Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Archive
Volume 16 Number 1, April 2015
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Walter, Christina,
Optical Impersonality: Science, Images, and Literary Modernism,
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014.
339, ISBN-13: 978-1-4214-1363-1 59.95 US Dollars
Reviewed by
Middle East Technical University
Optical Impersonality: Science, Images, and Literary Modernism with its 339 pages is divided into 5 Chapters, Acknowlegements, Introduction, Afterword, Notes, Bibliography and Index. Each Section including the Introduction and Afterword starts with 1 or 2 quotations (Intro.: 1,4 Two quotations; 2,3,5, Afterward One Quotation). For each Section there are detailed and comprehensive notes with explanatory information. All throughout the book 35 Figures have been used to complement the “Optical nature” of the book.
Christina Walter, in the Introduction to the book, gives a detailed overview of impersonality (even the prefix im is important), personality and the approach of the modernists to these elusive concepts and the reconsideration of “sight and reason”, “images and text”, “otherness and selfhood” thereby exploring “the science of vision” especially for “the modernist world”. Walter mentions that she has taken the frequently used term “imagetext” in the book, from W.J.Mitchell. To further illustrate the argument, she gives the example of Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End (1924- 28) and “the visual perceptions” of the protagonist of the book and how he experiences “uncontrollability” which irritates him. She draws the reader’s attention to the “new cultural collaboration between vision, the image, and subjectivity”.
Chapter 1, while examining the origins of “impersonality”, focuses on Walter Pater’s The Renaissance (first published in 1873 and revised again until 1893). Here, Walter observes how Pater sees “vision as a complex process” and Pater using “imagetext” “interrogates the embodied observer of the science of vision”. Walter relates Pater’s observations of Leonardo da Vinci’s involvement in optics. Pater also elaborated on Leonardo da Vinci’s famous and mysterious “Mona Lisa”. Walter further elaborates on how Pater’s friends Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper under the name of Michael Field have been influenced by The Renaissance. These women were interested in physiological studies and were enthusiastic museumgoers.
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At the same time they were familiar with the works of famous critics such as Winckelmann, Lessing, and Ruskin. Their work Sight and Song comprising picture poems formed an example for ekphrasis reflecting their interest in museum catalogs and guide books.
In Chapter 2, Walter presents Hilda Doolittle’s ( Ezra Pound’s ex-fiancé)(H.D.) elaborations and descriptions and how she is concerned about a “refocusing process” to reach a new clarity. Her work The Usual Star shows London perceived as “a complex physiological body capable of sight and perceptual image” by the protagonist of the novel. H.D.’s Sea Garden with its four poems is presented also. In her Notes on Thought and Vision, H.D. develops “an aesthetic impersonality that adapts the scientific study of vision as a phsychophysiological process into an exploration of the impersonal nature of being and the sociopolitical function of art” and in the Bordeline pamphlet H.D. presents her “impersonal film theory”.
Chapter 3 is devoted to Mina Loy, a versatile woman who worries about “the social subjugation of women” which is clarified in the “Feminist Manifesto”. Loy found information about Bess M. Mensendieck’s “system of functional movement”, who attended a medical school after leaving an art school where she studied scultpture. Thus Mensendieck had the opportunity of understanding the body from muscular, skeletal, and neurological angles. She even developed a method called “sculpting flesh”. Loy used this information in her Auto-Facial Construction”. Loy was also influenced by Marcel Duchamp and his adaptaion of optics. Walter gives other examples of Loy’s works to present “imagetextual account of impersonality”.
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Chapter 4 focuses on D.H.Lawrence’s modernism and how desperate Lawrence was “to know through the body and the material world”. This Chapter provides a possibility of analysing Lawrence’s works from a different angle. While Lawrence challenged “Kodak-vision” he worried about what the eye was seeing and what the mind was taking in. In this Chapter, detailed information is given about Lawrence’s poetry and what his poems depict and how they do this. Furthermore, an analysis of Lady Chatterley’s Lover is provided to capture Lawrence’s perception of “impersonality and its relation to a scientific vernacular of vision.
In Chapter 5, Walter wants to highlight the fact that T.S.Eliot is different from H.D., Loy, and Lawrence. Eliot sees “poetry” as “science”. Walter clearly points out that Pater and Filed are linked to “impressionism and aestheticism”, H.D. and Loy are linked to “retro-Romantic individualism”. Water presents the different reactions of various critics to T.S.Eliot; some judging him mercilessly; some trying “to explore” his impersonality. Giving Cecil Beaton’s portrait-photograph of T.S. Eliot, Walter wants to show how light is no more “transparent enlightenment and singularity” and how this portrait-photo becomes an imagetext. Walter also presents in detail the three reasons why Eliot sees poets as scientists. She also elaborates on T.S.Eliot’s Wasteland and The Family Reunion.
In the Afterword, focusing on Brian Massumi’s and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s works, Walter presents “Affect Theory” with detailed explanation of “affect”.
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Throughout the book, detailed explanations are given accompanied by vivid examples. Where necessary examples have been supported by figures of engravings, diagrams, photos, drawings, paintings, texts, sketches forming an optical and a theoretical book. It is amazing to note how the eye(s) (as presented in the jacket illustration of the book) can trick the beholder and to note what goes on until the beholder registers what is seen. Walter emphasizes the fact that science and aesthetic culture will continue to interact to solve the enigmatic and elusive issues of personality/impersonality.
Her book definitely presents a new scholarly approach to optical and literary issues providing an innovative evaluation possibility of the literary and art works through different angles.