Introduction: The Eye

Coherent, yet an amalgam of hypothesis and tentative truth; not reflecting Eternal Forms1 but
perhaps perennial forces; drawn from the author’s environment and transforming (‘unconscious’)
memory;2 its producer poised, alert yet dreaming, on the shifting front between the social and the
natural — such, apparently, is authorial imagery.

Is it, as a cavalcade of concrete, historical symbols, overlain by mistier abstractions, the motor
or source of ‘creativity’ in literary composition? Or is writing a mere recycling of past writings, a
stultifying intertextualité3 where nothing new is possible and originality is a chimera?

The author is I, the reader Thou, and both explore the deictic, contextual this, of a ‘text’ in the
real world.4 The text is like a shared map, and its unique campaign of imagery is re-fought in the
reader’s mind, where the blood and mire of composition are less distracting. One imagined scene or
locale sparks off the next, not always as anticipated. Abstractions solidify. Imagery, the illusory image-
sequence, is the organic (occasionally orgasmic) escapement that regulates creation and re-creation of
the work. As an organising, rhythmic, patterning principle, a ‘clock’ bridging the ‘infinite gap’5
between the two explorers (to violently mix metaphors and risk an explosion), imagery embroiders a
synoptic ‘tapestry’, a map or globe or diagram for reader and writer to orient their dialectic by.
Since production entails the purposive recombination6 of matter and energy, the image-
sequence, if the source of creativity, needs to be the malleable, resistant object of literary labour.7.
Paradoxically, such resistance moves the text (and reader) because it hinders it: it supplies ‘fiction with
friction’; it is poesis’s ‘productive barrier’; it’s something to get our teeth into.8

If the foothold is firm and the illusion convincing, the reader is propelled into the saddle. If,
contrariwise, the cavalcade (or cavalry) is assembled at a ‘psychical distance’from the reader, then
each image triggered by the words appears to hail from an ‘infinite’ — or infinitely divisible, ‘minutely
articulated’10 — universe of meaning.

Rearranging ‘jigsaw pieces’11 of authorial experience (‘syntagmatically’ or ‘paradigmatically’)
presents to an audience clear, yet ‘blurry-edged’ scenes (as in a curved mirror, rather than a play),
which may overlap logically yet are not fungible, like commodities or contemporary bourgeois
political parties, by reduction to a common aesthetic numeraire. This Frankensteinian effect may be
anything but bizarre; it comes from shuffling ‘infinites’, where shuffling in itself may generate
unexpected outcomes. (As in anagrams, the D.N.A. sequence, and metaphor.) Whichever descriptive
‘units’ represent these continuua, geometrical abstractions (say fractals) or words, they like the images
themselves need only be ‘discrete enough’ to be discernible and combinable, and as numerous as you
like.12

Being endlessly, intimately reborn13 of infinites — the ultimate intimate theatre — the imagistic
text retains its ‘aura’ of unique authority (in Benjamin’s sense),14 despite capitalist mass-reproduction
and the exclusive club of censorship. Its integrity is not that of the random snowflake or soap-bubble. It
is the singularity of the author’s (quixotic?) labour on an ‘internalised’ world-fragment — with all the
Weltschmerz inherent in the inevitable loss of each individual moment, one closer to the grave.15

A line of great poetry — “My name is Ozymandias, king of kings / Look on my works, ye
Mighty, and despair!” — conserves its authority without Shelley or his manuscript being physically
present.

Imagery thus crystallises gems of reader curiosity in the textual world, and hopefully the real
one. After all, it stems from the integrating ‘sensorium’ which itself is integrated into the social-natural
interface. Running in the brain like a rich alluvial stream through a medieval ‘memory palace’,16 the
fruit of vast magmatic processes in the hidden depths of the psyche, it is no mechanical aggregate of
atomistic elements, or of fanciful, arbitrary17 (whimsical or random) concoctions. These particulars are
alive. In Wordsworth’s daffodils (1804), a 205-year-old image dances, superior to even a moving
picture. One can think of many other examples, well-known or private.

Generally speaking, an image may manifest in any sensory modality, but articulate vision (a
‘cross’ between hearing and touch) predominates, literally and figuratively.18 It is a moment of life on
show. No wonder it drives composition, for it (rather than love, or money, or even love of money)
makes the world go round.

Whether in the mind of author or reader — for it is never ‘on the page’, which is the secret of its
resistance to ‘massification’, and of its immense longevity — it is labile, an unstable equilibrium which
momentarily, like a beating heart, draws a text together then impels it on. In so doing, the figments
rebuild the original world-fragment, and the psychic homeostasis of the reader is transformed.

Composition is always recomposition (since the first story), the reader is always to an extent an
author and vice-versa, and originality is elusive but not ‘utopian’, for there are always new
combinations, especially when re-ordering the infinite. The difficulty is selecting the right one, and
within a finite time, how to pour all one’s riches — or shit! — through the eye of a needle. That is my
task in this dissertation.

Each writer is an historical agent whose experience is inflected but not inflicted by semantic
systems, at root imagistic too, like natural language. The stream of language — even that of Finnegans
Wake — is not purely self-referential, circular, and suicidal, or like a fictive continent of cannibals its
lineage would have long expired. To sidestep this kind of ‘linguicide’ the author must generate
narrative from the heart, from the distilling ‘sensorium’ which is a part, albeit a refractory part, of its
surroundings.

From this environment flows the dark matter of symbolism. Neither the crude or sophisticated
manipulation of arbitrary signs or signals,19 but the very grain of art.

Chapter One: Metaphor