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.,
(Pbk) £25 (Hbk) £13.99 (Pbk)
Crary,
Jonathan. Suspensions of Perception:
Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture.
Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999. 397 pp.,
$45 / £30.95 (Hbk), $22.95 / £15.95 (Pbk),
Reviewed
by
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.