Chapter 3: Image

Jonathan Reeve

Table of Contents

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Introduction

Color and shape converge into the image. Having modeled color vision in Chapter 1, and object vision in Chapter 2, we now turn to their aggregate, the image, in order to further interrogate the literary historical trends posited by these previous chapters. The analyses in Chapter 1 find an overall increase in color terms, and hued visuality more generally, across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Those of Chapter 2 find a general increase in the presence of objects and shapes, as well. What could account for these trends? I have already discussed some generic considerations, in the genre analysis of Chapter 1, and in some of the lists provided in Chapter 2. But visuality is a complex phenomenon, which takes place across genres, so more investigation is necessary.

In this chapter, I explore three interrelated modes which I argue account for the increase in visuality in twentieth century British literature: a descriptive mode, an impressionist mode, and an imagist mode. Although the term mode is inadequate to describe what others in computational literary analysis have called, speaking of their empirical findings, a thread or a signal, I prefer it to genre and type, which imply that these categories are even more mutually exclusive than they are. These modes operate on progressively smaller scales: description tends to work on the level of the paragraph or sentence, impression in the sentence, and image in the phrase.

Literary criticism has largely been ignoring these modes, as I will show, or treating them loosely. Outside of a few continental monographs from the 1980s, critics have been quiet about description, a grossly under-theorized literary phenomenon. There is more written about literary impressionism, although its connections to description and image are under-discussed. Finally, imagery and imagisms have fallen out of fashion among critics since the ’80s. While it is not the purpose of this chapter to revive interest in the literary merits of Imagism, or to argue for a resurrection in the thought surrounding literary impressionism, I will argue that we can’t explain the rise in visuality in twentieth century literature without them. All three of these modes, I will argue, along with their relations, are crucial to understanding literary visuality around the turn of the century, and in particular, the surge in color and object that we see at the beginning of the twentieth century.

For the more familiar phenomena of impressionism and imagism, I will complicate the discussions surrounding them, contextualizing them in literary history, and pluralizing them to impressionisms and imagisms. I am also using the -ism and -ist suffixes loosely. Although there is a well-defined movement in early twentieth Century poetry called Imagism which I will discuss at length, I won’t be restricting my discussion to those eight or so poets,Richard Aldington, H. D., John Gould Fletcher, F. S. Flint, D. H. Lawrence, and Amy Lowell, are the writers that appear in the anthologies the most, although the first, Des Imagistes, featured Ezra Pound, the movement’s founder, along with James Joyce, William Carlos Williams, and several others (Pound, Des Imagistes; Some Imagist Poets, Some Imagist Poets; Some Imagist Poets, Some Imagist Poets; Some Imagist Poets, Some Imagist Poets)

but will consider a wider plurality of imagisms. Similarly, although there is a movement in nineteenth Century French painting called Impressionism, with its own membership rosters, I’ll deal with implicit, as well as explicit, impressionisms as they appear in literature. And while description doesn’t have an associated school, its effects on the historical literary visuality appear just as strongly.

Still, these -isms of the turn of the century, a period which Mary Ann Caws terms A Century of Isms, carry with them rules, manifestos, prescriptions, and proscriptions, and a rich body of autoexegetic critical writing, perhaps more so than any other artistic movements (Caws). While these critical works should not be considered the sole means of interpreting their movements, they nonetheless provide a useful means of understanding their philosophical underpinnings.

Since imagisms and impressionisms are much harder to identify computationally, the quantitative exploration of this chapter will be one of description detection, and analysis of diachronic trends in literary description. While the boundaries and the shapes of descriptions change over time, confounding any efforts to measurement, as I will explain later, I find that literary description generally decreases through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This expands on the findings of the past two chapters, since it suggests, for one, that descriptive modes on their own account for less of the literary visuality than one might expect. Rather, I argue that this surge in visuality can be attributed to an increased interest in subjective impressions and image, as conveyed in text.

Description

Literary description, the first mode of visuality I’ll treat in this chapter, has received relatively little critical attention, much of which is dismissive of it and its role in fiction. The remaining criticism came into fashion briefly, in the 1980s, before passing away, and is primarily relegated to French and German literary theory, bearing the mark of the continental philological tradition.

José Manuel Lopes, in Foregrounded Description in Prose Fiction, contends that critics have largely considered it “purely ornamental, redundant, or even irrelevant,” and that since the nineteenth century, they’ve considered descriptions an “‘extra’ or as a dispensable ornament of narration, if not as a cumbersome set of textual segments that, standing in the way of storytelling, function as mere ‘catalysts,’ that is, as a series of devices to interrupt or delay the sequential unfolding of plots” (Lopes 6).

Lopes refers to Roland Barthes’ famous essay of 1968, “The Reality Effect,” in which he attempts to explain the presence of a detail in a short story by Flaubert. In this story, we are told that “an old piano supported, under a barometer, a pyramidal heap of boxes and cartons” (quoted in Barthes and Howard 141). About details, Barthes claims, that “they seem to correspond to a kind of narrative luxury, lavish to the point of offering many ‘futile’ details and thereby increasing the cost of narrative information” (quoted in Barthes and Howard 141). This economy of words seems almost to defend a brutalist architecture against a bourgeois Gothic revival, as if they were mutually exclusive, and existed in a zero-sum relationship.

This view is shared by Georg Lukács, who in his much-discussed essay “Narrate or Describe?” of 1936, pits narration against description. Comparing Zola’s Nana and Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, he prefers Tolstoy’s style in that, “in Zola the race is described from the standpoint of an observer; in Tolstoy it is narrated from the standpoint of a participant” (Lukács 111). Of Flaubert’s descriptions in Madame Bovary, he complains that “to the reader they seem undifferentiated, additional elements of the environment Flaubert is describing. They become dabs of colour in a painting which rises above a lifeless level only insofar as it is elevated to an ironic symbol of philistinism. The painting assumes an importance which does not arise out of the subjective importance of the events, to which it is scarcely related, but from the artifice in the formal stylization” (Lukács 115).

Gotthold Lessing, as well, in his Laocoon: or, The limits of Poetry and Painting, rejects description as a valid mode for poetry, and for all other literary writing, claiming that dynamic actions are the appropriate subjects for poetry, while static bodies are the appropriate subjects of painting: “those objects which are co-existent, or whose parts are co-existent, are called bodies; consequently bodies, with their visible properties, are the legitimate subjects of painting. Those things, on the contrary, which are consecutive, or whose parts are consecutive, are termed, generally speaking, actions. Actions are therefore the legitimate subjects of poetry” (Lessing 150–51).

Part of why description is so often misunderstood is that it’s so hard to extricate from narrative. Guido Isekenmeier argues that description is largely considered “doubly ontologically anchored,” meaning that it is “definable in terms of both the kind of phenomena in the fictional world that are descriptively constituted and the set of linguistic devices in the literary text that constitute description” (Isekenmeier 80). To demonstrate this doubly self-constituted nature of description, consider a paragraph from Madame Bovary, the novel Lukács is criticizing.

Towards four in the morning Charles, well wrapped up in his cloak, set off for Les Bertaux. Still drowsy with the warmth of slumber, he let himself be lulled by the peaceful trotting of his horse. Whenever it stopped of its own accord at one of those holes bordered with thorns that farmers dig along the edge of their ploughed land, Charles, waking with a start, would quickly remember the broken leg, and try to recall all the fractures that he knew. It was no longer raining; day was breaking, and, on the leafless branches of the apple trees, birds sat motionless, fluffing out their tiny feathers in the cold morning wind. The flat landscape extended as far as the eye could see, the clumps of trees round the farms making widely spaced splashes of dark purple on that vast grey surface which, at the horizon, merged with the dreary tones of the sky. Charles, from time to time, would open his eyes; then, his mind growing weary and sleep returning unbidden, he would fall into a kind of doze in which, his recent sensations mingling with his memories, he saw himself as double, at once a student and a married man, lying, as he had just been doing, in his bed, and walking across a surgical ward as in the past.Vers quatre heures du matin, Charles, bien enveloppé dans son manteau, se mit en route pour les Bertaux. Encore endormi par la chaleur du sommeil, il se laissait bercer au trot pacifique de sa bête. Quand elle s’arrêtait d’elle-même devant ces trous entourés d’épines que l’on creuse au bord des sillons, Charles se réveillant en sursaut, se rappelait vite la jambe cassée, et il tâchait de se remettre en mémoire toutes les fractures qu’il savait. La pluie ne tombait plus; le jour commençait à venir, et, sur les branches des pommiers sans feuilles, des oiseaux se tenaient immobiles, hérissant leurs petites plumes au vent froid du matin. La plate campagne s’étalait à perte de vue, et les bouquets d’arbres autour des fermes faisaient, à intervalles éloignés, des taches d’un violet noir sur cette grande surface grise, qui se perdait à l’horizon dans le ton morne du ciel. Charles, de temps à autre, ouvrait les yeux; puis, son esprit se fatiguant et le sommeil revenant de soi-même, bientôt il entrait dans une sorte d’assoupissement où, ses sensations récentes se confondant avec des souvenirs, lui-même se percevait double, à la fois étudiant et marié, couché dans son lit comme tout à l’heure, traversant une salle d’opérés comme autrefois.

(Flaubert et al. 13)

These six sentences begin and end with action: Charles setting off for Les Bertaux in the first sentence, and Charles imagining himself and his past in the last. The long descriptive passage then, in the middle sentences, is bookended by this action. The description is subordinated to, and supported by, its narrative. The details are not, as Lukács suggests, “undifferentiated, additional elements of the environment,” but inextricably narrative in their own right. They are essential to understanding Charles’s emotional state. The “gray,” “dreary” landscape mirrors Charles’s mood, and is caused by it. While there are “dabs of colour”—the “splashes of dark purple on that vast grey surface” is remarkably paintery—they hardly amount only to “an ironic symbol of philistinism,” as Lukács argues. Rather, these details express liminalities which support, and constitute, Charles’s feeling of doubleness. His internal state, between sleeping and waking, between the experience of the present and memories of the past, are mirrored in a rainy day without rain; the time between night and day; a winter scene with birds on the trees; and the color gray itself: neither black nor white.

To choose a more recent example, consider this strikingly similar passage from Mrs Dalloway (one I will use to train my neural model, below), which is even harder to parse with a narration/description binary:

She had the oddest sense of being herself invisible, unseen; unknown; there being no more marrying, no more having of children now, but only this astonishing and rather solemn progress with the rest of them, up Bond Street, this being Mrs. Dalloway; not even Clarissa any more; this being Mrs. Richard Dalloway.

Bond Street fascinated her; Bond street early in the morning in the season; its flags flying; its shows; no splash; no glitter; one roll of tweed in the shop where her father had bought his suits for twenty years; a few pearls; salmon on an iceblock.

“That is all,” she said, looking at the fishmonger’s. “That is all,” she repeated, pausing for a moment at the window of a glove shop where, before the War, you could buy almost perfect gloves. And her old Uncle William used to say a lady is known by her shoes and her gloves. (Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway )

Here, Clarissa, also out walking early in the morning, has been out walking, running errands, and daydreaming. Like Charles, she imagines herself doubly, both Clarissa and Mrs. Dalloway. There are details, but they are not unnecessary or unimportant: they are threads which lead to Clarissa’s memories. They not only tell us a bit about Clarissa’s history, but show how her mind works, how she daydreams, how details from the street make her remember her father.

“That is all,” her deictic comment to herself, is at once a continuation of “this being Mrs. Dalloway,” but is connected to the dead salmon, at which she is staring when she says it. It denotes a lack which is repeated in Bond Street’s “no splash; no glitter.” In contrast, the other things in this scene are overloaded: they are more than what they appear, since they contain also family memories: the roll of tweed is “where her father had bought his suits” and the glove shop reminds her of something her Uncle William used to say. The way that, according to her uncle, “a woman is known by” her gloves also reprises the motif of “being Mrs. Dalloway,” in which a woman is known by her husband’s name.

So, in most cases, description is never separate from narrative, and never its antagonist, but does its work, using image. One would never say of a film—any film that is narrative—that certain of its images or scenes are descriptive, and perform no narrative functions. And one would never say of a sufficiently narrative painting—a painting that is said to tell a story, such as Rembrandt’s The Night Watch—that its details are unnecessary, that a stray orange on the ground, or a dog curled up in the corner, had no purpose and shouldn’t exist. Yet fiction often comes under scrutiny for its use of images. Part of this may have to do with fiction’s inherent intermediality.

In Lessing, writing is always defined in opposition to painting, and this intermedial definition abounds in the thought surrounding description. In Description in Literature and Other Media, Werner Wolf argues that “description appears to be not only a transgeneric but also a transmedial phenomenon” (Wolf and Bernhart 1). Among his given evidence are a scene from Alice in Wonderland, in which the narrator gestures towards an illustration on a facing page, saying, “if you don’t know what a Gryphon is, look at the picture” (Wolf and Bernhart 3).

And there are plenty of other, less explicit, intermedialities, as well, not the least of which is the ekphrastic tradition, which claims as its progenitor the Homeric shield of Achilles, and which renders a visible art object. Another genre is the eighteenth century French monograph genre of the Description. Philippe Hamon’s monumental study of the description, Introduction à L’Analyse du Descriptif, begins with a history of this genre, which includes books with such titles as Description historique de la ville de Paris, of 1742, or Description des curiosités des églises de Paris, of 1759 (Hamon 11). At a time when mechanized reproductions images was considerably more expensive, a picture may have been worth much more, as the cliché goes, than a thousand words. But in another sense these books were readings, in the literary critical sense, of their objects, not unlike those which visual artists create of their models or subjects.

Hamon also cites the encyclopedic tradition of Diderot and others which, born of a rationalist impulse to interpret nature, finds description to be one of the primary tools of science, or “natural philosophy.” The power of this kind of description, in science and literary prose, is therefore much more than decorative: it’s evocative—it does what art is meant to do, which is to evoke, call forth, in its etymological sense, a reaction, an emotion, a thought, or a mental image.

The importance of description is also evident in pedagogical texts: writing and composition textbooks of the early twentieth century. Although we cannot assume that these instructional manuals were read and respected by the writers I’ve discussed here, is still likely that they, or others like them, would have been. At the very least, they form part of the zeitgeist surrounding description. And in these texts, we see many of these same types of assumptions about description: that it is separate from narration, that it is opposed to narration, that it is a methodical, sometimes scientific mode which is therefore tedious, and so on. In a 1902 American textbook of composition by Mary Rose and Arthur Beatty, Composition and Rhetoric Based on Literary Models, we see a section on “the relation between narration and description” which begins:

If we study the English novel historically we shall find that the early novelists massed their description, giving us sometimes two or three pages of it at once. These extended descriptions interrupt the story, which is our main interest, and become very tiresome. Later writers, realizing how prone we are to skip the descriptive passages when massed in this way, have broken up this element into shorter paragraphs, or even into sentences, and have scattered it throughout the book, so that it no longer retards the action. (Kavana and Beatty 145)

Is description really “tiresome,” as Rose and Beatty suggest, something that merely “retards the action”? Do readers simply skip descriptions? Or are they the very elements which lend vivacity to the literary work? The hard narration/description dichotomy of Lukács is still taken for granted here, but Rose and Beatty acknowledge that description may be interwoven into passages, or paragraphs, that are otherwise narrative. A 1903 textbook, Composition-rhetoric from literature, presents a similar dichotomy, but is less dismissive of description. The chapter on literary description begins, “we have found that description enters largely into literary narration,” suggesting that they are more intertwined than separate (Mooney 81).

Richard Green Moulton’s 1915 textbook, The Modern Study of Literature, gives a different typology, one in which description and “presentation,” along with poetry and prose, are four modes or “cardinal points” of literary form:

These four things, description and presentation, poetry and prose, are the four cardinal points of literary form. They are not to be conceived as four kinds of literature; but, like the cardinal points of the compass, they represent four necessary directions in which literary activity can move. Literature, developing from its starting-point in the ballad dance, finds its movement bounded in these four directions. The result of the movement so bounded gives us the six elements of literary form. (Moulton 17)

Fig. 1 shows Moulton’s cardinal points in diagram. This view enables description and narration (“presentation”) to coexist, as orthogonal vectors, as with poetry and prose: poetic prose and prosaic poetry mirror narrative description and descriptive narration.

Figure 1: Moulton’s “cardinal points” of literary form

These theorists, if they don’t reject description entirely, note that it is subordinated to narration. In some cases, they argue that it is increasingly subordinated. These are claims that deserve to be empirically tested.

Experiment: Quantifying Description

Does visuality, which I model in the previous chapters with its expressions in colors and objects, correlate with description? To measure this, I train a convolutional neural network to recognize paragraphs containing literary descriptions. I begin with a corpus of manually identified paragraphs of literary descriptions, from a range of novels from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, such as Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles, and Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, annotated in the machine-readable markup format TEI XML. I then create a corpus of non-descriptions, by randomly sampling paragraphs from these novels not labeled as descriptions.Although description certainly occurs on a sub-paragraph level, the paragraph is a useful semantic unit. For an in-depth look at the paragraph as a literary unit, see (Algee-Hewitt et al.)

Here is an example of a training passage I’ve manually labeled as description, from Tess of the d’Urbervilles:

This fertile and sheltered tract of country, in which the fields are never brown and the springs never dry, is bounded on the south by the bold chalk ridge that embraces the prominences of Hambledon Hill, Bulbarrow, Nettlecombe-Tout, Dogbury, High Stoy, and Bubb Down. The traveller from the coast, who, after plodding northward for a score of miles over calcareous downs and corn-lands, suddenly reaches the verge of one of these escarpments, is surprised and delighted to behold, extended like a map beneath him, a country differing absolutely from that which he has passed through. Behind him the hills are open, the sun blazes down upon fields so large as to give an unenclosed character to the landscape, the lanes are white, the hedges low and plashed, the atmosphere colourless. Here, in the valley, the world seems to be constructed upon a smaller and more delicate scale; the fields are mere paddocks, so reduced that from this height their hedgerows appear a network of dark green threads overspreading the paler green of the grass. The atmosphere beneath is languorous, and is so tinged with azure that what artists call the middle distance partakes also of that hue, while the horizon beyond is of the deepest ultramarine. Arable lands are few and limited; with but slight exceptions the prospect is a broad rich mass of grass and trees, mantling minor hills and dales within the major. Such is the Vale of Blackmoor. (Hardy 47)

This is a very traditional scene description, which seems almost like a landscape painting. It abounds in specificity, giving us a half-dozen place names. The imaginary “traveler from the coast” provides an excuse for a vista which is even more explicitly like a landscape painting, in which the countryside is “extended like a map beneath him.” Most noticeably, there are many color descriptors, here. The bright sun makes the lanes “white,” and the atmosphere “colourless.” The hedgerows are “dark green” over the “paler green” grass, and the valley is “azure.” The model will infer, based on descriptions like this, that a description may involve colors, light and darkness, and natural features such as grass, trees, hills, and “corn-lands.”

Using the Python libraries SpaCy and Prodigy, from Explosion AI, I train a multi-label text categorizer, with the labels “description” and “nondescription.” The model uses position-sensitive embeddings, and uses a convolutional neural network, based on an existing SpaCy language model of English. The training process holds back 20% of the training data, in order to evaluate its guesses, and iterates through about 5,000 epochs, until it achieves an 85% accuracy. The result is a model which can guess whether a paragraph of text is a description or not. Since it’s a multi-label model, it gives two probabilties for each paragraph it sees: the likelihood of it being a description paragraph, and the likelihood of it being a non-description paragraph.

The proportions of paragraphs labeled as descriptions, when viewed diachronically, are shown in fig. 2.

Figure 2: Object proportions over time, C_{PG2}

My initial hypothesis was that the proportion of descriptive paragraphs would increase over time, tracking the trends discovered in the two previous chapters: the increase in colors and shapes over time. However, the opposite occurred: a gradual decline in descriptive paragraphs over time. Several factors may account for this trend. The first, and most probable, is that descriptive paragraphs become less recognizable to the model I’ve been using to detect them. Since the model is trained on unambiguous examples, such as the paragraph quoted above, it’s possible that description is more tightly woven into narrative in the twentieth century than the nineteeth. If visuality, measured by color and shape, increases at the turn of the century, but description as a whole decreases, this might mean that narrative, in fiction, becomes more visual, instead of fiction becoming more descriptive.

Here are some of the texts with the highest proportions of descriptions:

Year Title Author % Descr. Paras.
1893 The Rhythm of Life Alice Meynell 72
1916 Letters from America Rupert Brooke 71
1887 Memories and Portraits Robert Louis Stevenson 69
1892 Views and Reviews William Ernest Henley 69
1880 Round About a Great Estate Richard Jefferies 67
1841 On Heroes, Hero-Worship … Thomas Carlyle 67
1896 Studies in Early Victorian Literature Frederic Harrison 63
1865 The Life of John Clare Frederick Martin 63
1907 The Boats of the “Glen Carrig” William Hope Hodgson 62
1887 Imaginary Portraits Walter Pater 62

Strikingly, this list consists primarily of non-fiction or quasi-fictional works: essays, memoir, biography, and descriptive collections of “sketches” or “impressions.” Round about a Great Estate is Jefferies’s nonfiction work of nature writing that also appears in the list of most object-filled works, in Chapter 2. Letters from America and The Boats of the Glen Carrig are travel narratives (see the discussion about imaginative distance below). Memories and Portraits is a memoir, containing character “portraits,” i.e., descriptions. The Life of John Clare is itself another such character portrait. And Imaginary Portraits is a collection of these. The remaining works are literary critical, descriptive of the primary literary works that they discuss.

The first on this list, The Rhythm of Life is a collection of short essays from the poet, suffragist, and essayist Alice Meynell, author of a critical work on John Ruskin, and several other poetic, descriptive essay collections (Meynell, The Rhythm of Life and Other Essays; Meynell, John Ruskin). Here is a passage from her essay “The Sun,” which shows how descriptive this volume can get:

Nowhere else does the greater light so rule the day, so measure, so divide, so reign, make so imperial laws, so visibly kindle, so immediately quicken, so suddenly efface, so banish, so restore, as in a plain like this of Suffolk with its enormous sky. The curious have an insufficient motive for going to the mountains if they do it to see the sunrise. The sun that leaps from a mountain peak is a sun past the dew of his birth; he has walked some way towards the common fires of noon. But on the flat country the uprising is early and fresh, the arc is wide, the career is long. The most distant clouds, converging in the beautiful and little-studied order of cloud-perspective (for most painters treat clouds as though they formed perpendicular and not horizontal scenery), are those that gather at the central point of sunrise. (Meynell, The Rhythm of Life and Other Essays)

As with the paragraph from Tess that the model was trained on, we see here an “enormous sky” and a vast plain. The “flat country” is described in opposition to a mountainous scene, and we see a sunrise over it in strikingly painterly fashion. Meynell even conjures up paintings of clouds, only to complain at their inaccuracy.

Other essays in the volume deal with similarly descriptive, noun-heavy, extended treatments of single objects or scenes. “The Flower” is a meditation on flowers. “Domus Angusta” is an architectural discussion. “By the Railway Side” describes a rail journey through Tuscany. Others are writings on literature: Shelley, Wilde, and Swinburne all make appearances, as do the lesser-known American poets Oliver Wendell Holmes and James Russell Lowell.

Two other volumes on this list are collections of literary critical essays: William Ernest Henley’s Views and Reviews: Essays in Appreciation: Literature deals with Dickens, Thackeray, Disraeli, Dumas, and Meredith, among others; so does Frederic Harrison’s Studies in Early Victorian Literature, which adds essays on George Eliot and Thomas Carlyle (Henley; Harrison).

Walter Pater’s Imaginary Portraits stands out as a generic anomaly: imaginary “portraits” of fictional people in historical times and places, these sketches are not quite narrative enough to be short stories, and could not be called novelistic, either. Here’s how it begins:

They have been renovating my father’s large workroom. That delightful, tumble-down old place has lost its moss-grown tiles and the green weather-stains we have known all our lives on the high whitewashed wall, opposite which we sit, in the little sculptor’s yard, for the coolness, in summertime. Among old Watteau’s workpeople came his son, “the genius,” my father’s godson and namesake, a dark-haired youth, whose large, unquiet eyes seemed perpetually wandering to the various drawings which lie exposed here. My father will have it that he is a genius indeed, and a painter born. We have had our September Fair in the Grande Place, a wonderful stir of sound and colour in the wide, open space beneath our windows. And just where the crowd was busiest young Antony was found, hoisted into one of those empty niches of the old Hotel de Ville, sketching the scene to the life, but with a kind of grace—a marvellous tact of omission, as my father pointed out to us, in dealing with the vulgar reality seen from one’s own window—which has made trite old Harlequin, Clown, and Columbine, seem like people in some fairyland; or like infinitely clever tragic actors, who, for the humour of the thing, have put on motley for once, and are able to throw a world of serious innuendo into their burlesque looks, with a sort of comedy which shall be but tragedy seen from the other side. He brought his sketch to our house to-day, and I was present when my father questioned him and commended his work. But the lad seemed not greatly pleased, and left untasted the glass of old Malaga which was offered to him. His father will hear nothing of educating him as a painter. Yet he is not ill-to-do, and has lately built himself a new stone house, big and grey and cold. Their old plastered house with the black timbers, in the Rue des Cardinaux, was prettier; dating from the time of the Spaniards, and one of the oldest in Valenciennes. (Pater)

This highly descriptive passage is rich with color and other sensory detail. We see not only the narrator’s father’s workroom, in great detail (a painterly description, fit for a “painter born”), but the “wonderful stir of sound and colour” of the September Fair. The computational model was correct to label this paragraph as a descriptive one. But, as before with Mrs. Dalloway, this description does not stand in opposition to narrative, as many critics would have you believe. Instead, the detail here serves to support the characters. In other words, we see impressions of the scene and the people in it.

Impression / Impressionisms

In Chapter 1, I posit that literary impressionism may help explain the way literature of the early twentieth century becomes more colorful. Here, I would like to build on that argument, and expand it more generally into literary visuality. I have already traced the ways literary impressionism, as a critical term, was derived from the movement in nineteenth century French painting. From there, we might assume that many of the same features of impressionism may apply to literary impressionism, as well: preference of color over line or form; soft focus; and the choice of bright, unusual, subjective colors over those in more traditional palettes. But there is also the sense carried by the term impression itself, which is more general than its use in the visual arts: a mental or emotional mark caused by an experience, often of a sensory variety.

In contrast with Imagism, literary impressionism was not a delineated movement with manifestos and anthologies. Instead, it is largely a critical term used to describe visual qualities of prose, and is applied to literature which appears at roughly the same time period as Imagism. The name is often used to describe the styles of fiction writers such as Joseph Conrad, Katherine Mansfield, Henry James, Ford Madox Ford, and Katherine Mansfield, many of the writers I treat in the previous two chapters.Several monographs treat literary impressionism with respect to these writers. (See Peters; Kirschke; Scholar; Hannah; Julia Gunsteren, among others).

To investigate why these writers are so often at the tops of the lists of the most colorful, or the most object-oriented, of their peers, we should then investigate the visual dimensions of literary impressionism as a mode of writing.

The difficulty of defining impression is evident in the word itself: a metaphor taken from the physical act of pressing an object into soft substance, leaving a mark of the object’s form. Although the impression retains the outer form of the object, the other qualities of the object, such as its color, are lost. The OED gives several senses for impression: notably, sense 6a is “an effect produced on the senses; a sensation, or sense-perception, in its purely receptive aspect,” and 6b is “an effect, especially a strong effect, produced on the intellect, conscience, or feelings. Esp. in first impression(s)” (“Impression, n.”). Sense 6b, an intellectual or emotional impression, is far older, with its first citation being one from Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, circa 1374; sense 6a, a perceptual impression, has its first citation in 1632. A third sense is only found in the philosophy of David Hume. He gives this definition in Essays in Human Understanding: “By the term impression, I mean all our more lively perceptions, when we hear, or see, or feel, or love, or hate, or desire, or will… Impressions are distinguished from ideas, which are the less lively perceptions, of which we are conscious, when we reflect on any of those sensations or movements above mentioned” (“Impression, n.”). This third sense seems to be somewhere between an intellectual and a phenomenological impression: they co-occur with emotions, yet remain perceptions, and are distinct from ideas.

Rebecca Bowler, in her 2016 Literary Impressionism, defines “the literary impression” in distinctively phenomenological terms: “the concern of the modernist subject who perceives, who registers that perception, and who later comes to the act of writing and the attempt to render this doubleness of the impression in all its complexity: both the act of primary perception and the nature of its encoding by the intellect” (Bowler 2). This “encoding by the intellect” is a reductive act, as the metaphor in impression suggests: it turns a complex sensory experience into a few words. But simultaneously, it is also an expansive act: it uses evocative words to create new sensory experiences. So the impression does more than description: rather than simply encode a described object, person, or scene, the impression creates a new one, separate from the original, yet which has a new complexity.

Elsewhere, impressionism seems almost a synonym for anarchism. In G. K. Chesterton’s 1908 satirical novel The Man Who Was Thursday, a detective novel largely concerning anarchists, and which likely satirizes Conrad’s The Secret Agent published just one year earlier, we hear impressionism described in post-Nietzschean, nihilistic terms as “that final scepticism which can find no floor to the universe” (Chesterton). The passage bears quoting in full, for its parodic nihilisim, (or, nihilistic parody):

Was he wearing a mask? Was anyone wearing a mask? Was anyone anything? This wood of witchery, in which men’s faces turned black and white by turns, in which their figures first swelled into sunlight and then faded into formless night, this mere chaos of chiaroscuro (after the clear daylight outside), seemed to Syme a perfect symbol of the world in which he had been moving for three days, this world where men took off their beards and their spectacles and their noses, and turned into other people. … Was not everything, after all, like this bewildering woodland, this dance of dark and light? Everything only a glimpse, the glimpse always unforeseen, and always forgotten. For Gabriel Syme had found in the heart of that sun-splashed wood what many modern painters had found there. He had found the thing which the modern people call Impressionism, which is another name for that final scepticism which can find no floor to the universe. (Chesterton)

Syme, an undercover police officer working in an anti-anarchist team, is appalled and bewildered by the anarchist poets he meets in the woods. This scene, with its masked faced and “wood of witchery,” echoes rites described in The Golden Bough, and prefigures The Rite of Spring of 1913. It is distinctly visual, as well: the quality of the sunlight is mentioned three times, and its chiaroscuro twice. “Everything only a glimpse” is Syme’s phenomenological reductio ad absurdum: phenomena are not symptoms of noumena, but only of themselves. Thus, Impressionism, in this view, is an asemic (or a-Syme-ic) phenomenology.

For Henry James, on the other hand, the impression is not an “always forgotten” glimpse, but a lasting memory, in the sense that clay has a memory. Yet this impression is also distinctly visual. Although James was a vocal critic of the impressionist school of painting, he nevertheless employed a literary impressionist style in his writing (Kirschke; Hoople; Scholar). In The Art of Fiction, James calls the novel “a direct impression of life,” and even goes so far as to argue that impressions and experience are synonymous: “if experience consists of impressions, it may be said that impressions are experience, just as … they are they very air we breathe” (Besant and James 66).

To choose one example, James’s short story, “The Altar of the Dead” is a bittersweet narrative about a couple who become acquainted in a chapel where they have been regularly paying their respects to their recently deceased. It is a pensive, nostalgic story, which, has much in common with James Joyce’s story, “The Dead”: they are stories in which a couple is haunted by memories of their past loves. These memories James refers to in his 1895 New York Edition preface as “impressions,” and they bear distinctly visual qualities: “Other conceits might indeed come and go, born of light impressions and passing hours, for what sort of free intelligence would it be that, addressed to the human scene, should propose to itself, all vulgarly, never to be waylaid or arrested, never effectively inspired, by some imaged appeal of the lost Dead?” (James 242). The dead appear to James in images and impressions, which are effectuated by light-effects of illumination and shadow: he explains how his story was inspired by a “pair of illuminating incidents,” which are etched into his mind, despite the “shadow” of forgetting (242, 245).

These are influential comments. In ABC of Reading, Ezra Pound recommends with his characteristic enthusiasm “the novels of Henry James, AND especially the prefaces to his collected edition; which are the one extant great treatise on novel writing in English” (Pound, ABC of Reading 90). Those prefaces are full of descriptions of James’s technique, in which we hear echoes of proto-imagisms and impressionisms.

In his essay “On Impressionism,” Ford Madox Ford (then Hueffer) attempts to define Impressionism, but concludes that it’s almost too subjective to be defined:

I am a perfectly self-conscious writer. I know exactly how I get my effects. … Then, if I am in truth an Impressionist, it must follow that a conscientious and and exact account of how I myself work will be an account, from the inside, or how Impressionism is reached. … This is called egotism; but, to tell the truth, I do not see how Impressionism can be anything else (Hueffer 167).

Ford does not mean egotism to be the selfishness it has come to mean in contemporary colloquial usage, but rather a kind of subjectivity with roots in radical politics—that after which Dora Marsden’s journal The Egoist is named. Subtitled “an individualist review,” the journal’s first issue contained large-print ads for Max Stirner’s anarcho-individualist The Ego and Its Own, Paul Eltzbacher’s Anarchism, and Benjamin Tucker’s State Socialism and Anarchism (Marsden 20). The journal, perhaps most famous for first publishing James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, is filled with contributions from Imagists such as H. D., Ezra Pound, D. H. Lawrence, Wyndham Lewis, and Richard Aldington, who co-edited the journal.

To illustrate this egoism, Ford compares a description of grass from the agricultural correspondent of the Times, and a similar description from W. H. Hudson, the Anglo-Argentinian ornithologist, naturalist, and novelist, author of Green Mansions.

The Impressionist gives you his own views, expecting you to draw deductions, since presumably you know the sort of chap he is. The agricultural correspondent of the Times, on the other hand—and a jolly good writer he is—attempts to give you, not so much his own impressions of a new grass as the factual observations of himself and of as many as possible other sound authorities. He will tell you how many blades of the new grass will grow upon an acre, what height they will attain, what will be a reasonable tonnage to expect when green, when sun-dried in the form of hay or as ensilage. … Mr. Hudson, on the other hand, will give you nothing but the pleasure of coming into contact with his temperament, and I doubt whether, if you read with the greatest care his description of false sea-buckthorn (hippophae rhamnoides) you would very willingly recognise tat greenish-grey plant, with the spines and the berries like reddish amber, if you came across it. (Hueffer 168)

In other words, it is Hudson’s subjectivity, that is, his egoism or individualism, which creates the vivacity of the description, and the specificity of its colors, whereas the agricultural correspondent’s objectivity leads him to make measurements which are less immediately visual or colorful.

Katherine Mansfield, whom I identify in Chapter 1 as one of the most vibrant and colorful writers of the past few centuries, is frequently called a literary impressionist. As with Ford’s characterization of Hudson, her impressionism is usually described in terms of her narrators’ interiorities. Julia van Gunsteren, in her mongraph Katherine Mansfield and Literary Impressionism, argues that it is a subjective observations and colloquial dialogue that lend reality effects to her work: “her impressionism is the epistemological record of sensory experience,” she argues, “to be accompanied by reflection, internalization, fantasies and dreams. It is the ordinary, everyday life-speech that gives the sense of being real” (Julia van Gunsteren 9). Van Gunsteren points to Mansfield’s techniques of free indirect discourse, extra-diagetic narration, and other literary techniques as evidence of her impressionism.

Marizia Boscalgi calls Mansfield’s impressionist style “simultaneously objective and subjective”: “as a modernist she does not always deploy the most experimental forms of modernist writing,” she argues, “but rather turns to realism and impressionism in order to affirm the primacy of individual perception, and to focus on the fragmentation of perceived reality in a complex and not fully knowable world” (Boscagli 80). Here again, we see a “primacy of individual perception” which values subjective sense perceptions over objective interpretations, specificity over abstraction, and visuality over ideation.

In pegagogical texts, as well, we see a trend, in the early twentieth century, towards subjective impressions. In Composition-rhetoric from Literature, which I introduced above, Mooney’s taxonomy of description posits picturesque and impressional subtypes. A picturesque description is a “word picture,” while an impressional refers to the way “the reader in imagination saw pictures, more or less vivid, of the places, persons, or objects, or he understood the feelings that the sight of these things had aroused in the author or in others who saw them” (Mooney 81). She later elaborates: “the terms impressional and dynamic are applied to descriptions producing certain effects on the mind. The sight of an object, a person, a place, or some phenomenon of nature may give the beholder an impression of joyousness, happiness, sorrow, pain, contentment, mystery, horror, desolation, awe, wretchedness, squalor, magnificence, elegance, purity, goodness, stillness, confusion, power, beauty” (Mooney 98).

This litany of emotions indicates that, for Mooney, impression reduces again: from sense perception into feeling. The example Mooney provides is from a description of Rabbi Saunderson’s library, from Ian Maclaren’s Kate Carnegie, one which is remarkably olfactory:

One whiff of its atmosphere as you entered the door gave an appetite and raised the highest expectations. For any bookman can estimate a library by a scent—if an expert, he could even write out a catalogue of the books and sketch the appearance of the owner. Heavy odor of polished mahogany, Brussels carpets, damask curtains and table-cloths; then the books are kept within glass, consist of sets of standard works in half calf … Faint fragrance of delicate flowers, and Russia leather, with a hint of cigarettes; prepare yourself for a marvelous wall paper, etchings, bits of oak, limited editions, and a man in a velvet coat. (Quoted in Mooney 98)

Here, the scents are only ways to “estimate” a library. In other words, the sense impressions are pathways towards the real emotional content of the passage. The items themselves are a wonderland of colonial products: mahogany wood from the Americas, along with its tobacco; carpets from Brussels; damask from the East, leather from Russia. This not only gives a distinct sense of specificity, which I will show in the next section is a mark of modernist visuality, but a necessary psycho-geographic distance which catylizes imagination.

Image / Imagisms

The third mode of literary visuality I would like to treat here is the image. Literary images, or imagery—visually evocative phrases, usually short—are of course common features of literature, and have been recognized as such since at least the sixteenth century (“Imagery, n.”). While M. H. Abrams’s classic Glossary of Literary Terms lacks an entry for impressionism or literary impressionism, there is a hefty entry for imagery, a term which he calls “one of the most common in criticism, and one of the most variable in meaning” (Abrams 169). For Abrams, imagery is that which makes poetry concrete, rather than abstract. It is “used to signify all the objects and qualities of sense perception referred to in a poem or other work of literature, whether by literal description, by allusion, or in the vehicles … of its similes and metaphors” (Abrams 169).

What may explain the rise in color and object, then, at the turn of the century, while the description proper declines in popularity, is a turn to the image: an imagism. It so happens that this period sees the birth of a movement in poetry known as Imagism. While literary visualities at the turn of the century are certainly not limited to Imagism proper, and while Imagism is not the only movement, school, or set of critical principles which enshrines the image, Imagism is a crucial movement for textual visuality, as it is one of the period’s most legible set of statements and practices related to image in text. Part of what makes Imagism proper so useful to understanding the textual image is its rich body of autoexegetic and autotheoretic work. Although it was a short-lived school of British and American poets, which lasted only around five years in the 1910s, from the first essays in 1913, to the 1914 anthology Des Imagistes, to the last anthology Some Imagist Poets in 1917—it has had a lasting theoretical influence (Pound, Des Imagistes; Some Imagist Poets, Some Imagist Poets; Some Imagist Poets, Some Imagist Poets; Some Imagist Poets, Some Imagist Poets).

Imagism has, however, fallen out of style in literary criticism. The book publication history for the LCSH imagist poetry, according to Open Library, peaks in about 1970, with a significant number of other retrospectives appear in the 1930s. To say that Imagism has mixed reviews would be an understatement. Glen Hughes, in a 1930 retrospective, argues that it “may be characterized as the best-organized and most influential ‘movement’ in English poetry since the activity of the pre-Raphaelites” (Hughes, vii). Martin Gilkes, writing a year later, calls it “the real beginning of Modern Poetry, the first step towards twentieth-century emancipation” (Gilkes 43). By the 1970s, however, David Perkins calls imagism “the grammar school of modern poetry, the instruction and drill in basic principles,” and it is unclear whether he means this as praise, i.e., that the imagists prepared the way for later poetry, or whether that they are simplistic. Either way, he concedes that they “probably had a more distinct impact than any other group on the style of American poets” (Perkins 329).

I argue that Imagism, as well as concurrent small-I imagisms, can explain much of the ocular phenomena in the literature of this period. Imagist theory plays with binary abstractions such as the static and the dynamic, the fragment and the whole, the idea and its expression, the near and the distant, the specific and the general, the small and the cosmic, the hard and the soft, and the dry and the wet. These are not mutually exclusive categories, as I hope will be apparent, but are loci of ambiguities and complexities which attracted these writers to them, as they do us.

Contemporary criticism has often pointed out these pairs, but almost always uses them as a starting place for symptomatic readings: for instance, in Peter Nicholls on the implications of “hard” modernism; Rachel duPlessis on gendered aspects of the “dry” and “wet” in Pound; and Gibson on the “dry” and “hard” as neoclassicist (Nicholls; DuPlessis; GIBSON). Jesse Schotter admirably problematizes the material membranes of the image and writing with his notion of “hieroglyphic” modernism, which synthesizes materialities of writing and image-making (Schotter). His notion of the hieroglyphic is one that fuses writing and image-production, and is present in the many faux-Egyptologies of the early twentieth century, as well as in Pound’s chinoiseries. For Martin Jay, the modernist moment is a “crisis in ocularcentrism” which reflects “a deep-seated distrust of the privileging of sight” (Jay 309). Claudia Olk, as well, argues that a break with realism in early twentieth century writing shifts conceptions of the visual from a representational and “natural” visual epistemology, to one a more “conceptual” and less “positivist” one (Olk).

Imagist poems draw much of their visual force from two of their most characteristic qualities. The first is their concision, which enables a fragmentary feeling. The second is the implied geographic distance which they uses to evoke a sense of wonder. I have discussed this socio-cultural distance in the previous chapters, but nowhere is this quality stronger than in these poems. The imagists’ exoterisms and exotopisms are further enacted by the concision, as well: the Imagists’ influences in ancient Greek and Japanese poetry, both geographically and temporally distant literatures, lend to Imagist poems their fragmentary quality, as well as their sense of the distant.

One of their earliest and most well-known Imagist statements is a sequence of two short notes in a 1913 issue of Poetry, the first by F. S. Flint, and the second by Ezra Pound (Flint, “Imagisme”). Flint’s begins with the tone of an investigative journalist, hot on the trail of the latest trend: “some curiosity has been aroused concerning Imagisme, and as I was unable to find anything definite about it in print, I sought out an imagiste, with intent to discover whether the group itself knew anything about the ‘movement.’ I gleaned these facts” (198–9). The irony is strong for us, and probably for some contemporaneous readers, since we know Flint to be a founding member of the imagists himself. Here, Flint names as imagist influences “the best writers of all time,”—Sappho, Catullus, and Villon. As an unusual selection, it deserves some discussion. First, the poems of Sappho, a Greek poet whose work survives only in fragments, presents a model, however unintentional, of the imagists’s fragmentary brevity. Some of her fragments, if treated as intentionally short poems, would be at home in an imagist anthology.

Hugh Kenner treats Sappho’s influence, and the fragmentariness of Sappho, on Pound in great detail in The Pound Era (Kenner). Kenner shows just how little of some of Sappho’s poems survive, and how much imagination would have been required for her imagist admirers. Since auxiliary grammatical structures, and fragments of words, often aren’t translated intact, since they don’t make much sense outside of their syntactic frame, what gets translated are the nouns, adjectives, and root verbs. In other words, what remains are images. Had Sappho’s works survived intact, the imagists wouldn’t have celebrated them, since their imagistic qualities are a result of the textual transformations undergone as they deteriorated into fragments, and were translated into smaller fragments.

The next of these influences, Catullus, as a neoteric poet, is known for his choices of quotidian, rather than epic, subjects, similar to those chosen by imagists. His best known work, known as Catullus 64, is told in an ekphrastic mode—a description of an image—and begins with the lines, here translated by Sir Richard Francis Burton in 1894:

Pine-trees gendered whilome upon soaring Peliac summit
Swam (as the tale is told) through liquid surges of Neptune (Catullus)

This image is virtually identical to that in H. D.’s “Oread,” which Pound cited as the exemplary imagist poem:

Whirl up, sea—
whirl your pointed pines,
splash your great pines
on our rocks (Some Imagist Poets, Some Imagist Poets 28)

Catullus, who was also inspired by Sappho, was also well-known for his love poems, known as the “Lesbia poems,” many of which are unapologetically sexually explicit, which is to say, specific, bodily. Richard Aldington quotes from one of these poems in the epigraph of “Daisy,” which reprises the theme of Catullus 53 (Some Imagist Poets, Some Imagist Poets 13).

Another well-established influence of the imagists was the Japanese poetic form of the haiku. The haiku became popular in Europe around 1900, first in France, and then in Britain. Hiroaki Sato argues that it had a profound influence on European poetry of this time, even attributing to the haiku’s influence a “reduced discursiveness in Western poetry” thereafter (Hiroaki). Haiku are traditionally characterized by the inclusion of a kigo, or a textual image which indicates the season: in Japan, this is typically cherry blossoms for the spring, or falling leaves for autumn. Even outside of his translations, buds, petals, and leaves are recurring themes in Pound’s poetry.

The haiku evolved from the opening stanza of a renga, called a hokku, which exhibits the same 17-syllable form. Among some critics, haiku and hokku are seemingly treated as synonyms, but I argue that this distinction is crucial: a haiku stands alone, whereas a hokku is only a small part of a much larger whole. Unlike a haiku, a hokku is always already fragmentary.

A frequent character in the modernist little magazines is Yoni Noguchi, an influential Japanese writer who often wrote in English. His work is admiringly reviewed in The Little Review in 1915, and in 1916, he introduced the hokku to readers of The Egoist, in a short article called “Seventeen Syllable Hokku Poems” (Anderson 45; Yone Noguchi). It begins, rather poetically for a critical work:

The value of the seventeen-syllable Hokku poem of Japan is not in its physical directness, but in its psychological indirectness. To use a simile, it is like a dew upon lotus leaves of green, or under maple leaves of red, which, although it is nothing but a trifling drop of water, shines, glitters, and sparkles now pearl-white, then amethyst-blue, again ruby-red, according to the time of day and situation" (Yone Noguchi 175).

The visual properties of Noguchi’s simile are very prominent, especially the hue. Each of these colors is described using a translucent precious stone of the same color, which constitutes a transformation in hardness from water to stone. Noguchi makes a point to mention that they are a sequence, rather than an assemblage. The scale of this simile is also very small: on the scale of centimeters. As in Pound’s early work, leaves abound, and everything is very wet. It is the scale of an object: the scale of that which can be held in the hand. These are the seeds, I suspect, which grow into the greater diachronic object trends we saw in Chapter 2.

Noguchi’s 1914 book, The Spirit of Japanese Poetry begins with a statement about economy of words that would sound at home in Pound or Lowell:

I come always to the conclusion that the English poets waste too much energy in ‘words, words, words,’ and make, doubtless with all good intentions, their inner meaning frustrate, at least less distinguished, simply from the reason that its full liberty to appear naked is denied. (Y. Noguchi 15).

One way to read Noguchi’s “naked” poetry is as fragmentary: denuded of syntactic function, rhetoric, and performativity. It is specific, and not abstract. Small, and not grandiose. It is no coincidence that Noguchi’s negative exemplar is a reference to Hamlet, which Eliot later singles out as a counterexample to his objective correlative.

Rebecca West’s 1913 article on Imagism also cites “nakedness” as a feature of good poetry, suggesting that poetry should be stripped of unnecessary clothing with a ruthless austerity:

Poetry should be burned to the bone by austere fires and washed white with rains of affliction: the poet should love nakedness and the thought of the skeleton under the flesh. But because the public will not pay for poetry it has become the occupation of learned persons, given to soft living among veiled things and unaccustomed to being sacked for talking too much. … But there has arisen a little band who desire the poet to be as disciplined and efficient at his job as the stevedore. Just as Taylor and Gilbreth want to introduce scientific management into industry so the imagistes want to discover the most puissant way of whirling the scattered star dust of words into a new star of passion. (West 86)

West’s images abound in part-whole relations: burning is a process which transforms single objects into many ashes; skeletons are disconnected assemblages of pieces, in contrast with the continuity of the flesh; and words are fragmentary “scattered star dust” which the poet must “whirl,” as H.D.’s pines do, into a solid “star of passion.” Under a cosmological taxonomy, all matter is star dust, but ideas, and the words that approximate them, are immaterial. West’s analogy, then, gestures towards the physical, as a remedy to a poetry of abstractions.

Like fragments, ideograms—image-writing said to be expressions of ideas—fascinated the writers of the early twentieth century, especially Pound and the Imagists. Although neither of the most common examples of ideogrammatic writing, ancient Egyptian and Chinese writing, are purely or even mostly ideogrammatic, they were so in the imaginations of many of these writers. Since the japonismes and chinoiseries of the imagists have been well-documented in recent years, (see Hayot; Z. Qian; Zhaoming Qian; and Xie) I will not continue to document their warped conceptions of the East. However, I would like to contribute to the metadiscourse, by showing how it is the distance, spacial and temporal, to these faraway places that enables their distortion in the imaginations of these poets, and that this imagination is what enables the production of images.

In ABC of Reading, a theoretical book of Pound’s first published in 1934, but based on earlier writings, he explains what he imagines are the origins of Chinese ideogrammatic characters:

When the Chinaman wanted to make something more complicated, or of a general idea, how did he go about it? He is to define red. How can he do it in a picture that isn’t painted in red paint? He puts … together the abbreviated pictures of ROSE; CHERRY; IRON RUST; FLAMINGO. The Chinese ‘word’ or ideogram for red is based on something everyone KNOWS. (Pound, ABC of Reading)

Pound is likely extrapolatating this from Fenollosa’s notes, but has either misinterpreted them, or is himself inventing a folk etymology of the Chinese word for “red.” Actually, the character 紅 of 紅色, red, is composed of 糸, a skein of silk, and 工, here used as a phonetic indicator (工, gōng, for 紅, hóng). 糸 was pictogrammatic in its earliest known form, but like many Chinese characters, evolved well beyond representational recognition. This “skein of loose silk” appears in Pound’s poem “The Garden,” and elsewhere in his work.

Crucially, Pound either doesn’t know, or avoids mentioning the phonetic indicators of Chinese writing, probably because it would complicate his “ideogrammatic method,” and contradict his view of the Chinese written language “as a medium for poetry,” following the title of Fenollosa’s treatise (Fenollosa et al.). This is to be expected, since we now know that Pound neither spoke nor read Chinese. Yet this didn’t stop him from pontificating about the language, or even in “translating” a volume of Chinese poetry, Cathay, from Li Bai (李白). “Cathay” itself is an archaic term for China, chiefly used in poetry, to denote an exotic, faraway place: it appears as “far Cathay” alongside “Ceylon” and “Inde” in Lord Byron’s “Don Juan,” for example (“Cathay, n.”). The subtitle of this volume emphasizes this sense of distance Pound sought to evoke, by tracing a long path of the provenance of the original text: “for the most part from the Chinese of Rihaku, from the notes of the late Ernest Fenollosa, and the decipherings of the professors Mori and Ariga.” Rather than translating, from the Chinese, however, Pound worked from wordwise literal glosses of individual Chinese characters, as told to the American art historian Ernest Fenollosa by his Japanese tutors.

Pound’s quickness to point out the provenance of his text feels anxiously insistent, not unlike the testimonials that accompany nineteenth-century hoax novels. As the only one with access to Fenollosa’s notes, Pound becomes the priest with the sole power to “translate” them into poetry—had he worked directly from the Chinese texts, he would’ve had to have contended with Chinese scholars, who could accurately understand the original. But this marketing ploy seemed to have worked: the celebrity of Cathay is what prompted T. S. Eliot, in his introduction to the 1928 Selected Poems of Ezra Pound, to call Pound “the inventor of Chinese poetry for our time” (Pound, Selected Poems). Ming Xie compellingly glosses Eliot’s statement as ambiguous, however: “it could mean either that Pound, equipped with knowledge of Chinese language and literature, single-handedly created Chinese poetry for his contemporaries as a model for poetry, … or equally that with no knowledge of Chinese at all Pound in fact invented, that is ‘fabricated,’ an image of Chinese poetry that does not correspond to the reality of Chinese poetry” (Xie 223).

The celebration of Chinese writing in ABC of Reading, besides being unfaithful to the Chinese language, has the effect of romanticizing, and ultimately dismissing, Chinese poetry. By ignoring the practical aspects of Chinese characters, such as their phonetic indicators, Pound only reinforces the stereotypical conception of Chinese culture as mysterious, spiritual, or symbolic. Chinese writing is not translated, in Cathay, but “deciphered,” as if it were a secret code, rather than a living language. However, as scholars of Chinese literature are quick to interject, Pound is too easy of a target. The interest of Pound’s Cathay is not in its verisimilitude, that is, to its accuracy as translation, but in departure from the originals: in its imagination. As such, some of Pound’s inventions, or imaginations, exhibit strong visual components. Timothy Billings traces some of Pound’s additions to “The City of Choan,” for instance, where he adds the word “bright” twice: “the bright cloths and bright caps of Shin” (Pound et al. 18). The distances to the places Pound describes allows him the freedom to inject his own imaginative visions.

One of the functions of imagination, that is, the willing creation of mental images, is to fill the gaps in one’s sensory knowledge. Distant places, then—and to a greater degree distant and inaccessible ones, become a matter of imagination, or extrapolation based on limited evidence. Whereas affluent Brits of the early twentieth century routinely vacationed on the European continent, the “far” East of China and Japan lived up to its name. This was not due to the raw distance itself, but to the travel time necessary. English-language conceptions of distance are typically physical, and it is only in colloquial speech that they are temporal, in expressions such as “two hours away.” One important exception is the isochronic map. As the cartographer John Gordon Bartholemew calculated in his 1914 isochronic map of the world, shown in fig. 3, inland China was in the most inaccessible category of destinations, starting from London. (Another is the Congo of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.) While it would take a Londoner at best, 10-20 days to reach Shanghai, the places named in Li Bai could take over 40. By invoking the time-distant, then, Pound evokes an obscurantist epistemology which allows him the space for the intervention of his artistic vision.

Figure 3: J. G. Bartholemew, Isochrone Map, 1914

It would have been appealing for Pound to translate poems about these distant places, since so few Europeans would have had direct experience of them. Thus, the imaginative freedom given the writer is broad, and the writing has built-in Brechtian estrangement effects: they are rich with images, since they are products of inventive imaginations. Edward Said, whose influential Orientalism explicitly excludes China and Japan from the category of the oriental, nonetheless writes about this distance in an applicable manner: “imaginative geography and history help the mind to intensify its own sense of itself by dramatizing the distance and difference between what is close to it and what is far away” (Said 55). Pound dramatizes the distance between London and China, thereby constructing his own identity, by positioning himself as mediator. For more on Pound and Orientalism, see Brooker and Thacker (31)

This distance is illustrated elsewhere in the era’s poetry, as well. In 1928, Pound collaborated with Mark van Doren to compile an anthology, An Anthology of World Poetry, with additional help from Ford Madox Ford, A. E. Housman, and other poets. This anthology’s structure illustrates the imaginative distances—geographic, travel, cultural, and chronological—from its publication place. Van Doren arranges this anthology’s poems seemingly in order of this distance from New York: starting with Chinese and Japanese poets, moving to Sanskrit and Persian; then Hebrew, Egyptian, Greek, and Latin; moving through modern European countries; and concluding with English, Irish, and American. Pound’s translations appear throughout this anthology: from the Chinese, French, German, and Latin. Only one of his originals is printed, however, “The Garden,” which, along with Eliot’s “Prufrock” and H. D.’s “Oread,” conclude the collection, and the American section, creating the illusion that they are the culmination of this tradition. A number of regions are noticeably absent from this collection, but tellingly, the countries that are included here are ones that are usually cited as influences of the imagists and modernists. One might read van Doren’s anthology as retroactively validating the thematic choices of these writers, by painting a picture of the world in which they themselves are the most worldly.

So simplified, however, Pound’s version of China, and Chinese languages, is one which he says, in ABC of Reading, achieves “the maximum of phanopoeia” (Pound, ABC of Reading 42). He immediately glosses this word, which appears to be his own coinage, as that which “throw[s] a visual image on the mind.” It derives from ϕανός [phanos]: light or bright. But it is not just visual content of words that enable this linguistic function. The scene being created must possess a distance which allows for imaginative labor to take place. There are many types of distance beyond the spatio-temporal and travel distances examined here, though: there are also hypo- and hypernym distances between words, which help to create this effect.

Precision, Specificity, and Scale

The question of poetic distance is one which is invariably linked to those of specificity and scale. Specificity is what engenders the “bright violets” which I measure in Chapter 1, and the hyponym depths of objects in Chapter 2. Among the Imagists, specificity is inextricably ocular. The leaf droplets of Noguchi and Pound are only discernible at a certain distance from the eye: several meters, perhaps, and they are only discernible as such if their boundaries may be visually detected such that they correspond to a certain lexical category. This scale is borne out in their theoretical writing, as well.

In a much-quoted passage from an early imagist manifesto, Flint lays out the “few rules, drawn up for their own satisfaction only,” which the imagists had devised: “1. Direct treatment of the ‘thing,’ whether subjective or objective. 2. To use absolutely no word that did not contribute to the presentation. 3. As regarding rhythm: to compose in sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of a metronome” (Flint, “Imagisme” 199). The first is an ekphrastic mode in which there is little permeability between the metaphor and the emotion whose traditional, abstracted designations it illustrates. The second describes not only an economy of language, but a prohibition of certain categories of words, namely those which have no visual component. And presentation here is antecedent to re-presentation, and is a rhetoric of directness which elides agency: presentation is not fabrication, it argues, it is merely showing what is already there. This is a realist stance, or in Barthes’s term a “reality effect” which minimizes the role of the poet’s imagination in the creation of the image (Barthes and Howard). These effects depend on notions of lexical specificity.

The essay that follows this manifesto of Flint’s in Poetry is Ezra Pound’s “A Few Don’ts by an Imagiste,” an imagist via negativa, in which Pound largely defines the school according to what it is not—in Pound’s terms, in “Mosaic negative.” In it, he defines an “image” as “that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time” (Pound, “A Few Don’ts by an Imagiste 200). This definition of image reveals a temporal component of the imagist conception of the image: an image presents not only an arrangement of objects or words, as a still-life painting might, but a frozen moment—a photograph or a film still, a dynamic scene rendered static. Pound goes on to specify that he uses the term “complex” “rather in the technical sense employed by the newer psychologists, such as Hart” (200). The British psychologist Bernard Hart, in his work The Psychology of Insanity which appeared the previous year, explains the complex as “a system of connected ideas, with a strong emotional tone, and a tendency to produce actions of a certain definite character” (Hart 61). The example Hart gives, tellingly, is a photography hobby which is driven by a “photography complex” (62).

As elsewhere in imagist propaganda, Pound defines this movement in terms of other media, and other genres. First, he cautions poets, “don’t be descriptive; remember that a painter can describe a landscape much better than you can, and that he has to know a deal more about it” (Pound, “A Few Don’ts by an Imagiste 203). It is unclear here whether Pound means that a painting “describes” a landscape, metaphorically, or that a painter, having painted the landscape, can describe it in prose much better than the poet. At a basic level, it is hard for writing, imagist or otherwise, to avoid description in the strict sense of the word, when one of its primary processes is the conversion of visual information into text—a process necessarily involving description. But what Pound seems to mean by “description” here is closer to verbosity, or prosaic, adjective-laden ekphrasis. Yet paradoxically, Pound does not eschew prose, but aligns himself with it: “Don’t retell in mediocre verse what has already been done in good prose. Don’t think any intelligent person is going to be deceived when you try to shirk all the difficulties of the unspeakably difficult art of good prose by chopping your composition into line lengths” (201–2). This attention to generic distinctions—and to blurring them—is one which we shall see appear again and again in the writers I discuss below.

Later in Pound’s essay, he repeats Flint’s trio of imagist rules: linguistic precision, directness, and irregular rhythm. The following year, after Pound’s leadership in the group was replaced with Amy Lowell’s, she, too, lists rules, but ones that have been modified somewhat, and to which three more have been added. Lowell repeats the goals of rhythmic innovation, and of image “presentation.” To this, she adds that “we are not a school of painters, but we believe that poetry should render particulars exactly and not deal in vague generalities” (Some Imagist Poets, Some Imagist Poets vii). Here again is an intermedial analogy, however, strangely, it is not the modern art of Wyndham Lewis, or the impressionism that inspired early Hulme, that provides the referent, but presumably a genre which values faithful representation.

“Exactitude,” to Lowell, may be a matter of language economy, but may also speak to specificity and to scale. First, using the exact word might mean that one has hit the target in one shot, and can therefore stop shooting. However, since Lowell goes on to explain that “exact” means not “merely decorative,” we can infer that “exact” here means something closer to “utilitarian.” But what would constitute a “decorative” word? “Exact” might also refer to specificity—in linguistic terms, the hypernym level in the lexical hierarchy: fir, rather than tree. Specificity, then, is related somewhat to scale: bough instead of tree: a part-meronymic relation.

“We oppose the cosmic poet,” Lowell announces, on grounds of imprecision (vii). Imprecision here is a matter of scale. The astronomical scale is one which Lowell considers irrelevant to her, and the imagists’ poetic interests. Several months later, in a special issue on imagism in The Egoist, Harold Monro accuses the poets of the school as being “so terrified at Cosmicism that they ran away into a kind of exaggerated Microcosmicism, and found their greatest emotional excitement in everything that seemed intensely small” (Monro 78). This critique is seemingly confirmed by the first poem in the anthology, Richard Aldington’s “Childhood,” whose central simile is that of a “chrysalis in a match-box” (Some Imagist Poets, Some Imagist Poets 3). Yet, the same poem parodoxically begins on what one might call a cosmic scale: “the wretchedness of childhood / Put me out of love with God. / I can’t believe in God’s goodness; / I can believe / In many avenging gods.” Although the speaker of Aldington’s poem repudiates the cosmic, he engages with it still.

It is an unanswered question whether Aldington, or any of the imagists, are really concerned with small things, whether they only seem so in contrast to prior poets, or whether they are in fact more concerned with the cosmos as their predecessors. An unanswered, perhaps, but not unanswerable question. Furthermore, we might ask: just how small is small? How do we know what a small object is, and what a big object is? Are these sizes relative to the size of human body? If so, which human bodies, precisely? When—under what circumstances, and at what sizes—does an object stop becoming an thing and become a collection of things, or a even a place? Scale is an important visual component of writing in this period, since it speaks to manipulability: what is small is smaller than a human. An object is typically small, since it can be held in the hand, and it must be of this scale in order to be moved, and movement is what gives it boundaries which make it discernible as an object in the first place, which is what gives it a word.

I contend that precision, as we see it in theory, in Lowell and Pound, is a trend in modern fiction and poetry that we see reflected in the increase in objects over the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as demonstrated in Chapter 2. This same precision accounts for a shift from abstract visual terminology towards precise hues, as demonstrated in Chapter 1.

Hard and Soft, Dry and Wet

There are other physical or visual properties that Lowell here uses to describe the work in the second imagist anthology. One of the goals of the imagists, she says, is “to produce poetry that is hard and clear, never blurred nor indefinite.” This word “hard” appears often in imagist rhetoric, and so it bears unpacking. While “hard” is obviously meant to be the opposite of “indefinite,” as it is used in phrases like “hard left turn,” “hard liquor,” or “hard shadow,” it also recalls physical properties of objects, like solidity, which Lowell might place opposite to conceptual ethereality. Solidity is one of the properties which help to endow objects with objecthood: water and sand are not objects, and do not take indefinite articles, since they do not cohere enough to be handled as such.

In 1918, Pound publishes an article in Poetry called “The Hard and Soft in French Poetry” in which he explains these terms somewhat (Ezra Pound et al. 285). I say “somewhat” because his explanation is vague: “by ‘hardness’ I mean a quality which is in poetry nearly always a virtue,” he begins, " … by softness I mean an opposite quality which is not always a fault." He continues, “anyone who dislikes these textural terms may lay the blame on Théophile Gautier, who certainly suggests them in Emaux et Camées; it is his hardness that I had first in mind. He exorts us to cut in hard substance, the shell and the Parian.” He then goes on to name who, in French or, more often, in English poetry, who is “hard” and who is “soft”: “since Gautier, Corbière has been hard, not with a glaze or parian finish, but hard like weather-bit granite. … Romains, Vildrac, Spire, Arcos, are not hard, any one of them” (288). At no point in the essay does he explain these terms further.

Peter Nicholls sees the “hardness” of Pound and Lowell as “a stylistic and ethical feature of verse that represents a challenge to poetic convention: ‘‘Gautier is intent on being ‘hard’: is intent on conveying a certain verity of feeling, and he ends by being truly poetic” (Nicholls 285). For Nicholls, “hardness” is a political stance, as well, where hardness “begins to attach itself to apparently incontestable ideological ‘verities,’ while ‘softness’ connotes a mythic, pre-political world where ‘musical’ values hold sway.” I would agree that the resort to physical, textural properties among the imagists is a depoliticizing rhetoric, but the it also speaks to ambiguity and specificity: that which is “soft” is pliable, ambiguous, and general; what is “hard” is lexically specific and small.

One of Pound’s examples of “hardness” is a few lines from Pierre-Joséph Bernard, an erotic poet, “praised by Voltaire,” whom he explains has “clear hard little stanzas.” The lines are from “l’Art d’aimer”:

J’au vu Daphné, Terpsichore légère,
  Sur un tapis de rose et de fougère,
  S’abandonner à des bonds pleins d’appas,
Voler, languir… (Ezra Pound et al. 286)

The “hardness” that Pound ascribes to this passage of Bernard’s describes the density, or in Lowell’s phrase, “concentration” of the verses: the ratio of images or visual information carried to the syntax that carries them. In less than one full sentence, we see Daphne, the mythological figure, dancing on a rug depicting roses and ferns (or, viewed differently, one which is rose-colored and fern-colored). This passage has much in common with some of the high-object paragraphs seen in Chapter 2.

There is also a distinct Hellenism in this passage. In Ovid, Daphne, a river nymph who is the object of Apollo’s cupid-crazed affections, transforms into a tree to escape his amorous grasp. In Bernard’s modernization, Daphne’s flora appear as the rose and fern designs on the rug on which she dances. The story is the subject of many neoclassical artworks, most notably Bernini’s 1625 sculpture Apollo and Daphne, which is almost photographic in the way it captures an instant of motion.

One of the keys to understanding Lowell and Pound’s “hardness” is in this continued association with Greek marble sculpture. Parian marble—mined from a quarry on Paros—is famous for its flawlessness. When Pound derided Edward Storer’s poetry as “custard” in comparison with H. D.’s “Hellenic hardness,” he might have had this marble in mind (Jones 22). H. D.’s own poetic themes certainly confirm both this Hellenism and sculptural qualities: her first poem in the second imagist anthology begins, “you are clear, / O rose, cut in rock, / hard as the descent of hail” (Some Imagist Poets, Some Imagist Poets 22). In fact, this substance is a favorite of imagists more generally, and appears again in Richard Aldington’s poem “To a Greek Marble,” the second poem in the first imagist anthology: “White grave goddess, / Pity my sadness, / O silence of Paros” (Pound, Des Imagistes 10). The solidity, hardness, of the marble is what gives it objecthood, and distinguishes it from custard. It is also what makes it an image, that is, a word possessing definite visual properties.

There is a gendered dimension to this sculptural theme that deserves discussion. Rachel DuPlessis and others have noted that Pound’s love poems, as well as those of other imagists, follow the genre of an ode to one’s muse. The muse—less the Greek goddesses of the arts, in this sense, and more generally objects of affection—is, according to Jed Rasula’s theory in Gendering the Muse, “the site of a poet’s own embedded otherness,” representing not the woman, but the poet’s own romanticizations (cited in DuPlessis 390). Like a marble statue, the muse-ode genre freezes the usually female amorous object in place, almost photographically, and strips her of qualities other than her appearance. It puts the poet’s lover on a pedestal, figuratively speaking, just as the sculptor does, literally.

The term which accompanies “hard” in Pound and Lowell is “clear.” Parian marble is clear of imperfections, and so there is a sense in which “clear” means “pure,” although that again a romanticization and a misunderstanding of the past: Greek statues, in their original contexts, would have been painted with bright colors, and wouldn’t have been white, as they now appear in museums. “Pure white,” of course, has a distinctly fascist ring to it, and this is only underscored by Pound’s own history as a fascist and anti-Semitic radio broadcaster, and so it would not be far-fetched to read “clear” as proto-fascist. But to highlight again the surface meaning of the term, and to make the best guess at what Lowell means here, “clear” would be closer to lexical specificity. Lowell chooses a visual metaphor, where objects are visible when they’re focused by the mind’s eye. “Clear” can also mean “transparent,” or “unclouded,” which leads us to associate poetic murkiness with abstraction. Going further, we might posit that clarity speaks to a richness of visual properties which can be inferred from the specificities of certain nouns and adjectives.

These ideas do not originate with Pound and Lowell, but appear in the works of the philosopher-poet T. E. Hulme, who is often named as the spiritual “father of imagism” (Hughes 9). A notorious anti-authoritarian, Hulme was famously “sent down” from Cambridge for unspecified “disturbances” (Jones 161–62). His “Notes on Language and Style,” which was probably written in 1907, was published posthumously in 1925 (224). There, we find Hulme using “firm” and “solid” as descriptors for the kinds of books he promotes:

Rising disgust and impatience with the talking books, e.g. Lilly and the books about Life, Science, and Religion. All the books which seem to be the kind of talk one could do if one wished. Rather choose those in old leather, which are solid. Here the man did not talk, but saw solid, definite things and described them. Solidity a pleasure. (Hulme 39)

Hulme contrasts “solidity” with “talk,” which supports a reading of “hard” as not the opposite of “soft,” but terse, economical. Unlike Pound, he does not reject description, but sees the writing process—at least that of “the man” who writes leatherbound books—as a process which begins with visual experience, is cognitively categorized into “definite things,” and ends with description. In contrast, “talk,” for Hulme, is language which is abstracted, and at a remove from, sensory experience. He later explains this process in mathematical terms:

…in algebra, the real things are replaced by symbols. These symbols are manipulated according to certain laws which are independent of their meaning. … An analogous phenomenon happens in reasoning in language. We replace meaning (i.e. vision) by words. These words fall into well-known patterns, i.e. into certain well-known phrases which we accept without thinking of their meaning, just as we do the x in algebra. (Hulme 37)

Hulme equates “meaning” with “vision,” implying a primacy of visual experiences in the constructions of words. He also attributes clichés to habit and to thinking which takes place at a remove from vision. Later, he draws the distinction between rhetoric and solid vision:

All emotion depends on real solid vision or sound. It is physical. But in rhetoric and expositional prose we get words divorced from any real vision. Rhetoric and emotion—here the connection is different. So perhaps literary expression is from Real to Real with all the intermediate forms keeping their real value." (38)

Hulme’s conception of rhetoric seems to be a teleological, pragmatic prose which he opposes with an ateleological, or autotelic art centered around visual experience. Its use as a pejorative term among the imagists is treated at length in John Gage’s work on imagist rhetoric, and may be traced at least to Yeats’s essay, “Emotion of Multitude,” in which he famously calls rhetoric “the will trying to do the work of the imagination” (Gage; Yeats 215).

Like Pound, Hulme finds that prose is typically more aligned with his ideal poetic criteria than Romantic poetry.

The contrast between (i) a firm simple prose, creating in a definite way a fairy story, a story of simple life in the country … Here we have the microcosm of poetry. The pieces picked out from which it comes. Sun and sweat and all of them. Physical life and death fairies. And (ii) on the other hand, genteel poetry like Shelley’s, which refers in elaborate analogies to the things mentioned in (i). (39)

His use of “physical” is unusual for imaginary beings, but the paradox highlights the importance, for Hulme’s poetics, of writing that evokes physical properties, meaning, usually, visual properties, as well: “sun” and “sweat” are not merely emblems—of happiness, hard work, or otherwise—but have discernible sizes, colors, and other visual properties.

In a later essay, “Romanticism and Classicism,” probably written around 1911, Hulme draws the distinction between the two eponymous forces that he sees as opposing factors in cultural history. “After a hundred years of romanticism,” he begins, “we are in for a classical revival” (71). Here, he disparages the habits of “the romantic,” who, “because he thinks man is infinite, must always be talking about the infinite … The word infinite is in every other line. … In the classical attitude you never seem to swing right along to the infinite nothing” (71-2). Hulme might object to the use of the word “infinite” on grounds that the scale is irrelevant to human concerns, or that it’s difficult to visualize: it has no visual properties.

In “Romanticism and Classicism,” Hulme refers to the “classical attitude,” in terms Pound would later adopt, as having “dry hardness”:

How many people now can lay their hands on their hearts and say they like either Horace or Pope? They feel a kind of chill when they read them. The dry hardness which you get in the classics is absolutely repugnant to them. Poetry that isn’t damp isn’t poetry at all. They cannot see that accurate description is a legitimate object of verse. Verse to them always means a bringing in of some of the emotions that are grouped round the word infinite. (75)

The “dry” / “damp” dichotomy here introduces a new figuratively physical set of poetic properties, as Hulme sees them. “Dry,” when used of writing, usually means “boring”: technical manuals are “dry.” The OED gives, in sense 17 for “dry,”: “deficient in interest; unattractive, distasteful, insipid. (figurative from food that wants succulency.)” (Dry, Adj. And Adv.). Yet Hulme is certainly not suggesting that writing should be boring, or distasteful. Instead, the liquid, in his metaphor, emotion, abstraction, or unnecessary ambiguity: factors that inhibit the transference or translation of a mental image from poet to reader.

As Sarah Barnsley points out, Pound’s poetry does not follow this stricture, since a common theme of his is wetness. Whereas Barnsley identifies in H. D. pervasive imagery of dryness, such as dry sand, she catalogues several instances in Pound of wet botanical imagery, namely, “a wet leaf that clings to the threshold,” (“Lie Ch’e”), “the petal fall in the fountain,” (“Ts’au Chi’h”); “petals on a wet, black bough” (“in a Station of the Metro”); “as cool as the pale wet leaves” (“Alba”), and “the dew is upon the leaf” (“Coitus”) (Barnsley 45). In contrast to Pound, she concludes, H. D. “fashions a feminine sphere through imagery of hard, dry textures that find no correlation in the damp, soft textures styling Pound’s Imagist sphere at this time” (ibid.). While there is some truth to this gendering of dry and wet among the imagists, I would like to emphasize its physical, and thus visual, properties. The imagery of wetness—and especially wet foliage—likely has its origin in the climate of Japan. Since southern Japan experiences an annual “wet” or rainy season, and that season is invariably accompanied with the blossoming of flowers, this image is the kigo which signifies the season.

In more visual terms, wetness, as we have seen in Noguchi, is that which creates a scintillating visual effect: when things are wet, they sparkle. Thus, Noguchi’s comparison of water droplets to precious stones is one that—on the surface—compares similar phenomena of light (Yone Noguchi 175).

I take hard in the Imagist sense to mean specific, as opposed to general or abstract. Dry also connotes specificity, and also denotes a style of writing which conveys visuality without accompanying commentary. In other words, these writers describe the visual phenomena I detect in my experiments of the first two chapters: the preponderance of objects hyponyms and the proportions of color expressions are the Imagists’s hard and dry: the modernists’s eye.

Image and Symbol; Image and Rhetoric

The imagists are quick to assert that images are not symbols, even when they still operate as signifiers. And Hulme is insistent on a dichotomy between images and rhetoric, even while blurring that distinction in practice. The symbolic order is never completely escapable in writing, since language itself is a set of symbols. Given that premise, imagist rhetoric feels at best naive, and at worst a failed marketing ploy. But it is for this reason that the boundaries between images and symbols deserve explanation.

To trace the genealogy of the image/symbol dichotomy even further, Hulme’s major philosophical influence, a French thinker whose books he often translated and reviews, was Henri Bergson. Besides being a well known and widely read philosopher of the period, his ideas appear often in the essays of this period’s literary writers (Gillies). It is probably from Bergson, in fact, that Hulme derives his ideas of instantaneity, and circumvention of the symbol in art. In Hulme’s translation of Bergson’s An Introduction to Metaphysics, we see this “direct treatment of the thing” explained:

If there exists any means of possessing a reality absolutely instead of knowing it relatively, of placing oneself within it instead of looking at it from outside points of view, of having the intuition instead of making the analysis: in short, of seizing it without any expression, translation, or symbolic representation—metaphysics is that means. Metaphysics, then, is the science which claims to dispense with symbols. (Bergson 9, emphasis in the original.)

We hear in Bergson’s metaphysics an attempt to escape the symbolic order through direct experience, direct “knowing” of “a reality,” and direct “seizing” it, without mediation. It is unmediated, therefore immediate; instant, therefore simultaneous. His aesthetic theory, or theory of perception more generally, depends on the conception of subjectivities of time for which he is famous: the temps / durée dichotomy. Later, Bergson, through Hulme, explains his notion of the image, in similarly temporal terms:

Now the image has at least this advantage, that it keeps us in the concrete. No image can replace the intuition of duration, but many diverse images, borrowed from different orders of things, may, by the convergence of their action, direct consciousness to the precise point where there is a certain intuition to be seized. By choosing images as dissimilar as possible, we shall prevent any one of the from usurping the place of the intuition it is intended to call up, since it would then be driven away at once by its rivals." (ibid. 16)

Images are only discernible, Bergson seems to say, through contrast with their surroundings, and with each other. Though their dissimilarities, they produce an effect of immediacy, which Hulme echoes, then Pound, and then Eliot and other writers of this period.

Many of the imagists’ conceptions of the image may also be traced to the French writer and critic Rémy de Gourmont, whose work was often featured alongside imagists in The Egoist. In a 1915 article in The Fortnightly Review, Pound praises his “intelligence” for its “limpidity and fairness and graciousness, and irony, and a sensuous charm in his decoration when he chose to make his keen thought flash out against a richly-colored background” (Pound, Selected Prose, 1909-1965 413–23). Although Pound does nod to Gourmont’s attention to the senses, it is somewhat parodoxical, or at least self-contradictory, for Pound that he would praise anyone’s writerly “decoration,” after rejecting said decoration just previously in his writings on imagism. Richard Aldington, in a later review, praises him not for his use of images, by for the ways in which his philosophy permeates his creating writing. But most of all, Aldington highlights his antiauthoritarianism: his “philosophic anarchism,” which was “too far-seeing to become imprisoned in a system” (Richard Aldington 169). “His thought,” he warns, “is a kind of pungent acid under whose action social humbugs and moral shams dissolve.” The force of this praise is the kind that lends credence to readings of these early modernist writers as proto-fascists. Yet Aldington, the imagists, and this period of literary history, see in Gourmont a figure whose thought promises the decisive break with tradition they wanted, and the fault lines for that break grow in the realms of the visual.

Gourmont’s own description of his writing, and his instructions for good writing, is not only much more subdued, but helps to shed light on its visual properties, and the intermedial metaphors he requires to describe them:

Écrire bien, avoir du style, … user d’un style « descriptif ou de couleur », c’est peindre. La faculté maîtresse du style, c’est donc la mémoire visuelle. Si l’écrivain ne voit pas ce qu’il décrit, ce qu’il raconte, paysages et figures, mouvements et gestes, comment aurait-il du style, c’est-à-dire, en somme, de l’originalité? Le peintre qui travaille « de chic » a devant les yeux la scène imaginaire qu’il traduit à mesure. De fort belles oeuvres ont été faites ainsi. Qui dit peintre, dit visuel. (de Gourmont) To write well, to have style, … to use a descriptive or colorful style, is to paint. The mastery of style, therefore, is the visual memory. If the writer doesn’t see what he describes, what he recounts, landscapes and figures, movements and gestures, how can he have style, which is to say, originality? The painter who works fashionably has before his eyes the imaginary schene which he translates. He then paints strongly beautiful works as a result. He who talks of painting, talks of the visual.

Writing as painting, or more specifically, describing as painting, is an old an often-used analogy, but one which takes on new meaning in the age of such schools of painting as abstract expressionism and post-impressionism. Chez les imagistes, it is no longer the writer’s job to faithfully represent the visual experience of the narration, but just a visual experience, one which evokes the emotion felt by the writer. These are symbols, of course, but they are symbols that pretend to be perfect substitutes for the thing-in-itself.

Imagist rhetoric borrows heavily from the French symbolists of a decade or two earlier. In fact, the repeated imagist insistence that they are not symbolists is probably the clearest indication that they are (Taupin and Pratt). Like the imagists, they also published a manifesto: “The Symbolist Manifesto,” Jean Moréas wrote and published in Le Figaro in 1886. In it, he declares symbolist poetry to be “ennemie de l’enseignement, de la déclamation, de la fausse sensibilité, de la description objective,”enemy of pedagogy, declaration, false sensibility, and objective description

and that it looks to “vêtir l’Idée d’une forme sensible qui, néanmoins, ne serait pas son but à elle-même, mais qui, tout en servant à exprimer l’Idée, demeurerait sujette clothe the idea in a sensory form which, nevertheless, would not be an end in itself, but which, in service of the expression of the Idea, would remain the subject

(Vanier 33–34).

Although symbolism is against “objective description,” it yet seeks to convey ideas through the use of symbols and objects: symbolist poetry is ideas clothed in the sensory. Pound insists that “imagism is not symbolism,” but the image as vehicle for emotion is suspiciously analogous to the symbol as clothes for the idea. In fact, much of what Flint says of imagism in Poetry he says of Symbolism earlier the same year. In his essay, “Contemporary French Poetry,” he calls symbolism “a contempt for the wordy flamboyance of the romanticists” (Flint, “Contemporary French Poetry 355). “Flamboyance” recalls Pound and Lowell’s “ornament” or “decoration”: words that can be removed without changing the meaning of the poem, or words which contribute nothing to the aim of the poem.

William Butler Yeats, an inspiration to the imagists, and with whom Pound worked closely, often writes of poetic practice in terms of its sister arts, or using analogies derived from the plastic arts. In an early essay, “What is Popular Poetry?”, he writes of his desire for a new national poetry, “which would not be an English style and yet would be musical and full of colour” (Yeats 3). What Yeats means by “colour” here might be closer to its use in the expression “local color,” rather than literal colors, but it still speaks to a visual dimension to his ideal poetry. In a later essay, “The Symbolism of Poetry,” Yeats praises Arthur Symons’s critical work, The Symbolist Movement in Literature, a seminal work for many imagists. In it, he shows what he means by “symbolism,” and illustrates it with two lines from Burns: “the white moon is setting behind the white wave, / and Time is setting with me, O!”. Those lines, he claims,

are perfectly symbolical. Take from them the whiteness of the moon and of the wave, whose relation to the setting of Time is too subtle for the intellect, and you take from them their beauty. But, when all are together, moon and wave and whiteness and setting Time and the last melancholy cry, they evoke an emotion which cannot be evoked by any other arrangement of colours and sounds and forms. We may call this metaphorical writing, but it is better to call it symbolical writing, because metaphors are not profound enough to be moving, when they are not symbols, and when they are symbols they are the most perfect of all… (Yeats 155–56)

While “whiteness” is not entirely too subtle for the intellect—it recalls the white hair of old age, for one—it shows that, for Yeats, the visual properties of poetic images are what allow them convey the otherwise ineffable, and what allow them to draw analogies across unrelated domains. This is the same phenomenon Woolf hints at with her properties of “thought,” and toys with the properties of the visual realm as are, and as they appear: in both their subjective and objective senses.

Subjective and Objective

Parian marble is an object: an object of the gaze, but also a grammatical object. Although Flint’s first dictum, “direct treatment of the thing, whether subjective or objective,” appears to take no stance in this dichotomy, T. S. Eliot does. An influential poet/critic of this period, and a friend of Pound, Woolf, and other imagists, T. S. Eliot reviews J. M. Robertson’s The Problem of Hamlet in 1919, and sketches his theory of the “objective correlative,” a notion which I introduce in the previous chapter, but bears revisiting, since it shares properties with the imagist “image” (Eliot). Scholars have often noted that Eliot’s is by no mean a new conception, as it is found in many other critics and philosophers, but has a few unique properties (Frank 311). In his essay, Eliot contrasts these lines of Hamlet, Act I—“look, the morn, in russet mantle clad / Walks o’er the dew of yon high eastern hill”—with a few “quite mature” but “unstable” lines from Act V—“Sir, in my heart there was a kind of fighting / that would not let me sleep” (Eliot 941). The latter is probably what he earlier calls Shakespeare’s “superfluous and inconsistent scenes which even hasty revision should have noticed.” This is pure imagism. Its insistence on revision for concision, distaste for abstractions (if we read “instable” as opposite to “concrete”) and preference for visual information are all found in the imagist propaganda of Pound, Flint, and Lowell. Furthermore, the quote from Hamlet is also Pound’s, from “A Few Don’ts.” Although where Pound doesn’t quite get the quote right, revising it to “dawn in russet mantle clad,” Eliot does. They both, however, attribute these lines to “Shakespeare,” rather than to his character Horatio, effectively hiding an easy explanation for the contrast between these two passages: differences in character speech patterns—Hamlet is much more given to abstraction than Horatio.

In explaining his reasons for what he considers the “failure” of Hamlet, Eliot announces that:

The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an “objective correlative”; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked." (941)

Again, we hear the echo of Pound’s theory of images as emotional expressions, and Pound and Lowell’s calls for particularity. Perhaps more importantly, we see the expansion of the imagist definition of Pound’s to include “events,” which adds a Bergsonian temporal dimension to the earlier notion of image. In an almost desperate attempt to avoid the symbol, or figurativity more generally, Eliot insists that “language in a healthy state presents the object, is so close to the object that the two are identical” (quoted in Gage 3). It is impossible for an object and its linguistic representation to be identical, but this is a rhetorical move which shows Eliot gesturing towards a surface reading, avant la lettre. Put differently, he wants us to see the object as rendered in text for what it is, rather than dismissing it as merely a signifier that points to some greater abstraction.

Static and Dynamic (Photography and Cinema)

Visual perception of movement, or “vibration” as Conrad puts it, depends on an ocular phenomenon known as persistence of vision. While this phenomenon has been well-known for centuries, it only began to be studied in earnest in the latter part of the nineteenth century. As one researcher defines it in 1898: “the retina of the human eye retains the impression of an object for a short time after the object itself has been withdrawn” (Bruce 201). Were it not for this neurological effect, he continues, “the rain-shower would be falling drops, not lines of water; the meteor in the skies would be bereft of its glories, being merely a fiery ball, leaving no glittering path behind it” (202).

The relation between a series of images and their perceived motion is complex, and analogous to the serialization and deserialization process of reading described in the previous chapter: discrete images, if shown in rapid succession, create the illusion of continuous motion, and continuous motion may be losslessly (to borrow a term from information theory) discretized into individual images. This is the principle on which the technology of the cinema depends: to be perceived as motion, the photographs that comprise a motion picture must be projected at a rate of at least 10-12 per second. The modern frame rate for films is around 24 frames per second, but it varied in early films, from about 16 to 24 (Neumeyer 588). Since writing is by nature discrete and serial, this phenomenon is an apt metaphorical lens through which to understand turn of the century writing.

Writing and cinema were never far apart among the high modernists. James Joyce briefly interrupted his self-imposed exile on the continent to attempt to open a cinema in Dublin, in 1909 (Attridge xv). And as Christopher Butler compellingly argues, the simultaneity of the “Wandering Rocks” episode of Ulysses might owe its technique to the montage of filmmakers such as Eisenstein, with whom Joyce was in contact. Virginia Woolf’s 1926 essay “The Cinema,” although it begins by discussing the then-new artistic medium, spends more time discussing fiction. She is interested here in interfaces between thought and image, imaginal image and literary image:

For what characteristics does thought possess which can be rendered visible to the eye without the help of words? It has speed and slowness; dart-like directness and vaporous circumlocution. But it has also an inveterate tendency especially in moments of emotion to make images run side by side with itself, to create a likeness of the thing thought about, as if by so doing it took away its sting, or made it beautiful and comprehensible. In Shakespeare, as everybody knows, the most complex ideas, the most intense emotions form chains of images, through which we pass, however rapidly and completely they change, as up the loops and spirals of a twisting stair. (Woolf, Selected Essays 252–53)

Here, for Woolf, literary art serializes what thought presents in parallel: it transforms images that “run side by side” with thought into “chains of images.” Woolf’s spiral staircase analogy illustrates this serialization, using a favorite image of Yeats’s, whose house, a rennovated Norman tower, prominently featured one; his The Winding Stair and Other Poems would be published in 1933. Yeats was also partial to the image of the gyre and to the cone, which derive from a theory of history he explains in A Vision. Pound and Wyndham Lewis, too, published the manifesto of their “Vorticist” movement only a few years earlier, one which takes as its central symbol a similar image: the vortex. Vortices, spirals, and other such symbols, are at once linear and recurrent: they repeat themselves, but with a difference. Vortices and spiral staircases are at once dizzying and transporting. Nico Israel treats this recurring symbol at length in his Spirals, where he argues that, “embodying tensions between teleology and cyclicality, repetition and difference, locality and globality, spirals challenge familiar modes of organizing disciplines of study” (Israel 2).

Woolf returns to this metaphor in her later essay, “How Should One Read a Book,” referring again to the images of Shakespeare. Here, though, she elaborates on the quality of the image:

Reading poetry often seems a state of rhapsody … and we read on, understanding with the senses, not with the intellect, in a state of intoxication. Yet all this intoxication and intensity of delight depend upon the exactitude and truth of the image, on its being the counterpart of the reality within. Remote and extravagant as some of Shakespeare’s images seem, far-fetched and etheral as some of Keats’s, at the moment of reading they seem the cap and culmination of the thought; its final expression. (Woolf, Selected Essays 131–32)

Woolf’s descriptors, “exactitude and truth,” convey an almost scientific tone, and echo the imagist rhetoric of Ezra Pound and F. S. Flint, as we will see below. This conceives of literary representation as one more aligned with photography than painting. The ambiguity in truth, both the opposite of a lie and an arrow’s true flight, allows Woolf to hint that the literary image should be both representationally accurate to the thought or emotion, and mimetically accurate to the real-world referent. And as in T. S. Eliot’s objective correlative, the image is that which corporializes the thought for Woolf—gives it body. Woolf’s terms for Shakepeare’s images, “remote” and “extravagant,” depend on a notion of distance which is built into the concept of the mental image, or the image-making process, imagination.

Woolf’s “truth” as accuracy appears also in Conrad, who, in a letter to H. G. Wells in 1905 congratulating him for his A Modern Utopia, says that, as a novelist, he “must speak in images,” rather than abstractions (Aubry 16). In another letter, where Conrad gives writing advice to R. B. Cunninghame Graham, he warns, “I don’t start with an abstract notion. I start with definite images and as their rendering is true some little effect is produced” (Aubry 268). Like Woolf, Conrad is concerned with the accuracy of the image and its ability to faithfully represent the thought or emotion that generated it.

This essay-novel of Wells’s, A Modern Utopia, describes a vision for a utopian world as an theatrical/cinematic image which is projected against a wall by a defective cinematograph, before which pass his two central characters, and the narrator, who resembles Wells himself:

So much by way of portraiture is necessary to present the explorers of the Modern Utopia, which will unfold itself as a background to these two enquiring figures. The image of a cinematograph entertainment is the one to grasp. There will be an effect of these two people going to and fro in front of the circle of a rather defective lantern, which sometimes jams and sometimes gets out of focus, but which does occasionally succeed in displaying on a screen a momentary moving picture of Utopian conditions. Occasionally the picture goes out altogether, the Voice argues and argues, and the footlights return, and then you find yourself listening again to the rather too plump little man at his table laboriously enunciating propositions, upon whom the curtain rises now.

Wells highlights static aspects of a technology meant to depict motion (“cinematograph” is a compound of κίνημα, motion, and γράφειν, to depict), reminding us that illusion of motion that the device allows is, at its base, a sequence of still images. In this way, we might understand cinema, and its impact on literary modernism, as an effect of persistence of vision, and therefore an effect of the image, an effect of the eye.

Coda

We have seen three ways in which textual visuality comes together: into description, impression, and image. All three are much more complex than they seem at first glance. Description is most legible as such in nineteenth century texts, it begins to get woven in to narrative in the twentieth century, which may account for the overall decrease in description over this time period, as measured by the neural model. We have also seen how literary impressionism forms a better model of visuality than description, and may explain more of the color and shape that appears in the twentieth century, especially with respect to its subjective treatment of sensory perception. But it is in image that we may most accurately model the surge in visuality.

Textual images, as conceived by this period’s many imagisms, have a number of discernible visual properties. They often possess an implied isochronic distance, which allows for a greater imaginative freedom. They are often free of “decoration” or “ornament”—“dry.” We might construe decoration as as a term or set of terms both extrinsic to the information conveyed by the syntactic frame, and possessing also some other redeeming value, whether as a pleasant sonic quality or other similar property. Images also convey visual information, such as color, shape, size, or space. This visual information is well-defined, that is, carries “hard” boundaries. Images represent, or convey, an “emotional complex”—they must be translatable into human emotion. Therefore, they would need to interact on some level with the human scale, and with human conceptions of objects. Images represent events or experiences: occurrences in time. They do not always take place in time, but are suggestive of the passage of time: moving images, as in cinema. A skein of silk blown against a wall, as in Pound’s poem “The Garden,” holds within it a kind of potential energy: the silk will fall, and so the image contains within it the suggestion of a future movement through time. As seen, as written, as read, as experienced, and as imagined, images are distinct entities from one another, yet analogous. The media of each condition their potential properties. They are interdependent, and are in some cases translations of each another.

Conclusion

In this dissertation, I have computationally modeled literary visuality in its two primary aspects: color and shape, as represented by the corresponding retinal cells of the cone and rod. These models not only reveal, for the first time, literary historical trends, of proliferating colors and objects, but show generic and stylistic affinities that help to explain these phenomena: Bildung and juvenile modes help explain brighter colors; isochronic distance helps to explain imaginative affinity with travel literature; and fetishisms help to explain the textual eros of this era’s body-language.

I contextualize these phenomena within their historical settings: literary movements such as impressionism, art-historical movements such as post-impressionism, material innovations such as photo-chromo-lithography and the synthesis of aniline dye. Ultimately, I find that these phenomena may be explained through image, impression, and description. Image and the imagisms of the early twentieth century carry with them rich theoretical frameworks, relating to lexical specificity (“hardness”), and even explaining motion and “the moving image” via the ocular phenomenon of persistence of vision. Impression enshrines the subjective experience of vision. Finally, description serializes this subjective experience. While I find that description decreases over time, as detected by a neural network, descriptive language, in its visual aspects, explodes across the early twentieth century.

In the end, modernism, in Virginia Woolf’s term, is all eye.

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