Literature by Widdowson Peter;

Author:Widdowson, Peter;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 165620
Publisher: Routledge

Let us consider this quality of ‘being literary’ in a different way. Earlier, I quoted the phrase Thomas Hardy used as the title for one of his volumes of poems, Moments of Vision. A close inspection of this seemingly simple, but resonantly complex phrase will act as a further gloss on much of what I have said so far. The ambiguity of the word ‘vision’ is readily apparent: at once the literal ‘seeing/sight’ (as in ‘20/20 vision’); the metaphysical notion of imaginative revelation (’she had a vision’); and the proleptic ability to see through or beyond the immediate (‘he has vision’, ‘her vision of the future’). The ambiguity of the cluster of inflexions around ‘moments’, however, is rather less obvious. Of course, ‘moments’ are brief fractions of time, usually implying stopped fragments in the temporal process (as in ‘this midnight moment’, ‘wait a moment’, ‘magic moments’ or ‘moment of truth’), and this is certainly the upper meaning in Hardy’s title: particular instances of ‘vision’. But there are two other senses which haunt the fringes of the word: first, that of serious consequence (‘momentous’, ‘matters of pith and moment’); second, and for my purposes here more fertile, that within physics which means the measure of a turning effect (as in ‘the moment of a force’). So Hardy’s phrase may imply that the instants of ‘vision’ are important (‘moments’ of great ‘moment’), but also that the vision is somehow itself in motion: turning, pivoting, swinging round a point.

If we think, then, of the effect of a turning vision, in the most literal sense, we must conceive of a ‘seeing’ which moves round its object (consider astronauts observing earth from their circulating spacecraft), and which can theoretically move round it through 360 degrees in any direction. Move round your chair, looking at it, and you will at various stages see it from all sides and angles. In other words, you will be able to apprehend it as a totality, a three-dimensional entity. But two things may strike you: one, if you stopped the moment when you were theoretically looking straight up at it from below (chair suspended, absolutely vertically above you), the ‘image’ from that ‘moment of vision’ would look remarkably unlike one’s standard received image of a chair. (Think of that kind of trick-photography which takes pictures of familiar objects from unfamiliar angles: where a bucket, for example, taken directly from above, becomes no more than a set of concentric circles.) Two, how on earth (and I use this phrase here, as will become apparent, not merely as a manner of speaking) would you represent, in visual terms, your total apprehension of the complete three-dimensional chair: the chair in all its chair-ness? How, indeed, would you ‘see’ it all, all in one moment? Two senses of ‘moment’ – turning and stopped instant of time – clash here in fundamental contradiction: one is, precisely, in motion, in time; the other, equally precisely, is still, ‘stopped’, out of temporal process. Is there any way

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