A Necessary Blindness

Abstract

If we had to think of one feature by which to define transition from late nineteenth century to something we call Modernism it would probably be shift from music to painting as privileged model for avant-garde writing. linguist Roman Jakobsen expresses this shift in definitive terms: The Romantic slogan of art gravitating toward music was adopted to a significant degree by Symbolism. foundations of Symbolism first begin to be undermined in painting, and in early days of Futurist art it painting that holds dominant position. (2) This from an essay on Pasternak, and Jakobsen thinking primarily of developments in Russian art, but proposition familiar to us as perhaps definitive way of thinking about evolution of AngloAmerican modernism, as it navigates its way out of self-reflecting, interiorised world of fin-de-siecle decadence and into light of an world which is, as it were, seen clearly again for first time since Homer, Dante and Shakespeare. Italian Futurism launches this modernism with its vociferous reaction to symbolist association of music with forms of ideality and to poetics of memory, loss and desire which that produced. new painting and sculpture offered basis for a radically different aesthetic, one for which spatiality coincided with avant-garde preoccupation with modernity--with dynamism, simultaneity, multiple points of view, and so on. This emphasis provides perhaps one consistent strand linking various modernist avant-gardes. Even surrealism, with its fascinated attention to occulted movements of unconscious, saw historical transition in much same way, with editors of journal Surrealisme writing, for example, in 1924 that Until beginning of twentieth century, ear had decided quality of poetry: rhythm, sonority, cadence, alliteration, rhyme; everything for ear. For last twenty years, eye has been taking its revenge. It century of film. (3) In considering this set of developments, Ezra Pound an almost inevitable point of reference, since movements and tendencies we associate with him--principally imagism and vorticism--were both closely tied to parallel developments in visual arts, and particularly to Pound's growing interest in work of artists such as Wyndham Lewis, Gaudier Brzeska and Jacob Epstein. What more, trajectory of Pound's early career, from Pre-Raphaelite tonalities of his first collections through to imagist poems of Lustra, seems a clear enactment of that shift from music to painting which Jakobsen finds at origins of modernism. Pound's thinking on these matters was shaped in part by Wyndham Lewis's arguments for what he called his philosophy of EYE (4) and related external method of satire, and Pound's own attempt to work free of Browningesque dramatic monologue certainly resonated with Lewis's contempt for forms of inwardness he associated with Freud, but especially with Henri Bergson. (5) As Martin Jay observes in his monumental study of occularcentrism or privileging of vision in Western tradition, it was not until Bergson that the rights of body were explicitly set against tyranny of eye. (6) For Lewis, Bergson's turn to body and dark stream of inner life epitomised empiric of sensational chaos which Lewis saw as distinctive feature of contemporary culture. Bergson, he said, is indeed arch enemy of every impulse having its seat in apparatus of vision, and requiring a concrete world. (7) By way of contrast, spatialising eye of painter looked out upon an intelligible world, where clear separation of subject from object allowed operation of intelligence rather than mere sensation. Lewis put it like this: Much as [Bergson] enjoys sight of things penetrating and merging do we enjoy opposite picture of them standing apart--the wind blowing between them and air circulating freely in and out of them: much as he enjoys indistinct, qualitative, misty, sensational and ecstatic, very much more do we value distinct, geometric, universal, non-qualitied--the clear and light, unsensational . …