Nabokov, Lewis and Garbo

For Adorno, as for Lewis, film's iconic immediacy, the mimetic spell it casts over the audience, pacifying them into submission, could be negated through a form of image-writing. The spell is broken, in Adorno's view, through montage, which ‘does not interfere with things but arranges them in a constellation akin to writing’; for Lewis, the dialectic between writing and image, or in my terms, speech and gesture, is generated through a performative prose style which thematises the double aspect of textual absence and mimetic presence. The Lewisian speech-gesture complex counteracts both iconic or performative mimesis which casts a reifying spell over the spectator, breaking down the performative body into linguistic components, and it also resists the autonomy and self-enclosure of writing, by showing forth a series of rehearsed gestures which never materialise as a finished spectacle. His aesthetic, which cannot be reduced solely to discursive or performative terms, manifests a politics which resists a totalised pre-scripted determination and disrupts the naturalising process of the universalised, transcendental reader-spectator.

In Lewis's view, the newly dominant form of Hollywood naturalism and its narrative conventions reduced spectator-subjects to mere consumers. For Lewis, as for Adorno, these conventions had become a new universal language, encoded according to forms of mimetic behaviour, rendering the audience passively star-struck and inducing the desire for mass mimesis.