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.

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.

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.

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.

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.