The Emergence of Pre-Cinema

Print Culture and the Optical Toy of the Literary Imagination

Alberto Gabriele

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781137597700
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137545923
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The book investigates the dispersed emergence of the new visual regime associated with nineteenth-century pre-cinematic spectacles in the literary imagination of the previous centuries. Its comparative angle ranges from the Medieval and Baroque period to the visual and stylistic experimentations of the Romantic age, in the prose of Anne Radcliffe, the experiments of Friedrich Schlegel, and in Wordsworth's Prelude. The book examines the cultural traces of the transformation of perception and representation in art, architecture, literature, and print culture, providing an indispensable background to any discussion of nineteenth-century culture at large and its striving for a figurative model of realism. Understanding the origins of nineteenth-century mimesis through an unacknowledged genealogy of visual practices helps also to redefine novel theory and points to the centrality of the new definition of 'historicism' irradiating from Jena Romanticism for the structuringof modern cultural studies.

© The Author(s) 2016

Alberto GabrieleThe Emergence of Pre-Cinema10.1057/978-1-137-54592-3_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: The Emergence of Pre-Cinema

Alberto Gabriele¹

(1)

Department of English, Tel Aviv University Department of English, Tel Aviv, Israel

Alberto Gabriele

Email: [email protected]

With the increasing scope of communications systems, the significance of painting in imparting information is reduced.

Walter Benjamin (Reflections, [NY 1978, p. 151], quoted by Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer. On Vision and Modernity in the 19th Century [MIT Press, Cambridge, MA—London, England, 1990] p. 20n.)

End Abstract

At the 2013 Venice Biennale the Belgian artist Laurent Montaron presented a video-art piece that included close-ups of the functioning apparatus of the magic lantern, as a reflection on consciousness, temporality and on how technology has mediated the experience of both. In the same summer of 2013 in Leipzig, Asisi opened to the public his long-in the making reconstruction of a panorama depicting the Leipzig Völkerschlacht of 1813, the final and decisive battle in the campaign against Napoleon—after his defeat in Russia. Asisi chose to depict not the battle scene itself, like in traditional panoramas, but to place the viewer at close range with a devastated city. Both works attest to the popularity of the pre-cinematic attractions of the magic lantern, the panorama and, more precisely, the diorama, in the case of Asisi’s spectacle, which reappear as an archeological trace to address the present phenomenological and civic concerns of the artists.

This book deals with the interest in the psychological and epistemological reverberations of the visual phenomena of pre-cinematic, but not merely pre-cinematic vision that punctuate the writings of several self-reflexive narratives focusing on vision in the poetry of Wordsworth’s Prelude, the experimental fragmentary writings of Schlegel’s Atheneum and in Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho. It does so first to illustrate how, in practicing new genres, such as the Romantic autobiographical narrative poem, the novel and the philosophical treatise in fragments, these authors relied on the new technologies of vision, from popular forms of entertainment to the spectacle of print culture, to theorize about modernity and the role that the open genres they championed had in redefining mimesis. A keen alertness to the phenomenological dimension of vision and the intellectual processes that lead from sensory impressions to the production of a theoretical knowledge that can encompass all reality were often pressing questions for the authors included here. These authors reflected on the new genres they were practicing through their asides as omniscient narrators, through their characters focusing on the act of vision itself or, more importantly, through the visual phenomena of pre-cinematic entertainment they incorporated. Their ongoing visual interest in new modalities of representation spoke of an overarching concern with a general synthesis to be imagined in opposition to the divergent and dizzying trajectories of the movement of people, things and ideas that constitute the experiential given of modernity. In discussing their contribution to a redefinition of mimesis through the objective correlatives of pre-cinematic spectacles and other visual phenomena, The Emergence of Pre-cinema offers a narrative centered on the responses to modernity in different national contexts as reflected by samples chosen over a long period of time, so as to recognize several thresholds of emergence of the new mindscapes these authors envisioned. It does so also to analyze a complex set of discursive, aesthetic and intellectual categories that are crucial for an understanding of the later development of nineteenth-century mimesis. By highlighting these visual and intellectual formations over a long period, and by selecting authors from different geographical contexts, The Emergence of Pre-cinema relies on methodological premises that transcend classical periodizations and national boundaries in the study of literature.

A study of self-reflexive modalities of vision from the late medieval to the end of the eighteenth/early nineteenth century will offer a Janus-like double perspective on nineteenth-century visuality: on the one hand facing a long tradition of innovations set out by Baroque playful wit, and on the other turned toward the experimental unweaving of narrative and textuality that is usually associated to twentieth-century modernist and post-modern inventions but is a hidden trace present throughout the long nineteenth century, with precursors in the previous centuries. Choosing a very long timeline allows, therefore, to identify a filigree trace in the culture of modernity and to recognize in the later canonical definitions of nineteenth-century mimesis a specific set of assumptions which, when crystallized in the dominant mode of figurative realist representation, reflect primarily contemporary concerns belonging to a dispersed history of discursive forces rather than to a nineteenth-century “invention.” This book, therefore, is a contribution to the study of modern aesthetics in two distinctive moments: the “modern” self-reflexive turn that dissociates the union of sign and referent upon which a long normative tradition, up to the Renaissance, relied to understand the power of mimesis (while repressing the more epicurean insights into the nature of things) and the nineteenth-century moment, which cannot but derive from the dispersed emergence of the latter mode. Nineteenth-century mimesis, rather than pushing these deconstructive and playful suggestions to the limit, is more interested in reintroducing a wide discursive field of unity to be intuited beyond fragmentation. Among the loose threads in this discursive field that characterizes nineteenth-century fiction in several countries are several strains of a loosely platonic mysticism, and the dissemination of new forms of knowledge such as mesmerism, which will be the topic of a more detailed analysis in my next book, Fragmentation, Movement and the Modern Episteme.

The main premise of The Emergence of Pre-cinema is to consider literary writing as an experimental attempt, like an “optical toy,” to posit a possible synthesis of the scattered fragments set in motion by the economic, social and aesthetic forces of modernity. In doing so, the book argues that the authors discussed contributed to thematize and naturalize, over a long period of time, some of the new structures and functioning modalities of knowledge production that informed what Foucault described as the modern episteme. ¹ Foucault defines the shift to the modern episteme by exploring the intellectual landscape that structured knowledge production not in the system of correspondences between macrocosm and microcosm that characterized the Renaissance (and medieval) period, nor in the taxonomic accumulative logic of the definitions that articulated the classical episteme. The modern episteme, as represented by the disciplines of biology, philology and the theory of value, makes the interaction between parts in the system the key to an understanding of the production of knowledge that is relational and seeks to define the value of each element within the role it plays in a dynamic and interactive larger system. The modern episteme, thus, escapes the self-contained harmony of the medieval early Renaissance model and the accumulative logic of the taxonomic descriptions of the world, to create, through an inner dynamic interaction between its parts, a self-reflexive and relational model of knowledge production. The literary imagination, therefore, participates in this epistemic shift by emplotting and naturalizing the psychological processes and intellectual mindscapes that enable such a discursive paradigm shift.

While Foucault reasonably detects the emergence of a modern episteme over a long period of time stretching from the end of the eighteenth century, and implicitly questions common methodological approaches defined by ruptures and innovations, he also speaks in the courses taught at the College de France now translated into English in their entirety of “silent births, distant correspondences” ² and “mutual incompatibilities.” ³ These metaphors speak of a far from schematic approach to history that would separate sharply the pre-modern and modern period, a division that is often ascribed to Foucault. These formulations, furthermore, represent an innovative perspective that escapes the strict confines of the discourse of specialization and of the paradigm-shift model that has become commonplace in the disciplinary demarcations of the study of nineteenth-century culture. In his discussion of the modern state, for instance, Foucault casts his glance over a discursive practice, such as the pastoral, that appears in the classical age as care of the self, only to be adumbrated by the new power formation articulated by the notion of the state as a territorial force sanctioned by international treatises, before it reemerged in the nineteenth century, in a possibly secularized version, through the new state apparatus of surveillance and normalization of identities coopted in the production processes of the industrial age. ⁴ While insisting on the dispersive nature—at the synchronic level—of the discursive formations of the modern power structure, Foucault envisions, at the diachronic level, a model of temporality that is made of somehow hidden or eclipsed phases that may reappear in full light in a later period. This best supports the analysis Foucault makes “permanences that persist beneath apparent changes” and of “slow formations that profit from the innumerable blind complicities.” ⁵ The focus of a cultural historian may retrace the life of a discursive formation as an “invisible familiarity” that exists under the surface, like the course of a Carsic river that flows on and underneath the surface of what is its river bed. The discourse of fragmentation versus unity, the practices of self-reflexivity associated with the modern novel and the forms of pre-cinematic entertainment that incorporated the same visual dichotomy are isomorphic with the intellectual mindscape that enabled the emergence of the modern episteme in the nineteenth century. Limiting the study only to the late eighteenth century/early nineteenth century, however, as the Foucauldian vulgate does, misses this hidden filigree trace, while implicitly calling for a more thorough understanding of the preceding formulations in this history.

I chose to identify the question of self-reflexivity in many forms—artistic, literary and theoretical—as “permanences that persist beneath apparent changes,” in order to provide a possible genealogical perspective on the emergence of the new visual regime identified with the modern episteme, in which the intellectual and physical movement of parts within a larger system enables both their analysis in separate units and also the persistence of a notion of universal relational order, however secularized and provisional it may be, when compared to the older models of medieval and Renaissance epistemes. Foucault himself recognizes in the self-reflexivity of a literary text, Don Quixote, the crisis of the classical age. In doing so, Foucault posits the end of a possible direct transparent relation between signs and meaning that characterized the theory of correspondence in the medieval and Renaissance period. Self-reflexivity is important because it both deconstructs and constructs representation: the common narrative devices of the play within the play, as well as the trompe-l’œil in painting, or the staging of representation itself in Baroque art and theater, not only alert to the unreliability of signs but also dissolve representation into its constituent parts that are held together by the will to recompose them in a cogent unity (Fig. 1.1).

Fig. 1.1

Huesca, St. Martin and Dominique, altar of Santiago, chapel of the Virgen del Rosario

Self-reflexivity, therefore, is a powerful defamiliarizing antidote to the pretense to truthfulness that comes with the trope of realism and with the “immersive” power of its figurations. The emergence of the modern novel in the Renaissance—and of film narrative in the twentieth century—develops the tropes of self-reflexivity in several ways, as Bob Stam has discussed them in Reflexivity in Film and Literature: from Don Quixote to Jean-Luc Godard. ⁶ I shall focus instead on the history of visuality in the period between the late Renaissance and the emergence of cinema. I am focusing on the precinematic spectacles, among them the print-based “optical toys” of periodicals and novel writing, in order to map the modalities of vision enabled by these forms of popular visualization animated by a self-reflexive and (de)constructive logic. I shall, furthermore, recuperate and highlight one of the first theorists of the novel, Friedrich Schlegel’s in his Atheneum Fragments. However unsystematic the aphorisms might be, they capture the open-ended nature of the novel in ways that anticipate novel theorists such as Bakhtin. The experience of reading a text in fragments, moreover, speaks of the psychological and intellectual modalities that this book charts in several media and cultural productions. Schlegel explains the new genre of the novel as a recurrence of the classical forms of the satire (Bakhtin will later famously discuss the menippean satire) and of the Socratic dialogue, which were equally fragmented and made to gain cohesion by the interaction between their parts. The self-reflexive nature of the modern novel, which gives narrative cogency to the multiplicity of reality it depicts, is fueled according to Schlegel by the pre-history of the *lanx satyra and the socratic dialectics. ⁷ The Early German Romantics, or, rather, the study and interpretation of the classical past emanating from Göttingen and the seminars taught by Christian Gottlob Heyne, which were attended, among others, by Alexander von Humboldt, the Schlegels and Coleridge, contributed to give a new visibility to these genres, which escape the confines of a long tradition of courtly poetic diction and platonist imaginings. New genres such as the novel, the philosophical treatise written in aphorism, Wordsworth’s unfinished autobiographical poem, Ann Radcliffe’s complex alignment of vision with conventional patterns of aesthetic taste and older media, renovate literary forms by giving new life to lesser canonical genres in which the unity of the composition is a result of the process of reading disparate parts that are made to be cohesive through the reader’s direct imaginative engagement. All of the works discussed constitute metaliterary attempts to posit a process of reading, by which it is the highlighting of a conscious, empirical registering of fragmented perceptions that make possible vision and the mediation of these sensory stimuli themselves in a cogent unity that sustains interpretation. In this sense, these various forms of self-reflexivity, which allow a constant negotiation of meaning in the process of reading and viewing, contribute to a restructuring of the question of unity beyond the immediate stimuli suggesting the contrary. These visual modes are not independent of the strong pull of the aesthetic conventions of the age: while potentially questioning traditional aesthetic intuitions ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• 1. Introduction: The Emergence of Pre-Cinema
• 2. From Analogia Entis to the Threshold of Self-Reflexivity in the Poetry of Dante, Donne and Shakespeare
• 3. The Modern(ist) Reader: Friedrich Schlegel’s Fragments, the Emergence of Modern Philology and the Montage Effect of Industrial Modernity
• 4. A Map to the Panorama: Intellectualized Vision and the Unrestrained Power of Shifting Forms in Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho
• 5. British Flâneurie, ca. 1805: William Wordsworth as Man with a Movie Camera and the Aesthetic Polarities of the Emerging Modernity
• Backmatter