Ambiguous Images and Crisis
George P. Landow, Professor of English
and Art History, Brown University
[From Chapter One, "Images, Situations, and Structures," Images of Crisis: Literary Iconology, 1750 to the Present, Boston and London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982, pp. 25-28. WWW version by Marisa Castagno, University of Turin, Italy, 1997.]
lthough the
modern or post-Christian versions of the situation of crisis
become increasingly important during the nineteenth century they never
become completely dominant -- at least
not in the sense that medieval Christianity and its codes became dominant
enough to triumph completely over classical pagan thought, however much of
it is subsumed, assimilated, or reinterpreted. In fact, as the
interpretation of any single metaphor or situation of crisis will suggest,
for the past two centuries we have existed in the face of competing code
systems. For example, whereas some literary and artistic interpretations of
the destruction of Pompeii present it as an instance of essentially
inexplicable catastrophe, others, such as Bulwer-Lytton's novel and Summer
Lincoln Fairfax's poem The Last Night of Pompeii (1832), employ it
as an instance of God's vengeance upon sinners. Similarly, some paintings
and poems employ the shipwreck to communicate the post-Christian sense of
existence in a Godless universe while others do so to communicate
traditional beliefs about divine punishment of the guilty. As we shall
observe in the next chapter, what is particularly interesting about the
position of any particular paradigm in this situation of competing codes is
that its users can emphasize this radical ambiguity; that is, taking the
shipwreck as an initially opaque or uninterpretable event, writers like
Coleridge, Tennyson, and Hopkins intentionally employ its capacity to move
the reader back and forth between opposing cultural codes and the
imaginative universes they create. The most orthodox employment of the
journey of life can be transformed into a new metaphor of isolation and
helplessness, and, conversely, an image of shipwreck that first appears to
present the speaker in a Godless universe can, with equal suddenness, be
converted into reassurances of divine presence. As Tennyson puts it, a
wandering, helmless bark may turn out to be, after all, an ark of grace and
deliverance. For these and many other authors, then, paradigmatic imagery
and structure, like the human condition -- it is supposed to help us
understand, may first appear in the guise of ambiguous revelations. Matthew
Arnold, following Carlyle's "Characteristics," describes modern man as
Wandering between two worlds, one dead,
The other powerless to be born.
["Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse"]
In fact, the situation of so many men and women of the past two hundred
years is better described as having to choose between two fully developed
codes and the imaginative worlds they create. Once
again, the condition of artist, writer, and audience faced with having to
choose between alternative applications (or meanings) of such situations
and structures of crisis has much in common with that of the scientist
during a period of scientific upheaval. According to Kuhn,
The transition from a paradigm in crisis to a new one from
which a new tradition of normal science can emerge is far from a cumulative
process, one achieved by articulation or extension of the old paradigm. Rather it is a reconstruction of the field from
new fundamentals, a reconstruction that changes some of the field's most
elementary theoretical generalizations as well as many of its paradigm
methods and applications.... Others who have noted this aspect of
scientific advance have emphasized its similarity to a change in visual
gestalt: the marks on paper that were first seen as a bird are
now seen as an antelope, or vice versa.... Just because it is a transition
between incommensurables, the transition between competing paradigms cannot be made a step at a time, forced by logic
and neutral experience. Like the gestalt switch, it must occur all at once
(though not necessarily in an instant) or not at all.... The transfer of
allegiance from paradigm to paradigm is a conversion experience that cannot
be forced.[The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1501): 84-5.]
Kuhn's description of what takes place during scientific revolutions well
describes what occurs during spiritual, religious, or philosophical ones as
well. His pointing out that a conversion takes place when a person
exchanges paradigms certainly matches what we have observed when people
lose or acquire religious faith. Since, however the paradigms (or
paradigmatic structures and metaphors) at which we have been looking are
also cultural codes, they have the capacity to reproduce the basic
experience of conversion. By employing such an essentially problematic
situation, the artist and writer can remind us that one assigns values to
it only by declaring allegiance to a particular cultural code and
conception of the human condition. Prompting the audience thus to assign a
value or spiritual interpretation to a problematic situation -- be it a
shipwreck, the invasion of Rome, or the destruction of Pompeii also leads
its members to undergo something roughly analogous to a religious
conversion, the difference between this artistic conversion and a real-life
one being that here the audience assigns value upon discovering which
paradigm the author has accepted and not the one that they would have chosen.
Last modified 26 December 2004