Aesthetic Blindness to Textual Visuality

Aesthetic Blindness to Textual VisualityAuthor(s): Richard ShustermanReviewed work(s):Source: The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 41, No. 1 (Autumn, 1982), pp. 87-96Published by: Blackwell Publishing on behalf of The American Society for AestheticsStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/430826 .Accessed: 03/01/2012 13:53

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RICHARD SHUSTERMAN

Aesthetic Blindness to

Textual Visuality Littera scripta manet

Horace

I.

ONE OF THE SAD and surprising phenomena of modern aesthetics and literary theory is the neglect of the importance of the visual or graphic in the literary text. While sound or oral qualities have always been held to be aesthetically central to literature (poetry in particular), the role of the written or printed-in short, the visual-has generally been regarded as aesthetically irrelevant, as merely a technical means of record- ing, preserving, and presenting the literary work. Such a view might seem plausible for ancient and pre-Gutenberg cultures, where, according to literary-historical dogma, literature was more often uttered than inscribed, more heard than read, and was typically preserved through oral tradition. However, recent scholarship suggests that this dogma is very questionable and supported by little evidence. The majority of historical evidence points to the contrary: that most of our literature has been appreciated and preserved through written manuscripts, and that the visual aspects of the manuscript (e.g., calligraphic style and format) were greatly appreciated aesthetically.' Indeed, the visual aspects were considered so important that the first printing presses were designed to imitate as closely as possible the visual properties of the aes-

RICHARD SHUSTERMAN is lecturer in philosophy and literature at the University of the Negev.

thetically finest and most admired manuscripts, rather than merely efficiently rere- sent in printed form the same letters.2

However, even if we hold fast to dogma and continue to question the central aesthetic status of the written text in pre- Gutenberg literary cultures, there is no doubt that with the invention and development of printing, the visual text has become established as a standard end- product of literary art and thus a typical object of literary appreciation.

As I have argued elsewhere,3 though literary art may have originated as an essentially oral art, with the invention of writing and further with the invention and development of printing and the consequent growth of literacy, the literary artist was provided with a medium through which he could reach a much larger audience and in which he could convey a far longer and more complex message, which could not be adequately vocalized or conveyed in a standard oral performance. The literary artist has come to write more to be read than to be heard; the written text has largely supplanted the oral performance, and we find more asides to "the reader of this story" or "the reader of these lines" as op- posed to "the hearer of this tale."

Moreover, once the inscribed text was firmly established as a standard, if not the predominant, end-product of literary art and typical object of literary appreciation, it was only natural that the literary artist

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would exploit the rich aesthetic possibilities offered by the inscribed medium. Promi- nent among these possibilities are, of course, visual effects.4 This tendency in literature towards accepting and aesthetically exploiting the visual medium of the text has received considerable impetus in the twen- tieth century, which has witnessed not only the Calligrammes of Apollinaire and the typographical devices of e. e. cummings, but also the rise (since about 1950) of an entire literary movement, that of Concrete Poetry, d dicated to the visuality of the text.

Yet despite these developments in literary art, literary theorists have, with but few exceptions, remained blind to the importance of the visual and have kept to the traditional view that poetry is sound and sense but not sight, that the visual aspect of the literary work does not form a part of the work's identity and aesthetic make-up, that to appreciate a literary work's visual aspect is to appreciate the work as graphic art, not literature. Eliot and Leavis may emphasize the visual in poetry, but this should not be confused as a departure from the accepted view. For what they mean is the importance of vivid visual im- ages that the reader must visualize in his mind, not what he can simply see in the text. A host of modern aestheticians from a wide variety of schools and approaches subscribe to the traditional dismissive view of the visuality of literature, more often simply assuming it than actually arguing for it. Lest my readers, hopefully dissatis- fied with this view, doubt its general acceptance, let me provide a very brief sam- ple of its prevalence.

First, among continental aestheticians,5 we find Croce treating the written text as merely a sign for producing certain sounds. Ingarden takes a similar view, denying the written symbols of the text a place in any of the four strata which for him constitute the literary work. They are thus not part of the work, but are merely symbols prescribing the sounds (to be ac- tualized physically or mentally) which constitute the first stratum. Mikel Dufrenne still more sharply denies the aesthetic relevance of writing, while maintaining the es- sentiality of the oral: "l'criture n'est qu'un tnoyen ... pour la vraie langue qui est la

langue orale"; "la poesie est une voix . . . pas un etre ecrit."

Among aestheticians of the analytic school, we find Beardsley maintaining that since words are "meaningful sounds," they and the literary works they constitute "present two aspects for study": "the sound-aspect" and "the meaning-aspect."6 Beardsley thus blatantly ignores that words consist of letters as well as morphemes and phonemes, and hence they and the literary works they constitute have a visual aspect as well. J. O. Urmson is more outspoken in rejecting the significance of the visual in literature, boldly asserting that "literature is essentially an oral art," "the written word being primarily a score for the per- former."7 Indeed, the view of textual visuality as aesthetically irrelevant is so deeply entrenched that even theorists like Wellek and Warren who start out by noticing its artistic uses end up blindly echoing Ingar- den and tradition, denying a visual stratum to the literary work and equating its physi- cality with its sound.8

Why is so questionable a view still so powerfully entrenched? Why are aestheticians so often blind to the visual in literature? Though my first task in this paper will be to try to explain this phenomenon, I do not mean to justify it. Rather, I shall go on to argue that not only actual literary practice but general aesthetic and semiotic considerations command us to grant aesthetic relevance to the visual aspect of the text. Finally, having established that textual visuality is in principle an aesthetically relevant part of the literary work, I shall suggest a general theory as to when it is particularly significant.

II.

There are probably many reasons why aestheticians have ignored the visuality of the text, but I shall concentrate on three which seem most significant. The first two relate to influences of major philosophical traditions, the Platonic and the Romantic, the third to a more general influence- conservatism.

Derrida, one of the few modern aestheticians to recognize and celebrate the written nature of literature, correctly

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Aesthetic Blindness to Textual Visuality

points to Plato's influence on the primacy of the oral over the written in Western

thought. Derrida, moreover, tries to relate this preference of the oral to a general bias of Western culture towards 'a metaphysics of presence' which locates both reality and truth in that which is immediately present to consciousness, a bias which also finds

expression in the Cartesian cogito being taken as the most indubitable reality.9 However, for our present aesthetic purposes it seems best to consider Plato's condemnation of writing in a narrower, aesthetic framework by comparing it to his

general condemnation of art which it re- sembles in some significant respects.

In The Republic Plato denounces the mimetic arts on several counts: for their

corrupting moral, educational, and political influences in undermining religion and morality with tales of the gods' misdoings, and in stirring up violent and dangerous emotions which threaten the rule of reason and social and political stability. Mimetic art was also condemned for epistemologi- cal inadequacy, failing to give real knowl- edge but only verisimilitude, and for its on- tological inferiority in being two removes from the truly real, an imitation of an imitation. However, Plato's notorious denun- ciation of art strikingly refrains from con-

demning art aesthetically, i.e., from an aesthetic point of view. Similarly, if we look at his condemnation of writing in The Phaedrus (274b-278c), we find no aesthetic censure of it.

Plato first condemns writing because of its harmful educational and moral effects. It makes the mind weak, undermining the cultivation of memory. Moreover, it fills men with an empty conceit of their own wisdom, which without memory is shallow and unabiding. Written discourse is further censured as epistemologically in-

adequate, since orphaned from the voice of its author which could explain or de- fend it, it cannot speak to answer inter-

rogators and is helplessly exposed to misinterpretation. Finally, the written word is

metaphysically inferior, a lifeless image of oral communication and as it were two removes from "the word of thought graven in the mind."

Not only is there no aesthetic censure of

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writing in Plato's Phaedrus but there is even aesthetic justification of it. Though writing is condemned as an evil for truth and

philosophy, it is sanctioned for the aesthetic purposes of literary art which provides "noble recreation" (276). Plato of course held literature vastly inferior to philosophy, but not because it is written rather than spoken; for he tells us that "neither poetry nor prose, spoken or written, is of any great value"'° unless instructive. Thus, Plato's condemnation of writing was not at all a condemnation of the written aspect of literary art, and therefore

only a misinterpretation of his Phaedrus would support the neglect of the written and visual. Sadly and ironically, such misinterpretation seems common enough to

support to some extent his criticism of written philosophy.

The second tradition of thought which has helped foster the disregard of literature's written or visual aspect might be termed "Romantic Idealism." This tradition advocated the primacy of spirit and imagination and championed them against the fetters of materiality. The concrete, material nature of the inscribed text was thus regarded as essentially alien and an- tithetical to the spiritual, ideal, and im-

aginative nature of literary art. To exemplify this Romantic attack on literary visuality we may consider the two rather dissimilar figures of Shelley and Hegel.

Though Shelley, like some other Ro- mantics, conceives poetry in quite general terms as "the expression of imagination"" and therefore as present in all the arts (and indeed as connate with the origin of man), he does reserve a special and imperial place for poetry in the restricted sense of

literary art. For Shelley, literature is inher-

ently superior to the other arts because its medium, language, is more transparent and is closest to and a more direct expression of the imagination, "whose throne is within the invisible nature of man."

Language ... is a more direct representation . . . and is susceptible of more various and delicate combinations than colour, form, or motion, and is more plastic and obedient to the control of [the imagination] . . . For language is arbitrarily pro- duced by imagination, and has relations to thought alone; but all other materials, instruments, and

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conditions of art have relations among each other, which limit and interpose between conception and expression. The former is as a mirror which reflects, the latter as a cloud which enfeebles, the light of which both are mediums of co nmunication.12

Literature's superiority is thus based on the alleged invisible transparency and

spiritual purity of its medium, language,, which is claimed to relate to thought alone and thus to be unconstrained by the material relations which limit expression in all other artistic media. However, Shelley, whose

poetic practice has frequently been censured for relying excessively on sound, cannot refrain from incorporating sound into the essence of poetry and ends up as-

serting that relations of sound are "con- nected" and "indispensable" to the poetic "relations of thoughts."'3 Thus, he cor-

rupts the spiritual purity of poetry and the

logical consistency of his theory of poetry's supremacy as a totally transparent and direct expression of imagination in a medium relating to thought alone.

With Hegel, a systematic philosopher and not a practicing poet, the Romantic view of poetry as the pure expression of

spirit is carried to its logical conclusion.

Poetry is "the most spiritual" form of art; it is the direct representation of the imagination and spirit itself, free from external sensuous material. Not only is the visual of literature dismissed as irrelevant, so is the oral. Ideas are all that is essential to poetry. "To express these it uses sound indeed, but

only as a sign in itself without value or content. The sound, therefore, may just as well be a mere letter, since the audible, like the visible, has sunk into being a mere in- dication of spirit. Poetry is the universal art of the spirit which has become free in itself and which is not tied down for its realiza- tion to external sensuous material."'4

Hegel's theory shows that the Romantic identification of poetry with pure expression of imagination and spirit can give no real support for the view that sound is essential to poetry while the visual aspect is irrelevant. If poetry is purely spiritual, immaterial, and nonsensuous, then both the sight and the sound of a poem are irrelevant; for both are material or sensuous. One might be tempted to think that

sounds are significantly more spiritual than sights, since it is more difficult to draw their material borders or precise lo- cation, and moreover since physics typically describes them as waves or vibrations of air. Thus conceived, sounds may indeed be invisible, but this does not in any way imply that they are immaterial, nonsensuous, or spiritual. To make such an in- ference is to reveal an outdated scientific and metaphysical outlook that borders on the primitive. However, as we shall pres- ently see, conservativism and antiquarian attitudes do play a major role in the con- scious neglect and rejection of visuality in literary art.

Though the Platonic condemnation of writing and the Romantic view of poetry as pure expression of spirit undoubtedly con- tributed to literary theory's continued rejection of textual visuality, they hardly seem sufficient cause. For, as we saw, these doctrines, properly interpreted, do not re- spectively condemn the written in literary art or assert that the visual aspect is aesthetically irrelevant while the oral is essential. Aestheticians have, of course, found other reasons for regarding literary art as essentially oral and thus rejecting the aesthetic relevance of textual visuality. Noteworthy among these is Urmson's ar-

gument that in order to give literature its proper place in the established classifica- tion of the arts into performing and non- performing, we must regard it as essentially an oral art.'5 Urmson argues that we should group literature with the performing arts of music, drama, and dance, which, like literature, are temporal arts whose works have a problematic multiple identity and cannot be identified (as a painting or sculpture can) with one particular material object. However, Urmson continues, to regard literature as a performing art we must regard some performance as essential to it, and the only one it has comparable to performance in the other arts is oral performance. Hence, Urmson concludes that literary art is essentially oral and that its written aspect is consequently an aesthetically irrelevant technical tool for oral performance.

I have elsewhere refuted Urmson's theory and suggested the dangers of deriv-

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ing conclusions on the essence of literature (if there is one) from the desire to maintain a general classificatory theory of the arts.16 Moreover, I noted that in order to group literature with the performing arts one need not affirm that it essentially requires oral performance (real or imagined). It is enough that literary works can be and sometimes are performed by executant ar- tists, while the works of non-performing arts simply cannot. However, the point I wish to make here is that Urmson tries further to strengthen his theory of literature's essentially oral and performing nature by employing an altogether different argument, by asserting that in ancient times, at the birth of literary art, literature was generally performed orally rather than read and that until modern times poetry readings and even prose readings remained quite common. The approach or attitude this argument reflects-that of aesthetic conservativism-has, I think, been the most powerful influence in sus- taining the view that while a text's oral properties are aesthetically essential, its visual properties cannot be aesthetically significant.

The force of aesthetic conservativism is great and perhaps necessary to balance the force of aesthetic innovation. There is a natural tendency to look back in wonder- ing admiration on the literary achieve- ments of the past and to try to emulate them. Probably more than any other pe- riod, that of ancient Greece has provided the paradigm of what literature is or should be. It is therefore natural that literary theorists would tend to regard literature as it was in its glorious formative days; and if that means disregarding the visuality of the text, so much the worse for visuality and the modern verse which employs it.

This conservative attitude is made strikingly explicit by Oscar Wilde, who complained already in 1890 about the growing, and to his mind unjustified, role of textual visuality, and who shrewdly discerned the technological and social factors contribut- ing to it.

Since the introduction of printing, and the fatal development of the habit of reading amongst the middle and lower classes of this country, there has

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been a tendency in literature to appeal more and more to the eye, and less and less to the ear, which is really the sense which, from the standpoint of pure art, it should always seek to please, and by whose canons of pleasure it should abide always.... We, in fact, have made writing a definite mode of composition, and have treated it as a form of elaborate design. The Greeks, upon the other hand, regard writing simply as a method of chronicling. Their test was always th spoken word in its musical and metrical relations. The voice was the medium, and the ear the critic.17

Despite its considerable psychological power, once the conservative case against visuality is thus explicitly articulated, it shows itself void of any logical force. The mere alleged fact that textual visuality was aesthetically insignificant in ancient Greece (and already in Hellenistic pattern poetry it was aesthetically employed) does not entail that it is still aesthetically insignificant. Still less does this entail that visual aspects of the text cannot be in principle aesthetically relevant to the work of literature qua literature. To assume that textual visuality is not and cannot be aesthetically significant to literary art simply because it was not so originally is to fall victim to the genetic fallacy on a grand scale.l8 Litera- ture, as Wilde complained, just is not exactly what it used to be, nor is there any logical constraint that it should be.

But in Wilde's remarks there is also a hint of another reason against accepting the visual, viz., that accepting the aesthetic relevance of another aspect (the visual) damages the aesthetic purity and hence aesthetic value of literary art. The defense against this charge of aesthetically damaging impurity brings me to the second part of my paper and to the claim that not only is it possible to grant aesthetic and literary relevance to the visual aspect of the text, but that our aesthetic interests and the nature of the aesthetic sign demand that we do so.

III.

At this juncture I must beware of en- tanglement in two enormously thorny is- sues: what exactly is aesthetic purity, and what exactly is the nature of the aesthetic sign? The notion of aesthetic purity is sus- piciously ambiguous and vague. It is often

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taken as total uniformity or lack of mixture of elements, but it is also frequently con- strued as perfect fusion or unification of elements into an organic whole. Even if we limit ourselves to the first conception, ambiguity abounds. For the purity can be abstinence from different sorts of mixture: that of sensual aspects (e.g., the visual and audible), that of quality within one aspect (e.g., unmixed rather than mixed colors), or that of aesthetic dimension (e.g., pure form rather than representation). From which mixtures must art abstain? The purists are not very clear about this, and abstinence from all would make a terribly dull work of art. Even Plato, Kant, and Hegel had trouble maintaining that there could be any.beauty in pure color, and there is no doubt that such beauty is inferior to the mixtures and combinations of colors and forms we find in nature and art. The demand for "elemental" purity stems from the aesthetic requirement of unity, but unity is only one side of the classic formula for beauty, the other being diversity or richness, which of course is quite contrary to this first conception of purity.

It is the second conception of purity whose violation in disunity, disorder, or discord implies an aesthetic flaw. Clearly, admission of the visual aspect makes literary art less pure in the first sense, mixing another aspect to those of sound and meaning. But this does not necessarily create impurity in the second sense, for there is no reason why the mixture cannot be harmonious and unified. The success of writing indicates its compatibility with sound and meaning, and surely we are not to deny in principle that the visual can be aesthetically united with the audible. Think what such a denial entails for drama, dance, and opera. Furthermore, to argue that acceptance of the visual aspect corrupts the artistic purity of literature seems to imply, by parity of reasoning, that the meaning-aspect likewise corrupts poetry's purity of sound and hence should also be dismissed from aesthetic consideration.

Thus, only a confusion of the two notions of purity could condemn the visual as an aesthetically damaging impurity in literary art. Moreover, the whole idea of

aesthetic purity seems overrated, an over- compensating safeguard for unity and for the autonomy of art against threats of moral and religious encroachment. What seems of far greater aesthetic importance is the notion of richness or complexity, i.e., that the unity effected in a work of art should be one that embraces not uniformity but diversity, a rich manifold of content. Philosophers as different as Dewey and Croce characterize the aesthetic by the inclusiveness or richness which is unified in experience or expression.19

The complex richness of the aesthetic has also been recognized by semioticians, who see it reflected in the very nature of the aesthetic sign. Mukarovsky regards the aesthetic sign as designating not a specific narrow meaning, but rather making "a glo- bal reference to reality," signifying "the total context of so-called social phenomena."20 Similarly, Barthes maintains that what distinguishes the literary text from ordinary linguistic discourse is its plurality of meaning, "its multiple systems of sense," its "galaxy of signifiers."21 Such notions of semiotic richness have their counterparts in Anglo-American theories of literary language as, for example, the language of ambiguity (Empson) or "semantical thickness" (Beardsley).22 Moreover, the logician-cum-aesthetician, Nelson Goodman, provides a rigorous account of the semiotic richness of aesthetic signs, regarding their density, exemplifica- tionality, and repleteness as conjunctively sufficient and disjunctively necessary for aesthetic experience.23

It is the notion of repleteness which has particular bearing on the acceptance of the visual aspect as part of the literary sign. According to Goodman, a symbol is more replete the more aspects of it are relevant or constitutive of its semiotic role. He illus- trates repleteness by contrasting the symbolism of drawing with the less replete and consequently less aesthetic symbolism of diagram. The black on white design of a momentary electrocardiogram may be identical to that of a Hokusai drawing of Mt. Fujiyama. What makes the difference between diagram and drawing is that in the former less aspects of the symbols are

92


relevant.

The only relevant features of the diagram are the ordinate and abscissa of each of the points the center of the line passes through. . . . For the sketch, this is not true. Any thickening or thinning of the line, its color, its contrast with the background, its size, even the qualities of the paper-none of these is ruled out, none can be ignored.24

The bearing of this on textual visuality seems direct and significant. By accepting the visual aspect as part of the literary sign we are making the literary sign more replete, more aesthetic. To deny the visual aspect is to deplete the aesthetic potential- ity of the literary work, to treat it less aesthetically; in much the same way as denying the aesthetic relevance of size or tactile qualities would deplete the aesthetic possibilities of painting.

Thus, though the nature of the aesthetic sign may be variously described and hotly contested, there is general agreement that it is characterized by richness, fullness, and complexity rather than narrowness, at- tenuation, and uniformity. Hence the very character of the aesthetic sign would rec- ommend that the literary work's visual aspect, which affords an added dimension to sound and sense, and thus enriches the literary sign, should definitely be considered part of it. Moreover, the general aesthetic desire for greater richness provides in itself reason for accepting the visual aspect of the text as aesthetically part of the work and not a mere external technicality.

Literary theory, therefore, must over- come its traditional blindness and conservativism and recognize the visual aspect of the literary work of art. This would not only render literary theory more accurate and faithful both to the actual practice of creative writers who utilize the visual and to the actual experience of readers who encounter and appreciate it. Such recognition would also have valuable consequences for aesthetic education. For theoretical recognition of the visual would teach and encourage the reader to pay more attention to the visual side of the literary work and thus possibly lead him to perceive new features, aspects, or mean-

93

ings which will enrich both his understand- ing and appreciation of the work. Thus, acceptance of textual visuality has more to offer than mere theoretical accuracy.

IV.

Having established that the text's visual aspect should in principle be regarded as aesthetically relevant, we might ask more sharply when it is actually or especially significant. Surely, even ardent exponents of textual visuality do not pretend that the visual is of major aesthetic importance in all literary works, and I certainly do not want to assert this. The question, then, is whether a general answer can be given as to when the visual is actually aesthetically important or whether we are confined to a particularist approach of case by case analysis. Though there is no scope here for adequate treatment of this issue, let me conclude by briefly suggesting a general theory that seems worthy of some consideration.

I suggest that aesthetic significance ob- tains when the visual is visible, or to make this sound even more tautological, when the visible is visible. There is, of course, no tautology here, but a play on the two mean- ings of "visible." "Visible" can simply mean "able to be seen," and in this sense the visual aspect of the text, when presented, is visible to anyone with normal sight. How- ever, "visible" can also mean "conspicuous," "apparent," or "strikingly manifest to the sight." In this sense we could speak of, say, midgets as being more visible in our society than normal-sized men. Though in the first sense they are no more visible (perhaps even less, since there is less to see of them), midgets are much more notice- able or visible in the second sense; they stand out and command attention.

Textual visuality might be considered aesthetically important when and to the degree that it is visible in this sense of being conspicuous or notable or calling attention to itself.

What then makes a text (or part of one) visible or conspicuous? I doubt that the answer can be found in any single or sim- ple group of intrinsic non-relational visual

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properties of text (e.g., ink of a certain color, type of a certain shape, etc.) which are independently grasped as conspicuous by the hypothetical "innocent eye" of the reader. The visibility of the visual text seems rather to be dependent on textual patterns and conventions, and on deviations from them; and since textual patterns and conventions may vary to some extent from context to context, the visibility of textual visuality seems fundamentally context-dependent. Thus, for example, while italicized words ordinarily seem more visible than those in ordinary type, in a (con)text composed of italicized characters, a word or line in ordinary type will stand out and be more conspicuous. Devia- tion from textual norms (whether general printing conventions or merely the norms or patterns of the particular text) seems central to the visibility of textual visuality.

There are many deviatory devices for at- taining this visibility or foregrounding of the visual: peculiarities of line length and spacing, unusual or irregular color of ink, deviations in case, size, and shape of characters, unconventional use of punctuation marks, etc. One can readily see how some of these devices are effectively employed to make the significant visuality of Lewis Carroll's "Tale of a Mouse" and e. e. cummings' #1 from his 95 Poems so distinctly visible.25

Carroll's poem, sometimes mistaken for a trivial visual pun, uses irregularities in the length and horizontal placing of lines on the page as well as a deviatory, steadily diminishing size of character in order to shape a pleasing image of a mouse's tail. In the context of Carroll's story, Alice's mis- taking the mouse's tale for the mouse's tail and the resultant quarrel reinforce Car- roll's important theme of the fragile nature of linguistic communication, by showing how easily it breaks down through reliance solely on its oral medium where homonyms like "tale" and "tail" abound. The visual presentation of the word "tale" would have prevented Alice's misun- derstanding, and the ingenious visual presentation of the tale as a tail ironically exemplifies the presence and importance of the visual medium of language. How- ever, even taken in isolation, the poem

Tale of a Mouse

"Fury said to a mouse, That

he met in the house, 'Let

us both go to law: I will prose-

cute you.- Come, I'll

take no denial: We

must have the trial;

For really this morn-

ing I've nothing to do.' Said the

mouse to the cur,

Such a trial, dear

sir, With no jury

or judae w ouId be wast-

ing our breath.

judge, I'l be

jury, said

cun- ning old

Fury: 'I 't

t rt e {he whoe

orn dem

#1

I(a

af fa

U

5) one I

incr

94


gains in richness from its visible visuality. Its steadily diminishing size of characters evokes the small print and minutia of legal proceedings which nevertheless have grave consequences; and the mouse's condemnation to death (the end of the tale) is mir- rored in the end of the tail and also in the

virtually annihilating diminution of the type.

Cummings's poem, visually simpler but

arguably richer in the effects of its visuality, does not deviate in size of type or in the horizontal placing of the lines. It gets its visibility through extreme brevity of line length (at one point only one character), where not only single words but single syl- lables are divided into two or more lines, and also through an unconventional (but regular) pattern of vertical line spacing. Punctuation is also deviant, the only punctuation being the highly unusual use of

parentheses to place an entire sentence within a single syllable. The effects of the poem's visuality are numerous and rich. The falling of a leaf to which loneliness is compared is not only visually represented by the sharp vertical fall of the poem, but we are brought to feel it empathetically in our reading of the poem. Moreover, the parentheses makes the metaphorical connection all the more powerful by graph- ically incorporating the vehicle into the tenor. The connection between loneliness and selfhood is also powerfully evoked through emphasis on the visual identity of the letter "1" and the numeral one in many type faces. We are visually shown that "loneliness" consists literally of "1," "one," "1," and "iness" (I-ness).

I have suggested that the visibility of textual visuality is dependent on convention and context, and I have indicated howN it

may obtain through certain deviations from conventions of printed format. My list of deviatory devices is not meant to be exhaustive, and the discovery, exploration, and application of other devices of this sort provide a promisingly fruitful field for both the creative artist and the literary scholar. However, it might be argued that the visibility of literature's visuality is de-

pendent on conventions of reading rather than writing, and can be increased through changes in our habits of reading and

95

analyzing literature. A habit of attention to textual visuality will make it much more visible. But these two different views on

visibility can be seen as complementary rather than mutually exclusive. And, indeed, this essay might to some extent be seen as an attempt to urge increased attention to the visual in our appreciation of literature, by removing some of the traditional theoretical obstacles to taking the visuality of the text as aesthetically relevant.

1 See, for example, D. M. Anderson, The Art of Written Forms (New York, 1969); A. Fairbank, The Story of Handwriting (New York, 1970); and W. Chap- pell, A Short History of the Printed Word (Boston, 1980).

2 Chappell, op. cit., pp. 12, 28-38. 3 R. Shusterman, "The Anomalous Nature of Lit-

erature," British Journal of Aesthetics, 18 (1978), 317- 29.

4 These visual effects are of different kinds and have different roles: some have aesthetic impact in themselves, some serve to foreground and thus en- hance the aesthetic effect of other aspects of the literary work, and some, perhaps the most effective, do both. For a detailed analysis of the various visual effects, see R. P. Draper, "Concrete Poetry," New Liter- ary History, 2 (1971), 329-40.

5 See, for example, B. Croce, Aesthetic (New York, 1970), p. 100; R. Ingarden, The Literary Work of Art (Northwestern University Press, 1973), Chapter 14; M. Dufrenne, Le Poetique (Presses Universitaires de France, 1973), pp. 70-71. Other examples are cited in J. J. A. Mooij, "On the 'Foregrounding' of Graphic Elements in Poetry," in Comparative Poetics, ed. D. W. Fokkema, E. Kunne-Ibsch, and A. J. A. van Zoest (Amsterdam, 1976), pp. 90-93.

6 M. C. Beardsley, Aesthetics (New York, 1958), p. 116.

7J. O. Urmson, "Literature" in Aesthetics, ed. G. Dickie and R. J. Sclafani (New York, 1977), p. 338.

8 R. Wellek and A. Warren, Theory of Literature (Harmondsworth, U.K., 1970), pp. 144, 154-56.

9J. Derrida, Marges de la philosophie (Paris, 1972), p. 376. See also the account of his views in J. Culler, Structuralist Poetics (London, 1977), pp. 131-33.

10 Phaedrus, in The Dialogues of Plato, trans. B. Jow- ett (Newv York, 1937), vol. 1, p. 281. " P. B. Shelley, "A Defence of Poetry," in English Critical Essays (Nineteenth Century), ed. E. D. Jones (Ox- ford University Press, 1945), p. 121.

12 Ibid., pp. 125-26. 13 Ibid., pp. 126-27. 14 G. W. F. Hegel, Introduction to Aesthetics (Oxford,

1979), pp. 88-89. 15 Urmson, op. cit., pp. 334-41. 16 Shusterman, op. cit. 17 O. Wilde, "The Critic as Artist," in The Works of

Oscar Wilde (London, 1954), pp. 955-56. 18

Mooij (op. cit., p. 9) makes a similar point. 19 J. Dewey, Art as Experience (New York, 1958), pp. 35-37; Croce, op. cit., pp. 9-10, 13-14, 19-20.

SHUSTERMAN

20 J. Mukarovsky, "Art as a Semiotic Fact," and "Po- etic Reference," in Semiotics of Art, ed. L. Matejka and I.R. Titunik (M.I.T. Press, 1976), pp. 9, 160-62.

21 R. Barthes, Critique et verite (Paris, 1966), pp. 11-16.

22 Beardsley, op. cit., p. 129.

23 N. Goodman, Languages of Art (Oxford Univ. Press, 1969), pp. 252-55.

24 Ibid., p. 229. One should note that Goodman himself ultimately decides to treat the literary work as syntactically articulate rather than replete, thus treating typography as inessential to the work's identity. However, Goodman admits that this decision is not based on "aesthetic" grounds, but rather motivated by the desire to provide a rigorously precise notational definition of the literary work by equating the work's identity with the syntactic identity of its text. (See ibid., pp., 115-22, 207-10) Goodman's theory of work- identity has been severely criticized; see, for example,

J. Margolis, "Numerical Identity and Reference in the Arts," British Journal of Aesthetics, 11 (1970); and A. Rails, "The Uniqueness and Reproducibility of a Work of Art: A Critique of Goodman's Theory," Philosophical Quarterly, 22 (1972).

25 The poems are taken from Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (New York, 1946), p. 31; and e. e. cummings, Complete Poems, 1913-1962 (New York, 1972), p. 673.

Earlier versions of this paper were read at the Beer- Sheva symposium on Visibilite/Lisibilite (April, 1981) and at the annual London conference of The British Society of Aesthetics (September, 1981). I am grateful to several participants of these meetings for helpful comments, and I also wish to thank Wilson Coker for very instructive criticism of an earlier draft of this article.

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Aesthetic Blindness to Textual Visuality