Optical Impersonality: Science, Images, and Literary Modernism

1 A Protomodern Picture Impersonality: Walter Pater and Michael Field’s Vision

Gathering himself together from the complex world and standing back as it were to gaze upon it[,] the mind of man embraces the third great idea under which in turn he may figure to himself as the master of nature and akin to its creator[:] the idea of the mind itself[,] of the ego or of personality or will[,] or of the soul or spirit of man as it is variously named. Pater, “The History of Philosophy” “Open-gaze” at it. . . . Dutch-picture the little scene on the brain. Do not hack or wear yourself. Yield not to vanity, and refuse to go out in the Sun. Katharine Bradley to Edith Cooper, 8 August 1887 In a rare lecture delivered at the London Institution in November 1890, the philosophy scholar and art critic Walter Pater labeled the French dramatist Prosper Mérimée a too perfect impersonalist. Mérimée was so coldly selfeffacing , Pater argued, that his style emphasized “transparen[cy]” over the “half-lights” of perception, and so cynical that he represented human materiality and its opaque workings only negatively, in terms of “maliciously active, hideous . . . bodies.”1 But though Pater condemns Mérimée’s impersonality , his critique doesn’t simply comport with scholarly accounts of his supposed investment in an individual personality, whether as the “father” of a subjectivist literary impressionism or of a modern homoerotic aesthetic anchored in identity politics.2 “Prosper Mérimée” doesn’t reject aesthetic impersonality in favor of personal expression. Instead, it proposes two models of impersonality, the second formulated for the most part as an alterna1 A Protomodern Picture Impersonality Walter Pater and Michael Field’s Vision 34 Optical Impersonality tive to Mérimée’s. This other, distinctly positive impersonality concerns itself with the “half-lights” of perception and the opacity of materiality in which they originate, accepts the impossibility of transparent knowledge, and constructs the resulting opaque impersonality as the condition of personality rather than simply as its opposite. It thus participates in the turn-of-thecentury redefinition of personality detailed in this book’s introduction, a redefinition that located personality in a broad flux of memory, perception, and social performance rather than in an essential identity or selfhood. Pater’s presentation of this other impersonality marks a significant moment in the genealogy of an impersonal aesthetic. As a philosophy scholar, Pater had a much more direct and specialized knowledge of visual science than did many of the modernists, who gained their sense largely from a vernacular science that circulated in visual culture. Pater’s knowledge makes his aesthetic an important window onto the scientific roots of modernist impersonality . The ingredients of his aesthetic date from his first and most controversial book-length work, The Renaissance (1873, 1877, 1888, 1893), where Pater situates his aesthetic project within the new physiology of vision that rejected the disembodied, objective observer of Cartesian optics and instead took vision as a complex process that is subject to the material limits of perception and the density and partiality of memory. Pater draws out the implications of this new visuality for being and knowing, thereby laying the groundwork for modernist impersonality and its intervention into vernacular visual science. Even more importantly, Pater’s aesthetic crystallizes the formal role of the imagetext in this process. As I explained in the introduction , 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 . A new model of vision could thus in theory be explored and even magnified by new image/text relations. The Renaissance transforms this theory into practice: where optics blurred the subject/object divide, it presents imagetexts that blur the image/text divide. It privileges, in both form and theme, an image that is conventional and unfolds over time—qualities traditionally reserved for text—rather than being natural, static, and mimetic. Pater uses this imagetext to interrogate the embodied observer of the science of vision and to theorize a material subjectivity that exceeds the self. Pater’s Prosper Mérimée lecture folds his early aesthetic into an explicit discourse of impersonality. The lecture uses the label “impersonal” to describe the subjectivity that Pater adapted from the new physiological optics. A Protomodern Picture Impersonality 35 It also declares that the work of accessing that subjectivity and exploring its...