Carolyn Williams

Walter Pater, Film Theorist

Though we are not accustomed to thinking of Pater as a film theorist — since film was still on the verge of being developed at the time of his death – I would like to venture several respects in which it makes sense to do so. Pater’s work is saturated with attention to the moving image. In this essay, I will link his concern with the art history of the tableau to his concern with the epiphanic moment, whose importance is well known in Pater studies. This link will form a framework within which we can discern new significance in his synthetic conceptions of painting and music. Thus the present essay will also illuminate Pater’s theory of Anders-streben, the ‘striving after otherness’ exhibited by all art forms, the way each art form struggles to surpass its own limitations and thus to merge with other art forms in an interart dynamic that is surely one chief focus of this volume.1

Response: Vehicular traffic

My title is meant to suggest the many kinds of conveyance at issue in Chandler’s provocative account of the sentimental tradition. I want to offer two clusters of points in response to his wonderful paper, ‘The languages of sentiment’. (1) My first cluster of points might be said to come under the heading of the history of poetics. It responds to the dimension of Chandler’s argument through which he offers us an allegory of signification – or, to cite the name of our conference investigation, a language of emotion. As Chandler points out, Sterne makes the coach serve as a figurative literalization for the vehicle of metaphor; Sterne’s coach is therefore a vehicle for a vehicle of the vehicle, as it were. This secondand third-order play on ‘the vehicle’ invites a further gloss. For what Chandler has vividly portrayed for us is Sterne’s very particular moment in the secularization of something called ‘the soul’, in its gradual modern transformation – over the course of two centuries and more – into something called ‘the psyche’. If Sterne is responding to More’s ‘vehicular hypothesis’ – and I was thoroughly persuaded by his argument that Sterne was so influenced – surely his paranomasia on the ‘vehicle’ shows that he was only half-hoping that More’s hypothesis might still carry some weight, while half-parodying it as the quaint and retro theory that, in fact, by then, it was. Now, it is certainly the case that all tropes of secularization are two-faced in exactly this same way. Each of them occupies a half-way house along a road we’re still travelling – by which figure I simply mean to emphasize that tropes of secularization always play on both sides of the vehicle. To change the metaphor: they offer old wine in new bottles, or new wine in old bottles. They carry forward something by means of a new vehicle, or they use an old vehicle to carry something unexpectedly novel. In other words, I am emphatically not saying that Sterne disbelieves in the soul. Sterne is not a secular writer, only a secularizing one. For at the very moment that he claims ‘I am positive I have a soul’, we are suddenly brought face to face with the awareness that, before this moment, he must have doubted. Textual Practice 22(1), 2008, 47–54

INTIMACY AND THEATRICALITY: MIKE LEIGH’S TOPSY-TURVY

T HIS THOUGHTFUL, RAVISHING period film treats us to a work of serious historical scholarship and theoretical speculation on narrative and history, disguised as the old-fashioned plot about the difficulties leading up to a famous theatrical production. Taking as its focus the well-chosen moment in the creative conflict between Gilbert and Sullivan that was eventually resolved in their successful 1885 production of The Mikado , Topsy-Turvy seems throughout its stately first half to be leading us chronologically toward that resolution as if toward its own fulfillment. But meanwhile, in the film’s antic second half, a serious play sets in for the duration, and that traditional momentum is disrupted. By the time of the film’s complex closure — which is both bittersweet and deliberately, astutely, provocatively unsettling — resolution has broken down into multiple divisions once again: between the characteristically divergent responses of Gilbert and Sullivan to their mutual success; between men and women on and off the stage; between theatrical illusion and life behind the scenes. In the fragments from the film’s production of The Mikado — one, in particular, at the very end of the film — we rest for a while in the humor and beauty of its otherworldly charm, but with the uneasy sense of how tenuous, how arduously produced this beauty must be. This play-within-a-film is, among its many other virtues, the best present-day representation of a Gilbert and Sullivan production that I have ever seen.