Alix Beeston

Five years ago, in August 2019, the Visualities forum was established as a site for thinking through the visual relations and ocular regimes of modernity. It posed three broad provocations: “In what new ways might we discuss the visual as a special category—aesthetic, epistemological, political—in modernism? How do different modes and practices of vision interact within the contested terrain of modernity?

The first section of “Judging by its Cover” consists of pieces that are interested in the cover as a form of compensation, a covering over, as a piece of gorgeous textile can mask or stand in for what one doesn’t want to confront, or what can’t be confronted for whatever nefarious, oblivious, or self-deceptive reason. The pieces are interested, too, in how covers spur questions about what others are thinking and what one’s own book is doing—and what it is about the cover image that links these...

On October 26, 1936, T. S. Eliot wrote a letter to American writer and host of an influential Parisian literary salon, Natalie Barney. In it he admitted with discernible embarrassment that his most recent author at Faber & Faber, Djuna Barnes—whose Ladies Almanack (1928) was about Barney’s salon and featured her as the character Dame Evangeline Musset—did not approve of the design for the first edition of Nightwood. “I must explain,” he writes,

A creature luminous and vexed, the firefly flits in melancholic briefness, brilliant yet burning out, its light’s little lifespan mocked by the starry fixtures of the sky. The firefly’s illumination is a chemical process, like the flash of a camera but without the photograph’s sense of permanence and history. Instead, summer by summer, children chase down these natural lanterns and collect them in mason jars, glass enclosures for viewing their darkening demise. Aquariums of lost energy.

Mirror, mirror, on the wall, or so the story goes. For Snow White’s stepmother, the evil Queen, the terrible magic of the mirror is its unimpeachable veracity, its devotion to the truth. The mirror doesn’t lie about what it knows; and what the mirror knows, it knows precisely; and what the mirror knows precisely, it knows visually. Who is the fairest one of all? It sees what it knows and it knows what it sees.

At the Oxford University Press stall at last year’s Modern Language Association Convention in New York City, Louise Hornby’s Still Modernism: Photography, Literature, Film was propped up next to Moving Modernisms: Motion, Technology, and Modernity, a collection of essays edited by David Bradshaw, Laura Marcus, and Rebecca Roach. Accidental, perhaps; mischievous, I hope: an editorial assistant with a twinkle in her eye.

In 1876, Francis Galton, the cousin of Charles Darwin and the founder of eugenics, reported to the Anthropological Institute of London his newest physiognomic method for uncovering and defining human “types.” Galton’s composite portraiture was an exercise in re-photography that co-opted the mechanical precision of the photograph for a pseudoscience of predetermined sociological and biological categories. Galton gathered sets of standardized quarter-length portraits of criminals and the infirm, as well as people defined by the indices of race, class, and gender, and layered them on top of one another, dividing the exposure time by the number of individual photographs. By evenly combining the images, he turned “irregularities” or inconsistencies between the faces into ghostly smudges, performing a series of erasures in the hope of isolating, capturing, and displaying “the central physiognomical type of any race or group.” The subject of the composite portrait became both less and more than a subject; the portrait depicted “no man in particular,” as Galton wrote, but rather “an imaginary figure possessing the average features of any given group of men. These ideal faces have a surprising air of reality. Nobody who glanced at one of them for the first time, would doubt its being the likeness of a living person” (figs. 1–3). Whatever vitality Galton perceived in his photographic portraits, the swimming form of these mathematically averaged and mashed-up faces is decidedly eerie. The portraits make the photographic surface into—or rather disclose its status as—a palimpsest, a repository of mysterious remains. Far from effacing the particularities of the individual images that make up the composite whole, the shadows and tracings of those particularities are entrancingly apparent. The eye gropes for the residue of idiosyncrasy and individuality that Galton hoped to obscure. Etched in a hazy play of joinings and junctures, Galton’s photographic figurations are riven with an interpretative vagueness and instability that belies their claims to the scientific knowing and controlling of the bodies of others through photographic mechanisms. They query, rather than codify, the discursive map of congenital essences that Galton imagines and images upon bodily surfaces.