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An Episode in the Histories of Realism and Emotion

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Prosaic Suffering: Bourgeois Tragedy and the Aesthetics of the Ordinary

by Alex Eric Hernandez

The essay begins: 

In 1778, Samuel Johnson was asked to weigh in on the prose of a new bourgeois tragedy, The Female Gamester. Its author, Gorges Edmond Howard, was a Dublin-based lawyer and literary dabbler whose attempt at domestic drama might have been wholly forgotten were it not for the fragment of Johnsoniana he preserved in its preface. Having originally written the play in a mixture of prose and verse, Howard had been advised by “several of [his] literary acquaintance” that his “not much exalted” prose was much more suitable to the “scene . . . laid in private life, and chiefly among those of middling rank.” For many, it seems, the bourgeoisie suffered in prose. But Johnson, Howard recalls, would have none of this:

Having communicated this to Dr. Samuel Johnson, his words (as well as I remember) were, “That he could hardly consider a prose Tragedy as dramatic . . . that let it be either in the middling or in low life, it may, though in metre and spirited, be properly familiar and colloquial; that, many in the middling rank are not without erudition; that they have the feelings and sensations of nature, and every emotion in consequence thereof, as well as the great, and that even the lowest, when impassioned, raise their language.”

Johnson’s argument tweaked the older, neoclassical assumption that poetic decorum mandates a correspondence between the language and social rank of a drama’s principal figures. Here a tragedy’s verse style has less to do with the nobility of those represented—as had been the case for John Dryden in An Essay on Dramatick Poesie (1668), where heroic rhyme’s “exalt[ation] above . . . common converse” images “the minds and fortunes of noble persons . . . exactly”—than with the intensity of the depicted afflictions. Tragedy needs verse not because its “elevation” allegorizes the status of its heroes, but because it corresponds to the magnitude of the drama’s subject matter, quite literally inscribing an emotional richness otherwise lost in the flatness of prose.

Johnson’s intervention plays out a mid-eighteenth-century discussion of the representation of emotion on the tragic stage, disclosing an unease with the degrading (if not also disenchanting) effects of prosaic suffering. Contemporaries in the period worried that prose was “fine and nervous,” disconcertingly “artless,” and “offensive,” while at the same time mere “trifling,” “below the dignity of Tragedy,” and even, for that reason, somehow “unnatural” in its expression. Consider, for example, that Johnson himself asserts that affliction “raises [one’s] language,” lapsing—naturally, he suggests—out of the grittiness of prose into the elegance of the poetic. A sort of poetry in the raw, suffering reaches after what’s already aesthetic and universal to misfortune, while prose trivializes and bogs down in the particular, rendering a tragedy “hardly dramatic,” untrue to the genre and affliction it purports to represent. Writing a few years later, Henry Mackenzie saw the genre’s strength as its ability to simulate those very same particulars, “the ordinary feelings and exertions of life” that nevertheless remained in tension with the tragic. In his view, suffering of this sort was if anything too true, its realism overburdening one’s perception. “Real distress, coming in a homely and unornamented state,” he concludes, “disgusts the eye.” Obscuring its art with disturbing efficacy, the outward formlessness of prosaic suffering threatened to neutralize the pleasures of the tragic.

These concerns spoke to a moment of renewed interest in bourgeois and domestic tragedy, capping a period of formal experimentation in Britain, France, and Germany that Peter Gay claims was crucial to the Enlightenment’s “emancipation of art.” Beginning around the production of George Lillo’s landmark 1731 tragedy The London Merchant, a series of important works fashioned a new aesthetic idiom calibrated to “the ordinary feelings and exertions of life” by working through varieties of verse, prose, and the visual arts. Scholars have long cited Denis Diderot’s Le Fils naturel (1757) and Discours sur la poésie dramatique (1757) as well as G. E. Lessing’s Miss Sara Sampson (1755), Hamburgische Dramaturgie (1767–69), and Emilia Galotti (1772) as key moments in the drama’s modernization. But a variety of lesser-known works such as Charles Johnson’s prose Caelia; or The Perjur’d Lover (1732), Lillo’s 1736 encore to The London Merchant, Fatal Curiosity (which contemporaries claimed produced domestic interiors to horrifying effect in the cramped Little Haymarket theater), and Trauerspiele like Clementina von Poretta (1760; by Christoph Martin Wieland) and Clarissa (Johann Heinrich Steffens’s 1765 dramatization of Samuel Richardson’s novel) played with the representational mechanics of what one might call “ordinary suffering,” inhabiting familiar spaces and embodied emotion in ways that contemporaries took to be radical departures from established tragic convention. Among the most revolutionary of these innovations was the sustained use of prose, which until then had been largely confined to the domain of comedy. Indeed, in London, the 1770s and ’80s alone saw the production and publication of a number of prose tragedies, including notable revivals of The London Merchant and Edward Moore’s The Gamester (1753), curious adaptations such as The Fatal Interview (1782; a domestic tragic sequel to Pamela), quasi-gothic meditations on domestic violence like Richard Cumberland’s The Mysterious Husband (1783), as well as drames bourgeois in the form of Diderot’s 1758 Le Père de famille (translated “by a lady” as The Family Picture in 1781) and Louis-Sébastien Mercier’s L’Indigent (1772; translated in London and Edinburgh as The Distressed Family in 1787). Despite the concerns of those like Johnson and Mackenzie, by the latter half of the century, a deft use of prose on the stage could render the theater uncannily intimate, calling forth a space where private woe played out for all to see.

In what follows, I want to explore the affective stakes of this turn to prosaic suffering. Or rather more precisely, I want to trace a line through the contested process by which suffering became prosaic in eighteenth-century bourgeois and domestic drama in order to draw some implications for the history of emotion and the dialectics of realism at midcentury. My claim is that the emergence of prosaic suffering on the period’s tragic stage helps to imagine modern forms of affliction, thereby navigating a range of confessedly “ordinary” feelings by evoking and engaging and testing them across page and stage. Unlike the “heroick suffering” of classical, pathetic, or otherwise “high” tragic forms prevalent at the earlier part of the century, prosaic suffering performed its grief with troubling immediacy and a raw intensity, in ways that were personal and familiar, absorptive rather than theatrical, and provocatively disenchanted in their implications. Prosaic suffering presents the tragic figure as an emblem of abandonment, in which (as Georg Lukács claimed of the novel) everyday life is experienced as simultaneously leaden and trivial. I anchor my discussion in a close reading of Moore’s The Gamester, a drama whose importance to the development of realism was well known in the eighteenth century, and whose use of prose at midcentury tracks this shift in suffering most clearly, though by no means exclusively (as will become clear). Adapting the novel’s “writing to the moment” for the theater, (a method almost certainly absorbed in Moore’s reading of Clarissa and correspondence with Richardson on the novel’s formal effects), prose conferred a lively presence upon the performance of suffering, in ways that denied its spectators the sort of rhetorical elevation that stood in for transcendence. In making this case, therefore, I place the practices of British bourgeois tragedy in dialogue with contemporary performance and aesthetic theory so as to reconstruct the terrain of emotion’s exploration onstage. If, as one critic has claimed, versification serves to beautify the experience of suffering, prose insists on its crude intolerability, its reality and resistance to poetic gilding. Continue reading …

This essay looks to bourgeois tragedy’s use of prose in the mid-eighteenth century as an episode in the histories of realism and emotion, arguing that the emergence of prosaic suffering on the period’s tragic stage helps to imagine modern forms of affliction. Taking Edward Moore’s 1753 drama The Gamester as emblematic of this shift, and situating the text in its performative and aesthetic contexts, I trace the “emotional practices” that navigated a range of confessedly “ordinary” feelings by evoking, engaging, and testing them across page and stage. Performing its grief with troubling immediacy and a raw intensity, in ways that were personal and familiar, absorptive rather than theatrical, and provocatively disenchanted, bourgeois tragedy thereby embodied a middling mode of existence in which the prosaic qualified not only the drama’s form but also, ultimately, its content.

ALEX ERIC HERNANDEZ is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Toronto, where he works on Restoration and eighteenth-century literature and culture. This essay is part of his book in progress titled Modernity and Affliction: The Making of British Bourgeois Tragedy.

 

Radical Staging

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Representations‘ editor Mary Ann Smart and authors Laura Tunbridge and Lydia Goehr on opera in Stockholm this weekend:

30 June 2017, 9.30 AM – 01 July 2017, 4.00 PM 
Department of Culture and Aesthetics, Frescativägen 22B-26, Stockholm University
After the much-noted “performative turn” in the humanities, the diverse field of opera studies seemed destined to move into a new paradigm. Widely read studies like Tom Sutcliffe’s Believing in Opera (1997) and David Levin’s Unsettling Opera (2007) promised a more refined approach to operatic production, dramaturgy and mise-en-scène, while Carolyn Abbate, Elisabeth LeGuin and others argued for the necessity of making bodily presence and liveness the key concern of opera scholarship. Against this background, the conference “Opera and Performance” aims to map a wide array of current positions in opera studies: To what extent have the concerns and methodologies of performance studies impacted current research on opera? Have notions of performance and event replaced the traditional focus on the operatic work, or have these perspectives merged into new syntheses? What is the current state of the debate pitting liveness and presence against meaning and interpretation? What is the role of the body and its movements in scholarship that emphasizes dance, gesture and choreography as vital components of operatic performance? What status do concepts of media and mediation have in opera studies today? Furthermore, how do these methodological issues relate to recent developments in the art of opera, such as stagings that operate beyond the dichotomous clichés of Werktreue and Regietheater; experimental forms of music theatre that take place outside the grand institutions of mainstream opera; and operas intended to be experienced through digital media?
Contact:  axel.englund@littvet.su.se

Hermaphrodite Outlaws

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Hermaphrodite Outlaws: Ambiguous Sex and the Civil Code in Nineteenth-Century France

by Anne E. Linton

The essay begins:

Nineteenth-century France was obsessed with the legal ramifications of hermaphrodism. Both medical and legal experts clamored to write on the subject. Entire treatises were dedicated to the particular implications of birth, adolescence, marriage, death, conscription, and inheritance for a hermaphrodite. Nearly every forensics textbook from the time offers a section on hermaphrodism, or at least addresses the questions raised by ambiguous sex in chapters on birth and divorce (or annulment, when divorce was illegal).Jurisconsults emphatically contradicted one another about rules applying to hermaphrodites, and the case record was inconsistent. Articles appeared in periodicals ranging from the popular press to specialized medical journals in surgery, psychology, gynecology, and even anthropology. Why did an issue that affected such a small percentage of the population suddenly become a zone of frenzied publication in nineteenth-century France?

Since no legal category existed at the time to describe individuals who were neither clearly female nor clearly male, hermaphrodites in France became “outlaws.” Contrary to the codes in other European nations that possessed laws governing marriage, divorce, or annulment in cases of doubtful sex, in France a unique legal situation coupled with historical pressures fueled social anxieties and stoked the debate about sexual ambiguity. The rigorous Napoleonic Code required that all infants be sexed dimorphically (labeled “male” or “female”) and registered formally within three days of birth. Marriage sanctioned only binary sex. The entire society had been predicated on a belief that both sexes were entitled to distinct rights and responsibilities. Yet the surprising story of hermaphrodism and the law is not that authors constantly acknowledged legal reality’s inability to account for natural reality; it is that they actually proposed that the laws be changed. Of course, their motivations were various. Some doctors called for stricter regulations to safeguard the faltering institution of marriage or to bolster oversight of initial sex declarations at birth in order to minimize later legal sex revisions. But there was also a vocal contingent advocating the addition of a third class of “neuter” citizens to the Civil Code, while still others claimed that “true sex” might be impossible to determine before death in certain individuals. To listen to their fervent prose, it becomes clear that what is at stake in these debates is the future not merely of a tiny fragment of the population but, rather, of the entire social structure and, equally important, of who would have the power to change it. Continue reading …

In this essay, Anne Linton shows how hermaphrodism became a zone of frenzied publication in nineteenth-century France, when numerous doctors recommended adding a “neuter sex” or a “doubtful sex” category to the Civil Code alongside those of “male” and “female.” Although attempts to add “doubtful sex” to the code were rarely intended to protect hermaphrodites, the legal silence regarding hermaphrodism actually afforded some doctors and patients the leeway to live in ways others wished could be outlawed.

ANNE E. LINTON is Assistant Professor of Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century French at San Francisco State University. Her research interests span a wide range of interdisciplinary topics in nineteenth-century cultural studies, including science, medicine, and gender studies. She is currently putting the finishing touches on a book manuscript titled Prescribed Fictions: Representations of Hermaphrodism in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Medicine.

The Origins of Modern Prose

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Mercury’s Words: The End of Rhetoric and the Beginning of Prose

by John Guillory

The essay begins:

The origin of modern prose style was the subject of much scholarly debate in the first half of the twentieth century, but interest in the subject waned thereafter. Today, few scholars other than Restoration specialists or historians of rhetoric are likely to recall the terms of the debate between Morris W. Croll and Richard Foster Jones or their successors. And yet prose style has once again become an important locus of work in literary study, most conspicuously in the new field of digital analysis, which has returned scholarship to some very old concerns of literary history. After decades in which literary study has been dominated by contextual hermeneutics, it seems possible once again to think about literary change in formal terms, as Franco Moretti has notably argued: “For me, formal analysis is the great accomplishment of literary study, and is therefore also what any new approach—quantitative, digital, evolutionary, whatever—must prove itself against.” I would endorse this provocation, and indeed I want to raise the stakes of formal analysis in this essay by taking a step back from the computational project and from the favored object of Moretti’s project—the novel—and look instead at prose itself as the perennial subject of discourse about style. The aim of my argument is to recover a crucial episode in the historical conceptualization of style and thus to restore the emergence of modern prose to its key position in our understanding of English literary history.

The unresolved inquiry begun by Croll and Jones set out from the manifest difference of modern prose from its Renaissance and medieval antecedents. As a subset of language change, the development of prose style has its own set of complex determinations. All prose, let us stipulate, is the sum of stylistic features determined by a familiar set of conceptual operators: form, genre, author, period, literary fashion, and perhaps others as yet unspecified. But prose as such is a purely conceptual entity; it functions as a kind of raw material for composition, seemingly undetermined with regard to content and yet constrained by conventions of grammar and usage. The components of style further limit prose, however difficult these elements are to specify. Croll argued that the emergence of modern English prose style in the later seventeenth century was a result of the anti-Ciceronian movement, which was correlated with a reorientation of the genre system that privileged the forms of essay and treatise over the form of oratory. Jones, by contrast, traced modern prose to a series of polemics emanating from the Royal Society on behalf of the “plain style,” which he saw as directly influencing composition in prose. Although both Croll and Jones grasped aspects of the transformation of prose, their causal hypotheses failed to demonstrate a definitive mechanism of change that would explain the syntax and diction we recognize as modern. I remain agnostic about causal arguments and propose here a different kind of historical hypothesis: New developments in the discourse of prose style betray the recognition of prose avant la lettre as a medium. This recognition was more precisely a misrecognition, in the sense that the “plain style” was understood as a new kind of prose rather than an intuition about the nature of prose itself. Nevertheless, this misrecognition had the perhaps unintended effect of dislodging prose from its immemorial subordination to the system of rhetoric and severing its link to the preeminent genre of oratory. Prose changed when this regulatory regime was lifted, though not necessarily in ways prescribed by the advocates of anti-Ciceronianism or the plain style. Further, composition in prose continued for some time to be described in rhetorical terms, because no other technical lexicon was yet available. The importance of this lexical overhang is a part of the story I mean to tell, and has consequences that extend into the present.

In this story, oratory is more important than narrative. The fact that we never encounter any prose that is not generically or formally marked means that prose is always somewhere behind its manifestations, of which narrative is only one. For this reason, I do not offer here a “prosaics” based on the instance of narrative, which has been the premise of most efforts to construct a theory of prose, from Viktor Shklovsky onwards. Prose was understood in antiquity rather as the complement of verse, which long predated it as a kind of marked speech. If poetry has an obvious signal in the aural form of meter, prose has been strangely harder to define, often yielding to Monsieur Jourdain’s naive apprehension: prose is any speech or writing that is not verse. Yet prose first appeared in ancient Greece in the rarified form of an art—rhetoric—complementary to the art of poetry. The first rhetoricians called the object of their art “persuasive speech.” This speech was obviously different from poetry, but such was the oddity of it that the Greeks could only name it “bare” or “naked” speech (logos gymnos), to indicate the absence of meter. Although the sophists elaborated this bare speech into complex syntactic schemes and figurative modes of expression, it somehow still remained nominally bare speech. The Romans struggled with the same paradox in what they called prosa oratio, “straightforward speech.” Prosa, which gives us our vernacular word prose, is a contraction of pro + vertere, to turn straight forward; prose means speaking “right on,” to quote Shakespeare’s Marc Antony (who, as it happens, is speaking neither forthrightly nor in prose). Eventually the umbilicus to oratory was severed, and prose came to be associated in a special way with the kind of writing that is visually distinct from verse, or written to the margin of the page. But it is not easy to say exactly when this break with oratory was accomplished. Writing in early modernity continued to exhibit what Walter Ong calls an “oral residue” for as long as oratory occupied the highest place in the hierarchy of prose genres.

Scholars have identified several beginnings of prose even after its inception with Greek rhetoric, for example, the one advanced by Jeffrey Kittay and Wlad Godzich in their study, The Emergence of Prose, which locates an origin of prose in the transition to French vernacular writing of the later middle ages. Kittay and Godzich see in this prose an irreversible movement away from the deictic situation of the French jongleurs, who recited (or sang) their vernacular verses, thus rooting their compositions in a single time and place of performance. French narrative prose, by contrast, whether chronicle or fiction, displaced this deixis to a purely “textual space” (116), in which Kittay and Godzich see the appearance of a new “signifying practice” that is highly versatile and pulls together any number of discourses in its web—in short, “the birth of modern prose” (195). That this moment of transition, which is linked to the privileged instance of narrative, fully comprehends the possibilities of prose in modernity seems unlikely to me, although where one stands on this question depends on how one defines modernity. In any correlation of prose with modernity, these two terms will define each other. Still, we can safely say that each emergence of prose enables what follows, and this is the explanatory framework I adopt in this essay. The emergence of prose in the seventeenth century is possibly the last of a series beginning in Greek antiquity—that is, if we are not now on the cusp of a new digital prose. Continue reading …

This essay offers a new interpretation of a longstanding and unresolved controversy concerning the origins of modern prose style. Setting aside causal explanations proposed for the marked changes in prose style during the later seventeenth century, I argue that what emerges in urgent polemics for the “plain style” is a recognition of prose itself as a medium of composition. This intuition about the nature of prose had the unintended effect of liberating prose from its immemorial subordination to the system of rhetoric and opening up new possibilities for its exploitation as a means of communication.

JOHN GUILLORY is Professor of English at New York University. His current work includes a book on the figure of philosophy in Renaissance writing and a study of close reading as “cultural technique.”

July Conference on Feminism and Contemporary Art

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Local/Global Dynamics in Feminism and Contemporary Art

July 3 2017, Middlesex University London

A research conference open to artists, academics and curators interested in feminism and contemporary art.

Organized by Katy Deepwell (founder and editor of n.paradoxa: international feminist art journal and Professor of Contemporary Art, Theory and Criticism, Middlesex University) and featuring panel discussions and presentations of current feminist research by:

Giulia Lamoni (art historian, Investigadora FCT, Instituto de Historio de Arte, Lisbon)

Ebru Yetiskin (curator, Associate Professor in Sociology, Media Theory, Digital Humanities. Istanbul Technical University)

Emanuela de Cecco (art critic/art historian, University of Bozen-Bolzano, Italy)

Martina Pachmanova (art historian, Associate Professor, Katedra teorie a dejin umení, VŠUP/UMPRUM v Praze, Department of Art Theory and History, Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague)

QUESTIONS EXPLORED

Writing in 1990, Elspeth Probyn argued that it was important to differentiate the concepts of locale, location and the local in order to address the broader questions of knowledge production and subject position in “where and how we may speak” – as well as a means to draw on a rich legacy of feminist thought from Adrienne Rich to Gayatri Spivak. In the production of artworks and in the analysis and presentation of the works of women artists in an international art world where globalisation, post-colonialism and a diasporic cultural politics have been predominant for two decades, this differentiation provides a starting point for this conference. Feminist questions about the politics of location; feminism’s role in countering “objective”/ “dominant” forms of knowledge, canons and historical agendas; as well as differentiating between speaking as women or Woman (as split and non-identitarian in her identifications) will be considered. Feminism has, for some time, argued that it can progress by “acting locally, thinking globally” in tackling women’s issues, often bypassing the question of the national en route to global comparisons on a world stage or by directing its critique at localised forms of nationalism.

Feminism nevertheless has also to counter perceptions of itself as homogeneous, when it is actually heterogeneous and scattered in how the position of women artists is theorised globally, and how women artists as subjects, both represented and representative and neither singular nor stereotypical, are written about. Acknowledging that individually we may speak from a location, about a locale and address local concerns requires more than personal caveats, it necessitates a commitment to dialogue and exchange as well as to hearing and engaging with other voices in the world who represent different realities/locations as well as diverse theoretical positions to our own.

This conference has been organised with the aim of building new and shared understandings across generations and geographies to think about where feminist debate in the visual arts is positioned today, especially given the current “popularity” of women artists in museums, biennales and galleries, as well as its directions for the future. The conference aims to address how different local concerns appear internationally and how locales may produce different understandings (locations) which may be productive for a stronger local and global dynamics within and across feminism(s).

All of the above approaches have been central to the work of the journal, n.paradoxa, for the last 20 years and this conference addresses the work of feminists, artists and researchers who have helped to create n.paradoxa: an international feminist art journal in a visual display of former contributors’ comments. The conference coincides with Volume 40 of n.paradoxa: international feminist art journal (July 2017) on the theme of Ends and Beginnings. In its 20 years of publication, over 400 women artists, writers and curators from more than 80 countries have contributed.

INVITATION TO ATTENDEES

All attendees, in the spirit of exchanging work and ideas, are invited to bring a poster outlining their own research work on feminism and contemporary art. The poster can represent a current art project, a research project, a thesis proposal or a plan for an article, chapter or book. The poster can be speculative, a proposition or a projection of future work. Part of the extended lunch time will be given over to attendees to discuss / present their poster displays.

Organiser: Katy Deepwell  K.Deepwell@mdx.ac.uk <mailto:K.Deepwell@mdx.ac.uk> or katy@ktpress.co.uk <mailto:katy@ktpress.co.uk>

Vision and the Firefly

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Does a Glowworm See? Sigmund Exner’s Study of the Compound Eye

by Christoph Hoffmann

The essay begins:

In 1891, the Viennese physiologist Sigmund Exner published the first comprehensive study of complex, multifaceted eyes. Today, his book The Physiology of the Compound Eyes of Insects and Crustaceans is a classic in its field. Scholars still refer to Exner’s findings, even if “it took the scientific community 80 years to catch up with his state of knowledge.” The most popular outcome of Exner’s studies was a picture proudly printed opposite the title page. According to the caption, the figure shows “the erect retinal image in the eye of the firefly (Lampyris spldl.).” The original photograph was made with the help of Josef Maria Eder, author of the Handbuch der Photographie and renowned director of the Viennese Graphische Lehr- und Versuchsanstalt (Academy of graphic arts). Eder placed the eye—fully stripped of all tissue behind the lens structure—under a microphotographic apparatus, focused on the plane almost directly behind the inner endings of the ommatidia, and then recorded the image that would have formed at this point on the removed retinal layer. The resulting photograph shows the window of the laboratory room; the letter R, slightly distorted, mounted on one of its panes; and finally, beyond the pane, the “Schottenfeld Church and church tower, approximately several hundred paces distant” from the laboratory. This, at least, is what a human observer notices when studying the picture. Far more questionable is what the glowworm might see. Even if the photograph exactly reproduces the image “which the eye of the glowworm beholds,” as Eder claimed, it is not at all clear whether the resulting impression is comparable to the one perceived by a human being, and, even less clear, whether we can suppose that seeing always takes place in the same way.

From today’s perspective, Exner’s monograph indeed marks a moment in which the then still uncontested equating of the visual process with the perception of images took shape as a widely valid but nevertheless limited understanding of vision. The phrase “from today’s perspective” deserves special emphasis because Exner himself never drew this conclusion in his writings. My suggestion is motivated, rather, by a tension between Exner’s focus in research on the mechanisms of image formation and his ideas about the purpose of the compound eye in animal life. This tension is most noticeable in the photograph of the retinal image of the glowworm (the folk name for the “firefly”). The impression captured is in some respects misleading because the depiction of objects, according to Exner, plays only a minor role in seeing with a compound eye. Instead, for him, the main purpose of such an eye was to detect perceptible changes in the environment.

In the following pages I argue that the unspoken conflict marking Exner’s discussion of the compound eye may be considered a window into the way Western scientific thought has constructed a framework for vision since at least the beginning of the seventeenth century. In part 1 I focus on the fact that Exner, with the photograph of the retinal image, visually cited a crucial experiment. For scholars in physiological optics, the retinal image did not constitute one phenomenon among others, but represented the very moment when seeing began: the formation of a picture of the outside world in the back of the eye. Originally based on observations made with the single-chambered-lens eye, image formation also guided scholars who, since the end of the seventeenth century, had begun to explore the capacities of the compound eye. As part 2 shows, the very different structure of such an eye only underscored the notion that the formation of the retinal image must take place slightly differently. Exner’s studies followed this line of research; for the two basic types of compound eyes, he successfully documented how the complex lens apparatus is able to form a retinal image of the outside world. Nevertheless, as already noted, Exner also subverted this line of research by emphasizing that such an eye must be particularly apt for perceiving changes in the environment. In part 3, I frame the resulting inconsistency, to quote Ludwik Fleck, as due to the “tenacity of systems of opinion.” I argue that the concept of vision based on the perception of images was so dominant that Exner overlooked the potential consequences of his own ideas. Continue reading …

What does seeing mean with respect to different living beings? Is seeing with a compound eye similar to seeing with a single-lens eye? In what way is vision conceptually coupled with the formation of a retinal image? These and other questions arise from consideration of a famous photograph of the retinal image formed by the eye of a glowworm in Sigmund Exner’s authoritative treatise on compound eyes of 1892.

CHRISTOPH HOFFMANN is Professor of Science Studies at the University of Lucerne. His current research focuses on experiments in animal communication and data work in the sciences.

 

Photography, Pathology, and Colonial Peoples in Hawai’i

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Promiscuous Signification: Leprosy Suspects in a Photographic Archive of Skin

by Adria L. Imada

The essay begins …

In 1903, a photograph of a Hawaiian leprosy patient appeared in the lead article of the Journal of the American Medical Association, “Leprosy in the Hawaiian Islands.” The author, a Philadelphia physician named Judson Daland, identified the male subject only by his clinical symptoms: “Leprosy, showing the characteristic plantar ulceration and changes in the fingers.” The image, along with those of seven other patients from Hawai‘i, dominated the text and drew the viewer’s eye to the open sores on his feet and fingers. Offering intimate optic encounters with the somatic alterities of leprous bodies, this photograph and its companions merged the horrors of leprosy with specific Hawaiian pathological cases. Daland linked racial difference to this disease, confidently declaring that Hawaiians were subject to a “peculiar susceptibility” to leprosy, while whites were not.

A decade later, another American physician repurposed the very same clinical image of this leprosy patient for a different purpose. This time, the photograph was used to promote a putatively successful surgical cure for leprosy. The caption in the 1913 New York Medical Journal read: “Illustrating surgical treatment of hand and foot,” although no surgery had been performed on this patient. The appearances of this clinical photograph ten years apart suggest how photographs of leprosy patients performed much cultural work. Western scientists relied on images of raced bodies with radically altered skin and body parts to draw attention to their clinical and public health narratives. At the same time, these images firmly attached this dreaded disease to people and bodies from the Pacific.

But what was the specific origin and history of this photograph? How did it come to travel from Hawai‘i to American medical journals and generate such flexible meanings? Why was it taken and whom did it represent? These answers can be partially found by tracing this photograph back to its original entry in the Hawai‘i Board of Health (BOH) archive in 1902. The patient was a nineteen-year-old Hawaiian man named John Kapuahi, also known as Keoni Kapuahi. He was one of at least eight thousand leprosy suspects apprehended in Hawai‘i under its leprosy segregation law between 1866 and 1969. Kapuahi’s file was created when he entered the leprosy detention hospital, known also as the Kalihi receiving station in the port city of Honolulu, on February 3, 1902. A few weeks later, his photograph was taken there. Determined to have leprosy, John Kapuahi was sent to the remote northern peninsula of the island of Molokai that had been set aside as a leprosy settlement. He died there at the age of twenty-six in 1910.

Kapuahi’s photograph resides among approximately 1,400 other images of people suspected of having leprosy in what is now the Hawai‘i State Archives. The images are organized not by name, but as serial cases: one number per individual suspect, a clinical dossier created by date of examination. Kapuahi’s photograph represents the medical and juridical process of examining, diagnosing, and archiving leprosy suspects on the borders of the US insular empire. Hawai‘i became an incorporated territory of the United States in 1900, following the US-backed overthrow of its sovereign and subsequent illegal annexation. Carrying out a strict leprosy isolation and segregation policy that criminalized leprosy beginning in 1866, white Western physicians posted at all island districts reported suspicious cases of leprosy to the Board of Health. Ordinary people were also required to self-report symptoms and surrender themselves to medical authorities. The vast majority of the men, women, and children exiled to the Molokai settlement were Native Hawaiian, with a smaller number of immigrants from Portugal, Japan, China, Korea, and the Philippines.

Today scientists understand leprosy to be communicable through slow-growing bacteria in respiratory droplets. Now known as Hansen’s disease, leprosy is not highly infectious and contracting it requires long-term exposure to untreated patients. It became curable in the mid-twentieth century with antibiotics, but in the nineteenth century no cure existed and there were few effective treatments. The disease can cause nerve damage in the hands, feet, skin, and eyes with disfiguring effects. Although leprosy had been endemic in parts of Western Europe and reappeared in England in the 1840s, it caused great panic in the West during the high age of empire as an “imperial danger” allegedly spread by racialized populations from colonies. By the late nineteenth century, Western scientists concurred that leprosy was caused by a bacterial infection, but they did not know its etiology or transmission. Was it a hereditary condition, or was it communicable through food, soil, or skin contact? Lacking clear answers and cures, physicians who gathered in Berlin at the first international leprosy conference in 1897 could only recommend the isolation of patients to halt its spread.

During this period, Hawai‘i became famous worldwide for its numerous leprosy cases and compulsory medical segregation law; the Molokai leprosy settlement incarcerated far more patients than did settler colonies in South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand. The Hawaiian archipelago in the North Pacific Ocean enabled scientists and public health officials to investigate leprosy as it developed and was experienced among different racial groups. Native Hawaiians were especially vulnerable to the disease, but recent immigrant laborers from Portugal, Japan, and China, as well as white settlers of all economic classes, were among confirmed sufferers.

Not only did Hawai‘i isolate and exile thousands of these patients, but its health bureau had also begun to photograph and archive individual cases beginning in the 1870s. This imaging became more systematic by the 1890s. More than any other colonial or tropical location, Hawai‘i produced spectacular images of leprosy patients that were collected, archived, and selectively published for transnational observers in political and medical venues. Yet despite this broad circulation, we know remarkably little about the production and institutional contexts of this visual archive and even less of its meanings. Continue reading …

This essay assesses clinical photographs of leprosy patients created by the Hawai‘i Board of Health in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, or what may be the most extensive visual cataloging of indigenous, Asian, and immigrant bodies in America’s Pacific empire. Building on theoretical and methodological approaches to archives as a process rather than a source, I follow the trail of these clinical images through time and space, from their emergence within a photographic practice of medical management and segregation in Hawai‘i to their prolific circulation in transnational political and medical arenas. Offering spectacular evidence of the racialized and sexualized pathology of colonial peoples, these photographs were tightly regulated but increasingly viewed as clinical erotica after the United States incorporated Hawai‘i as a territory in 1900. The essay further suggests the “affective excess” that can disrupt the photograph’s medical surveillance, as social intimacies and care between Hawaiian patients bloom within the frame.

ADRIA L. IMADA is Associate Professor in the Department of History at the University of California, Irvine, and author of the award-winning Aloha America: Hula Circuits Through the U.S. Empire (Duke University Press, 2012). She is currently writing a book about the visual culture of leprosy and kinship.

 

Michael Lucey Translation Reviewed

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Michael Lucey’s translation of The End of Eddy by Édouard Louis, published earlier this month, has just been reviewed in both the New Yorker and the New York Times. 

An autobiographical novel about growing up gay in a working-class town in Picardy, The End of Eddy at once captures the violence and desperation of life in a French factory town and provides a sensitive portrait of boyhood and sexual awakening.

The author, Édouard Louis, is a novelist and the editor of a scholarly work on Pierre Bourdieu. He is the coauthor, with the philosopher Geoffroy de Lagasnerie, of “Manifesto for an Intellectual and Political Counteroffensive,” published in English by the Los Angeles Review of Books.

Michael Lucey, a member of the Representations editorial board, is a professor of French literature at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of Never Say I: Sexuality and the First Person in Colette, Gide, and Proust and The Misfit of the Family: Balzac and the Social Forms of Sexuality and translator of Returning to Reims by Didier Eribon.

New from Kent Puckett

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War Pictures: Cinema, Violence, and Style in Britain, 1939-1945

In this original and engaging work, Kent Puckett looks at how British filmmakers imagined, saw, and sought to represent its war during wartime through film. The Second World War posed unique representational challenges to Britain’s filmmakers. Because of its logistical enormity, the unprecedented scope of its destruction, its conceptual status as total, and the way it affected everyday life through aerial bombing, blackouts, rationing, and the demands of total mobilization, World War II created new, critical opportunities for cinematic representation.

Beginning with a close and critical analysis of Britain’s cultural scene, War Pictures examines where the historiography of war, the philosophy of violence, and aesthetics come together. Focusing on three films made in Britain during the second half of the Second World War–Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943), Lawrence Olivier’s Henry V (1944), and David Lean’s Brief Encounter (1945)–Puckett treats these movies as objects of considerable historical interest but also as works that exploit the full resources of cinematic technique to engage with the idea, experience, and political complexity of war. By examining how cinema functioned as propaganda, criticism, and a form of self-analysis, War Pictures reveals how British filmmakers, writers, critics, and politicians understood the nature and consequence of total war as it related to ideas about freedom and security, national character, and the daunting persistence of human violence. While Powell and Pressburger, Olivier, and Lean developed deeply self-conscious wartime films, their specific and strategic use of cinematic eccentricity was an aesthetic response to broader contradictions that characterized the homefront in Britain between 1939 and 1945. This stylistic eccentricity shaped British thinking about war, violence, and commitment provided both an answer to and an expression of a more general violence.

Although War Pictures focuses on a particularly intense moment in time, Puckett uses that particularity to make a larger argument about the pressure that war puts on aesthetic representation, past and present. Through cinema, Britain grappled with the paradoxical notion that, in order to preserve its character, it had not only to fight and to win but also to abandon exactly those old decencies, those “sporting-club rules,” that it sought also to protect.

Kent Puckett is Associate Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley, and a member of the Representations editorial board. Puckett’s previous publications include Bad Form: Social Mistakes and the Nineteenth-Century Novel (Oxford, 2008) and Narrative Theory: A Critical Introduction (Cambridge, 2016).

 

New Issue, Representations 138

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Number 138, Spring 2017 (read at UC Press)

NOW AVAILABLE

1.cover-source

ADRIA L. IMADA
Promiscuous Signification: Leprosy Suspects in a Photographic Archive of Skin

CHRISTOPH HOFFMANN
Does a Glowworm See? Sigmund Exner’s Study of the Compound Eye

JOHN GUILLORY
Mercury’s Words: The End of Rhetoric and the Beginning of Prose

ANNE E. LINTON
Hermaphrodite Outlaws:Ambiguous Sex and the Civil Code in Nineteenth-Century France

ALEX ERIC HERNANDEZ
Prosaic Suffering: Bourgeois Tragedy and the Aesthetics of the Ordinary

Upcoming in Representations 139: Debarati Sanyal’s update on the Calais “Jungle” and Sylvain George’s 2010 film Qu’Ils reposent en révolte, Yoon Sun Lee on bad plots in the novels of Maria Edgeworth, Dahlia Porter on botanical collection and literary anthologies, Carmine Grimaldi on the use video in the Haight-Ashbury “Hippie Drug Ward,” and Justin Steinberg on legal and literary mimesis in the Decameron (coming in August).