In and Out of Sight: Modernist Writing and the Photographic Unseen by Alix Beeston

Abstract

Reviewed by: In and Out of Sight: Modernist Writing and the Photographic Unseen by Alix Beeston Stephen Pasqualina In and Out of Sight: Modernist Writing and the Photographic Unseen. Alix Beeston. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. Pp. 280. $78.00 (cloth); $74.10 (eBook). Was modernism "cinematic"? Over the past twenty years, a wide range of scholars have argued for reappraising literary modernism through its relations with early cinema and photography. Alix Beeston's probing, artful, and original In and Out of Sight: Modernist Writing and the Photographic Unseen extends and redirects this dialogue between modernist literature and visual media, offering a valuable contribution to a body of scholarship that includes such influential titles as Susan McCabe's Cinematic Modernism (2005), Michael North's Camera Works (2005), Sara Blair's Harlem Crossroads (2007), Stuart Burrows's A Familiar Strangeness (2008), and Mark Goble's Beautiful Circuits (2010), as well as more recent works such as Louise Hornby's Still Modernism (2017) and Jonathan Foltz's The Novel After Film (2017). Beeston at once challenges and deepens our understanding of literary modernism's relationship to visual media by unsettling assumptions about modernism's affinities with cinematic speed, wholeness, and narrative continuity on the one hand, and photographic stasis, rupture, and fragmentation on the other. She convincingly argues, instead, for a rereading of US modernist literature through the "intervallic" form, and feminist politics, of a field of visual culture situated between photography and film—what Beeston and other visual studies scholars have termed the "still-moving" field, a field devoted to examining the "interactions and relays between the photographic and the cinematographic" in composite and serial photography (12). Considering the book's avowed commitments to feminism and anti-racism, In and Out of Sight's introduction opens with an unlikely case study: Francis Galton's eugenicist, composite, photographic portraits. Beeston's contrapuntal reading of these troubling images locates in Galton's search for a racial science "processes of repetition and accumulation" whose gaps and seams destabilize the taxonomies of social Darwinism (4). This exchange between form and politics serves as both a model and a foil for Beeston's readings of a wide range of literary and visual texts. Her methodology is both deep and wide: she combines thorough and sensitive close readings with creative and historically grounded analogies across a diverse photographic archive. Conversing with the work of still-moving photographers such as Eadweard Muybridge and Etienne-Jules Marey alongside theories of photography and the moving image, ethnic studies, and feminist and queer literary criticism, Beeston reads the formal gaps and fissures of composite and serial photography as a model for a "new theory of literary textuality in modernism—a theory that occasions a feminist reappraisal of its ethical possibilities" (4). [End Page 629] Beeston adopts a reading methodology designed to dismantle the gendered and racialized exclusions that have traditionally structured modernist studies. Whereas scholars such as Susan Stanford Friedman, Jessica Berman, Matthew Hart, and Jahan Ramazani have challenged longstanding accounts of modernism by expanding the field's temporal and geographic boundaries, Beeston looks deeply within a body of long-canonized US literature to voice the latent political possibilities that lay dormant within modernism's formal gaps. The authors of these works, rather than embodying emancipatory politics, "show marked tendencies toward essentialist thought, racialist, nativist, gendered, or otherwise" (7). Beeston thus seeks to unearth what one might call, to adapt a phrase from Walter Benjamin, the "optical unconscious" of literary modernism: the absent presence of the composite, layered, and sutured women whose disarticulations have helped sustain a distorted and dated, yet stubbornly persistent, image of modernism as exclusively white, masculinist, and triumphalist.1 In search of modernism's "woman-in-series," its "recalcitrant, running-off female figures," Beeston examines an alternative archive of visual analogues to those typically deployed in readings of modernist literature (In and Out of Sight, 187). While scholars have often understood Gertrude Stein's writing in relation to Cubist painting, for instance, Beeston establishes in chapter one an analogy between the serialized, composite women characters of Three Lives (1909) and documentary and surrealist photography. Stein's first readers, Beeston demonstrates, encountered Three Lives as a "series...