--- Original Message ---
From: "James C. Nohrnberg" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Cc: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Fri, 02 Jul 2004 11:19:07 -0400
Subject: Scoping 'skeptophilia'

> Dear Steve -- Your trouble in my behalf is much appreciated!  Name
> your reward, and I shall try to oblige. Yours, Jim N.
>
> On Wed, 30 Jun 2004 15:47:29 -0400
> "James C. Nohrnberg" <[log in to unmask]> wrote
>
>
> Dear Prof. Willet:
>
>
> Thank-you for your remarks and generous citations. Isn't the
> question as regards Lewis not how good the translations are (now),
> but merely how current and of general interest they were (then)?
> Again, is the question that of how scientifically respectable
> Freudian theory was or is, or only that of how congruent it was
> with Lewis' contemporary moralizing of Spenser's song? I.e., does
> the song readily attach such morals and psychological readings to
> it as a Freudian analyst (or mythographer) might have or have had
> at his dispose? As for the application of the alleged dialectic of
> exhibitionism and voyeurism to the Graces, the text must be:
>
> ...he a troup of Ladies dauncing found
> Full merrily, and making gladfull glee, And in the midst a
> Shepheard piping he did see.
>
> He durst not enter into th'open greene, For dread them vnwares to
> be descryde,
> For breaking of their daunce, if he were seene; But in the couert
> of the wood did byde, Beholding all, yet of them vnespyde.
> There he did see, that pleased much his sight, That euen he him
> selfe his eye enuyde, An hundred naked maiden lily white
> All raunged in a ring, and dancing in delight. ...
>
>
> Much wondred Calidore at this struange sight, Whose like before his
> eye had neuer seene, And standing long astonished in spright, And
> rapt with pleasuance, wist not what to weene; Whether it were the
> traine of beauties Queene, Or Nymphes, or Faeries, or enchuanted
> show, With which his eye mote haue deluded beene. Therefore
> resoluing, what it was, to know, Out of the wood he rose, and
> toward them did go.
>
> Calidore is in the position of voyeur, yet suddenly he is
> presenting himself. (Faunus, in the Mutabilitie Cantos, can't help
> revealing himself either, apparently.) The poet who conjures up
> naked ladies to dance in front of him perhaps plays both parts also
> (exhibitionist and voyeur), in the very act of exhibiting or
> staging the "show" in the same momentum that he is viewing it. Not
> altogether similarly, Milton's satanic serpent, spying on Eve,
> eventually comes forth to exhibit his mainfold form and "pride"
> ("his head /Crested aloft," "oft he bowed his turret crest": like
> the peacock's -- see Leda and the swan in FQ III.xi.32, "Whiles the
> proud Bird fluffing his fethers wyde,/And brushing his faire brest,
> did her inuade:/She slept, yet twixt her eyelids closely spyde,/How
> towards her he rusht, and smiled at his pryde"), and thus he urges
> Eve, who is such a pleasure to the angel's eyes, to show herself to
> a larger public ("Thee all things living gaze on ... Who shouldst
> be seen/A goddess among gods, adored..."): in effect, "You should
> be in pictures." (See below.) For Guido Cavalcanti's poetical use
> of eye contact. possibly along earlier lines of the alleged
> dialectic (or possibly as a mere diversion), see Dana Stewart,
> "Spirits of Love: Subjectivity, Gender, and Optics in the Lyrics of
> Guido Cavalcanti," in Sparks and Seeds: Medieval Literature and its
> Afterlife, ed. Dana. E. Stewart and Alison Cornish, Binghamton
> Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 2 (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols,
> 2000), 37-60, on the mechanics of vision in traditional theory. The
> first part of Stewart's essay explains the sources and application
> of the theory of Platonic-Galenic extramission of the see-er's
> visual spirits (from his or her seeing eyes) and the contrary
> theory of the Aristotelian-Averroist intromission of the species of
> things seen (into his or her seeing eyes). In Cavalcanti a
> complementary 'gendered subjectivity' emerges: the lover is
> aggressed against by the beloved -- he receives intromissively what
> she broadcasts extramissively. Perhaps all of this seems slightly
> irrelevant to Ovid's visual imagination as boarded by Corinna, but
> the second part of Stewart's essay, reversing the two directions in
> the above rendering, is a bare-bones account of the cinematography
> of scopophilia (the male gaze victimizing the female) and the
> Medusan revenge of the object (the female's beauty paralyzing and
> so punishing the male). The relation of Cavalcanti's extramissive
> female to his unnerved male, one might argue, conforms to the
> 'reactionary' elements of this dialectic, and constitutes a part of
> its legacy.
>
> (It would be interesting to have Lewis' opinion of the movies --
> was it he or another who remarked that watching someone you did not
> know die of cancer on TV would be obscene?)
>
>
> [log in to unmask]
> James Nohrnberg
> Dept. of English
> Univ. of Virginia
> Charlottesville, VA 22903


-------------------------------------------------------
Steven J. Willett
Shizuoka University of Art and Culture
1794-1 Noguchi-cho, Shizuoka Prefecture
Hamamatsu City, Japan 430-8533
Japan email: [log in to unmask]
US email: [log in to unmask]