j hillis miller, whistler-swinburne_before the mirror (2003)

7Whistler/Swinburne:'Before the Mirror'

/. Hillis Miller

William E. Fredeman was a man of the manuscript and printed book epochif there ever was one. He also knew, however, that a printed book, like amanuscript, was not disembodied words that might be printed without lossin any type size and font on any sort of paper. A book or a manuscript is amaterial object, and the form of its materiality is part of its meaning.Moreover, as William E. Fredeman also knew, books have also always been inone way or another multimedia productions, most obviously in the case ofillustrated books. Fredeman's magnificent collection of Pre-Raphaelitematerials, like his published writings, took that particular group of artists,poets, bookmakers, and artisans, the Pre-Raphaelites, as a paradigmaticexample of the need to go back to originals in order to study the literatureof the printed book epoch adequately. This small paper attempts to reflecton the changes in such study being brought about by new communicationstechnologies. They are radically altering the way we examine the sort ofmaterial that Fredeman collected in his own library as the indispensablemeans of access to the cultural meanings embodied in Pre-Raphaeliteproductions.

The transformations now being wrought by new communications tech-nologies in shaping humanistic research and teaching are hard to defineand understand, partly because we are in the midst of them. The digitalrevolution, however, is clearly as radical and as irreversible as the move froma manuscript to a print culture. Email, faxes, computerized library cata-logues, composition on the computer rather than in longhand or on thetypewriter, the increasing use of computers and networks in instruction,the availability of more and more material online, the move from linear

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136 J. Hillis Miller

print media to multimedia hypertext, the online publishing of articles andmonographs that is altering the way research results are disseminated - allthese are irrevocably transforming the way teachers and students of litera-ture (and of other humanistic disciplines) do their work.

In striking passages written by one of the protagonists of La cartepostale(The Post Card), Jacques Derrida says the following:

An entire epoch of so-called literature, if not all of it, cannot survive acertain technological regime of telecommunications (in this respect thepolitical regime is secondary). Neither can philosophy, or psychoanalysis.Or love letters. ('Envois,' 212; Post Card, 197)

Refound here the American student with whom we had coffee last Satur-day, the one who was looking for a thesis subject (comparative literature).I suggested to her something on the telephone in the literature of the 20thcentury (and beyond), starting with, for example, the telephone lady inProust or the figure of the American operator, and then asking the ques-tion of the effects of the most advanced telematics (la telematique la plusavancee) on whatever would still remain of literature. I spoke to her aboutmicroprocessors and computer terminals, she seemed somewhat disgusted(avail 1'air un peu degoutee). She told me that she still loved literature (metoo, I answered her, mais si, mais si). Curious to know what she understoodby this. ('Envois,' 219; Post Card, 204)

What Derrida or, rather, his protagonist in La carte postale says in the citationis truly frightening, at least to a lover of literature like me or the protago-nist's hapless interlocutor, the American graduate student in comparativeliterature who was looking for a dissertation topic. What the protagonistsays arouses in me the passions of anxiety, doubt, fear, disgust, and perhapsa little secret desire to see what it would be like to live beyond the end ofliterature, love letters, philosophy, and psychoanalysis, all prime examplesof 'humanistic discourse.' To live beyond their end would be like livingbeyond the end of the world.

Derrida's words perhaps also generate in most readers the passions ofdisbelief and even scorn. What a ridiculous idea! We passionately andinstinctively resist the statement that Derrida makes in such a casual andoffhand way, as though it goes without saying. How could a change insomething so superficial, mechanical, or contingent as the dominantmeans of preservation and dissemination of information, the change, to beprecise, from a manuscript and print culture to a digital culture, actuallyCopyright

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Whistler/Swinburne: 'Before the Mirror' 137

bring to an end things that seem so universal in any civilized society asliterature, philosophy, psychoanalysis, and love letters? Surely these willsurvive any change in the regime of telecommunications? Surely I canwrite love letters by email! Surely I can compose and transmit literature orphilosophy or even a love letter on a computer connected to the Internetjust as well as I can with handwriting or a typewriter or through a printedbook? How is psychoanalysis, based as it is on face-to-face interlocution (it'scalled 'the talking cure'), tied to the regime of print and to be brought toan end by a shift to digital culture?

Derrida's curt and even insolent words arouse in me a passion of disgustlike that in the graduate student to whom he gave such strange advice. Thisadvice, by the way, was taken by Avital Ronell, in her own way and no doubtnot as a response to any direct communication from Derrida. Both Prouston the telephone and Derrida's ThePost Card figure in Ronell's admirableThe Telephone Book, itself in its format an anticipation of the new regime oftelecommunications. Laurence Rickels has also already written brilliantlyon the telephone in modern literature, psychoanalysis, and culture gener-ally, as has Friedrich Kittler.1

Nevertheless, that is what Derrida is claiming: the change in 'regime oftelecommunications' does not simply transform but absolutely bring to anend literature, philosophy, psychoanalysis, and even love letters. It does soby a kind of death-dealing performative fiat: 'Let there be no more loveletters!' How in the world could this be? Insofar as Derrida's words, eitherthose he (or one protagonist of ThePost Card) said to the graduate studentor the words you or I read now in that book, generate the passions of fear,anxiety, disgust, incredulity, and secret desire, those words are a 'felicitous'performative utterance. They do what they say and help bring about theend of literature, love letters, etc., just as saying 'je t'aime (I love you),' asDerrida argued in a seminar, not only creates love in the speaker but mayalso generate belief and reciprocal love in the one to whom the words arespoken.

In spite of all his love for literature, Derrida's writings, for example Glas,or La cartepostale itself, have certainly contributed to the end of literature aswe have known it in a particular historical epoch and culture, say the lasttwo and a half centuries in Europe and America. The concept of literaturein the West has been inextricably tied to Cartesian notions of selfhood, tothe regime of print, to Western-style democracies and notions of thenation-state, and to the right to free speech within such democracies.'Literature' in that sense began fairly recently, in the late seventeenth orearly eighteenth century, and in one place, Western Europe. It could comeCopyright






to an end, and that would not be the end of civilization. In fact, if Derrida isright, and I believe he is, the new regime of telecommunications is bring-ing literature to an end by transforming all those factors that were itspreconditions or its concomitants.

One of Derrida's main points in The Post Cardis that it is a feature of thenew regime of telecommunications to break down the inside/outsidedichotomies that presided over the old print culture. The new regime isironically allegorized in The Post Card in somewhat obsolete forms, that is,not only in the many telephone conversations the protagonist (or protago-nists) have with their beloved or beloveds but also in an old-fashionedremnant of the rapidly disappearing culture of handwriting, print, and thepostal system: the postcard. The postcard stands as a proleptic anticipationof the publicity and openness of the new communications regimes. Apostcard is open for anyone to read, just as email today is by no meanssealed or private. If an example of either happens to fall under my eye, asDerrida makes explicit for post cards and letters not only in La cartepostalebut also in the admirable essay called 'Telepathic,' I can make myself or ammagically made into its recipient. The postcard message or the email letterthat happens to fall under my eye, is meant for me, or I take it as meant forme, no matter who it is addressed to. This certainly happens when I readthe passage from The Post Card I have cited. The bad or even disgustingnews the speaker conveyed to the graduate student, news of the end ofliterature, philosophy, psychoanalysis, and love letters, is also conveyed tome. I become the recipient of this bad news. The passions that what theprotagonist said generated in the graduate student are also generated inme.

Perhaps the most disturbing thing Derrida says in the passage is that inthe power the new regime of telecommunications has to bring an end toliterature, psychoanalysis, philosophy, and love letters, 'the political re-gime is secondary.' More exactly, Derrida says, 'in this respect the politicalregime is secondary.' 'In this respect' means, I take it, that he does notdeny, nor would I, the importance of political regimes but that the power ofthe new regime of telecommunications is not limited or controlled, exceptin a 'secondary' way, by the political regime of this or that nation.

The second industrial revolution, as everyone knows, is the shift in theWest, beginning in the mid-nineteenth century and accelerating eversince, from an economy centred on the production and distribution ofcommodities to an economy increasingly dominated by the creation, stor-age, retrieval, and distribution of information. Even money is now primarilyinformation, exchanged and distributed all over the world at the speed ofCopyright






light by telecommunications networks that also transmit literature in digi-tized form. Several of Henry James's novels, for example, are now availableon the Internet, along with innumerable other literary works, works be-longing to the now rapidly fading historical epoch dominated by theprinting press.

Photography, the telegraph, the typewriter, the telephone, the gramo-phone, cinematography, radio, tape recorders, television, and now CDs,VCRs, DVDs, cell phones, computers, communication satellites, and theWorld Wide Web - we all know what these devices are and how their powerand effects have accelerated over the last century and a half. The posses-sion and consequent effect of these devices, as Masao Miyoshi and othershave frequently reminded us, is unevenly distributed among various coun-tries and peoples of the world. Only about 50 per cent of U. S. householdspresently have personal computers, and, of course, the percentage isimmensely smaller in many other countries. Nevertheless, in one way oranother and to one degree and another, almost everyone's life has alreadybeen decisively changed by these technological gadgets. The changes willaccelerate as more and more people come, for example, to have access tothe Internet, and they will include a transformation of politics, nationhoodor citizenship, culture, and the individual's sense of selfhood, identity, andbelonging, not to speak of literature, psychoanalysis, philosophy, and loveletters.

The decline or weakening of the nation-state's autonomy, the develop-ment of new electronic communities, communities in cyberspace, and thepossible generation of a new human sensibility leading to a mutation ofperceptual experience making new cyberspace persons, persons deprivedof literature, psychoanalysis, philosophy, and love letters these are threeeffects of the new telecommunications regime.

What is perhaps most scandalous about the radical effects of new tel-ecommunications is the way none of the inventors, so far as I know, in-tended or foresaw any of the effects their inventions have had. The inventorsof the telephone or of the magnetic tape recorder were doing no morethan exploiting technological possibilities, playing creatively with wires,electrical currents, vibrating diaphragms, plastic tapes, and so forth. Theyhad no intention, so far as I know, of putting an end to literature, loveletters, philosophy, or the nation-state. It is the incommensurability be-tween cause and effect plus the accidental aspect of the huge effect - noless than a radical disruption, interruption, break, or reorientation inhuman history - that is so scandalous.

My claim is that this new digitized existence will change literature andCopyright






literary study in manifold and as yet unforeseen ways. I would go so far as tosay that it will transform, is already transforming, the concept of literatureor of literarity, killing literature and giving it a new existence as the survivorof itself. Students of literature will and should remain as the guardians andsurviving witnesses of previous historical epochs, just as classicists bearwitness to what was the nature and function of Greek tragedy within avanished classical culture. Literature as we know it, as Derrida has argued,is inextricably associated with democracy, that is, with freedom of speech,the freedom to say or to write anything and everything (never completelyobtained, of course). Even the concept of free speech is being changed bythe electronic revolution. 'Literature' is also, I further claim, concomitantwith industrialization prior to the electronic revolution, with the age, nowcoming to an end, of the printed book, and with Cartesian and post-Cartesian conceptions of selfhood, along with their associated notions ofrepresentation and of'reality.' All these factors are intertwined and mutu-ally self-sustaining. Literature as a distinctive way to use language arises notfrom any special way of speaking or writing but from the possibility of takingany piece of language whatsoever as fictional or, on the other hand, aspossibly truth-telling, as referential in the ordinary sense. This 'taking'happens according to complex historically determined conventions, codes,and protocols. That neat opposition between fiction and truth-telling is afeature of print culture. In the digitized world of the Internet, the distinc-tion breaks down or is transformed, just as it has already been transformedby television. In television, advertising cannot always be distinguished fromnews, and wars like the one in Somalia or the Gulf War are presented asmedia spectacles, not all that different from war movies.

The computer-adept person, I am arguing, will read literature of thepast differently and think of its relation to other cultural artifacts differ-ently. I shall exemplify this with an example from Swinburne.

Swinburne's 1866 poem 'Before the Mirror,' is subtitled '(Verses Writ-ten under a Picture)' and then designated as 'Inscribed toJA. Whistler.'The picture is Whistler's The Little White GirL The poem and paintingtogether make a double work of art, each illustrating or interpreting theother. About this interaction and about Swinburne's admirable insight intowhat is going on in Whistler's painting, there is much to say. Mark SamuelsLasner has been kind enough to send me a reproduction of a photographof the painting in its original frame with a manuscript copy of the poemattached to the left and right sides of the wide frame border. The photo-graph is inscribed 'To Swinburne' 'fromJA McNeill Whistler' (fig. 7.1). Mr.Lasner has also provided me with a reproduction of the original autographCopyright






manuscript of 'Before the Mirror,' used as copy-text for the poem in Poemsand Ballads (1866). At some point the painting was exhibited withSwinburne's poem attached to make a double work of art. My stress now,however, is on the way the easy accessibility of both literary texts andgraphic images on the World Wide Web invites and facilitates certain formsof literary study. I was able to download Swinburne's 'Before the Mirror'from my computer terminal on Deer Isle, Maine, in a few minutes from theChadwyck-Healey database available through my university. A few moreminutes' search also produced a Whistler Web site with about forty Whis-der paintings in JPEG format, including The Little White Girl, which Idownloaded in a few seconds. I was then easily able to manipulate thisdigital image in various ways, for example, by printing it on my Epson 800colour printer, or by blowing up details. Here are five details I found usefulin interpreting the painting: details of the fan, hand, bar, and signature,and reflected painting (figs. 7.2 and 7.3).

Such manipulations make it possible to see that the picture on the fan isa seascape or riverscape, as is the Whistler painting reflected in the mirrorfrom the wall behind the viewer or painter. The most similar Whisderpainting to the one reflected in The Little White Girl is Nocturne in Blue andSilver (fig. 7.4). Whisder has painted one of his characteristic black barsdown the middle of the mirror in The Little White Girl Another suchpainting is Harmony in Grey and Green (fig. 7.5). Whistler has also superim-posed his signature, oddlyjust his last name with a period or dot after it, onthe upper right hand corner of the painting, as if to call attention to the wayhis proper name is also a common noun, meaning someone or somethingthat whistles, though I am at a loss to incorporate that into the reading ofeither painting or poem. That failure to find significance is significant.Apart from the black bar, the signature is the only thing painted on thecanvas that is not reflected or able to be reflected by the mirror. Both barand signature are outside the loop of representational mirroring anddoubling, neither inside nor outside, neither before nor behind themirror. In one sense, they are non-significant, but in another sense, theybelong to a different register of significance. The black line, you mayargue, might be seen as part of the mirror, a division between one piece ofglass and another. Nevertheless, I answer, Whistler need not have paintedit even if it was actually there. It is an intrusive bar, not centred over themiddle of the mantel and cutting through the reflected Whistler paintingin the background. It is like the black smudge of mortality across thesurface of social life in Densher's imagination of it in an eloquent passagein Henryjames's The Wings oftheDove: 'It was a conspiracy of silence, as theCopyright 2003. University of Toronto Press. All rights reserved. M





cliche went, to which no one had made an exception, the great smudge ofmortality across the picture, the shadow of pain and horror, finding in noquarter a surface of spirit or of speech that consented to reflect it' (2:299).The black bar exceeds its representational function. It looks like the rawmaterial from which the signature is painted, as though the same brushfullof paint were used for both or as if the straight line of the bar had beencurved and broken to make letters that still ostentatiously contain theirnon-signifying material base, since they are rather crudely drawn.

Whistler's painting, like Swinburne's poem, and like the poem in itsrelation to the painting, is a provocative and enigmatic series of doublings.These vertiginous doublings and redoublings are neither of opposites norof mirrored identities but of differential complementarities. Perhaps themost striking instance is the difference between the girl's expression andthat of her ghostly sister in the mirror. The girl looks calmly, meditatively, atthe wedding ring on her left hand. The girl in the mirror, however, has alook of ineffable heavy-lidded sadness and suffering, whether of painreceived or pain imposed it is not quite possible to tell. The girl is doubledand redoubled again by the riverscape paintings on the fan and reflectedfrom the wall behind the viewer and by the two oriental pots on the mantel,one red, one a cool white and blue. The girl's hidden body, chastelycovered from sight by the white dress, is doubled by her left hand, whichlooks so provocatively like female legs. Two of these finger-legs are chastelytogether, while two others (one the same finger) are spread lubriciouslyapart. This doubleness is picked up by the poem in the (presumably) malespeaker's questions about the girl's sexual innocence or knowledge. Is shechaste or is she 'fallen'? Her hand is said by the girl herself to be 'a fallenrose' that 'Lies snow-white on white snows, and takes no care' (35). Thequestion of her degree and kind of sexual knowledge cannot, the poemsays, be answered, not even, against common sense, by the girl herself.Speaking of her sister ghost, her mirrored image, the girl says: 'She knowsnot loves that kissed her / She knows not where' (29-30), and then the girlsays of herself: 'I cannot see what pleasures / Or what pains were' (36-7).The girl in the painting is doubled by the roses. As the poem says, 'Whiterose in red rose-garden / Is not so white' (1-2). These lines pick up a motiffrequent in Swinburne's poetry that sets red rose against white rose andcompares people, especially women or lovers, to flowers, gardens, or to thelandscape generally (in his early play Rosamund or in 'The Forsaken Gar-den' or in Atalanta in Calydori). The structure of doublings within doublingsin a receding series is present again in the painting in the wooden frameswithin frames of the mantelpiece enclosing the black hole of the fireplaceCopyright






proper, of which nothing can be said because nothing can be seen. Thefireplace is an emblem of the non-knowledge so insistently asserted inecho in Swinburne's poem. The doublings in the painting are redoubledby the way the poem brackets the middle part spoken by the girl with firstand last sections spoken by the poet. 'Before the Mirror' brilliantly manipu-lates the analogy between the girl and the seascape that the paintingproposes. Presenting a painted replica of a painting raises the unanswer-able question of the priority of original and mirrored copy that the poemrepeats. At the exact middle of the poem, the girl asks her mirrored image:

Art thou the ghost, my sister,White sister there,

Am I the ghost, who knows? (31-3)

Though of course someone reading Swinburne's poem could studyWhistler's painting in a book of Whistler reproductions or by going to seethe original painting in the Tate Gallery, the Internet makes it possible tocompare them far from any good library and far from the original painting.The way in which the poem and the painting can exist side by side on thecomputer screen or in a single file encourages thinking of the poem andthe painting as a single unit made of manifold doublings, mirrorings, andenigmatic echoings. The ease of manipulating so easily both poem andpainting encourages new kinds of multimedia study. It tends to breakdown the divisions between picture and text that are strongly institutional-ized in university departmental divisions. Moreover, these new technolo-gies to some degree free me or any other scholar-critic from the need toown or to have access to the sort of comprehensive collection of originalmaterials William E. Fredeman collected. This essay was prepared using allthe appropriate resources of the new technologies. Nevertheless, as aperson of the printed book epoch myself, though one strongly attracted bythe new technologies and fairly adept at using them, as in the compositionof this essay, I would relish the experience of seeing the original ofWhistler's Little White GzV/face to face, thereby interrupting her self-con-templation, or the experience of holding one of those old books in WilliamFredeman's collection in my hands. Like many scholars today, I remainsomewhat uneasily poised between two epochs, the printed book epochand the epoch of the Internet.






NOTE

1 See Avital Ronell, The Telephone Book (Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1989);Laurence Rickels, 'Kafka and Freud on the Telephone,' Modern AustrianLiterature: Journal oj'the International ArthurSchnitzlerAssociation, 22: 3/4 (1989):211-25, and Aberrations of Mourning (Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1988), esp.chapters 7 and 8; Friedrich Kittler, Essays: Literature, Media, Information Systems,ed. John Johnston (Amsterdam: G+B Arts International, 1997), esp. 31-49.

ILLUSTRATIONS

Fig. 7.1 J.A.M. Whistler, The Little White Girl: Symphony in White. 1864, oil oncanvas; Tate Gallery, London. Photograph with inscription on frame by MarkSamuels Lasner.

Fig. 7.2 The Little White Girl Detail of bar, hand, signature, and reflected paint-ing.

Fig. 7.3 The Little White Girl Detail of fan.Fig. 7.4 J.A.M. Whistler, Nocturne in Blue and Silver: Cremorne Lights. 1872, oil on

canvas, 50.2 x 74.3 cm; Tate Gallery, London.Fig. 7.5 J.A.M. Whistler, Harmony in Grey and Green: Miss Cicely Alexander. 1872-4,

oil on canvas, 190.2 x 97.8 cm; Tate Gallery, London.





j hillis miller, whistler-swinburne_before the mirror (2003)

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