WALKER EVANS: READING HIM BACKWARD AND FORWARD

6 4 Y W A L K E R E V A N S R E A D I N G H I M B A C K W A R D A N D F O R W A R D J E R R Y L . T H O M P S O N A long time ago when I was an undergraduate at the University of Texas, I took a course on Shakespeare taught by an older man with strong opinions. Among his favorite targets were critics who drew on the work of Freud in explaining scenes from the plays – for example, Hamlet’s emotional encounter with his mother. ‘‘Shakespeare never studied Freud,’’ he would thunder in a voice well-equipped to read Shakespeare’s plays aloud, which he liked to do, and did well. Ten years later I was a young faculty member in another university . A professor there was Harold Bloom, reported by some of his students to have a photographic memory. According to them, Bloom remembered what he had read once, forty years ago, as if he had read it that morning. For him the history of literature was not a sequence: it was a display of simultaneous events, like a large painting. At the time (around 1976) he was particularly interested in how one great poet influences another; in the lectures I heard him deliver, he would skip back and forth among the decades and centuries, quoting and discussing passages from this great poet and then that one as if they were in conversation. Some students who had worked with him joked about his lec- 6 5 R tures on topics they described as, for example, the influence of Wallace Stevens on Wordsworth. (The English Romantic poet died, of course, thirty years before the American was born.) Bloom was able to see them all as simultaneously present in his prodigious consciousness. Bloom’s approach made a solid point: how we understand an older artist is conditioned by how we understand the art that has come after that older artist. What we see in a work, especially what we as younger practitioners see in the work that we can use, is conditioned in part by the problems we are wrestling with ourselves as artists. In this sense, Stevens can influence Wordsworth (at least our understanding of Wordsworth) by directing our attention to certain aspects of his achievement – aspects we might not notice if we limited our inquiry to Wordsworth’s biography, his correspondence, contemporary sources, acknowledged influences, and so on. When we take a work of art seriously – not when we breeze by it in a museum, a gallery, or an auction house, pausing to notice only its most outstanding features – we engage it. That is to say, we lock into a kind of struggle with it, wrestle with it in an attempt to wrench its rich content from within the outer shell that attracts our notice in the first place. During this struggle – if it is a serious one – we are challenged; we are driven to bring all our resources to bear on coming to terms with the work. One of our resources is what we know. In part, we rely on what we know in order to understand a thing new to us. So if we are at home in conceptual art, we might work through that familiarity to help us find and name what attracts us to Evans. This gambit of understanding might well lead us to insights – insights we might not come to as quickly if we rely on only Evans’s biography, his acknowledged influences, his writings at the time he was working, and so on. But reading history backward is tricky business. We may indeed be led to insights – as Rosalind Krauss was led to rich insights about early-twentieth-century modernist art by reading it backward , through the discoveries and methodologies of postmodernism that came only later in the century. We might also – alas – be led onto paths that wander far out of the way toward dead ends. Cleanth Brooks, one of the most rigorous proponents of what in 6 6 T...