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Picture a room, no
window
A door that leads outside
A man lying on a carpet on the floor
Picture his three grown boys behind him
Bouncing words off of a screen
Of a television big as all outdoors
—Randy Newman, "My Country", Bad Love (1999)
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With his customary economy and wit Randy Newman
sketches a familiar anxiety of modern life: that late
capitalism has replaced community with isolated clumps
of incommunicados, formally known as families, who sit
together cemented by nothing more than their addiction
to television and an unwillingness to resist entropy.
The television is at once an intermediary and a sump
for misdirected language (words bounce off it, back to
others, or just nowhere). The door of the windowless
room is paralleled by the screen as big as all
outdoors, in which the door onto the world and the
screen double each other, blurring the distinction
between the real and the simulated. The tone is
only a mood swing away from the familiar territory of
suburban Gothic: "Watching other people living/ Seeing
other people play/ Having other people's voices fill
our minds/ Thank you Jesus." The vicarious
principle verges on technological possession (hearing
voices) in which entertainment and the divine become
schizophrenically mixed. The Gothic's master trope of
live burial, or broken communication, is brought into
comic view: "Feelings might go unexpressed/ I think
that's probably for the best/ Dig too deep who knows
what you will find." "Freddie Kruger " seems a likely
answer.
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I have started with Newman's song because it helps
sketch an historic arc that has come to concern
Romantic studies (Wood 7). The arc can be traced
through a question. Is there any continuity between the
overlap of individualism, consumerism, and the
beginnings of a technology-driven entertainment
industry based on visual pleasure, which marks the
Romantic period, and the familiar techno-visual
dystopia mordantly anatomised by Newman? If so, what
relationship does this arc bear to the
literary-cultural formation we call "Romanticism"?
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The present volume of Romantic Circles
Praxis seeks to contribute to this debate by
focussing on Gothic writing and visual technology.
There are several intersecting reasons for why such an
inquiry should begin with the Gothic. Whether as
popular theatre, Minerva romances or supernatural
ballads, Gothic was popular—and soon
mass—entertainment. Despite differences in genre
the Gothic tended to be overtly "visual", whether
literally so, in the popular theatre, where dramatists
such as Matthew Lewis adapted emerging spectral
technologies with electrifying effect, or figuratively,
in prose and poetry, through stylistic appeals to the
visual imagination. Two of the most famous
high-cultural put downs of the rising mass
entertainment industry turn exactly on the visual
character of the Gothic: Wordsworth's withering
comments on the stupefying effects of sickly German
tragedies (Gothic theatre), and Coleridge's elaborate
metaphor of romance reading as a visual technology (a
camera obscura) for implanting one person's reveries
into the mind of another.
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The links between the Gothic and the rise of visual
technology are at once deep and seemingly fortuitous.
For example, take the case of Count Cagliostro,
enlightened Free Mason, healer, alchemist, master of
Egyptian mysteries and friend of mankind, or Sicilian
mountebank, pimp, and dangerous adherent of Adam
Weishaupt's revolutionary Illuminati, depending on
one's point of view. Cagliostro himself liked to put on
a good show, with his mediums, crystal balls, and
spectral lighting, and as such he formed the model for
Schiller's "Sicilian" from the seminal Gothic novel,
The Ghost-Seer, whose acts of visual
legerdemain are exposed by the even more devious
Armenian. Cagliostro was eventually to attract the
attention of the Roman Inquisition who were
sufficiently startled by the gravity of the Great
Cophta's revolutionary threat to arrest him, torture
him, and extract his confession, before burying him
alive in the turret of a remote mountain fortress,
despite his European-wide celebrity. Cagliostro's
Gothic sufferings at the hands of the Inquisition
prompted two of the genre's most accomplished romances
from the late 1790s, Radcliffe's The Italian
(Miles, 2000, xvi-xviii) and Godwin's St
Leon.1
During the last of his three London visits, Cagliostro
was befriended by the Alsatian artist Phillipe Jacques
de Loutherbourg, another Freemason and alchemical
enthusiast. A trained engineer, Loutherbourg was also a
set designer of great brilliance and innovation,
specializing in
sound, lighting effects, and the use of automata.
Iain McCalman describes his influence on yet another
influential Gothicist, William Beckford:
Shows using ghostly special effects were, in 1787, to
be given the name of "phantasmagoria," but de
Loutherbourg actually pioneered the form six years
earlier when a rich young aesthete, William Beckford,
asked him to pour "the wildness of your fervid
imagination" into creating an occult eastern
spectacle at his country house. De Loutherbourg's
"necromantic" light effects, "preternatural sounds,"
voluptuous scents, and clockwork machinery had so
intoxicated young Beckford that he'd immediately
begun writing his famous Oriental romance,
Vathek. He didn't know it, but his
imagination had been seized by the forerunner of the
modern cinema (162).
There are two, linked questions here. To what extent
can the magic-lantern and its associated technologies
(now generally designated through the short hand,
"phantasmagoria") be justly characterised as the
forerunner of the modern cinema? And to what extent can
the Gothic's numerous filiations with the
phantasmagoria be characterised as a deep-structural
affinity with the century's emerging visual
technologies?
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Possible answers to the second question are the
concern of the articles collected in this issue.
Answers to the first we leave to the media historians
qualified to deal with it. Or rather, we leave the
vexed matter of technological continuity, of whether
there are meaningful affinities between the kinds of
projections made possible by eighteenth-century
"devices of wonder" (best catalogued and described by
Stafford and Terpak) and their modern counterparts. The
articles in this issue are concerned with a different
sort of question. To what extent are the kinds of
anxieties aroused by the spectral technologies of the
cinema and the phantasmagoria (irrespective of
affinities between them, real or not) themselves the
product of something prior to, or at any rate,
separable from, the technology? Following Michel
Foucault one might describe this "something" as an
epistemic shift. Read in this light, filiations between
the Gothic and the phantasmagoria no longer seem
fortuitous, as both may be said to be grounded in the
same "shift."
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One might describe this shift as a process of
"hollowing-out." Where the divine once was, the secular
now is, and the sign of the secular is the commodity
fetish. There is now a long line of Gothic criticism
working within this tradition, best embodied in Jerrold
E. Hogle's "the ghost of the counterfeit," a phrase as
slippery as it is rich. Hogle first used the phrase in
relation to Horace Walpole's The Castle of
Otranto (25). As a "post" text (post-Reformation,
post-revolution, post-Enlightenment and thus
post-modern), Walpole's supernatural confection was a
work of deep imposture. The acts of unquestioned belief
depicted as ghosts and supernatural machinery merely
call attention to themselves as "counterfeits," rather
than as true signs rendered current and legitimate by
faith. Alfonso is at once a counterfeit ghost (the
product of priestly deceit) and a ghostly reminder that
in the modern world all signs circulate with equal
freedom and (in)authenticity. In Walpole's "post"
world, we are all counterfeits now. Hogle's argument is
recalled by Andrea Henderson's thesis connecting the
circulation of commercialised Gothic imagery to
the shift from use
to exchange value, an emptying out identified by
Baudrilliard as the "order of simulation," the
epistemological condition of the modern world (492).
The strange transmutation of the sign of the sacred
(the supernatural) from the disciplined preserve of
faith to a commodity item and staple of the
entertainment industry, was also the substance of E.J.
Clery's argument in The Rise of Supernatural
Fiction.
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A complementary line of enquiry was initiated by
Terry Castle in her 1987 essay, "The Spectralization of
the Other in The Mysteries of Udolpho." Castle
begins with Philippe Ariès who argues that death
was a commonplace of pre-Enlightenment societies.
Ariès does not mean that beginning with the
Enlightenment there was, somehow, less death, but that
it was treated differently. Whereas in traditional
societies the rituals of mourning involved the presence
of the dead, in modern ones the dead disappear,
absorbed by service industries that invisibly sweep
away discomfiting mortal coils. In the former, religion
and ritual helped survivors accept death as a vestibule
to something else. In modern secular societies the dead
disappear, but the fact remains, unaccommodated. The
paradoxical upshot is that unaccommodated death leads
to spectral materialism. For the late
eighteenth-century imagination, materialism is uncanny.
Once dead bodies are hollowed out, as mere matter,
without a transcendental destiny—signifiers
without signifieds—they rise again, as
phantasmagoria. Coleridge explains, or rather
exemplifies, the phenomenon in Biographical
Literaria. Materialism (as evinced in Lockean
associationism) "removes all reality and immediateness
of perception, and places us in a dream-world of
phantoms and spectres, the inexplicable swarm and
equivocal generation of motions in our own brain"
(BL I: 137). Hence Castle's argument. In the
post-Enlightenment world, the dead live again, as a
spectral presence, a re-supernaturalisation of everyday
life that points, not to a resurgence of religious
faith, but to its absence. Without a belief in an
afterlife to house the dead, the dead persist,
psychologized, as continuously mourned memories that
recur with an intensity potent enough to overturn the
order of the real. For Castle, Gothic is the genre that
comes into being as an expression of modern, spectral
materialism. Hence the tendency of novels, such as
Radcliffe's, to feature dead who persist in the minds
of the protagonists, as spectralized others, as well as
the tendency of living others to become spectral.
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Even more influential has been Castle's extension of
her interest in spectralization to the realm of
technology. Beginning with "Phantasmagoria: Spectral
Technology and the Metaphorics of Modern Reverie",
Castle produced a series of articles on an overlooked
aspect of the rise of visual reproduction, its tendency
to relocate the supernatural from the external world of
inexplicable phenomena to the inner realm of the mind.
Gaspard-Etienne Robertson was the impresario who coined
the phrase "fantasmagorie" , having drawn together the
technical inventions of others, including de
Loutherbourg, into a Radcliffean extravaganza in which
the dead would live again, projected mid-air by magic
lanterns through a haze of smoke in the tombs of the
Capuchin, itself a fit emblem of the commercial
hollowing-out of the sacred (1995: 144, 148). But as
Castle notes, no sooner was "fantasmagorie" coined as a
word for the commercial show than it was adapted to
describe the modern condition of mental life bereft of
stabilising notions of the real. Without such notions
we are placed, says Coleridge, "in a dream-world of
phantoms and spectres." Modern life had become
phantasmagorical, or, as Castle was later to put it in
her collected essays, "uncanny." Spectral technology
broke down the barrier between mind and machine. If
spectral technology was like the mind, the mind, in
turn, was like spectral technology. As Fred Botting
explains, the "overlapping of fantasy and reality,
the confounding of inner and external worlds, the lack
of distinction between mind and materiality, are
…the defining features of the uncanny."
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In pursuing the "hollowing-out" argument we appear
to have arrived at a place antithetical to the one from
which we started. I began with Jerrold Hogle's "the
ghost of the counterfeit" , a reading of the rise of
the Gothic as the product of the modern shift towards
the condition of " simulation", which was independent
of technology, and have ended up with a process of
specularization driven by it. However, as Baudrillard's
own work makes clear, this is not so much a
contradiction as evidence of a dialectical process in
which the severing effects of commodity fetishism are
reinforced by the visual technology the capitalist
process itself gives rise to. The important point is
that for its recent critics—and certainly for the
critics represented in the present issue—Gothic
is at the centre of this
dialectic.
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Hence Angela Wright's focus on the Gothic novel as a
form repeatedly attacked, and stigmatised, as a
"mechanical" art or "technology." For the progressively
minded, literature was an "engine" of instruction. In
his preface to Political Justice William
Godwin declares that "Few engines can be more powerful,
and at the same time more salutary in that tendency,
than literature" (I, 20). Anna Laetitia Barbauld was
equally upbeat: "It was said by Fletcher of Saltoun,
"Let me make the ballads of a nation, and I care not
who makes the laws." Might it not be said with as much
propriety, Let me make the novels of a country, and let
who will make the system?" (quoted Grenby, 13). For
Godwin and Barbauld, novels possess a mysterious power.
For both, novels are a form of cultural technology,
instrumental in altering the system, or engineering
change. Conservative critics, such as T. J. Mathias,
took a similar view: "LITERATURE, well or ill
conducted, IS THE GREAT ENGINE by which,
I am fully persuaded, ALL CIVILIZED STATES must
ultimately be supported or overthrown" (link to Wright). But for
Mathias, the novel was, axiomatically, "ill conducted"
literature. The complaints lodged against the novel are
now well known. Novels were improbable (they left
readers with an undisciplined sense of the world as it
is) and unrealistic (they encouraged readers to
contemplate life above their station, thus breeding
incendiary discontent). These familiar complaints
obscure an essential point, one teased out by Wright.
Critics attacked the novel because they perceived it to
be a dangerous technology, a menace especially
prominent in the Gothic romance, the dominant shape of
the 1790s. Romance bred eidetic reveries in the mind of
the reader, as if projected there by a camera obscura,
an experience of visual pleasure increasingly
proscribed as " mechanical."
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In The Monk Matthew Lewis allegorizes the
novel's stigma as a dangerous technology and in the
process teases out why "reverie-machines" were feared.
Matilda has a magic mirror bordered with "strange and
unknown characters" (270) and with it she conjures an
image of Antonia, bathing, in order to seduce Ambrosio.
As Matilda explains, after an incantation "'the Person
appears in it, on whom the Observer's thoughts are
bent…'" (270). Antonia appears in the mirror,
undressing:
Though unconscious of being observed, an in-bred
sense of modesty induced her to veil her charms; and
She stood hesitating upon the brink, in the attitude
of the Venus de Medicis. At this moment a tame Linnet
flew towards her, nestled its head between her
breasts, and nibbled them in wanton play. The smiling
Antonia strove in vain to shake off the Bird, and at
length raised her hands to drive it from its
delightful harbour. Ambrosio could bear no more: his
desires were worked up to a phrenzy (271).
Lewis employs the standard iconography of
secretly-observed modesty to represent Antonia as an
instinctively coy Venus de Medici. The "Venus" was a
notorious image in eighteenth-century aesthetics, one
highlighting the problematic boundary between
pornography and art. In The Monk Lewis
habitually alludes to the Venus when representing how
his male characters – and readers – see
Antonia (9). As such, one might say that the magic
mirror signifies the veil of textuality that mediates
Ambrosio's lust (Jones). When Ambrosio thinks of
Antonia, she is always already figured as a Venus de
Medici, because that is how eighteenth-century culture
structures objects of male desire. But if the mirror
signifies textuality, it functions as a magic camera
obscura. As a technology the camera obscura is a close
avatar of television, or film. The camera obscura in Outlook Tower,
Edinburgh, provides an example. One stands in a
darkened room with a white circular dais in the middle,
onto which is projected a full-colour image of the
outside world, focused through a series of lenses
channelled through a movable periscope. The main
difference between cinema and the camera obscura (apart
from the technical means) is that the latter provides
the viewer with unedited, real time, action. Matilda's
magic mirror apparently does the same. Ambrosio
observes his naked sister, in real time. However, the
image is "edited," or at any rate composed, as a
mise en scène. She is not lifted "out
of life," but out of, or through, stock imagery. The
representation of Antonia's representation—the
glass in which she appears—signifies the potency
of books to seduce and deprave the unwary "reader," a
power figured by Lewis as a form of visual technology.
In effect Lewis represents the novel form as if it
really were a camera obscura furnished with Coleridge's
feared magic power of projecting one man's reveries
into the mind of another. The magic mirror may thus be
regarded as an allegory of the contemporary critical
anxiety directed towards illicit reading, a fear Lewis
further satirised through his scandalous suggestion
that mothers should stop their daughters conning the
Bible and so prevent its lubricious scenes being
projected onto the mind's inner tablet, where they
might flicker into corrupting life.
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With the foregoing in mind we can recast the
familiar criticism of the novel in the following way.
The Gothic romance was the occasion of moral panic
because it was widely regarded as an engine (a "magic
mirror") for the production of visual reverie. For
ambitious writers, such as Wordsworth and Coleridge, it
became imperative that they distance themselves from
Gothic romance, "German" drama, or "gaudy and inane"
verse, with their mechanical, eye-driven, arts.
As Dale
Townshend demonstrates, a turning away from the
"despotism of the eye" becomes a major focus of
Wordsworth's poetics, where such despotism was closely
linked, in Wordsworth's mind, to the mad assortment of
visual technologies thronging the London market,
such as panoramas,
dioramas, raree shows and phantasmagorias.
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Coleridge provides another illustration of this
anti-technological animus:
In the days of Chaucer and Gower our language
might…be compared to a wilderness of vocal
reeds, from which the favorites only of Pan or Apollo
could construct even the rude Syrinx; and from this
the constructors alone could elicit strains
of music. But now, partly by the labours of
successive poets, and in part by the more artificial
state of society and social intercourse, language,
mechanized as it were into a barrel-organ, supplies
at once both instrument and tune. Thus even the deaf
may play, so as to delight the many…Hence of
all trades, literature at present demands the least
talent or information; and, of all modes of
literature, the manufacturing of poems. The
difference indeed between these and the works of
genius, is not less than between an egg and an
egg-shell; yet at a distance they both look alike
(BL, I: 38-39).
Poems have been hollowed out by the ease of modern,
mechanical reproduction, are nowadays mere shells. As
Coleridge says elsewhere, such poems are "counterfeits"
(I: 42). They may look the same as true poems, but they
lack substance. The eye fails to serve as a means of
distinguishing the real from the forged, the shell from
the true egg, the carapace from the substance. As
Coleridge's metaphor implies, authenticity is a matter
of intangible virtues. Without authenticity, we are
back in a world of phantasmagoric materialism.
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Wordsworth's and Coleridge's assessment of the
radical difference between works of true genius and
those of the mechanic arts, between poems of
transcendental greatness, on one side, and a host of
overtly commercial "products," on the other, from
dioramas to Gothic romances, has been reproduced by
critics of Romanticism virtually ever since. But
matters look very different if we view them through
Jonathan Crary's Techniques of the Observer.
Crary argues that during the long eighteenth century,
"[p]roblems of vision then, as now, were fundamentally
questions about the body and the operation of social
power" (3). He examines "how, beginning early in the
nineteenth century, a new set of relations between the
body on one hand and forms of institutional and
discursive power on the other redefined the status of
an observing subject" (3). The Romantic era witnesses a
shift that "was inseparable from a massive
reorganisation of knowledge and social practices that
modified in myriad ways of productive, cognitive, and
desiring capacities of the human subject" (3). Crary's
Foucauldian reading focuses on the epistemic shift that
occurred as paradigms of knowledge and perception were
re-organised, from a model based on the camera obscura,
to one situated in the physiology of the eye. In the
camera obscura paradigm of the Enlightenment, the
observer's "sensory and physiological apparatus" does
not modify perception. Experimenters discovered that it
made no difference whether one inserted an anatomised
eye-ball into the camera obscura, or a mechanical lens,
from which it followed that physiology did not impact
on how humans see. If the eye-ball did not impact on
sight, the seeing had to be done elsewhere. Richard
Rorty makes the point: "It is as if the tabula
rasa were perpetually under the gaze of the
unblinking Eye of the Mind...it becomes obvious that
the imprinting is of less interest than the observation
of the imprint—all the knowing gets done, so to
speak, by the Eye which observes the imprinted tablet,
rather than by the tablet itself" (55). Crary comments
that although "the dominance of the camera obscura
paradigm does in fact imply a privilege given to
vision, it is a vision that is a priori in the
service of a nonsensory faculty of understanding that
alone gives a true conception of the world" (57).
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Paradoxically, the camera-obscura model of vision
was wedded to the principle of tangibility. We verify
what we see by cross-referencing visual data against
the other senses. According to Crary's argument, in the
nineteenth century the older Enlightenment ideas of
observation verified by touch were unable to deal with
a new order of "mobile signs and commodities whose
identity" was "exclusively optical" (62). Crary
sees the rage for
dioramas and stereoscopes as symptoms of the new,
nineteenth-century model of vision: "The loss of touch
as a conceptual component of vision meant the
unloosening of the eye from the network of
referentiality incarnated in tactility and its
subjective relation to perceived space" (19). For
Crary, the new model, in which perception was located
squarely in the physiological characteristics of the
eye, was a stage towards our modern culture of
spectatorship and consumption (a condition we might
gloss through Coleridge's description, quoted earlier,
of materialism as a phantasmagoria or "dream-world of
phantoms and spectres, the inexplicable swarm and
equivocal generation of motions in our own brain"
(BL I: 137). According to Crary's argument,
Wordsworth's anti-visual, anti-commercial animus had a
self-defeating consequence, for by stressing the
importance of the individual to revolve back within
himself, in order to glimpse presence, he was helping
to disseminate the discursive construction of the
isolated observer (an isolated eye, detached from
touch) that was to become the model of the modern
consumer of "spectacle". Crary points to a
twofold movement that constitutes his paradigmatic
shift, which he locates around the 1820s and 30s. On
the one hand, the linking between internal/external,
subject/object, breaks down. On the other, it is
discursively reconstituted through the body, to a new
science of the physiology of looking.
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Wordsworth was unintentionally complicit with this
process. By stressing inner vision he helps break the
link between internal/external (the camera obscura's
paradigm of vision mediated by a neutral lens), but by
so doing he creates the ground for phantasmagorical
modernity. For modernization a "more adaptable,
autonomous, and productive observer was needed in both
discourse and practice…" (149). For many during
this period, modernity, meaning the promiscuous
circulation of signs (commodity culture, panoramas,
billboards, illustrated newspapers) was itself a
"phantasmagoria", where the world itself appeared the
product of disoriented imagination (Castle 1995:
154-59). At this stage Castle's and Crary's argument
begin to dovetail. Crary's modern
observer—subjective and productive—fits
nicely with Castle's thesis that the common meaning of
phantasmagoria was quickly transformed from a word for
a kind of "high-tech" light show to the imagination
itself. Imagining visualization was no longer a matter
of modelling the mind as a camera obscura, but
representing it, rather, as it a productive source.
Wordsworth outwardly opposed the manifestations of this
shift. But through his inward turn he discursively
reproduced the very disconnection on which the
phantasmagoria was predicated. If Wordsworth's
imagination is a projective lamp, it is discursively
homologous with the one lighting up modernity's magic
lantern.
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According to Crary, then, if Gothic romance is a
visual technology, it is, at the time of its
apogee—around 1800—already in the process
of becoming obsolete, because founded on Enlightenment
models of "observation". Moreover, his analysis
presents us with the following counter-intuitive
position. The commercial romance, with its
illustrations, scenic descriptions, and hair-raising
tableaux—Matilda with a poniard to her exposed
breast, glinting in the moonlight; Schedoni hanging
poised over his sleeping "daughter", his dagger at the
ready; the monster stretched on the table, blinking his
yellow eye—is to be understood as less involved
in the discursive construction of the modern subject,
as a sovereign consumer of spectacle, than Wordsworth's
poetics. The Gothic romance is attached to the older,
"camera obscura paradigm" of passive consumption (much
as Coleridge depicts it), whereas Wordsworth helps
disseminate the prestige of the inwardly revolved
subject who is the self-generating source of what he,
or she, perceives, where presence is "presence"
precisely because it cannot be verified by touch.
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The position is both counter-intuitive and—I
think—incorrect. To understand how the Gothic
romance is a cultural form of visual technology we must
first acknowledge the degree to which it is founded on
Lord Kames's ideal presence, the dominant model of
eighteenth-century aesthetic response (see Miles, 1999:
19-20). Kames imagines a perceptual axis, with real
presence at one end, and reflection at the other. Real
presence is perception itself, the act of seeing.
Reflection is when we introspect about the process of
perception. Ideal presence occurs somewhere in between
these two poles. An act of memory, when we are lost in
a reverie of the past, and seem to relive old events
with an eidetic vividness, would be an example of ideal
presence, as would the inward turn taken when viewing a
painting, where we find ourselves mentally living in
the imaginative world it depicts. Ideal presence is
also operative in the appreciation of novels and poems.
Indeed, it is ideal presence that accounts for the
"reading trance", in which the world depicted through
the word appears to unfold before our eyes. To lose
oneself in a book is to find oneself in ideal presence.
When we introspect about our memories, or focus on the
words on the page, or otherwise interrupt our willing
suspension of disbelief, the spell breaks, and real
presence once more intrudes.
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Kames did not invent ideal presence so much as
codify a set of associative assumptions, deeply
embedded in Enlightenment thinking, which derived
ultimately from the works of John Locke. Locke
characterised the brain, the camera in which sensations
are apprised, "as the mind's presence room" (Crary,
42). The act of reviewing those sensations—as a
relived "playback"—produced "ideal presence." But
there is a signal difference between the state of
affairs described by Rorty, whereby the "unblinking eye
of the mind" reviews the goings-on of the camera, or
presence room, and the aesthetic response posited by
Kames. Rorty describes Locke's philosophical imagining
of mind, of how knowing gets done, whereas Kames
depicts the mental processes underpinning reading
pleasure. In the Lockean model, the "mind's eye" may be
compared to the individual in the camera obscura
observing projections flickering across the screen or
tabula rasa. In Kames's model, one is, so to speak, the
screen itself, onto which a world is projected. If one
were to translate the difference into Freudian terms,
one would say that Rorty's "mind's eye" was much the
same as the detached ego, whereas Kames is largely
thinking of the visualising capacity of the "tabula
rasa," which he images, as being less like a passive
screen, and more like the plastic powers of the primary
processes, characterized by Freud as pre-verbal,
eidetic, hallucinatory, overdetermined, and
pleasurable. This was precisely the objection Coleridge
lodged against the Gothic romance—that someone
else's reveries were being implanted in one's passive
mind, finding swarming purchase. As we earlier saw,
Coleridge complained that the Lockean system of
replayed associations turned the world into a
phantasmagoria, in which sense data floated free from
objects, and images from substance; a streamy
associative flow of pleasurable images, as Coleridge
elsewhere puts it (1957: 1770). Reading a novel was not
a detached matter of standing aloof within a "camera"
of perception—"the mind's presence
room"—taking stock of the process. It was an
inward revolution towards dream, unconsciousness and
pleasure, in which images flickered across one's tabula
rasa, at once the product of someone else's
imagination, and yet self-generated.
-
Gothic romances were, one might say, ideal-presence
machines. As such they participated in the "sovereignty
of the eye" that Crary cites as the distinguishing
characteristic of modern spectatorship. The act of
reading romances did not duplicate the neutral role of
seeing predicated by the pre-Modern paradigm (whether
through the human cornea or bevelled glass); nor does
the mind's inner eye stand impassively aloof observing
the mind's presence room in the act of re-perception,
as if in a private camera obscura, or cinema. Rather
the eye inflects the tabula rasa (the inner screen of
ideal presence), and vice versa. For Wordsworth the eye
is "despotic" because it links outer form to inner
desire, a chain only inner vision can break, the "eye"
that is not an eye. As such Wordsworth sought to
introduce a decisive cleavage between advanced poetics
and the popular consumption of modern, visual
technology, between inner vision, in touch with
incorporeal presence, and an emptied-out
phantasmagoria. Crary's Foucauldian approach
effaces this difference by drawing links between two
epistemically-related versions of self-generated
vision. Wordsworth's inner vision and the inner vision
of Romance's reading trance both turn on the
self-generative eye. According to this view, Gothic
romance does not anticipate cinema because of an
alleged mimicry of the magic lantern in the means by
which it projects its fantasies. Gothic romance
anticipates cinema, rather, by enthroning the
reverie-making capacity of the mind's eye as the
dominant determinant in aesthetic consumption, a
discursive act replicated by Wordsworth's elevation of
disembodied vision.
-
At this stage of the argument, Crary's hypothesis is
still to be fully tested. One can say, already, that it
makes better sense of the rivalry between Romance and
Romanticism, prose fiction and poetry, than that
provided by the story pressed by Wordsworth and
Coleridge, and many others ever since. Gothic romance,
it used to be said, was aesthetically retrograde,
because it appealed to an eighteenth-century model of
consumption (the passivity inherent in Kames' "ideal
presence," with the tabula rasa as mirror), one left
behind by the dynamic lamp of transcendental sight.
Drawing on Crary, we can now say that the Romance
struggled to maintain its prestige, not because of its
archaic quality, but because of its modernity, its
enthronement of the self-generating eye, which drew the
fire of reactionary—or, at any rate,
alarmed—forces. As a result, the Romance found it
easier to press ahead as the probable novel, which
promised to discipline, and regulate, fantasy (and thus
the phantasmagorical).
-
At the start of my introduction I said the papers in
this issue of Praxis addressed the following
question: to what extent can the Gothic's numerous
filiations with the phantasmagoria be characterised as
a deep-structural affinity with emerging visual
technologies? As I earlier explain, "phantasmagoria"
has come to take on a specialised meaning, post Castle.
Castle herself argues that the phantasmagoria should
have become a kind of master trope in
nineteenth-century romantic writing [cited by Hoeveler]. If it did
not fulfil itself in Romantic writing, it certainly has
in Gothic criticism, where it has become a master trope
for discussing the uncanny doublings of the material
and the human, where each takes on the unsettling
characteristic of the other, when least it should. The
first essay in the volume, Fred Botting's "Reading
Machines", explores the unsettling history of the
interchange between the mechanical and the human in
Gothic writing. For Botting, the uncanny locus of this
interchange is technology. The word's Greek root takes
us back to the human scale, to "art", even as its
modern sense involves the dizzying prestidigations of
mechanical reproduction. The modern uncanny, that is to
say, the Gothic, turns on the perception of the human
in the mechanical, and the mechanical in the human.
Sophie Thomas's "Making Visible: The Diorama, the
Double, and the (Gothic) Subject" extends Botting's
focus into the realm of Romantic-era visual technology.
The Diorama succeeded the Phantasmagoria and Panorama
as the period's most popular, "high-tech" spectacle. As
Thomas shows, the Gothic endured as a subject-matter,
albeit refocused from Radcliffe's terrors to the
architectural or natural sublime. But like Botting
Thomas argues that the Diorama's real power to disturb
derives, not from the terrors depicted, but from its
uncanny technology: "Perhaps in this the Diorama
doesn't simply respond to, or capitalize on, the
popularity of Gothic forms, but creates a space with a
view (so to speak) to mastering or capturing the abject
remainders of the counterfeit's ghostly productions"
[link to Thomas].
In "Smoke and Mirrors: Internalizing The Magic Lantern
Show in Villette," Diane Hoeveler examines yet
another shunt in the constant interchange between
visual technologies and the novel during the period.
Radcliffe inspires the subject-matter of Robertson's
"fantasmagorie", which is, in its turn, internalized in
Charlotte Brontë's Vilette. As already
mentioned, in "Haunted Br itain in the 1790s," Angela
Wright probes the special animus critics invested in
the term "mechanical", with regards to the Gothic (even
as they themselves reproduced the Gothic's mechanical
formulas) while Dale Townshend concludes the volume, in
"Gothic Visions, Romantic Acoustics," by teasing out
aspects of Wordsworth's development of an auditory
aesthetic, as a means of overcoming the despotism of
the eye.
-
The essays that follow are in reverse chronological
order. We begin with Botting, whose approach looks to
the present, and work back through the early Victorian
period, via the essays of Thomas and Hoeveler, to the
Romantic investigations of Wright and Townshend. The
first three contributions cross-refer to the concerns
triangulated by the work of Hogle, Castle and Crary,
and as such help frame the last two. The organising
premise of this field is that the rise of visual
technology during the Romantic era impacted on modern
subjectivity in ways that are still very much with us.
Randy Newman's comic dystopia of a nation of stupefied
television addicts certainly has direct connections
with the fears expressed by Wordsworth and Coleridge.
One could say that such fears are the least of it. The
papers in this volume set out to articulate what
something more might mean as registered in the troubled
relationship between Romantic Gothicism and
technology.
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