J Hillis Miller, Whistler-Swinburne - Before The Mirror (2003)

Copyright 2003. University of Toronto Press. All rights reserved.
. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses
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7
Whistler/Swinburne:
'Before the Mirror'
/. Hillis Miller
William E. Fredeman was a man of the manuscript and printed book epoch
if there ever was one. He also knew, however, that a printed book, like a
manuscript, was not disembodied words that might be printed without loss
in any type size and font on any sort of paper. A book or a manuscript is a
material object, and the form of its materiality is part of its meaning.
Moreover, as William E. Fredeman also knew, books have also always been in
one way or another multimedia productions, most obviously in the case of
illustrated books. Fredeman's magnificent collection of Pre-Raphaelite
materials, like his published writings, took that particular group of artists,
poets, bookmakers, and artisans, the Pre-Raphaelites, as a paradigmatic
example of the need to go back to originals in order to study the literature
of the printed book epoch adequately. This small paper attempts to reflect
on the changes in such study being brought about by new communications
technologies. They are radically altering the way we examine the sort of
material that Fredeman collected in his own library as the indispensable
means of access to the cultural meanings embodied in Pre-Raphaelite
productions.
The transformations now being wrought by new communications technologies in shaping humanistic research and teaching are hard to define
and understand, partly because we are in the midst of them. The digital
revolution, however, is clearly as radical and as irreversible as the move from
a manuscript to a print culture. Email, faxes, computerized library catalogues, composition on the computer rather than in longhand or on the
typewriter, the increasing use of computers and networks in instruction,
the availability of more and more material online, the move from linear
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136
J. Hillis Miller
print media to multimedia hypertext, the online publishing of articles and

monographs that is altering the way research results are disseminated - all
these are irrevocably transforming the way teachers and students of literature (and of other humanistic disciplines) do their work.
In striking passages written by one of the protagonists of La cartepostale
(The Post Card), Jacques Derrida says the following:
An entire epoch of so-called literature, if not all of it, cannot survive a
certain technological regime of telecommunications (in this respect the
political regime is secondary). Neither can philosophy, or psychoanalysis.
Or love letters. ('Envois,' 212; Post Card, 197)
Refound here the American student with whom we had coffee last Saturday, the one who was looking for a thesis subject (comparative literature).
I suggested to her something on the telephone in the literature of the 20th
century (and beyond), starting with, for example, the telephone lady in
Proust or the figure of the American operator, and then asking the question of the effects of the most advanced telematics (la telematique la plus
avancee) on whatever would still remain of literature. I spoke to her about
microprocessors and computer terminals, she seemed somewhat disgusted
(avail 1'air un peu degoutee). She told me that she still loved literature (me
too, I answered her, mais si, mais si). Curious to know what she understood
by this. ('Envois,' 219; Post Card, 204)
What Derrida or, rather, his protagonist in La carte postale says in the citation
is truly frightening, at least to a lover of literature like me or the protagonist's hapless interlocutor, the American graduate student in comparative
literature who was looking for a dissertation topic. What the protagonist
says arouses in me the passions of anxiety, doubt, fear, disgust, and perhaps
a little secret desire to see what it would be like to live beyond the end of
literature, love letters, philosophy, and psychoanalysis, all prime examples
of 'humanistic discourse.' To live beyond their end would be like living
beyond the end of the world.
Derrida's words perhaps also generate in most readers the passions of
disbelief and even scorn. What a ridiculous idea! We passionately and
instinctively resist the statement that Derrida makes in such a casual and
offhand way, as though it goes without saying. How could a change in
something so superficial, mechanical, or contingent as the dominant
means of preservation and dissemination of information, the change, to be
precise, from a manuscript and print culture to a digital culture, actually
William E. Fredeman
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Whistler/Swinburne: 'Before the Mirror'
137
bring to an end things that seem so universal in any civilized society as

literature, philosophy, psychoanalysis, and love letters? Surely these will
survive any change in the regime of telecommunications? Surely I can
write love letters by email! Surely I can compose and transmit literature or
philosophy or even a love letter on a computer connected to the Internet
just as well as I can with handwriting or a typewriter or through a printed
book? How is psychoanalysis, based as it is on face-to-face interlocution (it's
called 'the talking cure'), tied to the regime of print and to be brought to
an end by a shift to digital culture?
Derrida's curt and even insolent words arouse in me a passion of disgust
like that in the graduate student to whom he gave such strange advice. This
advice, by the way, was taken by Avital Ronell, in her own way and no doubt
not as a response to any direct communication from Derrida. Both Proust
on the telephone and Derrida's ThePost Card figure in Ronell's admirable
The Telephone Book, itself in its format an anticipation of the new regime of
telecommunications. Laurence Rickels has also already written brilliantly
on the telephone in modern literature, psychoanalysis, and culture generally, as has Friedrich Kittler.1
Nevertheless, that is what Derrida is claiming: the change in 'regime of
telecommunications' does not simply transform but absolutely bring to an
end literature, philosophy, psychoanalysis, and even love letters. It does so
by a kind of death-dealing performative fiat: 'Let there be no more love
letters!' How in the world could this be? Insofar as Derrida's words, either
those he (or one protagonist of ThePost Card) said to the graduate student
or the words you or I read now in that book, generate the passions of fear,
anxiety, disgust, incredulity, and secret desire, those words are a 'felicitous'
performative utterance. They do what they say and help bring about the
end of literature, love letters, etc., just as saying 'je t'aime (I love you),' as
Derrida argued in a seminar, not only creates love in the speaker but may
also generate belief and reciprocal love in the one to whom the words are
spoken.
In spite of all his love for literature, Derrida's writings, for example Glas,
or La cartepostale itself, have certainly contributed to the end of literature as
we have known it in a particular historical epoch and culture, say the last
two and a half centuries in Europe and America. The concept of literature
in the West has been inextricably tied to Cartesian notions of selfhood, to
the regime of print, to Western-style democracies and notions of the
nation-state, and to the right to free speech within such democracies.
'Literature' in that sense began fairly recently, in the late seventeenth or
early eighteenth century, and in one place, Western Europe. It could come
William E. Fredeman
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J. Hillis Miller
to an end, and that would not be the end of civilization. In fact, if Derrida is
right, and I believe he is, the new regime of telecommunications is bringing literature to an end by transforming all those factors that were its
preconditions or its concomitants.
One of Derrida's main points in The Post Cardis that it is a feature of the
new regime of telecommunications to break down the inside/outside
dichotomies that presided over the old print culture. The new regime is
ironically allegorized in The Post Card in somewhat obsolete forms, that is,
not only in the many telephone conversations the protagonist (or protagonists) have with their beloved or beloveds but also in an old-fashioned
remnant of the rapidly disappearing culture of handwriting, print, and the
postal system: the postcard. The postcard stands as a proleptic anticipation
of the publicity and openness of the new communications regimes. A
postcard is open for anyone to read, just as email today is by no means
sealed or private. If an example of either happens to fall under my eye, as
Derrida makes explicit for post cards and letters not only in La cartepostale
but also in the admirable essay called 'Telepathic,' I can make myself or am
magically made into its recipient. The postcard message or the email letter
that happens to fall under my eye, is meant for me, or I take it as meant for
me, no matter who it is addressed to. This certainly happens when I read
the passage from The Post Card I have cited. The bad or even disgusting
news the speaker conveyed to the graduate student, news of the end of
literature, philosophy, psychoanalysis, and love letters, is also conveyed to
me. I become the recipient of this bad news. The passions that what the
protagonist said generated in the graduate student are also generated in
me.
Perhaps the most disturbing thing Derrida says in the passage is that in
the power the new regime of telecommunications has to bring an end to
literature, psychoanalysis, philosophy, and love letters, 'the political regime is secondary.' More exactly, Derrida says, 'in this respect the political
regime is secondary.' 'In this respect' means, I take it, that he does not
deny, nor would I, the importance of political regimes but that the power of
the new regime of telecommunications is not limited or controlled, except
in a 'secondary' way, by the political regime of this or that nation.
The second industrial revolution, as everyone knows, is the shift in the
West, beginning in the mid-nineteenth century and accelerating ever
since, from an economy centred on the production and distribution of
commodities to an economy increasingly dominated by the creation, storage, retrieval, and distribution of information. Even money is now primarily
information, exchanged and distributed all over the world at the speed of
William E. Fredeman
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light by telecommunications networks that also transmit literature in digitized form. Several of HenryJames's novels, for example, are now available
on the Internet, along with innumerable other literary works, works belonging to the now rapidly fading historical epoch dominated by the
printing press.
Photography, the telegraph, the typewriter, the telephone, the gramophone, cinematography, radio, tape recorders, television, and now CDs,
VCRs, DVDs, cell phones, computers, communication satellites, and the
World Wide Web - we all know what these devices are and how their power
and effects have accelerated over the last century and a half. The possession and consequent effect of these devices, as Masao Miyoshi and others
have frequently reminded us, is unevenly distributed among various countries and peoples of the world. Only about 50 per cent of U. S. households
presently have personal computers, and, of course, the percentage is
immensely smaller in many other countries. Nevertheless, in one way or
another and to one degree and another, almost everyone's life has already
been decisively changed by these technological gadgets. The changes will
accelerate as more and more people come, for example, to have access to
the Internet, and they will include a transformation of politics, nationhood
or citizenship, culture, and the individual's sense of selfhood, identity, and
belonging, not to speak of literature, psychoanalysis, philosophy, and love
letters.
The decline or weakening of the nation-state's autonomy, the development of new electronic communities, communities in cyberspace, and the
possible generation of a new human sensibility leading to a mutation of
perceptual experience making new cyberspace persons, persons deprived
of literature, psychoanalysis, philosophy, and love letters these are three
effects of the new telecommunications regime.
What is perhaps most scandalous about the radical effects of new telecommunications is the way none of the inventors, so far as I know, intended or foresaw any of the effects their inventions have had. The inventors
of the telephone or of the magnetic tape recorder were doing no more
than exploiting technological possibilities, playing creatively with wires,
electrical currents, vibrating diaphragms, plastic tapes, and so forth. They
had no intention, so far as I know, of putting an end to literature, love
letters, philosophy, or the nation-state. It is the incommensurability between cause and effect plus the accidental aspect of the huge effect - no
less than a radical disruption, interruption, break, or reorientation in
human history - that is so scandalous.
My claim is that this new digitized existence will change literature and
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J. Hillis Miller
literary study in manifold and as yet unforeseen ways. I would go so far as to

say that it will transform, is already transforming, the concept of literature
or of literarity, killing literature and giving it a new existence as the survivor
of itself. Students of literature will and should remain as the guardians and
surviving witnesses of previous historical epochs, just as classicists bear
witness to what was the nature and function of Greek tragedy within a
vanished classical culture. Literature as we know it, as Derrida has argued,
is inextricably associated with democracy, that is, with freedom of speech,
the freedom to say or to write anything and everything (never completely
obtained, of course). Even the concept of free speech is being changed by
the electronic revolution. 'Literature' is also, I further claim, concomitant
with industrialization prior to the electronic revolution, with the age, now
coming to an end, of the printed book, and with Cartesian and postCartesian conceptions of selfhood, along with their associated notions of
representation and of'reality.' All these factors are intertwined and mutually self-sustaining. Literature as a distinctive way to use language arises not
from any special way of speaking or writing but from the possibility of taking
any piece of language whatsoever as fictional or, on the other hand, as
possibly truth-telling, as referential in the ordinary sense. This 'taking'
happens according to complex historically determined conventions, codes,
and protocols. That neat opposition between fiction and truth-telling is a
feature of print culture. In the digitized world of the Internet, the distinction breaks down or is transformed, just as it has already been transformed
by television. In television, advertising cannot always be distinguished from
news, and wars like the one in Somalia or the Gulf War are presented as
media spectacles, not all that different from war movies.
The computer-adept person, I am arguing, will read literature of the
past differently and think of its relation to other cultural artifacts differently. I shall exemplify this with an example from Swinburne.
Swinburne's 1866 poem 'Before the Mirror,' is subtitled '(Verses Written under a Picture)' and then designated as 'Inscribed toJA. Whistler.'
The picture is Whistler's The Little White GirL The poem and painting
together make a double work of art, each illustrating or interpreting the
other. About this interaction and about Swinburne's admirable insight into
what is going on in Whistler's painting, there is much to say. Mark Samuels
Lasner has been kind enough to send me a reproduction of a photograph
of the painting in its original frame with a manuscript copy of the poem
attached to the left and right sides of the wide frame border. The photograph is inscribed 'To Swinburne' 'fromJA McNeill Whistler' (fig. 7.1). Mr.
Lasner has also provided me with a reproduction of the original autograph
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manuscript of 'Before the Mirror,' used as copy-text for the poem in Poems
and Ballads (1866). At some point the painting was exhibited with
Swinburne's poem attached to make a double work of art. My stress now,
however, is on the way the easy accessibility of both literary texts and
graphic images on the World Wide Web invites and facilitates certain forms
of literary study. I was able to download Swinburne's 'Before the Mirror'
from my computer terminal on Deer Isle, Maine, in a few minutes from the
Chadwyck-Healey database available through my university. A few more
minutes' search also produced a Whistler Web site with about forty Whisder paintings in JPEG format, including The Little White Girl, which I
downloaded in a few seconds. I was then easily able to manipulate this
digital image in various ways, for example, by printing it on my Epson 800
colour printer, or by blowing up details. Here are five details I found useful
in interpreting the painting: details of the fan, hand, bar, and signature,
and reflected painting (figs. 7.2 and 7.3).
Such manipulations make it possible to see that the picture on the fan is
a seascape or riverscape, as is the Whistler painting reflected in the mirror
from the wall behind the viewer or painter. The most similar Whisder
painting to the one reflected in The Little White Girl is Nocturne in Blue and
Silver (fig. 7.4). Whisder has painted one of his characteristic black bars
down the middle of the mirror in The Little White Girl Another such
painting is Harmony in Grey and Green (fig. 7.5). Whistler has also superimposed his signature, oddlyjust his last name with a period or dot after it, on
the upper right hand corner of the painting, as if to call attention to the way
his proper name is also a common noun, meaning someone or something
that whistles, though I am at a loss to incorporate that into the reading of
either painting or poem. That failure to find significance is significant.
Apart from the black bar, the signature is the only thing painted on the
canvas that is not reflected or able to be reflected by the mirror. Both bar
and signature are outside the loop of representational mirroring and
doubling, neither inside nor outside, neither before nor behind the
mirror. In one sense, they are non-significant, but in another sense, they
belong to a different register of significance. The black line, you may
argue, might be seen as part of the mirror, a division between one piece of
glass and another. Nevertheless, I answer, Whistler need not have painted
it even if it was actually there. It is an intrusive bar, not centred over the
middle of the mantel and cutting through the reflected Whistler painting
in the background. It is like the black smudge of mortality across the
surface of social life in Densher's imagination of it in an eloquent passage
in Henryjames's The Wings oftheDove: 'It was a conspiracy of silence, as the
William E. Fredeman
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J. Hillis Miller
cliche went, to which no one had made an exception, the great smudge of
mortality across the picture, the shadow of pain and horror, finding in no
quarter a surface of spirit or of speech that consented to reflect it' (2:299).
The black bar exceeds its representational function. It looks like the raw
material from which the signature is painted, as though the same brushfull
of paint were used for both or as if the straight line of the bar had been
curved and broken to make letters that still ostentatiously contain their
non-signifying material base, since they are rather crudely drawn.
Whistler's painting, like Swinburne's poem, and like the poem in its
relation to the painting, is a provocative and enigmatic series of doublings.
These vertiginous doublings and redoublings are neither of opposites nor
of mirrored identities but of differential complementarities. Perhaps the
most striking instance is the difference between the girl's expression and
that of her ghostly sister in the mirror. The girl looks calmly, meditatively, at
the wedding ring on her left hand. The girl in the mirror, however, has a
look of ineffable heavy-lidded sadness and suffering, whether of pain
received or pain imposed it is not quite possible to tell. The girl is doubled
and redoubled again by the riverscape paintings on the fan and reflected
from the wall behind the viewer and by the two oriental pots on the mantel,
one red, one a cool white and blue. The girl's hidden body, chastely
covered from sight by the white dress, is doubled by her left hand, which
looks so provocatively like female legs. Two of these finger-legs are chastely
together, while two others (one the same finger) are spread lubriciously
apart. This doubleness is picked up by the poem in the (presumably) male
speaker's questions about the girl's sexual innocence or knowledge. Is she
chaste or is she 'fallen'? Her hand is said by the girl herself to be 'a fallen
rose' that 'Lies snow-white on white snows, and takes no care' (35). The
question of her degree and kind of sexual knowledge cannot, the poem
says, be answered, not even, against common sense, by the girl herself.
Speaking of her sister ghost, her mirrored image, the girl says: 'She knows
not loves that kissed her / She knows not where' (29-30), and then the girl
says of herself: 'I cannot see what pleasures / Or what pains were' (36-7).
The girl in the painting is doubled by the roses. As the poem says, 'White
rose in red rose-garden / Is not so white' (1-2). These lines pick up a motif
frequent in Swinburne's poetry that sets red rose against white rose and
compares people, especially women or lovers, to flowers, gardens, or to the
landscape generally (in his early play Rosamund or in 'The Forsaken Garden' or in Atalanta in Calydori). The structure of doublings within doublings
in a receding series is present again in the painting in the wooden frames
within frames of the mantelpiece enclosing the black hole of the fireplace
William E. Fredeman
Account: s8989984
143
proper, of which nothing can be said because nothing can be seen. The
fireplace is an emblem of the non-knowledge so insistently asserted in
echo in Swinburne's poem. The doublings in the painting are redoubled
by the way the poem brackets the middle part spoken by the girl with first
and last sections spoken by the poet. 'Before the Mirror' brilliantly manipulates the analogy between the girl and the seascape that the painting
proposes. Presenting a painted replica of a painting raises the unanswerable question of the priority of original and mirrored copy that the poem
repeats. At the exact middle of the poem, the girl asks her mirrored image:
Art thou the ghost, my sister,
White sister there,
Am I the ghost, who knows? (31-3)
Though of course someone reading Swinburne's poem could study

Whistler's painting in a book of Whistler reproductions or by going to see
the original painting in the Tate Gallery, the Internet makes it possible to
compare them far from any good library and far from the original painting.
The way in which the poem and the painting can exist side by side on the
computer screen or in a single file encourages thinking of the poem and
the painting as a single unit made of manifold doublings, mirrorings, and
enigmatic echoings. The ease of manipulating so easily both poem and
painting encourages new kinds of multimedia study. It tends to break
down the divisions between picture and text that are strongly institutionalized in university departmental divisions. Moreover, these new technologies to some degree free me or any other scholar-critic from the need to
own or to have access to the sort of comprehensive collection of original
materials William E. Fredeman collected. This essay was prepared using all
the appropriate resources of the new technologies. Nevertheless, as a
person of the printed book epoch myself, though one strongly attracted by
the new technologies and fairly adept at using them, as in the composition
of this essay, I would relish the experience of seeing the original of
Whistler's Little White GzV/face to face, thereby interrupting her self-contemplation, or the experience of holding one of those old books in William
Fredeman's collection in my hands. Like many scholars today, I remain
somewhat uneasily poised between two epochs, the printed book epoch
and the epoch of the Internet.
William E. Fredeman
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J. Hillis Miller
NOTE
1 See Avital Ronell, The Telephone Book (Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1989);

Laurence Rickels, 'Kafka and Freud on the Telephone,' Modern Austrian
Literature: Journal oj'the International ArthurSchnitzlerAssociation, 22: 3/4 (1989):
211-25, and Aberrations of Mourning (Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1988), esp.
chapters 7 and 8; Friedrich Kittler, Essays: Literature, Media, Information Systems,
ed. John Johnston (Amsterdam: G+B Arts International, 1997), esp. 31-49.
ILLUSTRATIONS
Fig. 7.1 J.A.M. Whistler, The Little White Girl: Symphony in White. 1864, oil on
canvas; Tate Gallery, London. Photograph with inscription on frame by Mark
Samuels Lasner.
Fig. 7.2 The Little White Girl Detail of bar, hand, signature, and reflected painting.
Fig. 7.3 The Little White Girl Detail of fan.
Fig. 7.4 J.A.M. Whistler, Nocturne in Blue and Silver: Cremorne Lights. 1872, oil on
canvas, 50.2 x 74.3 cm; Tate Gallery, London.
Fig. 7.5 J.A.M. Whistler, Harmony in Grey and Green: Miss Cicely Alexander. 1872-4,
oil on canvas, 190.2 x 97.8 cm; Tate Gallery, London.
William E. Fredeman
Account: s8989984

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Copyright 2003. University of Toronto Press. All rights reserved.

print media to multimedia hypertext, the online publishing of articles and

Whistler/Swinburne: 'Before the Mirror'

bring to an end things that seem so universal in any civilized society as

Whistler/Swinburne: 'Before the Mirror'

literary study in manifold and as yet unforeseen ways. I would go so far as to

Whistler/Swinburne: 'Before the Mirror'

Whistler/Swinburne: 'Before the Mirror'

Though of course someone reading Swinburne's poem could study

1 See Avital Ronell, The Telephone Book (Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1989);

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