. (2, 368-71) The relation between the outer eye and inner eye is uncertain. There is indeed confusion in Wordsworth's accounts of what and how he saw both as a child and as an adult. O n the one hand, "the eye it cannot choose but see," and thus, as a passive receptacle for the "visionary power" (2, 330) that attends on natural objects, it becomes a channel through which moral guidance is absorbed. At the same time, seeing is described as active, since the moral effect of nature is to prompt a watchful eye Which with the outside of our human life Not satisfied, must read the inner mind. (8, 66-8) In key instances, the prospect in the mind overmasters what is seen by the eye, as in Resolution and Independence (1802), where the old leechgatherer is transfigured in the course of the poem, and "the whole body of the man did seem / Like one whom I had met with in a dream," so that the poet ceases to hear what the old man is saying. Wordsworth says he "saw a Man," and "watch'd him," yet while he was talking, was not the same as the drowned man's ghastly face: there is nothing 'such' about a particular man's face, except in the abstracting mind of someone past caring to retain the true distinction." Donoghue does not notice that in the 1798-9 version of The Prelude, the equivalent passage ends as the dead man "bolt upright / Rose with his ghastly face" (1,278-9); the lines he finds "distasteful" were added by 1805 as a gloss upon the original account. 18

Prelude, 1,357-427. It is of some interest that the word "intercourse" began to be used with reference to sexual intercourse about this time (the first citation in the Oxford English Dictionary is from 1798), and there may be a link with the eroticism of arrested desire that Alan Liu finds in the picturesque; see Liu: Wordsworth The Sense of History, especially p. 63.

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In my mind's eye I seemed to see him pace About the weary moors continually.19

and this vision seems sent to give the poet "apt admonishment" (later revised to "strong admonishment"), i.e., to work on him with a moral force. So, too, in the "Tintern Abbey" lines, it is not the immediate sight of the banks of the Wye that profoundly affects him, but rather the recognition that such sights, and the memory of them, give access to "that serene and blessed mood" in which we are laid asleep In body, and become a living soul: While with an eye made quiet by the power Of harmony, and the deep power of joy, We see into the life of things.20

This vision relates to what he calls "The picture of the mind," and he goes on in the poem to acknowledge a process in which the eye half-creates and half-perceives, enabling him to find in what he calls "the language of the sense" the guide and guardian of his "moral being." The phrase "the language of the sense" here is especially interesting, for Wordsworth seems to realise that in looking at the natural scene, he interprets it through a language, a vocabulary, that has been learned, as he is conscious of doing in his Guide to the Lakes, but only intermittently acknowledges in his poetry. In describing the natural scene, Wordsworth represents not what is there, but a perception mediated through a particular grammar of seeing, what Kendall Walton would call the rules of a game of make-believe.21 But beyond this is another kind of "seeing" for the poet, when the landscapes or persons observed are transfigured, and take on the aspect of a dream or vision (Wordsworth's words, as used of the leech-gatherer, the highland girl, a process analogous to what, in the "Tintern Abbey" lines, he calls seeing into "the life of things"). This secondary mode of vision works on him to moral effect mediated through intense feelings. Its operation can be imaged thus in terms of pleasure, especially in retrospective accounts of childhood moments, when, for instance, the sky Never before so beautiful, sank down Into my heart, and held me like a dream; (Prelude 2,178) 19 20 21

Wordsworth: Poetical Works vol. 2, p. 240, lines 129-30. Ibid., p. 260, lines 45-9. See Walton: Mimesis as Make-Believe, Chapter 1, especially pp. 53—4.

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but it can also be directly moralised into the "watchful eye" that enables him to cope with vice, and he congratulates himself on having in early years a "real solid world of images" around him, and an eye made "rich" by a natural world, the Lake District, that provided him with "forms distinct" to steady him (Prelude 8, 598). These varying assertions propose a confusing double mode of vision, especially in The Prelude?2 on the one hand, Wordsworth claims for himself as a child a direct unmediated access to nature, when the visible scene W o u l d enter unawares into his m i n d With all its s o l e m n imagery; (5, 3 8 4 - 6 )

on the other hand, he acknowledges as emotionally and morally significant a secondary vision which interprets the language of the sense in the picture of the mind. The operation of this secondary vision is linked in some important passages with an image of "flashes," the flash of illumination which at the same time extinguishes or obliterates a primary mode of seeing. So the imagination is described as working by "usurpation," when the light of sense G o e s out in flashes that have s h o w n t o us T h e invisible world. (6, 6 0 0 - 0 2 )

This usurpation is analogous to the visionary moment described in the "Tintern Abbey" lines in terms of being "laid asleep in body" with breath and motion suspended, or in "Resolution and Independence" in the transfiguration of the old leechgatherer into a dream vision. This secondary mode of vision gives rise to another kind of confusion when it is located also in poetry itself: Visionary p o w e r A t t e n d s u p o n the m o t i o n s of the winds E m b o d i e d in the mystery of w o r d s ; T h e r e darkness makes abode, and all the h o s t O f s h a d o w y things d o w o r k their changes there A s in a m a n s i o n like their p r o p e r h o m e . Even f o r m s and substances are c i r c u m f u s ' d B y that transparent veil with light divine, A n d through the turnings intricate of verse 22

McFarland: Romanticism and the Forms of Ruin, pp. 86-7, comments on the contradictions in Wordsworth's expressed attitudes to "the relation of the mind to the external world."

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The mystery of nature here turns into the mystery of words, giving further resonance to the idea of the "language of the sense." The syntax of this passage is opaque, as the repeated word "there" can relate to "darkness" or to "words"; and the relation of "that transparent veil" to winds, darkness, and words remains unclear. I do not think Wordsworth resolved these confusions, or was ever quite aware of them; so in Book 11 of The Prelude, after identifying the "spots of time" with the feeling that the mind Is lord and master, and the outward sense Is but the obedient servant of her will, (11, 2 7 1 - 3 )

he goes on in the next book to restate his youthful conviction that Nature through all conditions hath a power T o consecrate, if we have eyes to see, The outside of her creatures, and to breathe Grandeur upon the very humblest face O f human life. (13, 2 8 3 - 7 )

At the same time, he claims, although "visible form" Is to the pleasure of the human mind What passion makes it, that meanwhile the forms O f Nature have a passion in themselves That intermingles with the works of man... ( 1 2 , 2 8 2 - 5 )

v

" I f we have eyes to see" implies a vision that is active, that has learned to perceive grandeur, yet untaught "The eye it cannot choose but see." "Visionary power" attends both on the winds, and on words; and in "outward circumstance and visible form," or what he later calls "life's everyday appearances" (13,369), the poet has "sight / O f a new world," one that can be "made visible / T o other eyes" - but are these physical eyes, or "the authentic sight of reason"? It seems likely that these difficulties gave purchase to Coleridge's criticism of Wordsworth's poetry in Biographia Literaria, Chapter 22, where his first two complaints concern matter-of-factness in description, or what he calls "painting" rather than "creation," instancing The Excursion, 3, 23-91. Wordsworth here seemed to Coleridge to be writing verse that proposed "truth for its immediate object, instead of pleasure,"™ and so destroyed the distinction 23

Coleridge: Biographia Literaria vol. 2, p. 130.

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between prose and poetry. It might seem that Coleridge failed to notice that in describing in detail an attempt to trace a stream to its source, the Wanderer suddenly discovers a hidden, still nook, in which stones, arranged "like an altar," support a shining holly tree, providing evidence in the scene of "power intelligent, / And of design" (line 83). In other words, this "painting" deploys a special vocabulary that turns the scene into a "chronicle" of God's purposes, and does not simply represent what was seen, any more than the "Tintern Abbey" lines do. Coleridge amplified his criticism by reference to Milton's ability to give us the sense of "the whole picture flash'd at once upon the eye";24 and he links Wordsworth's matter-of-factness with "an anxiety of explanation and retrospect" as a defect that destroys illusion:25 That illusion, contradistinguished from delusion, that negative faith, which simply permits the images presented to work by their own force, without either denial or affirmation of their real existence by the judgment, is rendered impossible by their immediate neighbourhood to words and facts of known and absolute truth.

A pleasing fiction is turned into a revolting falsehood by the fidelity of description and anxiety of explanation which indeed may be said to characterise much of Wordsworth's poetry. Coleridge perhaps did not perceive the extent to which Wordsworth was caught in a double bind: in order to validate claims for the power of visions rooted in nature, he needed to establish the authenticity of "spots of time," experiences that enabled claims for visionary power to be made; and thus he had to be specific, even to inventing times and places, in order to substantiate the assertion that these things really happened. Coleridge himself had anticipated this effect in his conversation poems, but with a difference. So, in "Fears in Solitude," he begins from a similar image of stealing away to a quiet nook and making a couch of "fern or withered heath," and there he 24

Ibid. vol. 2, p. 128. Here Coleridge uses the word "flash'd" in a different way from Wordsworth, to describe the creative act of perception by which a mental picture is produced, "as the sun paints in a camera obscura." - See also Thomas Vogler's comments on "flashes" in Wordsworth's poetry, p. 179 and 183 below.

25 Coleridge: Biographia Literaria vol. 2, p. 134. Sheats: The Making of "Wordsworth's Poetry, pp. 222-3, argues that Coleridge "moves towards an apprehension" of objects "so intense as to annihilate self-consciousness altogether," while to Wordsworth "such transfiguration of mundane reality very probably seemed reprehensible on both philosophic and moral grounds." Sheats points to an important difference between the poets, but I do not think Wordsworth saw the issue with this kind of clarity.

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Visual Perception and Verbal Representation Made up a meditative joy, and found Religious meanings in the forms of Nature. 24

In these lines the landscape itself is transfigured as he gazes on it, and, as in "This Lime-Tree Bower," his senses "swim" as he dreams, and yet sees and hears at the same time, gazing till all doth seem Less gross than bodily; and of such hues As veil the Almighty Spirit, when yet he makes Spirits perceive his presence. 27

So in Biographia Literaria, he wants the images in poetry to "work by their own force," their grossness dissolved by the "negative faith" of illusion, without the need to be concerned to affirm or deny their "real existence"; but such illusion is not possible if the images are immediately related to "words or facts of known and absolute truth." The fifth and last defect Coleridge finds in Wordsworth's poetry is "mental bombast," or a "disporportion of thought to the circumstance and occasion."28 His prime example is the ending of "Daffodils." This poem, which appears so simple, is puzzling; I quote the 1815 version, since Coleridge was thinking of that edition: I wandered lonely as a cloud That floats on high o'er vales and hills, When all at once I saw a crowd, A host, of golden daffodils; Beside the lake, beneath the trees, Fluttering and dancing in the breeze. 29

Wordsworth of course reconstructed the experience, if Dorothy's journal can be trusted; she was with him when they saw "a few dafffodils," then "more and yet more," and finally a "long belt" of them along a lakeside.30 In the poem, Wordsworth represents himself as alone and lonely, and he suddenly sees the whole mass of flowers at once in a bird's-eye view. The image of the poet as a cloud, aloof from the world and people, with all the landscape open to him, suggests that he simply did not notice the daffodils until they impinged en masse on his eyes. So the speaker seems a passive receptor here, while the 26 Coleridge: Complete Poetical Works vol. 1, p. 257, lines 23-4. 27 Ibid. vol. 1, p. 180, lines 40-3. 28 Coleridge: Biographia Literaria vol. 2, p. 136. 29 Wordsworth: Poetical Works vol. 2, p. 216. 30 Journals of Dorothy Wordsworth, p. 109.

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daffodils are active, for they become instantly a gay "crowd," personified as a "host," a "jocund company" (stanza 3; "laughing" 1807). They intrude on his loneliness, break into it by drawing him among them as one of the "company," so that his aloofness at the opening begins to look a bit bleak. Even so, though he joins the crowd, he does not lose his identity among them, and remains at the same time apart from them, as he stares, "I gazed - and gazed," with no activity other than looking and being aware of their gaiety, and with no thought of the "wealth" they had brought him. H e is at once actively with them and passively watching them. In the last stanza he is able to recover the "show" not by an act of will, but when the daffodils spontaneously "flash" on his "inward eye"; then, as in his other uses of this term, the flashes obliterate other sensations; and they give pleasure to him, not as gazing on the flowers, but now as dancing with them, in feeling at any rate, as his heart "dances." David Perkins sidestepped Coleridge's criticism by claiming that this poem "is a symbolic event that speaks to Wordsworth of the union of all things in a bond of joy."31 But I suspect Coleridge was troubled by some of its puzzling features, for instance, whether there is any significant difference between the loneliness of the first stanza and the "solitude" of the last; and whether there is any essential difference between the sight of the daffodils as external objects in Stanza 1 and the vision of the inward eye in the last stanza. Coleridge did not accuse this poem of being matter-of-fact, for no doubt he recognised that the opening lines convert experience from mere sight ("I saw a crowd") into a vision, a vision of beautiful people, who by their "golden" quality (1815; "dancing" 1807) recall the golden age, and as a conglomerate "host" welcome him into their presence; so they capture a sense of innocence, a recovery of gaiety lost in loneliness, and of companionship. The daffodils are perceived as such, but also transmuted into visionary creatures. So the success of this poem perhaps lies in rendering the experience of seeing as at once active and passive, uniting what is so often separated out in Wordsworth's poetry, so that the interchange of internal feelings co-operating with the external scene is rendered as a single activity (not recalled as, for instance "an ordinary sight" invested with joy or alternatively with "visionary dreariness," but rather inviting our immediate engagement in the fusion of the inward and outer eye). The sudden impact of flowers on the poet's passive eye turns into an immediate activity of mind, or 31

Perkins: Wordsworth and the Poetry of Sincerity, p. 198. - For a different account of "Daffodils," see the chapter by Thomas Vogler, p. 179.

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inner vision, and the excitement of the joyous dance is simultaneously there in the daffodils and in the poet. Yet Coleridge was unhappy with the ending: "They flash upon that inward eye / Which is the bliss of solitude," saying: 32 in what words shall we describe the joy of retrospection, when the images and virtuous actions of a whole well-spent life, pass before that conscience which is indeed the inward eye which is the "bliss of solitude"? Assuredly we seem to sink most abruptly, not to say burlesquely, and almost as in a medly from this couplet to And then my heart with pleasure fills, And dances with the daffodils. F o r Coleridge the last lines sink into a mixture of heterogeneous elements, a medly, descending to triviality. But he interpreted the "inward eye" as the eye of conscience, as if there should be found here the link Wordsworth constructs elsewhere, as in The Prelude and the T i n t e r n Abbey" lines, between what is perceived by the sense and the poet's "moral being." W h y was Coleridge confused? In "Tintern Abbey" lines, for example, Wordsworth's recall of the scene ("Once again / D o I behold these steep and lofty cliffs [...]") expands into a long explanation which is at the same time a dilution, distancing the reader from the immediacy of "Once again I see / These hedgerows"; only when these sensory experiences are pushed away as "absent long" does he attribute to the memory of them in "lonely rooms" moral effects, tentatively building up through subjunctives ("such, perhaps, [...] N o r less, I trust, / To them I may have owed [...]") to the image of a trance-like state in which with an eye made quiet by the power Of harmony, and the deep power of joy, We see into the life of things.33 This metaphysical claim of access to some kind of higher knowledge (things by definition have no life) is the basis for his further claim for nature as the guide of his moral being. But here the secondary vision does not spring 32

Coleridge: Biographia Literaria vol. 2, pp. 136-7. Wordsworth incidentally said later on, in 1843, that these lines were contributed by his wife. In Poems (2 vols., 1815), he noted: "The subject of these Stanzas is rather an elementary feeling and simple impression (approaching to the nature of an ocular spectrum) upon the imaginative faculty, than an exertion of it" {Poetical Works vol. 2, p. 507). An ocular spectrum specifically meant the image retained on the retina of the eye after gazing fixedly at a brightly-coloured object. Coleridge cites the poem from the 1815 edition, and presumably must have read Wordsworth's depreciatory comment, which might be taken as a warning not to put too much weight on the last stanza.

33

Wordsworth: Poetical Works vol. 2, p.260, lines 31,35-6,47-9.

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directly out of his seeing the Wye valley landscape, or out of the "picture of the mind"; it is loosely connected with this "picture," with "forms of beauty," only in that phrase, " N o r less, I trust, / T o them I may have owed another gift [...]," one that operates when the eye is "made quiet," and, so to speak, anaesthetized, to make way for another mode of vision. In other words, the "Tintern Abbey" lines do not render the immediacy of the act of special or secondary vision, but a hesitant, complicated, moralising explanation of it. Perhaps the absence of such moralising is what baffled Coleridge in "Daffodils," so that he found a kind of bathos in the ending. This ending seems exactly right to me, gaining power by its directness and simplicity and the absence of larger claims. The word "flash" certainly links with other passages where Wordsworth writes, as noted earlier, of "objects recognised / In flashes, and with a glory scarce their own" (see above, p. 152), but in "Daffodils," he makes no such large claims for greater glory. Rather we move from an initial sighting of the daffodils seen from the lofty isolation of one who seems to have no contact with people or things ("lonely as a cloud"), to the poet at home, reunited with his fellows in the dance of feelings prompted by the inward eye, so that the remote, alienated "loneliness" of the opening is replaced by a solitude sought in the intimacy of his own room, where the initial vision is re-enacted, but with a difference: now the burden of the poet's individuation, his chosen solitude, the private space of his own couch, is relieved by an inner vision that allows him, in the mystery of words, to become one with the crowd, to lose himself in the dance. In a fragment connected with, but not included in, The Prelude, Wordsworth attributed "creation" to the senses:3,1 There is creation in the eye Nor less than in the other senses; powers They are that colour, model and combine The things perceived with such an absolute Essential energy that we may say That those most godlike faculties of ours At one and the same time are the mind And the mind's minister.

Here Wordsworth's shifts between the eye as passive and as active, and between a celebration of the vision of the inward eye as pleasure and claims for moral guidance, seem for the moment reconciled. But it is understandable that Coleridge should have had trouble with Wordsworth's use of terms like 34

Ibid. vol. 5, pp. 343-4.

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"inward eye," "mind's eye," "inner mind," etc. Philosophers still argue about whether the eye in perceiving is creative to the extent that perception is a mental act, or simply a passive receptor of sense data; 35 and if the eye is creative in response to scenes that for some reason are especially impressive, and the memory can recover in "flashes" these creations (involuntarily or not), then the inward eye may see a re-enactment of the original perception, which is pleasurable as recapturing an initial delight, but has no necessary metaphysical or moral resonances. This would seem to be what D o r o t h y Wordsworth registered when, on returning from Yorkshire in 1802 after her brother's marriage, she recorded her delight in passing through Wensley and seeing again "the Bridge, the little water-spout the steep hill the Church. T h e y are among the most vivid of my own inner visions, for they were the first objects that I saw after we were left to ourselves, and had turned our whole hearts to Grasmere as a home in which we were to rest," that is to say in 1799, when she and Wordsworth first came to live in the Lake District. 3 6 In "Daffodils," Wordsworth's "inward eye" seemed to Coleridge t o do no more than recall the original impression of delight, when he looked for some deeper concern with moral life. It was not an unreasonable expectation, given the radical difference between them. F o r Coleridge needed that matter-of-fact quality in Wordsworth, that reference of all things to the self as a stable moral force, so that he could look on his friend as one of the "truly great," who "in power and act, / Are permanent, and Time is not with them." 3 7 In his Guide to the Lakes Wordsworth describes two "appearances" that struck him as remarkable, the more "marvellous" of the two being that of a new island in Grasmere, more distinct than the familiar real one: 3 8 Marvellous was the illusion! [...] I do not scruple to say that as an object of sight, it was much the more distinct. "How little faith," we exclaimed, "is due to one sense, unless its evidence be confirmed by some of its fellows! What stranger could possibly be persuaded that this, which we know to be an unsubstantial mockery, is really so; and that there exists only a single Island on this beautiful Lake?" At length the appearance underwent a gradual transmutation; it lost its prominence and passed into a glimmering and dim inversion, and then totally disappeared; - leaving behind it a clear open area of ice of the same dimensions. We now perceived that 35 See Gregory in Barlow et al., eds., Images and Understanding, pp. 310-30, especially p. 313. 36 Dorothy Wordsworth: Journals, p. 158. 37 Coleridge: "To William Wordsworth." Complete Poetical Works vol. 1, pp. 403-08, here p. 406. 38 Wordsworth: Guide, pp. 109-10. See also the chapters by Frederick Burwick, p. 131-2, and Thomas Vogler, p. 185, for further commentary on this passage.

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this bed of ice, which was thinly suffused with water, had produced the illusion, by reflecting and refracting (as persons skilled in optics would no doubt easily explain) a rocky and woody section of the opposite mountain named Silver-how. Here Wordsworth is concerned primarily with the way a reliance on one sense, the sight, can make an appearance, an optical illusion, seem real; what he marvels at is less the illusion itself than a quasi-scientific explanation of it. H e focuses on the particular experience, and, as in so much of his poetry, validates it by circumstantial detail, the matter-of-factness that Coleridge observed. H e relates the appearance here to its permanent cause, the laws of optics, as in his poetry he commonly relates appearances to intimations of a divine presence or order. Coleridge, by contrast, who became something of a connoisseur of his own performances, came to see life as a theatre, viewing nature not as a moral guide, but as a pageant. If Wordsworth looks for the permanent, Coleridge is absorbed in flux. Among the many projects Coleridge envisaged but never carried out was one for his guide to the Lakes, which would have taken a different form: 39 I have often thought of writing a set of play-bills for the vale of Keswick - for every day of the year - announcing each day the performances, by his supreme majesty's servants, clouds, waters, sun, moon, stars, etc. It is the continuing pageant rather than the isolated spot of time that Coleridge would celebrate. In his poem "A Day-dream," for example, the vision of his inward eye ("My eyes make pictures when they are shut") is not a still, but a motion picture, in which the camera of the mind tracks from fountain, willow and hut to the wild rose making the roof of the hut, then to the names carved on the tree, and, as day gives way to night, to the stars and crescent moon. 40 Here the eye creates the picture in the mind, whereas the "fiendish crowd / Of shapes [...] a trampling throng" of nightmare horrors that visit Coleridge in "The Pains of Sleep" are interpreted in the poem as "punishments" for sin. Coleridge's ideas changed greatly after 1800, when he had said that the Preface t o Lyrical Ballads contained his and Wordsworth's "joint opinions" on poetry, 41 and he came to associate what was given, or spontaneously flashed on the mind, as in "Daffodils" and in his nightmares, with an external authority whose force was exerted through the "inward eye" of the reason and con39 40 41

Coleridge, letter No. 448 to Sara Hutchinson, July 27,1802 - Collected Letters vol. 2, p. 825. Coleridge: Poetical Works vol. 1, p. 385. Coleridge, letter No. 354 to Daniel Stuart, ca. 30 September 1800 - Collected Letters vol. 1, p. 627.

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science. In The Friend he argues that human beings share with animals the organs of "outward sense," but "man's understanding has likewise an organ of inward sense, and therefore the power of acquainting itself with invisible realities or spiritual objects." This organ is his "Reason," and it acts as "another and inward eye."42 Furthermore, reason "applied to the motives of our conduct, and combined with the sense of our moral responsibility, is the conditional cause of ConscienceThe "inward eye" is thus the eye of reason, which gives access to spiritual realities, and causes the conscience to function as a kind of "spiritual sensation."44 Here might be a way of explaining Coleridge's sense of sinking abruptly at the end of "Daffodils" from the inward eye of conscience to mere pleasure in the recollected dance of flowers. Coleridge's comment on the poem might seem to conflict, however, with his remarks on illusion a page or two earlier in his critique of Wordsworth's poetry, where he defines illusion as a "negative faith" that "permits the images presented to work by their own force, without either denial or affirmation of their real existence,"45 for the image at the end of "Daffodils" appears to be of this kind. If Coleridge was troubled by incongruities in Wordsworth's poetry, here he reveals an inconsistency in his own thinking. In his lectures on Shakespeare he had been brought up against the need to rethink his ideas about illusion.44 He moved towards a conception of inner vision that was linked to dramatic illusion rather than to vivid or pleasurable spots of time. When, in 1811-12, he began to read August Schlegel's lectures on dramatic poetry, he reformulated a concept of organic unity, which he had anticipated in his definition of beauty in 1808 as a "pleasurable sense of the Many (by Many I do not mean comparative multitude, but only as a generic word opposed to absolute unity - ) reduced to unity by the correspondence of all the component parts to each other." 47 Under the influence of Schlegel, this was refined into "a law which all the parts obey conforming themselves to the outward symbols & manifestations of the essential principle."48 The apparent similarity masks a radical difference; for in the earlier statement Coleridge had internalised the idea of artistic harmony as a mental experience, a "pleasurable 42 43 44

Coleridge: The Friend vol. 1, p. 156. Ibid., p. 159. Coleridge: "The Statesman's Manual." Lay Sermons, p. 66.

45 46

Coleridge: Biographia Literaria vol. 2, p. 134. The development of Coleridge's thinking about illusion is the theme of Chapter 5 in Burwick: Illusion and the Drama. Coleridge: Lectures 1808-1819: On Literature vol. 1, p. 35. Ibid. vol. 1, p. 358.

47 48

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sense of the Many [...] reduced to unity," while Schlegel's account would locate organic unity in the work itself.49 In the same lecture in which he referred to Schlegel's account of organic unity, Coleridge compared the experience of reading Shakespeare's plays to forms of illusion, specifically the Brocken spectre and the Fata Morgana at Messina, "in which all forms at determined distances are presented in an invisible mist dressed in all the colours of prismatic imagination and with magic harmony uniting them and producing a beautiful whole in the mind of the Spectator."50 If the "beautiful whole" is in the mind of the spectator, and if each reader perceives unity as a process of seeing himself without knowing that he "makes the shadow he pursues," then the "magic harmony" is created by his own mental processes, and is not attributable to the work itself. Here Coleridge began to develop an aesthetic theory that departs from Schlegel, and is bound up with the nature of dramatic illusion, which was problematized for Coleridge by his awareness of the deliberate efforts being made in his age to maximise scenic illusion in the theatre by the use of new technical devices like the eidophusikon or panorama. Coleridge was concerned to distinguish between scenic and dramatic illusion, which were commonly confused as synonymous, and to define dramatic illusion as a process in the mind of the spectator, which has to be rethought in terms somewhat different from the "magic harmony" produced by the imagination of the reader. For in the theatre the spectator is aware of the scenery and scenic effects as such, however realistic their aim, and his pleasure is derived "from knowing that the scene represented was unreal and merely an imitation." 51 As he reworked his theory of dramatic illusion, Coleridge came to insist in his 1818 lecture on Shakespeare's The Tempest that "we chuse to be deceived,"52 and so in reading or watching a play we are brought to suspend our powers of comparison gradually, by the Art of the Poet and the Actors, and with the consent and positive aidance of our own Will. We chuse to be deceived, - The rule therefore may be easily inferred. What ever tends to prevent the mind from placing itself or from being gradually placed, in this state in which the Images have a negative quality, must be a defect, and consequently any thing that must force itself on the Auditors' minds as improbable - not because it is improbable (for that the whole play is foreknown to be) but because it can not but appear as such.

49

This difference was pointed out by Abrams: The Mirror and the Lamp, p. 124, and is analysed in Sychrava: Schiller to Derrida, pp. 50-57.

50

Coleridge: Lectures 1808-1819: On Literature vol. 1, p. 352.

51

Ibid. vol. 1, p. 211.

52

Ibid. vol. 2, p. 266.

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Thus "the aesthetic experience depended upon a willing and active awareness of illusion as illusion."53 Coleridge's comments here might serve as a gloss on his general objection to Wordsworth's inweaving "minute matters of fact" into his poetry, so destroying the "negative faith" of illusion. The concept of "negative reality" also points to a gap in Coleridge's thinking. For there is no necessary link between the negative reality of illusion and the "invisible realities or spiritual objects" accessible to the "inward eye" of reason. In his further commentary on The Tempest, he notes that the assistance to illusion provided by stage decoration is "dangerous," since "the spiritual vision is apt to languish, and the attraction from without will withdraw the mind from the proper and only legitimate interest which is intended to spring from within."54 It seems that Coleridge was trying to have it both ways. O n the one hand, he argues that we choose to be deceived into placing the mind in a state in which images have a negative reality, and on the other hand the "mind's eye" is equated with the reason, whose concern is with spiritual vision, and what are presumably positive realities, if invisible to the eye of the senses. The problem emerges in Coleridge's treatment of Hamlet in 1813, where he focussed on Hamlet's "Habit of brooding over the world within him" in words that are "as it were the half embodyings of Thought, that make them more than Thought, give them an outness, a reality sui generis, and yet retain their correspondence and shadowy approach to the Images and Movements within." 55 "Outness" is Berkeley's term for the sense of things external to the mind. A reporter at the lecture, condensing what Coleridge actually said as distinct from his lecture notes, recorded "Man was distinguished from the animal, in proportion as thought prevailed over sense: but in healthy processes of the mind, a balance was maintained between the impressions of outward objects and the inward operations of the intellect." 5 ' Hamlet's broodings are thus unhealthy, yet in the peroration to this lecture Coleridge is reported as saying:57 Ο blest is H e who not only in the theatre, but in the probationary Play of Human Life, possesses a Life & creative joy in his own Heart, which by the strength of the inward Illusion can supply the defects of the outward scenes - Ο happy that Actor on the Stage of real Life, for whom in the becoming Warmth & honest Fervor of his own Part the daubed Landscapes on the wormeaten Canvas, bloom as a Paradize, & whom the shiftings of the scenes awakens not out of his delightful Vision. 53 Burwick: Illusion and the Drama, p. 222. 54 Coleridge: Lectures 1808-1819: On Literature vol. 2, pp. 268-9. 55 Ibid. vol. 1, p. 540. 56 Ibid., p. 543. 57 Ibid.

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Here, in another metaphor of life as theatre, Coleridge cherished a consolatory sense of "inward Illusion" as compensating for the defects of "outward scenes"; but he elsewhere identifies the "inward eye" as the eye of reason or conscience. If not by the "mind's eye" or "inward eye," by what eye was the delightful vision of inward illusion perceived? If in his criticism of Wordsdworth's poetry, Coleridge signposted a confusion in Wordsworth's use of terms like "vision" and "inward eye," his response to "Daffodils" also points to a confusion in his own thinking about appearances, seeing and illusion. For if the inward eye ought to function in the process by which a poet might "expect to moralize his readers,"5® then Coleridge's objection to the end of the poem is understandable; but it does not seem possible to differentiate altogether this inner vision from that of "inward Illusion," which is a way of experiencing the theatre as world, and the world as theatre. The process of illusion transforms the experience of the outward senses by aestheticizing rather than by moralising it. In other words, Coleridge's concept of illusion, as developed through his reflections on Shakespeare and the drama, is essentially aesthetic, even as his concept of the function of poetry is moral. There is no easy commerce between his lofty notion of the inward eye of reason and conscience, - as it relates to his idea of Wordsworth's poetry as designed to "improve us"59, or to Shakespeare as "a writer of all others the most calculated to make his readers better as well as wiser,"60 - and his concept of the workings of illusion in poetry and in drama.

58 59 60

Coleridge: Biographia Literaria vol. 2, p. 131. Ibid. Coleridge: Lectures 1808-1819: On Literature vol. 1, p. 522. On illusion as "our opening into every version of the aesthetic," see Murray Krieger, "The Anthropological Persistence of the Aesthetic," especially p. 312.

THOMAS VOGLER

University of California, Santa Cruz

Seeking the Visible World: Wordsworth's Real Illusions

Abstract: This essay focuses on the dominant eighteenth-century model of visual perception in order to show that to follow the poetic arguments of Wordsworth, it is useful to have a grasp of the optical epistemology that influenced his concept of poetic vision and shaped his literary practice. Wordsworth is discussed as "the prophet of Lakeland" (further specified as "Lookland" and "Locke-land"), and his fascination with reflected images is traced to their being an external doubling and confirmation of his model of internal perception, as if sight were looking at its own looking. Wordsworth offers to guide his reader not to the physical location of sights, but to the proper way of seeing that is taught by and suitable for Lakeland. His work is further located in the context of the origins of the nineteenth-century tourist industry, whose function was to sell the commodity of vision to consumers. The materiality of his poetic process is related to the procedures of photographic exposure, which it anticipates, and the results of all these considerations are then brought to bear on the importance for Wordsworth of what can be called his "real illusions." I was left alone Seeking the visible world, nor knowing why. (Wordsworth, Prelude 2,292-3) Call ye these appearances [...] ? (.Prelude 8, 428)1 M y main focus in this essay will be on the eighteenth-century model of visual perception, and h o w it can help us to understand some important aspects of wordsworth's poetics of the eye. Since I want to locate Wordsworth in a context that we still share, I begin with some twentieth-century touchstones then move backwards; first, a look at Heidegger in "The Age of the World Picture": 1

Wordsworth: The Prelude 1799,1805,1850. Unless otherwise indicated, all quotations from The Prelude will be from the 1805 text as presented in this edition, identified by Book and line number in my text.

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Metaphysics grounds an age, in that through a specific interpretation of what is and through a specific comprehension of truth it gives to that age the basis upon which it is essentially formed [der Grund seiner Wesensgestalt]. This basis holds complete dominion over all the phenomena that distinguish the age.2 I would like to adopt this formulation, but with "epistemology" in place of "metaphysics" as the prior basis; for it is epistemology that tells us how we know "what is," and how we know that we know. In particular, I would like to evoke an episemological world-view, in the sense that Foucault has appropriated for the term "epist?m5," and then turn back to Heidegger's essay for a sketch of that epistemS. In it he describes scientific modernity as a mode of binding [Bindung] and blinding lucidity, where the world appears fully established as though "fixed" and "sketche [d] out in advance" 5 , providing a flat availability of objects for our view, our calculation, our research. Scientific discourse works by first constituting a world that can be approached through mediating procedures of representation - by thinking of the world, Heidegger suggests, as a collection of objects on display; as a picture, or as something picturable, naturally complicitous with the work of representation. This "world picture" Heidegger says, "when understood essentially, does not mean a picture of the world but the world conceived and grasped as picture" 4 . The world is valued as something that allows itself to be pictured by and for a subject, and modernity is definable as the moment when for something to be considered real it must take the form of a representation for a subject - an accessible representation that allows to its possessor a certain power over the world so represented. It is not always clear when "modernity" starts for Heidegger, but it is clear that the dominant tradition in Western philosophy from the time of Descartes and Locke on has agreed that the immediate objects of sense experience are not objective entities, like tables and chairs, but private interior images called "ideas" or "impressions" or "sensedata." The conscious mind is enclosed as though in a private viewing room, looking at images of the outside world projected on a screen. Rosalind Krauss has characterised as "foundationalist" the "assumption that it is in the nature of vision itself that any art practice (historical or modern) will be grounded," calling this assumption "the condition of opticality" and the "founding optic." 5 She traces "certain assumptions that paralleled one another over the last hundred years" to show how the exploitation 2

Heidegger: "The Age of the World Picture," p. 115.

3

Ibid., p. 118.

4

Ibid., p. 129.

5

Krauss: "Story of the Eye," pp. 285-7.

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of physiological optics led eventually to "the reification of the retinal surface under the logic of modernism," and provoked the criticism by Duchamp of visual productions that stop at the retina. Duchamp, who could only fight one kind of optics by invoking another, was forced to become a "spέcialίste en oculisme de precision" ("specialist in precision optics") in order to define the difference between "a kind of painting that primarily addresses itself only to the retina, to the retinal impression, and a painting that goes beyond the retina and uses the tube of paint as a springboard to something further."4 It is common to take the nineteenth century, and especially the movement that came to be known as "impressionism," as the period when scientific description became artistic prescription, transforming the processes of visual perception into a new type of art. Frederic Jameson, for example, shares this view with Krauss: This is of course what happened in impressionism when the psychological accounts of the organization of atomistic sensations into larger perceptual wholes were enlisted in an attempt to make painting reflect this psychology 'more truthfully' than did the older classical type: clearly, contemporaries of such a scientific 'truth' were unable to presevere [s/c] calmly in the conviction that their world of appearance - that of the ordinary recognizable perceptions of everyday life - was stubbornly accompanied by some ghostly realm of reality - in other words, the stimuli and sensations supposedly at work in the retina of the eye, 'objectively,' and before any transformation into the merely subjective impressions of perception. They therefore itched to turn their own appearances back into realities [...].

We need to go back further than this if we want to trace the trajectory of art as it follows the science and psychology of perception, seeking to represent not the "object" per se, but the process of perceiving the object - not the "reality" of an external object world, but the "reality" of our mode of perceiving that world. The system that Duchamp was reacting to most immediately was indeed impressionism, but impressionism itself was merely a continuation and elaboration of the complicity between optical epistemology and visual art that had been in place since the eighteenth century. Richard Rorty, in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, provides a more comprehensive and historical critique of this optical epistemology and argues that the mainstream of modern Western philosophy began at the moment the paradigm for knowing and the central problem for philosophical thought fused in a focus on the model of a knowing subject as the container [i.e. the internal "space" of the mind] of representational contents endowed with con6 7

Ibid., pp. 287-9. Duchamp had the "title" printed on his business cards during the 1920s and 30s." Jameson: "Ideology of the Text," p. 34.

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sciousness. He locates the historical origin of that focus in the rise of epistemology as the study of mental representations in the seventeenth century, and the identification of "knowledge" with mental representations based on the model of optics. Paralleling this dominant philosophical discourse has been the deliberate and thoroughly successful attempt on the part of Western artists, beginning in the early Renaissance, to construct a pictorial equivalent to vision, in a system where vision itself is already conceived as pictorial, leading to a circular complicity between a theory of vision based on a concept of picture and an ideal of the picture based on a theory of vision. In the Opticks Newton uses painting figuratively, to describe the creation of the image on the retina, where light converges "to paint the Picture of the Object upon that skin (called the Tunica Retina) with which the bottom of the Eye is covered. For Anatomists [...] can then see through the thinner Coats, the Pictures of Objects lively painted thereon. And these Pictures, propagated by Motion along the Fibres of the Optick Nerves into the Brain, are the cause of Vision." 8 In the eighteenth century, what was figural for Newton became literal for painters in the main stream, as the retinal and pictorial surfaces came to share a single set of laws and the same abstract language of the dominant scientific discourse.' Thus to aspire to be a poet in the eighteenth century required that one become a specialise en oculisme de pricision, and to follow the poetic arguments of a visionary poet like Wordsworth it can be useful to have a basic grasp of the optical epistemology that influenced his concept of poetic "vision" and shaped much of his literary practice. As we turn to Wordsworth, I'd like to look at a little Blake poem called "The Crystal Cabinet," that provides a precise model for most of what I will be discussing: T h e Maiden caught m e in the Wild W h e r e I was dancing merrily She put m e into her C a b i n e t A n d L o c k d m e u p with a golden K e y 8

Newton: Opticks, p. 15.

9

Cf. Philip Thicknesse, in his biography of Gainsborough (1788): "Mr. G like the best was born a Painter, for he told me, that during his Boyhood, though he had no idea of becoming a Painter then, yet there was not a Picturesque clump of trees, nor even a single tree of beauty, no, nor hedge row, stone, or post, at the corner of the lanes, for some miles round about the place of his nativity, that he had not so perfectly in his mind's eye, that had he known he could use a pencil, he could have perfectly delineated." Quoted from Bermingham: Landscape and Ideology, pp. 58-59. Even the "mind's eye" in this formulation is literal, as we shall see in Wordsworth.

164

Visual Perception and Verbal Representation This And And And

Cabinet is formd of Gold Pearl & Crystal shining bright within it opens into a World a little lovely Moony Night

Another England there I saw Another London with its Tower Another Thames & other Hills And another pleasant Surrey Bower Another Maiden like herself Translucent lovely shining clear Threefold each in the other closd Ο what a pleasant trembling fear Ο what a smile a threefold Smile Filld me that like a flame I burnd I bent to kiss the lovely Maid And found a Threefold Kiss returnd I strove to sieze the inmost form With ardor fierce & hands of flame But burst the Crystal Cabinet And like a Weeping Babe became A weeping Babe upon the wild And Weeping Woman pale reclind And in the outward air again I filld with woes the passing Wind 10 Our most conspicuous clue for an optical epistemological reading of this poem is the verb "Lockd," emphatically capitalized in contrast with all the other lower-case verbs in the otherwise generously capitalized text. We know that Blake read Locke early, with his usual active critical attentiveness, from his annotations to Reynolds. His poetic engagement with Locke is visible from the very beginning of his career, as this moment from An Island in the Moon (1784) suggests: Then Scopprell & Miss Gittipin, coming in Sopprell took up a book & read the following passage An Easy of Huming Understanding by John Lookye Gent. John Locke said Obtuse Angle, Ο ay Lock said Scopprell. (f4 v ) n 10 11

Blake: The Complete Poetry and Prose, pp. 488-9. For a more detailed discussion of this poem see my "Allegory of Allegory." From Phillip's edition (Blake: An Island in the Moon), an excellent facsimile version for those unable to consult the autograph manuscript in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. In the

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The word-play in this comic interlude signals the primary focus of "The Crystal Cabinet," as well as anticipating that poem's punning mode. The "easy" prosaic style of Locke's work is captured by the transformation of "Human" into "Huming," which also gestures towards the influence of Locke on David Hume and the many other commentators on the nature of human understanding who flourished in the eighteenth century.12 The transformation of Locke's name into "Lookye," together with the other vision puns (Scopprell, "Ο ay") reflects the visual-perceptual emphasis of Locke's whole system. Blake was not alone in finding the model of visual perception to be the key to Lockean epistemology. The fascination with optics inaugurated by Kepler's discovery that the eye works like a camera obscura, in which the lens causes the image of an external object to be focused on the retina - a discovery elaborated on by Descartes and further augmented and systematized by Locke and Newton - had led to a widespread infatuation with the many applications that could be spun out of a knowledge of the mechanics of the eye and optical perception.13 In the aptly named Spectator (1711-12) Addison made a condensed version of Locke's system widely available, claiming sight as the ground of all aesthetics and citing Locke as his authority: I have here supposed that my Reader is acquainted with that great Modern D i s covery which is at present universally acknowledged by all the Enquirers into manuscript the "-an" in "Human" has been overwritten by "ing" to produce "Huming." "Gent" has overwritten the first part of a longer word (words?) ending in "-man." I agree with Keynes (Blake: Complete Writings, p. 52) that the base word was "Pantryman," because the downstrokes on the "P" and "y" are clearly visible. I am also influenced by the satirical relevance to Locke's constant emphasis on the mind's "store of ideas" and their proper inventory and disposition. Bentley (Blake: William Blake's Writings, p. 886) finds the base word illegible. Erdman (Blake: Complete Poetry and Prose, p. 849) and Phillips (Blake: An Island in the Moon, p. 43) both read "Gentleman." 12 By the time Hume wrote his Treatise of Human Nature (1734-37, during a stay in France) he could confidently assert as commonplaces the basic assumptions of Locke's epistemology: "We may observe, that 'tis universally allow'd by philosophers, and is besides pretty obvious of itself, that nothing is ever really present with the mind but its perceptions [...]." Hume: A Treatise of Human Nature Book 1, part ii, sect, vi, p. 67. 13

Svetlana Alpers, in The Art ofDescribing, has a useful condensed history of optical discoveries and their implications for northern art. A number of studies have explored the importance for eighteenth-century English literature of this optical epistemology; among those I've found useful is A. D. Nuttall'sii Common Sky, a consideration of the prison metaphor in a context of modern epistemology and literature. In Confinement and Flight, W. B. Camochan traces the theme of "epistemological prisons" in its relationship with Locke's "version of mind as screened off from reality and the external world, receiving only shadowy projections of things as they are" (p. 7).

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Visual Perception and Verbal Representation

Natural Philosophy: Namely, that Light and Colours, as apprehended b y the Imagination, are only Ideas in the Mind and not Qualities that have any Existence in Matter. A s this is a Truth that has been proved incontestably by many modern Philosophers and is indeed one of the finest Speculations in that Science, if the English Reader would see the N o t i o n explained at large, he may find it in the Eighth Chapter of the second B o o k of Mr. Lock's Essay o n H u m a n Understanding. 1 4 O t h e r p o e t i c v e r s i o n s and e n d o r s e m e n t s o f L o c k e b u r g e o n e d in w o r k s like A k e n s i d e ' s Pleasures

of the Imagination

a n d T h o m s o n ' s Seasons

( 1 7 4 4 ) , B l a c k m o r e ' s Creation

(1712)

( 1 7 2 6 - 4 8 ) . A r t i s t s l o o k e d at t h e w o r l d

through

C l a u d e g l a s s e s a n d m a n y , i n c l u d i n g Sir J o s h u a R e y n o l d s , e n j o y e d t h e i r o w n camerae

obscurae.

I n An Island

in the Moon

Blake satirized the optical pursuits

o f h i s h a p p y e y e - l a n d e r s : " T h u s t h e s e h a p p y Islanders s p e n t t h e i r t i m e [...]. T h e n h e w e n t u p stairs & l o a d e d t h e m a i d , w i t h glasses, & brass t u b e s , & m a g i c p i c t u r e s . " " N o said I n f l a m m a b l e G a s s . I have g o t a c a m e r a o b s c u r a at h o m e w h a t w a s it y o u w a s talking about." 1 5 C h i l d r e n c o u l d read in w i d e l y available w o r k s like Tom

Telescope

(1761) a condensed version of the mainstream

p h i l o s o p h y o f m a n e x p l a i n i n g t h e s e n s e s , t h e nature o f u n d e r s t a n d i n g , a n d t h e o r i g i n o f ideas, w i t h a great deal m o r e o n o p t i c s a n d t h e p r i s m . 1 6 B y 1780 there were specialized t o y s h o p s t h r o u g h o u t L o n d o n where o n e c o u l d b u y e d u c a t i o n a l "scientific" t o y s like c h e a p camerae

obscurae

made

e s p e c i a l l y f o r c h i l d r e n . A l t i c k has c h a r t e d t h e p a s s i o n f o r " s h o w s " t h a t

14

15

16

Addison: ["On the Pleasures of the Imagination"] (The Spectator nos. 411-21) - Addison, Steele, et. al..: The Spectator νol. 3, pp. 276-309, here p. 284 (No. 413). Cf. also pp. 276 and 277 (No. 411): "Our Sight is the most perfect and most delightful of all our Senses. [...] We cannot indeed have a single Image in the Fancy that did not make its first Entrance through the Sight [...]. [so] that by the Pleasures of the Imagination, I mean only such Pleasures as arise originally from Sight [...]." Blake: Complete Poetry and Prose, pp. 462, 452. Blake makes the identity of this allegorical eye-land even more clear at the beginning: "In the Moon, is a certain Island near by a mighty continent, which small island seems to have some affinity to England. & what is more extraordinary the people are so much alike & their language so much the same that you would think you was among your friends" (p. 449). "All our ideas, therefore," says Tom, "are obtained either by sensation or reflection, that is to say, by means of our five senses [...] or by the operations of the mind [upon them]." Quoted from Plumb: "First Flourishing," p. xx. This little illustrated book, "Adapted to the Capacities of young GENTLEMEN and LADIES, and familiarized and made entertaining by Objects with which they are intimately acquainted," tried to do for children what Locke had done for their parents. It was one of John Newbery's great successes, going through ten editions between its initial publication (1761) and the turn of the century - and it was far from unique. Plumb discusses A Museum (fifteen editions between 1750-1800) and other examples of the genre.

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prompted profitable inventions like the Panorama, the Diorama and the Eidophusikon. In 1791 Erasmus Darwin modelled his Botanic Garden after the camera obscura,17 and ten years later William Paley, in what proved to be one of the most popular "science" books ever written, chose the eye as the instrument most clearly showing the necessity of God's existence. 18 At the end of the century Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon project (1791) was the architectural realization of a century's dream come true. Equally serviceable in his mind's eye for prisons, schools and factories, it was a physical structure in which all life's stages and functions could be carried on. The unseen warder in the center of this eye-shaped translucent building was the new word made flesh, a living embodiment of Adam Smith's psychological metaphor of the "Impartial Spectator." In a structurally comparable visual domain, the spectator was placed in the very center of the panoramic wonder of a carefully illuminated surrounding image of the city of London, an invisible viewer with nothing to disrupt his enveloping vision.19 The panorama enclosed its spectators, regulating their pleasures as they became isolated, perspectives privatized, and trained to perceive their whole field of vision as a "shew" or "spectacle." 20 This brief overview of the domination of the eye in the optical epistemology of the eighteenth century can help provide a context that makes it unnecessary to turn to Blake's private "system" to trace the allegorical implications of his poem. Locke's favorite image for the human mind was the "cabinet of perception," imagined as a camera obscura or "little Sensorium" (Newton's term) where little pictures of the external world were projected on the retinal "wall."21 It is in this same literal sense that Wordsworth refers to "the cabinet 17

"GENTLE READER! LO, here a CAMERA OBSCURA is presented to thy view, in which are lights and shades dancing on a whited canvas, and magnified into apparent life! - if thou art perfectly at leisure for such trivial amusement, walk in, and view the wonders of my

18

Paley: Natural Theology, pp. 12-33.

ENCHANTED GARDEN" (ibid., p. x v ) .

19

Cf. Altick: Shows of London and Dubbini: "Views and panoramas."

20

Cf. Altick: Shows of London, pp. 136,147, 188. "Shew" and "Spectacle" were Wordsworth's favorite words for a totalizing scenic experience. Epiphanic scenes like the view at the top of Snowdon (Prelude Book 13, 106-19) where "The universal spectacle throughout / Was shaped for admiration and delight" function precisely as panoramas, replacing "the Sea, the real Sea" with a "shew" that usurps the entire field of vision ("as far as sight cold reach").

21

For Newton God was a "Being incorporeal, living, intelligent, omnipresent, who in infinite Space, as it were in his Sensory, sees the things themselves intimately, and thoroughly perceives them, and comprehends them wholly by their immediate presence to himself. Of which things the Images only carried through the Organs of Sense into our little Sensoriums, are there seen and beheld by that which in us perceives and thinks." Newton: Opticks, p. 370.

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Visual Perception and Verbal Representation

/ O f their sensations" and plays on it figuratively as model for the interior of the mind: "Carelessly / 1 gazed, roving as through a cabinet / O r wide museum [...]." (Prelude 2, 28-29; 3, 651-53) This cabinet is described from inside in Blake's poem, according to Locke's two-stage theory of the progress of human understanding. The first stage begins with the passive reception of sensory stimuli as they are constituted on the level of primary ideas, followed by the exercise of the faculty of "reflection" which actively operates on the passively-received sensory input. B y R e f l e c t i o n then [...] I w o u l d be u n d e r s t o o d to mean, that notice which the mind takes of its o w n operations [...]. M e n then c o m e t o be furnished with fewer or m o r e simple ideas f r o m without [...] according as they m o r e or less reflect o n them [...]. A n d hence we see the reason, w h y it is pretty late b e f o r e m o s t children get ideas of the operations of their own minds [...] still the understanding turns inward u p o n itself, reflects o n its own operations, and makes them the object of its o w n contemplation. 2 2

First we see the little images on the retina, then we see ourselves seeing them ("Another England there I saw") in the second stage of reflection. In stanzas two through five the speaker of the poem describes his experiences in this second stage after his mind has been stored by sensation with primary ideas. There, perhaps with the help of T o m Telescope and the Spectator, or even John Lookye himself, he reflects on the operations of his own mind as a sophisticated observer who understands his transition from the "Wild" of unorganized sensory perception to the reflective organization within the cabinet of the mind. It is in this second stage that the discovery of the lack of correspondence between the mental representations "inside" the cabinet and their material causes "outside" can be made as the result of the futile attempt to "seize the inmost form" of images that are phantoms. The bursting of the cabinet can be seen as a second transition, in which the epistemological cabinet of perception becomes a metaphysical prison. The attempt to "seize the inmost Form" reveals that there is nothing "there" (i.e. inside) and that the "primary qualities" that are "outside" and that cause the "secondary qualities" or affective sensations in our "little lovely Moony" sensorium have no resemblance to those effects. In his Opticks Newton found the century's most vivid example of this argument in his experiments with the refraction of light: A n d if at any time I speak of Light and Rays as coloured or endued with C o l o u r s , I w o u l d be u n d e r s t o o d to speak not philosophically and properly, but grossly, and 22

Locke: Essay, Book II, chap.I, §§ 4, 7, 8 passim (pp. 124-26).

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accordingly to such Conceptions as vulgar People [...] would be apt to frame. For the Rays to speak properly are not coloured. In them there is nothing else than a certain Power and Disposition to stir up a Sensation of this or that Colour. For as Sound in a Bell or [...] other sounding Body, is nothing but a trembling Motion, and in the Air nothing but that Motion propagated from the Object. 2 1

Blake condenses the conclusion of this discursive description into his image of the "passing Wind," a perfect image for Newton and Locke's ultimate physical reality, where everything we can perceive is - in a splendid anticipation of Foucault — nothing but a bare effect of Power. I clasp'd the phantoms, and I found them air, Ο had I weigh'd it ere my fond embrace! 24

This is why Mont Blanc represented the epiphanic sublime for the eighteenth century quester; there was nothing there that could be perceived.25 Blake's "Crystal Cabinet" is an allegoric version of Shelley's "Mont Blanc," its balladlike simplicity a parody of the matter-of-fact acceptance of the Lockean system in eighteenth century thought that kept finding allegorical variations for the same inevitable conclusion. Addison's version, from The Spectator, is an influential example: In short, our Souls are at present delightfully lost and bewildered in a pleasing Delusion, and w e walk about like the Enchanted H e r o of a Romance, w h o sees beautiful Castles, Woods, and Meadows; and at the same time hears the warbling of Birds and the purling of Streams; but upon the finishing of some secret Spell, the fantastick Scene breaks up, and the disconsolate Knight finds himself on a barren Heath, or in a solitary Desart. It is not improbable that something like this may be the State of the Soul after its first Separation, in respect of the Images it will receive from Matter. 24

The "golden key" in Blake's poem reminds us that keys can both lock and unlock. In this case the golden key with the bright promise of knowledge that will unlock the mysteries of how the human mind works, is instead an "epistemological key" that locks us into a way of perceiving and understanding the world. The "me" who is locked in is at the initial phase a bundle of sensory perceptions caught by the mechanism of the eye in its little dark room, or 23 24

Newton: Opticks, p. 124-5. Young: Works vol. 1, p. 7.

25

"Remote, serene, and inaccessible [...], the power is there" (Shelley: "Mont Blanc" 11.97,127 - Complete Poetical Works, p. 534). I explore some of the rhetorical implications of this theory in "The Tropology of Silence in Eighteenth-Century English Blank Verse."

26

Addison: ["On the Pleasures of the Imagination"] - Addison, Steele, et. al.: The Spectator vol. 3, p. 283-4 (No. 413).

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camera obscura. This entrapment is graphically represented in early "portable" camerae obscurae, such as the one Robert Hooke used to demonstrate the function of the eye to the Royal Society in 1680, or the one he described in a 1694 paper for the Society. In these models the head is inserted from the bottom into the camera, which then functions like a larger head in which the user's eyes become the "mind's eye" as they gaze at the image captured on the sheet of waxed paper or glass that functions as the retina.27 Stephen Toulmin finds the prison metaphor most apt to characterize the vision of mental life held by scientific writers of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, pointing out that it is as if "our minds (or souls) are imprisoned from birth in the depths of our brains" and our conception of the external world "is like the problem facing a lifelong prisoner in solitary confinement who has no way of finding out what is going on in the world beyond the prison walls, aside from the sounds and pictures reaching him via a television set in his cell.28 Locke's metaphor for the mind as cabinet constantly plays on the punning isomorphism between the two containers, so that Blake's crystal cabinet links the crystal of the eye with the implicit mirrors in the mind seen as a cabinet of perception, the "little sensorium." Knowledge of the optic nerves as part of the mechanism for "catching" the sensory impression and turning it into an image add cabinet to the repertoire of puns at work in the poem. The "wild" is in its first instance the incoherence of the sensory manifold before it is brought into the form of images through the operation of the optic lens. "Wild" can also have positive connotations, even when it must give way to controls, as when Dorothy's "wild eyes" in "Tintern Abbey" remind Wordsworth of his own eyes before he had "learned to look on Nature." The "Maiden" and her cabinet make it hard to resist a "sexual" reading for most critics, even though the active nature of this maiden gives the male what might be considered an unusual passivity for sexual activity. Part of the equivocation here is that "sex" (as gendered active/passive, male/female) is here an allegory for something else - the play of relations between man/nature, mind/nature, direct/reflected light This allegorical gender is not an essence, or 27

See Hammond: Camera Obscura, pp. 22-3 for more detailed description and illustrations. Three centuries later Freud will use the same model for "how the mental instrument is put together," suggesting that: "we should picture the instrument which carries out our mental functions as resembling a compound microscope or a photographic apparatus, or something of the kind. On that basis, psychical locality will correspond to a point inside the apparatus at which one of the preliminary stages of an image comes into being." Freud: Interpretation of Dreams, Standard Edition vol. 5, p. 536.

28

Toulmin: "The Inwardness of Mental Life," pp. 1-16.

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an anatomical characteristic, but a structural (i.e. relational) phenomenon, similar to that used by Wordsworth in a poem like "Nutting," or in the Intimations Ode where nature is seen as acting with "something of a Mother's mind": The homely Nurse doth all she can To make her Foster-child, her Inmate Man, Forget the glories he hath known29 The interior of the cabinet is described as "Night," as is fitting for the darkened chamber of the camera obscura. The inner world, "opened" as the outer world is closed off, is "little" at this stage because the images formed on the retina of the eye are, quite literally, little.30 Its illumination is "Moony" because its source of light is always elsewhere. The images in the inner world are "Another" version of the external world. According to Locke the mind's "simple ideas are not fictions of our fancies, but the natural and regular productions of things without us." The ontological status of the pictures in the eye and in the "mind's eye" is a crucial part of Locke's system, and a basis for much of the eighteenth-century's discussion about the status of artistic representation as modelled on Lockean epistemology. It is of the utmost importance for Locke that this inner world be legitimate other in the "natural and regular productions of things without us," and not an illusion. As "an honest heir to the centuries-old English tradition of empiricism,"31 Wordsworth shared this view and used it to help "recall" himself from the "abyss of idealism to the reality."32 In his Lectures on Light (1705) Robert Hooke takes pains to explain how the eye is a "Microcosm, or a little World" that forms a perfect double for the external world, having within itself "a distinct Point [...] for every distinct Point without it self in the Universe; and when a Hemisphere of the Heavens is open to its view, it has a Hemisphere within it self."33 The poem ends with the passing "Wind" as a perfect image for the modes of invisible and incomprehensible Power that dominated eighteenth-century science, producing effects that reveal and hide the power at the same time. 29

Wordsworth: Poetical Works vol. 4, p. 281.

30

Cf. Paley: Natural Theology·. "In considering vision as achieved by the means of an image formed at the bottom of the eye, we can never reflect without wonder upon the smallness, yet correctness, of the picture, the subtilty of the touch, the fineness of the lines. A landscape of five or six square leagues is bought into a space of half an inch in diameter. [...] The prospect from Hampstead-hill is compressed into the compass of a sixpence" (pp. 21-2).

31

Abrams: Mirror and the Lamp, p. 314.

32

Havens: Mind of a Poet vol. 2, p. 155.

33

Hooke: "Lectures on Light," p. 121.

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Newton's Gravity, or his pure unrefracted white light, or Adam Smith's "invisible hand" are other names for this invisible efficacy which the Romantics would try to make the "symbol" that would answer their allegorical desire, in the hope that "Visionary power / Attends upon the motions of the winds." (Prelude 5, 619-20) At the same "moment" that the speaker of Blake's poem, expelled from his crystal cabinet, was filling with woes the passing wind, Wordsworth presented himself at the beginning of The Prelude "coming from a house / Of bondage" to find "blessing in this gentle breeze" that awakens "within / A corresponding mild creative breeze" with "vernal promises." (Prelude 1,1-50 passim) Coleridge was wondering what if all of animated nature Be but organic Harps diversely fram'd That tremble into thought, as o'er them sweeps Plastic and vast, one intellectual breeze At once the Soul of each, and God of all?34

And Shelley was invoking the West Wind as "unseen presence" through the "incantation" of his verse for another turn of the seasons, a re-turn and a re-birth of poetry: " O Wind, / If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?"55. But the only promise of Blake's unromantic "Crystal Cabinet" is a return to the "Wild" of the poem's beginning and a re-turn of the same allegorical machinery. For Locke, "the understanding [is] like the eye," and it would also be possible to use Blake's poem as a model of the organization of the inaugural formation of the "self" in his system, with all potential functions and relations organized around the accepted model of the eye and its mode of functioning, making the model of mind isomorphic with the model of the eye, and founding epistemological certainty on the model of "reflection" as a metaphor for that mode of thinking that has itself for its own object.36 This isomorphism between the eye and the I brings over to the production of the subject the same representational mediation encountered in the model of the eye, where the world is not perceived directly, but rather through "pictures" imprinted on the retinal surface. Since those pictures are in the eye, there must be another eye, a "mind's eye" capable of perceiving them. If we ask who is this implicit "I" who is telling his own story as a "me," we find that it is the Lockean "self," telling the story of how it came to be a self, 34 35 36

Coleridge: "The Eolian Harp." Complete Poetical Works vol. 1, p. 102. Shelley: O d e to the West Wind." Complete Poetical Works, p. 579. This argument is worked out in detail in my "Allegory of Allegory."

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in a system of identity formation that made him a prisoner of his own selfrepresentation. The story is an allegory of the production of the subject, in which the process cannot be imagined as a gradual progression in which "Shades of the prison-house begin to close / Upon the growing Boy."37 It is rather a moment of recognition that can only be known in the past tense. Having accepted Locke's invitation to turn his thoughts inwards upon what passes in his mind3' the speaker must find his starting point in a "turningpoint," the moment in the chronology of a self that is also the origin of self, the moment in which his being became constituted as a "self" and the "eye" of his passive perception advanced to a mental "I" of self-conscious reflection. The moment is like a second birth, the first having been into Nature or the body, the second into self-consciousness and temporality. Although the wild stage is imagined as coming before the cabinet stage, there is an inevitable sense in which as representation it can only be produced retroactively from inside the cabinet, as its temporal "outside" or preconscious past, a diachronic boundary of self. The self produced by the Lockean system is based on the premise that it is "impossible for any one to perceive without perceiving that he does perceive [...]. Thus it is always as to our present sensations and perceptions: and by this every one is to himself that which he calls Self!"39 The self constituted as such in the moment of self-recognition is by the mechanism of Lockean self-perception split or doubled and hence no longer - or not yet - whole. Morris Golden has observed that "wherever we look in the period, we are reminded that its guiding epistemological concept is Locke's divided mind, one part operating on signals from without and one observing these operations."40 This is what Wordsworth describes as a problem "That almost seems inherent in the creature, / Sensuous and intellectual as he is, / A twofold frame of body and of mind" (Prelude 11, 167-9) and causes him to feel, reflecting on his earlier spontaneous sensuous self, that he is "Two consciousnesses — conscious of myself, / And of some other being" {Prelude 2,32-3). But this is only one phase of the division; in order to complete the Lockean curriculum, we must observe ourselves observing, see ourselves seeing; that is the unavoidable division in the model of Lockean mind that makes his "principium individuationis" inevitably a principle of allegorical otherness. The "Crystal Cabinet" is a poem where we see the I of the poem seeing seeing - not the real act of seeing, 37 38 39 40

Wordsworth: "Intimations Ode." The Poems, p. 525. Locke: An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Book 2, ch. xxi, p. 119. Ibid. Book 2, chap, xxvii, §11. Golden: Self Observed, p. 10.

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we might say, only a reflection of it; but yes really, because seeing is already only a reflection, in the Lockean see-me-optics that works like a Peircian semiotics of infinite regress. The implications of this potentially infinite regressive series were already familiar to the late eighteenth-century philosophical discourse as part of the frustrating inheritance that led Coleridge to his self-appointed task as executor of the Lockean discourse, hoping that the German transcendentalists would provide the cure for his existential Angst. His own experience led him to conclude that our inner flow of perceptions (no matter how much we reflect on them) could not guarantee self-unity, and made Kant's differentiation between this empirical consciousness and a "transcendental" consciousness (holding out the promise of a base on which to connect our thoughts and experience as ours) seem like a salvation. Coleridge's eighteenth-century problem has continued into modern phenomenological epistemology, where we can find Derrida's critique of Husserl's "now" (a moment in which the identity of experience can be instantaneously present to itself) as a myth based on spatial and mechanical metaphors/1 If consciousness of self is defined in terms of knowledge of things, whereby I am a unique kind of thing since, when I hold myself up to my own "intro-spection" in an act of self-presentation, I am present to myself as no other object could be, then thepresentness of the self's presentation can never be guarantied (as the model assumes) because reflection and representation introduce difference. Such a model leads only to an infinite regress since the "subject" and "object" of reflexive introspection (the "I" looking and the "me" looked at) need to be shown to be the same entity ("myself"), and that entity - to be conscious of itself through reflection would have to look at itself and recognize itself. Representation mingles with what it represents, to the point where one speaks as one writes, one thinks as if the represented were nothing more than the shadow or reflection of the represented [...]. In this play of representation, the point of origin becomes ungraspable. There are things like reflecting pools, and images, an infinite reference f r o m one to the other, but no longer a source, a spring. There is no longer a simple origin. F o r what is reflected is split in itself and not only as an addition to itself of its image. T h e reflection, the image, the double, splits what it doubles. T h e origin of speculation becomes a difference. What can look at itself is not one. 4 2

41 42

Cf. Derrida: Speech and Phenomena, passim, especially chapter 5, "Signs and the Blink of an Eye." Derrida: Grammatology, p. 36.

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2. Wordsworthian Profit of Lakeland "And isn't it strange," said the young lady, passing with startling suddenness from Sentiment to Science, "that the mere impact of certain colored rays upon the Retina should give us such exquisite pleasure?" "You have studied Physiology, then?" a certain young Doctor courteously inquired. "Ohyes! Isn't it a sweet Science?" Arthur slightly smiled. "It seems a paradox, does it not," he went on, "that the image formed on the Retina should be inverted?" "It is puzzling," she candidly admitted. "Why is it we do not see things upside-down?" "You have never heard the Theory, then, that the Brain also is inverted?" Lewis Carroll, Sylvie and Bruno "You are old, Father William," the young man said "'And your hair has become very white: And yet you incessantly stand on your head — Do you think, at your age, it is right?" Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland43 Derrida's "Things like reflecting pools" are an essential feature of the landscape for Wordsworth, "the prophet of Lakeland," whose art sought to be a pictorial equivalent to vision - not in the production of objects to be seen, but rather as exemplary of the kind of vision appropriate to his "Lookland," which is also his "Locke-land." 44 Wordsworth's encounters with the "real" are at all times mediated by the dominant optical epistemology, and the beauty he found in reflected images is partly due to their being an external doubling and confirmation of his model of internal perception, as if sight were looking at its own looking. Thus in describing "the appropriate enjoyments" of "the sense of vision," Wordsworth insists that "the presence of a lake is indispensable to exhibit in perfection" the full beauty of the scene. "The reason of this is, that the havens are not only brought down into the bosom of the earth, but that the earth is mainly looked at, and thought of, through the medium of a purer element."45 In his Guide to the Lakes as well as in his poetry, Wordsworth 43 Carroll: Sylvie and Bruno, pp. 242-3; Alice in Wonderland, p. 37. 44

De Selincourt refers to Wordsworth as "the prophet of Lakeland" in his introduction to the Guide to the Lakes, p. ix. 45 Wordsworth: Guide to the Lakes, p. 47. Cf. also pp. 5,11,13,32,39-41,106-07,139, for his

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offers to guide his reader not to the physical location of sights, but to the proper way of seeing that is taught by and suitable for Lakeland. As a "guide," Wordsworth can be seen as part of an emerging and flourishing tourist industry, the function of which was to sell the "commodity" of vision to consumers. O n one level - and a very successful one - his "commodity" can be seen as books. From the 1840s on, inexpensive illustrated editions of Wordsworth "appeared at the statistical average of two a year until the end of the nineteenth century." 46 But in a more profound sense, Wordsworth's product was immaterial. He was offering the possibility of a relationship with nature as a spiritual resource, a concept his works did so much to create. Thus we can see him as a full-fledged member of the tourist industry, where the product sold, "in its most general form, is a commodified relation to the Other." 47 In his first letter on the proposed Kendal and Windemere Railway, Wordsworth notes that Lakeland is an economically depressed area that "has little to send out," and that "The staple of the district is, in fact, its beauty and its character of seclusion and retirement." 48 As a tourist attraction, it is uniquely favored to take advantage of "relish for choice and picturesque natural scenery [which] is quite of recent origin,"49 but which is also "neither inherent in mankind, nor a necessary consequence of even a comprehensive education."50 In the second letter he makes this point even more explicit, stating that "the perception of what has acquired the name of picturesque and romantic scenery is so far from being intuitive, that it can be produced only by a slow and gradual process of culture." 51 This "perception" can be seen as Wordsworth's "product," and the potential consumers those who aspired to the status of what Addison called the "Man of a Polite Imagination," who

46

47

48 49 50 51

favoring of views "from the bosom of the Lake" (p. 5). Future references to this work will be included in the text as Guide. Woodring: "Wordsworth and the Victorians," p. 268. As was fitting for a poet whose work was dedicated to the gaze, and to reporting "natural" sights and their effects on the sensitive viewer, many of these tried to find visual equivalents for the poetic images through illustration. Frow: "Tourism and the Semiotics of Nostalgia," p. 150. Also Cf. Williams: The Country and the City: "Like the landscaped parks, where every device was employed to produce a natural effect, the wild regions of mountain and forest were for the most part objects of conspicuous aesthetic consumption: to have been to the named places, to exchange and compare the travelling and gazing experiences, was a for of fashionable society" (p. 128). Wordsworth: Guide to the Lakes, p. 148. Ibid., p. 149. Ibid., p. 150. Ibid., p. 157.

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meets with a secret Refreshment in a Description, and often feels a greater Satisfaction in the Prospect of Fields and Meadows, than another does in the Possession. It gives him, indeed, a kind of Property in every thing he sees, and makes the most rude uncultivated Parts of Nature administer to his Pleasures: So that he looks upon the World, as it were, in another light, and discovers in it a Multitude of Charms, that conceal themselves from the generality of Mankind. 52

In this context, all of Wordsworth's work, not just the Guide to the Lakes, can be seen as part of the new emphasis on "an 'eye' believed to yield direct, unmediated, and personally verified experience."53 Adler's account of the eighteenth-century historical connection between tourism and sightseeing, an emphasis that had not previously existed, identifies the "historically new, overweaning emphasis upon the isolated exercise and systematic cultivation of the sense of sight," in a practice of "sightseeing" that must be understood in relation to the historical development (and eventually popularization) of postBaconian and Lockeian orientations towards the problem of attaining, and authoritatively representing knowledge. They must be seen in relation to forms of subjectivity anchored in willfully interpreted vision, and in the cognitive subjugation of a world of 'things.' Above all, they need to be understood in relation to that European cultural transformation which Lucien Febvre first termed 'the visualization of perception.' 54

The self-conscious investment of Wordsworth's poetry in literal and figurative "vision" can hardly be emphasized enough. His career as a poet may be said to have started when he found himself "left alone / Seeking the visible world nor knowing why" (Prelude 2,292-3). When he is arrested on Westminster Bridge, it is by "A sight so touching in its majesty" that it provokes a corresponding poem. The inception of his poetic calling, as it is recalled late in The Prelude, is of a visual recognition: "I seem'd about this period to have sight / Of a new world, a world, too, that was fit / To be transmitted and made visible / To other eyes" (Prelude 12, 370-3). The major turning-point in his career that came with "Tintern Abbey" in 1798, combined a theory of the production of his consciousness with the manifestation of it in the poetic act 52

Addison: ["On the Pleasures of the Imagination"] - Addison, Steele, et al.: The Spectator vol. 3, p. 278 (No. 411). Wordsworth suggests that In order to claim this "property" as intellectual capital, what is needed is training, not trains, if "persons who must labor daily with their hands [...] can be trained to a profitable intercourse with nature where she is the most distinguished by the majesty and sublimity of her forms" (Guide, p. 152). The distance between London and Lakeland is like that between Egypt and Canaan in Exodus, not to be measured in miles.

53 54

Adler: "Origins of sightseeing," p. 11. Ibid, p. 8.

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o f beholding again a scene he had carried with him as a "picture of the mind." His gaze in that poem is matured, for he has "learned/ T o look on nature," and seeks to share the results with his readers. H e inaugurates the new century with his "Prospectus," which continues the new-found focus on " T h e transitory Being that beheld / This Vision," and when his poetic powers begin to fail it is as a loss of seeing that he can most vividly express his anxiety: " I see by glimpses now; when age comes on / May scarcely see at all" (Prelude 9 , 3 3 8 - 9 ) . T h e basic move in almost all o f Wordsworth's poetry can be seen as a shift of vision, from a lower one of limited pleasure to a higher one of "insight." Thus the great Ode, with its loss of vision ("The things which I have seen I now can see no more") moves through that loss to a new vision of the "eye / That hath kept watch o'er man's mortality." It would not be inappropriate to suggest that a roving photographer, shooting pictures to be kept faithfully in an album, storing up images for future restoration, would have a striking resemblance to Wordsworth's selfrepresentation as a poet of visual experience recollected in tranquillity. When he praises "the Art whose subtle power could stay / Y o n cloud, and fix it in that glorious shape," if we did not know that the poem was a tribute to "the sight of a beautiful picture, painted by Sir G. H . Beaumont, Bart.," we might well take it for a tribute to the photographer and his art: Thou, with ambition modest yet sublime, Here, for the sight of mortal man, hast given To one brief moment caught from fleeting time The appropriate calm of blest eternity.

T h e quality of the image itself is not a concern here, but rather its ability to stop the motion of time, "T'arrest the fleeting images that fill / The mirror of the mind, and hold them fast" 55 - not to be a "sight" unto itself, but to be a reminder o f that "originary" experience, to represent a way of seeing where the image captured and fixed on the photographic plate is like the image fleetingly recorded on the retina of the eye, its referent not an object but a sensation. T h e system is of course circular since - as we shall see in more detail - the way of seeing (including the selection of the sight) is valued for its ability to produce the image that will recall its own production. T h e word "image" in this context brings with it the force of an empiricist theory of knowledge, invoking those images of the objects of sense which arise in the mind in perception, for which the photograph functions as paradigmatic image. 55

Cowper: The Task. The Poetical Works, p. 152.

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Wordsworth's Daffodil poem ("I wandered lonely as a cloud") is a perfect verbal analogue for this "snapshot" poem. The subject presents itself suddenly: "When all at once I saw a crowd, / A host, of golden daffodils. [...] Ten thousand saw I at a glance, / Tossing their heads in sprightly dance." The golden "wealth" of this "show" enters the lens of the poetic eye where it is imprinted for future restoration, when it can again "flash upon that inward eye / Which is the bliss of solitude."56 The "inward eye" here is not a metaphor, but a literal description of the simple two-stage version of the model of perception. It will be able to "recall" the image that has been stored up because the original experience was already the perception by the internal "eye" of a mediated reality available only as an internal image. The materiality of this poetic process matches perfectly the procedures of photographic exposure.57 It could readily be - as indeed it often was - doubled by the pressing of "real" daffodils between the pages of this poem, or daisies with "To the Daisy," or celandines with "The small celandine," and so on, in a literalizing of the same trope that Lewis Carroll (himself an excellent photographer!) uses for the capture of that "golden afternoon" represented by the production of the first Alice book: Alice! A childish story take, And with a gentle hand Lay it where Childhood's dreams are twined In Memory's mystic band, Like pilgrim's withered wreath of flowers Pluck'd in a far-off land.58

56 See my Troping the Seasons" for a more extended discussion of "golden load" imagery. 57 The Wordsworthian poetics can be seen as a focus on certain positions within a structure; these positions are underwritten by a conceptual structure, the structural requirements of which the practice of photography very neatly fits and fulfils, as if it makes the figurative come literally true - as if (and indeed it functions as) it were ».photograph of that system. The structure is that of having an "experience" in the Lockern schema, where the terms and practice of photography literalize the figures (themselves claiming a reality status) used by Locke for having an experience. Primary ideas enter the "cabinet" of the mind (camera or chamber) where they imprint themselves on the tabula rasa, thence giving rise to and becoming subject to ideas of "reflection" as they achieve full "mental" status in the conceptual mimesis of the "real world" outside the camera. 58 Carroll: Alice, p. 18. Lewis Carroll's transformations of mundane reality through "looking glass" reflections deserve more attention as analogues of Wordsworth's project than I can give them here. He could parody Wordsworth so well only because he knew him so well, and shared his visionary goals.

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A poem like "I wandered lonely" makes it seem so effortless and automatic that it is easy to overlook the important psychological implications of the system. A visual experience like this is like a successful shuttle-launch; it is valuable in and of itself, but its success also shows that the whole operation is working as it should be and is reliable. In a similar way "My Heart leaps up when I behold" shows the importance of steady, repetitive, affective response for a sense of stable identity (continuity of the subjective "I" with the "mind's eye"), proving that the image storing and retrieval system can continue to work even when the adult knows the laws of optical refraction.. Now, for a more ambitious and complex example, let us consider a heroic simile of vision in Book 8 of The Prelude. Originally written for Book 6, in an attempt to express his feeling of anti-climax at having crossed the Alps (the literal goal) but having missed the anticipated "experience" (the visionary goal), this passage is Wordsworth's version of Blake's "Crystal Cabinet" poem, Locked in a model of perception that leads to too much clarity and fixity, to an all - too - clear vision of vision that eliminates Vision, that "perceives it die away, / And fade into the light of common day."59 As when a traveller hath from open day With torches passed into some vault of earth, The grotto of Antiparos, or the den Of Yordas among Craven's mountain tracts, He looks and sees the cavern spread and grow, Widening itself on all sides, sees, or thinks He sees, erelong, the roof above his head, Which instantly unsettles and recedes Substance and shadow, light and darkness, all Commingled, making up a canopy Of shapes, and forms, and tendencies to shape, That shift and vanish, change and interchange Like spectres - ferment quiet and sublime, Which, after a short space, works less and less Till, every effort, every motion gone, The scene before him lies in perfect view Exposed and lifeless as a written book. (Prelude 8, 711-77)

Such "clarity" of disillusioned vision is lifeless in its fixity, where the inner image is reduced to a "perfect view," or reflection of the external. This simile of expectation simultaneously fulfilled and disappointed is the visionary anticlimax that hovers over The Prelude like the crisis moment of Blake's "Crystal 59

"Intimations Ode," 11. 76-7.

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Cabinet," or the grim fulfilment in the "Intimations Ode" when the "glory" is put out by the "light of common day." We can get still closer to the nature of the experience in this passage for if we note the shift in location, from a liminal anti-climax in Book 6, a place marking a similar "moment" ("the hour, / The moment rather say [...]. The very moment [...]. Twas a moment's pause: / All that took place within me came and went / As in a moment") described in Book 8, when he has made the long-anticipated entry into the city of London, crossing a visionary threshold as well as a physical one, only to find "vulgar forms / Of houses, pavement, streets, of men and things, / Mean shapes on every side," when images of the "real" London replace his anticipations, rendering him the passive recipient of a merely mechanical model of perception: "Great God! / That aught external to the living mind / Should have such mighty sway." This domination by the external is the opposite of what Wordsworth experienced in those "moments, worthy of all gratitude," in which "We have had deepest feeling that the mind / Is lord and master, and that outward sense / Is but the obedient servant of her will" (Prelude 11, 271-4); it represents the oft-repeated crisis "moment" of The Prelude, coming predictably when least expected, as when Wordsworth first saw the "real" Mont Blanc, and "grieved / To have a soulless image on the eye / Which had usurped upon a living thought / That never more could be."60 This anti-climax is Wordsworth's version of a common tourist experience: the failure to complete what Urrey describes as "a kind of hermeneutic circle" between the "markers" (e.g. guidebooks, descriptions, visual representations) and the experience of the image for oneself in a process of "authentification" of the relationship between origin and trace.61 Wordsworth has entered that uneasy space of simulation, where a "sight" cannot be seen without its "marker" (in MacCannel's sense) or representation, and the representation (here Wordsworth's anticipatory mental image) tends to become constitutive of the sight as it "removes or defers the sight from any undifferentiated immediacy."62

60

The Prelude, Book 6,11. 453-6. Compare the recollection of the sparkling patch of light in Book 8 (11.559-86) that can be "seen" in a hundred different ways. These visual delights are preserved by not visiting their source, which "Twas doubtless nothing more / Than a black rock [...] wet with constant springs" (11. 567-8).

61

Urrey: "Tourist Gaze," p. 140. Another conspicuous example centered on a conventional tourist sight is Wordsworth's visit to the site of the Bastille, described in Prelude, Book 9: "I looked for something which I could not find, / Affecting more emotion than I felt" (11. 70-1). Van den Abbeele: "Sightseers," p. 11.

62

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In Book 6 the anti-climax of the anticipated peak experience of Mont Blanc is followed by "The woundrous Vale / Of Chamouny," which "reconciled us to realities." A comparable reconciliation to "realities" comes in the Book 8 simile, immediately after the scene is reduced to "perfect view" and thereby rendered "Exposed, and lifeless as a written book" But let him pause awhile and look again, And a new quickening shall succeed, at first Beginning timidly, then creeping fast Through all which he beholds: the senseless mass, In its projections, wrinkles, cavities, Through all its surface, with all colours streaming, Like a magician's airy pageant, parts, Unites, embodying everywhere some pressure O r image, recognized or new, some type O r picture of the world - forests and lakes, Ships, rivers, towers, the warrior clad in mail, The prancing steed, the pilgrim with his staff, The mitred bishop and the t h r o ^ d king A spectacle to which there is no end. (Prelude 8, 728—41)

There is no reductive correspondence here between an external real object and its image on the retina; there is rather a play of representation (call it Imagination) which uses the sensory stimulus to go beyond the merely real. The cavern becomes like an animated version of Pope's famous grotto at Twickenham, a visionary scene in which new and old "images" can be projected and combined and recombined in endless combination.63 This simile in Book 8 can thus be seen as a condensed version of the structural shift of The Prelude from the mise-en-scene of London to Lakeland. Book 8 is produced as a response to the "spectacle" of St. Bartholomew's fair in London, that puts "The whole creative powers of man asleep" (7, 655-6) and to the theatrical "spectacles / Within doors" and "those mimic sights that ape / The absolute presence of reality / [...]. imitations fondly made in plain / Confession of man's weakness" (7,245-55passim). It is not so much a failure of mimesis in the usual sense (correspondence between representation and 63

Cf. Pope's letter to Edward Blount, 2 June 1725: "When you shut the doors of this grotto it becomes on the instant, from a luminous room, a camera obscura, on the walls of which all the objects of the river, hills, woods, and boats, are forming a moving picture in their visible radiations; and when you have a mind to light it up, it affords you a very different scene." Quoted in Hammond: Camera Obscura, p. 94. A similar effect was produced each year in the Royal Academy exhibitions, with the walls of their large rooms covered completely with "images" in the form of paintings.

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object) but its mechanical excess that provokes Wordsworth in London; and it is over against such sights that he has "singled out / Some moments" for Book 8. Among the "moments" exhibited in Book 8 we can take the three optical illusions of the shepherd (391-428) as exemplary of Wordsworth's insistence that a natural illusion can be more desirable (for its truth and moral beauty) than an exact perception or mimetic representation. In the first, "suddenly / surprized with vapours," the shepherd seems "In size a giant, stalking through the fog, / His sheep like Greenland bears." At other times his form flashes forth "glorified / By the deep radiance of the setting sun," or as an elevated silhouette, seen as "A solitary object and sublime, / Above all height, like an aerial cross." In this triple optical illusion Wordsworth asserts that the shepherd is "a man / With the most common" who can nevertheless be seen as "exalted" through the aid of vapors, fog, rain, surprise and distorted perspective - without whose help he would be reduced to the mundane realm of "meanness, selfish cares, / Coarse manners, vulgar passions, that beat in / O n all sides from the ordinary world / In which we traffic" and to the "deformities of crowded life, / And those ensuing laughters and contempts" that inevitably follow (8,423-66passim). If we dare to "Call [...] these appearances [...]. A shadow, a delusion" it will be because we are "fed / By the dead letter [i.e. of things as they are] not the spirit of things." (8,428-32). Yet they are clearly presented as illusory with respect to ordinary optical perception of reality. What such moments offer is, I suggest, a shift from optical epistemology to optical metaphysics; they are "natural" optical phenomena that let us see - by troping our ordinary seeing - the spiritual realities hidden behind the dead letter of ordinary perception. What distinguishes the "dead letter" objects that appear to the mind in ordinary perception from those of the Imagination is the reductive existence of a familiar referent, a known object of sense. But the status of the image perceived by the mind's eye, from the point of view of the properties of the image perse, cannot distinguish the image of a (real) sensed object from that of an imagined object or real illusion - both the object of experience and the object of Imagination are available as mental images inside the subject. Thus in the most exalted epiphanic moments in The Prelude "the light of sense / Goes out in flashes that have shewn to us / The invisible world" (6, 434-6.). The "imagination" in such moments can be imaged as an "unfathered vapour" because it is the natural miracle of evaporation, transforming water into air, matter into spirit, dead textual letter into allegorical significance, that both causes and figures the optical experience as simultaneously reality and illusion, or real illusion. This visionary transformation of the real marks Wordsworth's key experiences, from the first book, where the "spectacle" of the

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uprearing crag in the boat-stealing scene replaces the "familiar shapes / Of hourly objects" with "huge and mighty forms that do not live" yet "like living men" move slowly through his mind - to the epiphany atop Snowdon at the end, where "a huge sea of mist" and "vapours" produce "shapes" that usurp upon "the real Sea [...] as far as sight could reach," producing a "shew" and "universal spectacle shaped for admiration and delight" (13,108-117passim) .M While Wordsworth shows no qualms in presenting these experiences in The Prelude as illusions, in the ordinary sense, in the Guide he actually goes to great lengths to praise and explain the optical effects of evaporated water: "Vapours exhaling from the lakes and meadows after sunrise, in a hot season, or, in moist weather, brooding upon the heights, or descending towards the valleys with inaudible motion, give a visionary character to everything around them; and are in themselves so beautiful as to dispose us to enter into the feelings of those simple nations [...] by whom they are taken for guardian deities of the mountains."65 There are frequent places that remind us of Wordsworth's claim that the Guide "will tend naturally to illustrate"66 his poems, as well as explaining "the superiority, in point of visual interest, of mountainous over other countries" because "their apparent forms and colours are perpetually changed by the clouds and vapours which float round them: the effect indeed of mist or haze, in a country of this character, is like that of magic."67 At times these "model" descriptions68 can be quite detailed, as when, under the heading CUMBRIAN PHENOMENA, he first describes a "singular phenomenon" of the category "reflections from still water." Walking by the side of Ullswater upon a calm September morning, I saw, deep within the bosom of the lake, a magnificent Castle, with towers and battlements, nothing could be more distinct than the whole edifice; - after gazing with delight upon it for some time, as upon a work of enchantment, I could not but regret that my previous knowledge of the place enabled me to account for the appearance. It was in fact the reflection of a pleasure-house called Lyulph's Tower - the towers and battlements magnified and so much changed in shape as not to be immediately recognized. In the meanwhile, the pleasure-house itself was altogether hidden from my view by a body of vapour stretching over it and along the hill-side on which it stands, but not so as to have intercepted its communication with the lake; and hence this novel and most impressive object, which, if I had been a stranger to the spot, 64

See my Preludes to Vision, pp. 86-92 for more discussion of this scene.

65

Wordsworth: Guide to the Lakes, pp. 45-6.

66

Ibid., p. viii.

67

Ibid., pp. 28-9.

68

Ibid., p. vii.

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would from its being inexplicable have long detained the mind in a state of pleasing astonishment Appearances of this kind, acting upon the credulity of early ages, may have given birth to, and favoured the belief in, stories of subaqueous palaces, gardens, and pleasure grounds - the brilliant ornaments of Romance.69 In contrast with "this inverted scene" he then goes on to describe "a much more extraordinary phenomenon" that shows how "elegant fancies" can have their origin "less in invention than in the actual processes of Nature." H e goes on to describe the spectacular effect ("Marvellous was the illusion!") of seeing a "new" island in Lake Grasmere, one that was "much the more distinct" than the "old" island, and would prevent any Stranger from being persuaded that "there exists only a single Island" on the lake. As the image fades into inversion, "We now perceived that this bed of ice, which was thinly suffused with water, had produced the illusion, by reflecting and refracting (as persons skilled in optics would no doubt easily explain) a rocky and woody section of the opposite mountain named Silver-how."70 In both cases, "the actual processes of Nature" have produced optical effects that result in retinal images that are not linked to a corresponding reality in the usual way, but both are "phenomena" that can be resolved into optical illusions at play in the cabinet of perception. To the untrained eye the illusions would be mistaken for reality; but to the trained eye they are real illusions, wherein Nature shows us how to see ourselves seeing, so that real images can be free from the ordinary limits of referential correspondence, allowing the visionary experience to transcend the merely optical, even while relying on real illusions as an enabling stimulus. The result is Wordsworth's equivalent to the breaking of the cabinet of reflection in Blake's poem, real illusions that reveal the illusion of the real.

69 70

Ibid., p. 108-09. Ibid., pp. 109-10 passim.

Sensory and Illusory Effects in Art, Music, and Dance

Ε . S. SHAFFER

University of East Anglia, Norwich

The Death of the Artist and the Birth of Art History: Appearance, Concept, and Cultural Myth Abstract: This essay examines the genre of the "Life of the Artist," using the Life of Salvator Rosa as a prime example, to show how the diverse development of the "Life" as literary form played on the one hand into the Romantic movement, with its stress on the particularity of the artist's experience, and on the other hand into the development of a "scientific" art history, with its opposing stress on the characterization of styles, movements, and epochs. The earlier anecdotal "Vita" stemming from Vasari was elaborated through a variety of forms, from local legend to imaginary biography such as William Beckford's Biographical Memoirs of Extraordinary Painters (1780) and fictional representations such as Lady Morgan's biography of Salvator (1822). The development of art history through the neglected J. D. Fiorillo, and especially C. F. Rumohr, is stamped by the conflicting possibilities in the genre of the "Life" which prompted at the outset explicit critical discussion of issues current in the debates in literary theory and in the "New" Art History. Recent critics proclaim the 'novelty' of old arguments that had already taken productive forms within the Romantic dialogue, while using them as weapons against the very predecessors who had first formulated the arguments. The 'death' or 'disappearance' of the author in our time has been much vaunted, from the N e w Criticism (Wimsatt in his now classic essay "The Intentional Fallacy" in pursuit of the dethronement of biographical criticism) to the more flamboyant formulations by Barthes in the influential essay, "The Death of the Author": "the text is henceforth made and read in such a way that at all its levels the author is absent."1 Foucault still more melodramatically proclaimed: "Where a work had the duty of creating immortality, it now attains the right to kill, to become the murderer of its author."2 Through a structural approach to the text, through the notion of iaiture as a concern for the conditions of any text, and more fundamentally through the need to discuss "the functional 1 2

Barthes: "The Death of the Author." Foucault: "What is an Author?"

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conditions of specific discursive practices," the author has been replaced by "the author factor," that is, the functions referred to by the name 'author'. N e w historicists and cultural materialists have capitalized on the elimination of the author to open the evacuated text to the tides of history and politics. Despite the heated attacks on the notions of the author and biography in N e w Critical, Structuralist, N e w Historicist and Deconstructive discussions, all of which regularly set up Romanticism as a straw man whose supposed stress on author (and authority), biography, unity, and autonomy are what is to be overcome, surprisingly little attention has been paid to the characteristic form of the biography of the artist, the 'Life of the Artist'. In Barthes' handling, the relationship between artist and work is often quite unproblematic, as in his essays on Arcimboldo and Ειΐέ; he is even content to write of the "clear intentionality" behind images.3 Foucault claims that his "authorfunction" applies also to painting and music; but he passes on rapidly to "initiators of discursive practices." 4 This neglect is the more surprising as our own investigation shows that the theory and practice of the 'Life of the Artist' in the Romantic period are particularly rich in discussions of the 'death of the artist' in a sense equivalent to Barthes' 'death of the author'. Between 1750 and 1830 the momentous shift from an aesthetics of illusion to an aesthetics of imaginative construction within nature took place. The development of the Life of the Artist in two contrasting directions during this period was deeply implicated in this epochal change. The relatively undeveloped form of traditional anecdotes and unsifted facts grew into, on the one hand, full-scale Romantic fictions representing the significant experience of the artist, and on the other hand, an increasingly disciplined search for sources of the significant facts of artists' lives and works. Early in the nineteenth century 'scientific' art history disowned Romantic fictions, and declared the death of the form of the 'Life'. Yet in the first practitioners the tendencies are closely intertwined, and the development of art history is inseparable from the Romantic 'Charakteristik'. The crux lies in the location of significance. The beginning of the shift in England may be seen in William Beckford's undeservedly neglected Biographical Memoirs of Extraordinary Painters (Ί780), a series of imaginary Lives of the Artists, in which Beckford, as in so much of his oeuvre, foreshadows Romantic positions, as well as initiating his 3

4

For his essays on Arcimboldo and Ε π έ see Barthes: The Responsibility of Forms, pp. 103-28, and 129-48; for the "intentional signification of images," see "Rhetoric of the Image," in The Responsibility of Forms, p. 22. Foucault: "What is an Author?," p. 134.

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own career as a writer, collector, patron, and critic of the arts.5 How much the development of the Life of the Artist owes to significant literary figures is evident throughout the period. The development of the shift towards its full Romantic statement may be seen in the Life of the Artist in the hands of J. D. Fiorillo, the first professor of art history at Göttingen, who furthered the transformation of the Lives into a systematic history of art, from his early Life of Salvator Rosa to his ambitious and wide-ranging Geschichte der zeichnenden Künste von ihrer Wiederauflebung bis auf die neuesten Zeiten [History of the Pictorial Arts from their Reawakening to the Present Time] (1798-1820). Fiorillo's influence as a teacher stretched over the ensuing generation: among his illustrious pupils were both W. H. Wackenroder, who with Ludwig Tieck wrote the Herzensergiessungen eines kunstliebenden Klosterbruders [Outpourings of the Heart of an Art-loving Monk] (1797), establishing the Romantic literary form of the exploration of the nature of art through the fictional life of the artist; and C. F. Rumohr, the founder of the discipline of source studies, whose book Italienische Forschungen [Italian Researches] (1827-31) is the acknowledged turning-point between the tradition of the Lives and the professional practice of scientific art history. In England, the novelist Sydney Owenson, Lady Morgan, in her Life and Times of Salvator Rosa (1822) developed the Life as a full-blown Romantic biographical fiction, and William Hazlitt developed the Life of the Artist (in contradistinction to the Life of the Poet) in relation to the power of the self-referring sign. The appearance so essential to illusionism gave way to a nature in which imagination could discern its own products and embody them in immanent form, and having accomplished this complex operation, perceive them directly again as appearance. Beckford's Extraordinary Painters was perceived by its first reviewers mainly as a precocious schoolboy jape, intended as a satire on contemporary artists whose identity, however, remained irritatingly unclear to them. When the book was given a second edition in 1824 and a third in 1834 mainly on the strength of Beckford's reputation as 'author of Vathek,' he received one laudatory review, from John Gibson Lockhart, Scott's biographer, who wrote that the biographies were "a series of sharp and brilliant satires on the Dutch and Flemish schools - the language polished and pointed - the sarcasm at once deep and delicate - a performance in which the buoyancy of juvenile spirits sets off the results of already extensive observation, and the judgements of a 5

See Shaffer "William Beckford's Biographical memoirs of extraordinary painters and the genre of the 'life of the Artist' in the eighteenth century" (abstract). Transactions of the Eighth International Congress on the Enlightenment, pp. 1424-7.

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refined [...] taste." 6 This view of Beckford's aim misled critics further, in that it was accepted as the full explanation, although it could at best refer to only two of the six Lives. A n d ^ Parreaux, Beckford's most substantial critic in this century, following Lockhart's suggestion that the Extraordinary Painters was a series of satires on the Dutch and Flemish schools, traced some of Beckford's passages to Jean-Baptiste Descamps' Vies despeintres flamandes (1753-4), which Beckford owned and annotated. 7 While noting that several other works from Beckford's Library sold in 1823 belonged to this genre, Parreaux did not explore further the relation of Beckford's book to the genre of the Life of the artist. In England the genre of the Life of the artist had arrived relatively late. The 'Life of the Artist' was first practised effectively in modern times by Vasari, whose Lives of the most eminent Italian Architects, Painters and Sculptors from Cimabue to the Present (1550) established the European model for the genre.8 Vasari's Vite were imbued with a strong conviction of the excellence of the artists whose Lives he related. He had presented Renaissance art in Italy as evolving through technical achievements such as the gradual mastering of perspective and proportion, yet giving life again to a classical norm. He had explicitly excluded the Gothic and the 'maniera tedesca,' the Germanic style; the Middle Ages were at best the prehistory of the cycle of rebirth. Gradually the genre spread, to Germany, to France, to Spain, and last of all to England, where there were fewer artists to catalogue, and considerable uncertainty about whether there was or could be a specifically English art history. Joachim von Sandrart, a painter by profession, wrote his massive account of Northern artists, Der deutsche Akademie in 1675-9; Beckford owned the Latin version of 1683. Several series of major Lives appeared, by French critics: especially important were those by the diplomat and amateur Andre Felibien, Entretiens sur les vies et sur les ouvrages des plus excellens peintres anciens et modernes (1666-88) - which also appears in the sale catalogue of Beckford's library of 1823 - and Roger de Piles, Dissertation sur les ouvrages des plus fameux peintres avec la vie de Rubens (1681). Antonio de 6 7

8

The New Monthly Magazine, 71 (1824), p. 151. Quoted in Beckford: Biographical Memoirs of Extraordinary Painters, p. 27. Page references are to this edition. Parreaux: "Les peintres extraordinaires de Beckford sont-ils satires des icoles flamandes et hollan daises?" (1961). That Parreaux discussed Extraordinary Painters only in an article in a relatively unknown journal, and did not discuss it in his substantial study of Beckford's oeuvre: 'William Beckford (1960), has undoubtedly contributed to its relative neglect. Vasari: Le Vite de'piu eccellenti architettipittori et scultori italiani da Cimabue insino a' tempi nostri (1986); for translations see the bibliography.

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Castro y Velasco Palomino, a well-known fresco painter, wrote an account of the lives of Spanish artists, El Pamaso espanol pintoresco laureado (1724). Translations and adaptations of Palomino's book were important in eighteenth-century England, for in Spain, as in England, visiting or foreign-born artists had played a leading role. While the Lives were not limited only to the artists of one country - artists tended to be peripatetic - , there was usually a national bias, discernible in the attempt either to add to the number of national artists, or to alter the emphasis of the progress of art to give due weight to national interests. For example, F£libien's most important Life was the substantial Life of Poussin (1724). Where Vasari had stressed the supremacy of Michelangelo, and G. Bellori (who brought Vasari up to date in the seventeenth century) had elevated Raphael to the superior place and argued that the successors to the great Italians of Vasari's Lives were to be found in Annibale Carracci, Domenichino and Poussin, Fdlibien strengthened the case for his countryman Poussin. Moreover, he placed a new emphasis on Poussin's experiences in Paris, rather than in Italy, despite his own decisive personal encounter with Poussin in Rome. A feature of Romantic art criticism would be the argument that the Carracci brothers and Domenichino represented not the continuing superiority but in fact the decadence of Italian art. Thus not only the existence of a national art but the relative merits of the various styles, groupings and periods was an issue from the start, even in the most primitive fact-gathering or legend-mongering accounts. Descamps' Vies must be looked at in this context. As president of the Academy of Antwerp, writing in French, he is endeavouring to present the painters of his country, and its cultural centre, Antwerp, in the most favourable light possible, given the general acceptance of the superiority of Italian painting, and his own acquiescence in the negative judgements on pre-Renaissance painting. His Life of Dürer gives an excellent summary of the negative judgements, and he generalizes them for the North in his Life of Ottovenius. He draws on De Piles' defense of colour over line, especially in the case of Rubens, to make a strong case for colour as a technical achievement of Flemish art, which controversies in the French Academy had made at least a tenable position; and he goes on to state a similar claim for chiaroscuro effects, in his Life of Rembrandt (while still paying lip service to the notion that the Flemings had had to learn it from the Italians), defending Rembrandt's controversial creation of strong colour contrasts without line. The Life of Rembrandt is altogether a subtle piece of polemics: while repeating the commonplace that Rembrandt by staying at home instead of travelling to Italy cut himself off from the understanding of the beautiful and so from the highest development

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of his art, he parries it with the development of a potent counter-clichd: Rembrandt had nevertheless approached the beautiful, by "la force de son imagination et de son assujettissement continuel ä suivre pas ä pas la nature [...]."' Although Descamps' tone is still apologetic, and observant of the dominant views of the French Academy, his Lives are an important step towards the claim of Northern art to equality with the classical South which was to become a hallmark of Romanticism. The task of making a case for an English art was even more difficult than Descamps* task of presenting the case for Flemish art. As Beckford entered the scene, the prospects for English art were improving. Horace Walpole, emboldened by the emergence of Hogarth, seen as the first important nativeborn artist, had produced the Anecdotes ofEnglish Artists (1749), often referred to as the first Lives of the English artists. In fact, the earliest attempts at English Lives go back into the seventeenth century, when the first translations of eleven of Vasari's Lives were made (1685), but they were shyly inserted into or appended to the translations of the more famous Lives. Dryden himself translated Du Fresnoy's De arte grapbica from Roger De Piles' French version of the Latin poem, prefacing it with his own "parallel betwixt painting and poetry" (1695); appended to this was A short account of the most eminent painters, both ancient and modem, continu'd down to the present times [...] By another hand.10 The painters are divided into 'ancient' and modern': the ancients are the Greek painters, still accorded the palm; the moderns are the European, including English, painters. Only seven English painters are cited, and the best-known were either visitors like Rubens, or were born abroad like Holbein, Van Dyck, and Peter Lely; only the most recent, and least well-known, John Riley, and William Dobson, were born, lived and died in England.11 The accounts are succinct and well-turned, stressing the good points rather than the weaknesses of the artists (though Raphael is praised at the expense of Michelangelo), and displaying their qualities as courtiers and gentlemen as well as painters. The author lists his goodly number of sources - most of the Lives then available in the several 9

Descamps: Vi« des peintres flamandes (1753-4) vol. 2, p. 81: "the force of his imagination «nd his continual self-discipline in following nature step by step.' 10 Du Fresnoy: De arte graphica. The art of painting. Translated into English [...] byMr.Dryden (London, 1695). 11 The seven are William Dobson, Holbein, Sir Peter Lely, John Riley, Van Dyck, Antonio More, and Rubens. More (b. Utrecht 1519, d. Antwerp 1575) was "sent into England, to draw the Picture of Queen Mary." The resulting fine portrait now hangs in the Master's Lodge, Trinity College, Cambridge.

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languages - but complains of the paucity of information about English artists and the lack of concern for the arts evinced by his countrymen: For those of our own Country, I am asham'd to acknowledge how difficult a matter I have found it, to get but the least Information touching some of those Ingenious Men, whose works have been a Credit and Reputation to it. That all our Neighbours have a greater value for the Professors of this noble Art, in that there has hardly been any Master of tolerable Parts amongst them, but a Crowd of Writers, nay some Pens of Quality too, have been imploy'd in adorning their Lives, and in transmitting their Names honourably to Posterity.12 As Hazlitt put it early in the nineteenth century: What might be called an English school had never been formed. All that Englishmen had done was to copy, and endeavour to imitate, the works of eminent men, who were drawn to England from other countries by encouragement, which there was no inducement to bestow upon the inferior efforts of the natives of this island.13 English art - forwarded mainly by foreign-born artists of Northern European origins - Holbein, Kneller, Van Dyck - could establish itself, could begin to write its history, only by virtue of the larger case for Northern European art. Only if there were a common Northern tradition could there be a significant English art history. Beckford's personal contacts with the painters Alexander Cozens, his tutor in art, and the latter's son, J. R.Cozens, gave him an early insight into the English landscape art that was to be so triumphantly developed over the next half-century; and his momentous encounter in Geneva in 1777 with PaulHenri Mallet, the author of the Northern Antiquities, shortly after the Extraordinary Painters was begun, gave him direct access to the developing argument in favour of the Gothic and the styles of Northern art.14 In Geneva, too, he found artists engaged on sketching the sublimities of the Alps. Descamps - for all his pomposity and careful subservience, which Beckford ridicules provided him with the larger pattern of the development of characteristic Northern excellences. It is with his second chapter, containing the Lives of O g of Basan and Andrew Guelph, written after his return from Geneva, that Beckford begins 12 13 14

Du Fresnoy: De arte graphica: The art of painting, p. 231. William Hazlitt: "On Farington's Life of Sir Joshua Reynolds" [Edinburgh Review, August, 1820]. Criticisms on Art (1844), p. 306. See Marian Hobson: "What is Wrong with St. Peter's: Or, Diderot, Analogy, and Illusion in Architecture," pp. 53 of this volume, for another crucial example of the gradual reassessment of the Gothic in the third quarter of the eighteenth century.

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to shape a new kind of myth of the artist. Beckford's Life of Og sets before us not only the Gothic lineage but the Romantic life experience of the landscape artist. O g and Andrew after the death of their master Aldrovandus "set out together for Tyrol, which they had a great desire to see, as the wildness of the landscapes and the romantic grandeur of the mountains, promised them excellent subjects for the pencil."15 Andrew settles in the valley and paints exquisitely peaceful pastoral scenes, and at night he paints the familiar scenes made strange and luminous by moonlight. Og the solitary goes up into the highest and wildest of the crags, which furnish him with new and visionary subjects. In the terms of the English eighteenth century, of course, the two major landscape artists were Salvator Rosa and Claude Lorrain. Beckford's portraits of the styles of Og and of Andrew undoubtedly owe much to then current views of Salvator and Claude. O g challenges Sucrewasser and Soorcrout to a painting competition - a classical topos familiar from Pliny, in which Zeuxis succeeded in fooling the birds into pecking at his painted grapes, but Parrhasius fooled Zeuxis himself into requesting that a painted curtain be drawn back so that he could see Parrhasius' work, thus winning the competition. In Beckford's variant, Andrew and Og rout the Venetians (the masters of trivial illusion) with their paintings respectively of moonlit vales and wild crags. Andrew's and Og's direct, freshly felt inspiration from nature is stressed, as opposed to the copyists' capacity to create an illusion. Soorcrout and Sucrewasser flee without even daring to display their paintings. The new style of painting directly from nature is victorious. After Og's sojourn in Rome, where he is afflicted by melancholy on copying Raphael's stanze, he and Andrew set off again, journeying towards Sicily. But once again pastoral is set over against the sublime within their complementary partnership: for Og, racked by guilt and suffering over the loss of his love, a young girl who has drowned herself after his departure, again leaves Andrew and his new disciple Benboaro, a shepherd, to climb up alone to the volcano Aetna. Benboaro follows after his master to the very crater. Frightened peasants report they have seen the "sorcerer" who conjured up the tempest "fall from the cliff, wrapped in a blue flame." 16 15 16

Beckford: Extraordinary Painters, p. 51. Ibid., p. 78.

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Figure 12 Joseph Wright of Derby: Vesuvius erupting, Col. Sir John Cromptonlnglefield, Photo archive, Paul Mellon Centre, London.

Og suffers a spectacular Liebestod in a sublime setting. This dramatic denouement is in itself both an allusion to Salvator Rosa, one of whose most striking paintings is Empedocles throwing himself into Aetna, and to the popular contemporary paintings of volcanoes by night, both Aetna and Vesuvius, by Joseph Wright of Derby, exhibited in London shortly before Beckford began his book (Figure 12). As a major critic of Rosa has pointed out, "After Mortimer, the English artist who shows Rosa-like qualities most directly and significantly is Joseph Wright of Derby." 17 The tale uncannily foreshadows the Romantic handling of the theme: in 1799 Hölderlin would use the Empedocles myth in his poetic drama Der Tod des Empedokles, The Death of Empedocles, to embody the conception of elected suffering for mythopoeic cognition and revelation. Volcanic imagery of all kinds increasingly attached itself to Salvator's Life and image. 17

Wallace: The Etchings of Salvator Rosa (1979), p. 115.

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Og, then, unites and embodies a set of themes that will be crucial for the Romantic artist and implies an evolutionary history for them: the Northern and medieval tradition, represented by Ossian and Gothic architecture, Flemish landscape, the more recent history of landscape painting in the muchprized work of Claude and Salvator, combining the classical and rococo handling of the "birth of painting through love" with the topos of the "birth of genius" developed as a dramatic and solitary communion with and immersion in the extremes of nature, and culminating in a Liebestod in which the lovers rejoin nature in the elements of water and fire, and the sacrifice of the artist is celebrated on the altar of his own genius. The primitive notion of the artist as magician, as animator and creator - not as imitator or fashioner of an illusion of an illusion - returns: the demigods of myth, who were the first artists, the imprisoned Daedalus, the lame Wieland, the crippled Haephaestus, and their great ancestor, the enchained liberator of mankind Prometheus reemerge as the model for the Romantic artist.18 Beckford's touch, howeve, is light, and he perceives what is risible in this portrait of the artist as a young Goth even before its vogue is fully formed; but Og is unmistakably presented as the coming man. In the Life of Blunderbussiana, "the chef d'oeuvre of the whole," as Beckford's tutor declared, Beckford gives us another Romantic prototype, the myth of the mad visionary artist, the wild son of a bandit.19 In the course of it, he makes skilful use of other material from the Life of Salvator Rosa which was particularly topical at the time he wrote, and was to have a remarkably vigorous and fertile future in the transition from doctrines of illusion to those of the imitation of nature as symbol, and from symbol to sign. In this memoir, Beckford comes closest to an actual Life, that of Salvator Rosa. The Life of Rosa had already begun to acquire legendary accretions. Beckford's "imaginary life" is one of the earliest steps towards the fictional development that was to attend the Life of Salvator. Beckford sketches his portrait in prose, in particular, the 'wild' portrait of Blunderbussiana, probably on the model of Salvator Rosa's famous self-portrait: When he reached the borders of cultivation, his savage mien and the barbarous roll of his eyes, frighted every villager that beheld him; and so strange was his appearance, that some said he could be nothing but the Antichrist, and others believed him to be the Wandering Jew. 20 18 19 20

Kris: "The Image of the Artist." Kris: Psychoanalytic Explorations in Art (1952), p. 78. Lewis Melville: The Life and Letters of William Beckford (1910), pp. 67-70. Quoted in Beckford: Biographical Memoirs of Extraordinary Painters, p. 17. Ibid., p. 87.

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Figure 13 Salvator Rosa: Bandits on a Rocky Coast. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Charles B. Curtis Fund, 1934 (34.137).

Beckford's description of the young genius brought up among the banditti is irresistible: Blunderbussiana's first ideas, caught from the objects around, cannot be supposed of the gentlest nature. He beheld gloomy caverns hollowed in craggy rocks, which threatened every instant to fall upon his head. He heard each night dreadful relations of combats which had happened in the day, and often, when wandering about the entrance of the caves, he spied his father and his companions stripping the slain and letting down their bodies into pits and fissures which had never been fathomed.21 N o w once again Beckford links a major technical achievement with the wild genius: this time the study of anatomy, which the artist's bandit father's "prodigies of cruelty and valour" made possible. 22 In a hilarious variant on the discovery and recognition topos given exemplary form in Vasari's Life of Giotto, Blunderbussiana's talent is recognized by a famous artist who 'discovers' him skinning a cat with the utmost dexterity. 21 22

Ibid., pp. 84-5. Extraordinary Painters, p. 85.

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Figure 14 Salvator Rosa: Four Warriors and a standing Youth (from the Figurine series), British Museum. The youth in the foreground was identified by Lady Morgan in her biography of Rosa (1822) as Rosa himself taken captive by bandits. Today it is known simply as Five soldiers.

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He proceeds to Venice, where he gains fame and fortune by painting vivid scenes of the life of the banditti. The banditti were regarded as a favourite subject of Salvator Rosa, and were taken up again under his influence by painters contemporary with Beckford (Figure 13). Rosa had executed a series of etchings known as the Figurine in 1656 (Figure 14). The current vogue was represented by the work of Philippe de Loutherbourg and John Hamilton Mortimer. De Loutherbourg, who had learnt to know Rosa's etchings through prints in Paris, produced in 1763 and 1766 two series of small figure etchings of soldiers or banditti, intended as a capriccio series, clearly based on Rosa's Figurine, and after he came to London in 1771 he exhibited a number of banditti subjects at the Royal Academy, in 1773,1775, and 1776, just before Beckford began the Extraordinary Painters23 (Figure 15). The Figurine of Salvator were "so widely copied and forged that they can lay claim to being among the most imitated prints in the history of graphic art."24 The vogue was carried even further by John Hamilton Mortimer, who both as artist and as man became identified with Rosa.25 He appears to have modelled his life as well as his works on the fictionalized Life of Salvator the bandit26 (Figure 16 and 17). Encouraged by De Loutherbourg's success, Mortimer in 1774, under the general heading of Banditto, exhibited at the Society of Artists four pictures known as The Progress of Vice. The description of the first, "The Initiation," given in the European Magazine, read: In the the first of these pictures, the Chief of the Banditti, examining the raw recruit to villainy that was brought to him, whilst a bowl of human blood is presented to him to drink, is a masterpiece of character and expression. 27

His Banditti heads were admired for their menacing vigour (Figure 18). In 1778 Mortimer published a series of fifteen prints dedicated to Reynolds, of which one, entitled "Salvator Rosa," represents Rosa as a bandit.28 23

24 25 26 27 . 28

Salvator Rosa (exhibition catalogue, 1973), pp.77-8. On De Loutherbourg see also Rüdiger Joppien: Philippe Jacques de Loutherbourg, exhibition catalogue (1973), under "Shipwreck, Banditti." Salvator Rosa (exhibition catalogue), p. 50. See Sunderland: "John Hamilton Mortimer and Salvator Rosa." Vaughan: Romantic Art (1978), p. 48. European Magazine (1795), p. 34; quoted in Salvator Rosa (exhibition catalogue), p. 78. That Beckford's Blunderbussiana is represented as reading treatises on painting captured by his father the bandit chief may owe something to the Mortimer print in which Rosa the bandit is shown reading a book of banditti prints done in his own manner. Mortimer's print is reproduced in Salvator Rosa (exhibtion catalogue), no. 135.

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Figure 16 John Hamilton Mortimer: Banditti returning. Paul Mellon Foundation, Photo archive, Paul Mellon Centre, London.

But finally, in Beckford's imaginary life, Blunderbussiana's dismal childhood, and his midnight graveyard robbing expeditions, overwhelm him, and catching a fever he begins to rave. "Every minute he seemed to behold the mangled limbs of those he had anatomized, quivering in his apartment." Dying shortly thereafter, His body was given over to the college of surgeons, whose "skeleton the faculty have canonized."29 Thus again Beckford gives us a portrait that reaches back to Flemish models and forward to the current vogue for the banditti of Rosa and his imitators that still haunted the landscapes of the end of the eighteenth century. The technique of engraving - the medium in which Salvator's banditti and many of his other works were known - was linked with anatomical dissection.30 The vogue for banditti did not abate: Turner's Dolbadam Castle, North 29

Beckford: Extraordinary Painters, p. 89.

30

Barbara Stafford: Body Criticism: Imaging the Unseen in Enlightenment Art and

Medicine

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Figure 17 John Hamilton Mortimer, Manner of: Rocky Landscape with Banditti, c. 1770-80. Tate Gallery.

Wales (1800), for example, "a sublime capriccio in the manner of Salvator Rosa," and one of the most important oils in the artist's early career (presented to the Academy as his diploma picture), used a group of figures in the foreground of the picture, two soldiers in armour and a stripped and shackled prisoner who is being addressed eloquently by a pointing figure in ample draperies, a group that owes less to Salvator than to the drawings and prints of that "Salvator of Sussex" John Hamilton Mortimer. 31 As late as 1854 it was exhibited simply as Landscape with Banditti. There were several legends about Salvator Rosa which played an essential part in the making of the Life of Salvator into a cultural myth. They were first

31

(1991), Chapter I, "Dissecting," parallels developments in anatomical investigation with graphic techniques in the eighteenth century. Gage: "Turner's Dolbadam Castle: Sublimity and Mystery," p. 41. Turner even used the work of Mortimer's pupil Charles Reuben Ryley.

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Figure 18 John Hamilton Mortimer: Banditti Heads. Paul Mellon Foundation, Photo archive, Paul Mellon Centre, London.

given currency in the eighteenth century by the local writer of Lives of the Neapolitan artists, B. De Dominici, Vite de' Pittori, Scultori ed Architetti Napoletani (Ί743). 32 "Like most Italian biographers of the period D e 32

The first Life of Salvator was by G. B. Passen, appended to a new edition of Giovanni Baglione's 1642 Lives: Le vite [...] 1572-1642 with the Life of Salvador Rosa (Napoli 1733), and then published in Passeri's own Vite (1772); the next was by Filippo Baldinucci, in Notizie de' Professori del Disegno da Cimabue in qua vol. 3 (Florence, 1728); most of the legends were introduced by Bernardo De Dominici: Wie de' Pittori, Scultori ed Architetti Napoletani vol 3 (Napoli, 1742-3).

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Dominici was a partisan of artists born in his own region and introduced many of the legends that later blossomed in Romantic accounts of Rosa." 33 One of the most popular was that Rosa spent part of his youth as a prisoner of the bandits in the Abruzzi, and this apocryphal tale, in a variety of colourful forms, continued to figure in Lives of him until the late nineteenth century.34 As William Gilpin, who did much to circulate the legends in England and to promote Salvator's reputation, wrote of him in 1768: A roving disposition, to which he is said to have given full scope, seems to have added a wildness to all his thoughts. We are told, he spent the early part of his life in a troop of banditti; and that the rocky and desolate scenes, in which he was accustomed to take refuge, furnished him with those romantic ideas in landskip, of which he is so exceedingly fond; and in the description of which he so greatly excels. His Robbers, as his detached figures are commonly called, are supposed also to have been taken from life.35 The use of 'romantic' here is symptomatic of the absorption and transformation of Salvator into a model for a new art. Beckford too employs the adjective 'romantic' several times in the course of his book. The association with wild landscape, and with the wild landscapes of Salvator Rosa in particular, provided the occasion of the earliest affirmative uses of the term.34 Horace Walpole, writing in 1739 of his tour in the Alps, enthused: "Precipices, mountains, torrents, wolves, rumblings, Salvator Rosa [...]."37 Another eighteenth-century legend originating from the same local Neapolitan sources had it that Rosa had taken part in an uprising in Naples against Spanish rule in 1647 led by the famous fisherman rebel Masaniello, and in England this lent him a further glamour as a defender of liberty against absolutism. Beckford did not take up this theme of political insurrection, confining himself to its aesthtic form, artistic innovation through outlawry, but the combination of the two was to become a leading motif of the Revolutionary era. 33

Salvator Rosa (exhibition catalogue), p. 17.

34

Later Italian writers on Salvator Rosa attributed the anecdote about his capture by bandits to the imagination of his nineteenth century English biographer, Lady Morgan (see note 66); but it was already well known in the eighteenth century. (Sunderland: "John Hamilton Mortimer and Salvator Rosa," p. 527.) Wallace holds that the earliest source of the legend of the abduction by bandits has not been found. William Gilpin: Essay upon Prints (London, 1768), p. 83.

35 36

See Eichner, ed., Romantic and its Cognates: The European History of a Word, passim.

37

Walpole: Correspondence with Thomas Gray, Richard West and Thomas Ashton, p. 181.

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In the Life of Blunderbussiana, Beckforcbhad once again, as with the northern Og, seized upon material that was in the process of becoming a cultural myth and a locus of aesthetic and political controversy. That the Lives were imaginary allowed each one to refer to a variety of artists along the newly defined historical trajectory. It was this evolutionary aspect of Beckford's Extraordinary Painters, whereby the imaginary artists' identities shift over time, that confused Beckford's critics; for he was writing not simply a personal satire but a proto-art history. We have seen how in fashioning new, ironic proto-romantic myths of the artist Beckford drew on and reformulated the legendary Life of Salvator Rosa that had begun to take shape from the 1740's. In the next phase, in which the Life begins to assume new forms both as Romantic fiction and as the vehicle for a more disciplined art history, the presence of Rosa looms larger still. The Life of Salvator Rosa became a cultural myth which historians of art today refer to as "il vecchio mito romantico-romanzesco del Rosa."38 If this phrase conveys a certain familiar disrespect, the formation of this cultural myth, rightly understood, illustrates the productive tensions at the centre of the movement as the new aesthetics of nature as an imaginative product emerged. The argument against the traditional biographical form of the Life of the Artist was powerfully made at the very inception of 'scientific art history,' early in the nineteenth century: the merely anecdotal, traditional, and fictional - the appearances - in the Life of the Artist must be rooted out, in order to establish an objective history of periods and styles. Yet, paradoxically, the very possibility of a Life purged of biographical irrelevances for the purposes of an account of significant periods and styles - a systematic history - could only be perceived on the basis of the Romantic conception of 'immanent form,' the underlying significance of the Life, or as Friedrich Schlegel called it, the Charakteristik, which in the hands of Schlegel, Schleiermacher and Coleridge became an instrument of Romantic hermeneutics. It is important to note that the idea of the Charakteristik came to Friedrich Schlegel not from literary or philosophical sources but from Winckelmann. Schlegel expressed the hope that the second part of the first volume of his Geschichte der Poesie der Griechen und Römer, History of the Poetry of the Greeks and Romans, would do for the art of poetry, what "Winckelmann attempted for the plastic arts, 38

Oreste Ferrari: "Gli Studi su Salvator Rosa Oggi." Salvator Rosa Pittore e Poeta nel centenario phrase may be translated as "the old romantic-novelistic myth of Rosa"; but the play on words which links 'romantic,' 'romance,' and 'novel' is lost in English.

della Morte (16H-73), p.19. This

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namely, to ground the theory of art in its history." 39 Thus from the start he recognized Winckelmann's history of Greek art as the model for the appropriate mode of grounding theory in history, that is, giving an account of history that is coherent with theoretical principles of art: whatever those structuring principles might be, they spelt the end of naive anecdote and unconnected 'facts'. The most momentous cases in general hermeneutics were those of the Life of Jesus and the Life of Socrates.40 For art history in general, the momentous cases were the Lives of Raphael, Michelangelo, and Leonardo; yet for Romanticism specifically the momentous case was the Life of Salvator Rosa. The pivotal figure is J. D. Fiorillo, whose work, like Beckford's, has been given less attention than it deserves. Fiorillo's first publication was an edition of Salvator Rosa's poem on painting, La Pittura, with a prefatory Life of the artist(1785). 41 Fiorillo, an Italian born, and working from a recent Italian edition of Rosa's Satires, was particularly well placed to present this work to a German audience.42 It was of considerable importance that Salvator Rosa was seen as a poet as well as a painter by the Romantics, and indeed as a musician and a performer too. 43 He thus served as a model for the Romantic artist in his person as well as in his landscapes. "Og" and "Blunderbussiana," instead of being barbarous 'sports' within artistic tradition, began to take on a more cultivated and sophisticated image. The Gesamtkunstwerk was shadowed forth in the capacity of the 'genius' to project his quality in whatever medium he chose. 39

Friedrich Schlegel: "Ankündigung der geplanten Übersetzung des Piaton" [\%0Ü\. Kritische Ausgabe vol. 3, p. 334: what "Winckelmann für die bildende versuchte; nämlich die Theorie derselben durch die Geschichte zu begründen."

40

For the hermeneutic development of the conception of biography, see Shaffer: "Kuhla Khan" and The Fall of Jerusalem and Shaffer: "The Hermeneutic Community: Coleridge and Schleiermacher." La Pittura. Satira di Salvator Rosa con le Note di Giovanni Domenico Fiorillo. Göttingen: Rosenbusch, 1785. Salvator Rosa: Satire con le note ed alcune notizie appartenenti alia Vita dell' autore (1780). The notes relating to the Life of Salvator represent a conflation of accounts by Baldinucci, Passen, Leone Pascoli, and De Dominici. Salvator's reputation as a poet has held firm, and he is included in the anthologies of major Italian verse satirists. The work of recent critics like Umberto Limentani and in Italy Oreste Ferrari and Ferrucio Ulivi: Salvator Rosa Pittore e Poeta nel centenario della Morte (16151673) confirms this. His reputation as a composer and musical performer has, however, receded, though the productiveness of the myth has been copiously exemplified in song, opera, and instrumental music.

41 42

43

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Nevertheless, the element of the primitive retained its power. Fiorillo participated in the vital arguments over the nature of the grotesque, and had a major impact on the theory of the grotesque.44 His defence of the grotesque also set its mark on Fiorillo's history of English painting, in which Fuseli (a foreign-born, German-speaking artist), emerges as the most significant figure in contemporary English painting. Fiorillo's handling of the new eighteenth-century legends about Rosa is of major significance to our argument: for he succeeds in distancing these as apocrypha unworthy of an artist of increasing stature, while at the same time giving them further currency through his very vivid account of them. He treats Rosa again in his ground-breaking Geschichte der zeichnenden Künste, of which the second volume contains Die Geschichte der Venezianischen, Lombardischen und der übrigen Italienischen Schulen enthaltend (1801), the history of the Venetian, Lombard, and other Italian Schools, including the Neapolitan. The Rosa material (banditry and political revolt) retains its anecdotal colour and intensity, indeed, the two themes are combined in a still more striking narrative and pictorial image, which retains its power throughout the revolutionary era. Rosa is not kidnapped by bandits as a child or young man, the bandits instead make their appearance in the significant context of Masaniello's uprising.45 The 'bandits' in ensuing years were identified and valued in a variety of ways according to the political aim or allegiance of the writer: the revolutionaries might themselves be denounced as bandits, or they might be held to be noble bandits, in the manner of Schiller's Die Räuber·, or those who sided with the autocratic power of the foreign rulers in Naples might be seen as bandits. Even a sober modern historian calls Masaniello "the most spectacular of the messianic demagogues in the west": he put himself at the head of the people's violent demand for an end to famine, brutal oppression, and foreign rule. Masaniello was shot and beheaded in July 1647 by a "gang of obscure origin," and legends sprung up around him instantly; it was said that four hundred priests and a hundred thousand spectators attended his funeral, where the body miraculously pieced itself together to give them a saintly benediction.44 44 45

46

Fiorillo: Über das Groteske. See the exemplary brief discussion in Burwick: The Haunted Eye, pp. 61-71. This is the case in the Life prefacing the edition of the Satire which Fiorillo had already drawn upon, as well as in the ground-breaking history of painting by Luigi Lanzi: La Storiapittorica della Italia inferiore, the first part of which was published in 1792, a source often acknowledged by Fiorillo. Pennington: Europe in the Seventeenth Century, pp. 396-7.

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In Fiorillo's account the bandits include the artists themselves: the Compagnia della Morte, the Company of Death. 47 The Company of Death roamed the streets of Naples after the Masaniello uprising, carrying out deeds of heroism, carnage, or arbitrary lawlessness, depending on one's viewpoint. The legends thus remain and are intensified; but the legend of Rosa's leadership of the band is transferred to a more minor artist, Rosa's master and friend, Aniello Falcone, a painter known principally for his depictions of battlefields. The whole account appears not in the Life of Salvator, but in the Life of Aniello. Fiorillo has it both ways. Fiorillo argues that Rosa could never have been the "demigod of learned and noble circles" in Florence that he shortly afterwards became if he had been part of the conspiracy; and so much the more must one see the groundlessness of that other legend, "which one had misapplied to him in order to belittle his achievements, namely, that he had spent his youth in a band of bandits."48 But even though he protects Salvator's name from the imputation of having participated in the uprising, in the Life of Aniello Falcone Fiorillo tells the story of the Compagnia della Morte with dramatic flair and considerable relish for the gruesome details. During the revolution engineered by Masaniello, he relates, Falcone conceived the idea of getting revenge on the Spaniards, so he gathered all his pupils, friends, and relations, and other painters joined them and they dubbed themselves the Compagnia della Morte: By day they roamed through the city and killed every Spaniard that had the misfortune to fall into their hands, but in the evening they busied themselves with a competition to paint portraits of Masaniello by torchlight. Thus during the few days this rebel stood at the head of the Neapolitan people they multiplied his likenesses extraordinarily, which moreover were nearly all executed by the most excellent artists. 49 47 48

49

This legend derives from De Dominici, and is also related in the Life preceding the Satire and by Lanzi. J. D. Fiorillo: Geschichte der zeichnenden Künste vol. 2: Die Geschichte der Venezianischen, Lombardischen und der übrigen Italienischen Schulen enthaltend (1801), p. 821: "Abgott gelehrter und Adelicher Zirkel"; "welche man ihm zur Verkleinerung seiner Verdienste hat verwerfen wollen, daß er nämlich in seiner Jugend unter einer Banditen Bande zugebracht habe." Ibid., p. 815: "Bei Tage streiften sie durch die Stadt und brachten jeden Spanier um, der ihnen unglücklicherweise in die Hände fiel, am Abend aber beschäftigten sie sich im Fackelschein wetteifernd Porträte vom Maso Aniello [sie] zu verfertigen. Daher haben sich auch in den wenigen Tagen, worin dieser Rebell an der Spitze des Neapolitanischen Volks stand, seine Bildnisse ungemein vermehrt, welche überdiess fast alle von den ausgezeichnetsten Künstlern herrühren." - Not all those sources that link Rosa with Masaniello tell the story of the

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Whether or not Salvator was there, this torchlit night scene of the artist-bandits vying with each other to portray the young revolutionary leader of the people in the chaotic city in revolt became indissolubly linked with his name and style. This competition of the artists is an unmistakable revisionary version of the classical competition between artists vying with each other to produce an illusion of nature so lifelike that "birds will peck at it," which Beckford had adapted as the competition in which the new landscape artists put illusionism to rout. The urban revolutionary context carries the banditti (and the artist) into the age of the French Revolution. Moreover, Fiorillo does not fail to describe the landscape of Salvator in a vein that brings out its sinister and macabre tones, carrying the risk and danger of the banditti back into the countryside itself: In his landscapes a certain terror dominates and a wildness so desolate that his forests arouse in the spectator the kind of panic fear which sometimes ambushes the most resolute wanderer, if he suddenly believes himself to have mistaken his path at break of night. 50

Yet in Fiorillo's influential Preface to the first volume of his History he speaks plainly of his intention to purge the genre of the Life of the Artist of its irrelevances - not merely of apocryphal or undocumented material, but of all that was merely biographical. What belongs to the Life is what relates to the artist's work qua artist: The biographies of the artists are undoubtedly the most elegant sources from which one can obtain knowledge of art history: but where are the readers w h o , even if they have the liveliest inclination to this study, have enough patience, and can find sufficient leisure, to find their way through these almost numberless volumes, which moreover are not everywhere available. Most biographies of painters linger over a multitude of trivial items, which have no relation whatever to art history

painting competition. De Dominici gave a list of the painters: Falcone, Fracanzoni, Marullo, Vacaro, Micco Spadaro, and others, and offers a circumstantial account of Salvator's painting, and of those who saw it later, including Luca Giordano. (Quoted by Salerno: Salvator Rosa, p. 72, from the Vite of 1743.) De Dominici in fact relates the story twice, once in the Life of Aniello, and again in the Life of Salvator; in the Life of Salvator he adds further names of painters, with circumstantial detail, including the sizes of the paintings of Masaniello (Vite vol. 3, p. 226). 50

51

Ibid. vol. 1, p. 198: "In seinen Landschaften herrscht hingegen ein gewisser Schauer und eine so öde Wildheit, daß seine Wälder dem Betrachter die Art von panischer Furcht erregen, die zuweilen den entschlossensten Wanderer überfällt, wenn er bey einbrechender Nacht auf einmal sich verirrt zu haben glaubt." Ibid. vol 1: Die Geschichte der römischen und Florentinischen Schule enthaltend (1798),

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H e concludes with a summary of his method: I have therefore always aimed to show in the painter not the citizen, the lover, the husband, the father, the friend, and so forth, but the artist. I have tried to characterize his talent and his style; in particular, to give an overview of the artistic pedigree, derivation and interrelation of manners, how one branch divides into a variety of smaller ones and disseminates itself, or again how new creations proceed out of mixtures of the character of one school and one country with that of another; finally, to depict the continual ebb and flow of the dominant taste and mode of the age. This passage represents a statement of the essentials of the doctrine of the "Charakteristik," of which Friedrich Schlegel, who also came under Fiorillo's influence, became the most effective exponent. The Life must seek the essentials of the artist's experience qua artist, purging all the incidentals that do not belong to the immanent form of the significant oeuvre. The implications go far beyond the criterion of factual accuracy and contribute powerfully to the fictional impulse itself. Furthermore, this passage is a also a programmatic statement of what art history would have to accomplish, and Fiorillo set out in successive volumes to do it for the whole of European art as well as it could be done in his time: to locate the sources and materials, sift the Lives, describe the works themselves, and link the schools, styles and periods in a continuous narrative. H e departed from the tradition of the Lives in not adhering to the chronology of birth and death of artists, but rather tracing a tendency or style, from the master through his imitators. 53 H e also tried to unite the history with the criticism of art. Only in 1815 would he arrive at the volumes he confessed were Vorrede, pp. ix-x: "Die Biographien der Künstler sind unstreitig die vornehmeste Quelle, woraus man Kenntniss der Kunstgeschichte schöpfen kann: aber wo sind die Leser, die, selbst bey der lebhaftesten Neigung zu diesem Studium, Geduld genug besitzen, und Muße finden können, diese fast unzähligen Bände, die man überdieß nicht aller Orten zur Hand hat, durchzugehen. Die meisten Mahlerbiographen halten sich bey einer Menge von unnützen Dingen auf, die auf die Kunstgeschichte gar keinen Bezug haben [...]." 52

Ibid., pp. x-xi: "Ich habe daher immer mein Hauptaugenmerk darauf gerichtet, in dem Mahler nicht den Bürger, den Liebhaber, den Gatten, des Hausvater, den Freund u.s.w., sondern den Künstler zu zeigen; sein Talent und seinen Styl zu charakterisiren; vorzüglich die künstlerische Geschlechtsfolge, Ableitung und Verkettung der Manieren übersehn zu lassen, wie ein Stamm sich in verschiedne Zweige getheilt und ausgebreitet hat, wie hinwieder aus Vermischungen des Charakters einer Schule und eines Landes mit dem eines andern, neue Erscheinungen hervorgegangen sind; endlich die beständige Ebbe und Flut des herrschenden Zeitgeschmacks und der Mode zu schildern."

53

Ibid., p. xviü.

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his main concern: the history of Northern an. For this gargantuan task he drew on the resources of his friends and pupils. There are tensions, even to the point of contradiction, in Fiorillo, which continue to run through both Romantic fiction and scientific art history. If he states with clarity and force the need to cut loose from the biographical form, he insists on a significant form which may take on a biographical guise. Even while excluding biography from art history he also admits an important exception: in the case of the really first-rate artist it may be worth knowing all the details about his life. Moreover, at the level of practice, while he excises the apocryphal material from the Life of Salvator, he reintroduces it in the Life of Aniello Falcone. The Romantics, of course, followed all these paths: the pursuit of the significant pattern of the artist's experience, or the pursuit of the detail of the Life (which might lead on the one hand to full-blooded fictional romance, or on the other serve as an epitome or fragment by which the inward form of the artist's life qua artist could be revealed); the use of the Life (whether ostensibly factual or robustly fictionalized) to illuminate a style, an epoch, or a "spirit of the age." The very multiplicity of fruitful directions in Fiorillo shows the increasing self-consciousness with which the apparently straightforward genre of the Life of the Artist would have to be approached. One of Fiorillo's most important students, C. F. Rumohr is accounted by twentieth-century art historians the founder of scientific art history. This reputation depends in part on the judgement that Fiorillo himself was "uncritical," clearly far from the whole truth. But Rumohr's achievement is considerable. It is described by Julius Schlosser in his introduction to Rumohr's most important work, Italienische Forschungen (Italian Researches, 1827-31), precisely in terms of his rejection of the 'appearance' in favour of the 'concept,' that is, the rejection of the "biographisch-anekdotische Stoffsammlung äußerlicher A r t , " "collection of biographic-anecdotal material superficially grasped," as in the traditional Life, in favour of a systematic and conscious placement in a unified structure of 'art history'. 54 Schlosser presents this as "a fateful step" "to let the individual life of the artist in his work be incorporated in a real or imagined total development of a typical kind, that is, to sacrifice the appearance to the concept." Moreover, this "sacrifice of appearance to concept" is seen as a declaration of independence from the dominant Italian model, and a salient characteristic of Northern art history. 54

Julius Schlosser, Introduction (pp. vii-xxxviii) to Rumohr: Italienische Forschungen, pp. xii-xiii: "das eigentliche Leben des Künstlers in seinem Werk in ein gewaltsam-willkürliches Gerüst wirklicher oder vermeintlicher Gesamtentwickelung typischer Art aufgehen zu lassen, die Anschauung dem Begriff zu opfern."

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Rumohr began his career in 1812 with the publication of an essay attacking the mindless classicizing imitation by Anton Raphael Mengs and his school, most probably a contemporary model for Beckford's Sucrewasser, and still much prized in Weimar in Rumohr's time. His book Drey Reisen in Italien (Three Journeys to Italy) was published only in 1832, but looked back on the crucial period of his three journeys to Italy, the first, after studying with Fiorillo froml802 to 1804, to Rome and Naples in 1805-6; the second, in 1816-21, to Florence and Rome; and the third in 1828-9, to Florence and Milan. This book, using the Goethean literary genre of the 'Italian Journey,' and autobiographical, even anecdotal, in manner, is far from imposing any systematic overview of 'art history,' though it is often polemical. It represents his slow progress towards a viable conception of art history as a journey winding round the muddy terrain of others' inadequate views, in particular, those of Goethe, Friedrich Schlegel, and Fiorillo. The second journey relates the significant event of his own intellectual life, his discovery of Vasari's radical inaccuracy, his decision to write a commentary on Vasari's sources, and his unearthing of the archives in Tuscany which would help him correct Vasari's errors and biases; it was this work that culminated in the Italienische Forschungen. This discovery has the force of a personal illumination. Vasari had had critics before, and they have their uses; but, Rumohr felt, they lacked a standpoint. His standpoint is to understand the Italian primitives rightly, so that a new art may be founded on it in his own time. An important strand in the book is his treatment of the question of the training of the artist, through the exemplary but failed Life of a young contemporary artist; he devoted, in fact, much time and effort to helping young landscape artists wean themselves from the methods of the academy and to learn to paint directly from nature. For him Goethe's statement was a guide to painterly practice: "Es ist viel Tradition bey den Kunstwercken, die Naturwercke sind immer wie ein erstausgeprochnes Wort Gottes."55 The third journey was primarily spent in negotiating the purchase of art works for the new art gallery in Berlin, of which he hoped (though in vain) one day to be appointed director. Eventually, after two more trips to Italy, he retired to the curatorship of his own extensive collections. How much the conception of the Life had altered can be seen in his question in Drey Reisen: "ob man je darauf geachtet hat, daß in gewissem Sinne 55

Letter to Herzogin Louise, No. 2540, December 23,1786 - Werke (Weimarer Ausgabe) ser. IV, vol. 8, p. 98: "In works of art there is a great deal of tradition: works of nature are always like a freshly uttered divine word." See also Walter Pape: "'Die Sinne triegen nicht': Perception and Landscape in Classical Goethe," pp. 96-121 in this volume.

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jeder Künstler die gesamte Kunstgeschichte in seinem eigenen Streben und Wirken wiederholen muß," "whether anyone had ever observed that in a certain sense each artist must repeat the whole of art history in his own striving and effective working."54 The Life is thus an epitome of art history - not a tissue of individual anecdotes. The truth or falsity of the Life takes on another dimension. The Life is also developmental, not only in terms of the artist's individual end, but in terms of the productive direction of art history. Beckford had taken a step towards this, to the confusion of his contemporaries and early reviewers. Three Italian Journeys still has the quality of a literary work, and it hovers fruitfully between the partially conflicting possibilities already implicit in Fiorillo: that of the Life as a tissue of possibly apocryphal anecdotes or as a relation of documented facts, as a "Charakteristik" of significant experienced events or as a "Charakteristik" of significant art-historical structures, or as outright fiction. Rumohr, moreover, was quite conscious of these possibilities. He wrote both Novellen and a novel, and engaged in controversy over the theory of the novella with Tieck, with whom he was friendly for some time. His undertaking to write a commentary on Vasari made it a vital fact that Vasari had made use of Italian novellas (by Boccaccio and Sacchetti) in some of his Lives, and Rumohr drew on these forms for his own fiction, especially Der Letzte Savello (1834), his "Cinquecento-Fresko." Thus the excluded apocrypha became fit material for reformulation in the genre from which the Lives had from the first borrowed, while the new Life was absorbed into and subordinated to a standpoint from which to view art history. Yet this standpoint is less a systematic structure than a point of view. In Italian Researches Rumohr set out art history from the rebirth of Italian painting in the middle ages through the death of Raphael from this standpoint, displaying the concept, as Schlosser put it from his own point of view of triumphal scientific art history; but in his Three Journeys to Italy, he shows the evolution of the concept in the form of the contemporary Life, including his own. The second volume of Rumohr's Novellen (1835) is an exercise in the redefinition of the novella form. In the familiar 'frame' of three nights of story telling, he shows five characters discussing the novella and relating examples of different kinds. The frame presents a paradigmatic social dialogue that is more typical of the hermeneutic Gespräch of Rumohr's Germany, as, for example, in Schleiermacher's Weihnachtsfeier, than of the Decameron or The Thousand-and-One-Nights. The view taken of the Italian form is particularly 56

Rumohr: Drey Reisen, p. 193.

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crucial, given Rumohr's clear perception of Vasari's use of novellas in the Lives. For six hundred years the novella was merely "das lose Geschwätz," "loose chat," or gossip; this form reached its apogee in Italian literature, as the "Gemisch von Klätscherey und poetischen Geiste," "the mixture of chitchat and poetic spirit."57 The new form, Rumohr suggests, is the "historisch-romantisch," "historical-romantic," a longer form, centering on an idea, which it explores from every side. In one of his Novellen in the earlier volume, Erfahrungen eines Bedachtlosen (Experiences of a Thoughtless Youth), a clear example of the "historisch-romantisch" form, he made use of the familiar material of the Company of Death from the Life of Salvator Rosa (or Aniello Falcone). It shows vividly how that material was translated into the revolutionary events of Europe nearly two centuries later. A young Englishman of Italian extraction sails for Naples to find his fatherland - the story explores the idea of "the Sehnsucht for a homeland," under a variety of aspects. It gives a moving and thoughtful account of attempts at uprising, a political form of the search for a homeland. Thus biography, even wholly fictional biography, is in the service of an idea. Inadvertently, the traveller in Rumohr's novella becomes deeply embroiled in the political events of the day. Society is completely disrupted, and violent bands roam the streets. A young revolutionary leader, wounded, finds refuge in his flat, through the good offices of a woman. Later, wandering at night in a quarter he has been warned away from, Pompeii, the scene of night meetings of the revolutionaries, he encounters his wounded guest again. The mysterious figure thanks him, but warns him that his peculiar English love of wandering among ruins by moonlight - a familiar theme in English painting from Beckford's time - puts him in danger: "my countrymen have no concern for ruins," and are accustomed "mit dem Leben zu spielen", "to gamble with life." It is too late to get away, or be conducted to a safe house. He must stay by the rebel's side and evince "Theilnahme, [...] Wärme, glühenden Patriotismus," "sympathy, warmth, burning patriotism." 58 The inner court fills silently with "dunklen, ungewissen Gestalten," dark, shadowy figures. A dispute arises: one of the leaders accuses his friend (Antonio) of having fought with the people against the French liberation forces. Antonio maintains that they must fight both against their rulers and against the French invaders.59 The leader finds it 57 58 59

Rumohr: Novellen vol. 2, p. 10. Ibid, vol.1, p. 229. Ibid., p. 235.

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suspicious that Antonio is accompanied by an unknown. Daggers are drawn, a light is shone on him. His life is at risk. This scene is, of course, the familiar scene of the Company of Death: the chiaroscuro of the dark but moonlit Neapolitan night in which the conspirators meet, the bright torchlight shining on a few faces and on the daggers, the sinister atmosphere of disorder, danger, and imminent death. The novella has at its centre the 'Romantisches Nachtstück' in its pictorial form; yet here it refers obliquely to a suppressed legend about non-existent paintings. The political struggle went on both in the seventeenth century, when the French tried to take advantage of the popular uprising against the Spanish, and in the Napoleonic period, when the French set up Jacobin Republics in Italy. Masaniello is said to have led the people's protest against hunger and poor conditions, and only after his death did the revolt turn into a struggle against Spanish rule with the aid of the French. So here Antonio is close to the people, and suspicious of the French Jacobins with whom his band is trying to make common cause. Rumohr enforces the parallel between the uprising of 1647 and that of 1799, and their brutal suppression by the monarchy, in line with the main thrust of Neapolitan history. The ambiguous position of the mass of the people, who supported and welcomed back the monarchy, adds to the traveller's feeling of alienation in his homeland. The question of who is to be regarded as the 'bandits' is explicitly addressed. Later, in a prison scene (the protagonist having been taken for Antonio and arrested), a young revolutionary who is to be executed the next day accuses the judges of being 'bandits': "And these judges, who seem more like bandits and rogues than men, treat me - whose heart is more capacious than thousands of theirs, with so much unbounded contempt!" 60 The uprising was in fact put down with summary justice, and large numbers executed. Antonio has escaped in the guise of the protagonist, and the protagonist is rescued by the British authorities, supporters of the Bourbon monarchy, who consider Antonio "the most dangerous man in the country." 61 The two meet once more by chance in the north of Italy shortly before Antonio's death; hope for a united homeland must be deferred. If in Germany the growing self-consciousness about the accurate use of sources, and the ambition to write not only a German art history but a German form of novella, led to a cautious or displaced handling of the Life of Salvator 60

61

Ibid., p. 254: "Und diese Richter, welche Banditen und Schelmen ähnlicher sehn, als Menschen, mich, dessen Brust mehr Raum hat, als Tausende der ihrigen, so, so grenzenlos verächtlich behandeln!" Ibid.

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Rosa, or its masked refictionalizing, incorporating particular visual reminiscences of Rosa's style, in England it was still in the form of the Life that the fiction of Salvator Rosa reached its high point: in the Life and Times of Salvator Rosa in two volumes in 1822 by Sydney Owenson, Lady Morgan. Owenson was one of the most popular novelists of the time, who nevertheless for her championship of the Irish cause and liberal movements across Europe regularly received a vitriolic press, especially from the Tory Quarterly Review. Her achievements as a writer deserve reassessment. In the present context, her biography of Salvator Rosa has done her reputation little good, because she enthusiastically espoused the legendary and apocryphal material, turned it to current liberal political ends, and embodied it in a robust, attractive, and highly readable novelistic treatment. Yet given her own role in Irish politics and letters, this conscious utilization of the form of the Life of the Artist for political ends is in itself worthy of attention in the history of the genre. Just as the banditry and popular uprisings of 1647 translated readily into the events of the Napoleonic period, so they could be used to depict the dawning nationalist movement of the post-Napoleonic period. Owenson's widely-read travel writings, her Travels in France just after the fall of Napoleon, and her Travels in Italy (1821), applauded by Byron, were aimed at aiding the liberal cause; her book was banned in Italy. Naples in 1820-1 had again seen an anti-monarchical uprising, and a brutal suppression, this time by the Austrians; other regions followed suit. The conspiratorial Carbonari movement (the secret insurrectionary brotherhood of the 'good cousins') had spread from the south to the north, bringing revolt with it. The relation of 'bandits' to political rebels has been explored by modern historians, and the link between endemic banditry and political revolt is held to be tenuous.62 But as William Fitzpatrick wrote in 1860 in his finely indignant and amusing defense of Lady Morgan, her choice of Rosa as subject was governed by her admiration for the "Italian Patriot who stood in the foregound of times not the most forward or tolerant, and in the teeth of persecution openly and fearlessly declared his sentiments."63 Throughout the nineteenth century the two most common depictions of scenes from the lives of past painters (so far as they have been traced) were of "Raphael and the Fornarina" and "Salvator Rosa among the Bandits."44 62 63 64

Hobsbawm: "Bandits and Revolution." Habsbawm: Bandits, pp. 98-109. Fitzpatrick: Lady Morgan; Her Career, Literary and Personal, with a Glimpse of her Friends, and a Word to her Calumniators, p. 234. Haskell: Past and Present in Art and Taste, p. 91.

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By the end of the nineteenth century Italian art historians not only dismissed the stories of banditry and political revolt from the Life of Salvator, but attempted to lay the blame for inventing them on Lady Morgan.65 She herself had suggested there were political motives for excising these episodes from the Life. Today we have a new Salvator Rosa: a man who never returned to his humble beginnings in Naples after 1637, who never participated in Masaniello's or any other uprising, and who never consorted with bandits on any terms; indeed, it seems, the Figurine do not depict bandits at all: they are now merely "Soldiers."66 The cultural myth that mediated the changes in aesthetic theory has shrivelled away. The shock of deprivation, the complete alteration of perception this at first entails signals indeed the 'Death of the Artist'. Yet the significance of the style as established by the cultural myth still remains, bodied forth, as it now appears, in the work. Thus the 'conceptualizing' of the Lives through art history celebrated by Schlosser ensconced denatured cultural myth within history of styles (Figure 19). This 'death' had already been brought about in another way, most significant of all for our own modes of thinking about the relationship between writing and images, life and work. Hazlitt, in reviewing Lady Morgan's biography, gave another, decisive turn to the conception of the Life of the Artist. He fully accepts Salvator as the type of Romantic artist: Rosa is "beyond question the most romantic of landscape painters." He does not challenge the legends of Salvator among the bandits, which she recounts in her accustomed vivid manner without pronouncing on their truth or falsity; indeed, he complains rather pettishly of her careful omission of any claim to the truth of the legend of his abduction by the Abruzzi bandits: "it is left quite doubtful whether this last event ever took place at all."67 The story of Salvator's participation in the uprising in Naples under the fisherman Masaniello she relates at length, as the dramatic climax to Volume 1; here Hazlitt, despite his general objection to her tendency to embroider or to insert novelistic details of costume and scenery in the absence of hard fact, takes no exception to, indeed summarizes and confirms, her account of the "short-lived revolution at Naples, brought about by the celebrated Masaniello. Salvator contrived to be present at one of the meetings of the patriotic conspirators by torchlight, and 65

Salvatore Rosa: Poesie e Lettere edite e inedite vol. 1, p. 10, η. 1, and Luigi Salerno: Salvator Rosa, p. 15. 66 Wallace: The Etchings of Salvator Rosa, p. 36. 67 Hazlitt: "On Lady Morgan's Life of Salvator Rosa." [Review of Sydney Owenson, Lady Morgan, The Life and Times of Salvator Rosa\. The Edinburgh Review, July, 1824, p. 332. Reprinted in Hazlitt: Criticisms on Art, p. 332.

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has left a fine sketch of the unfortunate leader."63 Here Hazlitt perpetuates the myth of the many paintings of Masaniello, first started by De Dominici, who described a portrait of the young rebel that Salvator executed and took with him to Rome.69 Hazlitt's objections are on more fundamental theoretical grounds, those of the nature of the genre of the Life of the Artist. He, like Schlegel, suggests a form of 'Characteristic,' a critical genre that he developed and deepened throughout his writing life, from his encounters with the Romantic poets, and his account of the characters of Shakespeare's plays, to his neglected aphoristic Characteristics published the year after his review of Lady Morgan's Salvator Rosa. His mastery of this genre calls for further attention especially in the realm of the visual arts. In this case, the 'characteristic' is one which arises out of the specific difference of the Life of the Artist from the Life of the Poet, or any other Life: T h e lives of painters seem to be even more interesting than those of almost any other class of men," Hazlitt holds.70 His reason is striking: "There is something mystical and anomalous to our conceptions in the existence of persons who talk by natural signs and express their thoughts by pointing to the objects they wish to represent."71 This quality must not be betrayed by giving them "the gift of speech," as Lady Morgan does. He prefers the old Lives, "an anecdote or two - an expressive saying dropped by chance, - an incident marking the bent of their genius, or its fate," for their brevity and suggestiveness, for their preservation of the mystery of the "image-worker." This, then, is the crucial point. The Life of the Artist must be the equivalent in literary terms of the 'natural sign' of the artist. The mystery of the Life should be preserved in order to act as a sign of the irreducibility of the work of art either to the system of words, or to a 'reality' behind the appearance. Moreover, landscape painting is made exemplary of this view of the Life: for the solitary artist finds in landscape "a deeper seclusion, a more abrupt and total escape from society, more savage wildness and grotesqueness of form"; and as Salvator Rosa is "the most romantic of landscape painters," so his landscape above all others is a 'natural sign' which defies the Life to find an equivalent.72 This equation between the inexpressibility of the essential life and the romantic form of landscape is the completion of the abandonment of the aesthetics of illusion. Just as Barthes has asserted, 68 69 70 71 72

Ibid., p. 341. Cf. note 50. Hazlitt: "On Lady Morgan's Life of Salvator Rosa." Hazlitt: Criticisms on Art, p. 317. Ibid., pp. 318-9. Ibid., p. 322.

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Figure 19 Salvator Rosa: L'umana fragilitd. c. 1656. Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge.

221

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there is no going 'behind the paper' (the representation )in search of that to which the representation refers.73 If illusion was attacked and demolished as "the lie of appearances," once the natural landscape was justified by the symbol of the truth ensconced within nature, the appearance alone could once again be valuable simply as sign without the support of symbolic truth. From the proto-romantic imaginary Lives of Beckford to the romantic art critic Hazlitt, then, the Life of the Artist assumes a number of possible forms which are far from biographical, indeed, are explicitly anti-biographical. For Hazlitt, the very faults that the new historians of art found with the old Lives, their fragmentariness, their brevity, became their prime value, the integral reticence of unglossed appearance. Modern critics proclaiming 'the death of the author,' and the death of the romantic Life with it, have merely retraced the complex of possibilities explored in the challenge to 'illusion' in art. Indeed, the case is more forcibly made in terms of the Life of the Artist: for the power of the author is shown to be especially radically limited, because of the difference in medium between the author and the artist. This insight highlights the fact that the nature of the subject - whether it is an historical character, a religious figure, a writer, or a fictional character - is always in principle radically different from what it becomes within the literary medium. Thus the Life becomes paradoxically the locus of the perception of the overriding power of the literary language, and the site of its radical incapacity. Finally, the notion of 'the Death of the Artist' is inconceivable except in the context of the Life of the Artist, and the debates over its appropriate form. Like so much twentieth-century criticism, Barthes' 'Death of the Author' and Foucault's 'author-factor,' while gesturing their opposition to 'Romanticism,' enact a repetition in a degraded form of Romantic aesthetic thought. 74 The very notion of 'the Death of the Author' belongs to the genre whose legitimacy it denies.

73

Barthes: SZ, pp. 128-9 and 122-3. Moriarty: Roland Barthes, ρ 129; "Representation is not directly defined by imitation: even if we were to get rid of the notions of 'reality' and 'verisimilitude' and 'copy,' there would still be 'representation,' as long as a subject (author, reader, spectator, or oberver) directed his gaze toward a horizon and there projected the base of a triangle of which his eye (or his mind) would be the apex." (Barthes: The Responsibility of Forms, pp. 89-90).

74

For another example of this critical manoeuvre on the pan of a recent critic (Derrida), see Shaffer. "Illusion and Imagination: Derrida's 'Parergon' and Coleridge's 'Aid to Reflection'." Burwick/Pape, eds., Aesthetic Illusion, pp. 138-57.

BARBARA MARIA STAFFORD University of Chicago

Instructive Games: Apparatus and the Experimental Aesthetics of Imposture Abstract: This essay suggests that the steady rise in number and appeal of Enlightenment entrepreneurial science demonstrations was inseparable from an experimental aesthetics. Delight in the succession of appearances generated by apparatus was rooted in a broadly popular, and hence still oral and imagistic, European society. Moreover, such visual pedagogics were an intrinsic part of the developing cinematization of leisure. This marriage of amusements with bursts of information was brought about through machinery. Instruments intended to visibilize the invisible realm stimulated alike the young and the young at heart. Intellectual excitement was aroused by the strange phenomenal behavior summoned up by the flamboyant speech-acts of peripatetic showmen-teachers. M o r e generally, the skillful playing of solitary or group games created ingestable patterns of order, a kind of f o o d for thought, out of merely random events impinging on the perceiver's consciousness.

What were the challenges and opportunities facing the early moderns for communicating in a public, and therefore essentially instrumentalized, medium? If e-ducare signifies a "leading out," 1 the training of the faculty of judgment to evaluate the myriad Lockean impressions streaming in from the outside, it also denotes a participatory and exploratory process of discovery. Just as present-day interactive videodiscs offer the potential for drawing their watchers into enormously rich contexts of time and space - thereby transforming them into productive actors - the "ornamental science culture"2 of the eighteenth century brought people and gadgets together in a viewer-friendly way. Filmmakers, too, routinely using state-of-the-art computer models and computergenerated imagery to create dazzling cinematic scenes are the distant heirs of the Enlightenment popular science Merlin. These special effects wizards constantly expanded the horizon of what was possible to show. Then, like now, an industrialized light and magic were at the root of sophisticated and spectacular projections 1 Stoddart: "Culture in Education," p. 19. 2 Porter: "Science, Provincial Culture and Public Opinion in Enlightenment England," p. 34.

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and animations. Nonetheless, there is a basic difference between the two epochs since our separatist culture seems bent upon dividing knowledge from entertainment. Eighteenth-century conjurers, on the other hand, wished to place eyecatching technological innovations at the service of pleasurable learning. This essay suggests that the steady rise in number and appeal of Enlightenment entrepreneurial science demonstrations was inseparable from an experimental aesthetics. Delight in the succession of appearances generated by apparatus was rooted in a broadly popular, and hence still oral and imagistic, European society. Moreover, such visual pedagogics were an intrinsic part of the developing cinematization of leisure. In filmic fashion, the work of making physical contact with nature was spectacularized into instructional "recreations."3 This marriage of amusements with bursts of information was brought about through machinery. Instruments intended to visibilize the invisible realm stimulated alike the young and the young at heart. Intellectual excitement was aroused by the strange phenomenal behavior summoned up by the flamboyant speech-acts of peripatetic showmen-teachers. (Figure 20) More generally, the skillful playing of solitary or group games created ingestable patterns of order, a kind of food for thought, out of merely random events impinging on the perceiver's consciousness. (Figure 21) Solving taxing puzzles in common provided a practical mediating example for how a commonly constructed reality might intersect with private illusion, ethics with aesthetics, and reasoning with the pleasurable freedom gained through play.4 I wish to argue, then, that the Enlightenment's "sympathetic imagination" continued into the era of Romantic visionary reconstructions, intuitively pieced together from spectral historical remains.5 On the negative side, the nineteenth century also inherited that earlier age's deep skepticism concerning machine-made impostures fabricated to deceive the eye. The irony of experimental display - stretching back to Boyle and the seventeenth-century experiments conducted by the Fellows of the Royal Society - was that ostentatious staging appeared to conflict with the sober recording of 3

Stafford: "Conjuring," and Body Criticism, chap. V: "Magnifying." Also see Stafford: Artful Science / Experimental Art: Enlightening Entertainment and the Eclipse of Visual Education (1994), chap. Ill: "Laboratory Games." 4 Schiller: On the Aesthetic Education of Man, p. 103. Also see, Gadamer: Relevance of the Beautiful, p. 23; and Lockridge: Ethics of Romanticism, pp. 84-5. 5 Stafford: Symbol and Myth, pp. 154-175; Shaffer Kuhla Khan and the Fall of Jerusalem, pp. 142-3; and Foakes: "The Power of Prospect," pp. 129-31.

Stafford: Instructive Games

ijÜ^t

Figure 20 J. T. Desaguiliers: Demonstrations of Gravity, Magnetism, and Electricity, from Course of Experimental Philosophy, /, 1745, PI. II. Engraved by J. Mynde (photo: mine).

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Figure 21 Jean Baptiste Simion Chardin: The House of Cards, c. 1735. Oil on canvas (photo: National Gallery of A n , Washington, Andrew Mellon Collection).

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Κ XXIV

Figure 22 Athanasius Kircher: Catoptric Alphabet and Camera Obscura, from Ars Magna Lucis et Umbrae, 1645, PI. p. 912. Engraving (photo: mine).

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matters-of-fact.4 The public performance of science within the social setting of the laboratory subjected it to the corroboration of multiple eyewitnesses, thus appearing to get around the charge of individual jugglery. Nevertheless, experimentation could not long evade the more fundamental suspicion increasingly leveled at all ocular testimony. Technologists were also deemed by their opponents to be synonymous with conjuring charlatans, visual quacks, engineering artificers, ingenious mechanics, and religious enthusiasts. These "sophistic" imagists peddled primarily optical phantasms. Such apparitions seduced illiterate and credulous gapers into erroneous belief. Hume's anti-Catholic treatise, Of Miracles (1748), railed against such "magnification" of grossest delusions propagated by fanatics for money. Casting aspersions on a theatrical and Jesuitical visual culture (Figure 22) - then in the process of being unseated from power by silent, solitary and, in the main, Protestant readers - Hume debunked the miraculous prodigies supposedly witnessed by gullible spectators.7 This ubiquitous aura of trompe I'oeil fakery, emanating from besotting optical devices, surrounded both fashionable and absorbing cinematic entertainments8 as well as modish empirical experiments.' The specter of the duping magician haunted technologists from Giovanni Battista della Porta and Athanasius Kircher up to and including Sir David Brewster and Gaston Tissandier.10 Letters four through seven of Brewster's Natural Magic, Addressed to Sir Walter Scott (1833) dealt in one way or another with a pagan and esoteric "science" clandestinely manipulated for purposes of sorcery. Wood-engraved vignettes interpersed throughout the text illustrated time-honored techniques for creating deceptions with catoptric mirrors (Figure 23), aerial images projected on smoke, and a miscellany of optical and acoustical illusions. Significantly, Brewster's specters - emulating Robertson's ghostly Parisian slide shows - were intended to perfect "the art of representing phantasms." In Humean fashion, these exhibitions sought to expose the ignorant "supersti6

Shapin and Schaffer: Leviathan and the Air-Pump, pp. 31; 55-7. Also see: Schaffer: "Self Evidence."

7

Hume: Of Miracles, pp. 37-9. On the differences between an oral and print society, see: Vincent: Literacy and Popular Culture, p. 203; and Chartien "Practical Impact of Writing." Chartier, ed., History of Private Life vol. 3, pp. 125-6; 147-51. For the role of Protestant theologians in the composition of children's books, see, Pape: Das literarische Kinderbuch, p. 71. Hollander: Moving Pictures, p. 209.

8 9 10

Hume: Of Miracles, p. 30. On Brewster, see, Burwick: "Romantic Drama from Optics to Illusion," pp. 173-80; and "Science and Supernaturalism."

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Figure 23 Sir David Brewster: Catadioptrical Phantasmagoria, from Letters on Natural Magic, 1833, Fig. p. 86. Woodcut (photo: mine).

tions of ancient times," to reveal the mechanical "means by which they [tyrants] maintained their influence over the human mind." 11 Brewster's enlightening "natural magic" took aim at the obfuscating "system of imposture" favored by Catholic hermeticists like della Porta or Kircher, living at a time "when knowledge was the property of only one caste." Consequently remarkable inventions were easy to manipulate in order "to subjugate the great mass of society." Modern science, in contradistinction to the magician's "unhallowed machinations," was "one vast [undeceptive] miracle." Gaston Tissandier's late nineteenth-century compilation of Popular Science Recreations continued the Enlightenment drive to unmask the ordinariness of even the most entrancing technological contrivance. Witty games were now part of an overt and rigorously based scientific method, a "genuine exercise" in physics, chemistry, mechanics, or natural history. There was none of della Porta's aristocratic fear of making natural philosophy ridiculous by prostituting "Her Excellence to prophane and illiterate men." Quite the contrary, and reminiscent of Chardin's or Charles van Loo's genre paintings, Tissandier discerned scientific principles in the humblest of objects: a coffee pot trapping 11

Brewster. Natural Magic, pp. 2; 82-6.

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Figure 24 Gaston Tissandier: Optical Distortions, from Popular Scientific Recreations, late 19th century, Fig. 92. Steel engraving (photo: mine).

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Figure 25 Charles Amadie Philippe van Loo: Soap Bubbles. 1764. Oil on canvas (photo: National Gallery of An, Washington, Gift of Mrs. Robert W. Schuette).

grotesquely deformed reflections on its burnished convex surface (Figure 24) or in the concave hollow of a large shiny spoon. H e recounted how he came to this democratic insight while observing a crowd strolling through the Conservatoire des Arts in Paris. Spectators gazed fascinated into the distorting optical cabinets on display until the guards chased them away. Small and mundane kitchen implements were thus popular substitutes for the large and expensive professional or institutional science of intimidating machinery. Like soap bubbles, Tissandier maintained, "the least costly apparatus will sometimes produce the most marvelous effects."12 (Figure 25) N o t for this eloquent

12

Tissandier: Popular Scientific Recreations, pp. 98-9. On Chardin's Soap Bubbles, see Conisbee,

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advocate of the plebian were della Porta's allegorical emblems, obscure written style, and elitist reluctance to bring his sublime "Catalogue of Rarities" (Figure 26) to the "publick view of all men." According to the seventeenth-century Neoplatonist, there were many things fit for the worthiest nobles "which should ignorant men that were never bred up in the sacred Principles of Philosophy come to know, they would grow contemptible, and be undervalued [...]."13 We are currently living within a demoralizingly dichotomous society. The manifest division between training and education, manual skill and intellectual competence, a lowly service-based economy separated by a chasm from managing data processers, makes it difficult to imagine a past moment when the concrete was the expression of the abstract. Yet there was a historical stretch when mastery over engaging instruments and feigning imaging technologies could symbolize not just delusion but enlightenment concerning things not otherwise visible. Eighteenth-century demonstrative rhetoric, in particular, provided participatory strategies for the proper engagement with make-believe. I wish to suggest that scientific educational games functioned acording to the same rhetorical rules governing figurative poetry or imaginative painting. The appreciator was enticed to enter into the fiction, to undergo bodily the physical experience enacted.14 (Figures 21, 25) Sensuous rhetoric should be seen as an anti-hermeneutics - where hermeneutics was a managing theory predicated on the inexorable and interminable textual explanation of invisible and "deep" meaning.15 The art of persuasion, instead, taught its users how to engage with "superficial" and mobile appearances prior to their interpretation. This praxis for handling not yet clarified meaning was especially suited to those perceptual instants when the world of supposedly fixed significations shifted disquietingly. The Jesuit system of secondary education, dominant throughout Catholic Europe until the Order's expulsion in the early 1760's, promulgated shaping, painting, and moving the passions through imaginative spectacle. Fenelon's Dialogues concerning Eloquence (1722) documented this optimistic emphasis on improving theatrical performances, roundly denounced as indulgent and soft enchantment by austere Jansenists and Augustinian Protestants alike. For moral rigorists, such glitter and smoke were to be shunned in favor of simple,

exhibition (National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.c., 1991) Soap Bubbles of Jean-Simion Chardin. 13 Della Porta: Natural Magic, Preface (unnumbered). 14 Walton: Mimesis as Make-Believe, pp. 209-15. 15 Pfeiffer: "Theorien und ihre 'Dynamik'," pp. 11-6.

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Figure 26 John Baptist della Porta: Titlepage, from Natural Magick, 1658. Engraving (photo: mine).

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text-obedient declamation without costume or scenery.14 Nevertheless, and in spite of these fundamental doctrinal differences, the Anglican or even Dissenting Royal Society's commitment to experimental display was not totally unlike the Jesuit shows and hermetic ceremonies that the Royal Society wished to challenge. Ρέηέΐοη, like such British sensory skeptics as Hooke, Hobbes, and Berkeley, also wanted to banish mercenary "Haranguers." These sophists catered only to the corrupt taste of "women and the undiscriminating multitude" by purveying dazzling amusements and idle curiosities. No, the orator, as spiritual "Censor of the People," served the public by teaching them pleasure in "solid and valuable things" made palatable through pleasing demonstration. Just "suppose," he hypothesized, "I should invent some fantastic Art, or imaginary Language, that cou'd not be of any use; cou'd I serve the Publick by teaching such a senseless Language, or silly Art?" 17 The Jansenist educator Charles Rollin, professor of eloquence at the Coll£ge Royal, spoke for the aniconic position. He denunciated evidence attractively dramatized or packaged for the eyes. The Method of Teaching and Studying the Belles-Lettres was widely translated and applauded throughout Europe. This treatise on rhetoric called for a form of discourse not "decked out, tricked up and painted." His pessimistically Pauline point-of-view emerged in the thesis that humanity was born into the world enveloped "by a cloud of ignorance" which was further deepened by bad education, idleness, play, and debauchery. Here, useful intellectual occupation functions specifically to fill up potentially sinful, and thus dangerous, vacant hours "and renders that leisure very agreeable."18 Rollin, whose conception of history also inspired the rising generation of Neoclassical artists at the Academie de Peinture et Sculpture, made no bones about the fact that he preferred molding the heart of an honest man to forming an intellectual. Significantly, unlike the Jesuit emphasis on ostentatious visual or evidentiary techniques, he counselled concealing the ancient authors from whom the speakers borrowed "under the name of stories." This disguising of the sources made them seem "less designed," as if "thrown in their [the auditors'] way by pure chance."19 The cloaking of examples in a seamless narrative style is the hallmark of a period in which the power of external appearances has become weakened. The ensuing pictorial impotence is registered by a heightened illusionism, that is, by the

16 Vincent: Literacy and Culture, pp. 14-5; and Brockliss: French Higher Education, pp. 171-7. 17 Finilon: Dialogues concerning Eloquence, pp. 18-26; 46-7; 215. 18 Rollin: Method ofTeachingvol 1, pp. 10; 57-9; 61; 88. 19 Ibid., pp. 13,17-25.

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hiding of the persuasive means necessary to any material execution.20 In this textual system, images deny their demonstrative character by behaving modestly as i/they were sequentially printed words. Given his Protestant leanings, it is not accidental that Rollin cited chaste and manly pulpit oratory, or the transmission of God's Word, as the antidote to gaudy fables. This absurd "medley [was] composed of real facts and ornamental falsehoods." On the contrary, virtuous natural history, as the reputed Jansenist the Abbέ La Pluche concurred, was analogously inscribed in that "most erudite and perfect Book for the cultivation of our reason."21 Extracts from this divine tome might safely be used "as a recreation, and should usually be made a diversion."22 The spectacle of nature, construed as the science of children and, more broadly, of the unlearned, thus became the foundation of a "bare," "honest," and "simple" rhetoric. This plain style appeared to be derived from nature itself and transparently articulated its deeds, not the self-referential performances of the flashy orator.23 Like Rollin and La Pluche, the Scottish moral philosopher George Turnbull, in his Observations upon Liberal Education (1742), advocated the identical illusionizing techniques. The teacher should not be afraid to "come down" to the capacities of children by being pleasing. Further, nothing was more important than imparting the distinction between "useful inquiries" and those "that ought only to have the place of Amusements, like a Game at Chess or Picquet." Yet these authors unanimously stressed that, in order for knowledge to take hold in the mind not only of children but of the ignorant and poor, it must be "embellished." This meant rendering it the source of "Manifold Entertainment as well as of Information," while not seeming to do so. Fundamental to these Augustinian educational theories, then, was the disingenuous concealment of a personalized or "showy" style in the name of a higher moral purpose. Performances and pictures were "Samples" or "Experiments" that appeared to body forth naturally the workings of the very things in the visible world that, in ventriloquist fashion, they spoke for.24 For our purposes, the unresolved tension within Catholic and Protestant rhetorics can be summarized in terms of the rupture or the maintenance of illusion. Subjective self-advertisement, carried out in overt praise of nature, was pitted against 20 21 22

Cf. also Pfeiffer's essay in this volume, p. 15-32. Rollin: Method of Teaching vol. 2, pp. 309-10; vol. 4, pp. 157-8; and La Pluche: Spectacle de la nature vol. 1, p. v. Rollin: Method of Teaching vol. 4, p. 224; La Pluche: Spectacle de la nature vol. 1, pp. xxii-xxiii.

23 24

Rollin: Method of Teaching vol. 2, p. 63; and La Pluche: Spectacle de la nature vol. 1, p. vii. Turnbull: Liberal Education, pp. viii-xi, 127-8, 145.

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supposedly objective demonstration, persuading an audience that the created fiction was the naked truth. The issue of counterfeit is inseparable from the use of apparatus to mediate between subject and object. 25 Like current expensive special effects, creating seamless transformations from flesh to cyborg, technological innovations historically have always been fraught with charges of confusing reality with illusion. During the eighteenth century, in particular, the manufacture of elaborate scientific machinery was on the rise. These instruments for fabricating fluid appearances thus came to possess a Janus double face. Laudably, technology made abstractions concrete in private instructional games. When contrived for public consumption, fascinating optical aberrations could constructively challenge our ingrained interpretations of the external world.26 Pejoratively, misleading trompe I'ceil was interpreted as the dubious means whereby, since the beginning of time, visual imposture had been perpetrated. In either case technical artifacts, controlled by concealed or conspicuous manipulators, purported to show how nature functioned if only one could see it. (Figure 20) I want to examine a clutch of freelance demonstrators, model-makers, and private tutors generally operating outside the confines of institutionalized science, who popularized the tricks of their trade in performance. These dexterous demonstrateurs - spurred on by the surge of interest in forming cabinets de physique and collections of instruments - 2 7 exploited the inherently optical fascination with mechanisms. Gadgets metamorphosed complex invisible operations into spectacle. Unlike conventional magic acts or trick cabinets28 (Figure 22), however, experimentalists removed the viewers' initial bafflement by enlightening them concerning some empirical perplexity. Like motion pictures, the scientific demonstration captured the eye and kept it engaged with the unfolding events as long as the variety show lasted. Experiments were not integrated into the physics curriculum provided in the college system but were afterthoughts relegated to post-classroom hours. Given this marginalization, it is not surprising that both in France and England independent professors arose to show the aspiring professional surveyor, navigator, or military architect and possibly even the next generation of scientists and mathematicians how to deal with the laboratory of the physical 25 26

Latour Science in Action, pp. 46-7. Shephard: Mind Sights, p. 3.

27

Torlais: "La physique expfrimentale." Taton, ed., Enseignement et diffusion des sciences, p. 637.

28

Shephard: Mind Sights, pp. 19; 26-7.

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world. 29 In this spirit of dissemination, the French Newtonian J. T. Desaguiliers claimed that his present Course of Experimental Philosophy (1745) was the 121st he had given since starting at Harts-Hall, Oxford, in 1710. While there, he had been inspired by his famous mentors and associates: Francis Hauksbee, William Whiston, and Dr. John Keill. After moving to London in 1713, and thus attaining independence, he boasted of becoming one of eleven or twelve instructors who now "perform Experimental Courses at this time in England, and other parts of the world." Desaguiliers, using machines and instruments of his own and other's manufacture, envisaged his demonstrative science as anti-metaphysical. Simple, ordinary-language conjuring was a critique of Descartes' "philosophical Romance," couched in Latin "hard Words and Pompous Terms." Significantly, Desaguiliers, employed those two staples of Protestant rhetorical theory: the plain style and a disguised illusionism. "Sometimes one must make use of such ways of demonstration as are not mathematically true, to prepare them for what is a little more abstract; as I have been often forc'd to do to a large audience, where close attention is not very common." Thus the mathematician wished not only to unmask the foundationlessness of high Cartesian speculation but to trap base charlatans everywhere. Lecture IV, teaching the workings of pulleys and weights, managed simultaneously to expose the flummery of common street entertainers, strongmen, and "pretended Sampsons." "The Kentish Fellow, Joyce," and "the German," had their supposedly marvelous feats in the Hay Market debunked. As the illustrations made clear, their feats were not due to magic but to the mechanical action of muscles and the contrived positions of the body readied for lifting great weights. 30 (Figure 27) N o more assiduous Enlightenment vulgarizer excited the wealthy scientific amateur while, at the same time, educating an international and upwardly mobile bourgeoisie than the Abb£ Nollet. Tutor to the French royal family in all matters electrical, Nollet had been a student of Reaumur and Dufay in France and of Desaguiliers in England. The L'Art d'experiences (1770) culminated a succession of volumes chronicling his open-ended and non-partisan view of experimental physics. Neither a Cartesian nor a Newtonian, he desired to bring problems and instruments into diverting and instructive conjuction, thus forming the general culture of well-born women and men. His prodigious dexterity, unusual habit of demonstrating while lecturing, and multimedia presentations using drawings and advanced equipment of his own construction, 29 30

Brockliss: French Higher Education, pp. 190-2; 387-8; 437. Desaguiliers: Course of Experimental Philosophy vol. 1, pp. xi-xii, 265.

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Figure 27 J. T. Desaguiliers: Demonstrations of Feats of Strength, from Course of Experimental Philosophy, 1, 1745, PL 19. Engraved by J. Mynde (photo: mine).

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Figure 28 Jean-Antoine Nollet: Construction of Solar Microscope, from L'Art d'expMences, III, 1770, PI. IX. Engraved by Bradel. (photo: mine).

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transformed optical recreations into fashionable jeux de sociiti,31 (Figure 28) His striking and attractive "art of experimentation" thus created at a single stroke the profession of the applied engineer and of the entrepreneurial manufacturer of delightful scientific goods. These technologists released a succession of astonishing telepresent effects for wide consumption within broader and broader strata of society. Significandy, consumerism and the "selling" of education was accomplished through enticing "portraits" of apparatus. Just as Nollet insisted on interactive lessons during which the demonstrator and his audience solved problems together, he did not suppress the necessary visual details that might inform others of how to construct and manipulate their machines. For example, the anatomized laying out of the parts composing the solar microscope, their pared-down economical simplicity, and absence of ornament, were intrinsic to the demonstrative instructional rhetoric emanating from the plates.32 This distinctively French technological and schematic style was prescient of the clarity and distinctness valued in Neoclassical art. Oddly, as a recreative educator, Nollet most closely resembled Rousseau, in spite of the Savoyard's diatribes against the inautheniticity introduced into civilization by the cultivation of the arts and sciences. Both thinkers shared the conviction that concrete demonstration was preferable to disembodied reasoning.33 Given the importance assigned to the senses, it is nonetheless ironic that French michaniciens, in contradistinction to their British rivals, displayed their wares with an elegant conceptual minimalism that verged on the abstract. Thus Nicolas Bion, chief instrument-maker to Louis XV, like Nollet, created an airless progression of point, to lines, to ideally regular shapes, to compasses, pens, and rulers.34 These universal geometries existed not within a particular performance but as if pinned against the void of a dictionary's page.35 (Figure 29) Occupying neither the messy space of the laboratory, nor the cluttered salle des machines, nor the heteroclite cabinet de physique, isolated tools and their optical effects seemed to obliterate any signs of conspicuous craft. They bore no trace of the mechanical procedures required for their construction. 31

Torlais: "La physique expirimentale." Taton, ed., Enseignement et diffusion des sciences, pp. 620-3, 626, 632. 32 Nollet: L'Art d'expirience% vol. 1, pp. xx, 233-4. 33 Rousseau: Emile, pp. 89-92. 34 Bion: Mathematical Instruments, pp. 4-5. 35 See my Body Criticism, Chap. II: "Abstracting," for what I term the "dictionary style."

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Figure 29 Nicolas Bion: Construction of Geometrical Figures and Drawing Implements, from Mathematical Instruments, 1758, PL I. Engraving (photo: mine).

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Reminscent of Jansenist rhetoric, they appeared to deny their fabricated nature, their manual connection to the lowly farmer's scythe and the cobbler's awl. The itinerant lecturer and adult-educator, Benjamin Martin, roamed the provinces as well as transfixing London. The work of this commercially successful instrument-maker provides an insight into the national differences characterizing the promotion and consumption of science. Like the French, the British were also engaged in staging demonstrations and publishing heavily illustrated books selling apparatus. But the English peripatetics addressed not just aristocrats, salonniers, enlightened philosophes, and professionals, but aspiring gentleman wishing to be schooled in the principles of politeness. Selfadvertisement was intrinsic to the retailing of machines encouraging burghers to make discoveries in, what Martin invitingly termed, "this curious and inquisitive Age." Such broadly based salesmanship required both showiness and showmanship. Thus a plate depicting a phenomenon as remote as the "Effluvia of Odours" was particularized by the engraver (Figure 30). An English rose, ringed by radiating dots inscribed in concentric circles, literally visualized the diffusing scent emanating from the blossom's center. This alluring and concrete demonstration of perfume in action was both instructive and entertaining. 36 The British consistently anthropomorphized their objects of study. (Figure 31) But personification, as the prototypical metaphor 37 generated by children or by those who desired to learn about the unfamiliar, infused a more general eighteenth-century cultural empiricism. This sensationalistic way of representing phenomena personified objects as actants, as metonymic companions in profitable labor or imaginative games. (Figures 21,25) Thus Adam Walker's System of Familiar Philosophy (1799), based on his lectures, claimed that the interrogation of nature by way of trial and experiment laid the cornerstone for all future knowledge of the environment and its laws. This rhetoric of the senses and of a sensualized technology was embodied in the materializations of work depicted in Emmanuel Barlow's accompanying engravings. Realistically rendered fragments of daily life were meant to stamp deep impressions on the brain. The perceptual process was analogous to that of "a nurse [who] supposes a child is only amusing itself by striving to catch hold of everything within and without its reach, [but] it is laying in a stock of important information!" 36 37

Martin: Philosophical Grammar, pp. 287. MacKay: "Personification and Spatial Metaphors," pp. 98-9.

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Figure 30 Benjamin Martin: Of Colours and Sapours, from Philosophical Grammar, 1738, PL VIII. Engraved by E. Bowen (photo: mine).

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Figure 31 A. Walker. Mechanics, from System of Familiar Philosophy, 1799, PL V. Engraved by Barlow (photo: mine).

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This vivid enactment of abstractions can be seen in the enlivening of the category, "Mechanics." The picturing of its performers and performances took the form of energetic realizations: windmills, a reaping machine actuated by a horse, a threshing machine manned to strike the corn from the straw, and an explanatory ground plan and magnified section displaying the functional parts of an iron wheel with its seven rotating knives. Analogously, Walker, in Deist fashion, insisted that the teacher must "open the book of nature before his readers" by showing them the "foundations of morality [embedded] in the constitution of things." 38 In this and other plates, visual education was achieved through paratactic vignettes. These illusion-breaking bits of information produced the effect of an infinite miscellany of theatrical asides sporadically and frankly addressed to the viewer by the artist-orator. Consequently, the episodic nature of English scientific illustration differed dramatically from the seamless and elegant uniformity typical of printed texts and marking the French works by Nollet and Bion. These compilations, dictionaries, encyclopedias, spectacles, and "recreations" must also be seen as part of the new Enlightenment attitude toward children. The child now played an incipient role both within the public community and the private sphere.39 One could argue that the eighteenth-century emphasis on pleasure and amusement was intrinsically childish, intended to attract the young and to appeal to the child-like in the adult. Edifying games, as spiritually desirable, were directed at detouring boys in particular from the moral anarchy of such grown-up vices as cards and dice. The undemanding instruments of gambling became transformed into the imaginative props of meditation. 40 (Figure 21) John Newbery's Newtonian System ofPhilosophy (1761), according to tiny "Tom Telescope," preached empiricism through participation. Children were shown making sense of everything happening around them by means of experimentation. Conceived as a tiny docudrama, the frontispiece captured Tom in performance, whipping his instrument-top, and himself the demonstration incarnate of matter in motion. (Figure 32) This small didactic book, intended for little readers, was a Lockean cinema venti of useful entertainments 38 Walker: System of Familiar Philosophy, pp. x; 101-04. 39 Gilis: "The Child: From Anonymity to Individuality." Chartier, ed., History of Private Life vol. 3, p. 325; Castan: "The Public and the Private." ibid., pp. 406-7. Also see, Hunten Before Novels, pp. 275-9. 40 On the connection between spiritual and profane children's literature, see, Pape: Das literarische Kinderbuch, p. 67. On reader-involvement in the picture book, see, Tucker The Child and the Book, p. 49.

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Figure 32 Tom Telescope: A Demonstration of Matter in Motion, from Newtonian System of Philosophy, 1761, frontispiece. Engraving (photo: mine).

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Figure 33 Tom Telescope: Vignette ofRieding 1761, Fig. p. 19. Woodcut (photo: mine).

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Telescope, from Newtonian System of Philosophy,

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deemed worthy of being imprinted on still malleable minds. Scientific diversions, as Master Telescope exclaimed to the assembled mothers and their children, offered "more innocent amusement than playing cards for money." The infant moralist denounced Bath where he had witnessed "a young urchin just breeched* or a little "doddle-my-lady in hanging sleeves" led up to a gaming table to "play and bet for shillings, crowns, and perhaps guineas among a circle of sharpers." Not for him such corrupting distractions or merely idle past-times like Threading-the-Needle, Hot Cockles, Shuttlecock, and Blindman's-Buff. 41 The conversational question and answer mode - disjunctively interspersed with woodcuts - (Figure 33) also precluded lazy gaping and encouraged viewer involvement. The abrupt configuration of instruments, like the reflecting telescope used in "our little philosopher's" performance in the observatory, mimicked the excited verbal interjections of the high-society mavens and fine lords in attendance. The exclamations of the Countess of Twilight, the Marchioness and Marquis of Setstar, Lady Caroline, and the Duke of Galaxy functioned pictorially like colloquial vignettes. Partial scenes and fragmented speech, constituting the "Boys Philosophy," thus obeyed the casual, broken, and intricate aesthetic patterns of the Picturesque. Visual demonstration proved to be very entertaining and, at the same time, extremely useful; for whether our knowledge is acquired by these amusements, and reading little books or by serious and elaborate study, what is obtained will be equally serviceable: nay, perhaps that which is acquired in the entertaining manner may have the advantage; for it is as it is conveyed to the mind with a train of pleasing ideas, it will be the more permanent and lasting, and the easier called up by the memory to our assistance. 42

Indeed, the leitmotif of this brief book of short lessons is that neither children nor adults have conceptions of theoretical constructs without the intervention of experimental demonstration. The aristocratic onlookers of these purposeful games could not help but play along. N o longer bored voyeurs, the grownup watchers imaginatively took part. Engagement with the unfurling "fairytale" of science collapsed the aesthetic distance separating the mature observer from a groping and child-like production of comprehension. 43 This magical construction of mental and physical order out of perplexity was achieved by means of an essentially visual and social performance remote from the activity 41 Telescope: Newtonian System of Philosophy, pp. 2-3. 42 Ibid., pp. 3, 5, 17-20,98. 43 Gadamer: Relevance of the Beautiful, p. 24.

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of solitary reading. Recreative lessons were taught imitatively, as Tom Telescope understood, by action and attitude. Here, then, was the practical and applied Enlightenment at work on behalf of knowledge and against imposture. Arguing for the instrumentalized pleasures of learning seems as appropriate to today's oral-visual milieu of high-tech simulation as it was for the eighteenthcentury culture of fascinating and surprising appearances.

WAYNE SLAWSON

University of California, Davis

Forked Tongues: Structural Illusions in Music Abstract: Illusion-like phenomena, which may be termed "structural illusions," arise in abstract music of the West. The image/reality bifurcation of the mimetic arts is reformulated, in this concept, into solipsistic doubles or multiples where what is referred to or what is expressed is contained within the musical work itself. A sound having one apparent musical function or structural meaning is heard over, typically, a larger context to take on quite a different function or structural meaning. Passages from the music of such composers as Mozart, Schubert, or Stockhausen exemplify the phenomenon. Illusion, with its implication of bifurcation between "reality" and its artistic image, appears problematic on its face as an analytic category for "absolute" music. Eighteenth-century aestheticians who advanced imitation of nature as a general artistic value stumbled with instrumental music, where mimesis is vague and unconvincing. Aesthetic theories of "expression" seem intractable on similar grounds because they still require some artistic imitation of what is to be expressed. 1 The obvious and recognized power of instrumental music to stir both the emotions and the intellect set the philosophical problem in its baldest terms. H o w can contentless patterns of notes convey concepts and move listeners? The only convincing answers to this question in the 18th century were formalist aesthetic theories. Among the most straightforward of these theories was that advanced by Adam Smith. His aesthetic defense of instrumental music seems very close to the view taken for granted by musicians of the present day. He writes: "In the contemplation of [...] sounds, arranged and digested [...] into so complete and regular a system, the mind in reality enjoys not only a very great sensual, but a very high intellectual pleasure, not unlike that which it derives from the contemplation of a great system in any other science." 2 One recent critic reads Smith as advancing an aesthetics of "abstract formalism and anti-illusionism." 3 Present-day music theory, in 1 Neubauer: The Emancipation of Music from Language, pp. 149-67. 2 Smith: Essays on Philosophical Subjects, p. 205. 3 Barry: Language, Music and the Sign. pp. 104-9.

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particular, takes on precisely the task of describing Smith's "systems" - sometimes generally, attempting to construct a syntax of an entire corpus (e.g., rules of tonal voice-leading, etc.), and sometimes specifically, analyzing just how the musical elements in a particular work are systematically "arranged and digested." Since this formulation in terms of abstract structures leaves no prominent place for imitation, representation, or expression - the apparent prerequisites for illusion - it is not surprizing that illusion is not a category widely recognized by theorists, critics, or historians of music.4 There is room, however, within a formalist aesthetic of music for a concept like that of illusion. The trick is to turn the image/reality bifurcation of the mimetic arts into solipsistic doubles or multiples of structural meanings where the issue of what is referred to or what expressed is sought within the musical "system" itself. It is this that I propose to explore in the present essay. By means of a series of examples I shall attempt to show that at least Euro-American music includes passages that exhibit these "abstract" or - the term I prefer - structural illusions. But beyond the issue of whether musical illusions of this sort can be said to exist (and this is certainly in part a matter of definition), there is the pragmatic question of whether it is fruitful to identify as illusory features of musical phenomena that may be described in other terms; whether, in short, calling something an illusion suggests some fresh way of hearing. I shall take up this question near the end of this essay. Limiting my discussion to structural illusion justifies neglect of several side paths. I am convinced by the arguments of Smith and more recent critics that the issues of mimesis and illusion in vocal, dramatic, and program music are different from those in "absolute" music. But even granting the different constraints a composer takes on when setting text, I think it is hard to deny a remarkable continuity of musical language and styles across composers' vocal and instrumental works. It would seem then that demonstrations of structural illusion in the case of music not associated with text might contribute to an understanding of vocal and dramatic music. In vocal, dramatic, or program music, on the other hand, it is sometimes difficult to distinguish structural illusions from illusions that are somehow imitative or expressive. I feel justified on these grounds in leaving out consideration of imitation and illusion in vocal and program music. Recent attempts to resurrect what amount to expressive or imitative aesthetic theories of instrumental music are also irrelevant to issues of structural 4 That no entry on illusion appears in the New Grove is not decisive, but certainly indicative, of the attention musical scholars have given the concept.

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illusion.5 Those approaches re-open the possibility of using extra-musical metaphor for describing aspects of instrumental music. Whether such descriptions are persuasive or not, they seldom deal with issues of structure and can coincide comfortably with the multiply self-referential structures that I propose to investigate. The two approaches simply apply to different aspects of the music, and offer quite different kinds of explanation. Adorno makes illusion a sine qua non of high musical art.6 Although Adorno's concept of illusion is complex, it seems clear that his critical agenda is aimed at developing a rationalization for aesthetic evaluation of whole genres of music. Here again I feel justified in ignoring these and any other such general aesthetic considerations because my intent is not aesthetic evaluation at all. Structural illusion can be illustrated only by analysis of detailed relationships in specific works. Whether such structures contribute to the aesthetic value of the work I shall leave to others to argue. Psychological study of auditory illusion misses structural illusion on the side of detail. The most prominent recent work in this area has been that of Diana Deutsch, who has shown by means of a long series of carefully controlled psychological experiments that certain sounds or sound patterns, synthesized and arranged carefully in controlled contexts, are heard in surprizing, anomalous ways.7 Almost all these phenomena deal with auditory processes that have only small effects on musical structure. In contrast to those studied by Deutsch, structural illusions appear to depend upon listeners' selective analytic attention and - often, if not always - their detailed, if sometimes tacit, knowledge of the system of constraints under which the music is composed. Such phenomena do not lend themselves easily to controlled psychological experimentation. Not the least of the experimental difficulties they present is their placement in compositions of considerable sophistication. They can be excised from their full musical context only at risk of severely reducing their effect. Recognizing that distinctions in these matters can never be clear, I would imagine that psychologists would classify structural illusions as, not perceptual, but cognitive in nature.

5 6 7

For example, Guck: "Musical Images as Musical Thoughts: The Contributions of Metaphor to Analysis." Adorno: Aesthetic Theory, pp. 148-54. For a review, see Deutsch: "Musical Illusions."

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Structural Illusions in Electronic Music Perhaps the clearest cases of structural musical illusion occur in electroacoustic music - music produced by some kind of electronic means. In this music one of the techniques of construction and development involves radical electronic modifications that markedly change the character of a given sound. The sound is heard to have one musical (and perhaps narrative) meaning, but then the modification turns the same sound into something with quite a different musical (or narrative) meaning. We find ourselves using language in a strange way here. If the before and after sounds have entirely different characters, why regard them as "the same"? We do so because, in electroacoustic music the process of modification itself can be presented to the listener. We hear a more-or-less continuous change in a sound, as if the physical properties of the sound-generating object are gradually and profoundly changing, with the audible process of transformation forming the connection between the quite different sounds at the beginning and the end of the process. My first example of this sort of thing is a relatively brief excerpt from Stockhausen's Hymnen, an electronic composition that makes use of national anthems from around the world as part of its source material.8 The passage is near the beginning of Region II of this two-hour, four-Region piece. The sound in question is a continuous strand that has been heard over several minutes at the end of Region I. High-but-indefinitely-pitched, glittering, scraping, the strand serves sometimes as background and sometimes by default as foreground in places where other, more inherently prominent events no longer sound. It is the last sound heard as Region I fades away. Region II takes up the strand where Region I left off, and after a little over a minute (during which are sounded nine portentious sound "columns") the strand begins to slide down in pitch until the listener realizes that the strand is made up of the yelling of a mob.9 We realize that the original of the strand was illusory in the sense of being misperceived; what we took to be a mechanical sound or one electronically produced turns out to have been a greatly modified 8 9

Stockhausen: Hymnen is available as a sound recording (1969), and in the form of a study score (1968). Apparently during the mixing of Hymnen, a frequency-shifted version of the mob-scene sound was joined, essentially imperceptibly, with the continuous strand shortly before the downward slide. Thus the entire strand may not, in actuality, have been derived all along from the mob-scene sound, but Stockhausen has managed to make the juncture between the two so seamless that the effect is as I have described it. The historical facts of the synthesis and editing processes are beside the point from the listener's point of view.

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natural sound. As conscientious listeners we are likely to respond to that realization by adjusting, in retrospect, our assessment of the strand's musical status in Region I. In spite of the continuity of the strand from Region I to II, which tends to blur the distinction between the two sections, our reinterpretation of it, induced by the exposure of its "true" origin, is an important factor in marking the beginning of a new large section of the work and, at the same time, suggesting a connection between the two Regions at a greater depth of reference than the mere identity of the material across their juncture. It is no denigration of this first example to suggest that any alert listener, whether having studied music or not, would hear the passage more or less in the way I've described it. The example also has a narrative aspect. The sound of a mob in the midst of a work entitled Hymnen composed by a German born in 1928 has myriad emotional and even political references that reach outside of the realm of "absolute" music. What about mimesis? The strand is transformed into the actual sound of a mob, but prior to that transformation no specific object or emotion is suggested. Could we say that our post-transformation reevaluation of the initial high sound reflects its "true" identity? The issue is complicated by the naturalism of the revealed source of the strand and by the necessity of assuming that a listener re-evaluates the meaning of the strand in retrospect. Those issues aside, I think the example exhibits an interesting kind of self reference; here it is not distinct musical structures that refer to each other, but rather the "same" sound in its two states, highly modified and unmodified, that are images of each other. And in the face of the radical differences in sound between the strand when first heard and when revealed as a mob screaming, the self reference depends entirely on our hearing the process of turning the first into the second. I do not insist that my second example is specifically illusory, but, like the first example, it involves drastic modifications over time of what is arguably a single sound. The sound's musical status - its function or "meaning" - is radically changed as a result of those modifications. This too is music by Stockhausen, from Kontakte, a work in versions for tape alone and for tape

Figure 34 Excerpt from Stockhausen's Kontakte.

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with piano and percussion. 1 0 Occurring at the exact center of the work, the passage I am concerned with (see Figure 34) has been analyzed in detail by the composer himself. 11 T h e passage begins with a rather raucous-sounding buzz having a medium pitch and a specific timbre. T h e sound begins quickly to slide down lower and lower in frequency until the lower limits of pitch perception are reached and passed. N o w instead of a buzz we hear discrete pulses. As the individual pulses emerge, we have a growing awareness that we have been hearing, not the pulses alone, but rather the pulses modified by a resonating system to which they have been supplying energy. This resonating filter has been giving the sound its color. N o w the filter becomes more and more resonant so that it takes on its own characteristic pitch and a ringing quality. Then, by varying the resonance frequency of the filter, Stockhausen plays a kind of tune, the rhythm o f which is given by the pulses. What was once a pitched buzz is now a rhythmic pattern. T h e resonator's tune settles onto a single pitch as the pulses slow even more until the final pulse starts an apparently unending tone - the third and final "meaning" of the sound is that of a delimitor o f form. This description, which largely paraphrases Stockhausen's own account, suggests that the train of pulses has been transformed, by drastic and continuous lowering of its inter-pulse durations, through three domains of musical meaning. This passage from Kontakte is also comprehensible to an alert, but musically untrained listener. But here, in contrast to the first example, the pulse train has no clear extra-musical meaning; there is no analogy to the mob-scene sounds in Hymnen. As a consequence, nothing is misperceived in this case. W e could say only that, over the course of time, the music reveals unexpected potentials that were inherent in the sound all along. In this second example there is little reason to suggest imitation, in the sense of a reference to something external to the music. There is, however, a multifacitedness exposed over time that again seems to satisfy the conditions of structural illusion. Just as in the first example, we hear the self-reference in the face of enormous differences in the ostensible character of the original sound and its eventual transformation. The paradox of suggesting that sounds drastically different in character are miming each other is resolved by our memory of the process by which one is turned into the other.

10 11

Stockhausen: Kontakte, sound recording. Stockhausen: T h e Concept of Unity in Electronic Music," pp. 39-48.

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Structural Illusions in Tonal Music Structural illusions often depend on a listener's knowledge of the structural constaints of a particular style. The next three examples represent instances of distinct musical entities that have double structural meanings - the phenomenon that inspired my title. I should point out before proceeding that a concept of musical structures with double meanings is not novel. It is common parlance in elementary instruction in harmony and voice-leading to speak of "pivot chords" at the point of modulation between tonal levels. Other kinds of modulation are said to be effected by means of common-tones. All of these attempts to explain harmonic structure and elaboration in tonal music require the notion of a single pitch or chord sharing two different functions. All, therefore, appear to have characteristics that suggest structural illusion. If that notion is too weighty for such common features of essentially all tonal music, it may seem more appropriate in the cases of the examples that follow, where musical puns

«9« o

Ί - ^ t V i T S '

Figure 35 Mozart's String Quartet in Cmajor, K. 465, "Dissonance." In (a) is an abbreviated score of the first four measures; in (b) is an analytical reduction of the passage.

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are emphasized by effects so extreme as nearly to violate the constraints of the tonal language. The first of this next set of examples is the famous opening of Mozart's String Quartet in C, Κ. 465.12 This piece is known as the "Dissonance" quartet not because it has more dissonance, in the strict sense of the word, than other works by Mozart or others of his time, but because the opening of the introduction sounds peculiarly strident - even temporarily "wrong." The opening C, Α-flat, and Ε-flat in the lower three instruments are not exceptional (see Figure 35), but the entrance of the first violin's high Α-natural on the second beat of the second measure sounds, at least momentarily, as a wrong - hence "dissonant" - note. It is instructive to listen to the four-voice texture starting with the entrance of the high Α-natural. By itself the chord on the second beat of the second measure is indeed dissonant, but it has none of the stridency that it has in context. We hear that chord, and the few following it, as a regular progression oriented toward the dominant, G. In the context of the first four beats of the piece, it is clearly the juxtaposition of the viola's Α-flat and the first violin's Α-natural that led to the quartet's famous subtitle. Since there is no simultaneous cross-relation (the technical term for sounding together the same note with different accidentals, i.e., Α-flat and Α-natural), we might say that the "dissonance" itself is illusory; the Α-flat and Α-natural do not sound literally at the same time. There is a more interesting sense in which the passage can be called illusory, however. The first violin's Α-natural progressing downward in measure 3 can be described as either the second degree of the scale on the level of the dominant moving to the first degree or as the upper voice in a series of descending parallel sixths with the bass.13 However, there is a sense in which the Α-natural also moves upward by step to the B-flat in measure 4. That movement upwards in the first violin is reinforced by precisely the same movement in the cello over the barline into measure 5. The Α-natural is therefore "forked": it is heard as both second-degree-moving-downward and leading-tone-(eventually and in retrospect)moving-upward (see Figure 35b). The crucial question is whether one hears the Α-natural in measure 4 to be "same" as the Α-natural in measure 2; whether, in other words, there is a sense of continuity in the Α-natural over its movement down to G in measure 3.1 have read no analysis of this passage that completely satisfies me. The tendency is to explain away the "dissonance," 12 13

Mozart: «String Quartet" in C, K. 465. The appoggiatura chord on the first beat of measure 3 contradicts neither of these interpretations.

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as if our sense of its strangeness is somehow invalid. I think the cross-relation cannot be attributed to "disregard" on Mozart's part,14 but rather a means of signalling that something special is to be attributed to the Α-natural beyond its immediate movement downwards. It is as if Mozart is inviting us to connect it with the upward-moving Α-natural a measure later. My next example is drawn from Schubert's Sonata for Arpeggione and Piano.15 The slow movement of this piece is not independent, but rather an extended introduction to the fast third movement; the long transition at the end of the movement is at issue (see Figure 36). Ä

i

w

Ä

Ι

I c?

Α

τ\

-

) A^V-f

t*

Figure 36 Schubert's Sonata for Piano and Arpeggione, Movement 2, Adagio. An analytical reduction of measures 57-67.

The striking quality of the harmony in this passage is a result of a strong motion toward the tonal area a half-step above the tonic - the so-called Neapolitan. The Neapolitan chord came into usage in the latter half of the eighteenth century as an extension and intensification of pre-dominant harmonies. The Neapolitan can be said to be derived from the first inversion of the chord built on the second degree in the minor mode - a diminished chord. When the second degree (a whole-step above the tonic) is lowered chromatically (now to a half-step above the tonic), the diminished chord becomes the Neapolitan sixth, a major triad in first inversion (the third in the bass). It is this major-triadic characteristic of the Neapolitan that Schubert exploits so strikingly - we might say, illusorily - in this movement. Picking up the action on the last phrase, m. 57-67, we observe that the first chord in the piano is the tonic Ε-major (the arpeggione part - often played by a viola, a double bass, or cello - contributes little to the progression until m. 14 15

Schenker·. Harmony, p. 104. Schubert: "Sonata for Arpeggione and Piano."

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64). The plot begins to thicken with the C major chord in m. 58, which cannot be understood at all in the key of the tonic major. In Ε-minor, however, we can hear the chord as the triad built on the sixth degree. This is often called "borrowing'' from the opposite mode, a practice very common in Schubert's music. The plot thickens with the F major in m. 59, a chord belonging to neither Ε-major nor Ε-minor. But the C major-to-F major motion is perfectly normal and understandable with respect to the tonal level of F-major. The next move, the Α-flat in the bass, shifts the F major to minor, not an uncommon progression but one that undermines to a degree the suggestion of a tonicization of F. The next chord sounds like the confirmation that we would need to hear if the music were to move strongly to F, either major or minor. The suspended F can be expected to resolve in m. 62 to Ε-natural, the leading tone of a normal dominant seventh-chord in F. We get the expected E, but along with it there is another movement in the bass downward by half-step to G-flat, forming another one of those chords with national names (this is a French Sixth) that have, not a dominant, but a pre-dominant function. Measure 62, then, has the effect of undermining the almost-confirmed tonicity of the F-major chord that follows in m. 63, transforming it into an incipient dominant of B-flat. Where, we might ask, is Ε-major, the key of the movement? It seems long gone by m. 63, with the apparent move toward B-flat, the level most remote of all from E. The very simple, but crucial, restatement of the F major chord in first inversion in m. 64 starts us suddenly back to Ε minor via its dominant in ms. 65-66. It turns out that this whole progression - so nearly completing a modulation toward, or tonicization of, the disastrously remote levels of F or B-flat - was to be construed as an extension or prolongation of a Neapolitan chord. The final twist of the major ending in m. 67 prepares the way for the eventual tranformation of the Ε into the dominant of Α-major, the key of the last movement. In both the Dissonance Quartet and the Arpeggione Sonata, we are presented with musical structures that have (at least) two meanings. That the two meanings are "resolved" over the course of time - that any tonicization of a non-tonic level in tonal music is finally brought back to the tonic - detracts not at all from the illusory character of these kinds of structures. Unless we follow the short-term fork of meaning, we cannot comprehend or appreciate the elegance and cleverness with which we are exposed to the other fork of longer-term perspective. By "follow" or "comprehend" I do not mean to imply that the listener must be able literally to explain the music, but rather to hear, for example, that something about the chord in m. 62 of the Schubert (the French sixth) undermines the developing sense of F centricity or that the first violin's Α-natural in the Mozart is somehow sustained over its downward

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progression so that it can later be heard to move upward. But even if our knowledge is not verbalizable, we must have a well-developed sense of the rules of tonal harmony and voice leading if we are to hear in this way.

A Structural Illusion in New Music The practice of composing "forked" structures was not lost with the invention in the 20th century of new methods for the organization of music. Understanding the double meanings in the serial music of our time presents problems of prior knowledge that are not radically different from those of tonal music of the previous two centuries whose constraints are much more familiar.I am convinced that the difficulty many listeners have with new music can be attributed, in large measure, to the relative novelty of the organizational principles and their unfamiliarity, not to impossible demands inherent in the music. Clearly the issue cannot be resolved under present conditions in which few people hear the music at all, and fewer still hear it enough to begin to sense the constraints that animate it. I have chosen a passage from my own recent Interpolations of Dance for string quartet 16 to illustrate a bifurcated structure in contemporary music (see Figure 37). The passage in question provides a link between the first and second large sections of the piece. The low G in the first violin (measure 115) finishes the first section of the piece; the G in the viola two measures later, in the same register and loudness as the first violin, starts the second section. The identity of the pitches played by both instruments is perceivable with no knowledge of the musical language, but comprehension of their structural significance - the sense, specifically, in which G is a forked tone - requires at least tacit prior knowledge. To begin with, one would have to know that in the language of Interpolations the same pitch classes do not normally occur in more than one voice at the same time. This principle is apparently violated by the passage. Thus the doubled G in my piece is "wrong" under the constraints of serial music in something like the sense that the high A at the beginning of the Dissonance Quartet is "wrong" under the constraints of tonal music. It is an oversimplification to say that the statuses of the unison and the interval of a minor ninth are reversed in the musical languages of Mozart and that of present-day serial composers. But for Mozart, his contemporaries, and other Western composers 16

Slawson: Interpolations of Dance.

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|~e*ywiiiig of VmT H

A34 V l n . 1:

A134 \G

Gt Ct At Dt Ε A F Ft

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Ft

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Vcl.:

Figure 37 Slawson's Interpolations of Dance for string quartet. In (a) is an excerpt from the score, measures 114-119 with analytic annotations; in (b) is the corresponding portion of the compositional design showing the aggregate of the twelve pitch classes at the end of the first section of the work (A34) and the corresponding aggregate at the beginning of the second section (A 134).

through Brahms, the unison is consonant - that is to say, relatively free of local voice-leading constraints - whereas a simultaneous minor ninth - only just barely avoided in Mozart's passage, but still ringing in the listener's auditory short-term memory - is dissonant and requires resolution. For serial composers of our day, the minor ninth is not particularly remarkable; the unison, exceptional. A "knowledgable listener" might comprehend the passage from Interpolations as follows: Hearing the anomaly in the unison entrance of the viola in

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measure 117, this listener has reason to regard the passage as somehow exceptional. The reentrance of the first violin in measure 118 on G-sharp, C-sharp, Α-sharp, and so on, recalls - by inversion and retrogression - the last pitches of the viola line in measure 115. N o w the listener may comprehend a reason for the exception: the "wrong" unison may be heard as a kind of cognitive punctuation signalling that the first large section of the work is finished and the second - the inverted retrograde of the first - has begun. Temporal overlap tends to merge two structurally distinct pitches into a single "forked" G - the first violin's version of it pointing to the past; the viola's, to the future. The five examples that I've discussed here share pun-like structures that are particularly striking, both in themselves, and because they occur at crucial points of formal punctuation. However, I must emphasize again: the practice is by no means rare. It occurs in a somewhat different guise in the vocal polyphony of the Renaissance, in eighteenth- and nineteeth-century instrumental music, in serial music of our time, and in electroacoustic music. It may even occur in music of a certain complexity outside the European tradition. I am no expert in the musics of North India or West Africa, but even my relatively uninformed hearings suggest a kind of sophisticated play with bifurcated structures. Further study would be required to confirm this informal observation. Even if the question of cultural spread must be left open, the building of structures with double meanings in instrumental music is a practice widespread in Western music that has persisted over many centuries and across drastically differing musical styles.

Structural Illusions in the Mimetic Arts The foregoing discussion of structural illusions in "absolute" music, the least imitative of the arts, raises questions about how such illusions may be expressed in the other, so-called mimetic, arts. The choice of how to represent what the work "is about" is a crucial issue. When the work is about "something" in the real world, a question the artist must answer is how to refer to that "something" at some point on a range from veridicality on the one hand to obscurity on the other. When the work is abstract, as in the case of instrumental music and some electroacoustic music, it is nevertheless about "something." The "something" in the case of instrumental music may be most often is - a sound structure having a distinct character. Like the mimetic artist, the composer of abstract music must decide whether a particular reference to that "something" is to be exact, simple, approximate, or obscure. Many, many such decisions must be made throughout the composition pro-

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cess. I would think that painters, after first deciding on a real-world subject and then deciding how their painting will mime the subject, may also work out multiple interior references that are simple or obscure. I know too little of the history of the graphic arts to judge just how often this third step was taken in older art, but it is widely represented in 20th-century paintings. So too in the literary arts. Beckett's Waiting for Godot is impressive and moving, in part at least, on account of its imaginative, multiple expressions of single motifs motifs whose outside referents may be obscure. The announced intentions of Vladimir and Estragon to "go" and their failure to move at the ends of both acts are instances of crystal clear internal references and at least slightly murky external meaning.17 The presence of interior references in a work of art appears to be a precondition for structural illusions like those found in abstract music. Are there significant instances of forked structures in the other arts? If so, what forms do they take? In the mimetic arts, are there ways in which references outside the work are bifurcated? In all these cases, is expertise required to comprehend the structural illusion? These questions may be regarded as directed to the other arts from music, where solipsistic structures are so well developed because, one might say, they are all she has. What I have called structural illusion is no rare or peripheral phenomenon in abstract music. By means of electronic and computer processing, natural sounds can be presented in forms so modified as to be unrecognizable and then the sounds can be de-modified, so to speak, exposing their true source over the course of perhaps an extended passage of time. Other cases depend upon double meanings of notes, chords, or tonal levels in instrumental music. Appreciation of these illusions requires that the listener have internalized the specific musical language of the piece in question. To hear the "forked" structures we must understand the musical grammar that permits their multiple continuations. But is the concept of structural illusion necessary? It is possible to describe satisfactorily each of my examples without calling them illusions, but the common features of the phenomena I have analyzed may be unrecognizable without such a concept. It seems to capture something of the playful essence of much of the music we value most highly. It may do so in the other arts as well. If so, then we would be justified in exploring whether such imitative play - whether expressed among internal or external references - is a general human predilection worthy of study in its own right.18 17 18

Becket: Waiting for Godot, pp. 35, 60. I am grateful to David Lewin for help on aspects of this paper.

DIANNES. HOWE University of California, Irvine

Outside In: The Movement from Exterior to Interior Illusions in Dance

Abstract: This two-part essay investigates the creation and use of illusion in the European tradition of concert dance, particularly the nineteenth century ballet and the twentieth century modern dance. The first section, focusing on the ballet, shows how the elements of dance - space, time, and force - are manipulated to create illusions beyond the facts of dance (its movement). The second section examines the turn-of-the-century shift of the primary illusion as it was realized in the modern dance. The classical ballet focused on creating the illusions of external reality: time, place, and character. Conversely, the modem dance concerned itself with transforming one's inner experiences, as their own reality, into readable illusions.

This essay focuses on the European tradition of concert dance, particularly the romantic and classical ballet of the nineteenth century and the modern dance of the twentieth century. The examples are drawn primarily from this time frame because, traditionally, it has been the ballets of these periods which provide the mainstay of historical offerings performed by today's companies and the major change in illusion-making in dance occurred at the turn of this century with the developments of the modern period. The essay is divided into two sections. The first acts as an introduction to the concepts of illusion making in dance; the elements of dance - space, time and force - are discussed to differentiate between the 'facts' of dance and the illusions created by those facts. The second section then delves into the shift of the primary illusion from the classical ballet to modern dance. The primary intent of the classical ballet was to create the illusion of the external elements of time, place and character. However, at the turn of the century, the modern period of dance broke with the previously held aesthetic of exterior grace and supplanted it with an aesthetic of inner truth; therefore, the primary illusion became the projection of the inner experience. Dance is illusion; as a non-verbal form of communication, it relies on its ability, or the performer's ability, to create the illusion which will convey the intent of the choreographer. Particularly in the case of the classical ballet, the

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young student is constantly reminded of the magic of the dance. The student wears special clothes (which until the advent of aerobic exercise classes were not seen on the street). N o matter who the young student is outside the dance studio, once he or she enters, dons the leotard, tights and slippers worn for class, and the girls pull their hair back into the traditional bun, the student is transformed into another being capable of becoming a prince, a peasant, a flower, a swan or even a spirit. Once in class, the students perform the technique exercises which have been developed to enable the dancer to create the illusions of ease and weightlessness, in ballet, or conversely, the effort and weightedness more prominent in modern dance. In ballet class, dancers work day after day on repeated tendus, degagds and grand battements to develop strong feet and legs aiding in the lightness and buoyancy of their jumps and leaps. At the same time the upper body performs various port de bras, or arm movements, to enhance the sense of flow, elegant line, and the illusion of ease with which the movement is accomplished. The defiance of gravity presented in the jumps and the long, upward flow of the body line in part define the classical ballet. With the advent of modern dance in the early twentieth century, the intent of the dance changed and correspondingly so did the technique. The modern dancer wanted to work with gravity and so, among other exercises, practiced swinging movements, releasing his or her body into gravity and allowing momentum to pull the body out of the downward push of gravity. In addition to the technique, dance also uses extrinsic elements such as make-up and costuming to aid in the presentation of the desired illusion of otherness. The basic stage make-up for the ballerina exaggerates her facial features making her look rather exotic. For particular roles, such as the Firebird in Michel Fokine's ballet of the same name, the make-up is more intricate, heightening the mystical quality of the dancer-bird. Likewise the costuming also is used to create particular images. In the classical ballet, certain costuming conventions assist the audience in reading the illusions: the smooth, white feather headdress and white feathers on the tutus of Odette and her Swans of Swan Lake, the blue feathers on the costume for the Bluebird pas de deux in Sleeping Beauty or the small gossamer wings at the back of the waist worn by the Sylph in La Sylphide.1 1

Firebird received its premiere in Paris, 1910, by Diaghilev's Ballets Russes. Swan Lake was choreographed by Marius Petipa (Acts I and III) and Lev Ivanov (Acts II and TV) for the Maryinsky Ballet of St. Petersburg in 1895. Sleeping Beauty was choreographed by Petipa for the Maryinsky five years earlier in 1890. La Sylphide, choreographed by August Bournonville, the ballet master of the Royal Danish Ballet, received its premiere in 1836.

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The Elements of Dance Dance is often described as extraordinary movement; movement removed from its everyday utility.2 As extraordinary movement, dance presents a dual reality; the first reality is the facts of the movement, e.g. the direction of the movement, the shapes the dancer is creating, the rhythm of the movement, and the actual amount of energy expended - however, this last "fact" tends to be the most illusory, that is the actual force expended is hidden in the appearance of the movement. The second reality is the illusion or effect created by the movement which may include the sense of space created by a carefree, expansive performance attitude of the dancer or the sense of time manipulated by the rhythm and speed of the movement sequence. The elements of dance which the choreographer can manipulate to create the particular appearance of the movement are space, time, and force.3 The element of space includes the floor patterns created as the dancer moves along a path which may be curvilinear or angular, the direction of the movement along that path - forward, backward, sideward, diagonal - , the facing of the dancer - e.g., towards, or away from, the audience - and the focus, or where the dancer is looking. Also included are the concepts of size, or range, of the movement, the line of the body (shape), and level, from lying or sitting on the floor to being en pointe (on the tips of the toes) or leaping into the air. These 'facts' can be used to describe the spatial aspects of the specific movement of the dance such as the entrance of the swans in Act II of Swan Lake. The dancers enter the stage from the upstage left wing one at a time, equally spaced, and travel along the back of the stage in a forward motion, facing and focusing in the line of direction which is perpendicular to the audience's sightline. The movement is in the middle level and fully extended but not in an exaggerated range. The orderliness of the path and spacing of the 2

3

Paul Vatery, in his treatise "Philosophy of the Dance" writes: "For the dance is an art derived from life itself, since it is nothing more nor less than the action of the whole human body; but an action transposed into a world, into a kind of space-time, which no longer quite the same as that of everyday life." In Steinberg, ed., The Dance Anthology, p. 330. Rudolf von Laban (1879-1958) dance theorist, teacher and choreographer defined the dance elements as space, time, force (Raum, Zeit, Kraft). These designations are the most commonly used, however some dance theorists and teachers, including the American dance education pioneer Margaret H'Doubler include shape as a separate element. The element of force sometimes is referred to as energy or dynamics. Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, author of The Phenomenology of Dance, writes the elements as one word spacetimeforce because they are so intricately and intimately connected.

Howe: Outside In: The Movement from Exterior to Interior Illusions in Dance 2 6 7

dancers coupled with the non-exaggerated range of movement and self-contained focus (which is not directed at the audience or any other particular direction) portray the sense of an idyllic place where the swans are undisturbed and safe. The danced movement at times may present an optical illusion of changing space such as happens in Act I of Vaslav Nijinsky's Le Sacre du Printemps (1913) when the four groups of peasants gather in the diagonal corners of the stage and with an incessant bent-over stomping gallop move toward and away from center stage. Moving this way in unison makes the stage space appear to contract and expand. Similarly, the effect of advancing and retreating space is created in Isadora Duncan's Revolutionary Etude with the forward and backward runs, which the dancer performs in the center stage path, facing straight forward toward the audience. Beyond the real space of the stage or other performance venue, there is the illusionary space particularly important to the modern dance choreographer. Mary Wigman (1886-1973), German choreographer, considered space to be a sentient thing, the dancer's partner or adversary. Writing of the elements of dance, Wigman singles out space as: the realm of the dancer's real activity, which belongs to him because he himself creates it. It is not the tangible, limited, and limiting space of concrete reality, but the imaginary, irrational space of the danced dimension, that space which can erase the boundaries of all corporeality and can turn the gesture, flowing as it is, into an image of seeming endlessness, losing itself in self-completion like rays, like streams, like breath. Height and depth, width and breadth, forward, sideward, and backward, the horizontal and the diagonal - these are not only technical terms or theoretical notions for the dancer. After all, he experiences them in his own body. And they become his living experience because through them he celebrates his union with space. Only in its spatial embrace can the dance achieve its final and decisive effect. 4

The sentient quality of space for Wigman is revealed in her explanation of her performance of "Sturmlied" from the dance cycle Schwingende Landschaft ("Storm Song" - Shifting Landscape), choreographed in 1929, in which it was as if she did not will her movements but rather the force of space acted upon hen The feet race across the floor, chasing the body in wide curves through space, as though whipped by the winds, driven by the storm. [...] Seeking protection, it [the body] crouches, is being tossed about and bent - back and forth, back and forth rearing up and falling like a tree hit by lightning. The body remains breathless in the short pauses of calm, only to expose itself to the raging wind again, gripped and 4

Wigman: The Language of Dance, p. 12.

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shaken by it, driven ahead and turned about on its own axis - until left exhausted and thrown to the ground in dull indifference by a last gust.5

In another dance from Schwingende Landschaft, Wigman created the illusion of a particular place. In "Pastorale" the bare stage is transformed into a beach on a warm summer day. Wigman begins the dance lying on the stage; one arm wafts upward reacting to the gentle breeze. Gradually Wigman comes to standing and proceeds to walk in softly arcing paths becoming quick prancing circles which open up in space. Finally Wigman returns slowly sinking into her original pose and the right hand completes the dance with a soft, effortless movement to and fro before it settles, too, into the stage. The effect of this danced movement alternated between Wigman being a woman at the beach playing at the water's edge, and being the space itself - the gentle breeze, the lapping waves, and warm air. The facts of the second element of dance, time, include rhythm, musical concepts such as meter, tempo, acceleration and deceleration, and duration. Although each of these can be scientifically measured, the last three components of the time element might be manipulated to create an effect of that which is not actually there. 6 One of the most obvious examples of this phenomenon is the entrance of the Shades in La Bayadere choreographed by Marius Petipa in 1877. Similar to the swans in Swan Lake, thirty-two ballerinas enter the stage one at a time, traveling down a ramp and criss-crossing the stage in evenly spaced intervals. The dancers perform a lyrical twelve-count movement phrase which flows and ebbs in fluid steps and poses without variation. This phrase is repeated until all dancers are onstage in a neat, grid-like pattern. The exact repetition of the simple phrase and the addition of one dancer at a time to the scene creates the illusion that the entrance of the Shades is never-ending, extending the sense of duration beyond the actual amount of time which passes with their entrance. Another example of this choreographic trickery is found in the contemporary American modern dance, Spanish Dance choreographed by Trisha Brown in the mid-1970's, which also uses the canon structure for the dancers' entrance. The dancers in this situation perform a regularly pulsed, shuffling walk in a thirty-two count canon. The accompaniment is a medium tempo song with a constant, even rhythm. All the dancers are onstage, equally spaced. The dancer on the far stage left begins the action and, as she moves across the stage, runs into the back of the next dancer who picks up the rhythm and together they 5 6

Ibid., p. 60. See Hanslick: The Beautiful in Music·, Kivy: Sound and Semblance·, Coker: Music and Meaning.

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move on to the next dancer. In this case the audience knows exactly what will happen - how many dancers need to be picked up and how long each segment takes yet once again the audience's perception of elapsed time is skewed because of the minimal quality of the movement extending over the thirty-two count repetition. Another time component, the acceleration-deceleration continuum, is manipulated in the segment of Le Sacre du Printemps discussed earlier. When the dancers move toward and away from center stage, affecting the perceived stage space, the movement appears to accelerate even though the underlying pulse remains the same, because the duration of the movement phrase is decreased by shortening the number of steps. The secondary effect of the shortening phrase is the building frenzy of the ritual which relates to the element of force. Force encompasses how the dancer uses energy to complete any given movement or phrase. It creates the dynamics and dynamic flow of the choreography. Force also is inherent to the sense of weightlessness or weightedness which is separate and unrelated to the actual physical weight of the dancer. The sense of weightedness is created by activating opposing muscle groups, using additional energy; conversely, weightlessness is created by using only the necessary energy with all involved muscle groups working together. Although the illusion of weightedness can be created when moving in any given direction, the illusion of weightlessness is almost always associated with a sense of verticality. Wigman creates the sense of weightlessness in the opening and closing arm movement of "Pastorale" by only using the minimal amount of force required to raise her arm and keep it aloft. By allowing the arm to raise along a soft, curving, upward path and keeping the fingers and wrist softly curved, Wigman creates the appearance of effortlessness. The quality of lightness is continued with her gay, quick steps on demi-pointe, again in curving paths. Conversely, Wigman appears extremely weighted in her 1926 dance "Hexentanz II" from the cycle Visionen ("Witch Dance II" - Visions), which is performed for the most part in a seated position. As she inches forward, toward the audience, she lifts her leg holding onto her ankle with high tension in the arm and slams her foot into the ground to drag the body forward. The extreme force of the downward motion and the excess energy expended by opposing muscle groups create the sense of weightedness. Also in Duncan's Revolutionary Etude, as performed by Annabel Gamson, the strong force of the downward thrust of the arm with the hand in a fist conveys the appearance of extreme weight. In classical ballet examples of weightlessness are most prevalent, but in works such as Le Sacre du Printemps with its stomping gallops, angular lines and downward focus, weightedness is revealed. More common, though, is the quality of

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lightness as seen in Fokine's Les Sylphides (1909) in which all the dancers, except for the one male dancer who is a poet, are non-human, otherworldly sylphides. The force used is light and primarily focused upward. In the Prelude the tempo is slow so that the dancer appears calm, with the dynamic climaxes always ending in a lifted position such as the pose en pointe, facing upstage, focusing upward with the back arched and arms softly out-stretched. Because illusion had been such an integral part of the performance of dance, some of the avant garde artists of the 1960's wanted to try to create dance devoid of illusion or artifice. One of the leaders of this group was Yvonne Rainer who wrote the "No manifesto** in which she expressed her desire to eliminate the illusions of dance: N o to spectacle no to virtuosity no to transformations and magic and make-believe no to the glamour and transcendency of the star image no to the heroic no to the anti-heroic no to trash imagery no to involvement of performer or spectator n o to style n o to camp no to seduction of spectator by the wiles of the performer no to eccentricity no to moving or being moved. 7

Rainer's words: transformations, magic, make-believe, trash imagery, seduction and wiles, leave little doubt of her opinion towards the artifice of illusion. Yet in her signature work, The Mind Is a Muscle, Trio A, which uses no pauses between movements and gives no particular movement more importance than any other, illusions are still created. Even though the movement does not adhere to the commonly held notions of structure and form, the simple movement performed by dancers and non-dancers creates the illusion of pedestrianism. Pedestrianism is that quality of movement which is commonplace and can be executed by non-dancers. The attitude is utilitarian, e.g., to get to the phone, to pick up the baby, rather than aesthetic. In reality, the movement is anything but ordinary or utilitarian. By attending to the movement, the performer gives the movement significance beyond its pedestrian purpose. The movement is set off by the performance area and people are watching the movement to have some kind of an experience. In Sara Rudner's performance of Trio A, it appears that, because of her talent and skill as a dancer, she cannot help but to "dance" the movement, to make the movement extraordinary, to give it meaning. Yet in Trio A, Rainer's intent was to explore movement-as-task, which sounds anti-illusion, but in her voice-over on the video Beyond the Mainstream, she confesses to the desire to create illusions: KI wanted to look effortless, that I wanted to be light, heavy."8 So whether illusion is the result 7

Rainer Work 1961-73, p. 51.

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of the intent of the choreographer, the attention of the performer, or the perception and interpretation of the audience, it is virtually impossible to do away with in dance totally. Indeed it might be said that illusion is a defining characteristic of dance, as opposed to mere movement. It is the illusion on any of these levels (from the perspective of the choreographer, performer, or audience) that transforms the movement from the ordinary into the extraordinary.

Exterior and Interior Illusion in Dance Although this paper presents the exterior and interior landscapes of dance as being mutually exclusive (and typically one or the other tends to be more important in a particular work) the exterior and interior illusions often work together to some extent to present the total illusion of the dance. The exterior illusion was most important in the nineteenth century romantic and classical ballets which primarily present a story. The librettos are based on fairytales, previous literature or original stories and are often written by someone other than the choreographer, although Petipa did collaborate on the book of some of his ballets. The illusions, therefore, are concerned with the literal aspects of time, place, character and event, partially explained by program notes. In addition to the program notes which explain the basic plotline and list the characters, the audience also is assisted in reading the illusions by the scene. The scenic clues which help the audience to suspend disbelief and accept the illusions of the ballet include the set, props, costumes, and often the corps de ballet dancers who play the roles of peasants, townspeople, party guests, or otherworldly creatures. The scenic details tell the audience where the action takes place - in a glade, by the lake, in some exotic setting such as Scotland (La Sylphide) or the Orient (La Bayadere). Such exotic and mysterious locations ease the audience's transition from the concerns of their everyday world to the realities of the illusory world of the theatre, a world traditionally separated from the ordinary world by the proscenium arch, footlights and a heavy velour curtain. Although the corps de ballet dancers are described by general titles such as Wilis, Swans, or the Prince's Friends, the principal characters of the ballets of this period were particularized; they had names, such as Prince Siegfried, James or Giselle, and a social station - typically either royal or peasant. This particularization points to the importance of the outward appearance of the 8 Yvonne Rainer in Beyond the Mainstream.

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character. The lead male dancer in August Bournonville's La Sylphide is the young Scottish peasant named James Reuben, who, on his wedding day in 1830 dreams of a sylphide. What is important here is that this particular young man wants to possess the sylphide, and as the story unfolds the audience discovers that by possessing this ethereal creature, James destroys his object of desire. James' emotions are particular to the events of the ballet and often conveyed by ballet mime, a codified set of gestures. The plots of two of the most famous ballets of this period hinge on the effects created by mistaken identities which create interesting situations that challenge that dancers to make these false identities apparent in dance terms. In Giselle, the lead character - Giselle - is engaged to Loys, a peasant, who is actually Albrecht, Duke of Silesia. And in Swan Lake Prince Siegfried is in love with Odette, a swan queen who is actually a woman transformed into a swan by the evil sorcerer, Von Rothbart. In Act III, Prince Siegfried dances a romantic pas de deux with Odile, the daughter of Von Rothbart who pretends to be Odette. The cunning Odile fools Prince Siegfried into believing her, ruining any chance he might have of returning Odette to her human state. The Odette-Odile role has become a measurement of a ballerina's dramatic ability and balletic artistry because in this role the dancer must project the character of the regal swan queen, Odette, and her evil counterpart, Odile. In Act III, Odile appears at the Prince's party disguised as Odette. In her movement, the ballerina must combine aspects of both characters, Odette who is vulnerable, yielding, and in love with the Prince, and Odile who is haughty, willful, and delights in fooling the Prince. Odette's movement in Act II is marked first by fearful, trembling motions and the frantic runs en pointe, then slow, preening movement as she delicately gives her weight to her Prince portraying her trust in him. When the ballerina appears as Odile, her persona dramatically changes and the softness of Odette is lost. George Balanchine, choreographer and founder of the N e w York City Ballet, describes the difference between the Act II pas de deux with Odette and the Act III pas de deux with Odile: "In opposition to the adagio of Act Two, it has another kind of grace: it is full of pride and arrogance, rather than tenderness; it has the cold, dazzling light of a bright diamond."' Where Odette shows her trust by using the support of Prince Siegfried, Odile shows her independence in her unsupported balances. Where Odette is coy, looking beyond her upraised arm as if it were a wing shielding her face, Odile smiles cunningly, coldly. Although the movement vocabulary of both characters is similar, it is the nuances of energy, shape and 9

Balanchine: Balanchine's Complete Stories of the Great Ballet, p. 370.

Howe: Outside In: The Movement from Exterior to Interior Illusions in Dance 2 7 3

facial expression that allow the viewer to understand the illusion within the illusion, first that it is Odile pretending to be Odette - the illusion presented to Prince Siegfried - and second the illusion presented to the audience that the ballerina is a swan-woman. Because the primary intent of the majority of the ballets of this period is to present a story, the events of the plotline are important. The story of Swan Lake centers around a young man coming of age. The ballet opens with the birthday of Prince Siegfried; he receives a crossbow and is told he must choose a wife soon. In Act II he goes hunting with his friends at the lake and there encounters the Swan Queen, Odette, with whom he falls in love. Act III takes place the next day at the Prince's castle where his birthday ball is celebrated. At the party, he dances with the evil Odile whom he believes to be his love, Odette. Prince Siegfried asks for Odile's hand in marriage thereby unwittingly breaking his vow to be faithful to, and only love, Odette. In Act IV, the Prince realizes his mistake and returns to the lake to ask for Odette's forgiveness. Odette and the Prince know that they cannot be free of Von Rothbart's spell in life, so they commit suicide by drowning themselves in the lake. Swan Lake is divided into segments presenting the story - the plot and the relationships between characters - and segments presenting the dancers divertissementi. The story is presented in a combination of mimed and acted sections used to promote the storyline, and danced sections used to show who the characters are and their relationships to one another - such as the way the various pas de deux between Siegfried and Odette demonstrate their growing love for one another. The gestures of the mimed sections in classical ballets, including Swan Lake, are based on codified movements such as pointing to the ring finger of the left hand (to marry), hands clasped at the heart (to love), or drawing an imaginary line around the face (beautiful). These gestures assist in communicating the story of the ballet, but their codification limits the communication to particular situations rather than allowing the dancers to explain individualized expressions of their inner motivations. Siegfried's expression of love in the mimed sections cannot differ from the love Franz mimes for Swanhilda in Coppelia. The reliance on the mime, which is necessitated by the storylines of the classical ballets, makes those sections of the ballets able only to present the outward appearance of stereotypic situations. It is in the danced sections that the audience can realize more clearly the ramifications of the love stated in the mime. Although the classical ballet is by definition unreal in its silent action,the unreality of the situation is juxtaposed to realistically depicted items such as set pieces made to look like trees, real peasant huts, ornate castles, as well as property pieces such as Siegfried's crossbow or the sword Giselle uses in her

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mad scence. It is in these accoutrement - the mime, acted sequences, set, and properties - that an attempt at verisimilitude is made. The materialism and ornamentation prevalent in the exterior illusions of the classical ballet became a rallying point for the moderns who rebelled against the ballet. Mary Wigman, one of the pioneers of the modern movement, defines dance and the choreographic process in terms of making the visible the invisible; of making the internal, the intuitively known, consciously known. Wigman contends that the importance lies not in the object (the sentiently apprehended evidence of the dance work) but in the essence of the object - the subject - in the spiritual extract (inner truth) of the material.10 The intention of the early moderns was to present more abstract ideas which necessitated creating illusions which could communicate the experience that was the content of the dance. Martha Graham, American choreographer, discussing her purpose as a choreographer, which was similar to, but perhaps more concrete than Wigman, wrote in "A Modern Dancer's Primer for Action": I did not want to be a tree, a flower, or a wave. In a dancer's body, we as audience must see ourselves, not the imitated behavior of everyday actions, not the phenomena of nature, not exotic creatures from another planet, but something of the miracle that is a human being, motivated, disciplined, concentrated. 11

In the same article, Graham goes on to explain the method of making the invisible visible in her dance and in so doing points to what she felt were the short-comings of the classical ballet: True theatricality is not a vain or egotistic or unpleasant attribute. Neither does it depend on cheap tricks either of movement, costume, or audience appeal. Primarily, it is a means employed to bring the idea of one person into focus for the many. First there is the concept; then there is a dramatization of that concept which makes it apparent to others. This process is what is known as theatricality.12

It is in the process of dramatization that Graham creates the illusions which will give substance to the internal motivations and emotions of her characters so that they might communicate "the miracle that is a human being." Martha Graham created several works based on the Greek myths such as Night Journey based on the Oedipus story and Cave of the Heart based on the Medea story. In both cases, contrary to the manner by which the ballet deals with stories, Graham was not concerned with the general plot, but rather with the 10 11

See Wigman: Composition, p. 12; Pfeiffer. "Mary Wigman." Martha Graham: "A Modem Dancer's Primer for Action." Steinberg, ed., The Dance Anthology, p. 45. 12 Ibid., p. 49.

Howe: Outside In: The Movement from Exterior to Interior Illusions in Dance 2 7 5

characters of the story as archetypes to convey some aspect of the human experience and psyche. Graham presupposed the audience knowing the myth from which she extracted her characters; but instead of presenting the plot as some sort of progression over time, she presented a flashpoint - a moment when her main character must confront a particular situation such as Jason's return to Medea or Jocasta's reaction to Oedipus blinding himself. The external elements of character, setting, and time which garnered so much attention in the classical ballets were made subservient to the dance idea and unobtrusive in their own right. At most, the specific set pieces were abstracted beyond their normal appearance so that they merely suggested their purpose and were incorporated into the choreography so that they were no longer mere decoration. Wigman was particularly interested in purifying her medium, so typically her works were performed on bare stages without sets. Graham did use set pieces but they were so intimately woven into the choreography that they were integral to the work as a whole. The artistically abstracted set pieces by Isamu Noguchi for Graham's works indicate some aspect of the character such as the massive abstract platform (bed) which represents the incestuous relationship between Jocasta and Oedipus. Just as the set pieces, when used, indicated some aspect of the personality of the character, the costumes too were used to reflect the emotion of the character. In Graham's solo work Lamentation, the dancer is clad in a jersey tube which covers her from head to foot with only the face, feet and hands visible. The dancer, sitting on a bench, rocks back and forth and thrusts her hands into the stretched jersey; the ripples in the stretched jersey costume give outward form to the inner reality and thereby heighten and underline the tension felt by the grieving woman. The woman in Lamentation is not a specific woman of a particular social standing; she is everywoman. Because of this her costume is not required to indicate any of the outward characteristics of character - whether she is young or old, mother or daughter, rich or poor. What is significant is the manifestation of the interior landscape of this everywoman, her grief, her loss, her attempt to find comfort within herself. The illusion of this work is the sentient representation of the inner reality of lamenting. In another example, Mary Wigman's "Sturmlied'' (Storm Song) from Schwingende Landschaft, the costume is a further abstraction. The costume, a red chiffon drape which covers her head and body, helps to create the image of a flashing red beacon in a storm or the swirling fury of the storm itself. Wigman is no longer a person, but rather the passion of a raging force. As is the case in Lamentation, "Sturmlied" also is the outward presentation of an inner state. The ability of modern dance to present the inner reality is benefitted by a movement vocabulary tailored to the dancework in which it is used. In opposition

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to the classical ballet, the choice of movement in modern dance choreography is not limited to a technique codified by definition of the genre nor is it limited to only those movements which are considered graceful or "beautiful." The movement choices are governed rather by their efficacy in revealing the inner forces at play in the characters presented. The choreographer must decide the appropriateness of any given movement to portraying the character or force that is the content of the dance-work. Therefore the heavy, slamming, seated scoots and percussive head reverberations of "Hexentanz II" from Visionen are appropriate to give outward expression of the witchness in all humans, and the small, repeated convulsions and skeetering on the knees is effective in conveying Medea's envy. Where Graham used archetypic characters, Wigman used generic characters, as in "Hexentanz II," to be more direct in revealing those commonalities we share as human beings. In "Hexentanz II," Wigman did not portray a particular witch with movements which typically caricature those mean women in black dresses and tall pointed hats. "Hexentanz II" presented those dark recesses of the human psyche from which evil thoughts and deeds arise. For this role, Wigman wore a mask as part of the costume. The mask obliterated the particulars of Wigman, the person, to again facilitate the reading of the illusions presented as reflections of humanity in general. The mask also lends an appropriate eeriness to the dance with its unchanging, painted and carved expression. For Wigman the dance arises out of an internal necessity and is intuitively and intentionally formed. The impetus to create derives from the experiences of life, the human condition. It is the fantasy, the vision, of the choreographer's mind enmeshed with the reality of her physicality. Through her choreography, performances and writing, Wigman validated dance as a language of intensely felt personal feelings and experiences which have been externalized and made universal through the abstraction of movement. Therefore, the success of the dance depended upon the ability to create, though choreography and performance, legible illusions of invisible properties. In the early years of the modern dance movement, the choreographers often stripped dance of the extrinsic elements to concentrate and rely on the intrinsic elements of the art form. The illusions were no longer of the theatrical reality of a specific character within a story which takes place in a particular setting an unfolds over the course of a full evening work. Instead, the choreographer relied on the movement to create the illusions of particular aspects of human nature. The non-dance elements, when used, were in support of the movement, and reflective of the emotional content, rather than in support of the story and reflective of the setting.

Visual Metaphors and Textual Shadows

DONALD G . MACKAY AND TOSHI KONISHI University of California, Los Angeles

The Selection of Pronouns in Spoken Language Production: An Illusion of Reference

Abstract: This chapter reports an illusion of reference in how people select p r o n o u n s to complete sentences such as "When a teenager grows up to be tough." T h e results indicated that pronouns don't just agree in person, number, and gender with their antecedents, but have semi-autonomous functions of their own. Specifically, unconscious beliefs about and stereotypical attitudes toward the antecedents govern pronoun choice. F o r example, speakers tend to use human pronouns rather than it for nonhuman antecedents that are named, are typically pets, or are engaging in typically human activities. T w o general frameworks for explaining these findings are discussed.

H o w do speakers select words when producing sentences? The present study examines two general frameworks for understanding lexical choice and presents some new experimental data that is consistent with one of these frameworks but not the other. The two frameworks are the objectivist framework and the experientialist framework, and both are spelled out in detail in Lakoff & Johnson 1 . Of the two, the objectivist framework has had much greater impact on research and theorizing in psycholinguistics and related fields 2 . Under the objectivist framework, semantic features represent the meaning of a word and play a critical role in retrieving the word during everday language production. By way of illustration, consider retrieval of content words such as nouns. Under the objectivist framework, noun retrieval results from calling up a set of semantic features that are stored in the brain together with the noun. These features are then matched against the features of the world that one wishes to discuss. The noun with the greatest number of semantic features that happen to match the current features of the world gets chosen for production. Features are assumed to remain constant over time, and to be 1 2

Lakoff and Johnson: Metaphors we live by. Ibid.

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independent of the attitudes, beliefs or thoughts of the speaker, and of the linguistic and nonlinguistic context in which the word is used. One problem with the objectivist account of word retrieval is that it has proven difficult to specify the semantic features for content words such as nouns. For any given noun, there is little agreement on what the semantic features are or even whether they are limited in number3. However, pronouns represent a set of lexical items that seem immune to these problems. Semantic features for pronouns are widely agreed upon, few in number, and completely specifiable. This makes pronouns well suited for testing general theories of lexical retrieval because, if the objectivist framework is correct, pronoun features do not differ in principle from fetures underlying other types of word retrieval4. We therefore focussed on pronoun retrieval in the work reported here. Most feature theorists limit the values a feature can take to + and - , and given this restriction, the agreed upon pronominal features are humanness ( + or - human), number (+ or - singular), and gender ( + or - male). Under the objectivist framework, pronouns are substitutes for nouns and this framework has been so successful for so long in promoting this view that it has become built into the word pro(noun) in English and many other languages. Within the objectivist framework, pronouns are chosen by matching semantic features of the pronoun with corresponding features of the antecedent noun. Whatever pronoun shares the greatest number of features with the antecedent noun gets selected for production. For example, she is chosen to refer to the noun woman because both share the underlying features +human, +singular, and - male5. One problem with the objectivist explanation of pronoun choice is that in many instances, pronoun choice systematically violates the feature matching principle. Examples are reification (e.g., use of it to refer to human infants), contextual neutralization (e.g., use of he to refer to neutral or sex-indefinite classes such as person, student, pedestrian), and personification (e.g., use of the human pronouns, he and she, to refer to nonhuman antecedents such as animals, inanimate objects, and abstractions). As MacKay & Konishi4 point out, such instances of personification can be highly systematic; For example, she rather than he is used to refer to ships, countries, cars, the earth, and nature, whereas he rather than she is used to refer to death, time, and the sun. 3

See for example, Clark and Clark: Psychology and language.

4

See also Marslen-Wilson and Tyler: "Towards a psychological basis for a theory of anaphora."

5

These specific features were propopsed by Clark and Clark: Psychology and language.

6

MacKay and Konishi: "Personification and the pronoun problem."

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T o explain these violations of the feature matching principle, objectivist theories postulate a feature suppression process, but so far no account has been developed to explain why some nouns trigger this hypothetical suppression process while other nouns do not. Why for example do nouns such as infant or baby trigger suppression of the feature + human (resulting in use of the pronoun it) whereas other nouns (e.g., girl, boy) do not? The objectivist framework has also failed to develop an account of why some sex-indefinite classes such as nurse, secretary, and model trigger suppression of the feature +male (resulting in use of the pronoun she), while other sex-indefinite classes trigger suppression of the feature + female (resulting in use of the pronoun he). Nor has the objectivist framework developed an account of the violations of feature matching in pronominal personification. For example, because speakers use she to refer to an object such as a ship on some occasions but it on other occasions, the theory of lexical retrieval must explain why feature suppression operates for some contexts or occasions but not others. Because the objectivist framework assumes that context is irrelevant to lexical choice, this is a serious problem for this framework. Problematic examples of this sort, where a speaker refers to one and the same referent using one pronoun on one occasion and another on another occasion are many in number. Mathiot7 provides a typical example where a man refers to a door as it when talking to his boss but as she when talking to his family. Here contextual factors such as the person (s) spoken to must be determining the choice of pronoun for referring to one and the same object. Such effects cannot be explained in the objectivist framework without major revisions. MacKay and Konishi8 observed many similar violations of the feature matching rule in a sample of approximately 35,000 uses of he, she, and it in children's literature. Their findings led to a new view of lexical retrieval, which they designated the underlying attitude hypothesis. Under this hypothesis, the so-called exceptions to the feature matching rule are manifestations of a more general rule, namely that underlying attitudes toward the communicative situation and concept referred to can strongly influence lexical choice. For example, a speaker who uses it to refer to an adult male (as in "Oh no! Here it comes.") may be manifesting a negative attitude toward this person9. This underlying attitude hypothesis is consistent with the second framework for 7

Mathiot: "Referential gender in American English."

8

MacKay and Konishi: "Personification and the pronoun problem."

9

Ibid.

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studying meaning and lexical choice, the experientialist framework10. Under this framework, the meaning of a word is not limited to a set of inherent features with fixed and discrete values such as + o r - Nor are words chosen on the basis of a feature matching process involving features inherent either to words or to the world. Rather, meaning is meaning to a person and is relative to his or her point of view, beliefs and attitudes at a particular time and context of use. The present research tested two important predictions derived from the experientialist framework. One is that pronoun choice will vary with beliefs about or attitudes toward the concept referred to, independent of any inherent features the concept may be said to have under the objectivist framework. The other is that attitudes or beliefs underlying pronoun choice are context dependent and variable across subjects and over time, and can vary continuously rather than assuming all or none values such as + or - human.

Study I: Preliminary Determination of Attitudes and Beliefs To test the prediction that pronoun choice will vary with attitudes and beliefs regarding the concept referred to, we first constructed sentence fragments, each with two or more alternative topics that intuitively seemed to elicit contrasting attitudes. An example is the pair "Whenever America tries to get support from some allies," vs. "Whenever Iran tries to get support from some allies." Because of political events over the past 15 years, we expected that the attitudes of subjects toward Iran in this context would be more negative than attitudes toward America. If this in fact turned out to be the case, we could then determine the effect of this negative attitude on the use of it vs. human pronouns she and he) in a separate study (Study II) where new subjects completed the Iran and America versions of this sentence. To test the prediction that pronoun choice will vary with beliefs regarding the concept referred to, we constructed 2 pairs of sentence fragments (lab-2ab below) that intuitively seemed to elicit contrasting beliefs. By determining the beliefs that subjects actually hold about these sentences, Study I enabled the experientialist framework to generate further predictions for test in Study III. la. When a teenager grows up to be tough, lb. When a teenager grows up to be pretty, 2a. If a student practices basketball instead of studying, 2b. If a student practices ballet instead of studying, 10

Lakoff and Johnson: Metaphors we live by.

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Subjects. Subjects in Study I were 48 UCLA students (24 males, 24 females: mean age 19.7) who received credit in an introductory psychology course for their participation. Procedure. Subjects were presented with 26 typed sentences, together with a set of questions such as "What is the likelihood that a student who practices basketball instead of studying is a female? A 5-point scale was provided for answering each question, with response alternatives such as 1 (zero likelihood), 2 (very little likelihood), 3 (moderate likelihood), 4 (more than moderate likelihood), 5 (very high likelihood). Materials. Although subjects rated all versions of the 26 sentences in Table 1, each subject rated only one version of each sentence; Different versions of the same sentence were presented to different subjects in counterbalanced fashion. To illustrate the concept of counterbalancing, consider sentences lab-2ab above and in Table 1: Half the subjects received sentences la and 2b, while the other half received sentences l b and 2a. In this way, subjects' rating for the a version would not be influenced by their rating for the b version of the same sentence, and vice versa. Materials relevant to Study II consisted of 9 sentence fragments (3-11 in Table 1) each of which came in several versions formed by changing one or more words, giving 22 sentences in all. As illustrated below, questions for these sentences tapped 8 attitudinal dimensions (although not every attitudinal dimension was tested for each fragment; see Table 1): (1)Masculinity: e.g., How masculine are dogs considered? (2)Likeability: e.g., How likeable are dogs? (3) Femininity: e.g., How feminine are dogs considered? (4) Personification: e.g., How humanlike or personified is the dog in the following situation? "When the dog saw a much dreaded enemy across the way..." (5) Personal involvement: e.g., How personally involved would you be with a dog in the above situation? (6) Uniqueness: e.g., How unique or one-of-a-kind would the jellyfish be to someone who said "After Kelley the Jellyfish lost one of those stinging tentacles?" (7)Familiarity: e.g., How familiar are you with dogs in the above situation? (8)Rationality: e.g., To what extent does a child have the ability to reason?

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