Optical Impersonality: Science, Images, and Literary Modernism by Christina Walter (review)

Since the publication of Sharon Cameron's Impersonality: Seven Essays (2007), modernist literary studies has seen a renewed interest in the concept of an impersonal aesthetic, whose tenets, as famously outlined by T. S. Eliot in "Tradition and the Individual Talent," have long been recognized as one of modernism's most celebrated (and notorious) legacies. Scholars like Tim Dean, Colleen Lamos, and Rochelle Rives have produced work that reimagines modernist impersonality, widening its scope with the incorporation of writers on the fringe of the canon, like Mina Loy and Mary Butts, and complicating its presumed relation to a masculine, and frequently conservative, social vision. With Optical Impersonality: Science, Images, and Literary Modernism, Christina Walter aims to further this new direction. Following Cameron's suggestion that the "im" in impersonality doesn't necessarily signify a "lack," but rather a recognition that the self is always already fragmented, Walter traces how a constellation of modernists discovered in nineteenth-century optical science a language describing an embodied subjectivity, from which they forged a "vernacular science in aesthetic form" (3). By demonstrating that optical science is "a window onto the impersonality that already resides within the human subject," impersonality emerges in her account less as something to strive for and more like something to be true to (5). There is a political dimension to her argument: Walter's six protagonists all register the shock of this optical paradigm shift and the new notions of selfhood that spring from it; but while Walter Pater, Michael Field, H.D., and Mina Loy strove to fashion aesthetic artifacts that expressed the emancipatory potential of the new visual regime, D. H. Lawrence and T. S. Eliot ultimately settled on strategies of containment.

In her introduction, Walter writes, "Reformulating modernist impersonality … requires close attention to the three cultural sites that became the crucible for its development: the history of optical science, the history of image-text relations, and the history of personality" (7). Very briefly, the backdrop for her argument is as follows: Cartesian optics, based on classical geometrical principles and taking the camera obscura as its model, had posited a stable, transparent relation between the observer and the observed; the eye, in other words, was capable of perfectly duplicating the image of the exterior world inside the mind. This theory, closely aligned with an Enlightenment model of subjectivity, had slowly collapsed over the course of the nineteenth century, under the pressure of relentless empirical investigation; and scientists eventually replaced it with a physiological model of what was by now an organ like any other, emphasizing its dense materiality, and laying to rest any notion of the eye as privileged window into consciousness. The destabilizing of the subject that follows from the new optical paradigm, moreover, had implications for the relationship between pictures and words: for centuries, Walter writes, "the relation between objective observer and transparent vision had long been complemented by an image/text binary in which text conveyed rational thought and the image was a static, mimetic record of external objects" (34). Thus, the blurring of the subject/object divide precipitated by the new embodied optics finds its analogue in the blurring of the image/text divide. The exploration of various modes of this "imagetextuality" is in Walter's account the major link among the figures she discusses.

Though modernist scholars will forever quibble about when exactly Modernism began, it is apt that Walter begins with an extended analysis of Walter Pater's boldly revisionist study of The Renaissance (1873–93). Drawing on Goethe's discovery of the optical phenomenon of "after-images," which suggested a fundamental rupture of the link between perception and its object referent, Pater argued that the works of Leonardo and his contemporaries unfolded in the viewer's mind over time, endowing the traditionally static realm of the image with the kind of temporality associated with written texts. "The Renaissance," Walter writes, "makes imagetextuality the model for its own form, as an art history that continually renegotiates and...