The Indifferent Spectator

Just finished a marvelous book, Victorian Literature and the Victorian Visual Imagination, for a seminar book review. The book itself is a collection of 15 essays based around visuality and literature in the Victorian period, nicely done on its own, but one of the essays tackled a particular idea I find intriguing: the idea of sanctioning constructions.

In the Victorian era film was just beginning to take off as a medium. Photography was in its birth pangs. And a thousand tiny gadgets (think: kaleidoscope) were being born to sort of capture various sorts of "photographs-in-motion," to represent optical illusions, and to constantly remind Victorian readers/viewers of this new sort of reality they were in.

Optical illusions, particularly, were challenging the notion of "seeing is believing" because they taught the Victorian's that vision was flawed and could be unreliable. As a result, a constant awareness of the Victorian idea of self-as-spectator sort of emerged - an awareness that "yes, I am watching this thing happen, I am disengaged, and can be objective about it."

"Sanctioning constructions," then, are things that remind the viewer, "Hey! You're watching this! You're not a part of it!" The construction might be as simple as a pair of binoculars (a tool through which to see).

I think I'd like to argue in my seminar paper that the narrator serves as a sort of literary "sanctioning construction," stepping out every so often to remind the reader that they are effectively a "spectator" of the text. The essay I read in the book argues that constructions foster indifference; I'm inclined to wonder how that might translate over to The Woman in White or even Bleak House.

That said, I be tired of this quarter. I like theory sometimes (and certain types of theory always), and I enjoy Victorian lit, but I'm starting to get pangs for Keats and Shelley. I miss them. I miss Romantic literature. I miss the Rousseau sort of pastoral freedom of it all. I miss poems, period.

I think I'm getting end-of-quarter drag. A presentation this week (on serialized issues of Bleak House), a 12-15 page paper on sanctioning constructions, and then a 20-30 page paper on mid-high-low Japanese avant-garde culture and kitsch as a reimagination of the cultural aesthetic binary.

Geh.

I want it to be over.

- b-