MOVING IMAGES AND MODERN FICTION: MUYBRIDGE, JAMES, AND CONRAD

by

JANE E. GATEWOOD

(Under the Direction of Adam Parkes)

ABSTRACT

By turning to the advent of moving images in the 1870s, I demonstrate that the aesthetic

and formal shifts evident in the modern novel are not only the embodiment of subjective vision

and a reaction to changing norms of aesthetic representation informed by technological

mediation, but that these changes occurred much earlier than has previously been thought. By

tracing a dialectic between moving images and modern novelists, I demonstrate that these

authors and their progeny were not only interested in moving images but that the aesthetic of

moving images and the debates surrounding them were integral to their developing literary style

and form. Rather than situate the predominant link between cinema and modern literature in

works of the Twenties and Thirties, this study explores the nascent relationship between the

written word and visual media emerging at the end of the nineteenth century, demonstrating that

while early film very often aspired to novelistic narrative, the novel likewise made compelling

turns toward moving images much earlier than previously thought. My project will link two key

progenitors of literary modernity—Henry James and Joseph Conrad—with early motion pictures

and emergent cinema. By following such a path, we arrive at a more comprehensive picture of

the form, as well as the function, of the modern novel.

INDEX WORDS: Eadward Muybridge, Henry James, Joseph Conrad, cinema, modernism, moving images, motion pictures, instantaneous photography

MOVING IMAGES AND MODERN FICTION: MUYBRIDGE, JAMES, AND CONRAD

by

JANE E. GATEWOOD

BA, Emory University, 1998

MA, Montana State University-Bozeman, 2001

A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of The University of Georgia in Partial

Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

ATHENS, GEORGIA

2010

© 2010

Jane E. Gatewood

All Rights Reserved

MOVING IMAGES AND MODERN FICTION: MUYBRIDGE, JAMES, AND CONRAD

by

JANE E. GATEWOOD

Major Professor: Adam Parkes

Committee: Jed Rasula Hugh Ruppersburg Electronic Version Approved: Maureen Grasso Dean of the Graduate School The University of Georgia August 2010

iv

DEDICATION

For my parents, who have always supported me unconditionally.

v

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Numerous people, libraries, archives, and institutions have contributed to the

completion of this dissertation, and I am indebted to them. Several people offered

significant guidance and input on this project, and I thank Adam Parkes and Laura

Wright both for their initial and continued insight and guidance regarding its direction

and construction. The UGA English Department and my faculty committee—Adam

Parkes, Jed Rasula, and Hugh Ruppersburg—have all contributed considerable insight to

this project and to them I am more than grateful. Numerous archives and archivists have

assisted with my research and with locating materials, and to whom I am immeasurably

indebted: Michael Boggan and Stephen Roper at the British Library; Fred Baum at the

Library of Congress; Sean Delaney and many others at the British Film Institute; Ron

Magliozzi and Charles Silver at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Leslie Morris

and Susan Halpert at the Houghton Library of Harvard University; Stephen Crook, Nina

Schneider, Isaac Gewirtz, and Philip Milito of the Berg Collection at the New York

Public Library. I thank Dean Maureen Grasso, the University of Georgia Graduate

School, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for their financial support of my research.

Likewise, I thank the Institute for Historical Research, Senate House, London; and the

School for Advanced Study, University of London, for their intellectual and logistical

support. Goodenough College and the Goodenough Trust deserve thanks for the

wonderful accommodation offered in the heart of London, and the UGA at Oxford

Program, William Kretzschmar, and Ralph Hanna deserve thanks for first introducing me

vi

to archives in the U.K. I would also like to thank the archivists at the Beineke Library,

Yale University for their assistance with Joseph Conrad’s “film play,” and I would like to

thank Peter Underwood of Pennington Solicitors (U.K.) for permission to cite it. Kavita

Pandit and the staff of the UGA Office of International Education have all offered

collegial assistance and support for this project and to them I am more than indebted.

Finally, I would like to thank my family and friends for their intellectual and emotional

guidance and support: James McClung, Kalpen Trivedi, Christine Albright, Peter Appel,

Elizabeth Inglesby, Rachel Norwood, and Kathleen Anderson have all offered academic

and moral support and deserve recognition and thanks; Winfield Terry deserves special

appreciation for the consideration and understanding he has shown for this project during

the time I have known him; and my family—Charles, Joan, Andrew, and Claudia

Gatewood—and my many pets have all been more than accommodating during the time I

have devoted to this venture, and I thank them for their unconditional love and support

for me and for this endeavor.

vii

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS .................................................................................................v

LIST OF FIGURES ......................................................................................................... viii

CHAPTER

1 Introduction .......................................................................................................1

2 Unseen Views: Photographic Motion Studies and the Art of Fiction .............30

Eadweard Muybrige’s Motion Studies .....................................................36

Instantaneous Vision and Henry James’s Modern Realism ......................41

Henry James and the Muybridge Debate ..................................................45

Realist Vision and the Art of Fiction ........................................................57

3 The Image of Movement and the Crisis of Representation ............................76

Henry James, Moving Images, and Cinema .............................................80

Unnatural Vision and Uncanny Views .....................................................87

Spectatorial Perspectives and Shifting Points of View .............................95

4 Rendering Visuality: Conrad’s Visual Fictions ............................................107

Joseph Conrad and Visual Narrative Structures .....................................111

Instantaneity in The Secret Agent ...........................................................121

Aesthetics of Indeterminacy ...................................................................128

5 Conclusion ....................................................................................................134

REFERENCES ................................................................................................................140

viii

LIST OF FIGURES

Page

Figure 2.1: Eadweard Muybridge "Sally Gardner Running at a 1:40 Gait" ......................32

Figure 2.2: Comic: “New Zoöpraxiscopic Views of an Eminent Actor in Action” ..........51

Figure 2.3: Comic: “Country Fair [After Muybridge]” .....................................................51

Figure 2.4: Comic: “Full Cry” ...........................................................................................52

Figure 2.5: Ernest Meissonier, Friedland-1807 .................................................................65

Figure 3.1: Eadweard Muybridge, Animal Locomotion, Plate 1, Male Walking ...............99

Figure 4.1: Pneumatic Regulator for Clocks ....................................................................124

Figure 4.2: Pneumatic Clock............................................................................................124

There is scarcely any branch of animal mechanics which has given rise to more labour

and greater controversy than the paces of the horse.– Etienne-Jules Marey, 1873

CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION

The more radical the rejection of anything that came before, the greater the dependence on the past.-- Paul de Man, Blindness and Insight1

The first motion pictures, “movies,” were not cinema. To historians of the cinema,

this statement will offer nothing new, but to historians of literature it suggests alternative

perspectives from which to view the history of literature’s connection with the movies,

making the easy conflation of terms such as “cinema,” “film,” “motion pictures,” and

“movies” problematic in literary studies. Distinguishing between “cinema” and “motion

pictures” forces us to shift the critical focus upon the intersection between motion

pictures and literature temporally backward from the 1920s and 1930s to the late

nineteenth century when photographic moving images first emerged.2 Assessing and

analyzing this earlier shift is precisely what my study sets out to do. By doing so, I extend

recent arguments linking literary modernism with cinema back into the 1870s, into what

Tom Gunning has called the “chaotic curiosity shop of early modern life,” demonstrating

1 Paul De Man, Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism, 2nd ed., Theory and History of Literature V. 7 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 161. 2 Photographic motion pictures should be distinguished from animated drawing projected through magic lanterns which were extant as early as the seventeenth century. See Charles Musser, The Emergence of Cinema: The American Screen to 1907, ed. Charles Harpole, History of American Cinema, Vol. I (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press), 17-27.

2

that the convergence of fictional form and screen practice occurred well before the advent

of cinema proper in 1895.3

David Trotter has aptly noted that “characters in novels began to go to movies

almost as soon as there were movies to go to.”4 But by “movies” Trotter means

“cinema,” and his study, while notable, focuses almost entirely upon works of the 1920s

which have already been linked critically and historically with the cinema.5 In contrast,

my study follows one line of the confluence of technologies and practices that converged

to form cinema in the late nineteenth century—Eadweard Muybridge’s photographic

motion studies of the 1870s and 1880s. Pursuing this line of inquiry reveals that novels

of the 1880s, 1890s and early 1900s began to manifest some of the formal and thematic

transformations that have been associated almost exclusively with literary works of the

1920s and 1930s. Following this trajectory of the novel’s interest in and alignment with

pre-cinematic moving images, then, opens previously unexplored aspects of the early

developments of literary modernism. Accordingly, I demonstrate that technologically

mediated forms of representation in the late nineteenth century raised issues and concerns

regarding human perception and vision which play out in the novel as a crisis of

perspective and form.

3 Tom Gunning, "'Animated Pictures', Tales of Cinema's Forgotten Future," Michigan Quarterly Review 34, no. 4 (1995): 102. 4 David Trotter, Cinema and Modernism, Critical Quarterly (Malden, MA, USA: Blackwell Pub., 2007), 17. 5 Trotter focuses upon James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and T.S. Eliot, all of whom have been linked with cinema in one way or another in previous works, such as Maria DiBattista and Lucy McDiarmid, High and Low Moderns: Literature and Culture, 1889-1939 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996); Susan McCabe, Cinematic Modernism: Modernist Poetry and Film (Cambridge, UK ; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Michael North, Camera Works: Photography and the Twentieth-Century Word (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005); Ronald Schuchard, Eliot's Dark Angel: Intersections of Life and Art (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).

3

The modern novel contains several characteristics that distinguish it from its

antecedents: they generally appear truncated in length and form when compared with

their eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century counterparts; they eschew narrative

coherence for fragmentation and dislocation; rather than appeal to the reader directly in a

“dear reader” format, they implicitly rely upon, without referring to, the reader to

complete the pauses and gaps left in the narrative. Moreover, modern novels typically

exhibit a lack of a stable point of view from which to narrate the story, which is

compounded by layering multiple points of view to achieve the effect of simultaneity in

time with separation in space; they conflate and confuse temporal distinctions by

juxtaposing past and present verb tenses; they intermittently suggest and recount

statements by characters through the persistent layering of direct and indirect dialogue.

While all of these characteristics can be found in early cinema, they are also present in

earlier motion pictures and moving images dating from the late 1870s.6

Analyzing modern literature in the context of its relationship with early motion

pictures and the development of cinema forces us not only to look at the influences of

economic, social, and political aspects upon aesthetic form, but also to turn to the

technological.7 Rather than being merely coincidental, mutually exclusive developments,

6 Throughout I have chosen to use the term “emergent cinema” rather than “pre-cinema” to account for the time period preceding the technical development of cinema proper, in order to avoid the teleological connotations of “pre-cinema.” With the understanding that both terms are lacking, “emergent cinema” allows for the more open conceptualization of the period preceding cinema. Gaudreault asserts that terms such as “pre- and early cinema” encourage a “time zero” perspective of cinema and screen history. See Andrε Gaudreault, "The Diversity of Cinematographic Connections in the Intermedial Context of the Turn of the 20th Century," in Visual Delights: Essays on the Popular and Projected Image in the 19th Century, ed. Simon Popple and Vanenssa Toulmin (Trowbridge, Wiltshire, England: Flicks Books, 2000), 8-9. 7 In 1974, Christian Metz noted that technology has not been adequately historicized, arguing that “the technical does not designate a kind of enclosed area sheltered from history, … the how of its [the machine’s] functioning (the ways in which the machine is regulated), which is distinct from its why, is

4

the relative simultaneity of the emergence of motion pictures and subsequent

dissemination of cinema and the formal changes embodied in the modern novel are

comprehensively integrated and mutually informed developments.8 Ultimately, this study

seeks to uncover the ways in which the conventions as well as the limitations of early

motion pictures and cinema are reflected in the style and form of the modern novel,

encouraging a review of the timeline of modernist literary studies by suggesting that key

aspects of modernist literature were in play much earlier than has been previously

thought.

Writing in Scribner's Magazine in 1936, Gilbert Seldes defined what he saw to be

a division of impulse and habit among contemporary writers. He separated these writers

into two categories: "those who have read Stendhal and those who have gone to the

movies instead."9 According to Seldes, those belonging to the former category produced

uninteresting works for which Stendhal "would have had a vast contempt," while those

nowise under the control of science and brings into play options which can only be of a socio-cultural order.” See Christian Metz, Language and Cinema, Approaches to Semiotics, 26 (The Hague: Mouton, 1974), 17. See also Teresa and Heath De Lauretis, Stephen, ed. The Cinematic Apparatus (New York: St. Martin's Press,1980). Since Metz’s writing, film history has taken up the task of historicizing technological forms and practices, but such historicism remains largely lacking when film is used for analysis in other disciplines, such as literature. 8 While the terms “motion pictures” and “cinema” are now used interchangeably, I distinguish between the two, in that motion pictures preceded cinema proper by decades in the form of “motion studies,” or photography of motion. Motion photography, as I establish, led indirectly to the development of cinema, which only became possible after the successful development of film by George Eastman in 1885; see Robert Sklar, Film: An International History of the Medium (New York: H.N. Abrams, 1993), 21. F.A. Talbot contends that the Rev. Hannibal Goodwin produced a similar film in England around the same time, but Eastman was the first to produce and market the celluloid film effectively. See Frederick Arthur Ambrose Talbot, Moving Pictures: How They Are Made and Worked, Rev. ed., Conquest of Science (London: W. Heinemann, 1912), 29. For more on the indirect relationship between motion pictures and cinema see Tom Gunning, "'Animated Pictures': Tales of Cinema's Forgotten Future, after 100 Years of Films," in The Nineteenth Century Visual Culture Reader, ed. Vanessa R. & Jeannene M. Przyblyski Schwartz (New York, NY: Routledge, 2004).. 9 Gilbert Seldes, "No More Swing?," Scribner's Magazine C, no. 5 (1936).

5

successful in the latter grouping created "new relationships in time and space." Seldes

goes on to classify some of the works from this latter category as effectively "post-

movie." Through Seldes's categorizations we arrive at another attribute of writing

perceived to be influenced by the cinema: new modes of perceiving and rendering time

and space. Linked to a lack of chronology, these new cinematic modes of writing

indicated by an attention to visual rendering of images, a lack of chronology, and new

modes of perceiving time and space.

Yet “cinematic” in the context of literary studies has become an associative term

used to describe some formal acrobatics and visual plays that characterize literary

modernism and developed alongside the emergence of cinema. But in its current usage,

the term is at best vaguely helpful, implying (probably) that something—a novel, a

poem—seems to behave like a film. But what, really, does that mean? One might guess it

means that a text conveys immediacy, perhaps through free indirect discourse or present-

tense verbs, or that its structure may be formally disjointed, relying upon associative

jumps rather than narrative bridges, or that it is experimental and visually descriptive, or

that it otherwise departs from more traditional narrative structures or styles.10 Or, all of

the above. And while these all may be the intended defining characteristics, “cinematic”

remains, nonetheless, problematic not only because it lacks specificity, but also because

the term’s current critical deployment lacks historicity. Thus, cinematic, at least as a

literary term, proves awkward in that it remains largely undefined and in that the

characteristics it attempts to define are not exclusive to the cinema. Rather, technological

processes (motion studies, instantaneous photography) which preceded the emergence of 10 McCabe, Cinematic Modernism: Modernist Poetry and Film, 7. McCabe does not define “cinematic,” but she does distinguish it from “static.”

6

cinema by over a decade offer the same characteristics. But the latter point aside, the

practice of using “cinematic” as a definitional term without definition muddies the critical

waters regarding general meaning as well as in historical terms. Such use encourages

thinking (and writing) about cinema, ironically, as a static form without its own historical

practice and evolution.

It is no surprise, then, that many works analyzing “cinematic” literature focus on

the golden period of silent and early-sound cinema occurring in the years from 1900 to

1939—the heyday of pre-sound and pre-studio cinema and of literary modernism (as it is

most commonly conceived).11 During this period, the medium of cinema grew

technically sophisticated and developed narrativity—aspects which also allowed for the

development of avant garde cinema texts and practice, thereby making the kinship

between experimental cinema and modernist literature readily apparent. For instance, in

her 2005 work Cinematic Modernism Susan McCabe imagines “the thrill HD and other

modernists must have felt in response to the emergence of film in its revolutionary ability

to represent somatic movements and gestures as they had never been represented

before.”12 But to imagine both HD and emergent cinema in this fashion is, at best,

ahistorical. McCabe is referring to 1930s film, which was well-developed both

generically and technically speaking and capable of much more than the mere awe-

inspiring effects McCabe describes. Cinema of the 1930s was no longer revolutionary in

itself; rather, it was already undergoing its own technical revolution—the introduction of

11 The hegemony of sound cinema began with the Jazz Singer in 1927, although experiments in simultaneous sound and image projection were decades old; the Hollywood studio system spanned the Twenties through the Forties. See Donald Crafton, The Talkies: American Cinema's Transition to Sound, 1926-1931, History of the American Cinema V. 4 (New York: Scribner, 1997). 12 McCabe, Cinematic Modernism: Modernist Poetry and Film, 1.

7

recorded sound. Audiences were well beyond easy mystification at the jolt of movement.

By 1930 this shock was over half a century old, and audiences were accustomed not only

to recreated movement but also to developed narrative cinema which emerged in the

nineteen teens.13

Since cinema, motion pictures, photography and literary modernism all exhibit

shared epistemological concerns regarding subject-object relations, McCabe is right to

note that cinema and its antecedents introduced a series of shocks and thrills.14

Nevertheless, initial bafflement at the recreation of movement occurred in the late 1870s

and early 1880s with the introduction of motion photography.15 Thus, critical studies

must go beyond dependence upon analogies or metaphors that merely suggest one

medium (the novel) is "like" another (cinema). This dissertation demonstrates that

literature of the Twenties and Thirties so often linked to film—those by Dorothy

Richardson, Gertrude Stein, John Dos Passos, and others—are actually part of a longer

13 Tom Gunning has argued that even though early cinematic projections, such as those presented by the Lumière brothers, produced a sense of shock in spectators, this sense was one more of surprise than credulity. See Tom Gunning, "A Mischievous and Knowing Gaze " in L'aventure Du Cinematographe - Actes Du Congrès Mondial Lumière (Lyon: Aléas éditeur, 1999), 318; Tom Gunning, Leo Braudy, and Marshall Cohen, "An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the (in)Credulous Spectator," in Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings (New York, NY: Oxford UP, 1999). 14 By making such an argument, McCabe is, of course, following the path cleared by Walter Benjamin who commented significantly on elements of shock in modernity. Walter Benjamin, "On Some Motifs in Baudelaire," in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken Books, 1968); ———, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken Books, 1968). 15 McCabe furthers her ahistorical view by arguing that Muybridge’s studies “prefigured” Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase (1912). This problematic language not only suggests that Marey and Muybridge were developing toward an inevitable painting by Duchamp, but it also overshadows the fact that Duchamp used Marey’s work as a departure point for this painting. The link, then, is not so much one of prefiguration as of direct influence. For more on the teleological current of cinema history (e.g. all things aligned to create modern motion pictures) see Anthony R. Guneratne, "The Birth of a New Realism: Photography, Painting and the Advent of Documentary Cinema," Film History 10 (1998).

8

history of response to pictorial technologies of motion and to new ways of seeing they

prompted. The novels of the 1920s and 30s reflect a new way of seeing, a new mode of

vision that was emerging in the late nineteenth century. Novels ever since have been

grappling with these new modes of seeing and representation of the visual. As such, they

are not "like" the cinema, but rather are responding the new epistemological and

ontological vistas opened by these new views. I do not mean to suggest that the term

“cinematic” should be stricken from critical parlance, but rather that the term should both

be better defined and, where possible, distinguished from “photographic.” Thus, the

stylistic, narrative, and structural aspects of literature these critical works attempt to

define as “cinematic” were present in novels of the late-nineteenth century—a time

before cinema, as both a technical process and product, was created. 16

Tom Gunning has written that cinema’s origins are not revealed in a “warranted

pedigree” but can be found “in a morass of modern modes of perception and new

technologies which coalesced in the nineteenth century.”17 Not only is cinema’s history

varied and complex, much of it has been lost or destroyed; that which remains had been,

until recently, largely forgotten, and as a result, remains understudied.18 Thus, scholarly

16 This is not to say that the idea of cinema didn’t exist, only that, formally speaking, it didn’t. See Andre Bazin’s dream of total cinema in André Bazin and Hugh Gray, What Is Cinema? (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967). 17 Gunning, "'Animated Pictures': Tales of Cinema's Forgotten Future, after 100 Years of Films," 102. 18 The 1994 discovery in a London basement of numerous bins of film negatives produced in the 1890s and early 1900s by Sagar Mitchell and James Kenyon provides one such example of previously lost (and unknown) footage. Now housed at the British Film Institute, the Mitchell and Kenyon Collection was restored in the 1990s from the found negatives and has only begun to be historicized and critically understood. See Vanessa Toulmin, Electric Edwardians: The Story of the Mitchell & Kenyon Collection (London: BFI, 2006); Vanessa Toulmin, Simon Popple, and Patrick Russell, The Lost World of Mitchell and Kenyon: Edwardian Britain on Film (London: BFI Publ., 2004); Robin and Peter Worden Whalley, "Forgotten Firm: A Short Chronological Account of Mitchell and Kenyon, Cinematographers," Film History 10, no. 1 (1998).

9

examination of early cinema is, ironically, younger than that of later cinematic forms, for

many early films were lost, damaged, or destroyed in the time between the emergence of

cinema and its entry into academe in the 1960s. Due to its relatively understudied nature,

early film has few links to other disciplines, and while work has begun in the

interdisciplinary study of early cinema, the field remains largely uncharted. Film

restoration projects and societies, begun in the 1980s and 1990s, work to restore these

films from paper prints and to locate and preserve extant early forms of cinema, but the

study of early and emergent cinema remains younger than that of Hollywood system and

later forms.19 Further, Film Studies generally attends to films and shooting scripts,

leaving the form and style of screenplays and scenarios largely unexamined. My study,

however, attends to these neglected writings, linking them, along with early motion

pictures, to the emergence and development of the modern novel.

With the introduction of university film studies departments in the 1960s, the

succeeding decade saw a surfeit of literary criticism purportedly devoted to inter- and

intratextual analyses of cinema and literature. A significant amount of scholarly research

has shown that film aspired to narrative conventions of the novel, and a smaller amount

has demonstrated that the formal conventions of the novel of the 1920s and 1930s began

to aspire to film. But critical works which investigate an intersection of filmic and literary In the U.S. prior to 1912, when American copyright laws were amended to include motion pictures, the method of preserving copyright for films was to print the film on paper and copyright it as a photograph. These prints were stored in a vault at the Library of Congress, which was locked and forgotten until 1940. In the 1950s, these paper prints were re-photographed onto 35mm film, only after which could they be re-historicized. See "The Paper Print Film Collection," (Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress, 1894-1912); Tom Gunning, D.W. Griffith and the Origins of American Narrative Film: The Early Years at Biograph (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991). 19 For information on film restoration, see Paolo Cherchi Usai, The Death of Cinema: History, Cultural Memory, and the Digital Dark Age (London: British Film Institute, 2001); ———, Burning Passions: An Introduction to the Study of Silent Cinema (London: British Film Institute, 1994).

10

narrative, such as Alan Speigel's Fiction and the Camera Eye (1976), William Jinks's

Celluloid Literature (1974), and Edward Murray's The Cinematic Imagination (1972),

often result in adaptation studies or discussions of ways that film aspires to the novel.20

More recently, works such as DiBattista and McDiarmid’s High and Low Moderns

(1996) attend to the intersection of popular or mass cultural forms with those of high

culture, but this work in particular only makes that link by associating authors of high-

modernism with authors of popular literature or other mass cultural forms. I extend this

line of reasoning by associating modernist and proto-modernist authors not only with

other people, but with supposed low-cultural forms of motion photography, fairgrounds,

and later, the cinema. Likewise, I demonstrate that nascent cinematic forms of

instantaneous photography and motion pictures as well as some early cinema

presentations were associated with high-cultural circles of Europe and North America,

dismantling the “great divide” view of cinema and literature so often deployed in literary

studies.21

20 William Jinks, The Celluloid Literature: Film in the Humanities, 2d ed. (Beverly Hills Calif.: Glencoe Press, 1974), Edward Murray, The Cinematic Imagination; Writers and the Motion Pictures (New York: William Jinks, The Celluloid Literature: Film in the Humanities, 2d ed. (Beverly Hills Calif.: Glencoe Press, 1974); Edward Murray, The Cinematic Imagination; Writers and the Motion Pictures (New York: Ungar, 1972); Alan Spiegel, Fiction and the Camera Eye: Visual Consciousness in Film and the Modern Novel (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1975). 21 Andreas Huyssen responds to the dichotomies of modernism in Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism, Theories of Representation and Difference (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986). DiBattista and McDiarmid provide a selection of essays which attempt to assess various intersections of mass culture and modernist literature, but as the title suggests, the high-low dichotomy prevails: DiBattista and McDiarmid, High and Low Moderns: Literature and Culture, 1889-1939. Specifically relevant to my study, biographers of both Henry James and Joseph Conrad have cast aspersion on the idea that James and Conrad were compelled by the moving images their writings confirm they viewed, although James’s biographer went on to suggest that his writing style mimicked a “camera.” See Leon Edel, Henry James, the Master: 1901-1916, 1st ed. (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1972); Zdzislaw Najder, Joseph Conrad, a Chronicle (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1983).

11

A nineteenth-century photography movement, which became known as

"instantaneous photography," served as the immediate precursor to cinema, and

landscape photographer Eadweard Muybridge played a crucial part in it.22 Responding to

a telegram sent by Leland Stanford, Muybridge conducted preliminary photographic

studies of trotting horses in 1872-73 at the Union Park racecourse near Stanford's

Sacramento residence, ultimately answering the much-contested question of whether a

trotting horse has all four hooves off the ground at once. This question and its subsequent

answer, of course, has attained its own mythology and cult status in the popular

imagination. 23

22 Writing presciently in 1860, an inventor, scientist and photographer, Sir John Herschel, imagined a type of photography so instantaneous it would offer the “representation of scenes in action—the vivid and lifelike reproduction and handling down to the latest posterity of any transaction of real life […] anything, in short, where any matter of interest is enacted within a reasonably short time.” Sir John F.W Herschel, "Instantaneous Photography," Photographic News 4 (May 1860).

Even though he grants that Herschel provides one of the better definitions of the movement, Philip Prodger asserts that at the time there was no authoritative characterization of instantaneous photography as such: “The people who made up the movement never gathered in a single place. There were no manifestos or journals devoted to instantaneous photography […] Those who worked to produce instantaneous photographs had no unifying political or social agenda. They had no catchy name, like Fauvism, Futurism, or Impressionism; nor were they featured in exhibitions as a group […] It was what might be described as a vernacular movement—a grassroots upheaval.” But beyond the diversity of subjects and methods, instantaneous photographers had a unified objective: “to freeze motion in time.” While Prodger notes that "there has never been a rigorous assessment of the instantaneous photography movement,” his work, nonetheless, provides a comprehensive overview of the movement. Phillip Prodger, Time Stands Still: Muybridge and the Instantaneous Photography Movement (New York: Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University in association with Oxford University Press, 2003), 25-35. 23 The historical evidence and narrative of Muybridge's introduction to what he came to call "animal locomotion" is well-established and has been well-documented. See Robert Bartlett Haas, Muybridge: Man in Motion (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 45-49; Rebecca Solnit, River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West (New York: Penguin, 2003); Phillip Prodger, "The Romance and Reality of the Horse in Motion," in Marey/Muybridge, Pionniers Du Cinéma: Recontre Beaune/Stanford, ed. Joyce Delimata (Beaune: Conseil Regional de Bourgogne, 1996); Prodger, Time Stands Still: Muybridge and the Instantaneous Photography Movement; Deac Rossell, "Eadweard Muybridge and Moving Image Culture," in Marey/Muybridge, Pionniers Du Cinéma: Recontre Beaune/Stanford, ed. Joyce Delimata (Beaune: Conseil Regional de Bourgogne, 1996). Rossell notes that the 1872-73 studies were conducted with a single camera. The first published account of Muybridge’s

12

At Stanford’s ranch, Muybridge developed a pre-cinematic form of stop-motion

photography, in which photographs of moving objects and bodies were taken in rapid

intervals. The photographic prints could be reassembled and projected in sequence to

form a moving image. After experimenting with this form in the late-1870s, Muybridge

began acting as a traveling lecturer, displaying his findings—which he termed

"Zoopraxography," or the science of animal locomotion, known more generally as

"motion studies." He presented the results of his photographic experiments to what the

newspapers of the day described as "delighted" audiences of intellectuals, artists, and

writers in both the United States and in Europe. 24 But although these audiences

displayed enthusiasm for the projection of horses in motion—a restoration never before

seen—Muybridge's motion studies also prompted a discussion on the function of art and

the nature of reality in general-circulation newspapers and magazines. For in their

presentation of a view of reality never before seen, these studies contradicted both human

perception and the history of realistic depiction in art. Thus while the projection of

animals in motion generated excitement and fascination, the implications of these

projections, both for the capacity and reliability of human perception and for current and

past artistic representations, faced disparagement, derision, and disagreement. In

summarizing an article from The Century, the New York Times writes that "the matter

seems to resolve itself . . . into a question whether the artist should represent things as

success was in the Alta California newspaper, 7 April 1873; see Prodger, Time Stands Still: Muybridge and the Instantaneous Photography Movement, 142. The photographic motion studies presented in San Francisco in 1880 were the culmination of Muybridge’s 1878 studies in Palo Alto, California, which offered an extension of his 1872 preliminary experiments photographing Leland Stanford’s horse, Occident. 24 See "Animals in Motion." New York Times. Mar. 10, 1888: 3. and Rebecca Solnit's River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West. New York: Viking. 2003: 209-238.

13

they are or as they seem."25 And this concern and debate did not limit itself to visual art,

for Muybridge's motion studies facilitated a crisis of human vision and seeing which

rippled through both the public and private aesthetic consciousnesses.

Michel Foucault writes in The Order of Things of “the nineteenth’s century’s

double advance, on the one hand toward formalism in thought and on the other towards

the discovery of the unconscious—towards Russell and Freud.”26 Muybridge’s work

makes such a double advance in that it formalizes the articulation of movement while it

also uncovers what Walter Benjamin has called the optical unconscious:

The act of reaching for a lighter or a spoon is a familiar routine, yet we hardly

know what really goes on between the hand and metal, not to mention how this

fluctuates with our moods. Here the camera intervenes with the resources of its

lowerings and liftings, its interruptions and isolations, its extensions and

accelerations, its enlargements and reductions. The camera introduces us to

unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses.27

By revealing hidden threads of motion and extending understanding of vision and its

limits, Muybridge’s work, along with that of other motion photographers, is integral to

the perceptual and conceptual shifts of modernism. While Muybridge attempted to

25 "Some of the July Magazines, The Century." New York Times. June 26, 1882: 3. 26 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things; an Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage Books, 1973), 299. 27 Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction." Both Thom Andersen and Tom Gunning have asserted that Muybridge’s motion studies extended photography into the “optical unconscious.” See Thom Andersen, "Eadweard Muybridge, Zoopraxographer" (Film, UCLA, 1974). Tom Gunning, "Never Seen This Picture before; Muybridge in Multiplicity," in Time Stands Still: Eadweard Muybridge and the Instantaneous Photography Movement, ed. Philip Prodger (New York: Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University in association with Oxford University Press, 2003).

14

present his work as being both scientifically accurate and of service to artists and

painters, this association of art with scientific accuracy spurred great controversy in the

1880s and 1890s. Rather than being the “father of the motion picture” Muybridge’s

motion studies revealed, while trying to span, a conceptual fissure between

science/technology and aesthetics.28 So while linking them, his studies also ironically

served to galvanize the distance between the two projects, for until such studies were

published the scientific and the aesthetic realms of visual representation had been largely

parallel projects.29

The relevance of Muybridge's studies to modernism lies in the fact that they not

only force new views and new ways of thinking about space and time that other

nineteenth-century technologies—radio, telegraph, train—had made possible, but

Muybridge's work links these technologies and the concerns they raised with aesthetics,

building an ostensible bridge between science and technology and aesthetic

representation. Whereas Etienne-Jules Marey and other chronophotographers are

predominately linked to scientific study, the power of Muybridge's studies lies in the link

they make between the scientific and the aesthetic, a link which exists in part because

Muybridge presented his work as serving artists.30 And rather than present his work

28 For the argument of origins regarding Muybridge as the “father of motion picture,” see Gordon Hendricks, Eadweard Muybridge: The Father of the Motion Picture (New York: Grossman Publishers, 1975). 29 Guneratne, "The Birth of a New Realism: Photography, Painting and the Advent of Documentary Cinema."; Prodger, Time Stands Still: Muybridge and the Instantaneous Photography Movement, 212. 30 The chronophotographic gun was invented by Etienne-Jules Mary in 1882 to study birds in flight. Shaped like a gun, the camera recorded twelve pictures per second. For more on Muybridge’s relationship with other chronophotographers, such as Marey, Georges Demeny, and Thomas Eakins, see Brian Coe, Muybridge and the Chronophotographers (London: Museum of the Moving Image, 1992). Furthering the point the Muybridge’s work appealed to literary and artistic types was a column in the New York Times in Feb. 1883 to which the lead sentence read, “A case of interest, especially to literary and art people, has

15

solely at scientific institutions and photographic societies, Muybridge also presented his

work at artists’ salons and to societies devoted to art and art appreciation.31

In the debates that surrounded Muybridge’s work, we see the central tenets of

modernism in play: namely, a separation between scientific, empirical truth and

subjective perception and knowledge.32 In visual art this manifests itself in artists

departing from scientific realism and depicting imagined, rather than actual, views.33 In

novels, authors begin to render perceptions rather than actions, and points of view

multiply; rather than be grounded in an objective perspective with a definite moral

framework, narrative is embedded within an interior consciousness with unreliable

moorings. Thus, the central features of Muybridge’s work and the controversy

surrounding it also contain, not coincidentally, key aspects of modernist aesthetics: a

focus upon temporality; fragmentation resulting from separation between time and space;

and concern with motion, moving bodies, and the embodiment of motion. Additionally,

been entered in the Suffolk County Superior Court here [Boston]. Edweard (sic) Muybridge, the lecturer on the theory of animal progression, has brought suit against Leland Stanford, ex-governor of California, a well-known lover of horses and a student of their habits and breeding” "Animal Progression in Court," New York Times 1883. 31 See "The Zoogyroscope," The New York Times, May 19 1880; Francoise Forster-Hahn, "Marey, Muybridge and Messionier: The Study of Movement in Science and Art," in Eadweard Muybridge: The Stanford Years, 1872-1882, ed. Anita Mozley (Stanford, Calif.: 1973); Anita Ventura Mozley, et al., Eadweard Muybridge: The Stanford Years, 1872-1882, Rev. ed. (Stanford, Calif. 1973); "Art and Artists: Animals in Motion," Californian, July 1880. 32 Articulating this separation is, of course, not new. Walter Pater classified modern poetry as that which demonstrated “an intimate consciousness of the expression of natural things.” Pater also offered a meditation on the interior-exterior separation in his conclusion to The Renaissance. But it is my premise that Muybridge’s work and literature existed within mutually informed and informing contexts. Thus, examining literature in terms of the Muybridge debate offers a more comprehensive picture of the emergence of modernism. Walter Pater, "Wordsworth," in Selected Writings of Walter Pater, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Columbia University Press, 1974), 127; ———, "Conclusion [to the Renaissance]," in Selected Writings of Walter Pater, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Columbia University Press, 1974), 58-60. 33 Marc Gotlieb, The Plight of Emulation: Ernest Meissonier and French Salon Painting (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996), 183.

16

Muybridge’s work spawned questions concerning representational modes—should art

represent things as they are or as they seem?—and introduced technologically mediated

forms of representation into aesthetics, which produced an attendant anxiety that vision is

subjective and mediated. While these formal and thematic characteristics are certainly

well-attested in novels of the Twenties and Thirties, they begin to surface in earlier works

by Henry James and Joseph Conrad.

* * *

Critically speaking, literary modernism’s parentage is decidedly various:

influenced by philosophy, theology, various forms of religion; cross-pollinated by

theatrical and visual arts; and linguistically diverse and formally experimental. Yet

studies of literary modernism often account for the linguistic and formal experimentation

of modernist fiction by tracing an intellectual history which ignores or fails to account for

parallel developments popular culture, tacitly upholding a low/high cultural distinction

which is generally held to not have ruptured until after World War Two.34 Historicizing

the contemporaneous reception of moving images, however, disrupts such a distinction.

Recent critical works such as David Chinitz’s T.S. Eliot and the Cultural Divide (2003)

have begun the work of criticizing and, in some ways, dismantling the “great divide”

34 See, for instance, Michael H. Levenson, A Genealogy of Modernism: A Study of English Literary Doctrine, 1908-1922 (Cambridge [Cambridgeshire] ; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984); James Longenbach, Modernist Poetics of History: Pound, Eliot, and the Sense of the Past (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1987). Both these works provide compelling and otherwise exemplary accounts of literary modernism which, nonetheless, overlook correspondences between literary modernism and popular modernity. These historical accounts trace literary modernism’s development as an intellectual history.

17

theory of literary modernism which many modernists themselves helped to assemble.35

Such critical work re-examines the cultural context of modernism, scrutinizing the tacit

assumption that high-cultural circles of the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries

had very little to do with supposed low-cultural ones. But, in doing so, such work leaves

unquestioned the perception that cinema was a low-cultural form from the first.

Historical work in film studies, however, suggests otherwise. Charles Musser’s High-

Class Moving Pictures (1991) debunks the commonly held assumption that early motion

pictures can be simply equated with popular commercial entertainment.36 Likewise, his

earlier works on screen practice prior to 1907 and Gunning’s work on both the practice

and reception of emergent and early cinema demonstrate that cinema emerged both from

and into a complex system of often competing practices, technologies, and norms which

was not limited to low-cultural venues.37

The critical language characterizing modernist studies in the years since Jonathan

Crary’s Techniques of the Observer (1990) has begun to attend to aspects of the visual—

perception, attention, looking, visual delay—embedded within modernist literary texts.38

35 David Chinitz, T.S. Eliot and the Cultural Divide (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003). See also DiBattista and McDiarmid, High and Low Moderns: Literature and Culture, 1889-1939; Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism. 36 Charles Musser, High-Class Moving Pictures: Lyman H. Howe and the Forgotten Era of Traveling Exhibition, 1880-1920 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991). 37 Gunning, "'Animated Pictures', Tales of Cinema's Forgotten Future."; Tom Gunning and Richard Abel, "'Now You See It, Now You Don't': The Temporality of the Cinema of Attractions," in Silent Film, Rutgers Depth of Field Series (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1996); Gunning, Braudy, and Cohen, "An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the (in)Credulous Spectator."; Musser, The Emergence of Cinema: The American Screen to 1907; Charles Musser, "Toward a History of Screen Practice," Quarterly Review of Film Studies 9 n1(1984). 38 Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1990); ———, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999); Mary Ann Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic

18

And much of this critical work begins to analyze the implications of these aspects of

visual culture (for example, impressionism as a characteristic of bourgeois “haze” that

promotes a dialectical system of critical vision).39 Less of this critical work, however,

historicizes literary modernism’s focus upon the visual and all its aspects—seeing, being

seen, time, delay, history, the perpetual present. Extending Crary’s argument that “visual

modernism took shape in an already configured field of techniques and discourses about

visuality,” I establish that similar shifts occurred in literary modernism, due in large part

to transformations in visual and spectacular culture occurring in the late nineteenth

century.40 Such a move stands to further critical understanding of an area of modernist

studies which Crary identifies as being particularly problematic—comprehending the

“ways in which film and modernist art occupy a common historical ground.”41 By

following this line of inquiry, my study demonstrates that a cross-pollination of visual

culture and literary modernity not only occurred, as has been shown in recent critical

work, but also that the shocking new forms of visual representation had a profound and

complex impact upon subsequent developments in literary narrative.42

Several recent literary and aesthetic histories which link photography,

stereoscopy, and panoramic displays with the literary imagination have begun to explore

the evidence of a bountiful and rich fusion of literary and visual culture operating well

Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002); North, Camera Works: Photography and the Twentieth-Century Word. 39 See Jesse Matz’s chapter “Cultures of Impression” in Mao and Walkowitz, Bad Modernisms, 298-330. 40 Crary, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture, 6. 41 Ibid., 5. 42 For critical work that has begun to explore the intersections of visual culture and literary modernity, see DiBattista and McDiarmid, High and Low Moderns: Literature and Culture, 1889-1939; Schuchard, Eliot's Dark Angel: Intersections of Life and Art.

19

before the advent of the cinema proper in the mid-1890s.43 Even so, many of these

studies, such as Michael North’s Camera Works, quickly jump from visual technologies

and screen practices of the late nineteenth century to the novelistic form and style of the

1910s, 1920s and 1930s, leaving scant analysis of the intersection of late nineteenth

century novels and contemporaneous screen practice.44 As Gunning has shown, the

relation between Muybridge’s work and late-nineteenth-century visual arts has only

begun to be explored.45

Equally underdeveloped are examinations of Muybridge’s relationship to changes

in narrative strategies which respond formally and thematically to visual technologies

emerging in the late nineteenth century. For instance, Muybridge is a notable absence

from Trotter’s book; like other examinations of literature and cinema, his analysis begins

at the presumed ground zero of the cinema: the Lumière screening in Paris, December,

1895. Even other compelling analyses of the confluence of literature and photography

inexplicably omit Muybridge’s contributions to both photography and to the development

of moving pictures.46 In contrast, I demonstrate that the relation between literary

43 For instance, see Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century; ———, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture; Richard Menke, Telegraphic Realism: Victorian Fiction and Other Information Systems (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2008); North, Camera Works: Photography and the Twentieth-Century Word. 44 Menke provides one welcome example of analysis that examines the received divide between Victorian and modernist texts by referring to parallel technologies and practices for formal comparison and exploration. See Menke, Telegraphic Realism: Victorian Fiction and Other Information Systems.

“Screen practice” is Musser’s term, meaning the practice of projecting images and their sound accompaniment dating back to the mid-seventeenth century. See Musser, The Emergence of Cinema: The American Screen to 1907, 15-17; ———, "Toward a History of Screen Practice." 45 Gunning, "Never Seen This Picture before; Muybridge in Multiplicity." 46 Two notable works which omit Muybridge are Nancy Armstrong, Fiction in the Age of Photography: The Legacy of British Realism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999); Jane M. Rabb,

20

modernism, specifically the modern novel, and the emergence of moving images goes

well beyond formal coincidence. Ultimately, these moving images markedly altered the

way humans perceive and represent the world. This transformation in perception and

representation lies at the core of modernism in all its forms and has begun to be analyzed

and historicized in the field of art history and visual art (film, painting, photography).47

Regarding British and American literary modernism, recent critical projects have

adequately addressed the symptoms of the paradigm shift in representation that is

modernism. Nonetheless, the account of modernism’s provenance generally remains a

story of high-cultural forms and does not adequately link the cultural context of visuality

at the turn of the century with parallel developments in literature. This dissertation

explores the intermedial context of scientific and aesthetic realism in the late nineteenth

century, revealing that modernist aesthetic concerns were equally informed by

technological advances in optics as by religious or philosophical doctrines.

Muybridge’s work brought to the fore issues concerning artistic authority and

human creation of the art object—an anxiety which is thematically rendered in Henry

James’s novels of the 1880s and 1890s, which develops into a crisis of form in both his

Literature & Photography Interactions, 1840-1990: A Critical Anthology, 1st ed. (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995). 47 Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century; ———, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture; Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism; Andreas Huyssen, "Modernist Miniatures: Literary Snapshots of Urban Spaces," PMLA: Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 122, no. 1 (2007). 47 Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century; ———, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture; Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive; North, Camera Works: Photography and the Twentieth-Century Word.

21

and Joseph Conrad’s later novels. 48 Both Conrad and James placed a high value upon

rendering visuality via language, but in both authors' works the rendering of the visual,

external realm is generally qualified by a knowing and perceiving human consciousness.

For instance, Henry James's "The Art of Fiction" (1884) distills his aesthetic theory of the

novel, asserting that the author must able to ascertain the whole of the thing by only

viewing a part; and, in language that evokes photography and appeals to its perceived

realism, his "Preface to The Portrait of a Lady" (1908) establishes the consciousness of

the artist as the source for art. Similarly, Conrad repeatedly stated that his writerly

mission involved making the reader “see,” and to this end, he often engaged a singular

consciousness from which to render his tales.49 Thus, as James is concerned with

rendering individual consciousness, the visible world primarily exists in his works to

reflect human subjectivity. Conrad, on the other hand, locates truth in the visible world,

but this truth is only knowable or perceivable through a knowing subject, a human

consciousness. James and Conrad, then, provide two related but distinct responses to the

48 Michael Hoffman asserts that while nineteenth and twentieth century thought was concerned with exploring invisible deep structures, in the face of technology modern humans are reduced to a fragile subjectivity, a “central intelligence,” and modern literature affirms this subjectivity. Hoffman follows Stephen Spender’s categorization of the mechanistic and technological tendencies of modern literature as “the destructive element,” whereas the “great modern movement” consists of the “individual vision of writers” who isolated this vision through their “realization of the destructive element of modern society.” For Spender, the modern movement is characterized by individual vision along with “faith in the absoluteness of the poetic image.” In the negative response to Muybridge’s work, we can see individual vision rejecting the “destructive element” embodied in the mechanized and mass-produced art object of the moving photograph. See Michael J. Hoffman and Patrick D. Murphy, Critical Essays on American Modernism, Critical Essays on American Literature (New York, N.Y.: G. K. Hall, 1992); Stephen Spender, The Destructive Element: A Study of Modern Writers and Beliefs (London: J. Cape, 1935); ———, The Struggle of the Modern (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1963). 49 Even though Conrad often utilizes a first-person perspective through deployment of a character such as Marlow, this singular vision is not authoritative. Michael Levenson provides a comprehensive analysis of the implications of subjective viewpoints in Conrad’s fiction; see Levenson, A Genealogy of Modernism: A Study of English Literary Doctrine, 1908-1922, 1-35.

22

modernist separation of the interior and exterior realms, demonstrating a continuum of

subject-object relations in modernism. As such, these two authors' commentary in

conjunction with the larger Muybridge debate will help to establish the impact of the

emergence and rise of motion pictures and, later, cinema upon the authorial imagination

and upon modernism.

Significant critical work exists regarding Henry James's relationship with visual

art, his attachment to it and its influence upon his own work.50 He has often been quoted

by art historians, a critical move that according to Viola Hopkins Winner, "attests to his

visual perceptiveness."51 The context of the Muybridge debate uncovers a comparatively

overlooked aspect of James’s lifelong interest in visual art and vision: namely, his

guarded interest in photography, motion pictures, and later, cinema. What this tells us

about James and his work is that he is not merely interested in visual art, specifically

painting, but that he is compelled by a broad-spectrum of vision and visual

representation. Moreover, these additional visual sources had a profound and under-

examined effect on his work.52 Just as Muybridge’s work conveyed conflicting

messages, James exhibits a dual response to the Muybridge debate. Whereas James’s

50 See for instance Hazel Hutchinson, "James's Spectacles: Distorted Vision in the Ambassadors," Henry James Review 26, no. 1 (2005); Adeline R. Tintner, The Twentieth-Century World of Henry James: Changes in His Work after 1900 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2000); Viola Hopkins Winner, Henry James and the Visual Arts (Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 1970). 51 Winner carefully establishes James’s interest in the visual arts was intense and lifelong, but as she reads his remembered views as “living pictures,” she misses the import of her chosen phrase. Winner 52 Ralph Bogardus offers an insightful analysis of James’s relationship with photography, but as he is concerned largely with whether James considered photography to be an art, Bogardus misses the larger debate concerning realism surrounding Muybridge’s work. Both Bogardus and Edel have argued that James’s centers-of-consciousness technique has a “camera-like” effect. Ralph F. Bogardus, Pictures and Texts: Henry James, A.L. Coburn, and New Ways of Seeing in Literary Culture, Studies in Photography No. 2 (Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research Press, 1984); Leon Edel, "Novel and Camera," in The Theory of the Novel: New Essays, ed. John Halpern (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974).

23

criticism, letters, and essays regarding art demonstrate an active rejection of the stated

utility of Muybridge’s work for aesthetics, James’s fiction betrays an alliance with the

aesthetic of the moving image.

Over a decade before Henry James wrote “The Art of Fiction” (1884) Muybridge

began his studies of horses’ movements, and Chapter Two explores the relationship

between James’s criticism and the debate concerning realist representation emerging

from Muybridge’s work. Muybridge’s work participates in a long-standing

preoccupation with motion, physical movement, representation, and perception that found

heightened attention in the late nineteenth century, the implications and extensions of

which we are still grappling with today.53 This debate contained many points similar not

only to James’s theories of fiction but also to the development of modernist aesthetics.

Anthony Guneratne has argued that by offering a new form of mimesis which altered

both the style and subject matter of artistic representation photography transformed art.54

Muybridge's studies thus amplified a discussion concerning aesthetic representation

several decades old, one which photography inaugurated in the 1840s and 1850s. For

instance, writing about the Salon of 1859, Baudelaire condemned photography and the

society that championed it, asserting that Daguerre was a messiah of trivial images

catering to Narcissus-like sun worshippers.55 Stop-motion photography and moving

images produced by this new photographic form augmented the debates concerning

53 For a comprehensive history of the various attempts to arrest motion and study its aspects, see Laurent Mannoni and Richard Crangle, The Great Art of Light and Shadow: Archaeology of the Cinema, Exeter Studies in Film History (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2000). 54 Guneratne, "The Birth of a New Realism: Photography, Painting and the Advent of Documentary Cinema," 168. 55 Charles Baudelaire and Jonathan Mayne, Art in Paris, 1845-1862 ([London]: Phaidon Publishers; distributed by New York Graphic Society Publishers, Greenwich, 1965), 153.

24

photography by presenting an entirely new view on life and the world, one never before

seen.56 And this view facilitated a crack or fissure in confidence regarding human

perception which is at the core of the development of modernism in all its forms.

While both Deac Rossell and Phillip Prodger note that Muybridge’s work and

those of the larger instantaneous photography movement were discussed widely in

publications of the day, the details and the outcomes of this debate as they pertain to

literary aesthetics have not been adequately historicized.57 In Chapter Two, I offer an

assessment of this debate and its implications for literary modernism by linking Henry

James’s literary criticism with Muybridge’s motion studies. To this end, I demonstrate

that the epistemological changes embodied in the modern novel were as much a response

to changing modes of representation prompted by motion studies and emergent cinema as

they were responses to philosophy. Mary Ann Doane argues against historical claims of

coincidence emphasizing the importance of historical practice that traverses disciplinary

boundaries and accords emergent fin de siècle media similar ground as that allowed more

traditional and revered subjects, contending that:

The indexical representation of photography, the use of intermittent images to

produce the illusion of movement in the cinema, and the choice of a standard

speed in projection are practices with epistemological underpinnings. They have a

knowledge effect. Similarly, the understanding of perception in terms of the

56 See Tom Gunning, "Never Seen This Picture Before: Muybridge in Multiplicity," in Prodger, Time Stands Still: Muybridge and the Instantaneous Photography Movement. 222-272. 57 Ibid; Rossell, "Eadweard Muybridge and Moving Image Culture."

25

concept of the afterimage, or persistence of vision, is a discursive event that

cannot be assigned a lower status than the pronouncements of philosophy …58

Moreover, Doane notes that “cinema’s central role as entertainment does not preclude its

intimate relation with new epistemologies, its inextricability from the reorganization of

knowledge taking place in modernity.”59 I extend this point in Chapters Three and Four

through analysis of Henry James’s and Joseph Conrad’s fiction, arguing that early

moving images played a dominant, but heretofore unexamined, role in that very

reorganization of knowledge as embodied in the modern novel.

While early cinema may seem primitive to our present-day eyes, to

contemporaneous eyes early cinema and moving pictures were more than just an archaic

form of novelty entertainment.60 Early moving images and cinema offered a version of

reality not otherwise visible to human eyes, and this version could be slowed or sped,

taken apart and reassembled. As such, moving pictures facilitated a crisis of human

vision and sight, challenging the reliability of human perspective while also offering

opportunities for new understandings of human subjectivity and for new representations

of transformed vision. In Chapter Three I argue that Henry James's novels of this period,

such as Wings of the Dove (1902), The Ambassadors (1903), and The Golden Bowl 58 Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive, 21. Emphasis added. 59 Ibid., 24. 60 Tom Gunning rightly questions the present-day perception that early viewers of motion pictures and other emergent forms of cinema were unsophisticated or naïve, and he has drawn critical attention to the unlikely scenario that such viewers were unaccustomed to illusionist spectacle. Gunning notes that whether “suspicious” or “enthralled,” the viewers of these moving entertainments most certainly placed “the phenomenon within the context of visual illusions.” It is this context of visual illusions that facilitated much of the popular discourse surrounding Muybridge’s motion studies, specifically, and instantaneous photography, generally. Tom Gunning, "'Primitive' Cinema: A Frame-Up? Or, the Trick's on Us," in Early Cinema: Space-Frame-Narrative, ed. Thomas Elsaesser and Adam Barker (London: Brit. Film Inst., 1990), 95.

26

(1904), likewise present a challenge of perspective, and James's reliance upon the

omniscient viewpoint of an outsider begins to wane. Additionally, both Portrait of a Lady

(1881) and The Turn of the Screw (1898) dramatize and frame a crisis in human vision.

This crisis of vision and the waning of omniscience in James's later novels is

symptomatic of a larger cultural shift, one facilitated in part by the emergence of moving

images and of cinematic modes of narration which employed multi-perspectivism,

indirect narration, and silent development of plot—all typical traits of James's later style.

In Chapter Four, I turn to Joseph Conrad and the “task” he established as a writer

in his "Preface to The Nigger of the Narcissus" (1897)—the author's project of rendering

the visual world. According to Conrad his goal was "by the power of the written word to

make you hear, to make you feel—it is, before all, to make you see."61 While this

statement of purpose is probably the most frequently cited by scholars analyzing the

visual aspects of Conrad’s work, Conrad sustained his interest in and concern for

rendering vision throughout his career. Works such as Heart of Darkness (1898), The

Secret Agent (1907), and “The Secret Sharer” (1910) all display a concern for the

rendering of the visual and ethereal quality of shadows. While these references to

shadow may operate on a larger metaphorical level, I demonstrate in Chapter Four that

such renderings draw attention to the look of the scene. Conrad does not employ shadow

references abstractly via simile, rather he renders them directly via description, thereby

enhancing the visual quality of the narration.

61 Joseph Conrad and Cedric Thomas Watts, The Nigger of the 'Narcissus', Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics (New York: Penguin Books, 1989).

27

Throughout his writing life, Conrad continued to express an interest in the visual

aspects of the written word, evidenced by both his public writings and private letters. In

1920 he wrote a film scenario—a never-to-be-filmed adaptation of his short story

“Gaspar Ruiz,” re-titled The Strong Man for the cinema. During his American tour of

1923, he expanded upon his earlier references to the “visual aspect” of writing by

preparing a reading entitled “Author and Cinematograph.” Whether or not Conrad

actually delivered this particular speech is unknown.62 Nonetheless, that Conrad

included the topic for a potential reading sponsored by his American publisher,

Doubleday, carries significance in the context of his continued interest in the visual. In

the notes to this speech, Conrad draws several parallels between the author and moving

pictures, “confessing” near the speech’s close that “many of [his] ambitions have been

concentrated on the visuality and precision of images.”63 These statements do not

account for late-career moves for Conrad, however. When viewed in conjunction with

Conrad’s earlier writings, such later references to the visually moving aspects of

literature attest to his sustained interest in the visual.

Strangely, neither of these later references to moving images have attracted much

attention in Conrad studies. For instance, John Batchelor’s biography, while it does

mention Conrad’s trip to the States makes no reference to the speeches he prepared, nor

does it mention Conrad’s adaptation of “Gaspar Ruiz” for the screen, under the title

62 Arnold Schwab remarks: “How much of the ‘Notes’ Conrad actually delivered at Garden City and in what order, no one knows.” Arnold T. Schwab, "Conrad’s American Speeches and His Reading from Victory," Modern Philology 62, no. May (1965): 343. 63 Ibid.: 346.

28

Gaspar, The Strong Man.64 Nonetheless, despite Conrad’s apparent interest in the

possibilities offered by moving images, his film-play “remains the only creative work by

Conrad that has never been published.”65 I intend to explore this critical absence by

demonstrating that Conrad sustained and nurtured his interest in visuality throughout his

professional literary career and that this interest figured significantly in both his

development as an author as well as in the develop of literary modernism.

Rigorous scrutiny of the emergence of moving images and the debates they

spawned concerning realism and fantasy, the spectral and phantasmagoric, will uncover

aspects of the novel previously unnoticed, and such an analysis can help account for

many of the oddities and seemingly inexplicable features of the modern novel and of

literary modernism: namely, a concern for the nature and effect of time, a concern with

the constitution of reality, and the resulting crisis these concerns presented both for the

characters of these novels and for novelistic form. Henry James’s and Joseph Conrad’s

novels of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century begin to render scenes that might

appear on a screen or through a camera lens, but wouldn’t otherwise be accessible to

human vision. Thus, cinema and its pre-history of early moving images can further help

us to contextualize the crisis of form and vision articulated by Conrad and James and

faced by later modern novelists, for embedded within the discourse surrounding moving

64 John Batchelor, The Life of Joseph Conrad (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1994), 275-276.

Another prominent chronicler of Conrad’s life and works, Zdzislaw Najder, does refer to the “film-play” in his Joseph Conrad: A Chronicle, asserting that the film script “has not survived, and, no doubt luckily, was never filmed.” Najder, Joseph Conrad, a Chronicle. Gene Moore goes on to correct Najder’s view, noting that “both the original manuscript and a revised ‘first copy’ in typescript have survived in American university collections at Yale and Colgate.” Gene M. Moore, Conrad on Film (Cambridge ; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 31. 65 Gene M. Moore, Conrad on Film (Cambridge ; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997).

29

images lies a parallel discourse regarding the crisis of human vision and the nature of

reality.

CHAPTER 2

UNSEEN VIEWS: PHOTOGRAPHIC MOTION STUDIES

AND THE ART OF FICTION

The camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis

to unconscious impulses. – Walter Benjamin1

In 1916 when Henry James wrote to H. G. Wells “it is art that make life,” he was

not merely reaffirming his lifelong view of the art of fiction.2 He was also extending his

participation in a public debate regarding the form and function of realism in art which

has heretofore received little attention in literary history—the debate surrounding the

publication of Eadweard Muybridge’s motion photography.3 An aesthetic détente of

sorts, the Muybridge debate emerged in the late 1870s following the initial publication of

stop-motion photographs depicting the physiologically accurate positions of horses’

bodies, particularly the legs, while in motion (see Figure 2.1).4 While taken from life,

these photographs presented views unattested by human vision, and as a result,

Muybridge’s images challenged not only human vision but also the history of realist

1 Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction." 237. 2 Henry James, Henry James and H.G. Wells; a Record of Their Friendship, Their Debate on the Art of Fiction, and Their Quarrel (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1958), 267. James wrote these words at the culmination of his friendship with Wells, and they serve also as his final statement in their debate on literature and the novel. These words, though, also encapsulate James's critical view, his art of fiction—a theory which he developed and distilled over the majority of his writing life. 3 I will term this public discussion the “Muybridge debate,” since it sprang from the photographic motion studies of Eadweard Muybridge in the 1870s and 1880s. 4 The first publications occurred 1878 in Scientific American and in La Nature. Shortly thereafter, though, newswires carried the story throughout the U.S., Great Britain, and continental Europe. While these photographs were initially published in static format, Muybridge would re-assemble them into a continuous moving image in his lectures.

31

depiction in art. In doing so, Muybridge’s work spawned significant and far-reaching

public discussions regarding the role of realism in art as well as of the artist in creating

realist depictions. Polemical from the start, this debate was both public and long-lived,

ultimately playing a principal role in forcing a divide in realist depiction in art, from

which modernism emerged. Viewed within the context of this debate, then, James’s

views on the art of fiction—views which he distilled over the majority of his writing life

and which argue consistently and forcefully for the primacy of the artist’s vision in

creating art—demonstrate that he is not arguing merely for the purpose or place of

fiction. Rather, in the face of changes threatened to realist representation by technologies

of visual mediation, James is arguing for subjective realism in art and for the primary role

of the artist in creating it, and by doing so, he engages with the substance of the

Muybridge debate. Thus, James’s turn to the interior consciousness as the source of art

occurs not only as part of a discussion regarding fiction in the 1880s, but as a reaction to

the implications presented by Muybridge’s photographic motions studies.5 Hence, the

Muybridge debate plays a primary role in understanding James’s turn to the interior

consciousness since this debate raised a primary question concerning realism in art which

James seeks to answer in his critical writings: should art represent things as they are or as

they seem?

5 The critical discussions concerning the art of fiction in the 1880s include William Dean Howell’s article on Henry James, published in The Century, November 1882; Sir Walter Besant’s “The Art of Fiction,” delivered at the Royal Institution, April 25, 1884 and published in pamphlet form by Chatto and Windus the same year; Henry James’s “The Art of Fiction,” published in Longmans magazine, September 1884; and Robert Louis Stevenson’s “A Humble Remonstrance,” published in Longmans magazine, November 1884.

32

ames emphasized his position regarding the primacy of the artist’s

conscio argument, in

t

g.7

Figure 2.1: Eadweard Muybridge, "Sally Gardner Running at a 1:40 Gait"

J

usness, with varying degrees of force but always with consistency of

essays and letters that span over twenty years.6 That he returned to this point again and

again throughout his writing life suggests that the nature and source for art was a subject

of contention and that James saw the role of the artist, as well as the role of art as

changing. Critics have explored this territory in some detail, generally arguing tha

James’s criticism, his Prefaces in particular, are designed as an antidote to misreadin

6 Dating from his initial publication of “The Art of Fiction” in Longman’s Magazine in 1884 to his final letter to H.G. Wells in 1916, cited above. In addition to these two works, most of his Prefaces explore this

ye,

s, 1985); Vivienne Rundle,

topic, as do some of his essays, such as his essays on John S. Sargent and Ernest Meissonier, and his mentions of Burne-Jones in essays on the various London galleries and exhibitions. See Henry James, "London Pictures and London Places," in Henry James: Essays on Art and Drama, ed. Peter Rawlings(Aldershot, England: Scholar Press, 1882); ———, "The Art of the Novel: Critical Prefaces," ed R.P. Blackmur. (New York: Scribner's, 1934); ———, "John S. Sargent," in The Painter's Eye, ed. John L. Sweeney (Madison: University of Madison Press, 1989); ———, "London Pictures," in The Painter's Eed. John L. Sweeney (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989). 7 See for instance, Anne Throne Margolis, Henry James and the Problem of Audience: An International Act, Studies in Modern Literature No. 49 (Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Pres

33

Extending this position, I want to argue that James’s desire for control suggests a fear or

anxiety regarding receding aesthetic ground.8 It is my premise, then, that the core of

Henry James’s critical writings about the novel concerned, not coincidentally, the sam

topics that informed the substance of the Muybridge debate: realist aesthetics and

representation, human agency and vision.

If we look beyond the literary and pl

e

ace James’s writings about fiction within the

context

ation

s

given the topical, formal, and geographical intersections of his works with authors such

of this wider cultural debate concerning science, technology, art, and vision,

which occurred contemporaneously with James’s writings about fiction in the late

nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, we will see it as a source of James’s motiv

for asserting and re-asserting the primacy of authorial consciousness, as well as of his

sense of vulnerability concerning the role of the artist in modernity. Since Muybridge’

work has not been historicized outside of the history of photography and cinema, much

critical work remains to be done regarding the intersections of his motion studies with

literature.9 As such, Muybridge’s import to literature remains largely unexamined, but

"Defining Frames: The Prefaces of Henry James and Joseph Conrad," The Henry James Review 16, no. 1

r 3

d the Profession of Authorship (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986); Margolis, Henry mass

o

(1995). Peter Rawlings argues that James’s Prefaces are designed to insulate him from mass culture, PeteRawlings, "A Kodak Refraction of Henry James's 'the Real Thing'," Journal of American Studies 32, no. (1998). 8 Critics who deal with James’s palpable anxiety attribute it generally to problems he had with the marketplace and his concern about his legacy. See Michael Anesko, "Friction with the Market": Henry James anJames and the Problem of Audience: An International Act. Rawlings demonstrates that James saw culture as a contributing factor to his marketplace woes. See Rawlings, "A Kodak Refraction of Henry James's 'the Real Thing'." I contend that he was anxious about the role of the artist not only because his view of his own worth was not matched by the public sales of his work, but that this incommensurability was symptomatic of a larger cultural shift, in which the Muybridge debate played a significant role. 9 The Oxford Companion to American Literature provides and entry for Muybridge, but the connection tliterature remains undisclosed. See James D. and Phillip W. Leininger Hart, ed. The Oxford Companion toAmerican Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press,1995).

34

as Henry James suggests more than a coincidental connection. Additionally, this wider

historical lens helps to contextualize formal and thematic shifts that occur in James’s late

fiction and in the modern novel generally.

Muybridge’s work brought to the fore issues concerning artistic authority and

human creation of the art object, an anxiety

r

which is thematically rendered in Henry

James’ r

his

ith

paraphrase of Walter Pater.10

But thi

of

era was

s writings about fiction and, as I will demonstrate in the next chapter, in his late

novels. James established an oblique but important link with motion pictures through

writing on “The Art of Fiction” (1884), a link which is echoed in other writings and

further developed in his later prefaces. When we review James’s position on the art of

fiction in the context of the Muybridge debate, James’s statements become charged w

allusions to and implications for this larger discussion.

James writes in “The Art of Fiction” (1884) that the novelist is one on whom

nothing is lost, which is, as Jonathan Freedman notes, a

s phrasing of James’s also points to the discourse surrounding motion

photography. The argument behind this technological innovation was that photography

motion captured every instant—even instances beyond human sight. The cam

touted as being capable of capturing instants humans were unable to discern, and as such,

the camera—not the artist—became the one on whom nothing was lost. Thus, not only

does James argue against traditional aestheticism in “The Art of Fiction” and re-shape it

into high art, but he argues against scientific objectivity in art, a primary component of

10 Jonathan L. Freedman, Professions of Taste: Henry James, British Aestheticism and Commodity Culture (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990), xxv.

35

motion photography.11 Just as Freedman reads James as responding directly to the

aesthetic movement in England, I will argue that James, and by extension the aesthetic

movement and its progeny of modernism and avant-gardism, are all responding to a

larger cultural shift related to vision, perception and aesthetic representation spawned by

moving images and the discourse surrounding them.

e seeing and being, and by

providi e to

thetics

e thus

12

Freedman argues that the aesthete recurs as a problematic figure in James’s

fiction, one that raises questions between art and pow r,

ng a negative critique of the aesthete, Freedman contends that James was abl

reshape British aestheticism into modernism.13 By examining James’s aesthetic

reformation in the context of the Muybridge debate, though, I demonstrate that James

was not merely responding to British aestheticism, but rather to a threat to the aes

of realism. The discourse of the Muybridge debate contained at its core similar

epistemological and ontological concerns as those presented by Freedman’s assessment

of James’s aesthetes, and the cultural response surrounding the Muybridge debat

magnifies Freedman’s taxonomy of James’s negative critique of the aesthete, for within

this larger, extra-literary discourse definitions of art are chided, redefined, and re-

aestheticized into a “surpassing aestheticism” we call modernism.14

11 Freedman argues that James argues against traditional aestheticism and reshapes it into high art. Ibid.,

athan Crary assesses this shift and historicizes its import for art history. See Crary, Suspensions of

sthete becomes a consumer of culture, by s,

Henry James, British Aestheticism and Commodity Culture, xix-xxiii.

xxi. 12 JonPerception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture. 13 Ultimately, following Adorno, Freedman asserts that the ae“enact[ing] and represent[ing] the commodification of art.” Freedman, Professions of Taste: Henry JameBritish Aestheticism and Commodity Culture, xix. See also Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (Boston:Routledge & K. Paul, 1984), 339. 14 Freedman, Professions of Taste:

36

Eadweard Muybridge’s Motion Studies

Muybridge’s photographic motion studies of the late-1870s emerged as a product

of various combined tech utter mechanisms and

increas

to

nologies—the dry-plate process, rapid-sh

ed shutter speeds—and succeeded in the objective of freezing motion in time.15

While the compulsion to arrest movement and study its aspects was not new in the 1870s,

motion had never been isolated and divided into individual, discrete movements before

Muybridge conducted his studies. Ideas about how people and animals moved had been

approximated in paintings and other forms of visual art, but these were not mimetic

representations—they contained the suggestion of movement rather than a scientifically

accurate representation of movement. Until photographers like Muybridge managed

improvise photographic technology to capture images of moving objects on photographic

plates, mimetic representations of movement were impossible to obtain.16 By

uncovering, though, the actual sequences of quotidian motions like running, trotting, and

15 Muybridge’s earliest studies in 1872-73 recorded movement via the wet-plate process, which required on-the-spot developing of the images, because when dry, the plate was impenetrable by developing agents. See Beaumont Newhall, The History of Photography: From 1839 to the Present, Completely rev. and enl.

,

ular

of

4.

les s; Distributed by the MIT Press, 1992).

ed. (New York: Museum of Modern Art; Distributed by New York Graphic Society Books, 1982); ———Latent Image: The Discovery of Photography (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1983).

While Muybridge’s early studies of 1872-73 captured the movement of the trotting horse, due to the technological limitations of both the shutter speed and the wet-plate process, the silhouetted images were out-of-focus and lacked detail. In his Descriptive Zoopraxography, Muybridge noted that while these early photographs were “little better than silhouettes … the object of the experiment was accomplished.” SeeEadweard Muybridge, Descriptive Zoopraxography, or, the Science of Animal Locomotion Made Pop(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 1893), 5.

For more on “freezing motion in time,” see Prodger, Time Stands Still: Muybridge and the Instantaneous Photography Movement, 148-149. For more on Muybridge’s shutter speed, see Musser, The EmergenceCinema: The American Screen to 1907, 48; Beaumont Newhall, "The Case of the Elliptical Wheel and Other Photographic Distortions," Image 28(1985): 3-16 Etienne Jules Marey was another figure also working in this area; he termed his studies “chronophotography.” See Marta Braun and Etienne-Jules Marey, Picturing Time: The Work of Etienne-Jules Marey (1830-1904) (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); François Dagognet, Etienne-JuMarey: A Passion for the Trace (New York: Zone Book

37

jumping, Muybridge’s motion studies revealed aspects of life never before seen

view was startling, provoking contradictory responses in viewers. On the one hand,

seeing motion captured and recreated proved provocative and exciting, but on the other

hand, the excitement very often was quickly replaced by incredulity, derision, and in

some cases, fear or anger. Even though Muybridge touted his studies as presenting

objective views, this statement was not unproblematic, for what was presented as

scientifically true and accurate seemed artificial and false. For instance, in 1882 The

Eclectic Magazine of Foreign Literature described Muybridge’s photographs as

“exhibiting an animal in different positions, some of which appear quite absurd, so

contrary are they to all our preconceived ideas upon the subject.”

. And this

idge’s

fore.

in

h ses, for example, were frequently portrayed with all

s

ly

moved. Running horses move too quickly, however, for their gait to be analyzed

l

17 Thus, Muybr

work made dual claims of presenting truth while also revealing views never seen be

Phillip Prodger further notes that “photography became increasingly capable of depicting

things beyond the limits of natural perception. What is revealed was sometimes

unfamiliar and even unsettling.”18

People had long been accustomed to seeing motion portrayed using certa

conventions … Running or

four legs in the air at the same time, spread in an elongated leap known by it

French name, ventre à terre (belly to the ground) … Artists and equestrian

experts in particular had long suspected that this was not the way horses actual

by the naked eye. So, artists used the ventre à terre position as a kind of symbo

17 "Photograph of the Trotting Horse," The Eclectic Magazine of Foreign Literature 36, no. 2 (1882): 284. 18 Prodger, Time Stands Still: Muybridge and the Instantaneous Photography Movement, 28.

38

to communicate the idea of a running horse, rather than trying to show how

horse actually runs. In other words, they used a semiotic approach rather than a

mimetic one.

the

When t

form of

exact re

From the first 1878 publications, Muybridge’s work caused a sensation, and when

de

establis

ntific

19

he public, accustomed to the semiotic approach, met Muybridge's mimetic one—a

mimesis which claimed its images were not a mere reflection of reality but an

plication of it—this public, as the saying goes, couldn't believe its eyes.20

he undertook his lecture tour, his presentation style added to the audience’s mystification

and shock at his results. Muybridge’s presentations began in the manner of a lantern sli

show, a presentation mode with which audiences were familiar.21 By utilizing an

hed format and pairing it with a new form of representation of motion, Muybridge

was able to convince audiences of the accuracy of his depictions. He would begin by

projecting, through his zoopraxiscope, individual stills of horses in motion—stills which

looked awkward and ridiculous to audiences accustomed to the flying gallop. Scie

American described initial effect of Muybridge’s still slides as follows:

19 Ibid. While the phrase ventre à terre literally translates as “belly to the ground,” the phrase also came to have a verbal connotation meaning to move at a very quick pace, as if at a gallop. 20 The phrase "couldn't believe [one's] eyes" and its variants ("won't believe your eyes") underscores the disbelief associated with this particular mechanized form of seeing, but ironically, the phrase's construction locates the source of the disbelief in the human body—the eyes. 21 Lantern slides projections had been common since the seventeenth century and were prevalent as a form of nineteenth-century entertainment. See Mannoni and Crangle, The Great Art of Light and Shadow: Archaeology of the Cinema; Musser, The Emergence of Cinema: The American Screen to 1907; ———, "Toward a History of Screen Practice." For more on the presentation style in the late-nineteenth century, see Simon Popple, Vanessa Toulmin, and University of Sheffield., Visual Delights: Essays on the Popular and Projected Image in the 19th Century (Trowbridge, Wiltshire, England: Flicks Books, 2000).

39

The most careless observer of these figures will not fail to notice that the

conventional figure of a trotting horse in motion does not appear in any of them,

dared

After p

success still images had been moments

d

spaper

udience, was the representation, by aid of the

ir

apparently,

nor anything like it. Before these pictures were taken no artist would have

to draw a horse as a horse really is when in motion, even if it had been possible

for the unaided eye to detect his real attitude.22

resenting each slide individually, Muybridge would display the images in rapid

ion, creating movement—or its illusion—where

before: “The figure of a man was made to walk, run, jump a hurdle, and turn a

somersault.”23 As attested in newspapers of the day, this technique startled and delighte

audiences, ultimately persuading them of the accuracy of the images.24 By new

accounts, audiences marveled not only at seeing animals depicted in positions counter to

accepted representational norms, but they showed particular astonishment when these

still images began to move.

What attracted the most attention—in fact, aroused a pronounced flutter of

enthusiasm from the a

zoogyroscope, of horses in motion. While the previous views had shown the

positions at different stages of motion, these placed upon the screen,

the living, moving horse. Nothing was wanting but the clatter of hoofs upon the

22 "A Horse's Motion Scientifically Determined," Scientific American, Oct. 19, 1878. 23 "Realities of Animal Motion," New York Times, Nov. 18 1882, 2. 24 As reported by the New York Times that audiences were “very enthusiastic, and the wonderful effects produced by the zoopraxiscope were repeatedly applauded.” Ibid.

40

turf and an occasional breath of steam from the nostrils, [to] make the spectator

believe that he had before him genuine flesh-and-blood steeds.25

But despite the excitement surrounding Muybridge’s motion studies (and contradicting

some newspaper reports that audiences were convinced of the accuracy of the

depictions), these studies were also decried by many in the press as false and ridiculed as

“ludicrous” and absurd.”26 All the while, though, these studies—despite their presumed

absurdity and falsity—captivated the public, for Muybridge’s lectures were both well-

attended and consistently covered by the press.

Due to its surprising nature, Muybridge’s work sustained continued interest, and

significantly, news reports about his motion studies and lectures remained steadily in the

news for nearly three decades after the initial publication of Occident trotting appeared in

the Alta California in 1873.27 In fact, until 1902 the studies of humans and animals in

motion received consistent reportage in American and European publications ranging

from standard newspapers such as The Pall Mall Gazette and the New York Times to

mainstream literary magazines such as The Century and Harper’s to more specialized

serials such as Medical News and The Critic as well as “little” magazines such as The

25 "The Zoogyroscope." 26 Some of the more skeptical responses to Muybridge’s studies referred to the positions of the animals photographed as “ludicrous” or “absurd” (Waring, Century July 1882). Muybridge himself noted that many of his 1878 photographs were “criticized by the journals of the day”; see Muybridge, Descriptive Zoopraxography, or, the Science of Animal Locomotion Made Popular, 6. See also "Art and Artists: Animals in Motion."; "Photograph of the Trotting Horse." 27 See Hendricks, Eadweard Muybridge: The Father of the Motion Picture, 47.

In mid-June of 1878, Muybridge held public press sessions in California where he presented his motion studies sequences. Shortly thereafter, local presses began to publish accounts of Muybridge’s studies, and these stories were transmitted via the news wires back East and in Europe, after which Muybridge embarked on a tour of Europe and America lecturing on the horse in motion. And it was these lectures and the news reports of them that gave Muybridge’s motion studies their wide acclaim.

41

Dial. 28 Moreover, Muybridge’s work was most often associated with elite literary and

artistic circles because he presented his work as benefitting aesthetic representation. 29

Instantaneous Vision and Henry James’s Modern Realism

In 1872, when Stanford sought out Muybridge for the latter's reputed skill in

photographing movement, he did so because Muybridge was known to be an

accomplished practitioner of a style of photography that came to be called

“instantaneous.”30 An ad hoc movement of sorts, “instantaneous photography” became a

loose and varied term, applied generally to photographic subjects and methods that

depicted “real” life—life as it is lived. Phillip Prodger notes that as a phrase

instantaneous photography “became common in nineteenth-century writings, though

there was surprisingly little discussion regarding precisely what it meant or how it should

be applied.”31 In 1840, the first year the term “instantaneous” was used in relation to a

photograph, the descriptor signified any photograph made with a “twelve to fifteen

minute exposure,” but more generally, “in the nineteenth century the term instantaneous

could be applied to a photograph of any subject so long as it contained an element of

28 "Photographing a Race-Horse," New York Times, June 23 1878; "The Zoogyroscope."; "Art Notes," The Critic: A Weekly Review of Literature and the Arts, April 2 1882; "Literary Notes," The Critic 38(1882); "Occassional Notes," The Pall Mall Gazette, March 15, 1882; "The Analysis and Synthesis of Animal Motion," Medical News, Feb. 24 1883; "Photography and American Art," The Century Magazine 34, no. 3 (1887); "Topics in Leading Periodicals, July 1887," The Dial VIII, no. 87 (1887). 29 Three decades is a conservative estimate: the first news report was in 1873, and the Kingston Scrapbook at the Kingston Museum has many clippings post-dating Muybridge's 1904 death. Some of Muybridge’s first presentations were at the California Art Rooms and the San Francisco Art Association. See "The Zoogyroscope." For more on Muybridge’s American presentations, see Musser, The Emergence of Cinema: The American Screen to 1907, 50. 30 William Henry Fox Talbot was the first to use the word "instant" in conjunction with photographic method in the March, 1839, edition of the London and Edinburgh Philosophical Magazine and Journal of Science; see Prodger, Time Stands Still: Muybridge and the Instantaneous Photography Movement. 34. 31 Ibid. 26.

42

movement.”32 Instantaneous also came to signal the “authenticity” of a photograph or

“trustworthiness” of a photographer, for it implied “spontaneous execution, capturing

things as they actually looked at a particular moment in time.”33

In his essay about Alphonse Daudet which first appeared in The Century

magazine in 1883, James draws upon the term “instantaneous” to describe Daudet’s style.

In doing so, James links modern modes of representation with their direct, quick

representation of life—their instantaneity—suggesting James’s familiarity with the term,

its photographic connotation, and its implications for aesthetic form: “In composition

Daudet proceeds by quick, instantaneous vision, but the happiest divination, by catching

the idea as it suddenly springs up before him with a whirr of wings.” Through

instantaneous vision, Daudet captures the motion of life—“What he mainly sees is the

great surface of life and the parts that lie near the surface”—and so makes his work

“peculiarly modern.”34 This reference to instantaneous vision is rapid but significant,

and James swiftly qualifies his description of Daudet, separating him from what James

characterizes as the hard dryness of the other French realists—Zola, Flaubert,

Goncourt.35 The significance of James’s deployment of terminology associated with

photographic vision is twofold. First, it suggests not only James’s familiarity with

32 Jean-Baptiste Dumas, "Observations Sur Le Procede De M. Daguerre," in Rapport Sur Le Daguerrotype, ed. Macedoine Meloni (Paris: Normant, 1840).; cited in Prodger, Time Stands Still: Muybridge and the Instantaneous Photography Movement, 35, 37. Prodger, 42-43, also notes that many nineteenth-century photographic studios advertised “that they made portraits by the ‘instantaneous process’ … suggest[ing] that the photographer produced naturalistic pictures … [and] that the procedure of being photographed would be relatively effortless.” This continued until the “launch of the Kodak camera in 1888, which rendered the term largely obsolete.” 33 Prodger, Time Stands Still: Muybridge and the Instantaneous Photography Movement, 43. 34 Henry James, Partial Portraits (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1970). 35 Ibid.

43

photographic terminology, and further, that he is thinking of its formal implications, and

applications, for literature. Second, it allows James to develop a definition of modern

realism, which he will furnish more fully a year later in “The Art of Fiction.”

For James, what distinguishes Daudet’s style from the hardness (James repeats the

adjective) of “consistent realism” is Daudet’s poetic touch, his “mixture of a sense of the

real with a sense of the beautiful.”36 Hence, “consistent” realism misses some artistry for

all its unrelenting attention to surface detail. Daudet’s artistry lies in his ability to link

the sensory world with the pictorial, the representational—a capacity which becomes a

hallmark of both James’s own late style and of his critical view of artistic vision as he

defines it in “The Art of Fiction.”37 By defining Daudet’s style, James also offers a

definition of modern literature, which I quote at length:

Alphonse Daudet is, in truth, very modern; he has all the newly developed, newly

invented perceptions. Nothing speaks so much to his imagination as the latest and

most composite things, the refinements of current civilisation, the most delicate

shades of the actual. It is scarcely too much to say that (especially in the Parisian

race), modern manners, modern nerves, modern wealth, and modern

improvements, have engendered a new sense, a sense not easily named nor

classified, but recognisable in all the more characteristic productions of

contemporary art. It is partly physical, partly moral, and the shortest way to

describe it is to say that it is a more analytic consideration of appearances. It is

36 Ibid. 37 James links vision and images with experience in “The Art of Fiction,” and the next chapter explores the implications of this linkage. See ———, The Art of Fiction, and Other Essays (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1948), 11.

44

known by its tendency to resolve its discoveries into pictorial form. It sees the

connection between feelings and external conditions, and it expresses such

relations as they have not been expressed hitherto. It deserves to win victories,

because it has opened its eyes well to the fact that the magic of the arts of

representation lies in their appeal to the associations awakened by things. It traces

these associations into the most unlighted corners of our being, into the most

devious paths of experience. The appearance of things is constantly more

complicated as the world grows older, and it needs a more and more patient art, a

closer notation, to divide it into its parts. Of this art Alphonse Daudet has a

wonderfully large allowance, and that is why I say he is particularly modern.38

This passage is ripe with implicit reference to the representational possibilities and

problems presented by Muybridge’s motion studies, and it goes a long way toward

describing James’s image for literary modernism in relation to such visual advances,

especially when paired with James’s description of Daudet’s instantaneous vision. James

signals here a perceptual change and conveys excitement about its possibilities for linking

vision with experience, for considering the sensorial aspects and implications of

“things.”39 Such phrases as “the newly developed, newly invented perceptions” and “the

most delicate shades of the actual” suggest not only that James is aware of the

considerations for aesthetic representation presented by instantaneous motion studies, but

also that he sees such perceptual changes as decidedly modern: “it is a more analytic

consideration of appearances. It is known by its tendency to resolve its discoveries into

38 James, Partial Portraits. Emphasis added. 39 For a concise version of thing theory in James’s work, see Bill Brown, "A Thing About Things: The Art of Decoration in the Work of Henry James," The Henry James Review 23, no. 3 (2002).

45

pictorial form.” Following James’s definition, then, modern realist representation

necessitates a heightened visual perception and an ability to render such fleeting visuality

in terms of language. Enacting such a decidedly visual style would involve a significant

formal shift from rendering action through plot and character development to signaling

events and their implicit action by attending to the look of a scene or scenario. But more

importantly, such a formal shift signals a parallel change in the practice and

understanding of realism, especially given that James links Daudet’s “newly invented

perceptions” with a more modern, more realistic style. As we will see, James further

develops his critical understanding of the link between vision and experience in the

practice of realism, an understanding which is as much informed by new fictional

practices as it is by new modes of seeing. Just as the term instantaneous meant freezing

time in photography, it also came to have a similar utility in describing literature.

Henry James and the Muybridge Debate

Henry James wrote “The Art of Fiction” in response to a lecture and its

subsequent publication given by Sir Walter Besant at the Royal Institution in March

1884. Fiction, Besant argued, is a “sister art” to painting, sculpture, music, and poetry—

fine arts which all have rules of perspective, rhythm, and meter that are teachable.

Following this parallel, laws of fiction exist as well and must be “laid down and taught

with as much precision and exactness as the laws of harmony, perspective, and

proportion.”40 Besant’s goal, then, is to elevate fiction’s status as a fine art, and in doing

so, he takes care to separate it from the “mere mechanical arts” of engineering and optics.

This rhetorical move by Besant is often overlooked in critical discourse. But it offers

40 Walter Besant, The Art of Fiction, New ed. (London: Chatto & Windus, 1902), 6.

46

significance for both his argument as well as for Henry James’s response, since

mechanical arts of the late-nineteenth century provided an area of contention and debate

regarding realist aesthetics.

Not inconsequentially, one of the foremost advocates for the integration of the

fine art of painting and the mechanical art of photography—Eadweard Muybridge—

presented his work at the Royal Institution two years prior to Besant’s lecture, one of a

series of Muybridge’s presentations which sparked widespread debate regarding the

nature of art and the function of the artist. Since Muybridge presented his work as

benefitting art and artists, the press coverage his work received and the patronage his

presentations attracted came largely from the fields of art and literature. Many patrons of

Muybridge’s lectures were also acquaintances of James, narrowing the degree of

separation between the two.41 Muybridge lectured in Great Britain twice: first, in 1882,

and later, in 1889. During both lecture tours, Muybridge was hosted by Sir Frederick

Leighton at the Royal Academy, the Royal Institution, and by Sir Laurence Alma-

Tadema at his studio in St. John’s Wood—persons and places known to James through

his connections to the art world in London.42 Although James was in the U.S. during a

41 For instance, James knew Sir Laurence Alma-Tadema and Sir Frederick Leighton, both of whom hosted lectures for Muybridge; James McNeill Whistler and John Singer Sargent both subscribed to Muybridge’s publications of Animal Locomotion (1893). Additionally, James was friends with Sir Edward Burne-Jones, whose The Golden Stairs (1880) Tom Gunning reads as responding to Muybridge’s motion photography. See Gunning, "Never Seen This Picture before; Muybridge in Multiplicity," 229-231. 42 James knew both Leighton and Alma-Tadema—the former from artists’ studios and the Royal Academy and the latter from the Reform Club. See Leon Edel, Henry James: The Conquest of London, 1870-1883 (London: Hart-Davis, 1962), 335, 337; ———, Henry James: The Middle Years, 1882-1894 (London: Hart-Davis, 1963), 149. James writes in his letters of an outing with Leighton in January of 1888. See Henry James, Letters, 1883-1895, ed. Leon Edel, 4 vols., vol. III (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1980), 211.

Stephen Herbert cites a letter dated February 11, 1889 from George du Maurier to Alma-Tadema regarding Tadema’s event for Muybridge on February 9, 1889. Du Maurier sent his regrets for not attending due to

47

portion of Muybridge’s 1882 lecture series in London, he did return to London while

Muybridge was still lecturing and receiving ample press coverage there, making James

privy to the press exposure of Muybridge’s lectures.43 During Muybridge’s second tour

of Great Britain in 1889, James was in London, and Muybridge’s work received steady

press coverage again, owing in part to Muybridge’s recent publication of new motion

studies he had undertaken at the University of Pennsylvania starting in 1883.44 As such,

James’s work from the 1880s onward existed within and emerged from the same

discursive cultural space as Muybridge’s motion studies and their attendant controversy

regarding realism in art. What is more, James’s work of this later period engages the

subject of realism in art which was central to the Muybridge debate.

Muybridge’s lecture at the Royal Institution on March 13, 1882 inaugurated his

lecture series in Great Britain, and he reprised it on the next night at the Royal Academy

of Arts. Both of these lectures were well-attended and both were subsequently publicized

illness. See entries for February 7-11, 1889 in Stephen Herbert, "The Compleat Eadweard Muybridge " http://www.stephenherbert.co.uk/muybCOMPLEAT.htm. I have not been able to confirm or discount the existence of this letter, nor have I been able to determine whether James was invited to this lecture. The publication of James’s complete letters may tell us more. James, DuMaurier, and Alma-Tadema were all members of the Reform Club, and Edel documents their dinners at the Reform Club and general interactions in Edel, Henry James: The Middle Years, 1882-1894, 149; Leon Edel, Henry James: The Treacherous Years, 1895-1901 (London: Hart-Davis, 1969), 135. 43 Muybridge’s work remained prominently in the news during his tour of Great Britain which lasted until the fall of 1882 and was still featured in publications familiar to James following his return in late May. From James’s letters and from Edel’s biography, we know that James returned to London at the end of May, 1882. As he wrote to Grace Norton, he planned to keep out of the “season.” See letter dated May 25, 1882 in Henry James, Letters, 1875-1883, ed. Leon Edel, 4 vols., vol. II (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1975), 382. See also Edel, Henry James: The Middle Years, 1882-1894. 44 Muybridge lectured in Great Britain from February through mid-summer 1889. For more on Muybridge’s work at the University of Pennsylvania, see Andersen, "Eadweard Muybridge, Zoopraxographer"; Eadweard Muybridge, Animal Locomotion: An Electro-Photographic Investigation of Consecutive Phases of Animal Movements, 11 vols. (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, 1887); Prodger, Time Stands Still: Muybridge and the Instantaneous Photography Movement.

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in papers known to James.45 Thus begins the intersection of Muybridge’s work with

numerous persons, publications, and venues known to, read by or published in, and

frequented by Henry James, leaving little doubt that James had occasion to become

familiar with Muybridge’s work.46

45 For instance, The British Journal of Photography reported the numerous members of the Royal Family were present at Muybridge’s lecture at the Royal Institution (the “Prince and Princess of Wales, the Princesses Louise, Victoria, and Maud, the Duke of Edinburgh and suite”), along with “leaders of the scientific and literary world” (“Professors Tyndall, Huxley, Owen, and Gladstone, the Poet Laureate [Tennyson], and many others”). The article went on to report that the lecture was repeated at the Royal Academy the following evening, “in the presence of Sir Frederick Leighton and most of the Academicians and Associates and a large number of guests, the exhibition was repeated, to the evident satisfaction of all, as the hearty applause which greeted most of the pictures testified.” "Muybridge's Photographs of Animals in Motion," The British Journal of Photography (March 17, 1882): 151. See also Mozley, Eadweard Muybridge: The Stanford Years, 1872-1882, 35 n.27; Eadweard Muybridge, in The Kingston Scrapbook (Kingston-upon-Thames: Kingston Museum), 75; ———, "Eadweard Muybridge, Esq. -- Attitudes of Animals in Motion," in Transactions of the Royal Institution of Great Britain (London: 1882).

The week prior to the Royal Institution lecture, Muybridge gave a preparatory exhibition at the Royal Institution, attended by Sir Frederick Leighton (the president of the Royal Academy) which secured his invitation to speak at the Royal Academy. That same week, he spent an evening at the house of Sir Laurence Alma-Tadema with other members of the Royal Academy to discuss the upcoming lecture. A letter from Muybridge dated 7 March 1882 to J.D.B Stillman references the lecture at Alma-Tadema’s studio, cited in Mozley, Eadweard Muybridge: The Stanford Years, 1872-1882, 125. James knew Alma-Tadema and Leighton. In August of 1882, he wrote a critique of the Royal Academy of Arts in the Atlantic (August 1882). See James, "London Pictures and London Places." James was not in England during these March lectures; he returned from America in late-May 1882. See Edel, Henry James: The Middle Years, 1882-1894, 43-44.

For publications offering coverage of Muybridge’s work which were familiar to James, see: "Occassional Notes."; "Photograph of the Trotting Horse."; George Sala, "The Attitudes of Animals in Motion," Illustrated London News, March 18, 1882. 46 For instance, The Pall Mall Gazette covered Muybridge’s London presentations in both 1882 and 1889, and ran a transcript of a public interview with him in March 1889 entitled “The Menagerie of Muybridge the Magician.” James also published work in The Pall Mall Gazette and referred to it in essays and letters, suggesting his readership of this paper. (See James, The Art of Fiction, and Other Essays, 18.) The Illustrated London News featured Muybridge on its cover in May 1889, which was the same publication for James’s The Other House in 1896. And The Century—the venue for the serialization of James’s The Bostonians (1885-86) and many other stories and articles—published two feature articles on Muybridge and several other shorter pieces between 1882 and 1887. Additionally, Muybridge’s work was parodied in Punch, the beloved magazine of James’s boyhood. See Henry James, Autobiography (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1913); ———, "George Du Maurier (1883)," in Partial Portraits, ed. Leon Edel (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1970). James was also friends with artists—most

49

While Muybridge presented his work as deriving from scientific enquiry, its main

application was directed toward art and artists, and his presentation style sparked both

interest and controversy, for he would compare his studies with historical representations

of animals in motion, revealing the history of artistic depiction to be misguided.47

Reporting in the Illustrated London News on Muybridge’s 1882 lectures at the Royal

Institution and Academy, George Sala—an acquaintance of Henry James—described the

following:48

He projected upon the screen, with the aid of the electric light, a large number of

transparent photographs, illustrating the conventional attitudes in which the artists

of various ages, from the earliest Egyptian to those of modern times, have

represented animals to assume while executing certain movements; and compared

them with the results obtained with twenty-four photographic cameras placed a

short distance apart upon a bench laid parallel with a track over which the animal notably, John Singer Sargent—who subscribed to Muybridge’s later multi-volume publication of Animal Locomotion (1893).

For references to, see: "Occassional Notes."; "Art Notes," The Pall Mall Gazette, 13 March 1889; "How Animals Walk and Run," The Pall Mall Gazette, 22 March 1889; "Last Night at the Royal Society," The Pall Mall Gazette, 9 May 1889; "The Menagerie of Muybridge the Magician," The Pall Mall Gazette, 23 March 1889; "Muybridge's Photographs of Animals in Motion," Illustrated London News, 25 May 1889; "The Photographic Convention of 1889," The Pall Mall Gazette, 21 August 1889.

A sample of the work James published in The Century during the 1880s includes: “Venice” (November 1882); “The Point of View” (December 1882); “Du Maurier and London Society” (May 1883); “Anthony Trollope” (July 1883); The Bostonians (1885-86); “Robert Louis Stevenson” (April 1888). James was also childhood friends with the wife (Helena DeKay) of The Century’s editor, Richard Watson Gilder. More than one article on Muybridge appeared in The Century during this decade. See also Talcott Williams, "Animal Locomotion in the Muybridge Photographs," The Century Magazine 34, no. 3 (1887); "Photography and American Art."; George Snell, "On the Galloping Horse in Art," The Century Magazine 26, no. 2 (1883). 47 This is not to say that Muybridge’s work did not receive coverage in scientific journals—it did—but the majority of the news coverage was slanted toward the implications of his work for art and artists. 48 A letter dated 10 January 1881 from Henry James to his mother describes being at one of the Rosebury houses with Sala. See James, Letters, 1875-1883, 330.

50

was caused to move, thus enabling him to obtain several pictures while it was

making a single stride. […] With another instrument, called the zoopraxiscope,

many of these photographs were exhibited apparently executing in sight of the

audience movements as plainly as one sees an animal moving in nature […] the

ugly animals suddenly became mobile and beautiful, and walked, cantered,

ambled, galloped, and leaped over hurdles in the field of vision in a perfectly

natural manner.49

Muybridge lectured on topics which interested James—art and aesthetics—in locations

familiar to James, which were then reported in the news by persons known to James—a

combination of circumstances which both demonstrates the scope and influence

Muybridge’s studies acquired and further establishes James’s proximity to their range

and content.

Due to the continued news coverage, Muybridge’s motion studies attained their

own shorthand in the popular imagination, giving his work an odd sort of currency and

establishing their pervasiveness within the discursive context shared with James and

other writers. Demonstrating the general population’s common awareness of

Muybridge’s work, magazines such as Punch, Harper's Bazaar, and The Century ran

comics which poked fun at the perceived ridiculousness of the posture Muybridge’s

motion studies displayed (see figures 2.2, 2.3, and 2.4). These cartoons suggest that

viewers had a working understanding of the general implications and suggestions of

49 Sala, "The Attitudes of Animals in Motion." Sala’s characterization of the still images of animals as “ugly” was not uncommon. News reports often referred to the positions of Muybridge’s animals as “impossible,” “awkward,” and “grotesque” due to their seeming “unnatural” postures in the still photographs. Once the images began to move, though, audiences recognized the movements as genuine.

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Muybridge’s work, since to appreciate them viewers needed to understand the basic

context and implications of the Muybridge debate.

Figure 2.2: Comic: “New Zoöpraxiscopic Views of an Eminent Actor in Action,”

Punch, April 1, 1882

Figure 2. 3: Comic: “Country Fair [After Muybridge],” Century Illustrated Magazine, June 1883

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Figure 2.4: Comic: “Full Cry,” Harper's Bazaar, Sept. 22, 1883

The cartoon from Punch (Figure 2.2) is perhaps the most readily accessible today, for it

shows in exaggerated fashion the perceived awkwardness of Muybridge’s still images of

movement and it provides some insight into the reception his studies met: people found

Muybridge’s still images of motion to depict grotesque, awkward, and exaggerated poses

and ultimately doubted their legitimacy.50 When the images began to move fluidly in

recognizable patterns, though, the awkwardness of the still was shown to be extant in the

movement, as described by Sala above.

50 Some of the humor of the other images has no doubt been lost, especially since their humor relied predominately upon readers of the day interpreting the depicted poses as awkward. Figure 2.4 from Harper’s Bazaar depicts a hunting scene—“Full Cry”—described in the byline as “a practical illustration of the scene according to Mr. Muybridge’s principles.” While today the depiction of the horses at full gallop with their legs tucked underneath them seems quite normal, to readers of the time such a depiction would have presented as illogical and ungainly, attesting to both the strong reaction against Muybridge’s images as well as to the ultimate effect Muybridge’s work has had in altering visual representation of movement.

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Furthermore, literary reviews alluded to Muybridge’s work in order to signal one

of two conflicting ideas: first, that the reviewed work was commendable for its cutting-

edge realism, as was the case for Harold Frederick’s 1896 review of Stephen Crane’s The

Red Badge of Courage; or, second, that the work was overwrought and not representative

of any perceptible reality, as was the case in an 1895 review of Oscar Wilde’s An Ideal

Husband.51 Nonetheless, Muybridge’s studies were viewed simultaneously as

compelling and ridiculous. Thus, while Muybridge presented his studies as being the

most accurate, most realistic depictions of humans and animals in motion, they seemed to

be patently and assuredly false—furthering the divide between what something was and

what it seemed to be. Moreover, the variety of publication types (cartoons, theater

reviews, by-lines, and feature articles) and number of articles and sources devoted to

Muybridge’s work attests to its currency in the late nineteenth century, further

establishing the sway these studies had in their cultural context. 52 Additionally, since

Muybridge’s work engaged with realist aesthetics, challenged realist terms, and presented

51 Harold Frederic, "Review of the Red Badge of Courage," New York Times, January 26, 1896, 5; "Ideality at the Lyceum," New York Times, March 13, 1895. Comparing Crane to Muybridge, Frederic wrote “at last, along comes a Muybridge, with his instantaneous camera, and shows that the real motion is entirely different. It is this effect of a photographic revelation which startles and fascinates one in The Red Badge of Courage. The product is breathlessly interesting, but still more so is the suggestion behind it that a novel force has been disclosed.” In contrast, Wilde’s reviewer juxtaposed that play’s witty banter and successful artifice to Muybridge’s motion studies, noting that the “commonplace person in the audience” may well need shorthand notes to recall or interpret the play's witticisms, but “shorthand notes of an Oscar Wilde play would be about as entertaining and as useful, as a sample of its quality, as a Muybridge photograph of a racing horse in motion.”

Edel establishes in The Master James’s neighborly, but detached, relations with both Crane and Frederic. See Edel, Henry James, the Master: 1901-1916, 57-58. 52 Prodger notes that the components, achievements, and problems related to instantaneous photography were widely discussed in publications of the day. See Prodger, Time Stands Still: Muybridge and the Instantaneous Photography Movement, 25. Muybridge’s work was no exception, and it possibly received increased coverage due to his self-promotion: in addition to lectures, he also wrote press releases about his methods. See Haas, Muybridge: Man in Motion.

54

irrevocable consequences for realist depiction in art, James’s engagement with debates

regarding realism, such as those offered in “The Art of Fiction,” suggest his engagement

with the terms of the Muybridge debate, if only at a distance.

Controversy regarding Muybridge’s work, though, arose not from the perceived

ridiculousness of the depicted poses, but from its stated aims of aiding artists and

aesthetic depiction. In 1883, the Medical News reported that Muybridge’s studies struck

a “rude blow” at “all the artistic representations of motion,” noting that the “postures

seem extraordinary, often impossible in the view of our conventional notions, and not

seldom even ridiculous. But the greater our familiarity with them and the longer we study

them the truer do they seem.”53 Michael North has termed this new form of vision

“camera vision,” arguing that even though representation did not immediately, or

ultimately, align itself fully with the machinic views offered by the camera this form of

seeing and representation offered multiple challenges to human vision and

conventionalized methods of representation.54 North and Doane both demonstrate that

the challenges presented to human vision manifested in various forms of self

consciousness and anxiety about the parameters and limits of unaided human vision.55

Ultimately though, this combination of self-consciousness and knowledge of faulty

human vision did not lead to blind parroting of machinic or “camera” vision. Rather, it

lead to a perceptual shift in both visual and narrative representation—one concerned

53 "The Analysis and Synthesis of Animal Motion." 54 North, Camera Works: Photography and the Twentieth-Century Word, 30. 55 Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive; North, Camera Works: Photography and the Twentieth-Century Word, 53. North focuses upon self-consciousness, while Doane analyzes anxiety.

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more with play than with fact, and with the possibilities provided by multiple angles of

vision than with portraying a representative singular truth.

Muybridge’s slide presentation typically involved a historical display of the

artistic depiction of the horse in motion, beginning with Assyrian and Egyptian paintings

and engravings and moving sequentially to contemporaneous depictions by renowned

painters of horses such as Rosa Bonheur and Ernest Meissonier, a strategy Muybridge

employed to demonstrate the “inaccuracy” of artistic depiction of motion:

Photographs of famous sculptures and paintings were thrown upon the screen, and

the impossible attitudes represented were contrasted with views of live horses

under the conditions which the artists intended to represent. When describing the

walking motion of a horse, Egyptian, Assyrian, and Roman pictures were shown

to demonstrate that an erroneous idea of this motion prevailed in the earliest

attempts at art.56

While the projection of animals in motion generated excitement and fascination, the

implications of these projections, both for the capacity and reliability of human

perception and for current and past artistic representations, faced disparagement, derision,

and disagreement. In summarizing an article from The Century, the New York Times

wrote that “the matter seems to resolve itself . . . into a question whether the artist should

represent things as they are or as they seem.”57

56 "Romance and Reality of Animal Motion," Scientific American XLVII, no. 23 (1882): 352. 57 "Some of the July Magazines, the Century," The New York Times, June 26 1882. The article referenced from The Century is: George E. Waring Jr., "The Horse in Motion," The Century Magazine 24, no. 3 (1882).

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This article from The Century provides one of the more succinct assessments of

the terms of the debate, and germane for my purposes here, The Century provided a

publication site very familiar to Henry James, for it was also a venue for his writing

throughout the 1880s.58 Even more compelling and furthering the connection to James,

though, is the fact that this article was written by one of James’s acquaintances and

correspondents: Colonel George Waring, Jr.59 Since Muybridge’s work was well-known

and oft-cited and given the numerous intersections and overlap of Muybridge’s work with

persons, places, and publications equally well-known to James strongly suggests James’s

familiarity with it. And, as we will see, James’s criticism engages both the subject matter

and terminology associated with the Muybridge debate.

Freedman writes that James’s response to British aestheticism (“re-aestheticizing”

the British aesthete into a producer and mediator of high-art) succeeded in creating a

“zone of high culture.”60 Viewing James’s work and aesthetics in light of the discourse

surrounding Muybridge’s motion studies further contextualizes James’s work, his role as

a progenitor of high modernism, and the cultural landscape from which modernism

emerged. Such an assessment demonstrates that while modernism concerned itself with

high-art forms—Freedman’s high-cultural “zone”—as well as with subjective vision, it

was equally informed by a parallel argument for scientific objectivity in art spawned by

58 See note 46 above. 59 The Biographical Register of Henry James’s Correspondents lists Waring as one of James’s correspondents and notes that they met in Newport in 1871. See Stephen H. and Susan E. Gunter Jobe, "A Calendar of the Letters of Henry James and a Biographical Register of Henry James's Correspondents," University of Nebraska Press, http://jamescalendar.unl.edu/cal-reg.htm. 60 Freedman, Professions of Taste: Henry James, British Aestheticism and Commodity Culture.

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technological developments in photography. Thus, the high-art zone of modernism

emerged in part as a response to scientific encroachments into realist aesthetics.

Realist Vision and the Art of Fiction

Prior to its publication in The Century in July 1882, Waring’s article was heralded

in numerous newspapers and magazines, and when published, it ostensibly served as a

review of J.D.B. Stillman’s book The Horse in Motion (1882).61 Stillman’s import lies in

his forceful argument that artists should modify their practices and depict bodies in

motion as Muybridge’s camera showed them to be. Lobbing accusations that artists who

continued to depict bodies in motion in conventional, rather than anatomically accurate,

positions would be committing the grossest of falsities, Stillman argued forcefully for

what he saw to be truth in art.62 Attempting to counter the claims for artists to represent

61 J. D. B. Stillman, The Horse in Motion as Shown by Instantaneous Photography, with a Study on Animal Mechanics Founded on Anatomy and the Revelations of the Camera, in Which Is Demonstrated the Theory of Quadrupedal Locomotion (Boston: J.R. Osgood and Company, 1882). Since Stillman’s book offered an overview and summary of the motion studies Muybridge undertook at Stanford’s ranch, the article begins and ends with references to Muybridge and reads more as a critique of the implications of Muybridge’s work than of Stillman’s book.

Waring’s article in The Century was presaged by the following: "Some of the July Magazines, the Century," 3; "The Century, for July," The Literary World: a Monthly Review of Current Literature 13(1882): 206; "Literary Notes," 166. Stillman’s book was written and published with the support of Leland Stanford, and served as the primary source of great strife and, eventually, a lawsuit between Stanford and Muybridge. See Mozley, Eadweard Muybridge: The Stanford Years, 1872-1882, 80-81.

Even though Waring did assent to the idea that increased familiarity with Muybridge’s studies would have impact on future representation, he ultimately argued for subjective realism: “The picture which shows it as our poor eyes must see it is really the truthful one for the purposes of art. So it must be with the horse in motion. We must see him on the canvas as we see him in life, not as he is shown when his movements are divided by the five-thousandth part of a second,” George E. Waring, "The Horse in Motion," The Century Magazine 24, no. 3 (1882): 388. 62 Stillman, The Horse in Motion as Shown by Instantaneous Photography, with a Study on Animal Mechanics Founded on Anatomy and the Revelations of the Camera, in Which Is Demonstrated the Theory of Quadrupedal Locomotion, 101-104. An advanced user of the rhetorical question, Stillman posed the following: “Why must every equestrian statue in Europe follow the model of the Antique Balbi in the Neapolitan Museum, with the bones of the fore leg flexed at right angles, and the other three feet upon the

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things as they seem, Stillman quipped: “those who think they see a horse in the positions

given in the conventional way have their conceptions formed by a false hypothesis.” He

further argued that:

Once attention is called to the true theory of quadrupedal motion, the truth of each

one of these positions, and the interpretation of them in relation to progression, is

so quickly recognized, while the error of the old theory of the gallop becomes so

manifest, that artists will no more be able to claim that they represent nature as

she seems, when they depict a horse in full run in the conventional manner, or the

mythical gallop.63

Thus for Stillman, the question of how art should depict motion—and by extension,

reality—post-Muybridge does not bear discussion: those artists who do not convert and

instead continue conventional practices of depiction are guilty of the utmost falsities. In

effect, Stillman questioned not only the history of art but also the integrity of artists

practicing at the time of his writing.

Henry James’s “The Art of Fiction” addresses the issues raised by the Muybridge

debate, such as those recapitulated by Stillman. Whereas Freedman reads James’s

invocation of “the authority of art” to be an attempt to smooth the volatilities of British

aestheticism, one might argue that James’s criticism from the 1880s onward provides a

ground? No such position was ever true, nor can it seem to be so to anyone who gets his impressions from nature,” 103. 63 Ibid., 101-102. Stillman further suggested an economic reason for failure to convert pictorial depictions: “There is too much capital invested in works of art all over the civilized world to permit the innovation without protest, and ridicule is the cheapest argument that can be employed in controversy, for it does not require truth for its foundation, and but a low order of talent for its display,” 101.

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commentary on the possibilities for art posed by Muybridge’s motion studies, ultimately,

as Freedman notes, “invoking the authority of art.”64

James’s arguments in “The Art of Fiction” draw on concerns extant in the

Muybridge debate, and while he ostensibly responds to Besant’s treatise of the same title,

his language throughout the essay demonstrates his attempt to recapture the visual world

for the mind of the artist.65 In order to establish a theory or “consciousness” for the

novel, James links aesthetics with the human body, separating it from technologically

mediated forms of representation such as photography. For instance, he writes that the

first tool for fiction is having “a capacity for receiving straight impressions” placing the

mechanism for perceiving reality and rendering realist depictions within the mind of the

artist.66 Since the Muybridge debate pitched photography against painting, artistic vision

against technology (or what Besant called the “mechanical arts”), reviewing James’s

argument regarding the art of fiction in this context suggests that he is participating in a

much larger discussion concerning realist representation and human perception. When

viewed in this historical framework, “The Art of Fiction” becomes as much a treatise

about art generally as it is about fiction specifically.

James alludes to the discussion of the novel occurring in the past year or two,

which has typically been taken to refer to the discussion of the modern novel prompted

by William Dean Howell’s article on Henry James published in The Century (November

64 Freedman, Professions of Taste: Henry James, British Aestheticism and Commodity Culture, xxiii. 65 His commentary that relates specifically to Besant’s argument seems after-the-fact and secondary to his initial points regarding the form and function of the novel as art. 66 James, The Art of Fiction, and Other Essays, 17. Significantly, James uses a subjective term, “impression,” for it emphasizes the human element of vision and art. Additionally, he does not refer to practitioners of fiction as “writers”; rather, they are artists.

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1882).67 This context certainly exists, but given that James writes broadly about art, we

can also read James’s essay within the larger discussion occurring in aesthetics prompted

by Muybridge’s motion studies. Thus, even though James ostensibly writes about the

role of fiction, he engages with the primary components of the Muybridge debate—

reality, representation, artistic vision, and of the role of the artist in representing reality—

suggesting his larger interest in the contested arena of realism, more so than in Besant’s

categorization of fiction as a fine art.

Just as James’s single criterion for a good novel is “that it be interesting,” he

further wonders about the rules for fiction Besant has outlined. While James gives

Besant’s rules their due for noble intent and inspiration, he notes “they are not exact.”

Significantly though, rather than undercut Besant’s rules in favor of his own, James

challenges the very notion of prescriptiveness in art: “the characters and the situation,

which strike one as real will be those that touch and interest one the most, but the

measure of reality is very difficult to fix.”68 The rhetorical effect of this move, rather

than position him as merely qualifying and adding to Besant’s project, situates James’s

argument in direct opposition to the suggestions for artistic “accuracy” and precision

surrounding Muybridge’s work such as those proposed by Stillman. In doing so, James

attempts to retake the contested territory of “reality” in art. For James, Muybridge’s and

Stillman’s suggestions that art was “wrong” were themselves incorrect and diametrically

opposed to the task of the artist, which is to render the artist’s vision of reality.

67 For more on the debate in fiction see Edel, Henry James: The Middle Years, 1882-1894, 70-71, 121-124. 68 James, The Art of Fiction, and Other Essays, 10.

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Foregrounding the realist debate, James writes that “the only reason for the

existence of a novel is that it does attempt to represent life.”69 While Stevenson will

quibble with James on this point in his “A Humble Remonstrance” (1884), realism and

the reflection of life remains James’s primary goal.70 But James’s version of realism

does not merely involve the mimetic rendering of exterior surfaces, which places him in

direct opposition to Muybridge’s realism of objective, scientific replication of a reality

unattested by human vision. Even as James ostensibly argues against some of Besant’s

vaguer points, he also argues against the proposition forwarded by Muybridge’s work:

that art should mirror or reflect life as it is shown to be through cameras and other

mediated devices. Conversely, James writes, “the measure of reality is very difficult to

fix”:

The reality of Don Quixote or of Mr. Micawber is a very delicate shade; it is a

reality so coloured by the author’s vision that, vivid as it may be, one would

hesitate to propose it as a model […]. It goes without saying that you will not

write a good novel unless you possess the sense of reality; but it will be difficult

to give you a recipe for calling that sense into being. Humanity is immense, and

reality has a myriad forms […] as for telling you in advance how your nosegay

should be composed, that is another affair.71

Here James carefully deploys the term “reality,” demonstrating that he knows the term is

contested. In the passage above and throughout the essay, James qualifies the term

69 Ibid., 5. 70 Stevenson asserts that novels are tidy, reality is not. See Robert Louis Stevenson, "A Humble Remonstrance," Longman's Magazine 5 (1884). 71 James, The Art of Fiction, and Other Essays, 10.

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through subjective modifiers: fictional and aesthetic realities have various senses, shades,

and colors, and as such, provide subjective rather than objective views. Later, he

describes another author’s ability to render a valid impression of French Protestant youth:

“she knew what youth was, and what Protestantism; she also had the advantage of having

seen what it was to be French, so that she converted these ideas into a concrete image and

produced a reality.”72 Here, images produce, rather than reflect, a reality, and his use of

the indefinite modifier “a” emphasizes variety in the production. Thus, James employs

the term “reality” in order to emphasize its multiplicity and variety, and to deny the

existence of a fixed, finite reality. By doing so, James thus rejects the set views or

formulas for realist depiction suggested by Muybridge’s work and propounded by

Stillman in The Horse in Motion. Rather, James situates his realist technique in

representations mediated by a human consciousness, not by technological modes of

seeing. James seems particularly affronted by suggestions for formulaic realism, and this

rhetorical move flatly rejects the proposition that an aesthetic representation of reality

could be reflected by anything other than a human consciousness. For James, a reality

unavailable to direct human vision—as Muybridge’s motion studies were—was no reality

at all.

Thus, “The Art of Fiction” primarily concerns reality and realism in the novel, but

for James, as for Nick Dormer in The Tragic Muse (1890), “all art is one.”73 Thus, the

main stakes for James differ from Besant’s goal of elevating fiction. James’s concern lies

72 Ibid., 11. 73 Nick continues: “It’s the same many-headed effort, and any ground that’s gained by an individual, any spark that’s struck in any province, it’s of use and of suggestion to all of the others. We’re all in the same boat.” Henry James, The Tragic Muse, Reprint ed. (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1908; reprint, 1908), 14.

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with the constitution of realism, which has come under significant scrutiny following

Muybridge’s motion studies. Throughout the essay, James links realism’s value with

human agency: for James, vision renders impressions, which in turn constitute

experience.74 By equating impressions with experience, he is further staking claim to the

visual world, placing value not in accuracy but in the intensity of impression. 75 While

James takes the occasion provided by Besant to continue the discussion regarding the

novel, James’s primary purpose is to recapture aesthetic ground for subjective realism in

art—ground which had been shifting since the publication of Muybridge’s motion

studies.

Following the premise that “all art is one,” James links the novelist’s task with

that of the painter. This move further places his argument in opposition to the realism

proposed by Muybridge’s studies, for visual art felt the most immediate risk from the

changes proposed by Muybridge’s studies. While this link continues James’s well-

established interest in paining, it also signals his alliance with traditional realism in

painting—the arena most contested in the Muybridge debate, since Muybridge argued

that for centuries artists had been “wrong” but that by following his studies art could be

corrected.76 James flatly rejects such assertions that art and artists become mere

reflectors of the camera’s version of reality, and by writing about painting in addition to

74 James, The Art of Fiction, and Other Essays, 11. 75 James writes: “A novel is in its broadest definition a personal, direct impression of life: that, to begin with constitutes is value, which is greater or lesser according to the intensity of the impression.” Ibid., 8. 76 For analysis of James and painting, see Adeline R. Tintner, The Museum World of Henry James, Studies in Modern Literature No. 56 (Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research Press, 1986); Winner, Henry James and the Visual Arts.

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the novel, he places himself even more within the context of the debate about realism

surrounding Muybridge’s motion studies.

Through his argument that the novel should represent life, James adopts the cause

of painting (“the same attempt that we see on the canvas of the painter”), drawing a direct

relationship between the painter and the novelist, which he sustains.77

Their [the painter and the novelist] inspiration is the same, their process (allowing

for the different quality of the vehicle) is the same, their success the same. They

may learn from each other, they may explain and sustain each other. Their cause

is the same […] as the picture is reality, so the novel is history … But history is

also allowed to represent life; it is not, any more than painting, expected to

apologize.78

James’s overt reference here is to Anthony Trollope, whom James chastises for his

propensity to speak directly to the reader and concede that “he and his trusting friends are

only ‘making believe.’”79 But James’s defense of the truth of painting, when viewed in

the context of the reaction to Muybridge’s studies and their implications for art, suggests

an oblique reference both to the Muybridge controversy, for one artist—Ernest

Meissonier— apologized very publicly for the incorrectness of his renderings of the horse

in motion and modified a painting.80 The significance of Meissonier’s revisionist move

77 James, The Art of Fiction, and Other Essays, 5. 78 Ibid. 79 Ibid., 5. 80 Meissonier nurtured an interest in both photography and the horse’s gait, spending time sketching horses at his own stables and at Saint-Germain. Going to great lengths to record accurately the paces of a trotting and galloping horse, he had a trolley built parallel with his track at his residence where he could, by controlling the speed of the trolley, ride alongside a running or trotting horse. Years before his

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for our understanding of James’s work is twofold. Generally, it provides further context

for James’s rejection of the need for artistic apologias. More specifically, it links James

indirectly to the Muybridge debate, for the painting Meissonier “corrected” was one

James wrote about for the New York Tribune several years prior: Friedland – 1807 (see

Figure 2.5).81

Figure 2.5: Ernest Meissonier, Friedland - 1807 (1875)

acquaintance with Muybridge’s work, the painter had, through fastidious study, documented the walk of a horse, which ran counter to previous pictorial representation of the horse's walk, and his works depicting this walk were criticized as invalid representations of a horse's true walk. Nonetheless, until Muybridge’s studies were published, the trot and gallop remained elusive. As Marc Gotleib has demonstrated, some critics complained that “Meissonier’s horses were anatomically correct but not true-to-life. His representations might be true to how horses ran, but that wasn’t what horses looked like when they passed across a spectator’s field of vision.” Thus, Meissonier’s work had already faced some of the same criticism Muybridge’s work met. Ironically though, when Meissonier saw Muybridge’s studies in La Nature, Marey’s assistant Georges Demeny recalled that the painter was “astounded” and asserted that the photographs must be false or incorrect. Demeny further noted that Meissonier said he would be satisfied with such scientific data only if it confirmed what he saw with his own eyes and recorded in his sketches. See Gotlieb, The Plight of Emulation: Ernest Meissonier and French Salon Painting, 166, 174. 81 Henry James, "The American Purchase of Meissonier's Friedland," in The Painter's Eye, ed. John L. Sweeney (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989).

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Regarding the American purchase of Meissonier’s Friedland, James focused

initially upon the “dear” price paid for the work by Mr. A.T. Stewart.82 But he ultimately

assented that when one has a talent as prodigious as Meissonier’s, value is difficult to fix;

James remarked, “If Meissonier is unique, why should he not command the prices of

unique things?” Monetary value, though, did not hold James’s attention for more than a

few paragraphs, and James’s final critique of Meissonier and of the painting was divided.

On the one hand, he admired Meissonier’s technical skill, but, on the other hand, he felt

something to be lacking in Meissonier’s work—an idea, an intellectual or moral purpose:

“It is this ‘idea’ which is conspicuously absent in M. Meissonier’s pictures; and yet in so

eminent a painter you cannot help looking for it.”83 James thus allows Meissonier his

renown for technical skill and artistry, but not necessarily for artistic vision.84

In his critique for The New York Tribune, James deals directly with Meissonier’s

depiction of bodies in motion:

They are magnificently painted, and full, I will not say of movement—

Meissonier, to my sense never represents it—but of force and completeness of

detail. This colonel is exactly passing the spectators, to whom, as he twists

himself in his saddle to lift his sabre and bellow forth his ‘Vive l’Empereur!’ he

turns his back. His pose, with its stiffened, elongated leg, its contortion in the

82 James notes the price paid was 380,000 Francs, or $76,000 USD. Ibid., 108-109. 83 Ibid., 112. James further wrote that “the picture has extraordinary merits, but I have seen works of a slighter ability which have pleased me more,” 111. 84 Meissonier was just the sort of literal painter James found uninteresting due to his lack of transformative vision. In contrast, James lauds the vision of both Burne-Jones (“the painting of Mr. Burne-Jones is almost alone in having the gravity and deliberation of truly valuable speech”) and Sargent (“Mr. Sargent’s impressions happen to be worthy of record”). See, respectively, James, "London Pictures," 205; ———, "John S. Sargent," 217.

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saddle, its harmony with the thundering gallop of the horse, is admirably

rendered. Behind him come plunging and rattling the others, with their long

swords flashing white in the blue air, their heads thrown back and turned to the

Emperor, their mouths wide open, their acclamations almost audible, their

equipments flapping and jingling, and their horses straining and clattering in a

common impetus.85

Even though James claims to not see movement in the painting, his description suggests

otherwise. More germane to my argument, though, this passage also tells us that James is

attuned to the rendering of movement, and the attendant positions of bodies to suggest

motion, in paintings, which brings him closer to the substance of Muybridge’s work.

James does not seem to have commented on Meissonier’s repainting of Friedland

as directly as he had done upon its initial sale, but his statements in the “Art of Fiction”

regarding apologies suggest familiarity with it: “[the novel] is not, any more than

painting, expected to apologize.” Additionally, as I have established above, James was

privy to Waring’s article on “The Horse in Motion” in The Century which also dealt with

Meissonier’s repainting. Waring reported that “Meissonier, who has made a speciality of

the action of the horse, is announced as an adherent of the new theory, and it is said that

he has recently modified a painting in conformity with it.”86 While Meissonier did not

modify the painting until 1887, the probability and possibility loomed large. After

hosting Muybridge in his Salon in 1881, he apologized to those present for incorrectly

rendering the horse in motion. The Evening Post reported on Meissonier’s revision of

85 James, "The American Purchase of Meissonier's Friedland," 110-111. 86 Waring Jr., "The Horse in Motion," 381.

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Friedland in 1887 noting that after Muybridge lectured at his salon years before

Meissonier acknowledged that his representations of horses in motion had been mistaken

and that

the picture ‘Friedland’ contained what he now knew to be gross errors, and he

expressed his regret that he could obtain no opportunity to correct them …

Feeling that his reputation as an artist might in time be compromised by this

picture, Meissonier, it is believed, has begun the new picture with the intention of

correcting such faults as he recognizes in the work in the Stewart sale.87

These moves on Meissonier’s part demonstrate the stakes at the core of the Muybridge

debate: Should art represent what things are or how they seem? Should art present life as

87 Charles M. Kurtz, "Letter," The Evening Post, March 24 1887. Friedland was up for auction as part of the Stewart collection at Chickering Hall in late March of 1887, thus garnering attention in the U.S. It sold to Mr. Hilton for $66,000 ($10,000 less than its original price) as reported. See "Art Notes."

Meissonier’s willingness to “correct” his work may in part explain his historical legacy as an all-too-literal realist, but we must be careful of dismissing Meissonier’s moves as unthinkable for a serious artist, for to do so is to overlook his significance as an important figure in a period of transition. In this sense, Meissonier becomes a bit of a tragic figure: he willingly made transitions in a period of transition, but history was not kind to these choices. He ultimately made the “wrong” ones aesthetically, and as aesthetic tides changed, he found himself on the wrong shore. He did so, though, because he could never envision his role as an artist beyond that of a realist, which was his folly—a very instructive folly for us, for it highlights the forces at play in aesthetic change in the late nineteenth century while also demonstrating the role that Muybridge’s work played in facilitating this change.

Gotleib rightly notes that today we may complain that Meissonier naively confused art and science, but to do so is to miss the historical point: for Meissonier and for many of his contemporaries and predecessors, particularly the Old Masters, scientific inquiry and artistic representation were joint and mutually dependent enterprises. Gotleib explains that Meissonier saw his role as an artist as a form of doing science. As such, he chose to remain “true to life” as it was shown to be by technologically mediated devices which had all the makings of scientific inquiry: space was divided, time was factored, and distance was measured, all in the name of truth and accuracy. Since his goal aligned with Muybridge’s goal, Meissonier went the way of scientifically determined truth and accuracy. But as Gotleib reminds us, until this point, no distinction existed in the visual arts between scientific truth and aesthetic realism. But Muybridge’s work facilitated the separation of these two enterprises as well as forced the breakdown of what Gotlieb calls a “verist standard of artistic truth” which had been the hallmark of Salon painting for the majority of the nineteenth century. See Gotlieb, The Plight of Emulation: Ernest Meissonier and French Salon Painting, 169-183.

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it is, or as it looks or feels? Should art represent subjective human vision or objective

scientific findings? Not coincidentally, these are the very questions James addresses in

his criticism. James ultimately rejects the position taken by those, like Meissonier, who

chose to forego their own perspective and understanding of external events and, instead,

rely upon machinic depictions as the source of their artistic renderings. James found such

possibilities detestable and antithetical to the very practice of art, which he defined as

being “all life, all feeling, all observation, all vision.”88 Without a perceptive human

consciousness to refract external views, art was merely illustrative, not transformative.

As he wrote in the Preface to The Portrait of a Lady¸ views are “nothing without the

posted presence of the watcher—without in other words the consciousness of the

artist.”89

Even though James’s turn to the interior consciousness is well-documented

critically, analyzing it in terms of the Muybridge debate provides for a richer

understanding of his impulse to place origin of realism within the mind of the artist rather

than in the external world. That James makes such a vehement proclamation at this

particular time, 1884, proves particularly compelling since the controversy surrounding

Muybridge’s images had been in the news for several years and would garner significant

coverage for much of the next decade. Such a move suggests that James is staking ground

that he feels to be receding, and his focus upon individual vision and human

88 James, The Art of Fiction, and Other Essays, 17. Ralph Bogardus rightly notes that James did not consider photography to be art, demonstrating that James used the term “photographic” in a pejorative sense to describe fiction and painting that contained too much detail and no perceptible point. See Bogardus, Pictures and Texts: Henry James, A.L. Coburn, and New Ways of Seeing in Literary Culture, 117-118; Henry James, "The Picture Season in London," in The Painter's Eye, ed. John L. Sweeney (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 141-142. 89 James, "The Art of the Novel: Critical Prefaces."

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consciousness constitutes a rejection of technologically mediated vision in art. James

stakes this ground with determination and vigor, for if accepted undigested, Muybridge’s

studies stood to upend not only the history of art, but also its current practice—a

possibility to which Henry James—as evidenced by his argument in “The Art of Fiction”

was only too aware. The immediate negative possibilities these studies posed for art

were staggering: if art was to begin to render prescriptive views of reality inaccessible to

human eyes, James’s entire practice (and appreciation) of art would crumble, given its

reliance upon human consciousness.

Additionally, a reality prescribed by technically correct or accurate images left no

room for artistic interpretation—a subject James dramatized in his short story “The Real

Thing” (1893). Peter Rawlings reads James’s treatment of the Monarchs in this story to

exemplify what he sees to be James’s negative view of the changing modes of

representation and reproduction extant within popular photography, represented by the

Kodak. Rawlings writes, “What George Eastman trumpets, Henry James abhors,” and in

this dichotomy, Eastman represents the “ready-made,” while James represents the

artistic.90 But it is a bit too easy to say that James rejected the Kodak, even if he did

disdain the pre-fabricated aspects of modernity.91 Not only does this argument reduce

90 Rawlings, "A Kodak Refraction of Henry James's 'the Real Thing'," 451. 91 James’s letters to Hendrick Andersen regarding the latter’s proposed “World Centre” provide insight into James’s repulsion at the “ready-made.” See letters dated April 14, 1912 and September 14, 1913 in Henry James, "Letters," in Beloved Boy: Letters to Hendrick C. Andersen, 1899-1915, ed. Rosella Mamoli Zorzi (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2004), 101, 111.

Rawlings overlooks the fact that James traded in “Kodak” photographs, referring to them by name (“Kodak” or “Kodak-things”) in letters to his brother William and to Hendrick Andersen. Edel also demonstrates in his biography that James traded Kodak snapshots with friends and family. Moreover, the Kodak images Andersen sent James were often of his sculpture, which gave James the occasion for aesthetic critique. See Edel, Henry James, the Master: 1901-1916; James, Letters, 1883-1895; ———, "Letters."

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James’s complex relationship with photography (including Kodak snapshots) into an

acceptance-rejection dichotomy which did not exist, but it also misses the context of the

debate surrounding photography into which Kodak was introduced in the 1880s and

1890s.92

Kodak photographs, all snapshots in fact, derive from instantaneous

photography—the type of photography Muybridge practiced and developed for his

photographs of motion. In 1889, Muybridge was making his second widely-publicized

European tour which reprised public concerns about the nature of realism and the

function of the artist.93 Thus, the “No. 1 Kodak” (1888) was introduced into an already

existing debate regarding representation prompted by Muybridge’s motion studies of the

1870s.94 And it is this context which informs James’s “The Real Thing,” providing one

of the better examples of James’s engagement with the substance of the Muybridge

debate. “The Real Thing,” then, is not simply about photography, but rather is better

understood as a meditation and comment upon the stakes for aesthetic representation

raised by the Muybridge debate.

For instance, the Monarchs’ sittings produce drawings that resemble photographs

or copies of photographs, and they are lesser creations for it. Mrs. Monarch “obliterates” 92 In contrast, Bogardus provides a helpful and detailed account of James’s relationship with photography. Yet, Bogardus also misses the Muybridge context in his reading of “The Real Thing.” Bogardus, Pictures and Texts: Henry James, A.L. Coburn, and New Ways of Seeing in Literary Culture, 113-141, 121. 93 In 1887, Talcott Williams wrote in The Century that “whether animals should be drawn as they appear in the camera is still sub judice,” Williams, "Animal Locomotion in the Muybridge Photographs," 356. For commentary regarding Muybridge’s 1889 tour, see: "Art Notes."; "How Animals Walk and Run."; "Last Night at the Royal Society."; "The Menagerie of Muybridge the Magician."; "Muybridge's Photographs of Animals in Motion." 94 While Rawlings does not accurately contextualize the debate surrounding representation, misleadingly attributing it to the development of the first Kodak, he does rightly add the element of reproducibility to the discussion, which was not foregrounded in Muybridge’s work.

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the difference between different poses: “she was the real thing but always the same

thing.” To adapt, the narrator-artist tries to “invent types that approached her own,

instead of making herself transform itself.”95 The outcome of the scenario in which the

subject is all perfection and no suggestion is that the subject controls the artist, rather than

the artist controlling the subject—one of the many concerns present in the Muybridge

debate. The narrator further explores the untenable relationship via reference to

photography: “I could see that she had been photographed often, but somehow the very

habit that made her good for that purpose unfitted her for mine.”96 The story thus

explores the unsuitability of the pre-figured, pre-determined subject which leaves nothing

for the artist. Such work, the story suggests, damages artists in its mimeographic, rather

than mimetic, nature. Through such suggestions, James engages with the substance of

the Muybridge debate. In doing so, he obliquely criticizes moves by artists such as

Meissonier who, rather than render views they knew and felt to be true, rendered scenes

objectively accurate but emotionally and intellectually lacking. In his lectures,

Muybridge would present individual slides of each position of motion, after which he

would speed up and slow down the succession of shots so that seeing would give way to

believing. For James, though, a separation still exists between seeing and believing, and

in the distance between vision and knowledge, human consciousness intervenes to create

art. The narrator of “The Real Thing,” categorizes this desire for the representational

over the actual as a “perversity—an innate preference for the represented subject over the

real one: the defect of the real one was so apt to be a lack of representation. [He] liked

95 Henry James, "The Real Thing," in The Tales of Henry James, ed. Maqbool Aziz (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), 200. 96 Ibid., 199.

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things that appeared; then one was sure. Whether or not they were or not was a

subordinate and almost always a profitless question.”97

For James, then, realism lay within the interior human realm, consisting of inner

consciousness and subjectivity. As for the artist in “The Real Thing,” certainty lies in

images rendered by an interior consciousness, not in the externalities presented to it. The

formal properties with which the author endows his text are integral to the novelist: “His

manner is his secret, not necessarily a jealous one. He cannot disclose it as a general thing

if he would; he would be at a loss to teach it to others.”98 Thus, for James, in opposition

to both Besant and to suggestions inherent to the presentation of Muybridge’s studies, an

artist’s or writer’s skills or attributes cannot be quantified, learned or taught. James

knows a good novel when he reads one, but the recipe for writing one is beyond

description: “Humanity is immense, and reality has a myriad forms; the most one can

affirm is that some of the flowers of fiction have the odour of it, and others have not; as

for telling you in advance how your nosegay should be composed, that is another

affair.”99 Even as James links novels with a sense of realism, novelistic reality and its

creation cannot be distilled or pinpointed as Besant would like, nor can it be graphed or

charted in any scientific fashion, for it lies within the consciousness of the artist. James’s

essay seeks to recuperate the arena of realism for the artist, reclaiming its value for

rendering interior knowledge rather than exterior facts. Consequently, in the dispute over

whether art should represent things as they are or as they seem, James responded in the

affirmative to both. For James, there is no difference between how things are and how 97 Ibid., 195. 98 James, The Art of Fiction, and Other Essays, 9. 99 Ibid., 10.

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they seem in art. As he wrote to Wells, it is art that makes life. In art, for James, things

are as they seem.

* * *

Visuality at the turn of the twentieth century was fraught with confusion, doubt,

and fear, and none of these concerns was singular.100 While onlookers doubted what they

saw in the motion studies they also doubted their own human vision: if what people were

seeing was real, and if humans had never seen it before, then this suggested that humans

were not capable of accurately discerning reality. As Mary Ann Doane has demonstrated,

this fissure between human perception and scientific truth led to an even greater fissure in

human confidence in human vision.101 This latter complication provides perhaps the most

compelling and indicative turn of modernism in the rejection of the world of realism as a

source of aesthetic truth and a turn to the interior human consciousness as the illuminator

of such truth. In short, truth wasn't to be seen, it was to be known. This turn, however, is

not without further complications and paradox, for this interior world of literary

modernism became, ironically, fixated upon the external world of the visual. So while

rejecting realistic linear narrative in favor of a narrative of sensory impressions,

modernist and proto-modernist narrative focus upon the aesthetics of sensory perception,

rendering passages which describe the look of the action, rather than the mere action.

This distinction cannot be understated. Even while a novelist such as Henry James

positioned his fiction within the point of view of a chief character, showing the narrative

development through this central character's consciousness, his fiction also betrays a 100 For more on anxiety and doubt related to human vision, see Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive, 79-80. 101 Ibid.

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conflicting tendency. While James attempts to locate the narrative core within a human

consciousness, the narrative slips from this consciousness, revealing perspectives that go

beyond what a human could see with his eyes. In short, James's fiction, like early

photographic motion studies, begins to present views never seen before by human eyes.

CHAPTER 3

THE IMAGE OF MOVEMENT AND THE CRISIS OF REPRESENTATION

It is the artist who tells the truth and photography that lies. For in reality, time does not stand still. – Auguste Rodin1

Instantaneous photography gave us the term “snapshot,” first used by Sir John

Herschel in the 1860s, a term which has now come to be synonymous with a photograph.

This term’s initial use, though, offers a distinction, both in product and in concept,

between instantaneous photography and other common forms of photographic

portraiture: instantaneous photographs, quite literally, were photographic shots taken in a

colloquial snap-second. As I showed in the previous chapter, Herschel was also the first

to offer any concrete definition of the instantaneous photography movement, identifying

“instantaneous” images as those taken rapidly, capturing lifelike scenes. He added an

element of subjectivity to an otherwise objective medium, noting that an instantaneous

photograph involved the “representation of scenes in action… anything, in short, where

any manner of interest in enacted within a reasonably short period of time, which may be

seen from a single point of view.”2 This definition, while comprehensive, also contains

an important difference from previous modes of representation in its emphasis upon a

single point of view. Prodger has demonstrated that prior to Muybridge’s mimetic

representations of the horse in motion, the semiotic ventre à terre depiction was generally

1 Auguste Rodin and Paul Gsell, Art: Conversations with Paul Gsell, Quantum Books (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 32. 2 Herschel, "Instantaneous Photography."; Prodger, Time Stands Still: Muybridge and the Instantaneous Photography Movement, 36.

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agreed to be an effective symbol of the horse’s run, even if its accuracy was suspect (at

least among artists and equestrians, if not in the general public).3 As such, a sort of

consensus occurred regarding the effective depictions of motion, and when Muybridge’s

work emerged, the representational terms shifted with outcomes based not upon

consensus but upon scientific objectivity.4 Instantaneous photography and its attendant

developments necessarily straddle the objective (scientific, data-driven) and the

subjective (“single point of view”) realms, mingling them in a troublesome manner and

revealing that views on life are always subjective.5

We saw in the previous chapter that Eadweard Muybridge’s motion studies fueled

a fierce and prolonged debate regarding realism in art, and in doing so, helped to spawn a

break between scientific objectivity and aesthetic realism, pushing the latter toward the

interior of human consciousness. Further, Henry James’s decisive turn toward the

consciousness of the artist in his theories of fiction reveal his stake in that debate. But

even though Muybridge’s work highlighted objectivity and captured movement, it

revealed the supremely subjective nature of any one view at a particular time. As he

aimed to capture actual movement, analyzing it linearly and from multiple angles, his

work also unwittingly demonstrates the subjective nature of any angle of vision. Thus,

3 Prodger, Time Stands Still: Muybridge and the Instantaneous Photography Movement, 28. See also my discussion of this issue in chapter one. Leland Stanford suspected that the horse’s run as conventionally depicted was inaccurate, which was one of his primary motivations in commissioning Muybridge to take photographs of his horses. For more on Stanford’s involvement, see Mozley, Eadweard Muybridge: The Stanford Years, 1872-1882; Solnit, River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West. 4 See Prodger for more on this point. Prodger, Time Stands Still: Muybridge and the Instantaneous Photography Movement, 28-31. 5 Doane notes that human vision is subject to temporality and physical embodiment. See Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive, 1.

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while his early studies at Stanford’s Palo Alto ranch emphasized accuracy of positions of

movement at a specific moment in time, the difference fractions of a second make in each

of these particular views highlighted the importance of both temporality and perspective

to any angle of vision (see Figure 2.1). Perhaps a great irony of Muybridge’s work is that

as he set out to capture movement accurately and presented it as a tool to help artists

create more realistic depictions, his work succeeded in spawning a highly subjective

realism that developed into modernism.

David Bordwell, in assessing the narrative conventions of the twentieth century,

has argued that by comparing the novel to a painting, Henry James equated narrative with

a perspectival point of view, effectively changing the question from “who speaks?” to

“who sees?”6 Edward Branigan extends Bordwell’s statements arguing that the position

from which an object or image is viewed provides the index for the subject position in

pictorial language.7 Thus, in texts which are concerned with the look of a scene more

than the action it conveys, visual perspective rather than linguistic markers plays an

increasingly significant role in conveying meaning. James’s novels from the 1880s

onward, such as Portrait of a Lady and The Ambassadors, employ a narrative style reliant

upon the look of scenes and upon the import of perceived views, rather than upon the

description of action for the development of plot. Moreover, as James is concerned with

rendering individual consciousness, externalities and details serve to reflect this

interiority, creating a highly subjective realism wherein objects reflect human

6 David Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), 8; ———, "Introduction," in Point of View in the Cinema: A Theory of Narration and Subjectivity in Classical Film, ed. Edward Branigan (Berlin ; New York: Mouton, 1984), XI. 7 Edward Branigan, Point of View in the Cinema: A Theory of Narration and Subjectivity in Classical Film, Approaches to Semiotics 66 (Berlin ; New York: Mouton, 1984), 4.

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consciousness and give specificity to human subjectivity. As such, images in these

narratives largely take the place of events, producing the attendant effect of situating the

narrative in highly subjective terrain rather than in concrete action or events.

Consequently, James privileges human subjectivity and interiority in his novels, making

the exterior world of objects serviceable to the interior human landscape. These stylistic

moves serve as an extension of his critical arguments made in the “Art of Fiction”

regarding the form and function of fiction, but they also reveal an attendant anxiety about

vision rendered both thematically and formally rendered, again signaling engagement

with the terms of the Muybridge debate.

Just as Muybridge’s work revealed a previously unseen language of motion,

Henry James’s work of the 1880s and 1890s depicts invisible forces affecting his

characters’ worlds and realities, demonstrating a desire to treat thematically a topic raised

by Muybridge’s studies. The Portrait of a Lady (1881) and The Turn of the Screw (1898)

provide two ready examples of such phenomena and outcomes, for both of these works

reveal the impact of the unseen upon the characters’ lives. Additionally, the terms of the

Muybridge debate are expounded more fully in James’s later works, such as The

Ambassadors (1903) and The Wings of the Dove (1904), works which respectively

portray the problems of representation and display the formal stakes of a shifting,

unstable narrative perspective. Thus, even though he rejected Muybridge’s terms for

aesthetics, James’s work engages attendant themes and forms stemming from and extant

in that very work.

Even though Muybridge’s work presented bodily positions derived from nature,

they served to undercut human perception causing the external world to lose its perceived

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stability, its concreteness. Jonathan Crary has argued that with the emergence of

photography-based projections, such as the panorama and stereoscope, the classical

figure–ground relationship was lost, as were coherent and consistent relations between

image and observer.8 This disruption of the standard relationship between viewer and

viewed, between subject and object is evident in the narrative strategies of James’s later

work: the reflection of human subjectivity begins to shift and to multiply, offering

unstable views of both interior consciousness and the exterior world and leading to a

crisis of the subject and of narrative form. Even though James rejects the suggestion that

art mirrors scientific reality, his later novels take up the issues and problems extant in

Muybridge’s work, presenting concerns related to perspective and authoritative vision

both formally and thematically. Thus, the narrative outcomes of James’s life-creating art

produce indeterminate results and few resolutions, leading to a shift not only in James’s

narrative style but in the form and function of the novel. As such, these stylistic shifts

can be seen as products of this historical moment when shutter speeds quickened,

allowing movement to be captured and studied from a variety of perspectives and angles.

Henry James, Moving Images, and Cinema

Critics who draw attention to the visual aspects of James’s work typically link his

visual style to painting, but textual evidence also suggests that he was compelled by

moving images.9 In Henry James and the Visual Arts Viola Hopkins Winner focuses

upon a scene in Paris of the Place and Colonne Vendôme James recounts as having

8 Crary, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture, 295. 9 For links between James and painting or artists, see Tintner, The Museum World of Henry James; Adeline R. Tintner, Henry James and the Lust of the Eyes: Thirteen Artists in His Work (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1993); Winner, Henry James and the Visual Arts.

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beheld through a carriage window as an infant.10 For Winner, James’s account of a view

through a frame signals both an analogy to a framed image in a gallery and James’s then-

inchoate status as an observer-artist who sees and remembers things through

circumscribed frames. While this is surely the case, Winner glosses over the animation of

James’s remembered view: he is seated in a moving carriage, and as his perspective

shifts, the scene before him—which is framed by the carriage window—moves. Later in

the same memoir, he accounts for a “vivid picture, framed by the cab window, of a

woman reeling backward as a man felled her to the ground with a blow to the face.”11

Thus, James is not only an observer-artist; he is an observer of animated views which

produce striking memories as well as shifting points of view and significant formal

effects in his fiction. Consider, for instance, his description of the Cathedral at Chartres:

The little gallery I have spoken of, beneath the statue of the kings, had for me a

peculiar charm. Useless, at its tremendous altitude, for other purposes, it seemed

intended for the little images to step down and walk about upon. When the great

façade begins to glow in the late afternoon light, you can imagine them strolling

up and down their long balcony in couples, pausing with their elbows on the

balustrade, resting their stony chins in their hands, and looking out, with their

little blank eyes, on the great view of the old French monarchy they once ruled,

and which has now passed away.12

10 James, Autobiography, 32-33; Winner, Henry James and the Visual Arts, 1. 11 James, Autobiography, 175. 12 Henry James, "Chartres," in Henry James: Collected Travel Writings (New York: The Library of America, 1993), 679-680.

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James writes not only about the look of the cathedral: the change in the afternoon light

and the open space of the gallery prompt him to imagine still figures which begin to

move. The passages above suggest that James’s visual consciousness is informed not

only by art galleries and paintings, or simply by architecture or the theater, but also by

motion pictures and moving images. Furthering this link is James’s continued

deployment of the window or frames through which his characters view momentous, and

often startling, images. As with the cab-window memories above, critics such as Winner

typically read James’s use of windows or frames in his fiction to signify his pictorial and

picturesque techniques, but given that the images they frame often move and shock or

startle the viewer, they also suggest that James was compelled by moving images in

addition to his interest in sculpture and painting.13

James regularly deployed visual tropes in both his narrative and his criticism.14

For instance, in his Preface to The Portrait of a Lady, James evokes his famous metaphor

of a “house of fiction.” While he does rely upon the language of architecture to build this

metaphor, his chosen vocabulary also reveals a competing influence:

The house of fiction has in short not one window, but a million—a number of

possible windows not to be reckoned; every one of which has been pierced, or is

still pierceable, in its vast front, by the need of the individual vision and by the

pressure of the individual will. These apertures … are but windows at the best,

mere holes in a dead wall, disconnected, perched aloft; they are not hinged doors

13 Winner provides an analysis of James’s pictorial techniques, and Tintner offers a close reading of James’s textual references to specific works of art in Tintner, The Museum World of Henry James; Winner, Henry James and the Visual Arts. 14 For more on James’s “optical tropes” in his Prefaces, see Christina Britzolakis, "Technologies of Vision in Henry James's What Maisie Knew," Novel: A Forum on Fiction 34, no. 3 (2001).

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opening straight upon life. But they have this mark of their own that at each of

them stands a figure with a pair of eyes, or at least a field glass, which forms,

again and again, for observation, a unique instrument, insuring to the person

making use of it an impression distinct from every other … The spreading field,

the human scene, is the “choice of subject,” the pierced aperture, either broad or

balconied or slit-like and low-browed, is the “literary form”; but they are, singly

or together, as nothing without the posted presence of the watcher—without in

other words, the consciousness of the artist.15

In this passage James employs language suggestive of moving images and photography,

indicating that as much as he rejected the premise that scientific objectivity should define

realism in art, the formal and visual properties extant in moving images captivated his

imagination. What is perhaps most suggestive about this house of fiction are its “mere

holes in a dead wall” before which stand figures with pairs of eyes who observe the

human scene, suggesting an allusion to a peepshow viewing device such as a mutoscope

or stereoscope, the latter of which having been in circulation in America, England, and

Europe since James’s boyhood.16 Notable, too, is the repeated use of the photographic

term “aperture” and the reference to another technologically mediated mode of seeing: 15 James, "The Art of the Novel: Critical Prefaces." 16 Musser notes that the stereoscope peepshow, also called a stereopticon, was introduced to the United States in 1850 by the Langenheim Brothers. Musser also establishes that “strong ties” were forged “between the stereopticon and the cultural elite,” making James’s familiarity with the devices highly probable. Kinetoscopes were first marked commercially by Edison in 1894, and mutoscopes were also developed the same year. Biograph began marketing the latter devices commercially in 1898 in the U.S. and on steamers. Mutoscopes had a semi-global presence by 1899: “By mid-1899, when it had officially changed its name to the American Mutoscope & Biograph Company, Biograph was part of an international organization that included eight sister companies: the British Mutoscope and Biograph Company …, the Biograph and Mutoscope Company for France, Ltd., and the Deutsche Mutoskop and Biograph Gesellschaft in Berlin, as well as companies in the Netherlands, Belgium, South Africa, Italy, and India.” 264. See Musser, The Emergence of Cinema: The American Screen to 1907, 31, 81-82, 264.

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field glasses.17 All of these linguistic moves suggest that as much as he wanted to

highlight individual vision, technologically mediated forms of visuality were not far from

his mind and informed, consciously or not, his own mode of vision.

While James and his work are integrally linked to visual art and venues such as

museums, galleries, and salons, little has been made of the fact that these locales often

served as venues for magic lantern and spectroscopic photography shows, as well as for

illustrated lectures, throughout the nineteenth century.18 As screen practice began to

include motion photography and moving pictures, these presentations were also included

in shows and presentations at museums and galleries.19 Hence, moving images and

projected screen entertainments were not confined to “low-cultural” venues such as

fairgrounds and music halls, as is commonly supposed in literary history.20 Moreover,

Muybridge’s work was specifically linked with locales such as artists’ salons and private

17 The Oxford English Dictionary offers the following definition for “aperture”: “Optics. The space through which light passes in any optical instrument (though there is no material opening).” Citations for this usage date from 1664, but all the citations from the nineteenth century onward relate to photography. "Aperture," in Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).

Hazel Hutchison suggests that James’s own declining vision later in his life informed the visuality of his late style. See Hutchinson, "James's Spectacles: Distorted Vision in the Ambassadors."

Bogardus also reads James’s focus upon frames in his autobiographical memories to conjure photography. Bogardus, Pictures and Texts: Henry James, A.L. Coburn, and New Ways of Seeing in Literary Culture, 133. 18 For James’s relation with galleries and museums, see Tintner, The Museum World of Henry James; ———, Henry James and the Lust of the Eyes: Thirteen Artists in His Work. Muybridge’s lecture style is generically classified as the illustrated lecture. 19 Musser, "Toward a History of Screen Practice."; ———, High-Class Moving Pictures: Lyman H. Howe and the Forgotten Era of Traveling Exhibition, 1880-1920; ———, The Emergence of Cinema: The American Screen to 1907. Musser has shown that early cinema practice derived from magic lantern projections and conventions of the illustrated lecture, which afford additional commonalities between Muybridge’s presentations and early cinema. 20 For one of the many such arguments, see DiBattista and McDiarmid, High and Low Moderns: Literature and Culture, 1889-1939.

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clubs and galleries, as demonstrated in the previous chapter.21 In fact, Charles Musser

has shown that immediately prior to the emergence of cinema in the 1890s, one of the

groups to which the illustrated screen lecture appealed was “the refined culture associated

with Harper’s Weekly.”22 Thus, it is worth restating here that James had the interest,

access, and connections to become even marginally acquainted with Muybridge’s work,

as well as with other forms of projected screen and moving image displays and devices.

Additionally, we know from James’s letters and Edel’s biography that he attended the

cinema with his niece Peggy.23 While cinema presents a technical departure from the

discrete moving images of Muybridge, his early motion studies, nonetheless, provide a

constructive link between photography and cinema. Aesthetically and conceptually,

Muybridge’s motion studies contain similar features of early cinema. Cinema

compounds the formal and visual innovations and concerns present in Muybridge’s

work—such as temporal and spatial disjunction, multiple and shifting perspectives, and

bodily isolation and dissociation. But even still, the issues and concerns presented by

early cinema for aesthetics are not, at least initially, very different from those present in

Muybridge’s work.24

21 Musser notes that he gave his presentation before “prestigious” audiences, see Musser, The Emergence of Cinema: The American Screen to 1907, 50. 22 The other was church-oriented groups. Ibid., 41-42. 23 Edel, Henry James, the Master: 1901-1916. See, for instance, letters from James to Peggy dated 1 April 1900, 25 Sept. 1900, 5 Feb. 1901, 14 Aug. 1902 in Henry James, "Letters," in Henry James Letters to Margaret James Porter (Cambridge: Houghton Library, Harvard University, 1899-1915). 24 For instance, Muybridge’s work and early cinema shared a similar mise en scene (out-of-doors filming, staged sequences, black backgrounds). Trick films were common in early cinema, and Muybridge’s work also appeared to depict trick sequences, given that he would seemingly make still photographs move, and he was occasionally referred to in the press as a magician. See "The Menagerie of Muybridge the Magician." Additionally, concerns related to continuity of shots and editing were present in both Muybridge’s still sequences, as well as in early cinema. For more on these latter two issues in Muybridge’s

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Moreover, as Gunning demonstrates, various aspects of early cinema’s marketing

and formal structures derive from either instantaneous photography generally, or from

Muybridge’s motion studies directly. For instance, an early Lumière cinema showing

“described the Cinematographe as ‘a curious application of instantaneous photography,’”

while Muybridge’s black backgrounds served as guides for Edison’s early films produced

in the Black Maria.25 Cinema is, however, technically distinct from Muybridge’s motion

pictures, relying upon collodion film rather than glass plates, and this technological

difference allowed for a more nimble and diverse development of styles and genres once

the novelty of movement subsided.26 Nonetheless, Gunning and Musser have both

demonstrated that most viewers placed early cinema forms within the context of screen

practice, visual projections, and illusionist entertainments already existing in the late-

nineteenth century, suggesting that viewers of early cinema would not have made the

formal separations along technical lines that exist in our present-day understanding of

cinema and its antecedents.27 Thus, linking both Muybridge’s motion studies and cinema

work, see Marta Braun, "Muybridge's Scientific Fictions," Studies in Visual Communication 10 n3(1984); Guneratne, "The Birth of a New Realism: Photography, Painting and the Advent of Documentary Cinema." 25 Gunning, "A Mischievous and Knowing Gaze ", 313-314. Gunning also demonstrates that the Lumiere brothers were instantaneous photographers. In contrast, Thom Andersen argues that Muybridge “was in no sense an inventor of a motion picture. He was bound by the inflexibility of the glass plate. His longest sequence was twenty-four images—as many as a contemporary motion picture projects every second.” Andersen, "Eadweard Muybridge, Zoopraxographer". 26 The Zecca Program notes that “by 1910, almost every imaginable type of film had already been attempted. The versatile Ferdinand Zecca—rival and contemporary of Georges Melies—was most successful in trick pictures and realistic melodramas, but made many farces, religious subjects, and fairy tales.” See "Ferdinand Zecca Program," (Museum of Modern Art). 27 Gunning writes: “the identity of cinema which theorists took pains to define from the 1910s to the 1960s has its origin in a morass of modern modes of perception and new technologies which coalesced in the nineteenth century.” Gunning, "'Animated Pictures', Tales of Cinema's Forgotten Future," 469.

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in an analysis of James’s novels serves to uncover a common response in James’s

narrative development and style to both cinema-proper as well as to moving images

existing prior to the cinema. 28

Even though James rejected the literal implications of Muybridge’s work for

realism, aspects of James’s work convey an affinity with both the formal properties and

the philosophical concerns present in Muybridge’s work, namely: James’s proclivity to

render framed views that convey moving, rather than fixed views; his reliance upon

“instantaneous” shock-inducing images that move the plot along; and the waning of

omniscience in his later novels, which gives way to multiple perspectives. All of these

devices indicate significant formal shifts which contain considerable implications for

narrative resolution and character development. In the sense that Muybridge’s work

disrupted the stability of the visual world, James’s work begins to explore this instability.

Unnatural Vision and Uncanny Views

While previous semiotic approaches to motion, such as the ventre à terre position

described in the previous chapter, relied upon consensus and, stemming from the

I share Gunning’s view that Muybridge’s work most certainly was a harbinger of the cinema, at least from a visual if not a technical perspective. As such, he is a useful crossover figure linking photography with motion pictures and motion photography (visually and conceptually) with cinema, and many of the same aesthetic concerns and issues which are associated with cinema are also extant in his work. 28 Given the commonalities of form, function, presentation mode, and audience, I treat Muybridge’s work and cinema generally as of a piece, and I note distinctions between the two as needed throughout.This is not to devalue the contributions of cinema to literature, or to diminish the importance of technical and technological histories, but to demonstrate that the visual possibilities and technical limitations present in early cinema available to James were also present in Muybridge’s work much earlier. After cinema emerges and establishes itself in the mid- to late-1890s, distinguishing between cinema and Muybridge fails to be useful. It is, nonetheless, important to bring Muybridge’s work into any discussion of early cinema forms and attendant changing aesthetics for literature, for in many ways his work established the paradigms for the changing visual modes in the late-nineteenth century which developed into or were subsumed by cinema.

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consensus, an implied objectivity of viewpoint (everyone sees the same thing the same

way, no matter the angle), mimetic approaches such as those employed by Muybridge, as

well as other instantaneous photographers and early cinematographers, relied upon

singular points of view without shared angles of vision. This new objectivity was

scientifically accurate but unfamiliar and visually suspect. Popular consensus was not a

part of this form of mimesis: no one saw things the way the camera recorded them, and

the things the camera recorded were governed by a temporality that could only be

retraced through the camera lens. As Prodger aptly observes:

the things one could see in a photograph were the same sorts of things one could

see in life. In Muybridge’s photographs, however, the close parallel between

observation and recording was disrupted. Eye and camera were no longer

substitutes for each other, but partners, the eye relegated to contemplating what

the camera showed.29

Such a change in the status of the viewer produced the strong negative reactions

described in the previous chapter, of which Henry James’s voice in “The Art of Fiction”

was one. But whereas James’s critical stance was one of rejection, his fiction began to

explore these new subjective positions of the watcher.30 Vision in these narratives, then,

becomes primary, and the narrative voice moves into a spectatorial role, contemplating

the images presented.

29 Prodger, Time Stands Still: Muybridge and the Instantaneous Photography Movement, 212-213. 30 Elizabeth Ermarth explores the implications of the loss of consensus in Henry James’s fiction in Elizabeth Deeds Ermarth, Realism and Consensus in the English Novel (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1983).

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In The Portrait of a Lady, Isabel reads and misreads a series of images, ultimately

detecting previously unseen details in the visual language of her surroundings. This new

information, though, does not prove redemptive, producing instead a series of shocks.

For instance, upon first meeting Gilbert Osmond, Isabel was struck by the image he

conveyed:

She had carried away an image from her visit to his hill-top which her subsequent

knowledge of him did nothing to efface and which put on for her a particular

harmony with other supposed and divined things, histories within histories; the

image of a quiet, clever, sensitive, distinguished man, strolling on a moss-grown

terrace above the sweet Val d’Arno and holding by the hand a little girl whose

bell-like clearness gave a new grace to childhood. The picture had no flourishes,

but she likes its lowness of tone and the atmosphere of summer twilight that

pervaded it.31

Here Isabel is drawn to the look of the scene and what it seems to be, taking it as

authoritative and representative of a truth. Yet while she thought she saw Osmond

clearly prior to their marriage, she realizes later that “she had not read him right.”32 This

realization follows her flash of vision involving him and Madame Merle. In this oft-cited

scene, Isabel experiences a series of shocks stemming from a static view which she

stumbles upon after returning from a carriage ride. At first glance, the image of her

husband and Madame Merle seems strange and slightly awkward, but also full of novelty

and undetected meaning: 31 Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady, ed. Geoffrey Moore, Reprint ed., Penguin Book of American Verse (New York: Penguin, 1881; reprint, 1986), 327. 32 Ibid., 476.

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Just beyond the threshold of the drawing room she stopped short, the reason for

her doing so being that she had received an impression. The impression had, in

strictness, nothing unprecedented; but she felt it as something new, and the

soundlessness of her step gave her time to take in the scene before she interrupted

it. Madame Merle was there in her bonnet, and Gilbert Osmond was talking to

her; for a minute they were unaware she had come in. Isabel had often seen that

before, certainly; but what she had not seen, or at least had not noticed, was that

their colloquy had for the moment converted itself into a sort of familiar silence.33

The newness of this uncanny scene framed by the threshold through which Isabel views

it, gives her both an impression and a jolt. Even though the scene she beholds is static, it

is full of suggested movement (“Madame Merle was in her bonnet, and Gilbert Osmond

was there talking to her”), conjuring for Isabel a whole realm of activity which had

previously been invisible, unseen. Just as Muybridge’s motion studies were for their

audiences, this scene for Isabel is both unbelievable and impossible to ignore.

As she continues to read the language of this image, she realizes that while lasting

only a brief moment the view contains substantial information to parse. To convey this,

James’s language not only suggests photography, but more specifically, it suggests

instantaneity—a passing moment captured which would have otherwise been missed:

“the thing made an image, lasting only a moment, like a sudden flicker of light.”

Moreover, this captured moment contains a heretofore unnoticed bodily syntax which

forces Isabel to rethink and redefine her understanding of her husband and of Madame

Merle: “What struck Isabel was that he was sitting while Madame Merle stood; there was

33 Ibid., 457-458.

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an anomaly in this that arrested her.” Thus by revealing previously unnoticed bodily

gestures and position, James employs the primary visual trope of Muybridge’s motion

studies: “Their relative positions, their absorbed mutual gaze, struck her as something

detected.” Thus, the newness of the image, with its unprecedented structure and

unnatural composition of bodies, suggests an engagement with broader aesthetic

implications of Muybridge’s work. Ultimately, “what she had not seen, or at least had

not noticed” forces a change in her understanding of her world, her circumstances, just as

Muybridge’s work forced a redefinition of the terms and conventions of realism.34 This

moment of vision and recognition parallels Muybridge’s motion studies and the changes

in representational syntax that they spawned. But this vision is not redemptive for Isabel

or any of the other characters. Rather it opens a vast ugliness for her, exposing features

that had contributed to the movement and progression of her life which had otherwise

been unseen and unnoticed, leaving her quite bewildered.35 Consequently, while

deploying visual tropes deriving from Muybridge’s motion studies and the debate they

provoked, Portrait begins to offer a negative critique of the implications of this work for

human vision and knowledge.

Following this instantaneous jolt, Isabel continues to receive a series of shocks,

which ultimately serve to show her truth.36 While this is what she striven to see during

her life with Osmond—“she had done her best to be just and temperate, to see only the

34 Ibid., 458. 35 Gunning argues that instantaneous photography raised questions and concerns about repressed emotional life in the bourgeois home, in Gunning, "A Mischievous and Knowing Gaze ", 317. 36 Both Doane and Benjamin address the role of shock in the nineteenth century. Benjamin, "On Some Motifs in Baudelaire," 174-175; Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive.

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truth”—the truth will reveal itself to be much uglier and awkward than she imagined or

anticipated, like the individual stills of Muybridge’s work were thought to be. Thus,

when it appeared in the drawing room scene described above, she didn’t recognize it.

The image was strange and made a lasting impression, but she didn’t know what to make

of it. In chapter forty-two of the second volume, Isabel sits late into the night before the

fire, “absorbed in looking” at the situation before her. Her husband has implied that she

has influence with Lord Warburton, which “had given her the start that accompanies

unexpected recognition.”37 Again Isabel lurches toward the revelation, but during this

reverie “the strange impression she had received that afternoon” remains an oddity she is

unable to assimilate.

The Countess Gemini, a character described as being “always in motion, in

agitation,” finally wakes Isabel to the syntax of the relations between Madame Merle and

Osmond. Isabel tries to follow the Countess’s “lucid” explanation, “but there seemed so

much more to follow than she could see.”38 The primary reason for Isabel’s slow

awakening is her conventionally held view of the representational world. To refer back

to the opening paragraph of this chapter, she holds a consensus view of the external

world. For her things are what they seem to be. Osmond told her he was conventional,

and she confirmed it with her vision of him above the Arno with Pansy. She believed the

image he presented to be both the representative and the accurate reflection of Osmond.

What she discovers, though, is that the image Osmond presented was a bit like the “flying

gallop” of the horse—visually suggestive but, ultimately, inaccurate. Likewise, she

37 James, The Portrait of a Lady, 472. 38 Ibid., 405, 588.

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engaged with what she thought to be a consensus view of Madame Merle. Near the

beginning of Book II, Isabel grows closer to Madame Merle:

At the end of an intimacy of three months Isabel felt she knew her better; her

character had revealed itself, and the admirable woman had also at last redeemed

her promise of relating her history from her own point of view—a consummation

the more desirable as Isabel had already heard it from the point of view of

others.39

Isabel thus receives and confirms what she understands to be a commonly held view of

the “wonderful” woman, in much the same way that she digested Osmond’s projected

image. Her belief in the consensus view serves less as an indication of gullibility,

though, and more as an indication of a challenge related to her perspective, her

viewpoint: until her instantaneous vision and its later explication by the Countess, Isabel

did not distinguish between subjective and objective views. Objects rendered and things

seen are one and the same. But her framed, instantaneous view of Osmond seated and

Madame Merle standing jolts her perspective and her worldview. And the subsequent

shocking images presented to her serve to reinforce and normalize the picture she is

seeing.

At the convent, Isabel engages with Madame Merle, whose “appearance in the

flesh was like suddenly, and rather awfully, seeing a painted picture move.”40 Finally,

this woman’s own storytelling gives way to a form of knowledge manifested as visual

39 Ibid., 374. 40 Ibid., 596.

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immediacy for Isabel, who “saw it all as distinctly as if it had been reflected in a large

clear glass.”41 Rather than shock, though, Isabel finds her ugly, malformed truth:

She saw, in the crude light of revelation which had already become a part of

experience and to which the very frailty of the vessel in which it had been offered

her only gave an intrinsic price, the dry staring fact that she had been an applied

handled hung-up tool, as senseless and convenient as mere shaped wood and

iron.42

This series of images, discrete but containing a continuous thread of hidden information,

serves to treat both thematically and formally the many of the issues surrounding the

Muybridge debate: idealism, realism, subjectivity, objectivity, immediacy, representation,

truth. Even though James’s critically rejected the aesthetic principles for art espoused by

Muybridge’s work, James’s fiction reveals that he acknowledged and found compelling

motion studies’ implications for human vision and subjectivity.

Portrait closes with language suggestive of Muybridge’s slide presentations of

bodily postures, foregrounded by Caspar Goodwood’s homage to objectivity and

emphasized by a descriptive rendering of his physique. He says to Isabel, “we see things

as they are.”43 Just as Muybridge’s studies focused on the externalities of the body,

Goodwood’s embrace is rendered in all its bodily physicality—“his face, his figure, his

presence.” Also like viewers of Muybridge’s lectures, after a slide-show “train” of

images, Isabel is released into the darkness. As in Muybridge’s work, body position

41 Ibid., 598. 42 Ibid. 43 Ibid., 634.

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conveys objective information but no overarching, redemptive knowledge, and Isabel

rejects Goodwood’s naïve presentation of objectivity, just as James rejected that of

Muybridge.

Until Isabel is faced with his bodily physicality and unrelenting objectivity, “she

had not known where to turn.” But afterward, “there was a very straight path.”44 Isabel

has seen her truth, and while it is bleak, there is no going back. To return to Caspar

would be a retreat from her new knowledge and vision, however hideous or bitter. She

has been subjected to a form of vision so shocking that she cannot purge it from her

knowledge. As such, Isabel serves as a tool for exploring changing understandings of

human vision in an era of significant volatility for representation. Portrait thus

dramatizes and criticizes the terms of the Muybridge debate, demonstrating that, as with

Isabel, the future is bleak, for even though unseen details are edifying they are not

redemptive.

Spectatorial Perspectives and Shifting Points of View

Just as “The Art of Fiction” rejects purely mimetic realism deriving from

photography of motion as discussed in the previous chapter, it also provides a preliminary

index to James’s visual style. In this essay, rather than present experience as stemming

from events, James links it with visual impressions. This move signals a changing

approach to fiction away from traditional storytelling comprised of concrete actions and

toward a method in which images and impressions signal plot and character development.

For James, images constitute action, plot and character development:

44 Ibid., 636.

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When one says picture, one says of character, when one says novel, one says of

incident, and the terms may be transposed. What is character but the

determination of incident? What is incident but the illustration of character? What

is a picture or a novel that is not of character? What else do we seek in it and find

in it? It is an incident for a woman to stand up with her hand resting on a table and

look out at you in a certain way; or if it be not an incident, I think it will be hard

to say what it is. At the same time it is an expression of character. If you say you

don't see it (character in that-allons donc!) this is exactly what the artist who has

reasons of his own for thinking he does see it undertakes to show you.45

Even though James here ironically discounts Besant’s categories of fiction as useless, he

also demonstrates his own visual strategy of employing scenic description to convey not

merely setting but the very raison d'être of a work. Thus, James’s narrative development

does not necessarily pursue a particular event or incident to its outcome or resolution, but

rather stems from the modification and juxtaposition of a series of images and visual

scenes. As such, James employs a montage structure to create narrative meaning.

Sergei Eisenstein noted in Film Sense that montage organized about one event can

be linked “not merely through one indication… but through a simultaneous advance of a

multiple series of lines, each maintaining and independent compositional course and each

contributing to the total compositional course of the sequence.”46 Eisenstein goes on to

note that “the general course of… montage [is] an uninterrupted interweaving of…

diverse themes into one unified movement. Each montage piece [has] a double

45 ———, The Art of Fiction, and Other Essays, 13. 46 Sergei Eisenstein, The Film Sense, trans. Jay Leyda (New York: Harcourt, 1947).

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responsibility—to build the total line as well as continue the movement within each of

the contributory themes.”47 James’s Portrait, as well as The Ambassadors and Wings of

the Dove, employ the use of montage to suggest meaning in scenes or to direct attention

to a character’s development.

In the above analysis of Portrait, images presented to and seen by Isabel serve to

propel the novel’s action, such as it is, forward. This novel renders its action as images:

the central scene of Madame Merle and Osmond which propels Isabel through the latter

half of the novel constitutes no obvious action. Rather, the scene is rendered entirely as

an image for Isabel’s line of vision of tension, possibility, and obscured relations, and the

remainder of the novel largely depends on Isabel’s interpretation and reaction to it. But

the formal, syntactic structure conveys a vexed temporality also akin to moving images.

Even as the syntactic effect upon the reader is one of forward movement (one word

follows the next), the narrative flits temporally backward and forward as it moves from

Isabel’s inner vision to the external views presented to her. In this sense, James’s syntax

follows and complicates the syntax of moving images, which seem to exist always in the

present although temporally their renderings dwell only in the past.

Additionally, Portrait effaces traditional milestones, such as weddings, with

Isabel’s and Osmond’s occurring between books one and two. These structural moves

suggest that the novel is moving toward an associative framework which would better

support contemplation of images, rather than a traditional framework focused upon

engagement with events and action. Rendering images to signal plot and character

47 Ibid.

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implicitly relies upon perspective and point of view, a characteristic which James

indirectly highlights in “The Art of Fiction” through textual and linguistic inversion:

It is an adventure—an immense one—for me to write this little article; and for a

Bostonian nymph to reject an English duke is an adventure only less stirring, I

should say, than for an English duke to be rejected by a Bostonian nymph. I see

dramas within dramas in that, and innumerable points of view.48

Even though he only briefly signals the importance of perspective here through the

changing grammatical positions of the Boston nymph and the English duke, this visual

technique and focusing device proves to be integral to the form and function of his later

novels, such as The Ambassadors (1903) and Wings of the Dove (1902). In these novels,

perspectives multiply and conflicting viewpoints are not always reconciled, often

culminating in indeterminacy. While centers of consciousness became central subjects

for James, his narrative form in these later works proceeds from multiple, rather than

single or central, lines of inquiry and angles of vision. This strategy further signals a

formal engagement with another aspect of Muybridge’s work.

In 1883, Muybridge began conducting research at the University of Pennsylvania,

and the corpus of the work he produced there was compiled into 781 plates and published

as a multi-volume work entitled Animal Locomotion in 1887.49 Each of these 781 plates

48 James, The Art of Fiction, and Other Essays, 19. 49 The Rare Books Department of Boston Public Library has digitized the eleven-volume work, available on-line: http://www.flickr.com/photos/boston_public_library/collections/72157623334568494/

The volumes were not divided by type of movement, but by the subjects depicted: horses, domestic animals, wild animals, men, women, and children. Additionally, the volumes containing nudes were separated from those depicting “draped” men and women, and those depicting “abnormal movements” were given their own volume. Abnormal movements included images of amputees, epileptics, and others physically disabled.

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presented multiple angles of a particular movement—running, jumping, walking,

ascending or descending stairs, etc.—undertaken by a particular being, human or animal

(see Figure 3.1).

Figure 3.1: Muybridge, Animal Locomotion, Plate 1, Male Walking:

Figure 3.1 shows a movement, walking, viewed from three different positions—

front, back, and side—and from twelve different temporal positions, creating thirty-six

individual views. 50 At a glance, the multiple viewpoints of his University of

Pennsylvania work don’t offer a coherent picture of motion; although comprehensive,

they highlight the relative knowledge of any one angle of vision. Multiple perspectives

added together don’t create a unified perspective; they create a fragmented view,

allowing for simultaneity in time but separation in space. Thus, while Muybridge’s

studies outwardly claimed to present the truth of motion objectively, the visual language

of the studies highlighted the inherent subjectivity of any view or perspective. As

50 Thirty-six was the standard number of images Muybridge obtained from any one sequence of movement, the smallest number being twelve and the largest being fifty-six. For more on image sequences per plate see Braun, "Muybridge's Scientific Fictions."; Guneratne, "The Birth of a New Realism: Photography, Painting and the Advent of Documentary Cinema," 174.

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Isabel’s visual shocks serve to awaken her to her own subject position, James later

deploys a perspectival framework similar to Muybridge’s, allowing him to present

multiple points of view in tandem.

This technique allows for a variety of angles of vision to be explored

simultaneously, such that James can focus multiple line of vision on one thing revealing

different perspectives at the same point in time—similar to the vertical rows in figure 3.1

above. James enlists this technique in The Ambassadors in order to convey the novel’s

central oppositions of interior consciousness to the exterior world, of vision to reality.

The central character, Lambert Strether, possess dual consciousness—“detachment in his

zeal, curiosity in his indifference”—which serves to anchor the novel squarely in the

middle of two. The novel’s first chapter presents a conflicting series of possible

viewpoints, which not only foreground Strether’s double consciousness, but refract vision

into multiple possible scenarios. As Strether approaches Maria Gostrey in the hotel

lobby, we are presented with “what his hostess might have seen with a vision kindly

adjusted” –a visual possibility, but not an actuality. But, as the description of Strether

continues, the point of view shifts: “an attentive observer would have seen catalogued, on

the spot, in the vision of the other party.”51 The latter qualification suggests that Maria

Gostrey does actually view Strether in the manner rendered, but it also suggests a third

angle of vision. In Strether’s search for the difference between illusion and reality, he

finds himself entwined in multiple complementary, but also competing, viewpoints,

dramatizing the visual and subjective crisis that exists within Muybridge’s multi-

perspectival catalogues of motion. 51 Henry James, The Ambassadors, ed. Christopher Butler, The World's Classics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 56, 58.

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James further complicates the problem of perspective in Wings of the Dove

(1902), by using a mirror framework to obscure interior and exterior views. In Wings the

narrating point of view assumes a third-person limited omniscience, as in Portrait,

allowing it access to various characters’ points of view. But rather than granting access

to the characters’ thoughts and emotions, this narrating perspective seems more capable

of rendering the visual worlds of the characters. In this sense, the narrating point of view

constitutes more of an eye, than an I.

The first sentence of Wings registers the larger significance of vision and

reflection in the novel:

She waited, Kate Croy, for her father to come in, but he kept her unconscionably,

and there were moments at which she showed herself, in the glass over the

mantel, a face positively pale with the irritation that had brought her to the point

of going away without sight of him.52

The description emphasizes sight, while the syntactic construction introduces repetition

and delay. The initial subject-verb-appositive construction, while unusual, highlights

delay (“waited”) and repetition (“She… Kate Croy”). This structure also offers two

different approaches to the subject—a general view announced by the subjective pronoun

“she,” and a specific denotation registered by the proper name “Kate Croy.” The

sentence goes on to compound perspectives by introducing a reflective view of the

subject through the mirror, and it closes with the absence of vision: she leaves without

sight of her father. Such an opening signals the multiplicity of views and perspectives the

novel will offer. 52 ———, The Wings of the Dove, ed. John Bayley, Penguin Classics ed. (New York: Penguin, 1986), 55.

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Kate’s sees her own situation clearly—she is her own subject. But the narrative

does not only follow her vision, and although Kate sees unambiguously and possesses

plain objectives (marry a man she loves), the narrative undermines her goals,

complicating an easy equation of clear vision with a noble cause. As such, the novel

suggests that clear or accurate vision does not necessarily constitute the most noble or

morally sound perspective. Even though as readers we know many of the reasons for

Kate and Densher’s actions, the factual information does not engender moral redemption.

The novel suggests that access to mere facts does not inevitably provide increased

knowledge, and multiple angles of vision do not necessarily contribute to an overarching

objective truth.53 As in Portrait¸ these conflicting perspectives are not necessarily

reconciled. Even the first sequence of words does not privilege a particular perspective

of Kate—both the general pronoun and the specific name are in interchangeable positions

in the sentence. Rather than find herself merely reflected in the mirror as an object of

vision, Kate “shows herself,” thereby retaining the subject position which began the

novel.

But although Kate retains control of her own view initially, the novel’s

perspective shifts, as signaled by the multiple vantage points in the first line. Even

though she retains her own subject position, she is later described as being “always in the

line of the eye”—necessarily the position of an object. Here James is playing with

perspective by mingling subjective and objective views and by offering multiple

perspectives on a single being or object. Shifting perspectives are further emphasized in

53 Sallie Sears argues that James rendered multiple viewpoints without “positing some final objective truth.” Sallie Sears, The Negative Imagination: Form and Perspective in the Novels of Henry James (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1968), 46.

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the novel’s first paragraph, as Kate Croy moves from looking into the mirror to looking

out of the balcony windows. As she moves from a reflective medium (mirror) to a

refractive one (window), the descriptive language mingles interior and exterior worlds:

The vulgar little street, in this view, offered scant relief from the vulgar little

room; its main office was to suggest to her the narrow black house-fronts,

adjusted to a standard that would have been low even for backs, constituted quite

the publicity implied by such privacies. One felt them in the room exactly as one

felt the room—the hundred like it or worse—in the street.54

Such description has the effect not only of emphasizing the conflation of vantage points,

but it also signals the instability and changeability of viewpoints. This shifting style

constitutes a loss for James, for as much as the narrative voice seems inclined toward a

singular, unified perspective—the singular “I” intrudes at times—the stability of a

singular perspective slips from view. As Bordwell argues, narrative voice becomes

narrative vision, and this vision, like James’s character of Maisie Farange, can see more

than it can explain.

Numerous critics have commented upon the indeterminacy of James’s later style,

often metaphorically equating his style with technologies of vision. For instance, Sallie

Sears equates James’s distancing effects with “screens.”55 Leon Edel famously read

Strether’s view of the Lambinet painting in The Ambassadors to be rendered as if “a

camera were moving toward the picture.” Edel further argues that in James’s later work,

54 James, The Wings of the Dove. 55 Sears, The Negative Imagination: Form and Perspective in the Novels of Henry James, 19.

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“we are given a feeling we have access to a series of cameras.”56 James’s brother

William made the connection to mediated vision as well. While criticizing Henry’s

seeming inability to “name it straight,” William compared his brother’s indirect narrative

style to illusionist devices at a Polytechnic.57 Extending these analyses, Hutchison

asserts that James’s late style undermines reality and its aesthetic representation. I agree

with the latter half of Hutchison’s analysis: James’s late style doesn’t undermine reality,

but rather humans’ ability to perceive and represent it accurately. Thus, James challenges

traditional practices of mimesis as well as consensus realism, not reality. Consequently,

James’s later work separates humans from external reality, just as he separated the artist’s

interior consciousness from exterior details in “The Art of Fiction,” placing both realism

and veracity of experience within the human consciousness. But by locating truth and

reality in a knowing persona, they become fractured and variable, changeable according

to perspective and point of view. As such, these uneven and unstable truths constitute

both a crisis of character and of form. When objective facts of the external world are no

longer discernable to unaided human eyes, an anxiety regarding truth and vision emerges,

raising questions both about the nature of subjectivity and about the constitution of

reality.

Muybridge’s work betrayed conflicting messages, revealing both the singularity

of and difference between all angles of vision, while purporting to offer an absolutist

version of the real. Likewise, James’s work takes up this conflict, formally rendering the

separation between multiple angles of vision. As such, he conveys both an anxiety about

56 Edel, Henry James, the Master: 1901-1916, 75, 77. 57 Quoted in F. O. Matthiessen, The James Family, Including Selections from the Writings of Henry James, Senior, William, Henry & Alice James, First ed. (New York: A. A. Knopf, 1947), 341.

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this state of indeterminacy, as well as an acceptance of the loss of consensus inherent in

this conflict. Elizabeth Ermarth writes that “consensus is a matter of the greatest

difficulty in James.” By providing little mediation of adjudication, “James’s form

threatens to fall apart at every moment.” 58 Ermarth further reads James’s style as

dissociative and full of deferred meaning, holding at bay any form of consensus.

Thematically as well as formally, James’s characters find themselves in spectatorial roles,

which when combined with multiple angles of vision produces not only a lack of

authority or consensus, but also a lack of action.59 The thematic tension of this formal

construction resides in a crisis of vision and its attendant meaning for the characters’

understandings of their own identities and places within the world.

Even as James rejects the prescriptive realism seemingly made possible by

Muybridge’s motion studies, his work engages with the formal and thematic attributes

and innovations of Muybridge’s studies. Just as Muybridge’s work uncovered aspects of

movement invisible to unaided human vision, James’s work similarly engages with the

possibilities and problems of limited human vision. As such, he gives formal as well as

thematic expression to dual concerns about vision’s status stemming from Muybridge’s

work. By rendering anxieties regarding authoritative vision and related to the loss of

consensus, James’s characters and his novels are left in realms of uncertainty.

Furthering the connection to Muybridge’s work, James’s novels engage with

aspects of instantaneity, producing moments of transformative vision, and these

58 Ermarth, Realism and Consensus in the English Novel, 258. 59 Jennifer Green-Lewis also writes on the spectatorial status of James’s characters in Jennifer Green-Lewis, Framing the Victorians: Photography and the Culture of Realism (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1996).

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instantaneous sequences are often produced by the rendering of multiple perspectives and

points of view, as did Muybridge’s work. James renders multiple perspectives, he still

seeks to highlight a central consciousness though the multiple angles of vision. Yet this

multiplicity constitutes a loss of sorts for James’s focusing devices, as the reader is

largely left to complete the links between the perspectives and images and decide upon

the resolution. Realism of the Henry James variety did not wish to depict life as it was

scientifically, but as it seemed to a human consciousness. Thus, locating reality in a

knowing persona rather than in the objective world places distance between the interior

and exterior realms, releasing realism from its objective moorings. As a result of this

detachment, narrative resolution, like Isabel Archer, reaches a point of no return.

CHAPTER 4

RENDERING VISUALITY: CONRAD’S VISUAL FICTIONS

All the damned professors are radicals at heart. – Conrad’s The Secret Agent

Conrad, as I noted earlier, made his first and only trip to the United States in

1923, where he met with his American publisher, Doubleday, and read from his novel

Victory (1915). He also planned to give another speech along with his reading, entitled

"Author and Cinematograph"—a speech which extended his earlier and now often quoted

assertion in his Preface to the Nigger of the "Narcissus" that the primary goal of the

writer was to make the writer "see."1 In 1923, Conrad repeated that "fundamentally the

creator in letters aims at a moving picture—moving to the eye, to the mind, and to our

complex emotions I will express with one word—heart." Earlier in this speech, he

suggests that the novelist has always had the rendering of action in mind "long before the

idea occurred to scientists … that the sun can make pictures, at first motionless and

afterwards moving," noting that the author can also react to form, whereas the camera

only reacts to light. Regarding narrative form, Conrad stated that his writerly goal was

not merely description, but evocation of scene and emotion. To this end he chose to

eschew chronological narrative, for “the knowledge of the consequences makes the facts

appear more significant.”2 These statements demonstrate Conrad’s knowledge of and

1 Joseph Conrad, "Preface to the Nigger of the Narcissus," in The Nigger of the Narcissus, ed. Cedric Watts (New York: Penguin, 1989; reprint, 1989). 2 Cited in Schwab, "Conrad’s American Speeches and His Reading from Victory."

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interest in the aesthetics of moving images, and they help to construct an index of

Conrad’s narrative style, particularly as it pertains to moving images and cinema.

Whereas Henry James drew analogies between his own work and painting,

Conrad spoke more directly to rendering visual images and drew direct connections

between narrative and cinema, such as those in his American speech cited above. To Eric

Pinker, the son of his then-agent, J.B. Pinker, he further described the basis of his

American lecture as following:

the (apparently) extravagant lines of the imaginative literary art being based

fundamentally on scenic motion, like a camera; with this addition that for certain

purposes the artist is a much more subtle and complicated machine than a camera,

and with a wider range, if in the visual effects less precise…3

Michael North has termed such narrative style “camera vision,” because cameras

(whether for cinema or photography) encouraged humans to criticize their own

perspectives and notice things previously invisible to the eye.4 To achieve his camera

vision, Conrad employs a highly descriptive narrative style, which renders details of

place and person. As in Henry James’s narratives, external details signal interiority. Yet

in Conrad’s work, the exterior and interior worlds remain largely discrete. Further,

Conrad’s treatment of externalities probes an anxiety about human vision stemming from

Muybridge’s work, and this treatment generally results in a crisis of the subject.5

3 Letter dated April 9, 1923 in Joseph Conrad, Joseph Conrad, Life and Letters, ed. G. Jean-Aubry, vol. II (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Page & Co., 1927), 283. 4 North, Camera Works: Photography and the Twentieth-Century Word, 30. 5 Doane writes of the “motifs of failure, deception, deficiency, and flaw” which surround nineteenth century discussions of the afterimage, in which Muybridge’s work was included. Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive, 79-80.

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Whereas James sought out a stable, if multiple, narrative perspective, Conrad’s fiction

renders indeterminate or unstable perspectives. For instance, Michael Levenson has

argued (following Leavis) Conrad’s Marlow provides a method of linking the internal

and external worlds as he mediates external objects through his consciousness. But rather

than render “facts”—those beastly things coveted by Mr. Vladimir in The Secret Agent

and by Jim’s jury in Lord Jim—Marlow (as well as other of Conrad’s narrative devices)

renders subjective details, the “sense of fact.” 6 Thus like James, Conrad seeks out a

central consciousness, but with Conrad’s narrative there is no pretense that it is stable or

authoritative.

Conrad admitted in the text of his American speech that his goals as a novelist

have been “concentrated on the visuality and precision of images,” something H.G. Wells

remarked upon in his Autobiography: “it was all against Conrad’s over-sensitized

receptivity that a boat could ever just be a boat. He wanted to see it and to see it only in

relation to something else.”7 Wells’s description of Conrad’s visual temperament signals

a formal visual framework consisting of descriptions of events and characters whose

significance is conveyed through structural position and orientation. Such structure

highlights subjective viewpoints through their very relationship, suggesting that no

authoritative view exists. By thematically rendering subjective human concerns related

6 Levenson, A Genealogy of Modernism: A Study of English Literary Doctrine, 1908-1922, 20. Leavis argues that through Marlow has a variety of uses, one of which is to serve as a “method of projection or representation.” F. R. Leavis, The Great Tradition; George Eliot, Henry James, Joseph Conrad (London: Chatto & Windus, 1950), 189. 7 H. G. Wells, Experiment in Autobiography; Discoveries and Conclusions of a Very Ordinary Brain (since 1866) (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1934), v. II, 619. Also cited in Linda Dryden, "A Note on When the Sleeper Wakes and Heart of Darkness," Notes and Queries, no. June (2004): 173. It should be noted that this desire on Conrad’s part is the antithesis of the outcomes of Muybridge’s studies, which showed the bodies depicted in isolation.

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to sight and vision, Conrad’s fiction engages with Muybridge’s motion studies and with

cinema. By utilizing a formal framework that hinges upon the presentations and

juxtaposition of images and scenes, he further employs the formal language of cinema

and motion pictures in his work. Conrad’s work, then, serves to extend the textual

indeterminacy evident in James’s later novels. In fact, uncertainty becomes a central

feature of Conrad’s work, arrived at through non-linear narrative structure and through an

unstable narrative voice. The compounded effect of these features is a lack of authority

of narrative voice and viewpoint, resulting in indeterminate structures and themes.

A boat, then, can never just be a boat. But Wells does not imply symbolism in his

statement; rather, Conrad’s narratives rely for their significance upon relationships and

associations built between things, characters, and scenes, such that an image of one thing

is only informed or understood through its adjacency or relation to something else. Such

a style, rather than being symbolic, consists of a spatial framework and temporal network

of events and characters, assembled in a fashion designed to educe the relations between

incidents and characters, rather than to follow a particular thread of narrative to its

resolution. As such, Conrad’s narrative style can be described as utilizing a montage

framework typically associated with film. Sergei Eisenstein, as I noted in Chapter Three,

describes filmic montage as “an uninterrupted interweaving of… diverse themes into one

unified movement. Each montage piece [has] a double responsibility—to build the total

line as well as continue the movement within each of the contributory themes.”8 Conrad

thus relies upon temporal and spatial frameworks to convey meaning and movement,

much in the way the Muybridge’s motion studies compartmentalized motion within

8 Eisenstein, The Film Sense, 76.

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individual frames. And even though Conrad’s temporal-spatial montages often portray a

tragic resolution of plot (almost everyone dies), moral indeterminacy remains—a result

which Conrad achieves through management of an ironic tone. Whereas James’s

utilization of themes and forms deriving from Muybridge’s work resulted in a crisis of

form, Conrad’s novels result in a crisis of the subject. Conrad’s narrative structure and

style serve to render shocking images to characters which suggest that human-created

meaning is not attested anywhere but in our own consciousnesses. Externalities provoke

internal despair, for as Muybridge’s work revealed, the natural world is written in a

language unavailable to human vision.

Joseph Conrad and Visual Narrative Structures

Conrad’s interest in moving pictures and cinema goes beyond metaphors he

employed in speeches and letters. He was one of the first authors in English to adapt his

works for the screen, and to date, his novels and short stories have been filmed over

eighty times. In 1913, he was approached by Pathé-Frères regarding reproduction of his

works for the cinema.9 In 1915, Conrad sold the motion picture rights to Romance, but a

film never materialized. A version of Victory appeared in 1919, making it the first of

Conrad’s works to be adapted for cinema.10 Later in his career, Conrad adapted some of

his works for the dramatic stage, including The Secret Agent. While such moves serve to

enhance Conrad’s career-long interest in linking written language with visual forms of

representation, they have been understudied and generally dismissed as economic

9 Knowles and Moore note that Conrad’s interest in adapting his works for the screen was “largely pecuniary.” Owen and Gene M. Moore Knowles, ed. The Oxford Reader's Companion to Conrad (New York: Oxford University Press,2000), 111. 10 Victory is also the Conrad work to be adapted most often—roughly eight times. See the “Filmography” section of Gene Moore’s Conrad on Film, pp. 224-49.

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maneuvers, as shown in the first chapter.11 But if we look beyond this preliminary

analysis, though, these adaptive works provide useful tools for understanding Conrad’s

synaesthetic motivation in writing as well as his visual narrative strategies.12

Yet Conrad’s interest in visual adaptations of his work extends the significance of

his attention to images and his highly developed sense of description in his prose. Even

though late-career adaptations have been critically neglected, the sales of the production

rights to his works began to occur after the commercial success of Chance (1914), which

Batchelor notes, “left him materially well off.”13 Thus while Conrad no doubt

appreciated the payments received from the sale of his works to film production

companies and through stage adaptations, and while the financial payback surely

encouraged his decision to make such moves, viewing them in light of Conrad’s

11 Knowles, ed. The Oxford Reader's Companion to Conrad. 12 Stephen Donovan, in his careful and long-overdue account of Conrad’s intersections with visual culture. Even though some of Donovan’s assessments lack historical precision, his overarching analysis demonstrates that Conrad’s work was informed by an interest in visual culture. For instance, Donovan reads Conrad’s shock at being confronted by a movie shooting gallery in Vienna to constitute surprise by “the sight of Scottish infantrymen in Vienna, a forceful reminder of the cinema’s ability to present spectators with lifelike animated images of those far away.” But this is not likely the cause of his shock, for the year was 1914 and cinema and moving images were culturally well-integrated by this point. In fact, it was due to the fear that cinema goers would tire of film that such formats as the cinema shooting gallery were developed—proprietors were constantly looking for new ways, some of them unscrupulous or macabre, to lure crowds. It is more likely that Conrad was shocked by the propagandistic—and senseless—violence of the display than by the Scots in kilts, prompting him to tell Borys to “take care you don’t hit any of those fellows” for to do so would have been to become complicit with the morally-vacuous spectacle. See Borys Conrad, My Father: Joseph Conrad (London: Calder & Boyars, 1970); Stephen Donovan, Joseph Conrad and Popular Culture (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).

For more on the development of screen practice, see Musser, The Emergence of Cinema: The American Screen to 1907; Popple, Toulmin, and University of Sheffield., Visual Delights: Essays on the Popular and Projected Image in the 19th Century; Vanessa Toulmin and Simon Popple, Visual Delights Two: Exhibition and Reception (Bloomington, IN: John Libbey; Distributed in North America by Indiana University Press, 2005). On the development of screen practice in England, see Linda Fitzsimmons, et al., ed. Moving Performance: British Stage and Screen, 1890s-1920s (Wiltshire, England: Flicks Books, 2000). 13 Batchelor, The Life of Joseph Conrad, 268.

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sustained interest in the visual aspects of the written word reveals that his desire to see his

works translated onto the stage and screen was not motivated solely (or even primarily)

by financial issues, for it is readily apparent that Conrad’s continued experimentation in

the process of rendering vision is evident throughout his life, and these later experiments

serve as an extension of his early prefatory statement for The Nigger of the Narcissus

defining art as a “single-minded attempt to render the highest kind of justice to the visible

universe.”14

When Conrad adapted The Secret Agent for the stage in 1919-20, he struggled

with rendering the novel’s bleak theme in less-controlled medium.15 To account for this

14 Joseph Conrad, "Preface to the Nigger of the Narcissus," in The Nigger of the Narcissus, ed. Cedric Watts (New York: Penguin, 1897), xlvii. 15 William Houze suggests that in adapting this novel for the London stage after the Great War, Conrad “implicitly reveals a dimension of his post-War mentality that could not but reacknowledge the validity of the negative assessment of human nature evident throughout The Secret Agent.” Conrad reflected as much in a letter to J.B. Pinker during the adaptation process, writing that “As I go on in my adaptation stripping off the garment of artistic expression and consistent irony which clothes the story in the book I perceive more clearly how it is bound to appear to the collective mind of the audience a merely horrible and sordid tale, giving a most unfavourable impression both of the writer himself and of his attitude to the moral aspect of the subject. In the book the tale, whatever its character, was at any rate not treated sordidly; neither in tone, nor in diction, nor yet in the suggested images.” Conrad further noted to Pinker that he had to “confess that [he] had no idea of what the story under the writing was till I came to grips with it in this process of dramatization.” Thomas Hemmeter argues, though, that when Conrad adapted this work for the stage, he “suppressed most of the work’s overt political material.” Nonetheless, the general substance of the plot remains, but the primary focus of the action is placed overtly upon Winnie, she “goes mad” rather than commit suicide, and many of the anarchists and double agents are excised. In so doing, Conrad presented a drama which sustained the novel’s bleak theme, while suppressing its political overtones. See Conrad, "Letter [dated Nov. 11, 1919]," in Letters from J. Conrad to J.B. Pinker (New York: The Berg Collection of The New York Public Library); Thomas Hemmeter, "Adaptation, History, and Textual Suppression: Literary Sources of Hitchcock's Sabotage," in Literature and Film in the Historical Dimension, ed. John D. Simons (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1994); William C. Houze, "The Secret Agent from Novel to Play," Conradiana 13 (1981).

Alfred Hitchcock re-set the drama in a cinema house when he adapted it for the screen in 1936 as Sabotage. In this film, Hitchock too excises much of the novel’s overt political material, substituting instead the trope of cinema. In Hitchcock’s film the bomb Stevie carries is placed within a film tin, making a direct association between film stock’s chemical instability and explosive devices. Alfred Hitchcock, "Sabotage," (UK: Gaumont British, 1936).

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lack of precision, he wrote lengthy stage directions, as well as at least one letter to the

play’s director Henry Benrimo, to compensate for loss of authorial command. When it

was staged in 1922, the play only ran for ten performances at the London Ambassadors

Theatre, but despite this short run, the first draft of the script holds some telling features

regarding Conrad’s visual style, which focuses attention on the look of a scene through

detailed description of externalities and develops action or character by juxtaposing

images. This play’s stage directions involve a visual precision and framing that the stage

does not easily allow. For instance, in Act IV Inspector Heat brings the torn bit of

Stevie’s jacket to Winnie, and the directives suggest a keen attention to the look of the

scene as well as to the characters’ relational placements, achievable only if viewed from a

singular, if shifting, point of view such as a camera:

H[eat] pulls out folded pink paper from pocket, throws it on counter, plunges

hand in pocket again and brings out piece of overcoat, as in Act Two: I suppose

you recognize this?

W[innie] takes it in both hands, walks to middle of shop, under gas, looks at the

cloth, and says, Yes. Steps back a pace and says, slowly, Why it is torn out like

this?

(The position nowise H. and W. instead of facing each other across the counter on

the left of the stage are in middle of the shop. H. having turned round as W.

moved out from behind counter they again face each other under gas jet but this

time W. is on the right and H. on the left.)16

16 Joseph Conrad, "The Secret Agent, a Drama," in BL MS Ashley 2946 (London: British Library, 1920).

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The considerable attention given to whom is facing whom, where, when, and under

which light source suggests that Conrad is considering how their faces would look and

would be lit, perhaps similar to medium close-up shots for film. But action and scenes

cannot be framed on stage the way they would be through a camera or in a novel, the

stage being a less easily focused medium. Conrad sustains this directive mode

throughout the remainder of the act, with some extended descriptions of the look of the

scene. In the previously described scene after Verloc and Heat exit, Winnie is left alone

on the stage:

They move towards the parlour door and exit one after another. H. last. Door

shut. Simultaneously W. totters towards counter, seizes folded paper. Falls on

chair, trembling from head to foot. Unfolding paper convulsively tears it in two,

and drops it on the floor. Glazed part of parlour door, which was dim before,

lights up brightly, and a shadow arm or hat flits on it. W. jumps up, runs to door,

falls on her knees against it with ear to keyhole and profile to audience.

Scene Shifts.

Note: It must be observed that when W. falls on chair, which is the chair on shop

side of the counter, she will be for an instant sitting with her back to audience and

facing parlour door. It is only when on her knees at keyhole that she will have a

profile position in reference to the auditorium.

Act IV: Scene 3

Change discloses parlour, as before.

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During this scene H. and Mr. V. are in a state of imperfectly suppressed

excitement. For the most part they talk loudly, only now and then dropping their

voices. There is a certain similarity in their personal appearance, both big men,

clothes same sort of cut, dark blue overcoats and round hats on. My intention is

that both should remain at the back, as near as possible to the door leading into

shop. Also it must be remembered that in the action there is no interval. Therefore

when the scene shifts H. Is still holding the handle of the door which he has just

shut. Mr. V is still very close to him, when the dialogue begins.

Staging such a scene change with no interval would be quite difficult in the theater, save

the use of a revolving stage. But a revolving stage would not allow for the profile view of

Winnie, as the stage would move; moreover, profile views on stage are hard to come by

given that the vantage point for each audience member differs. As written, this seems to

be a cross-cut, match-on-action, 180-degree shot for the cinema, with its exits, entrances,

lighting schema, and framing descriptions of particular vantage points (hand on

doorknob, face in profile to keyhole, etc.). Furthermore, Conrad drew at least five

diagrams for the stage setting, noting specific character positions in relation to both other

characters and to furniture and other props.17 Such intentionality and insistence on

Conrad’s part signals the importance of relational or associative frameworks and

meanings for his texts. Thus, Conrad’s visual style relies heavily upon juxtapositions of

symmetries and contrasting elements to convey meaning. As with the scene above,

Verloc (Mr. V) and Heat (H) are shown to be of a similar type, and visually Winnie is

separate from them but reliant open them as her keyhole-spectator position suggests. 17 ———, "The Secret Agent: Five Pen-and-Ink Diagrams for the Stage Setting," in Doubleday and Co. Files in the Berg Collection (New York: New York Public Library, undated).

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Conrad continued to stage direct via his writing desk through a letter to Benrimo,

describing himself almost apologetically as “a man of lasting impressions.” After which,

he wasted no space in making suggestions regarding the staging following his “first

visual experience of the play.”18 Primarily concerned about the look of the staged play,

Conrad wondered why his “ample” stage directions could not be followed, because “in

writing, I attached particular importance to Winnie, as it were, filling the stage. I want

the actual physical Winnie to be in the eye of the audience all the time from head to

foot.”19 Again, such desires suggest that Conrad is thinking of rendering the scene for

the screen, given his wish for Winnie to “fill the stage,” remaining in the audience’s eye

from “head to foot.” It is possible that thoughts of framing and staging for the cinema

occurred to Conrad as he adapted The Secret Agent for the stage, for just after he

completed this stage drama in 1920 he began adapting one of his works for cinema.

Conrad’s “Film Play” Gaspar, the Strong Man, adapted from his short story

“Gaspar Ruiz,” remains his only work never to be published in English.20 Generally

neglected by Conrad studies and once thought to be lost, this work merits consideration

not only in its own right but also in terms of its utility for understanding Conrad’s

18 ———, "T.L.S. To Joseph Henry Benrimo, Dated Oct. 19, 1922," in The Berg Collection (New York: New York Public Library, 1922). Emphasis in original. 19 Ibid. 20 Knowles and Moore note that “a translation of the manuscript draft appeared as ‘L’uomo forte’ in Opere varie, the fifth volume of Ugo Mursia’s Italian edition of Conrad’s collected works, Tutte le opera narrative di Joseph Conrad (Milan: Mursia, 1982). See Knowles, ed. The Oxford Reader's Companion to Conrad, 133.

It is worth noting that the variety of nomenclature for early film scripts and scenarios—film play, photo play, etc.—suggests the conceptual intermingling of film and cinema with photography, motion pictures, and the theater in the popular imagination.

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narrative form and style. 21 While described by Moore as “crude,” the handwritten

scenario contains formal structures which provide a useful comparative tool for analyzing

Conrad’s narrative style as well as for creating a more functional definition of

“cinematic” literature.

Consisting of 175 pages, the scenario for Gaspar, The Strong Man, consists of

three formal elements: “picture,” “screen,” and “action.” “Picture” seems to describe the

actual look of the projected images on the screen: positions of characters, geography,

scenery. “Screen” denotes intertitles, or the story-board convention of pre-sound cinema

for rendering background information, narrative, or dialogue to aid viewers in following

the story. “Action” seems to operate in a similar fashion to stage directions, denoting

21 Moore notes that reasons for critical neglect are two: “Gaspar Ruiz” is not highly regarded among Conrad scholars, nor was it regarded well by Conrad himself; he described it “to Edward Garnett and John Galsworthy as a ‘magazine fake.’” Moore further notes the “crude film scenario… was even rejected by the very producers who has encouraged Conrad to write it.” Moore, Conrad on Film, 31.

Additionally, the work merits critical attention in terms of its provenance and transmission history, which is largely outside of my argument here. But both the signed typescript and the handwritten scenario of this “film play” were purchased from Conrad by T.J. Wise in 1921. After Wise’s death in 1936, his collection passed to the British Library (Ashley Collection), and these two items were listed in Wise’s catalogues of his collection, which was erratically kept and catalogued: “the lack of an accurate and trustworthy catalogue has prevented this outstanding collection from being exploited as it ought. Wise’s lack of scholarship and of honesty, and his practice of dispersing related manuscripts throughout the collection, have made it impossible to accurately identify the contents.” Nonetheless, the handwritten scenario and signed typescript were never received by the British Library. See T. A. J. Burnett, ed. British Library Summary Catalogue to the Ashley Collection (London: British Library,1999).

It is very probable that from Wise these manuscripts went to Richard Curle, based on Curle’s Introduction to Wise’s A Conrad Library: “Conrad has been for a number of years a strong link between Mr. Wise and myself. Many precious Conrad items—horrible but inclusive word—passed, with his usual kindness, from Mr. Wise to me; a few passed from me to him.” See Richard Curle, "Introduction," in A Conrad Library, a Catalogue of Printed Books, Manuscripts, and Autograph Letters by Joseph Conrad, Collected by Thomas James Wise, ed. T. J. Wise (Edinburgh: Private Printing by Denedin Press, 1928), xvi. After Conrad’s death, Curle dispatched numerous letters to Edgar Wells, Esq. regarding his intent to sell his Conrad works. See ———, "Letters from Richard Curle to E. H. Wells Concerning the Sale of Joseph Conrad Manuscripts and Papers," in bMS AM 1317 (Cambridge: Houghton Library, Harvard University, 1926).

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character motivation as well as their mobility on the screen.22 The scenario offers more

“action” sequences at the beginning of the text, with “picture” and “screen” dominating

the latter two-thirds. While Conrad was engaged in writing his “film-play”—done at the

request of Famous Players–Lasky Film Co.—he wrote to Thomas J. Wise, a manuscript

collector who purchased many of Conrad’s first drafts, offering the manuscript along

with the first type-script of the film-play.23 Conrad admonished Wise not to mention to

anyone that he had written it, since it might not have been accepted and he didn’t want to

have a failure.24 Conrad wrote again a week later to describe the manuscript further:

This MS is the complete summary scenario of the Film Play entitled THE

STRONG MAN, and is of course from beginning to end written in my own hand.

It is in no sense a collection of notes, but a consecutive development of the story

in a series of descriptions, just as the whole thing presented itself to me when I

first began to think the subject out in its purely visual aspect. Such a line of

composition being perfectly novel to me, I found it necessary to write it all down

so as to have the whole thing embodied in a definite shape, before I could attempt

to elaborate it into a detailed presentation for the reading of the Films’ Literary

Editor.25

22 Joseph Conrad, "Gaspar, the Strong Man: Autograph Ms.," in Keating Collection (New Haven: Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, 1920). 23 After his death, Wise became known more for his forgeries of the Romantics (primarily Coleridge), although all of his Conrad manuscripts have been found to be authentic. See Burnett, ed. British Library Summary Catalogue to the Ashley Collection. 24 Letter dated Oct 24 in Joseph Conrad, "Letter to T. J. Wise," in BL MS Ashley 2953: Joseph Conrad Letters (London: British Library, Oct. 1920). 25 Letter dated Nov 1 in Ibid.

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In September of the same year, Famous Players transferred the head of their New York

Scenario department, Mr. Robert MacAlrney, to London where he would “have general

charge of all dealings with Authors, etc.” J.C. Graham of Famous Players wrote to

Pinker about this transfer, noting that MacAlrney would “arrange the definite contract

covering Mr. Joseph Conrad’s services as a special writer of film stories.”26 The scenario

was ultimately turned down by the production company, with MacAlrney writing to

Pinker in April of 1921:

Of course we are anxious to have a Conrad story. But, frankly, I do not think Mr.

Conrad should have offered us an adaptation of any of this published stories. We

have gone over, extremely carefully, everything Mr. Conrad has written. If we

had thought these contained the germ of what we could have made into a

powerful picture play, we should have done it long ago.

What I hope you can impress upon Mr. Conrad is that our attitude is not at

all antipathetic. We hold the utmost regard for the literary quality of his work.

But, since we are working with a medium which, although at times, elastic, is

very often hard and restraining, we cannot proceed with the making of a film

drama which our production instinct tells us would be weak commercially.27

Even though Famous Players–Lasky Co. opted not to adapt Conrad’s work for the screen,

its unique formal qualities do offer a glimpse of what Conrad considered a work’s

“purely visual aspect,” as he wrote to Wise. Intrinsically, then, this work provides a

26 J. C. Graham, "Letter to J.B. Pinker," in Paramount Pictures Correspondence (New York: The Berg Collection of the New York Public Library, 11 Aug 1920). 27 R. E. MacAlrney, "Letter to J.B. Pinker," in Paramount Pictures Correspondence (New York: The Berg Collection of the New York Public Library, April 29, 1921).

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guide to Conrad’s visual style. The style of this scenario suggests immediacy through its

fragmentary construction of discrete series of images intercut with action and dialogue,

and the immediacy is further compounded by the use of the present verbal tense

throughout. Moreover though, rather than being a late-career oddity, this work

demonstrates the culmination of a style Conrad employed in earlier works such as The

Secret Agent, which also rendered narrative development by intercutting images of scenes

and characters in order to achieve an effect of visual immediacy and to convey

relationships between characters and actions.

Instantaneity in The Secret Agent

Whereas Henry James’s work is concerned with instantaneous vision, Conrad’s

novel The Secret Agent deploys instantaneous devices and events which have the

consequence of disfiguring bodies. Such treatment of instantaneity engages Muybridge’s

studies thematically, for these images were initially seen to have disfiguring effects.

Muybridge’s studies, as demonstrated in chapter two, were thought to present

“grotesque” and “impossible” positions of bodies in motion. And while one response to

these seeming unnatural images was mockery, another was fear and anxiety. Thus while

Muybridge’s work produced anxiety about the limits of human vision, it also produced

anxieties about the human body in unnatural or disgraceful positions.

Disfiguration is introduced to the novel through the character of Stevie, not

simply because he is mentally handicapped, but because the “instantaneous” bomb he

carried left his body in a “state of disintegration.”28 The word “instantaneous” surrounds

28 Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent, Oxford World Classic ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1907), 87.

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both descriptions of his demise and descriptions of the bomb carried by the Professor,

suggesting a metaphoric link between the Professor’s bombs and Muybridge’s

photography, but the link extends beyond metaphor.

One of the most elusive characters in the novel, and the most anarchic, is the

Professor. Decidedly American, the bomb-carrying Professor searches for the “perfect

detonator” and is “incorruptible” primarily because he believes in nothing. Several

critics and historians have posed suggested sources for this character, ranging from a

cousin of Ford Madox Ford to a neighbor of Conrad’s. 29 But other possibilities exist,

too, which have implications beyond the political aspects of the novel. Conrad

cryptically wrote in the Author’s Note that “the suggestion for certain personages of the

tale, both law-abiding and lawless, came from various sources which, perhaps here and

there, some reader may have recognized. They are not very recondite.”30 Perhaps then,

to take Conrad at his word, the sources are not so far flung but rather are mired in the

novel’s historical milieu of the late nineteenth century.

The initial news reports of Muybridge’s motion studies, prior to his work at the

University of Pennsylvania, refer to him as “Prof. Muybridge”—a title which at first

blush does not seem fitting given his lack of educational credentials, even if he was

engaged in research on the physiology of motion.31 If we view this title, though, in a

29 Suggestions come from Norman Sherry, Conrad's Western World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971). The suggestion with the most historical evidence comes from Paul Avrich who proposes that the provenance of the Professor lies in the persona of a one Professor Mezzeroff, who penned a statement for the American anarchist paper The Alarm in 1880 describing his proclivity to carry bombs with him onto street cars. Paul Avrich, "Conrad's Anarchist Professor: An Undiscovered Source," Labor History 18, no. 3 (1977): 401-402. 30 Conrad, The Secret Agent, xxxviii. 31 See for instance "Realities of Animal Motion."

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different context—that of motion picture projection—we arrive at a different

understanding of both the title and an alternative reason for Conrad’s deployment of it in

The Secret Agent. Conrad’s Professor attempts “to invent a detonator that would adjust

itself to all conditions of action, and even to unexpected conditions. A variable and yet

perfectly precise mechanism. A really intelligent detonator.”32 The Professor also

describes the detonator on the bomb he carries as based “on the principle of a pneumatic

instantaneous regulator for a camera lens.”33 Muybridge himself was credited in the

press, although he only held the patent, for a “pneumatic regulator for clocks” in 1879

(See Figures 4.1 and 4.2).34 One news report described his device as very adaptable:

The pneumatic regulator may be applied to any ordinary clock operated by

weights, springs, and other motive power. It consists of a series of hollow bells,

plunging into and emerging alternately from vessels filled with a liquid.35

Such coincidence of title and device suggests a correspondence between Conrad’s

Professor and those like Muybridge who were part showmen, part scientist, part inventor,

and in doing so, suggests an alternative interpretation of the character of the Professor

and of Muybridge’s motion studies.

32 ———, The Secret Agent, 67. 33 Ibid., 66. 34 "Pneumatic Regulator for Clocks," Scientific American XL, no. 9 (1879): 130. 35 Ibid.

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Figure 4.1: Pneumatic Regulator for Clocks Figure 4.2: Pneumatic Clock

Muybridge was not the only illustrated lecturer to carry the title “professor.”

Mervyn Heard notes, many proprietors of early motion picture shows took titles,

including “Professor,” which for Heard’s argument provides evidence of their flamboyant

extroversion.36 But numerous early projectionists were, in their primary roles,

professors.37 In addition to this historical association of projection practitioners with the

title of Professor, the title also began to be used in the late-seventeenth century as a

“grandiose or mock title, assumed by or applied to professional teachers and exponents of

36 Mervyn Heard, "'Come in Please, Come out Pleased': The Development of British Fairground Bioscope Presentation and Performance," in Moving Performance: British Stage and Screen, 1890s-1920s, ed. Linda Fitzsimmons, et al. (Wiltshire: Flicks Books, 2000), 106. Other assumed titles included “Colonel,” “Senator,” and “Captain.” 37 Charles Musser, in his careful history of screen practice, demonstrates that one of the first projectionists was Anthanasius Kircher, a seventeenth-century priest and scientist who created a projection device, a “catoptric lamp,” used to cast images onto the wall of a dark room. Kircher wrote on the proper use and exhibition of projection devices, lest they be confused with magic, and important for my point here, was a professor at Universität Würzburg. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century projectionists, such as Emile Reynaud (inventor of the praxinoscope in 1876) and Etienne Gaspard Robertson (inventor of the Fantasmagorie in 1799) also began as university professors.Musser, The Emergence of Cinema: The American Screen to 1907, 17.

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various popular arts and activities, as dancing, performing, etc.”38 Additionally unlike

modern-day projection practices which involve both stable electric current and safety

film, both pre- and early-cinema practices were decidedly dangerous and prone to

spontaneous combustion, explosion, and fire. In pre-cinematic projections such as the

Fantasmagorie and the praxiscope, the combination of open flames and chemicals needed

for light projection required operational skill. Musser notes that Robertson’s

Fantasmagorie involved:

[a] large stationary lantern [which] often displayed a background on which figures

projected from smaller lanterns could move. Operators of these small lanterns

roamed about behind the screen to change the relative size and position of their

images. The operator even controlled the intensity of light: when he approached

the screen, the amount of projection light was reduced so the image would not

brighten.39

Thus, the central projectionist also coordinated operators of smaller lanterns, all of whom

required skill and experience in working with chemicals and fire. Even with the

emergence of cinema in the late nineteenth century, the hazards of operation did not

dissipate.

Having first acquired the necessary explosive gases, oxygen, and hydrogen, the

next hazard was to establish a balanced mix jet of sufficient intensity to irradiate

the lump of slaked lime, which would, in turn, produce the necessary limelight.

38 "Professor," in Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). 39 ———, The Emergence of Cinema: The American Screen to 1907, 25.

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There were constant explosions, and, had it not been for the costly investment in

the equipment, the task might have been at any time abandoned as a bad job.40

Just as Conrad’s Professor seeks the “perfect detonator,” projectionist professors likewise

sought a happy mix of oxygen and hydrogen to detonate calcium in order to create

limelight, suggesting that the Professor acts to signal a larger metaphor in the text

pertaining to moving images and motion pictures. And this reading suggests that

scientifically determined aesthetics are a form of violence, for Muybridge’s images were

iconoclastic in that they broke the old paradigms of representation.

Prodger has argued that gradually old conventions dissipated as people began to

accept the new photographic evidence as definitive:

But they did not go without a fight. In the case of the galloping horse, for

example, the ventre a terre convention persisted for several years after Muybridge

published his celebrated photographs of galloping horses in the 1870s.

Eventually, the new standard of photographic evidence was accepted as correct.41

This is not to say, of course, that art gave itself over wholly to science, but that aesthetic

representation changed markedly. Prodger goes on to note that a “new visual language

formed, based on not what was customary and agreed upon, but on what was shown to be

true.” 42 But even as aesthetic representation developed a heightened attention to surface

detail, in fictional narrative at least this surface precision is often undercut by an unstable

40 Heard, "'Come in Please, Come out Pleased': The Development of British Fairground Bioscope Presentation and Performance," 101-102. 41 Prodger, Time Stands Still: Muybridge and the Instantaneous Photography Movement. 42 Ibid., 28, 31.

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or unreliable point of view and an ironic tone, as in The Secret Agent—a decidedly

modernist technique which dislodges the possibility of finite resolution of plot or theme.

Through this extended metaphor linking the Professor to instantaneous devices

used for motion pictures and cinema, he embodies uncertainty in the text: he has a

ghostly presence, slight but firm; he believes in nothing except for his instantaneous

shutters, which is to say that he believes in death; he is shabby, yet incorruptible. And

because he carries his India-rubber ball in his pocket at all times attached to his

instantaneous detonator, he is consistently viewed at a distance. When the narrative lets

us close enough, we see what he sees, but we don’t ever know anything about him. As

such, like the cinema, he is something to be watched, and at the novel’s close, it is he

who, also like the cinema, goes on.

Louis Lumière is said to have remarked that cinema was an invention without a

future. 43 By this, he probably meant that he could not imagine cinema having extended

appeal or functionality beyond its initial novelty.44 Retrospectively, of course, this

comment seems a comical underestimation of the reach and power of cinema. But

Lumière’s statement also reveals an unintended irony: in its revelation of movement and

presentation of lifelike scenes, cinema is always coming into being—always existing in

the present tense, rather than the past. Given Conrad’s overarching ironic tone in The

Secret Agent, the final image and assessment of the Professor should be viewed with

43 Upon the eve of the cinema, Loius Lumière remarked that it was “an invention without a future.” Quoted in Andersen, "Eadweard Muybridge, Zoopraxographer". 44 Tom Gunning notes that the Lumieres initially presented projections from the cinematographe only as an “afterthought” in one of their early, non-commercial screenings. Only after audience demands for an encore, did they rethink their invention. See Gunning, "A Mischievous and Knowing Gaze ", 318.

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guarded skepticism. Although the Professor has no future, as a type he will always be in

the present, just like the cinema.

Aesthetics of Indeterminacy

Like James, Conrad is intent upon rendering images for both their representative

and their associative value. But whereas the changing subject-ground relationship signals

a loss for James, Conrad acknowledges their irreducible indeterminacy. For James, the

external world is discernable, approachable, if only through the interior consciousness.

And more importantly for James, this exterior world serves to illuminate interiority. But

Conrad differs from James in this instance, for the external world is impervious and

indifferent to the human consciousness. Additionally, this incomprehensibility proffers

an aesthetic opportunity for Conrad, for he presents the world as a series of discrete

images, detached from human consciousness. In order to illustrate the impermeable

nature of the external world, Conrad often renders shadows which serve to signal that the

exterior world can act upon the human body, but the human shadow cast leaves no effect.

Consider, for instance, the following passage from The Heart of Darkness (1899): as

Marlow tells his narrative, he describes first overhearing and then watching the shadows

of the Company manager and his nephew engage in a conversation and then exit. Marlow

describes their departure thus:

The sun was low; and leaning forward side by side, they seemed to be tugging

painfully uphill their two ridiculous shadows of unequal length, that trailed behind

them slowly over the tall grass without bending a single blade.45

45 Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, ed. Robert Kimbrough, Third ed., An Authoritative Text (New York: W.W. Norton, 1898), 35.

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While the unequal shadows suggest unequal power relations in the human realm, the

external world remains unchanged: no blade of grass is bent.

While James produced a two-tiered response to Muybridge’s work by rejecting

mimeographic realism while also formally engaging the more suggestive aspects of these

studies, Conrad proffers a more willing acceptance of the indeterminacies posed by

moving images. Thus, whereas James’s entire focus is upon interiority, upon rendering

interior consciousness, Conrad exploits images to convey a crisis of the subject. Like

James, Conrad’s novels convey indeterminacy, but whereas James continues to seek a

center of consciousness, Conrad remains in the margins. For instance, the main event of

The Secret Agent is rendered indirectly through multiple viewpoints. Initially, it is

remarked upon by a char woman, but it is told through other sources as well: Ossipon

hears it from a newsboy, and he then tells the Professor; Winnie learns of it by

overhearing Inspector Heat. An authoritative version of the event, if one exists, lies with

Winnie—a character who was not present for the act. Winnie sees the act of violence for

what it is: senseless, pointless homicide. But the novel’s task, and that of Conrad’s larger

oeuvre, is not to seek a center of consciousness to substitute for a loss of consensus, of

authority, but instead to represent this indeterminacy for what it is. Even if the narrative

does waiver in its perspective, it does not vacillate in its representation of indeterminacy.

Given Conrad’s attention to the look of the scene, it is not surprising that in his “Up River Book,” the handwritten diary of his journey up the Congo that provided material for both his Congo Diary and Heart of Darkness, contains sketches of scenery. Additionally, written in the back of the book is a list of items purchased for the trip, including a Kodak Camera which was apparently purchased from the Eastman Dry Slate and Film Co. at 115 Oxford Street in London for £7. ———, "Up River Book," in MS Eng 46 (Houghton Library, Harvard University, undated).

130

Nostromo extends the indeterminacy of an interior-exterior separation when

Decoud is shipwrecked on an island: “Not a living being, not a speck of distant sail,

appeared within the range of his vision; and, as if to escape from this solitude, he

absorbed himself in his melancholy.”46 This rendering emphasizes the separation

Decoud feels from the world. But after a while he doubts his own existence and

contemplates the “universe as a succession of incomprehensible images.”47 The

externalities provoke internal despair; the sun and the water all remain unchanged, and

maddeningly so. As such, there is nothing for him to grab onto psychically:

Decoud caught himself entertaining a doubt of his own individuality. It had

merged into the world of cloud and water, of natural forces and forms of nature.

In our activity alone do we find the sustaining illusion of an independent

existence as against the whole scheme of things of which we form a helpless

part.48

Thus, Nostromo presents a crisis of the subject by visually rendering externalities which

act upon Decoud in their indifference but upon which he can have no effect.

The physical objects Decoud relates to and interacts with are human-made—belt

with a revolver and a boat—and they possess the capacity to move him through or out of

the world. This scene presents an exterior world which doesn’t care about the individual;

humans are left to make meaning out of an indifferent world. Decoud fails to do so, and

ultimately uses both the revolver and the boat. He takes the last action available to him,

46 Joseph Conrad, Nostromo, ed. Martin Seymour-Smith, Reprint ed. (New York: Penguin, 1990), 416. 47 Ibid., 414. 48 Ibid., 413.

131

when he cannot engage with the world: he acts upon himself by committing suicide. As

he fell into the water, its “glittering surface remained untroubled by the fall of his

body.”49 Thus:

A victim of disillusioned weariness which is the retribution meted out to

intellectual audacity, the brilliant Don Martin Decoud, weighted by the bars of

San Tomé silver, disappeared without a trace, swallowed up by the immense

indifference of things.50

The rendering of Decoud’s death suggests that humans make no impact upon the world.

The exterior world—the series of incomprehensible images—is already written, set with

its own inscrutable language. Muybridge’s studies uncovered this possibility by exposing

the invisible language of movement—a discovery which went well beyond the simple

confirmation of unsupported transit in horses.

The sun rises and sets numerous times upon Decoud while he is in the boat, which

serves to count the days, foregrounding temporality. The sequence, though, also serves

to emphasize repetition, which we count as time and perceive as forward movement. In

this instance, however, no forward movement occurs, only repetitive sameness which

ultimately drives Decoud to his self-inflicted death. The only action left to him is to

break with the world, since he cannot be aligned with it. These revelations, as begun by

Muybridge’s work and rendered in Conrad’s prose, suggest that all the meaning we have

created—time, money—is not attested anywhere but in our own consciousnesses. While

49 Ibid., 416. 50 Ibid.

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the sun rises and sets and silver is rendered from the earth, these things do not have the

meaning we give them.

As Conrad’s novels suggest, the external world does not care about individuality,

and humans’ relationship with the exterior world appears to be unidirectional. Humanity

must make meaning out of an indifferent world. Whereas James struggled with the loss

of a consensus view of reality, Conrad finds a form of existential consensus in human

mortality. Isabel makes decisive action in Portrait, but we know it is futile. Her external

circumstances are set, even though she may struggle against them. Conversely, Decoud

gives up the struggle to find meaning and makes the only decisive action available to

him. And as Winnie loses her locus of meaning in Stevie, she too finds solace in death.

Beneath the surface of this bleak turn, however, is the anxiety stemming from

Muybridge’s studies that humans have no effect upon what is and are living within a

world that is both indifferent and indiscernible to them. Conrad, though, capitalizes upon

this anxiety, ultimately breaking with the search for consensus. As with the Captain’s

understanding of his ghostly double in “The Secret Sharer” (1910), external action

confidently separates from interior knowledge.

When viewed in conjunction with James’s fiction, this separation of the internal

human realm from the inscrutability of the exterior world denotes a final stage in the

severing of the interior and exterior realms, indicative more broadly of the modernist

preoccupation with interiority. In James’s fiction, objects serve to reflect human

consciousness and give specificity to human subjectivity. In such renderings, the external

world is concrete, and human subjectivity is privileged. In James’s later fiction as in the

majority of Conrad’s, the external world of objects is knowable only through human

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consciousness, but the knowledge and truth provided by this external world is not stable

or static. This knowledge is changeable by both externalities, such as light or distance,

and by the subjectivity of the looker (mood, point of view). As such, the external world

is shown to be malleable and changeable. External truth in these works is defined by an

interior consciousness, rendering subjective truths.

Conrad’s fiction extends these latter moves by revealing that the external world of

objects has its own life, separate from and invisible to human consciousness and

perception. Objects in these fictional worlds exist separate from human interaction and

perception, like the house in the “Time Passes” section of To the Lighthouse (1927). Not

coincidentally, each of these sequences of the division of the interior and exterior worlds

in modernist literature was present either in Muybridge’s work or in the response they

engendered. Moving images facilitated a radical change in vision and perception which

began well before the commercialization of cinema in 1895. As such, analyses of

cinema’s import to modernism must extend not only beyond high-modernist works of the

Twenties and Thirties, but also beyond cinema into the numerous technologies and

scenarios that coalesced to produce it. Unlike Conrad’s ironic treatment of the Professor,

moving images did have a future, and they served to spawn surprising and rapid changes

in realist representation, developing a subjective form of realism that became known

more generally as modernism.

CHAPTER 5

CONCLUSION

I rather like it. This swift change of scene, this blending of emotion and experience—it is much better than the heavy, long-drawn-out kind of writing to which we are accustomed.

It is closer to life. In life, too, changes and transitions flash by before our eyes, and emotion of the soul are like a hurricane. The cinema has divined the mystery of motion.

And that is greatness. – Leo Tolstoy

The cinema is an invention without a future. – Louis Lumière1

In 1933, when Honorable John M. Woolsey lifted the publication ban in the U. S.

on Joyce's Ulysses, he declared that Ulysses "is not pornographic"; rather, Woolsey went

on to note, "in writing Ulysses, Joyce sought to make a serious experiment in a new

literary genre … Joyce has attempted to show how the screen of consciousness with its

ever-shifting kaleidoscopic impressions carries … not only what is in the focus of each

man's observation of the actual things about him, but also in a penumbral zone residua of

past impressions … What he seeks to get is not unlike the results of a double or, if that is

possible, a multiple exposure on a cinema film."2 Following Woolsey’s analogy,

numerous critics have subsequently drawn parallels between modern literature and

cinema, focusing almost exclusively on works produced contemporaneously with Joyce’s

tome. And while these correspondences certainly exist, they can benefit from further

historicizing both of cinema as a practice and a form and of the commonly deployed term

1 Quoted in Andersen, "Eadweard Muybridge, Zoopraxographer". 2 Hon. John M. Woolsey. “United States Discrict Court, Southern District of New York, Opinion A.” 110-59. December

6, 1933. Quoted in the Introduction to Ulysses. James Joyce, Ulysses (New York: Vintage International, 1990). Emphasis added.

135

cinematic. As I have shown, features commonly associated with so-called “cinematic”

literature also were present in literature existing before the emergence of cinema.

Before Muybridge’s work artistic and scientific truth were interdependent

enterprises, but his motion studies and the discussions they fostered facilitated a rift

between aesthetics and science. Muybridge’s work, nonetheless, remained on the cusp of

these two areas. His work ultimately split discussions concerning representation into two

camps: the scientifically accurate and the visually suggestive.3 And this was no small

divide. While Muybridge presented these studies as scientific, he declared them to be of

use to artists and painters, making an implicit argument that art should follow science,

that art should mirror reality or life. Such assertions, as I have shown, raised further

questions, and it is on this same cusp between scientific accuracy and aesthetic

representation that modernist aesthetics finds its primary components: fragmentation,

concern with time and space, rejection of linearity and accuracy. Further, it is here that

modernist aesthetics retreats from the primarily scientific, situating aesthetic truth in the

perceptual field of the artist. This is not to say that modernists reject the scientific—

James Joyce, John Dos Passos, Virginia Woolf, and others, of course, play with the

scientific by condensing time and expanding space. But such moves acknowledge

scientific accuracy while undercutting it: humans may be made subject to time, but the

superiority of human perception within the time-space continuum remains primary.

Thus, by way of concluding, I would like to return to the question of “cinematic”

literature, referred to by so many. Hitherto, the term has usually been deployed rather

3 For more on the aesthetic and scientific division in Muybridge’s work, see Andersen, "Eadweard Muybridge, Zoopraxographer"; Braun, "Muybridge's Scientific Fictions."

136

loosely and, in particular, without historicity. I hope that by reviewing Henry James’s

and Joseph Conrad’s work in the context of the emergence of moving images will

encourage scholars of modernism to refocus the critical debate linking cinema and

literature toward a greater historicity of motion pictures, cinema, and their attendant

technologies and screen practices. For, as I have demonstrated, “cinematic” literature

existed in a time before cinema.

All of the elements thus far associated with other critical analyses of “cinematic”

literature—montage, immediacy, motion, multiple perspectives—exist within the terms

of Muybridge’s studies, which are themselves more or less visually cinematic. Re-

assessing “cinematic” historically, then, provides a new approach to understanding the

subject-object separation in modernism. As I have suggested, this rupture began when

Muybridge’s work revealed that the external world is unknowable to unaided human

vision, and narrative and art moved to locate aesthetic truth in the human body. But even

this was unstable, for Muybridge’s work eliminated, even though it sought to replace, a

view of the external world relying upon consensus. Thus, singular viewpoints became as

suspect as multiple perspectives. In fact, the evidentiary language of Muybridge’s work

suggests that a multiple and encyclopedic rendering of the external world is desirable.

Further historicizing of cinematic modes and practices further reveals that early

moving images and cinema existed in a variety of cultural realms and social contexts,

undermining the traditional low-high dichotomy often readily employed by critics

assessing the intersections of film and literature. Since the term “cinematic” is in current

literary-critical useage, I don’t propose eradicating it from critical parlance. Yet, given

137

that Muybridge’s work inaugurated terms and concepts which we associate with cinema

into a world before cinema, we are left at a critical-linguistic impasse.

In utilizing the term we must do so with reference to screen practice. We must

historicize the technologies and practices associated with period that we are analyzing,

allowing for the term to render dynamically the implications for literature of the complex

and changing forms of cinema. A dynamic use of the term allows us to uncover the

language of the cinema in the novel as both forms develop, providing for the exploration

of questions linking literature and specific technological or generic aspects of film, such

as, the development of sound cinema, the emergence of narrative film, and the cinema of

attractions. Moreover, how does literature explore or resist the formal conventions of any

of these cinematic forms? Such critical questions and processes will lead to a more

dynamic and rich understanding of the multiple intersections of moving images with

literature. As Gunning has shown, the contextualization of films in their historical period

has been largely ignored in Film Studies until quite recently.4 Literary analyses stand to

benefit from the recent historiographic work undertaken in film history, offering

considerable fertile ground for the study of literature and film.

All literature deriving from an aesthetics based upon moving images will have

basic similarities in structure—immediacy, multiple perspectives, montage—but there is

more to both literature and to cinema than these aspects. To move the discussion into

more productive territory, analyses of literature and cinema, especially modernist

literature and cinema, must begin to historicize cinema as it has been historicized in film

studies—as a technical process and product of diverse type and form deriving from a

4 Gunning, D.W. Griffith and the Origins of American Narrative Film: The Early Years at Biograph, 5.

138

variety of modes and media in the late-nineteenth century. Such a move will allow for a

more productive critical exploration of the fertile ground that is the intersection of cinema

and literature. Further, understanding cinema as a dynamic and changing medium will

provide for more productive examinations of narrative of the many twentieth century

authors who also wrote for the cinema.5

Just as the intersections of cinema and literature are many, so are those of early

moving images and literature. This dissertation has explored one point of intersection of

Muybridge’s work with modern literature, but further study is needed. For instance,

several American modernists commonly associated with imagism—Ezra Pound, William

Carlos Williams, and Hilda Doolittle (HD)—shared the preoccupations of Muybridge’s

work. Like James, they too were privy to the production and circulation of Muybridge’s

motion studies, for Muybridge completed his research at the University of Pennsylvania

just a few short years before Williams and Pound matriculated.

Writing of Degas’s paintings, Paul Valéry drew a tangible link between Degas

and Muybridge, noting that Degas was “among the first to study the real positions of the

noble animal in movement, in the ‘instantaneous’ photographs taken by Major

Muybridge.”6 While noting that Muybrige’s work uncovered mistaken human vision,

Valéry suggests that these studies demonstrated “just how inventive the eye is,” further

suggesting that “it might be worthwhile to try to define, by means of documentary

comparisons, this kind of creative seeing by which the understanding filled the gaps in

5 Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Ford, Isherwood, and Huxley are just a few of the many novelist who also wrote for the cinema. 6 Paul Valéry, Degas, Manet, Morisot, Bollingen Series 45, 12 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989), 40.

139

sense perception.”7 Valéry is, of course, correct to note the creative vision which was

informed by Muybridge’s work. And as we have seen, once this creative vision realized

that it did not see things accurately or objectively, it began to explore other interior,

subjective realms.

Muybridge’s images depicted living beings in views, and in motion, never before

seen. These motion studies entranced the public and facilitated a crisis in both perception

and representation, and the reception of these studies in aesthetic circles met divergent

responses—in some cases fostering excitement, while facilitating rejection and

condemnation in others. Importantly, though, these first motion pictures were not,

materially or technically, films or cinema. They were photographs which had been taken

in rapid sequence, the slides of which were re-assembled and projected in rapid

succession through devices modeled on the magic lantern. In common parlance the terms

“cinema” and “movie” mean roughly the same things now, but it’s important to

distinguish critically between the terms “cinema” which derives from “cinematograph”—

the camera initially used both to record and project films, “film” which derives from the

rolls of celluloid upon which images were captured, and “movies” or “motion pictures”

which derive from the time immediately preceding the technological and chemical

development of film as a medium, a time when photographic images began to move.

7 Ibid., 41.

140

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