Consciousness, Literature and the Arts

Archive

Volume 3 Number 1, April 2002

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Silver, Carole.  Strange and Secret Peoples: Fairies and Victorian Consciousness. New York: Oxford UP, 1999. 272 pp., ISBN: 0-19-512199-6 (Hbk), 0-19-514411-2
(Pbk) £25 (Hbk) £13.99 (Pbk)

 

Crary, Jonathan. Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999. 397 pp., ISBN: 0-262-03265-1 (Hbk), 0-262-53199-2 (Pbk), 
 $45 / £30.95 (Hbk), $22.95 / £15.95 (Pbk), 

 

Reviewed by

Arthur Versluis

 

 

   Both Carole Silver’s Strange and Secret Peoples and Jonathan Crary’s Suspensions of Perception have as their primary focus the Victorian period and the emergence of modernity with an eye to the nature of consciousness.  This fin d’siècle period—that is, the one before last—is indeed a defining time for those who wish to chronicle and analyze the changes in consciousness that divide the nineteenth from the twentieth centuries, and modernity from all that came before it.  Of these two books, though, Silver’s is the more interesting and revealing.

   Silver’s book focuses on the Victorian fascination with fairies, and in her work, which focuses on the period from 1798 to 1923, she draws not only on such authors as Dickens and Yeats, but also on Carlyle and Conan Doyle, as well as artists ranging from “mad” Richard Dadd and Aubrey Beardsley.  Her book also draws on Silver’s extensive knowledge of nineteenth-century science and popular culture.  It is very clear that she has done considerable research for this book, and investigated areas that previously were overlooked, drawing on sources as varied as newspapers, now rare books, pamphlets, photographs, and much else.  In drawing upon this extensive range of material, Silver seeks to make a case that the Victorian fascination with fairies is indicative of underlying Victorian views of racial and cultural superiority and inferiority.

   But most interesting are Silver’s observations concerning the ways that widespread Victorian publicity and popular works about fairies idealized them and reduced them to nothing more than animated dolls, “little people.” Yeats and that other great researcher of fairy lore, W.Y. Evans-Wentz, recognized the dangers of the fairy realm, the fundamentally alien nature of fairies, and the potentially disastrous consequences of dealing with them.  The fairies, in folklore, were traditionally beings to be approached with caution or to be avoided entirely.  The appearance of “fairy photographs,” and the reduction of fairies to “little people” via children’s literature changed the ways people saw fairies; suddenly they were no longer so dangerous, only “cute,” rendered into kitsch. And it is interesting that the typically confabulated Blavatskyan Theosophist ideas concerning the fairies as “remnants” of an earlier quasi-physical race also contributed to the diminution of the traditional fairy. 

   Yet accounts of meetings with the original fairies continue into late twentieth century, as Silver documents.  While modern rationalism tends to reduce fairies to more or less decorative status, occasionally even in the late twentieth century, one comes across English accounts of men or women who encountered disheveled and dancing fairies with unkempt hair off in some uninhabited place.  And one has to wonder whether the aliens of UFO abductions and related tales are in fact more recent manifestations of fairy lore transposed into a new form, but with the same admixture of fascination and fear.  Silver alludes to this possibility, but does not explore it much.  And one wishes for more use made of the contributions of Evans-Wentz and other documentation of meetings with fairies, as this is the most fascinating aspect of the subject.  Still, Silver’s book is well-researched and contains some interesting insights into the disappearance of fairies from the rural landscape, even if, in the end, in this book, they remain more symbols or symptoms than anything else.

   A very different sort of work is Jonathan Crary’s Suspensions of Perception.  Crary’s book surveys various modern artists and authors whose works reveal the dissolution that remains characteristic of modernity, but here he focuses on the subject of attention.  At the conclusion of his book, he writes of Freud’s experience of loneliness experienced in a piazza, and concludes as follows:

The dissolution of the axial, monumental city coincides with what Gianni Vattimo details as the onset of a world of multiple rationalities, a proliferation of images and communication, and the erosion of a principle of reality. . . . Modern attention inevitable fluctuates between these poles: it is a loss of self that shifts uncertainly between an emancipatory evaporation of interiority and distance and a numbing incorporation into myriad assemblages of work, communication, and consumption.  Thus the plural, hubrid space of this Roman square in late summer of 1907 foretells how spectacular society is not irrevocably destined to become a seamless regime of separation or an ominous collective mobilization; instead it will be a patchwork of fluctuating effects in which individuals and groups continually reconstitute themselves—either creatively or reactively (370).

I quote this paragraph at length, albeit not in its entirety, so as to offer a sense of exactly how Crary writes.  This is the sort of writing that one either likes or dislikes, and I have to say that on balance I belong to the latter camp.  There are a lot of abstract words here, and there is, in the end, little content; it is a kind of musing that skates over the surface of its subjects and, although it analyzes them, after reading it one always feels as if one has eaten cotton candy, sweet, full of sharp artificial taste, but without much substance. 

   It is true that Crary’s book is full of examples of modern artists’ works and of the ways in which they manifest shifts from traditional to more fragmented modern perceptions.  He brings in hypnosis as an example of a “technology” of extended attention, and seeks to link together philosophical, artistic, and poetic strands in order to weave a larger narrative about the emergence of consumptionist modernism.  Freud, Peirce, Seurat, Cézanne, Matisse, all have their due references here.  The book rolls on, and on, and on, sustained by Crary’s droll prose and produced impeccably by MIT Press, and yet never goes beyond its mannered inspection of these various works, offering only observations wrapped in dense abstraction.  By its end, I began to wonder if Suspensions of Perception is not more symptomatic than anything else, revealing what happens when academic writing spins off into its own solipsistic world of images and sterile speculations, spinning a web of words that glistens invitingly.