Knowing It When You See It by Patrick O'Donnell;

Author:Patrick O'Donnell;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Published: 2020-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

While James seems to believe that there is a single, silver clue to the “labyrinth” of one’s own consciousness—that of the watcher at one of many disparate and detached windows opening out onto the “show” of reality—he also recognizes that consciousness (transposed into a “sea”) contains far more silver entities (fish, clues, signs) than can ever be incorporated into poetic vision. In the novel that this reflection references, perhaps the nonnegotiable antinomy between the singularity of consciousness and the utter indeterminacy of what consciousness apprehends is represented for James in the shattering of the novel’s central, and centralizing symbol, the golden bowl. The image of the author casting nets into the sea of his own consciousness in order to capture the silver clues that stand metonymically for its impossibly complex totality is, as Walkowitz suggests, a trope of modernist insufficiency: the relation between surface and depth is one of opacity; consciousness is conceived as an occluded repository of infinite content and significances or clues that can only be “netted” randomly, contingently; the Christological reference (“I will make you a fisher of men”) suggests that for James the work of the artistic consciousness is hermeneutically redemptive (“I will make you a fisher of clues”).17

This figuration of the oceanic deeps of consciousness, once more, draws a contradictory relation between seeing and knowing that, in effect, provides the author with a mission: to discern the flashes of his own insight that illuminate the extent of the totality that remains in darkness. This figure seems at first glance in startling contrast to simulative senses of visuality such as that of Frederic Jameson’s, who observes in Andy Warhol’s photography a “new depthlessness” in “the external and colored surface of things—debased and contaminated in advance by their assimilation to glossy advertising images—[which] has been stripped away to reveal the deathly black-and-white substratum of the photographic image which subtends them.”18 Jameson’s contemporaneity in relation to James’s modernism in this formulation appears to be the relation of the unrepressed to the repressed, the totally visible to the absent or hidden, the indifferent to a difference built on the hermeneutic fantasy of depth and secrecy.19 Yet I wish to suggest that there is the inception of an antinomy linking visuality to knowledge in James’s figures of consciousness that mark his pre-cinematic anxieties and investments, which more are fully realized in such contemporary metafilms as Caché, Memento (2000), Mulholland Drive (2001) and Adaptation (2002) that variously engage in the representation and critique of the manifestations of Jamesonian totality or depthlessness. The possibility of total exposure—the suggestion that there is a “whole” to and for the visible—is premised on the paradox of this totality’s partial visibility and parceling, its “netting,” its filming. Implicitly, James is already on to one of the resident contradictions of Jameson’s notion of visuality: that the more available the totality of reality becomes to visualization (the example comes to mind of London as a city with so many surveillance cameras that everything and everyone who passes through the city center is continuously being recorded) the less transparent it is.

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