Emerson should have grasped the sense of “a new valuation of visual experience,”
derived from “an unprecedented mobility and exchangeability, abstracted from any founding site or referent.” Referring to this recognition, Branca Arsić sharply comments on the “powerful criticism of idealism embedded in Nature which has rarely been acknowledged” (56). She puts forward a construction of Emerson’s idealism, which
“teaches us the difference ‘between the observer and the spectacle.’” For her, on the one hand, “idealism is pleasing to the mind,” but, on the other hand, “idealism ruins the world, removing it from our sight. The world is ruined precisely by what is desirable to the mind, perspectival idealism” (55-56). Following in this vein, Emerson states: “The ruin or the blank that we see when we look at nature, is in our own eye. The axis of vision is not coincident with the axis of things, and so they appear not transparent but opaque” (CW I 43). If “the axis of vision” here corresponds to “the stable and fixed relations incarnated in the camera obscura” or the imperialistic eye in the metaphor of
“eye-ball,” then to what kind of scopic regime do “the axis of things” and the “uprooting of vision” hinted by Goethe correspond?
This imagery of the “peephole” and a static, fixated character are closely related to the model of the camera obscura we have discussed. Next, Jay indicates, borrowing the binary opposition between gaze and glance from Norman Bryson, that the perspectival vision follows the logic of gaze and that other alternative scopic regimes simultaneously exist within the tradition of Cartesian perspectivalism: “Looked at more closely, however, it is possible to discern internal tensions in Cartesian perspectivalism itself that suggest it was not quite as uniformly coercive as is sometimes assumed” (10).
One of the most interesting instances Jay cites is Dutch seventeenth-century art, which Svetlana Alpers calls “the art of describing,” because it seems to follow the logic of glance as an alternative to “Cartesian perspectivalism” (though Jay does not make a definite statement). In The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century (1983), Alperse draws comparisons between the pictures of Kepler and Alberti as Renaissance art in the North and South Netherlands:
. . . attention to many small things versus a few large ones; light reflected off objects versus objects modeled by light and shadow; the surface of objects, their colors and textures, dealt with rather than their placement in a legible space; an unframed image versus one that is clearly framed; one with no clearly situated viewer compared to one with such a viewer. The distinction follows a hierarchical model of distinguishing between phenomena commonly referred to as primary and secondary: objects and space versus the surfaces, form versus the textures of the world. (44) In opposition to the art of the South, the art of the North mainly concentrates on “the surface of objects” and the “unframed image” with “no clearly situated”
viewer/observer. This idea is compatible with “the axis of thing” Emerson considered
and with the logic of glance.4
Emerson directly discusses how the painter and sculptor see the object and works of their art in his essay “Art” (1841). To begin with, he notes that “[t]he power to detach and to magnify by detaching is the essence of rhetoric in the hands of the orator and the poet” (CW II 211). In other words, he takes “[t]his rhetoric, or power to fix the momentary eminency of an object” as “the painter and sculptor exhibit in color and in stone” (CW II 211). This rhetoric or power very naturally foregrounds the logic of gaze.
Emerson claims that the power of the eye is the fruit of gymnastics and training: “I too see that painting and sculpture are gymnastics of the eye, its training to the niceties and curiosities of its function” (CW II 212). Arsić succinctly digests this condition: “seeing a painting requires an eye trained in abstraction and able to see stillness where there are motions” (71). Referring to Bryson’s binary opposition between gaze and glance, Arsić connects this trained, focused eye with the logic of gaze and indicates Emerson calls another eye “glance” in essay “Nature” (1844): “If we look at her work, we seem to catch a glance of a system in transition” (CW III 105). She explicates that glance is the eye “capable of catching minute changes,” which “cannot be considered trained.” In short, “glance sees the transition itself” (71). From her perspective, “in reversing the hierarchy of gaze and glance, Emerson negates the privilege traditionally conferred on depth.” Instead, he emphasizes the importance of glance as following “the changes on the surface, which are always sensible, it remains tied to the body” (73). For instance, in “Art,” Emerson contrasts the people, particularly “a beautiful woman” in the street, with the works of art like “picture and sculpture”:
Picture and sculpture are the celebrations and festivities of form. But true
4 In “Goethe; or The Writer,” Emerson also briefly refers to “drawing of the lines from Goethe to Kepler” (CW IV 165) in the historical portion of Theory of Colors.
art is never fixed, but always flowing. . . . All works of art should not be detached, but extempore performance. A great man is a new statue in every attitude and action. A beautiful woman is a picture which drives all beholders nobly mad. (CW II 216-17)
It is interesting here that Emerson seems to distinguish “all works of art” from “a beautiful woman,” at the same time that he equates her with “a picture.” Similarly, he likens the people in the street to “the eternal picture which nature paints” in an earlier section of the essay:
And then is my eye opened to the eternal picture which nature paints in the street, with moving men and children, beggars and fine ladies, draped in red and green and blue and gray; long-haired, grizzled, white-faced, black-faced, wrinkled, giant, dwarf, expanded, elfish, —capped and based by heaven, earth and sea. (CW II 212)
Coupled with these arguments, Arsić insists “no beautiful sculpture can endure the comparison to a beautiful woman; only the passing of a pretty woman drives the beholder out of his mind” (75). I contend, however, that, in these quotes, Emerson cannot fully separate people, like “a beautiful woman,” from their environments—that is to say, man from nature.
Emerson also seems to acknowledge the possibility that art with the logic of glance—e.g., what Alpers calls “the art of describing” in seventeenth century Netherlands— “drives him out of his mind.” This chapter insists that Dutch painting well suits with this Emersonian ambiguity. He actually writes about it in one of his journal entries:
That which we had only lived & not thought & not valued, is now seen to have the greatest beauty as picture; and as we value a Dutch painting of a
kitchen or a frolic of blackguards or a beggar catching a flea when the scene itself we should avoid, so we see worth in things we had slighted these many years. A making it a subject of thought, the glance of the Intellect raises it. . . . It admonishes us instantly of the worth of the present moment. It apprizes us of our wealth, for if that hour & object can be so valuable, why not every hour & event in our life if passed through the same process?
(JMN V 212; emphasis original)
When evaluating Dutch paintings of ordinary scenes, viewers do not solely see the main object, but, instead, “see worth in things we had slighted these many years.”5At stake here is the relationship between “the glance of the intellect”— which, as Alpers points out, focuses on “the surface of objects” and the “unframed image” with “no clearly situated” observer—and the ordinary scenes or objects that “have the greatest beauty as picture.” Arsić argues “Art” is an essential essay because “Emerson denies, in a radical way, the aesthetic beauty of artistic objects, proposing instead an anti-Kantian aesthetics of the common, as depicted on the streets” (75). Next section will reinterpret this “anti-Kantian aesthetics of the common” from a different viewpoint, holding that it does not necessarily negates “the aesthetic beauty.” In some passages of Nature, nature or the landscape and men are hardly distinguishable. This character of nature leads us to an alternative vision, representing not “the eye of the reason,” but, rather, “the animal eye.”