methodology 3

As I was working on my chapter, I came across the book Pictures and Tears by James Elkins, an art historian who teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the University of Cork. As the title implies, the book is a study of "the ways pictures can move us--strongly, unexpectedly, and even to tears" (ix). What appealed to me about this initially was, I have to admit, a certain satisfaction at finding someone who would assert that tears were as legitimate a reaction to a piece of art (or music, or literature) as any critical gesture, and that those reactions we term 'irrational' might actually help us widen our understanding of what art is (and even what beauty is) and how it works--not to mention widen our understanding of what a critical response is and where it might find its genesis. Elkins compares philosophy to a "levee, keeping back the flood of disorderly thoughts" (22), but finds that sometimes philosophy is no match for the primacy of feeling--for instance, in the encounter many people have with the Rothko Chapel in Texas.

(As an aside, e.e. cummings may have said this better when he asserted that "since feeling is first/ who pays any attentionto the syntax of things/ will never wholly kiss you;/ wholly to be a fool/ while Spring is in the world// my blood approves,/ and kisses are a better fate/ than wisdom" ["since feeling is first"]. He at least said it more poetically, but then again, that wouldn't be appropriate here!)

Elkins sets out to find out about crying and pictures, but he says that he does not "want to understand these wonderful phenomena, or press them into the box of some...theory" (28). He has a liberty there that I do not--and one that I'm not sure I want, either--which is to stop where tears meet the image, to wonder about academics who are "content with their 'stony, unfeeling natures'" and who live without crying in front of paintings, who "don't feel much and [are]...suspicious of people who do" (103), but not to continue, in this book, deeply into the question of what happens when an academic relearns "how to initiate intimacy with objects" (121). This isn't a shortcoming of the text--it's simply the limit that it doesn't cross.

And in the end that's neither here nor there for me--what was useful was the idea here that on the range of responses to a text, tears might be as useful, and as thoughtful, a reaction as any other. I had also been reading W.J.T. Mitchell's book What Do Pictures Want? around this time, and it seemed to me that the question he applies to art history might be just as usefully applied to literary theory, and I wondered whether, in a dissertation about love that somehow also places love in opposition to other narratives, like history and philosophy, a consideration of feeling--of affect--as an indication of what the text needs (or, in Mitchell's term, lacks) might be appropriate.

(More tomorrow, Part 1 here, part 2 here.)