The Stakes of Immediacy for Transcendentalist Thought, Poetics, and Reform Efforts

Emerson’s interest in immediacy grew out of his religious thinking. For him the sanctity of human life rendered our direct contact with Nature or ultimate reality not only possible but necessary.² “The relations of the soul to the divine spirit are so pure,” he argues in “Self-Reliance,” “that it is profane to seek to interpose helps” (CW 2: 65). Because he saw humans as participating directly in the divine dimension of the world, he regarded the teachings and traditions of organized religion that would deny our immediate access to fundamental reality as harmful. They desecrated human life. Accordingly, Emerson entreats his audience in “The Divinity School Address” to base their religious practice on first-hand experience: “Let me admonish you, first of all, to go alone; to refuse the good models, even those which are sacred in the imagination of men, and dare to love God without mediator or veil” (CW 1: 145).

Emerson radicalized “the Unitarian theology of self-culture” to push for a transcendentalist reform of American culture (Robinson 151).³ The immediate experience of the divine was to bring about a renewal of American religious, cultural, and social life. Emerson rejected the “good models,” the handed-down repertoire of cultural practices that would intervene between the individual and divinity, and insisted that our beliefs, values, and knowledge should be grounded in and tested against the evidence of direct personal experience. His call for immediacy signaled a desire to stretch intellectually and emotionally beyond the confines of New England’s customs and history. It was a rhetorical stance that allowed Emerson to resist the draining effect of cultural norms and social conventions, which he repeatedly attacked in his essays and lectures. In “Self-Reliance,” for instance, he diagnoses, “But now we are a mob. Man does not stand in awe of man, nor is his genius admonished to stay at home, to put itself in communication with the internal ocean, but it goes abroad to beg a cup of water of the urns of other men. We must go alone” (CW 2: 71). On a psychological and social level, the privileging of immediacy and self-reliance over the mediations of doctrine and tradition functioned to counter the pressures of American cultural and civic life.

On a philosophical level, the turn inward and the supposition of immediate forms of knowledge left behind both Lockean empiricism and enlightenment rationalism and moves us onto the slippery epistemological ground demarcated by the concept of intuition in German idealism and European and American romanticism. Taking up Kant’s distinction between understanding and reason via his reading of Coleridge (little immediacy here), Emerson distinguished categorically between tuition and intuition as two modes of learning that result in disparate kinds of knowledge (Buell, Emerson 61).⁴ While the logical-analytical knowledge of the understanding is received through the senses from without, the contemplative knowledge of reason can only be intuited from within (“Self-Reliance,” CW 2: 64–65). As Emerson asks, “where, but in the intuitions which are vouchsafed us from within, shall we learn the Truth?” (“Lecture on the Times,” CW 1: 288). Since reason discerns “the deep force” spontaneously and directly (“Self-Reliance,” CW 2: 64), an intuitive approach to inquiry yields knowledge that is immediate in character. It is, in fact, its immediacy that sets intuition apart from other kinds of knowing. Kant states: “In whatever manner and by whatever means a mode of knowledge may relate to objects, intuition is that through which it is in immediate relation to them, and to which all thought as a means is directed” (65).

The romantic writers championed intuitive knowledge because they equated it with a move beyond the partiality and fragmentation engendered by empiricism and rationalism. They were convinced that in moments of intuitive insight knower and known were in direct contact. Although the two were not considered identical, nothing was seen to intervene between Me and Not-Me. Since intuition established a seamless connection with the world, it could remind us, the romantics hoped, that our lives unfold within a reality that is unified at base. Emerson describes this promise of immediacy in “Self-Reliance”: “For, the sense of being which in calm hours rises, we know not how, in the soul, is not diverse from things, from space, from light, from time, from man, but one with them, and proceeds obviously from the same source whence their life and being also proceed” (CW 2: 64). While contemplation may yield an intuitive awareness of connectedness, rational modes of thinking may shore up a sense of distance and separation, Emerson goes on to note: “We first share the life by which things exist, and afterwards see them as appearances in nature, and forget that we have shared their cause” (CW 2: 64). The passage clarifies that Emerson conceived of the “within” from which reason’s intuitive knowledge proceeds not as the interiority of an individual consciousness but as the participation of the knower in a foundational reality that extends beyond him and that he shares with the known. Thus Emerson’s statement affirms the paradoxical movement of transcendentalist self-reliance in which the focusing of attention inward results in an awareness of one’s embeddedness in the unbounded sphere of Nature.

For Emerson, the immediate experience of divine immanence (rather than transcendence, the misnomer “transcendentalist” notwithstanding) provided a corrective to rationalist and materialist views of reality and presented an indisputable foundation of knowledge. He shared this stance with other romantic thinkers, such as Coleridge, who declared: “On the Immediate, which dwells in every man, and on the original intuition, or absolute affirmation of it, (which is likewise in every man, but does not in every man rise into consciousness) all the certainty of our knowledge depends; and this becomes intelligible to no man by the ministry of mere words from without” (168). Immediacy was of paramount importance for the European and American romantics, then, as both a philosophical idea and as a cultural and critical agenda. The stakes of romantic claims to immediacy were high. Intuition rendered the world intelligible and grounded knowledge in first-hand experience; it released the knower from the corset of sociocultural demands into a direct engagement with a world in which self and other as well as material and immaterial reality were experienced as integrated rather than as separate at base. The principle of immediacy was invoked to explain nothing less than the fundamental order of the world and the place of humanity in it.

The far-reaching theological, epistemological, and sociopolitical implications of these claims to immediacy made the concept also highly relevant for romantic poetics. Romantic writers regarded it as one of literature’s principle tasks to express and communicate experiences of immediacy. Poetry was prized, in Wordsworth’s often cited definition, as “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings, recollected in tranquility” (266). The romantic concern with the immediacy of emotion and knowledge led to a reconceptualization of literature as a medium that conveyed and enabled experiences. Literature was valued for its capacity to voice and stimulate insights and emotions. It was “fashioning responses” to the world rather than providing “an exemplary or moral message” (Klepper 247). To write a text meant to strive for the direct expression of observation, thought, and feeling; to read a text meant to participate in the experience. Author and reader were joined in this endeavor. In “Song of Myself,” Walt Whitman evokes the experiential quality of literature by depicting the exchange between writer and reader as an intimate physical contact: “each man and each woman of you I lead upon a knoll, / My left hand hooking you round the waist” (Leaves 83).

In emphasizing the immediacy of literary communication, romantic culture echoed earlier appraisals of literature’s power to affect the minds and feelings of its readers. When Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten introduced the term “aesthetic” into mid-eighteenth-century philosophy, the shift from an objectivist to a subjectivist paradigm had already progressed to the point that the merit of a work of literature or art was determined by its capacity to move the audience (Marshall, Frame of Art 2–3, 6). The idea that literature should possess an “immediately affective character” made it imperative for writers to secure their readers’ imaginative and emotional involvement (Jackson 5). Authors strove to create effects of “compelling illusion” and “a sense of spectacle, voice, presence” (Marshall, Frame of Art 6). Affectivity was elevated to the cardinal quality of literary representation. The literature of sensibility certainly epitomizes this tendency.

In the romantic age, the desire for direct literary expression and immediate readerly response reflected a growing interest in the subjective nature of perception and cognition. American romantic poetics not only postulated an authentic personal response of writers and readers to world and text, however, but also stressed the intersubjective quality of writing and reading. “I celebrate myself, and sing myself, / And what I shall assume, you shall assume,” Whitman’s “Song of Myself” famously begins (Leaves 28). For American writers like Emerson and Whitman, the literary staging of immediacy possessed a strong social dimension. They imagined the poet as a figure who sees and says the truth directly and thus may serve as a guide for the reader. “He is the true and only doctor; he knows and tells; he is the only teller of news,” Emerson declares in “The Poet” (CW 3: 8). Similarly, Whitman concludes “Song of Myself” by reassuring his future readers: “You will hardly know who I am or what I mean, / But I shall be good health to you nevertheless, / And filter and fibre your blood” (Leaves 89).

By casting the poet in the role of prophet, teacher, and companion, the transcendentalists stressed literature’s ameliorative potential and democratizing force. They hoped that their audience, in the process of reading, would come to share their perspective and reform efforts. The strong intersubjective orientation of their writing served to advance the democratization of American culture. “One’s-Self I sing, a simple separate person, / Yet utter the word Democratic, the word En-Masse,” Whitman announces his agenda in the very first lines of Leaves of Grass (1). The transcendentalists thought of the direct and intimate communication between writers and readers as a model for social and political interaction, as I will explain in more detail in my chapter on Whitman’s poetics and in this part’s concluding section on “The Politics of Paying Attention.” The effort of the transcendentalists to create a sense of immediate contact and participation in their work is part of a long-standing American tradition of employing literature as a catalyst for democratic values and attitudes.

Romantic Poetics of Immediacy in Media Historical Perspective

The transcendentalist quest for immediate expression and connection constitutes a critical response to the far-reaching processes of modernization that unfolded in the late eighteenth to mid-nineteenth century. The transcendentalists argued that first-hand experience, intuitive knowledge, and direct expression were superior to the received wisdom of custom and tradition to lend moral authority to their social and literary reform efforts. Claims to immediacy were key for the countercultural thrust of transcendentalism – Emerson relied on them to argue for nonconformity and self-reliance, Whitman used them to promote egalitarian social relations, and Thoreau staged them to call for civil disobedience. While critics have described in detail how the transcendentalists engaged with the economic, political, and social challenges of their time – from criticizing market capitalism and aggressive territorial expansion to championing abolitionism, women’s rights, and educational reform, to name just a few of the diverse issues they took on – an aspect that has received comparatively little critical attention is how they addressed and sought to intervene in the massive changes underway in American media culture at the time.⁵ American romantic writers confronted in particular two developments in media culture that transformed literature’s cultural function: first, the technologically driven expansion of the literary market; and second, the rise of a technologically based visual mass culture in the wake of photography’s invention. In both cases, the transcendentalists relied on claims to immediacy to assert the pivotal role that literature could play in the development of American democratic culture.

In the first half of the nineteenth century, American print culture was rapidly changing and a literary mass culture began to emerge. Technological innovations, such as the invention of the cylinder press in 1847, ensured that the commercialization and professionalization of the literary field that had begun in the eighteenth century continued. As it became easier and cheaper to print newspapers, periodicals, pamphlets, and books, publication numbers soared. New forms of inexpensively produced reading material appeared, such as the dime novel in the 1850s. The serialization of novels in periodicals became common publishing practice. With the added help of an expanding distribution system, publishers began to cater to the preferences of increasingly diverse groups of readers. The middle class, however, began to identify as the reading class. The growth and diversification of the American literary market also fueled the professionalization of authorship. As writing became a career option, women entered the field in unprecedented numbers. The expansion of the literary market not only opened up new modes of writing and publishing, though; it also pushed the standardization of print culture. As generic conventions hardened, formulaic writing thrived. The combined force of advancing print technology, an expanding book market, and the professionalization of authorship significantly altered the conditions of writing and reading in nineteenth-century America.⁶

Confronted with the commercialization of the literary field, American romantic authors at times lamented the rise of literary mass culture – Hawthorne’s invective against the “damned mob of scribbling women” is an often cited case in point (Letters 304). Although they certainly engaged with popular trends and current conditions in their writing, the romantics liked to imagine that their own work belonged to an autonomous cultural sphere that functioned independently of the demands of capitalist economy. To downplay their participation in the socioeconomic dynamics of the book market, they stressed the originality and spiritual orientation of their writing. As Klaus Benesch points out, the romantics drew on a concept of modern authorship that had begun to emerge in the eighteenth century but whose “basic premises – the writer’s originality and his exemption from the material constraints of capitalist production – were by then already out of sync with the structural and economic development of antebellum society” (12).⁷ Although the ideal did not reflect the actual conditions the transcendentalists worked under – instead of being able to pursue their singular vision safely ensconced in a noncommercial literary realm, they persistently felt the pressure to conform to economic and sociocultural demands – it was an enabling fiction that bolstered their sense of cultural agency. The romantics staged immediacy and insisted on the sociocultural significance of associated qualities such as originality, self-reliance, and autonomy to also resist the standardization and commodification of literary practice.

At the same time that American print culture underwent significant changes in the wake of technological innovation and the commercialization and professionalization of the book market, the emergence of new, mechanically based visual media radically transformed the media system in its entirety. The impact of these shifts on romantic literature was considerable, and romantic poetics may be understood to take form, at least partially, in “reaction to the visual culture of modernity being born” (Wood, Shock of the Real 7). Granted, cross-fertilizations between the arts are nothing particular to the nineteenth century. Literature has always developed in exchange with other art forms – one only has to think of the ongoing dialogue between literature and music or between the “sister arts” poetry and painting. What was new about the exchanges between literature and visual media in antebellum America, however, was that literature began to interact with technologically based media while the literary field itself was fundamentally restructured by technological advances. Whitman addresses these rapid changes in media technology in “Song of the Exposition”:

American romantic writers were acutely aware that the literary sphere was part of a media culture that was becoming increasingly technological and commercial in character. Still, they hoped that their writing could open up a space resistant to the social constraints and economic pressures of antebellum society. To assert their claims to authenticity and cultural relevance against the competing claims of both other media and the new forms of popular writing that innovations in print technology helped spawn, they sought to develop forms of literary expression that possessed a palpable degree of immediacy, as my following analysis of Emerson’s and Whitman’s response to photography will show.

Photographic Immediacy: The Daguerreotype as “Spontaneous Reproduction”

The emergence of photography significantly transformed the cultural context in which Emerson worked as he sought to establish himself as a public lecturer and professional writer during the mid-1830s and early 1840s. In the five-year span between the publication of Nature in 1836 and the first series of Essays in 1841, photographic images began to permeate American culture. Following the announcement of Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre that he had invented a technique that enabled “the spontaneous reproduction of the images of nature received in the camera obscura” in France in 1839 (11), the Americans Alexander S. Wolcott and John W. Draper were fast to refine the process so as to render the technology fit for portraiture.⁸ Daguerreotypes were first exhibited in the United States in December 1839. Beginning in 1840, daguerreotype studios and galleries opened up in every major city and traveling photographers visited the smaller towns. By the time Emerson’s second series of Essays appeared in 1844, he and his family had sat for their daguerreotype portraits. When Emerson published his essay gallery of Representative Men in 1850, the exhibition and marketing of celebrity photographs had become common practice in the United States (Marien, Photography 68; Taft 80–81).⁹ Between 1840 and 1860, 108 daguerreotypists set up shop in Boston alone (cf. Newhall 37).¹⁰ At mid-century, around two thousand American photographers were practicing the trade professionally, producing three million daguerreotypes annually (Taft 60, 76). Emerson recognized the new medium’s transformative impact on American culture and ranked photography in importance with the railroad and the telegraph, two other nineteenth-century inventions that dramatically changed the perception of space and time (Journals 10: 174).¹¹

In its early years, photography was considered a natural medium, as the very names attributed to the new photographic technologies indicate: “photography” or light writing, “heliography” or sun writing, “the pencil of nature.”¹² The terms were used interchangeably. The first American book-length treatise on photography as an art form by Marcus Aurelius Root, for instance, carries the title The Camera and the Pencil, or the Heliographic Art (Reference Root1864). Its early users regarded photography as the result of nature’s collaboration with technology: it was sunlight falling through the camera’s lens onto a chemically treated plate that initiated the chemical reactions that created the photographic image. Since photography was chemical and mechanical in character, it seemed to offer a record of reality that was independent of human vision and cognition. “With Daguerre’s method, man is replaced by a machine that allows nature to record itself without human interference,” Marcy J. Dinius points out (13).¹³ Although there was of course a photographer who placed the camera and arranged the sitters, who framed the shot and developed the plate, people did not think of him as the artist who created the images. The artist at work in the daguerreotype studio was the sun.

Emerson’s first journal entry on the new medium in October 1841 expresses this common perception. He states: “The Daguerrotype is good for its authenticity. No man quarrels with his shadow, nor will he with his miniature when the sun was the painter. Here is no interference and the distortions are not the blunders of an artist, but only those of motion, imperfect light, & the like” (Journals 8: 106).¹⁴ Emerson equates photographic images with objective vision, impartial knowledge, and an unmediated access to the world. His comment is representative of the initial response to the daguerreotype. Daguerre himself set the tone when he proclaimed that “the Daguerreotype is not merely an instrument which serves to draw Nature; on the contrary it is a chemical and physical process which gives her the power to reproduce herself” (13). While from today’s perspective it may strike us as odd that early commentators would construe a technologically produced representation as a natural product and ignore the control that the photographer exerts over the composition, shooting, and development of the photographic image, the emphasis on the chemical and mechanical rather than the imaginative and creative aspects of photography makes sense historically.

For one, it seems understandable that early sitters for a daguerreotype portrait would overemphasize the technical aspects of the new medium, given how uncomfortable the process of being photographed was. Since the early daguerreotypes took a relatively long time to imprint and since any movement in front of the camera resulted in the blurring of the image, it was essential that the sitters remained completely motionless during the extended exposure times. Early daguerreotypists took drastic measures to ensure the success of the photographic process. An operating instruction from 1839 urged, “Paint in dead white the face of the patient; powder his hair, and fix the back of his head between two or three planks solidly attached to the back of an arm-chair, and wound up with screws!” (quoted in Rudisill 60–61). Even when, by the middle of 1840, exposure times for portraits had dropped from twenty-five minutes to sixty-five unblinking seconds, sitters continued to be locked into rigid positions with the aid of iron headrests and other mechanical contrivances (Rudisill 61–64). With mimics and posture completely frozen and the gaze firmly fixed, the mechanical and chemical side of the undertaking was hard to ignore for the sitter. The encounter with the new technology dominated the experience of being photographed. Emerson gives a memorable account of the procedure in his journal on October 24, 1841:

The perception of photography as a purely mechanical art persisted, however, even after the introduction of accelerators had reduced portrait exposure times to around fifteen seconds in the early 1850s and operators began to claim to take pictures “instantly” (Taft 98, 471). The daguerreotype and the forms of photography that began to replace it in the 1850s continued to be seen as the result of the combined effects of technology and nature, of automatic processes, that is, rather than of creative inventiveness. Which cultural function did this persistent image of photography as “the pencil of nature” serve?

Substituting the duo of sun and camera for the figure of the artist helped early observers to distinguish photography from earlier forms of visual representation. By discounting the creative agency of the photographer, nineteenth-century commentators expressed their sense of what was truly novel about the medium. In their accounts, it is the extent to which the production of the images relies on unintentional processes (of both technological and organic character) rather than on creative efforts that sets photography apart from other arts. Photographs were thought to possess greater mimetic accuracy than either painting or literature because they were seen to derive from a source that recorded an unprecedented amount of detail without subjecting the composition to processes of intentional selection and manipulation. While a painting was subject to the skills and shortcomings of its maker, to “the blunders of an artist,” as Emerson noted (Journals 8: 106), the collaboration of machinery and nature was thought to produce exact records of what was. The illustrated magazines of the 1840s and 1850s, for instance, which operated before the reproduction of photographs became feasible, often advertised that their illustrations were created after photographs to stress the documentary quality of the images (Henisch and Henisch 446). While painting became associated with subjective expression, photography was aligned with claims to objectivity and factuality.¹⁵

The new medium’s truth claims agreed well with the paradigm of positivist science. “The photograph was invented at a time when ‘fact’ was conceived of as sensory evidence at the same time that perceiving subjects were required to be eliminated,” Carol Shloss reminds us (33). Photographs began to be accepted as trustworthy evidence in such diverse areas as the natural and social sciences, law and police work, military campaigns, and colonialist expansion. The postulated absence of artistic interference simultaneously worked to endorse photographs as truthful documents and it put their status as an art into question (Marien, Photography 162–65). It is typical that Emerson does not list photography among the fine arts – “Music, Eloquence, Poetry, Painting, Sculpture, Architecture” – in his essay “Art” (CW 7: 43).

An exaggerated sense of the new medium’s mechanical and organic character thus provided the basis for its claims to veracity. Since photographic images seemed to naturally imprint themselves and to develop independent of human manipulation, they were considered “a ‘message without a code,’ a purely objective transcript of visual reality” (Barthes, “Photographic Message” 19; Mitchell 281). Photographs, in other words, were thought to possess an immediate relation to optical reality. They were an authentic slice of life. This concept was astonishingly long-lived in both popular opinion and critical discourse. It survived major paradigm shifts in the arts, sciences, and politics, and persisted well into the twentieth century. Compare, for instance, an early advertisement of the traveling daguerreotypists Moore and Ward for their operations with the critical reflections of Roland Barthes 140 years later. In 1841, Moore and Ward seek to lure potential customers to their studio by announcing that their images “being the reflected forms of the objects themselves far surpass in fidelity of resemblance any thing which can be accomplished by the eye and hand of the artist” (quoted in Henisch and Henisch 198). In 1981, Roland Barthes reiterates this position in Camera Lucida. He insists that photography is heir not so much to developments in the fine arts but to scientific discoveries in the realm of chemistry, which, as he poetically puts it, “made it possible to recover and print directly the luminous rays emitted by a variously lighted object. The photograph is literally an emanation of the referent. From a real body, which was there, proceed radiations which ultimately touch me, who am here” (80). Hence it is not surprising that Barthes claims an extraordinary status for photography. “More than other arts, photography offers an immediate presence to the world” (84; cf. Bolter and Grusin 110).

For its nineteenth-century audience, the reality effect of photography depended on the assumption that the quantity and quality of detail that photographs could record due to their mechanical and organic character made them continuous with the world they represented. Early photographic discourse not only insisted that the photographic image possessed a causal or existential connection to the objects, persons, or events it depicted and that it could therefore serve as evidence of their existence – that it functioned, in terms of Peircean semiotics, as an index – but that the photograph and unmediated reality shared the same ontological rank. As the artist and inventor Samuel F. B. Morse explained to the National Academy of Design in 1840: Daguerreotypes “cannot be called copies of nature, but portions of nature herself,” because they were “painted by Nature’s self with a minuteness of detail, which the pencil of light in her hands alone can trace” (quoted in Rudisill 57).

Granted, photographs exist as objects in the biophysical world, just like paintings, sculptures, and books. To think of photographs as matter in the sense of Morse, however, means to equate the content of the image with empirical reality, to collapse the difference between sign and referent. Early photography’s claims to veracity pivot on the assumption that the object and its photographic representation are in immediate contact. Such a direct connection can only be posited, if the processes of mediation are ignored that the creation of a photograph entails. This denial of mediation and creative human input finds its most extreme expression in the erasure of the very figure of the photographer. The artist is replaced by the sun; or, to repeat Daguerre, nature reproduces herself in the photograph (13). Once the photographer and her acts of mediation are rendered invisible, the photograph can be perceived “as a trace of reality skimmed off the very surface of life” (Sturken and Cartwright 17). Instead of the unmediated object and its mediated representation, we encounter two elements of nature in unbroken connection. In Barthes’s terms, the photograph is “continuous” with the world it depicts (“Photographic Message” 20). In Emerson’s words, “Here is no interference” (Journals 8: 106).

While photographs still derive much of their popular appeal from the idea that they grant us access to unmediated reality, the concept of photographic immediacy has fallen out of critical favor. W. J. T. Mitchell notes that the “view (variously labeled “positivist,” “naturalistic,” or “superstitious and “naïve”) that photographs have a special causal and structural relationship with the reality that they represent” (282) has become theoretical anathema. Yet, taking up Barthes’s distinction between the denotative and connotative aspects of photographic images, Mitchell concedes that “one connotation always present in the photograph is that it is pure denotation” (284).¹⁶

An early parody of the belief in the truthfulness of photographic representation is offered in Albany Fonblanque’s Reference Fonblanque1862 novel The Filibuster, in which a war correspondent confesses to faking his acclaimed photographs of the American-Mexican War: “Between you and me, I was only one day and night in the Filibuster’s camp; but there was an old ruin, a village and a forest near at hand, so I took 20 views of each from different points, and one or the other did very well for every place mentioned in the news.” He justifies the hoax: “No one in New York knows the difference. It was much the safest way of doing business and saved travelling expenses” (65; quoted in Henisch and Henisch 446). The satiric tone of the passage reminds us that even in photography’s early years a significant gap existed between the objectivist truth claims of the new medium and the actual practice of the trade. Although the technical possibilities for altering images initially were limited, photographers took the liberty to manipulate photographs according to their needs. Civil War photographers, for instance, faced the difficult task of documenting a war with technical equipment that could not record moving objects. Unable to depict troops in action, they focused on other motifs, such as camp life or the aftermath of battles, and selected, arranged, and framed their subjects as they saw fit. One of the most prominent photographers of the war, Alexander Gardner, did not shrink from moving the dead bodies of soldiers he photographed if this helped the composition of his battlefield pictures. He changed the posture and location of the bodies, added symbolic props, or even assigned the dead a different identity to achieve the desired effect. Some of the best known Civil War photographs that were published in Gardner’s Photographic Sketch Book of the War, such as Timothy H. O’Sullivan’s “The Harvest of Death, Gettysburg, July, 1863,” are the result of such blatant manipulations.¹⁷

Notwithstanding the fact that early photographers carefully composed their images, popular and scientific accounts of the new medium were invested in the idea that photographs manifested objective vision and unmediated knowledge. Photographic discourse redefined what counted as impartial observation, accurate representation, and reliable evidence. As a “pencil of nature,” the new medium promised a transparent world. How did American authors respond to the challenge that photography posed to established notions of how perception, cognition, representation, and mediation worked? American romantic writers shared the desire for an immediate contact with reality that ran rampant in photographic discourse, as we have seen. Yet confronted with the new medium’s claim that the most accurate and authentic writing was done by “Dame Nature” wielding her pencil of light, they reconsidered and specified which forms of immediate experience, knowledge, and representation they deemed meaningful, valid, and trustworthy.¹⁸

Emerson’s Use of Photography as a Poetological Model

Emerson reflected on photography’s representational powers to think through the possibilities of immediate literary representation and to stake claims for literature’s cultural relevance. Photography offered an attractive model to Emerson as he worked out his ideal of organic and authentic expression because the medium fulfilled new standards for the naturalness and truthfulness of representation. In his journals and essays, he compared literature with photography to define the distinctive dynamics and rewards of literary communication.

Emerson’s first notes on photography appear in his journal in October 1841 amid entries on the writing life and the question of what constitutes literary success. His assertion that the daguerreotype “is good for its authenticity” (Journals 8: 106) is preceded by an entry in which he voices the hopes and anxieties he harbors about the reception of his latest book, the first series of Essays, published in March 1841. “I neither wish to be hated & defied by such as I startle, nor to be kissed and hugged by the young whose thoughts I stimulate” (Journals 8: 106). Slightly worried about the intense emotional responses his writing may provoke, Emerson finds in photography a reassuring alternative. As products of nature, photographs are immune to criticism, Emerson observes. “No man quarrels with his shadow, nor will he with his miniature when the sun was the painter” (Journals 8: 106). Even if they are not perfect, the flaws of the daguerreotypes are not the fault of a human artist but the result of natural factors, “motion, imperfect light, & the like” (Journals 8: 106). Hence, unlike in the case of his book which readers may reject or embrace on their own terms, there is no need for judgment. Its organic nature invests photography with an indisputable authority – a quality Emerson obviously considers desirable.

In the following journal entry, Emerson shifts his focus from reading to writing and tackles “the topic of Expression” (Journals 8: 106). He presents unrestrained self-expression as a central element of self-reliance, equating it with the cultivation of personal integrity and happiness. “Does happiness depend on ‘uninterrupted prosperity,’ &c.? no, but on expression. Am I expressed? Then I am prosperous” (Journals 8: 107). Emerson’s vision of self-expression as the harbinger of the good life rests on the assumption that we possess an “aboriginal Self” (“Self-Reliance,” CW 2: 63) that exceeds our sociocultural training and that we can express in language. For Emerson, the deep self is an individual and unique manifestation of Nature; like a wave rising out of the ocean, it assumes its distinct form without separating from its matrix. Hence, to voice this self is both to assert one’s individuality and to move beyond the boundaries of individual consciousness into the common ground that unites all life. If the articulation of our “aboriginal self” offers us a way to realize our immediate participation in fundamental reality, this raises the stakes of literary representation considerably. A failure of expression then exiles us to estranged lives that are not adequate to our needs, cutting us off from the vitalizing energy of the world until “the brute form crowd the living soul out of nature” (Journals 8: 107). This threat certainly lends urgency to the question of how we can fully express our deepest sense of who we are.

Photography emerges in this passage from Emerson’s journal as a positive role model for literary practice. Rather than think of the new medium as fostering a dependence on automatic processes and thus heralding a troubling mechanization of creativity and experience, as we might expect of a romantic writer, Emerson associates photography with successful poetic expression. For him, photographs hold the promise of an organic, irrefutable, and truthful form of representation. As a piece of self-reproduced nature, there is nothing to argue about a photograph. It can take no alternative form and allows no doubt about its validity. It is as it should be. A successful photograph “is life to life. Thanks to the Sun! This artist remembers what every other forgets to report, & what I wish to know” (Emerson and Carlyle 400).

Like many of his contemporaries, Emerson was convinced that photographs connect the viewer directly with the empirical reality they depict and that this immediacy sets photography apart from earlier forms of visual representation, such as painting. “There is this advantage also about the new pictures,” Emerson notes in his journal, “that whereas in painted miniatures it will not do to hold them near the eye, for then I see the paint & the illusion is at an end, these are like all nature’s works, incapable of being seen too near” (Journals 8: 139).¹⁹ Because their smooth surface registers no traces of the creative process, such as brushstrokes, or draws attention to the medium, as the materiality of paint does, photographs are felt to offer no resistance to the gaze. One does not seem to look at them, at the surface of the photographic image, but to see through them, to perceive the surface of the depicted objects. Therefore, Emerson holds, for instance, that a photograph of Carlyle (a friend he has not seen in fourteen years) is “out of comparison more satisfying than any picture. I confirm my recollections & I make new observations: it is life to life” (Emerson and Carlyle 400). The photograph here functions as a transparent window onto the world. “The logic of transparency,” Bolter and Grusin point out, “treats the medium as a mere channel for placing the viewer in contact with the objects represented” (110).²⁰

This effect of immediacy is of course not intrinsic to the medium but an effect of viewing habits and aesthetic preferences. In fact, the perception of the daguerreotype as immediate and transparent directly conflicts with the unique physical properties of this form of photography. Daguerreotypes are positives, that is, they are directly imprinted on plates coated with a light-sensitive iodine silver alloy. They possess shiny silvery surfaces that, if held at a certain angle, reflect the viewer’s face or oscillate between the positive image and its negative. Hence, to look at daguerreotypes takes “time and concentration. Their physical characteristics make us wonder how they are made and how they go about the work of representation; they encourage us to see the medium as well as the message,” Susan Williams explains. “Rather than being ‘transparent’ likenesses of certain perceived realities, daguerreotypes need to be pored over and read” (xii).²¹ That early observers succeeded in ignoring the mediated character of photographic images, despite the attention that the reflective surface of the daguerreotype drew to the medium, indicates the intensity with which nineteenth-century audiences desired effects of immediacy. In his study of photography’s prehistory, Burning with Desire, Geoffrey Batchen shows that this cultural demand in fact predated and motivated the invention and positive popular reception of photography.

One reason for this investment in immediacy was certainly that transparency and truthfulness of representation were widely equated. Seemingly free of artistic intervention and manipulation, photographs provided an impartial vision of the world. Their precision and apparent objectivity vouched for the veracity of the photographic record.²² Emerson echoes the popular discourse on the new medium when he claims that photographs offer a reliable standard against which the accuracy of subjective perception could be tested. Like most of his contemporaries, he held that photography offered an irrefutable account of the world, even if a particular photograph disappointed the viewer’s expectations. Hence, Emerson regarded the daguerreotype as an apt model for self-expression. “Do what you can & the world will feel you: speak what you must, & only that,” Emerson asserts in his journal, before he turns to the daguerreotype as an externalization of this ideal: “‘Tis certain that the Daguerrotype is the true Republican style of painting. The Artist stands aside & lets you paint yourself. If you make an ill head, not he but yourself are responsible and so people who go Daguerrotyping have a pretty solemn time. They come home confessing & lamenting their sins. A Daguerrotype Institute is as good as a national Fast” (Journals 8: 142).²³ Intrigued by the immediate relation of the photographic image to its referent, Emerson accepts the truth claims of the new medium and imagines its unbiased vision in the service of self-culture and a democratic renewal of American culture. He perceives the daguerreotype as a concrete instance of the ideal he harbors for poetic expression – that it articulates our nature and that its form is purposeful and necessary rather than arbitrary. For him, the poet by definition is “an utterer of the necessary and causal” (“Poet,” CW 3: 8). “There is no choice of words for him who clearly sees the truth. That provides him with the best word” (“Poetry and Imagination,” CW 8: 33).

Despite his initial fascination with the immediacy effects of photography, Emerson also readily acknowledged the limitations of the new medium. In other journal entries, he offers a more skeptical appraisal of photography’s representational reach and cultural relevance. He critically compares the new medium with literature to delimit the sphere that photography can claim to represent accurately. For Emerson, to put it bluntly, photography offers immediate depictions of empirical reality, or nature (with a small “n”), while poetry gives immediate expression to the fundamental reality of things, or Nature (with a capital “N”). Emerson distinguishes categorically between these two modes of representations in a journal entry from 1862: On one side of the binary he places “representations of nature, which a photograph gives better than any pencil, and a camera obscura better than a photograph, and which is a miracle of delight to every eye.” On the other side he posits “ideal representation, which, by selection & much omission, & by adding something not in nature, but profoundly related to the subject, & so suggesting the heart of the thing, gives a higher delight, & shows an artist, a creator” (Journals 15: 261). The passage locates the differences between photography and poetry on the level of creative process, content, and reception. “Representations of nature” reflect the biophysical world with varying degrees of accuracy that depend on the medium employed rather than on the choices of the artist. Because a camera obscura’s unfixed images can mirror movement, they are preferable to photographs. The degree of the camera operator’s skill or ingenuity does not significantly affect the outcome. The camera indiscriminately records visual reality and plays it back to our senses. These representations are of nature in the triple sense, then: that they have the empirical world as their object; that they mechanically reflect what is given rather than inventively generate an alternative reality; and that their reception is predominantly a sensory rather than imaginative affair. The second type of representation, “ideal representation,” by contrast, requires the creative agency of an artist. Its subject matter reflects the central role human input plays in its creation. It is concerned with interiority and essence, with “the heart of the thing” rather than its surface details. It deals with feelings, cognition, and the imagination rather than matter, with the process of becoming rather than achieved form. In short, it does not record and provide sights as much as it expresses and encourages insights.

Accordingly, the two types of representation can claim for themselves different degrees of cultural significance. Because poetry puts writers and readers in immediate contact with foundational reality, it reaches deeper than photography. The poet “is ascending from an interest in visible things to an interest in that which they signify, and from the part of a spectator to the part of a maker” (“Poetry and Imagination,” CW 8: 42). To accomplish this task, however, poetic expression has to be necessary in the sense that photographic representation is. As the photograph reliably traces the external shape of objects, so the poem must realize their being and interpret their meaning. “The selection of the image is no more arbitrary than the power and significance of the image. The selection must follow fate,” Emerson insists. “Poetry, if perfected, is the only verity; is the speech of man after the real, and not after the apparent” (“Poetry and Imagination,” CW 8: 20). For Emerson, poetry is the art that comes closest to fulfilling his ideal of expressing ultimate reality or Nature; photography remains on the level of nature with a small “n.”

The juxtaposition of surface and depth, of the apparent and the ideal or real is a rhetorical strategy that is certainly not unique to Emerson but endemic in Western thought. The romantics held that sensory perception needed to be complemented by acts of contemplation and imagination, because these could facilitate experiences of immersion and creative engagement that were inconceivable within the frameworks of rationalism and empiricism. In the context of the media changes underway in the early nineteenth century, the preoccupation of romantic writers with interiority and the numinous also served to highlight the difference between literature and the emerging modern visual culture. Since the age of romanticism, D’Arcy Wood reminds us, the “standard literary critique of visual media” has been “staged as a perennial rematch of aging heavyweights, the Imaginary and the Visible, the Ideal and the Real” (Shock of the Real 223).

Emerson participates in this debate when he sides photography with automatism, sense, observation, understanding, visibility, and matter, while he aligns literature with creation, intuition, imagination, reason, knowledge, and life force. His clear-cut distinction between natural and ideal forms of representation seems to reiterate, for instance, Coleridge’s differentiation between copy and imitation, to which we will turn in a moment. Yet, while Emerson certainly sets up binary oppositions, he typically dissolves them in the course of his more extensive arguments. He categorically distinguishes between representations of nature and Nature, for instance, but then turns around and attempts to model the latter on the former. Hence it is not surprising that he would assign different cultural functions to photography and poetry, but nonetheless present the workings of the camera as an analogue for literary composition in order to claim that an immediate creative expression of foundational reality is possible. Choosing to describe his poetics in terms of the representational strategies of a new visual medium, Emerson significantly differs from earlier British romantics, such as Coleridge.

Coleridge defined imitation as the domain of literature and the fine arts and distinguished it from copying which he identified as the terrain of popular visual culture, like waxworks museums. An imitation, Coleridge argued in “Lecture 13 (On Poesy or Art),” clearly acknowledges the gulf of interpretation and mediation that separates art from nature. In contemplating an imitation, we remain aware of the difference between artful representation and empirical reality and are pleased to discover how close the work of art comes to “an approximation of truth” (quoted in Wood, Shock of the Real 4).²⁴ A “real Copy,” by contrast, collapses the difference between sign and referent and tricks us into mistaking the simulation for unmediated reality. The copy’s illusionary effect, when uncovered, leaves us “disappointed and disgusted with the deception,” Coleridge maintains. We feel that the copy, because of its fraudulent claims to veracity, is more distanced from truthful representation than the imitation that aimed at resemblance rather than identity to begin with (Wood, Shock of the Real 4).

Photography, when it was invented twenty-one years after Coleridge’s lecture, was appraised as “a real Copy” of empirical reality, as we have seen. Early photographic discourse downplayed the photographer’s role and rendered the medium transparent to claim an unprecedented degree of accuracy, factuality, and lifelikeness for photographic images. Like Coleridge, Emerson contested the truth claims of the popular “real copies” of his time and asserted the superiority of literature against the competing claims of the new visual medium. Unlike Coleridge, he was fascinated by the new immediacy effects he encountered. Rather than dismiss photography’s mechanically produced representations, he initially regarded the medium as a model for literature. He hoped to achieve a similar degree of immediacy and transparency in poetic expression.

If we re-read Emerson’s essays in the context of early photography, surprising similarities emerge between his concept of the poet as the “wild” speaker of Nature and the common perception of the daguerreotype as “the pencil of nature.” Emerson’s ideal poet does not carefully select his words, deliberately compose his lines, or self-consciously reflect on his representation of reality. Instead, he abandons himself to larger forces and takes dictation. As the photographer may come upon a given object with her camera and record it, so the poet notes down in words the “pre-cantations” in which objects exist (CW 3: 25). “For poetry was all written before time was,” Emerson argues in “The Poet,” “and whenever we are so finely organized that we can penetrate into that region where the air is music, we hear those primal warblings, and attempt to write them down, but we lose ever and anon a word, or a verse, and substitute something of our own, and thus miswrite the poem” (CW 3: 8). Emerson describes the poet here as a recorder who strives to produce a precise and accurate transcript of nature’s original text. The poet seeks to copy down rather than to create (or to imitate in Coleridge’s sense). He discovers rather than invents. Receiving the imprint of impressions, his consciousness functions akin to a photographic plate or the retina of the eye. What imprints itself, however, is not the shape of objects but their fundamental nature. “As, in the sun, objects paint their images on the retina of the eye, so they, sharing the aspiration of the whole universe, tend to paint a far more delicate copy of their essence in [the poet’s] mind” (CW 3: 24–25). Accordingly, the poet’s primary task is to avoid any interference with the immediacy of representation, since this would turn the poem into “a corrupt version of some text in nature, with which [it] ought to be made to tally” (CW 3: 25).

Emerson expands here on the idea that he also pursued in his first journal entries on photography – that full expression requires the writer to give up his conscious control over the creative process (Journals 8: 107). The poet’s “abandonment to the nature of things” is key for both contemplative practice and immediate poetic expression (“Poet,” CW 3: 26). By relinquishing his sense of being in charge and of having an autonomous self, the poet realizes that his art and life emerge out of a unified reality that traverses posited divides of materiality and immateriality, variety and unity, appearance and being. His immersion and participation in Nature are the source of his poetic authority and cultural relevance. They allow him to move beyond the constraints of social conventions as well as beyond the limitations of individual consciousness. By “unlocking, at all risks, his human doors, and suffering the ethereal tides to roll and circulate through him” (CW 3: 26), he becomes a transparent medium through which Nature speaks itself. “The poet knows that he speaks adequately, then, only when he speaks somewhat wildly, or, ‘with the flower of the mind’” (CW 3: 27). Emerson models the immediacy of literary representation, in other words, after the immediacy of intuitive insight.

Emerson’s ideal poet no longer conceives of material reality as the original which art seeks to represent (in the form of either copy or imitation). Instead, he regards the visible forms of empirical reality as “apparent copies of unapparent natures” (“Poetry and Imagination,” CW 8: 19–20) and seeks to give expression to this invisible primary dimension of reality.²⁵ In this respect, Emerson’s understanding of literary representation differs significantly from Coleridge’s. When Coleridge distinguishes between copy and imitation he addresses the different ways in which works of art may engage the division between the empirical world and its representation. What matters to him is how frankly the difference between original and replica is acknowledged. The rift itself is beyond question for him. Emerson, by contrast, aims to tunnel beneath this chasm. With art positioned on one side of the abyss and the unmediated reality of the biophysical world on the other, his poetics focus on the common ground in which the schism occurs – foundational reality or Nature.

In analogy to photography’s claim of producing “an unmediated copy of the real world” (Sturken and Cartwright 17), Emerson imagines poetry as manifesting Nature. Just as photographs were thought of as being continuous with the empirical world they depict, Emerson conceives of poetic expression as seamlessly connected to the fundamental reality it voices. Poetry is “a second nature, grown out of the first, as a leaf out of a tree” (“Poet,” CW 3: 22). As in early photographic discourse, Emerson’s assertion that representations may possess unmediated naturalness serves to stake a claim for the representation’s irrefutable truth and significance. Because the poet expresses foundational reality, his insights and words cannot be disputed but need to be reckoned with. He possesses “great public power, […] his speech is thunder, his thought is law, and his words are universally intelligible as the plants and animals” (CW 3: 26–27). The poet thus becomes a natural force himself and can perform the role of a “liberating god” for others (CW 3: 30). Obviously, this is an enabling self-definition for any writer who wishes to impress his mark on literary tradition and to effect sociocultural change.

It is also a difficult ideal to realize, however. In seeking to tether literary representation to the spiritual experience of Nature, Emerson had to come to terms with his conflicting recognition that knowledge and experience are inevitably mediated (by consciousness and language, for instance). “We have learned that we do not see directly, but mediately, and that we have no means of correcting these colored and distorting lenses which we are, or of computing the amount of their errors,” Emerson acknowledges in “Experience,” relying once again on optical metaphors. “Perhaps these subject-lenses have a creative power; perhaps there are no objects” (CW 3: 74–75). While self-abandonment carried for Emerson the promise of immediate contact with foundational reality, he felt that the self-conscious preoccupation with the processes of observation and signification through which we generate our sense of identity and reality tends to lock us into the limited sphere of subjective consciousness and distances us from the world we inhabit. “Once we lived in what we saw; now, the rapaciousness of this new power, which threatens to absorb all things, engages us” (CW 3: 76). In contrast to many of his romantic peers, Emerson thought of subjectivity not primarily in terms of an enabling individualism but suspected it of interfering with our participation in the larger than human world.²⁶ The acute awareness of the subjective and mediated quality of human experience could give rise to a sense of disconnection, isolation, and unintelligibility, as he describes it in “Experience.” Hence Emerson continued to grapple in his writing with his longing for a direct contact with the natural world and foundational reality. In search of conceptual frameworks that would help him tackle the problem of experiential and representational immediacy, he turned to photography, because the new medium’s aesthetics of transparency and impartiality resonated with his ideal of intuitive insight and direct poetic expression.

In sum, there is an intriguing congruence between Emerson’s vision of the poet as “an exact reporter of the essential law” or of the invisible (“Poetry and Imagination,” CW 8: 39) and the popular conception of the camera as the most precise recorder of the visible. This may seem surprising at first, since the two concepts differ radically in several respects: early photography follows an objectivist agenda, while Emerson’s poetics champion contemplative knowledge; photographic immediacy results from the indiscriminate precision of mechanical recording, whereas Emerson’s poetics of immediacy rely on perceptual receptiveness and self-abandonment. Yet the two concepts correspond in significant ways. Both pivot on the assumption that the camera and the poet produce representations that possess an immediate connection to the realities they depict. In both cases, this immediacy can be posited only because intentional creative agency and deliberate acts of mediation are bracketed. The sun rather than the photographer is seen to record through camera, plate, and chemicals the play of light on objects. Similarly, in full expression, the poet does not speak for himself but becomes a medium through which Nature voices itself. He “is not to speak his own words, or do his own works, or think his own thoughts, but he is to be an organ through which the universal mind acts” (“Art,” CW 7: 48–49). Akin to a photographer who relies on the camera’s automatic processes to create an impartial image, Emerson’s ideal poet does not permit his subjective preferences to shape his representation of Nature. In a state of self-abandonment, he neutrally records his intuitive insights and depicts what he sees “without any distortion or favor” (“Shakespeare,” CW 4: 213). He “has no discoverable egotism: the great he tells greatly, the small subordinately. He is wise without emphasis or assertion” (CW 4: 212–13). While early photography was hailed as a medium that allowed nature to reproduce itself, Emerson portrays the poet as a vehicle that allows foundational reality to express itself. He describes the poet, in short, as the pencil of Nature.

The Failure of the Photographic Analogy: Why Shakespeare Is not Daguerre

Although the photographic analogy was a helpful tool for Emerson because it provided him with a vocabulary and material model to conceptualize and describe processes of perception, cognition, and expression, his strategy of delineating the cultural work of literature by comparing it to daguerreotypy also had significant drawbacks. The figure of the poet as an impartial recorder of reality suggests a mimetic concept of poetry that is clearly at odds with Emerson’s conviction that it is the primary task of the poet to express the flux of deep reality. Emerson advocated self-abandonment to define subjectivity and literary practice in spiritual terms rather than to negate creativity. His objective was to ground identity and art in forces beyond individual consciousness, social dynamics, and cultural conventions. Yet the use of photographic metaphors made is difficult for him to assert the creative quality of perception and the expressive dimension of literary representation. The photographic analogy clashed with his processual poetics and interfered with his attempt to break with older models of the mind as a passive recipient of information and of art as an imitative mirror of the object world.²⁷

When Emerson asserts that the poet functions at the same time as a passive recorder (of foundational reality) and as an active creator (of the form in which this reality manifests itself in language), he moves beyond the photographic model. In Emerson’s words, the poet “copies that which never was seen before” (Journals 11: 433–34). Although poetry should sound “as if copied out of some invisible tablet in the Eternal mind,” as if the poet “found the verse, not made it” (“Art,” CW 7:50), the poem obviously is not a ready-made. As the poet gestures towards the ineffable in language, he actively selects his words and shapes his composition. “The wonders of Shakespeare are things which he saw whilst he stood aside, and then returned to record them” (“Art,” CW 7: 49), Emerson states, echoing Wordsworth’s dictum that poetry is “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings, recollected in tranquility” (266). It is the articulation and interpretation of experience that promotes the poet from “spectator” to “maker” (“Poetry and Imagination,” CW 8: 42). In the act of writing, the poet becomes a creative force. As a result, the poem is both “the received and the achieved,” Albert Gelpi notes (161).²⁸

The tension between the writer’s perceptual receptivity and his creative inventiveness tends to become obscured when Emerson adopts the standards of immediacy and veracity of early photographic discourse to define poetic achievement. A case in point is the comparison between Shakespeare’s work and daguerreotypy that Emerson develops in “Shakespeare, or The Poet” (1850). True to Emerson’s concept of “ideal representation,” his representative poet does not express his individual feelings or thoughts but succeeds in “transferring the inmost truth of things into music and verse” (CW 4: 213). To identify the exceptional quality of Shakespeare’s writing, Emerson likens him first to a mirror, then to a photographic camera. The articulation of “the inmost truth of things” is seen to function akin to the reflection and recording of the details of optical reality. The poet provides a precise, impartial, thorough, and extensive depiction of ideal reality.

Emerson’s appraisal of Shakespeare sounds as if he described a camera: “Things were mirrored in his poetry without loss or blur; he could paint the fine with precision, the great with compass; the tragic and the comic indifferently, and without any distortion or favor,” Emerson observes. “He carried his powerful execution into minute details, to a hair point; finishes an eyelash or a dimple as firmly as he draws a mountain; and yet these, like nature’s, will bear the scrutiny of the solar microscope” (CW 4: 213). The passage catalogues all the qualities that popular discourse attributed to photography: neutral vision, complete and accurate mimetic representation, absence of distortion, impressive minuteness of details, naturalness. Also, because the daguerreotype was thought to duplicate the natural world, offering a “perfect identity of aspect with the thing represented” and “truth itself in the supremeness of its perfection,” as Edgar Allan Poe surmised (21), the idea was popular in photography’s first years that a photograph could be interrogated with a microscope to reveal further details of empirical reality. Early viewers were baffled at the precision of the photographic image that unfolded when the picture was studied with magnifying glasses. They thought of photography as an enhancement of human vision. Samuel Morse, for instance, proposed that the daguerreotype would “open a new field of research in the depth of microscopic Nature. We are soon to see if the minute has discoverable limits. The naturalist is to have a new kingdom to explore, as much beyond the microscope as the microscope is beyond the naked eye” (quoted in Rudisill 77).²⁹ Emerson’s passage attributes the representational power of a photographic camera to Shakespeare. He “mirrors” the world accurately, without distorting its details or reducing its variety.

Yet the quality of Shakespeare’s work that makes him a representative poet for Emerson is not the transparency effect of mimetic precision but the integrative quality of his vision and expression. “He had the power to make one picture” (CW 4: 214), Emerson states.³⁰ The number one figures in this passage as a cipher for synthesis and unity as well as for uniqueness. Emerson juxtaposes Shakespeare’s creation of a singular work with the infinitely repeatable production of daguerreotypes to argue that it is the quality rather than the quantity of representation that matters. Shakespeare “is the chief example to prove that more or less of production, more or fewer pictures, is a thing indifferent. He had the power to make one picture. Daguerre learned how to let one flower etch its image on his plate of iodine; and then proceeds at leisure to etch a million” (CW 4: 213–14).³¹ Emerson’s comparison of Shakespeare and Daguerre notably casts the poet as an active maker and the photographer as a passive recorder. At the crucial moment of creation, Daguerre learns rather than invents, the flower imprints itself instead of being photographed.

While the comparison to photography allows Emerson to highlight the continued relevance of Shakespeare’s work, the strategy has the disadvantage that it forces him to define Shakespeare’s achievement in terms of the standards of verisimilitude, accuracy, and objectivity that the new medium established. Although Emerson explicitly states that “For executive faculty, for creation, Shakespeare is unique” (CW 4: 212), the photographic analogy leaves little room for a discussion of Shakespeare’s creative ingenuity because the metaphors of mirror and photograph encourage a conceptualization of representation as the exact transcription of a given reality that precedes the poet’s perception and writing process. Early photographic discourse is committed to a mimetic ideal that conflicts with Emerson’s processual poetics.

Turning Away from the Photographic Model: Representing a World in Flux

For Emerson, the poet, in contrast to the photographer, not only records what already exists but realizes the potential of things and situations. He creates what could be. His expression “adorns nature with a new thing” (“Poet,” CW 3: 10). Poetry introduces a new quality into the world, according to Emerson, because it discloses how Nature creates and animates the shapes of material reality. Poetic “expression is organic, or, the new type which things themselves take when liberated,” he asserts in “The Poet” (CW 3: 24). By articulating (or at least suggesting) the elusive flow of life through matter, the poet’s wording of reality freshly enacts the emergence of form out of undifferentiated “Being,” out of what Emerson variably designates as thought, spirit, power, Nature, or a number of other terms to indicate that this “ineffable cause” exceeds language (“Experience,” CW 3: 73, 72). In this sense, the process of poetic expression exemplifies creation. “Art is the path of the Creator to his work” (“Art,” CW 7: 359). Poetry thus becomes a quasi evolutionary force. It “throws [the poet] into natural history as a main production of the globe, and as announcing new eras and ameliorations” (“Shakespeare,” CW 4: 213).³²

Emerson captures the double identity of the poet as recorder and creative force in a striking metaphor. In the poet, Emerson asserts, “the world projects a scribe’s hand and writes the adequate genesis. The nature of things is flowing, a metamorphosis. The free spirit sympathizes not only with the actual form, but with the power or possible forms” (“Poetry and Imagination,” CW 8: 71). Emerson imagines the relation between shape and shapelessness, between the visible and the invisible, between achieved form and becoming as reciprocal. The poet is an expression of Nature (the world’s projection of a writing hand, or simply, the ‘”pencil of Nature”), just as the poet’s expression realizes Nature. “The path of things is silent,” Emerson observes. “Will they suffer a speaker to go with them? A spy they will not suffer; a lover, a poet, is the transcendency of their own nature, – him they will suffer” (“Poet,” CW 3: 26). As a creative force, the poet contributes to the world’s becoming. He “puts eyes, and a tongue, into every dumb and inanimate object” (CW 3: 20). Emerson’s processual poetics define creativity as “the production of the new in the sense of the unprecedented,” Herwig Friedl explains. “This activity as a universal need within Being […] accounts for the fact that Art and the arts are not really mimetic, but productive, in the sense of superseding that which is. Art is the condition of the possibility of an evolutionary growth” (“Art and Culture” 44).

Emerson argues that poetry should be productive rather than mimetic because he thinks of reality as fundamentally dynamic. For him, meaning is as transient as material form. Although we tend to perceive reality as made up of discrete objects and situations and although our observations, ideas, and words imbue the world with a certain solidity, what seems stable and distinct from a distance turns out at closer inspection to be fluid and unbounded. “There are no fixtures in nature. The universe is fluid and volatile. Permanence is but a word of degrees,” Emerson notes in “Circles” (CW 2: 302). Flux is the basal condition of objects as well as of ourselves. “There is no outside, no enclosing wall, no circumference to us” (CW 2: 304).³³ Recognizing that the particulars of material reality (including human beings) are temporal and at a deep level unbounded, Emerson thinks of identity in processual and immersive terms. Like the writer, whom Emerson metaphorically describes as a member of the world – “the world projects a scribe’s hand and writes the adequate genesis” (“Poetry and Imagination,” CW 8: 71) – we may envision ourselves as possible expressions of existence, as different ways in which life temporarily takes form. Hence, “Emerson’s ‘abandonment to the nature of things,’” Jonathan Levin points out, “serves less to indicate the possibility of arriving at an essential nature or core of being than to figure abandonment and transition as the nature of things” (3).

For Emerson, our immediate participation in the world’s becoming sets the standard for the orientation of representational practices towards the world. While his emotional response to the instability and impermanence of a world in flux varies significantly (with the jubilant drive of “The Poet” and the frank acknowledgement of suffering in “Experience” marking possible extremes), Emerson’s commitment to processual poetics of immediacy remains constant. Art should aim to express the flux of life without arresting it, he insists. “True art is never fixed, but always flowing” (“Art,” CW 2: 365). The poet strives to represent the perpetual emergence and disappearance of visible forms through and as the motion of Nature.

Accordingly, when Emerson considers the relative representational powers of literature and photography, his reflections frequently revolve around the question of whether they encourage an ongoing exploration and expression of the flow of life. This capacity determines the medium’s cultural significance for him. In sum, he tends to think of photography as threatening to cement our illusory perception of reality as stable and permanent, whereas he sees literary texts as possessing the potential to evoke the fluidity of reality.

Emerson’s critical view of photography already begins to take shape in his long journal entry on sitting for a daguerreotype portrait in late October 1841, which was quoted earlier in this chapter – “Were you ever Daguerrotyped, O immortal man?” In discussing his experience of being photographed, Emerson presents photography as the paradigmatic instance of a representational practice that conceals both the processual, at base unified character of reality and the participation of artists and audiences in its perpetual transformations. Photographs fixate the impermanent and instable, segmenting the continuous flow of reality into definite tableaus that can circulate independent of the photographer and the photographed. Recalling his visit to the daguerreotypist, Emerson describes the process of being photographed as a draining of vitality that results in a lifeless image. He details the “dismal” effects of sitting for a photographic portrait: frozen into position throughout the lengthy exposure time, he feels his hands become “clenched as for fight or despair”; “every muscle” seems to contract and to grow “every moment more rigid”; his eyes are “fixed as they are fixed in a fit, in madness, or in death” (Journals 8: 115). To produce a crisp photographic image, the photographer literally has to arrest the sitter’s movement. Emerson reads this limitation of early photographic technology as indicative of the medium’s general tendency to represent reality as an assortment of solid chunks of matter. While the camera accurately records the surface of inanimate or immobile objects, the dynamic appearance of animate subjects eludes it. In a generic photographic portrait, Emerson asserts, the viewer will “find the curtain drawn perfectly, and the coat perfectly, & the hands true, clenched for combat, and the shape of the face & head […] but unhappily the total expression escaped from the face,” leaving the viewer with “the portrait of a mask instead of a man” (Journals 8: 115–16). Emerson’s account of photographic portraiture is quite dramatic. The photograph, he suggests, violates the sitter because it reduces him to an inert object. By transforming the sitter’s living expression into a mad grimace or death mask, the portrait not only distorts his features but negates his sanity, vitality, and even spiritual being – as Emerson emphasizes when he introduces his description with an apostrophe to “immortal man.”³⁴

In contrast to Emerson, most of his contemporaries cherished photography precisely for its capacity to make the impermanent permanent and to bolster a definite sense of identity. Portraiture was the most popular photographic genre, and in the early years of the new medium, before most people had secured a lasting visual record of themselves and their friends and family, it frequently included post-mortem photography (Orvell, American Photography 20, 24–25). Photographs were appreciated as durable documents of individual existence. They were tokens of memory that promised to rescue one’s achievements, possessions, and emotional attachments from their annihilation in the course of time.³⁵ Also, photographic portraits provided a means to create and display individual and collective identities. This stabilizing psychological and social function of photographic portraiture became particularly important with the increase in spatial and social mobility that marked nineteenth-century migration and urbanization (Marien, Photography 30). Portraits rendered identity stable and communicable. Hence, the fixation of reality that Emerson considered problematic for aesthetic, social, and spiritual reasons seemed highly attractive to many other early users of the medium. The inventor of the calotype, William Henry Fox Talbot, advertised the promise of photography in his Account of the Art of Photogenic Drawing (1839) this way: “The most transitory of things, a shadow, the proverbial emblem of all that is fleeting and momentary, may be fettered by the spells of our natural magic, and may be fixed for ever in the position which it seems only destined for a single instant to occupy” (quoted in Marien, Photography and Its Critics 12). Photographs possessed testimonial value because they could circulate independent of the moment in space and time they documented. The viewer did not have to be present at the scene she studied, and some popular forms of photographic entertainment, such as armchair travel, even depended completely on this detachment of product from process.

While for many early nineteenth-century observers, photographs had a magical effect because they froze moments in time and rendered the absent permanently present, Emerson was concerned that these stable records of “all that is fleeting and momentary” would conceal the flux of the present. For him, photography raised crucial epistemological and representational issues. His journal entry on being daguerreotyped ends with the question, “Could you not by grasping it very tight hold the stream of a river or of a small brook & prevent it from flowing?” (Journals 8: 116). Photography provokes for Emerson, in other words, the question of whether we can see and say the world in its ceaseless unfolding. Does any act of cognition and representation inevitably halt and solidify the flux of reality? Or is there a possibility to think and represent the world in its shape-shifting processuality? Can life be captured in word, thought, or image and retain its living dynamism? Or must perception and representation necessarily fail because the temporality of life and the instability of meaning and identity continually elude us?

By naming things, by conceiving of things as solid and distinct and of ourselves as consistent and self-contained, we give reality a stable identifiable form. The world’s surface becomes intelligible, while its ceaseless transformation becomes invisible. A thought that fixates reality or a representation that depicts the world as a static assemblage of shapes, like Emerson’s generic photographic portrait, cannot trace the flow of life through the forms of the visible. Rather than contribute to the becoming of the world, which Emerson considered the central work of art, such perceptions and representations diminish life. “If anything could stand still, it would be crushed and dissipated by the torrent it resisted, and if it were a mind, would be crazed,” Emerson cautions in “The Method of Nature” (CW 1: 199).³⁶ Photography emerges in Emerson’s reflection as a metaphor for our investment in a stable sense of reality and in such corresponding notions as permanence and objectivity, which turn out to be illusionary. His exploration of the philosophical underpinnings of the new medium prefigures the argument of current critics that early photographic discourse “expressed a wish for permanence, stability, and control and implicitly challenged arbitrariness, fragmentation, and disorder,” reflecting “the desire to immobilize and intellectualize discrete images rather than render the flux of optical reality” (Marien, Photography and Its Critics 6).

Yet the fundamental problem that Emerson addresses with regard to photography – the incessant sliding away of reality from our intellectual and representational grasp – is not specific to this medium; it is an inescapable condition of our thinking and aesthetic practices. “In a radically flowing, Heraclitean world of ceaseless construction and destruction, nature it- or herself remains absent,” Herwig Friedl reminds us (“Masks” 113). Emerson unflinchingly confronts this perpetual absence in “Experience.” He asserts, “I take this evanescence and lubricity of all objects, which lets them slip through our fingers then when we clutch hardest, to be the most unhandsome part of our condition” (CW 3: 49). The unbounded flow of reality escapes our conscious observation; we cannot enter.³⁷ Stanley Cavell proposes that the basic problem Emerson tackles here is the instability not of empirical reality but of meaning. “Look first at the connection between the hand in ‘unhandsome’ and the impotently clutching fingers,” Cavell suggests. “What is unhandsome is, I think, not that objects for us, to which we seek attachment, are, as it were, in themselves evanescent and lubricious,” Cavell argues, “the unhandsome is rather what happens when we seek to deny the stand-offishness of objects by clutching at them, which is to say, when we conceive thinking, say the application of concepts in judgments, as grasping something, say synthesizing” (117).³⁸ Suffering is caused, in other words, not by the opacity intrinsic to reality but by our insistence on the world’s intelligibility. This idea certainly has the advantage that it defines the difficulty we face as a result of our orientation towards the world rather than as inherent in the order of things. If the problem results from our actions, it is amendable.

If we transfer this reading of the challenge that the fluidity of reality poses to our thinking to the field of representational practice, the problem now may be rephrased as follows: what kind of representation can acknowledge the inevitable mismatch between the distinctness and finality of its achieved form and the unlimited and incessant flow of reality? Emerson suggests that processual poetics provide an opening for a writer who seeks to trace in language the ongoing transformation of reality. Rather than try to find one appropriate expression, such a poet knows that naming is provisional and tentative. He continually restates his observations, allowing meaning to emerge, change, and disappear again, thus gesturing towards what lies beyond the limitations of language and rational thought.³⁹ In this way, the disturbing sense of absence, the continual delay of immediate connection that Emerson describes in “Experience,” becomes the precondition for the flourishing of literary expression. “The poet did not stop at the color, or the form, but read their meaning; neither may he rest in this meaning, but he makes the same objects exponents of his new thought,” as Emerson explains his process-oriented approach in “The Poet.” “For all symbols are fluxional; all language is vehicular and transitive, and is good, as ferries and horses are, for conveyance, not as farms and houses are, for homestead” (CW 3: 34).⁴⁰ For Emerson, poetry at its best is a creative force that counters our tendency to fragment and freeze the flux of life. It resonates with the awareness, born out of self-abandonment, that an unbounded reality animates the forms of the natural world, moving through and beyond the individual consciousness of writers and readers. Hence poetry defies our established, petrified notions of reality, keeping meaning afloat. “Poets are thus liberating gods. Men have really got a new sense, and found within their world, another world, or nest of worlds; for, the metamorphosis once seen, we divine that it does not stop” (“Poet,” CW 3: 30).

Emerson thus transfers the eighteenth-century distinction between painting and poetry as synchronic and diachronic arts to the newly competing media photography and literature only to put a pragmatist spin on the matter. Unlike his precursors, who defined the depiction of spatial tableaux as the domain of visual representation and the representation of temporal processes as the province of literature, Emerson is not concerned with measuring the comparative mimetic capacity of the arts.⁴¹ Instead, convinced that “in our fine arts, not imitation, but creation is the aim” (“Art,” CW 2: 351), he sets out to gauge how the two media contribute to our participation in a fluxional reality that resists our cognitive and representational grasp. Seen from this angle, the shortcoming of photography is not its inability to capture the flux of life but its failure to convey the necessity of an ongoing engagement with what ceaselessly evades our observation. The photographic image is misleading because it cements the illusionary perception of reality as made up of given separate objects rather than signal that these forms arise from and recede into “interminable oceans” (“Experience,” CW 3: 73). For Emerson, literature can offer an alternative to this impasse. Because a literary text unfolds successively, it can stage the processes through which we generate meaning. It can dramatize that we experience the world through incessant (and continually failing) cognitive and linguistic efforts to grasp – to segment, stabilize, and comprehend – reality. Because it functions consecutively, a text can remind us that representation acquires significance as process or practice rather than as product: art becomes relevant to our lives when it encourages us to engage in an ongoing reading process of reality, not when it adds yet another stable interpretation of the world to our gallery of illusions.

In the context of the modernization processes underway in nineteenth-century America, Emerson’s poetics of immediacy represent an attempt to come to terms with the changing conditions of cultural production and reception. Emerson recognized that the role of creativity and contemplation changed in an increasingly technological and commercial culture and that this challenge needed to be confronted if technological possibilities and economic interests were not to dictate the function of the arts in the future. In “Works and Days” (1870), for instance, he concedes that rapid innovations in such fields as transportation, communication, and science have radically transformed American society in the past fifty years. In light of these changes, he warns against an unqualified reliance on technology. “Many facts concur to show that we must look deeper for our salvation than to steam, photographs, balloons or astronomy,” Emerson cautions. “These tools have some questionable properties. They are reagents. Machinery is aggressive. The weaver becomes a web, the machinist a machine. If you do not use the tools, they use you” (CW 7: 164). For Emerson, the common equation of technological development with progress raises the specter of a society in which life is tailored to the demands of machinery. He worries that the new instruments will assume dominance over their users. Yet he also maintains that the only way to meet this risk and to ensure that the technological advances will contribute to the development of American culture is to use them in a way that serves human needs. Rather than reject technology, Emerson insists on its discerning use. “If you do not use the tools, they use you.”

This cautionary dictum, it seems to me, can serve as an apt motto for the response of Emerson and other romantic authors to the media technological innovations that altered the conditions under which literary texts were written, published, sold, and read in antebellum America. When early photography set a new standard for mimetic representation and changed how people thought about such issues as objectivity, verisimilitude, and veracity, Emerson confronted the truth claims of the new medium by appropriating it as a poetological metaphor. His use of photography as an analogue for poetic expression thus exemplifies the critical engagement with technological innovation he called for. While the analogy at times threatened to derail Emerson’s processual poetics because of early photography’s mimetic orientation – which is to say, the tool threatened to take control of its user – the comparative media perspective in sum sharpened his understanding of the relations between reality and representation and of the cultural work of literature. For him, art at its best reconciled a sense of transience and permanence, openness and closure, becoming and achieved form, surrender and control, precision of observation and originality of interpretation: “Daguerreotype gives the sculpture of the face, but omits the expression, the painter aims at the expression & comes far short of Daguerre in the form & organism. But we must have sea and shore, the flowing & the fixed, in every work of art” (Journals 9: 382).

Assembled into a coherent (and thus necessarily fictitious) narrative, Emerson’s reflections on photography suggest that his concept of immediacy changed as he recognized how central dynamics of mediation are to our ways of knowing and saying the world. Initially, Emerson hoped that he could move in moments of intuitive insight beyond the cognitive, linguistic, and sociocultural mediation of experience and come into direct contact with ultimate reality. He associated the camera’s capacity to register and record optical reality without distortion with this promise of an immediate experience and direct expression of fundamental reality. As he further developed his processual poetics, however, he acknowledged that our cognitive and linguistic tools for navigating reality inevitably structure our encounter with the world. As a result, he focused on the processes of perception, interpretation, and communication that he had previously deemphasized. He now suggested that it is paradoxically the awareness of the continual failure of our intellectual distinctions and linguistic designations to grasp the flux of reality that allows us to address the ineffable and to realize our participation in a fundamentally unified reality. As a processual practice, art offers a method to chart the “innavigable sea” that “washes with silent waves between us and the things we aim at and converse with” (“Experience,” CW 3: 48).