Product of One Particular Time and Place

Phooey. I was trying to get all these ideas somewhat organized when Felix Grant posted a follow-up  to his previous post that is full of additional distractingly interesting thoughts. I can’t seem to keep up with Felix … (And now I have to buy a copy of His Master’s Voice out of sheer curiosity.) 

In his previous post (before the newer one, linked above) on the concept of “straight record”, Felix made a very good point; that what is considered to be a “straight record” may be — or almost certainly is — “consensually intended/perceived” according to the representational beliefs of the age. Setting aside the connotations of what that should mean to any society’s uses of anything as “straight record,” it left me trying to imagine if and how this might work or feel or be in pre-photographic times.

Try looking at the portrait of Ann of Cleves, referenced by Felix in that post (I have cropped it to the face).

If that picture had been offered in court as evidence that Anne of Cleves had an abnormally eggshaped forehead and an extraordinarily long neck, would I have believed it? Or can I sort out what I take to be errors of the artist from what I (choose to) believe is a straight record? Now consider this additional portrait of the lady, also by Holbein the Younger.

Is this also a straight record or am I permitted to choose which of the two I believe to be a straight record — or can I take what I like from each? Add these two additional portraits of Anne of Cleves and what has happened to my “intended/perceived” belief in the straight record?

 

(Amazingly, I did find a true straight record of Anne of Cleves. This is her signature.)

Photographs, however, are not immune from this type of representational disagreement. One can have the same kind of belief-conflict with different photographs of the same person. In such cases, I tend to try to force the pictures into harmony (it was the light; it was the facial expression; it was age, and so forth). With that in mind, I have to try to imagine how I would evaluate the conflicting portraits of Anne of Cleves in the absence of my present, overwhelming awareness of the modern, photographic conception of what is a straight record. It’s confusing.

In addition, I notice that when looking at Anne of Cleves, there is an enormous amount of cultural baggage mixed into how I see the picture. I snicker at her dress (imagining myself wearing it — in the car, to the grocery store, trying to board an airplane…), I wonder what has happened to her eyebrows and her eyelashes, her stuffy, prim expression and so forth — applying my cultural values to her (and Holbein’s transmitted) self-presentation. In other words, what I see is dependent on what I am and I have no way of not being what I am in order to experience what seeing a picture would be like in that time. All of this degrades my ability to understand the image, much less believe in it as a record.

This is true of all of our historical records, not only pictorial. For example, consider these notes, by Lionel Trilling, in his commentary about the poem, To His Coy Mistress, by Andrew Marvell:

Certain words of the poem should perhaps be glossed to ensure that they are understood in the sense that Marvell intended. Coy means reluctant and hesitant, with implications of a certain self-consciousness or insincerity, but it does not have the overtone it later acquired, of vapidity or cuteness. In our modern usage, a man’s mistress is a woman with whom he has an established sexual relationship, but in Marvell’s day the word denotes the woman to whom a man has pledged his love. The vegetable quality of the love that the poet imagines if the lovers had all time at their disposal does not have the pejorative meaning we might now find in it, of being wholly dull, without sentience; it refers to the power of growth and implies the vitality or livingness of the growing thing. Quaint did not have its modern sense of something pleasantly old-fashioned but rather of something elegantly fanciful with a touch of what we should call affectation.

Or, think about how hearing the voice of a person (a straighter record), changes one’s whole conception of that person; of who he was and what he had to say … in print. This is from an article, Who’s ever heard Virginia Woolf? by Robert Fulford in National Post (Dec 2, 2008):

Hearing the voice of a long-dead writer adds another dimension to a reader’s connection with an author’s work, not profound, but intimate. It can also be surprising. Many years ago, I was jolted by a record of James Joyce reading a delirious passage from Finnegans Wake, an often incomprehensible but nevertheless enchanting experiment.
Until then, Joyce had existed for me only as words on the page. He was disembodied, the pure spirit of the English language at one of its greater moments. I was therefore astonished to hear him speaking much like a stage Irishman, rather in the style of Barry Fitzgerald, who played a series of lovable priests and cops in Hollywood films. Joyce’s accent made it clear that even late in life he remained intensely grounded in Dublin, the city he escaped before unfolding his genius. That subtly changed my feelings about him. It made him more local, more obviously the magnificent product of one particular time and place.

… [Virginia] Woolf spoke on the BBC several times, but on only one occasion did someone think it a good idea to save part of a talk she gave. The piece included in The Spoken Word: British Writers runs only eight minutes, but it’s a revelation. Heard in 2008, she sounds like a vicious parody of an English intellectual. I had to listen three times before I could get past her mannerisms and absorb what she was saying.

I don’t know. Why does Joyce or Woolf’s voice, or our interpretation of things such as “mannerisms” carry so much weight? If they seem to conflict, which is the straight record; their body of work or their mannerisms? What, exactly, does the word “record” mean … (you can see that this whole subject is vanishing into word meaning).

I leave you with a portrait of George Washington. I can’t make myself see this as a straight record. Can’t do it. He’s an icon. And that hair-do… I have tried to imagine what his voice would sound like. I can’t do that either. It’s not possible for George Washington to have a voice.

 

-Julie

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