Literature and Fascination

Sibylle Baumbach

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137538017
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

Exploring literary fascination as a key concept of aesthetic attraction, this book illuminates the ways in which literary texts are designed, presented, and received. Detailed case studies include texts by William Shakespeare, S.T. Coleridge, Mary Shelley, Bram Stoker, Oscar Wilde, Joseph Conrad, Don DeLillo, and Ian McEwan.

1

Literature and Fascination

Narratives of fascination

Many literary narratives include reflections upon their powers of fascination. In Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), the protagonist, who himself radiates an unsettling attraction, is absorbed not only by his portrait, but also by a book:

‘That book you sent me so fascinated me that I forgot how the time was going.’

‘Yes: I thought you would like it,’ replied his host, rising from his chair.

‘I didn’t say I liked it, Harry. I said it fascinated me. There is a great difference.’ (105)

‘Liking’ falls short of the intense aesthetic experience Dorian longs to describe here. The reading he received from his mentor Harry captivated him. It annihilated his sense of time and space and held him spellbound not because it was thoroughly enjoyable, but because it had something deeply disturbing and intensely threatening to it. As will be shown in Chapter 5, the luring forces of fascination constitute a complex narrative web in Wilde’s novel, which includes several different levels of verbal and visual enticement. Before further analysing literary fascination, we have to distinguish different approaches to fascination as concept and (popular) belief that literary texts reflect upon (and discuss) on the one hand, and fascination as a strategy employed by literary texts to evoke specific reactions within readers on the other, that is, between fascination in literature and the fascination of literature.¹

Fascination is commonly used to describe an attraction of and an intense interest for objects (images, texts, people, events) which enthral us, draw us in by their extensive beauty, their complexity, radical otherness or awfulness, in both senses of the term: by the wonder or admiration as well as by the terror and trepidation we feel on encountering them. It implies a temporary rupture of habitual perceptual modes, a state of exception and extraordinariness, an aesthetic friction and a radical betwixt-and-between where our critical faculties are suspended in a moment of mental paralysis, unable to process the experience and channel the contrasting emotional responses it elicits. As Maurice Blanchot suggests,

[w]hat fascinates us robs us of our power to give sense. It abandons our ‘sensory’ nature, abandons the world, draws back from the world, draws us along. It no longer reveals itself to us, and yet it affirms itself in a presence foreign to the temporal present and to presence in space.²

Literary fascination touches upon a wide variety of different discourses, reaching from (black) magic and the occult to magnetism, mesmerism and hypnosis or suggestion to the arresting effects and dangerous influence of art, technological progress and the rise of digital media, as well as to notions of presence in/and literature. Many neighbouring concepts, including the sublime, the uncanny or the fantastic, serve to support fascination mechanisms employed by literary texts. Despite the attraction exerted by the term itself, its mere appearance is neither a prerequisite nor a guarantee for this intense combination of attraction and repulsion to arise. On the contrary, the history of fascination, to a great extent, is a history that rests on the implicit presence of the concept of fascination rather than on the actual use of the term.³

Current state of the art

Given the dominant role of fascination in the literary, artistic and acoustic production of attraction and its vast powers of control, it is astonishing that the (historical) dimension of this term as well as the mechanisms of fascination in different media are still greatly under-researched. With its objective to explore the aesthetics of fascination in literary texts, this study both connects to and expands recent approaches in the fields of reception aesthetics and cognitive literary studies.⁴ The increased awareness of embodied representations and perceptual information in literary texts, as pioneered by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson,⁵ has prompted the demand not only for ‘reading for Stimmung’,⁶ but also for ‘reading for fascination’. While the term is frequently used to heighten specific research topics,⁷ only very few studies engage in a critical discussion, let alone a comprehensive analysis of fascination.

A first step in this direction has been taken by Andy Hahnemann and Björn Weyand in a collection of essays on Fascination⁸ which contains contributions from different disciplinary perspectives, including cultural, religious and media studies, as well as comparative literature. The essays exploring the connection between literature and fascination mainly focus on German literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and the nexus between fascination, suggestion and hypnosis.⁹ As argued by Hans Ulrich Seeber, fascination is especially prominent in fin-de-siècle literature and culture, which move from traditional aesthetics and Immanuel Kant’s concept of ‘disinterested pleasure’ to ‘an aesthetics of fascination’.¹⁰ Expanding on Seeber’s findings, this study will offer a much broader overview of fascination, based on the premise that literary fascination is a phenomenon that needs to be traced transhistorically in order to be fully understood.

To this end, Horst Bredekamp’s theory of the ‘picture act’¹¹ provides a valuable starting point. According to Bredekamp, images only remain silent as long as no one engages in them. Once they are looked at, the established relation between viewer and image demands a reaction that includes the return of the gaze. Bredekamp even goes one step further when he claims that the image absorbs part of the autonomy of its viewer: it casts a spell upon him, disempowers him, holds him in thrall and starts communicating, calling for a response.

The return of the gaze, which has also been examined by James Elkins, who draws on Jacques Lacan’s notion of being photographed by the image,¹² raises the question to what extent the energetic and generative power of images, that is, their power to draw in the spectator and exert an irresistible appeal that could be described as fascination (though neither Bredekamp nor Elkins use the term), can be transferred to literature. If fascination is linked predominantly to visual stimuli,¹³ does reading literary texts qualify as an experience of fascination? Can literature ‘look back’ at us, blur the boundaries between subject and object, even conflate them, and thereby lay claim to agency? How can this return of the gaze be described in, and enacted by, literary texts? To what extent do verbal and visual strategies of enchantment interact and do texts succeed in absorbing the power of images or transferring their power into words? Literary fascination frequently interweaves visual and verbal media of attraction, referring to various images and notions of infectious sight. This is indicated, for instance, by Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s picture-poems or, to refer to more recent examples, by 9/11 novels, most significantly by Don DeLillo’s Falling Man (2007).¹⁴ With regard to the latter, theories of ‘safe’ or ‘destructive spectatorship’¹⁵ offer important tools to assess the effect of aesthetically beautiful, yet ethically highly disturbing images and their representation in literature, photography and new media. Furthermore, the question arises to what extent fascination in literature is enhanced by the inclusion of, or references to, visual images, either existing paintings and photographs as in Rossetti’s or DeLillo’s work, or fictional ones as in The Picture of Dorian Gray. In this context, analytical approaches concerning the connection between text and image provide important input.¹⁶

In the context of art (history), this book will draw on recent research into the ‘language’ of images¹⁷ and emotions in art¹⁸ as well as on studies dealing with the philosophy of images and art appreciation.¹⁹ Further connections are provided by critical approaches that explore the cultural function of images,²⁰ the question of agency and the ‘art nexus’,²¹ and aspects of visual perception.²²

In the field of cultural and social studies, there is a substantial body of works that relates to fascination. Particularly relevant are the critical analyses of idolatry and the fascination of new ‘deities’ in postmodern fan-culture and their socio-political dimensions.²³ The connection of fascination and charisma²⁴ as a form of personal attraction as well as concepts of attachment and theories of ‘the social bond’²⁵ provide additional starting points to explore the pertinent role of fascination in anthropological and sociological processes of interaction, attraction and also manipulation. Further approaches that directly relate to ideas of fascination (without mentioning the concept) include studies devoted to the analysis of the (dangerously attractive) lure exerted by social media,²⁶ to mass culture,²⁷ and psychoanalytically informed theories on the fascination of popular culture,²⁸ as well as analyses that focus on the attraction of violence and terror,²⁹ pointing to the critical tension between ethics and aesthetics.³⁰

Studies that discern a gradual ‘re-enchantment of the world’³¹ further support the hypothesis of a re-emergence, or rather rediscovery, of strategies of fascination, confirming that these are fully compatible with secular rationality while retaining some of their originally magical qualities. What is striking is that the conceptual basis of fascination seems implicit in many of these studies, even though the term ‘fascination’ is scarcely mentioned, if at all, in passing. The significance of fascination for aesthetic theories has been greatly neglected up to this point. One reason for this might be the inherent difficulties of analysing a concept whose full scope can ultimately only be adequately approached through an interdisciplinary lens; another might be the multiple challenges posed by a process or (mental and bodily) state that cannot be grasped but primarily emerges from tensions caused by conflicting emotional reactions, which makes its measurement and delineation difficult.

Relevant sources that aid the study of literary fascination can be structured into three main areas relating to the fascination in and of literature respectively: (1) studies concerned with neighbouring concepts’ fascination needs to be distinguished from (2) studies that explore motifs or figures associated with fascination and (3) recent research approaches in the field of cognitive narratology, which help explore the fascination of literature.

For distinguishing fascination from neighbouring concepts, I draw on studies on disgust,³² evil,³³ the literary fantastic,³⁴ the uncanny,³⁵ the sublime,³⁶ hypnosis and suggestion,³⁷ extreme beauty and ugliness,³⁸ and the fascination of (religious) idolatry.³⁹ Further noteworthy works include those that set out to explore representations of horror and terror,⁴⁰ the creation of suspense⁴¹ and the dialectic of fear in literature.⁴² With the notable exception of Seeber’s work, none of these studies delineate fascination as an aesthetic concept, nor do they offer a comprehensive analysis of how fascination works, how it is generated, transmitted and received, and what functions it acquires in different literary contexts and historical eras.

Further approaches related to literary fascination mainly include studies on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literary mesmerism.⁴³ Following the invention of the telegraph and James Clerk Maxwell’s discovery of the electromagnetic field, which revolutionised studies on electrodynamics, electric knowledge became increasingly integrated into literature.⁴⁴ While the human body was regarded as resonating with the natural rhythm of the universe, it could also connect with other beings or objects by magnetic and electrical flows. A particularly significant area of investigation in this context are the ‘electric metres’,⁴⁵ which Jason R. Rudy identified in Victorian poetry, arguing that poetic rhythm was increasingly reflecting physiological mechanisms of the human body. The greater insights into electric knowledge had a strong impact on literary narratives of fascination, which explored the intersection of physiology, electricity and psychic energy.

Further relevant approaches to literary representations of mechanical, physiological and psychological processes of electric charging and discharging are found in research approaches concerned with the intersection of technology, magical thinking and literature.⁴⁶ They provide the basis for a detailed investigation of narrative strategies that help generate psychic energies released in processes of reading. As indicated by Ru...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1 Literature and Fascination
• 2 The Power of Magic and the Fear of Contamination: Fascination in Early (Modern) Literature
• 3 Facing the Femme Fatale: The Poetics of Seduction and the Fascination with Storytelling
• 4 The Spark of Inspiration: Mesmerism, Electrifying Fiction and Gothic Fascination
• 5 The Anxiety of Influence: Fascination with the Self and the Other
• 6 The Gorgon Gazes Back: Contemporary Fascination
• Conclusion: The Journey Ahead
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index