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Download (1865Kb) A Thesis Submitted for the Degree of PhD at the University of Warwick Permanent WRAP URL: http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/101777 Copyright and reuse: This thesis is made available online and is protected by original copyright. Please scroll down to view the document itself. Please refer to the repository record for this item for information to help you to cite it. Our policy information is available from the repository home page. For more information, please contact the WRAP Team at: [email protected] warwick.ac.uk/lib-publications Reading Seeing: Visuality in the Contemporary Novel by Camilla Weaver A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English and Comparative Literary Studies University of Warwick Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies September 2017 i Contents Acknowledgements ii Declaration iii Abstract iv Introduction: Reading for Visuality 1 Chapter One: Teju Cole 1.1 Writing in a Visual Context 49 1.2 Looking Closely 57 1.3 A Photographic Aesthetic 68 1.4 Photographic Structures 80 1.5 Opacity 94 Chapter Two: Ali Smith 2.1 The Novel as Fresco 107 2.2 Portraiture 112 2.3 The Pose 127 2.4 Invisibility 141 2.5 An Ethics of Vision 151 Chapter Three: Helen Oyeyemi 3.1 The Centrality of Description 163 3.2 Race and Colour 170 3.3 The Visual Field’s Possibilities 181 3.4 Reading Faces 190 Conclusion: Showing Seeing 203 Images Cited 210 Bibliography 212 ii Acknowledgments I would like to thank my supervisor Dr. Christina Lupton for her invaluable help, guidance, and encouragement throughout my research. Many thanks also to Dr. Ross Forman for his insightful comments in the early stages of this project. And thank you too to Dr. Cristina Britzolakis for all of her help throughout. Finally, I would like to thank the Wolfson Foundation, for making this project possible. iii Declaration This thesis is submitted to the University of Warwick in support of my application for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English and Comparative Literary Studies. It has been composed by myself and has not been submitted in any previous application for any degree. iv Abstract This study argues that contemporary literature archives and articulates its wider visual environment. It develops an interdisciplinary methodology, making a case for visuality as something that can be read. This study rethinks how we approach literary criticism: it asks that a reader bring awareness of a wider visual culture and an understanding of how images work to the text. Close reading reveals how description, far from being ornamental to narrative, drives much of the thematic or theoretical content of a given novel. These texts do not simply replicate their wider image environment; they engage with it on a critical level. A visual approach can illuminate literary concerns and techniques. But, equally, the novel form has a lot to tell us about the structures and issues attendant on the image. The first chapter considers how Teju Cole’s prose emulates certain visual forms, particularly photography. For this author, writing and reading have an inherent affinity with visualization. And his work has much to tell us about the ethical and historical issues that attach to particular techniques and targets of visual representation. The second chapter reads character description in Ali Smith’s fiction from the perspective of visual portraiture. It shows how description stages conversations to do with gender and identity, and with the limitations of narrow categorization in both respects. Smith’s novels then propose certain strategies as correctives to the dangers associated with a highly visual cultural environment. The final chapter focuses on how Helen Oyeyemi’s work exposes race’s uneasy relationship with vision and visual representation. Like Cole and Smith, for Oyeyemi the novel is a valuable and flexible space within which to explore the possibilities and limitations of the visual field as an area for expression, for representation, and for the unfolding of identity. 1 Introduction: Reading for Visuality But it is not only that this imaginary camera lens intervenes between the world and our look, structuring what we see in photographic terms, but also that we experience ourselves-as-spectacle in relation to it. Kaja Silverman, The Threshold of the Visible World. 1 In this thesis I look at the relation between visuality and contemporary fiction. Specifically, I examine the ways that the fiction of Ali Smith, Teju Cole, and Helen Oyeyemi argue for, and benefit from, a visually attuned theoretical approach. More widely, my point is a methodological and firmly interdisciplinary one: I want to make a case for visuality as something that can be read. In The Threshold of the Visible World, Kaja Silverman writes of our ‘cultural image repertoire’ or ‘screen’ – the visual field that conditions how we come to see and interpret the world and ourselves. We ‘experience our specularity’ in accordance with the wider image conditions of our culture. For Silverman, writing in 1996, three particular media forms play a preeminent role in conditioning experience: still photography, cinema, and video.2 My study proceeds from the premise that if image technologies so fully condition how we see, and experience ourselves as seen, then this stock of cultural images must surely filter down to impact on literary representation. Written images can be understood as product of, and indeed even part of, a contemporary image repertoire. This being the case, an appropriate critical approach – one that takes into account a novel’s emplacement within this wider visual scene – is called for. This study demonstrates such an approach. It unearths the visual inclinations of Smith’s, Cole’s, and Oyeyemi’s fiction, revealing their work to be highly responsive to the contemporary image environment. My analysis suggests ways in which a reader might experience and react to a text’s visual attunement. And, most importantly, it shows how a critic might approach such a propensity: it suggests how best to figure the visual texture of a contemporary novel; how to illuminate its relation or contribution to a text’s thematic. Analogy or comparison figures as a 1 Kaja Silverman, The Threshold of the Visible World (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 2 Silverman, Threshold, p. 195. 2 predominant mode of critique in this study: the fiction of the three authors is explored through the lenses of various visual media – namely photography, painting, and cinema – and by recourse to selected representational strategies, such as perspective or portraiture. In this respect, my approach relies heavily on close reading: it concerns itself with the formal operations of the considered texts. Close reading as a practice proposes the benefits of paying ‘close attention to literary texture and what is embodied there’.3 And paying close attention is something that, as this study’s chapters will go on to outline, the considered texts themselves also advocate. ‘No, look properly’, says Amy in Smith’s Like, ‘Look really closely’.4 Attentiveness in the work of Smith, Cole, and Oyeyemi is seen to carry an ethical weight. Slow, careful application to the considered object is therefore both this study’s predominant mode, and an object of thematic interest for it. My own focus on selected technical and aesthetic tropes contributes to a wider renewed critical interest in the practice. My methodology repurposes the New Criticism’s approach with the aim of parsing the relation between text and a specific media framework: twenty-first century visuality. As an interpretive strategy, it is especially sensitive to patterns of images, to descriptive techniques. It is visually minded in that it seeks out all those elements of the text that have some bearing on, or show some borrowing from, aspects of visual representation. While attention to the surface aesthetic of the work plays a significant part in this practice, it is more than just ‘surface reading’. Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus, in their introduction to a special issue of Representations, map the parameters of what they call ‘surface reading’. 5 Approaches as diverse as book history, genre criticism, and New Formalism fall under its rubric. What they all have in common is an attentiveness to ‘what is evident, perceptible, apprehensible in texts; what is neither hidden nor hiding; what, in the geometrical sense, has length and breadth but not thickness, and 3 Frank Lentricchia and Andrew DuBois, ‘Preface’, in Close Reading: The Reader, ed. by Frank Lentricchia and Andrew DuBois (London: Duke University Press, 2003), p. ix. 4 Ali Smith, Like (London: Virago, 2005), p. 46. 5 Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus, ‘Surface Reading: An Introduction’, Representations, 108.1 (2009), 1-21. 3 therefore covers no depth. A surface is what insists on being looked at rather than what we must train ourselves to see through’.6 The superficial appearance of a text – its descriptive use of shape or colour, its delineation of paintings or photographs – is this study’s starting point, but not its end point. I read these surfaces as something that must be looked at in order for them to be seen through. In this sense, Smith’s ekphrasis of a panel from a Renaissance altarpiece provides the reader with so much more than a straightforward experience of looking at a painting. Smith’s description can be a window onto the way that we look now. It can tell us about habits of attention, it can tell us about what motivates the twenty-first century gaze and suggest the images that comprise its sphere of reference. Vision, understood as culturally formed and rooted, comes with a weight of theoretical consideration behind it. Textual representations of visuality, on this reading, cannot figure in a critical vacuum.
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