William Golder’s The New Zealand Survey (1865): the relation between poetry and photography as media of representationBrian OpieCreation of machine-readable versionJamie NorrishNew Zealand Electronic Text CollectionWellington, New Zealand
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20051241324William Golder’s The New Zealand Survey (1865): the relation between poetry and photography as media of representationJournal of New Zealand LiteratureBrian Opie2006This article appeared in v.24, no.1 (2006), 36-57.
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William Golder’s The New Zealand Survey (1865): the relation between poetry and photography as media of representation.
Dr Brian Opie
School of English, Film and Theatre with Media Studies
Victoria University of Wellington
William Golder’s
The New Zealand
Survey (1865) includes an epic poem recounting the
origin and evolution of New Zealand as a landmass which
becomes, with the arrival first of Maori and then British
settlers, the scene and basis for the origin of a new nation
and the advancing of human civilisation through the
application of scientific and moral
knowledge. Golder’s thinking about the role of poetry
in this process is expressed through analogies with other
media of representation which precisely define his aim in
writing. His repeated and traditional metaphor for the
linguistic work of the poet is that of clothing ideas with
words; but in The New Zealand Survey, his
third volume of poetry, he offers two other analogies, both
tehnological — printing and photography — which
extend the other traditional metaphor of picturing into the
era of technical process and scientific invention.
References to photography occur in the third and fourth
volumes of poetry published by Golder,
The New Zealand Survey (1867),
and The Philosophy of
Love (1871).
The New Zealand
Survey; A Poem in Five Cantoes. With Notes Illustrative of
New Zealand Progress and Future Prospects. Also The Crystal
Palace of 1851; A Poem in Two Cantoes. With other Poems and
Lyrics, (Wellington: J. Stoddart and Co., 1867);
The Philosophy of Love. [A
Plea in Defence of Virtue and Truth!] A Poem in Six Cantos,
with Other Poems (Wellington: W. Golder, 1871).
Using the photograph as
an analogy for poetic representation is, in one respect,
simply consistent with Golder’s
constant enthusiasm for the new knowledge produced by the
discoveries of science and its technological applications,
and the new human and social capabilities which developed
progressively in association with that knowledge. It can
also be seen as an updating of the ut pictura poesis theory of the relation
between verbal and visual media, a new example of the sister
arts as they have been traditionally theorised in western
aesthetics. But recent investigation of the relations
between poetry, painting and photography in the first half
of the nineteenth century have emphasised that this period
marks a profound break with early modern theorising about
the visual.
See, for example,
Jonathan
Crary, Techniques of the Observer. On Vision and
Modernity in the Nineteenth Century
(Cambridge, Mass. and
London:
The MIT
Press, 1992).
Lindsay Smith affirms that, after 1839,
the camera’s “novel presence transforms acts of looking,
most obviously calling into question the concept of a
faithful transcription by the artist of the external world
. . . relations between the visible and the invisible, the
empirical and the transcendental, are newly conceptualised.”
He observes that, as a result of the tendency to consider
the still photograph as the forerunner of the movie,
“photography has received surprisingly little attention in
interdisciplinary discussions of Victorian culture when in
fact nineteenth-century visual and optical discourses, and -
most centrally - photographic ones, have ramifications for
literature and painting.”
Lindsay Smith, Victorian Photography, Painting and Poetry: The
Enigma of Visibility in Ruskin, Morris and the
Pre-Raphaelites (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1995), pp. 3-4.
Preliminaries
Photography, at its inception, like any new cultural
technology, was an invention the implications and potentials
of which were perceptible more through what Golder calls imagination and the
English inventor of photography, William
H. Fox Talbot, calls “floating philosophic
visions”
William Henry Fox Talbot,
The Pencil of
Nature (1842-44: rpt. New York: Da Capo Press, 1969), Introductory Remarks,
n.p.
than in its initial products. Part of
the excitement attaching to it was the way in which it
unsettled established relationships in the whole field of
representation, and how it was demonstrated that the
extremely powerful claims for realism and the scientific
mode of relating to nature which the products of photography
appeared to endorse were not essential to the photographic
process. Jennifer Green-Lewis
proposes that “Perhaps the best evidence of the
pervasiveness of photography in the nineteenth century
remains its appropriation by [positivist realism and
metaphysical romance]; photography’s power lay in its
potential to be identified either as validation of
empiricism in its surface documentation of the world or,
conversely, as proof that any visual account inevitably
represents the world inadequately. Realism’s triumph over
the meaning of photography in general was ironic in that
science deemed reliably truthful a process of representation
that had achieved notoriety and popularity through its
potential to lie.”
Jennifer Green-Lewis, Framing the Victorians. Photography and the Culture
of Realism (Ithaca and
London: Cornell University Press, 1996), p.2.
With respect to
Golder’s response to photography,
it is nonetheless from the imbrication of photography with
the culture of science that the values which he places on
the term and its significance for our understanding of his
poetic and cultural aims are derived.
Talbot coined the term
“photogenic drawing” to signify what for him was the
principal characteristic of the new method for making
images, its independence from any human intermediation
between “the objects of external nature” and their
representation.
On the origin of
the term “photography” and its cognates, see
Geoffrey
Batchen, Burning with Desire. The Conception of
Photography (Cambridge, Mass. and London: The MIT Press, 1997), pp.62-69,
100-102.
The analogy with drawing is explicitly
made in the title he gave to a series of photographs
published under the title,
The Pencil of Nature. In his
work, a distinctive intersection occurs between art,
printing, and scientific description of the natural
world. Images produced by traditional means, whether drawn,
painted or engraved, provide the context for thinking about
the new medium and its difference from them. The photograph
is, like other images, an arrangement of signifying marks on
a surface; but it is most like the printed surface of black
marks and white spaces because of the interposition of a
mechanism, the camera or the printing press, between
writer/artist/light and the representation.
For Talbot, inscribed surfaces were just as much objects
for photography as were natural and architectural objects,
and he understood from very early in his development of
photographic methods and their applications that the
reproduction and circulation of multiple copies would
democratise art, make remote places accessible, and provide
the scientist with representations of objects with an
accuracy to detail which had never before been
possible. Several photographs demonstrate the
objectification of inscription: an extract from a manuscript
of Byron’s; a stone inscribed with cuneiform script;
and books on a shelf. These objects are just as real as
anything else in nature; as signifying objects, they
represent Byron as author, another culture which, like
nature, has yet to be deciphered, and possibly Talbot in his
intellectual character.
Larry
J. Schaaf, The Photographic Art of William
Henry Fox Talbot (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton
University Press, 2000), Plate 78, “A Scene in a
Library”, which “might have been a self-portrait
of the inventor” (p.100).
Light impresses
itself on paper just as printing impresses language and
images on paper; in both instances, the representation is
thought of as objectifying what it represents.
Larry J. Schaaf, Out of the
Shadows. Herschel, Talbot & the Invention of
Photography (New Haven and London: Yale University
Press, 1992), p. 161, writes that “Talbot clearly saw
that the future of photography was inextricably intertwined
with that of the printing press.”
It is
obvious that, in this set of relationships between object,
medium, and language, the terms and protocols for the
production of scientific knowledge are being more completely
articulated, most noticeably by emphasising the displacement
of the human agent of inscription by a mechanical
agent.
Barbara Stafford, Voyage into Substance. Art, Science, Nature and the
Illustrated Travel Account, 1760-1840 (Cambridge,
Mass.: MIT Press, 1984), p.47, on the “issue of a
verbal (and pictorial) scientific style”.
But treating written language as an object points in a
different direction to that envisaged for photography by its
advocates and interpreters who were most committed to the
terms of realism and which the photograph fully instantiated
through its apparently transparent production of the real as
such, because it refuses the correlative of the effacement
of language and human agency in representation.
As Jennifer Green-Lewis notes, “The field of
perception is created from and made possible by the
technologies of the day, and those who exist within it, who
must perceive as that field dictates, are subject to the
possibilities and limitations within which it
exists.”Framing the Victorians, p.31.
A
particularly helpful way of orienting our thinking about the
distinctive characteristics of Golder’s writing is
provided by Geoffrey Batchen, who reframes the history of
photography, not as an origin story with its beginning in
the making public of the technical invention of the
daguerreotype or photogenic drawing in 1839, but as a
question about the origin of the desire for
photography. From an inquiry into a group he calls
protophotographers, together with others in painting and
poetry, Batchen concludes that “the desire to
photograph emerges from a confluence of cultural forces
rather than from the genius of any one individual
. . . during the two or three decades around 1800. The
inference clearly is that it was possible to think
“photography” only at this specific
conjuncture. . . .What had to be invented instead [of the
camera obscura] was an apparatus of seeing that involved
both reflection and projection, that was simultaneously
active and passive in the way it represented things, that
incorporated into its very mode of being the subject seeing
and the object being seen. That apparatus was
photography.”
Geoffrey
Batchen, Each Wild Idea. Writing, Photography,
History (Cambridge, Mass. and London: The MIT Press,
2001), pp.16, 22.
The effect of grounding the new invention in cultural and
epistemic issues is that, if this desire can be recognised
in other contexts than the specifically photographic, the
characteristics of the photographic can be perceived to be
elaborated in those other contexts as a particular
manifestation of the same desire. Put another way, a
democratic conception of the poet can produce a mode of
plain or unartistic writing which, if classified as
unliterary from within the traditions of literary
accomplishment, can also be seen to be manifesting the
democratic and aesthetic values which became rapidly
associated with photography as a popular medium. With
respect to Golder’s poetry, its rhetorical and
aesthetic qualities can be defined as exemplifications of
the desire for photography, so that when he comes to use the
process and its products as an analogy he makes explicit
what is already a fundamental characteristic of his poetic
practice.
Seeing through Writing
One reference by Golder to photography, in a poem
entitled “A Retrospective Reverie” which
concludes
The New Zealand Survey, is dated
to 1859 by an explanatory subtitle, “On receiving the
‘Hamilton Advertiser’ a provincial newspaper,
sent from ‘Home,’ 1859”. This poem is an
extended meditation on scenes and places in the region of
Scotland which he left when he emigrated to New Zealand, the
newspaper’s reports on all the villages in the
vicinity of Hamilton inciting “retentive
mem’ry” to recover “Old friendships, and
old scenes of joy”. Reference to one village, in whose
school he began work as a teacher, produces the following
response:
Rosebank, your scenes are photographedUpon my heart; in retrospection,These, oft enjoy’d, make cares a void,As Milton, Maulslee, Haughs of Clyde,Rise beautiful in each reflection;As when in placid lake is seenBright mirror’d—scenes,—although inverted—Of azure skies, lawns, woods, and bowers,Above which, gleaming mansion towers,All, beauty’s duplicate, asserted
!—The
New Zealand Survey, pp.166-167.
In this account the image of Rosebank is and is not
exactly like the real village. The scene from the past, both
reflected and reflected on, is an inverted version of its
original, an exact copy which is yet more intensely real
than its original because of the purity of the reflective
medium. In effect, recollection as a mental process is
thought of as equivalent to the way in which a camera
obscura mediates between the world of things and the
spectator or observer. What it shows is not exactly the real
place that is reported on in the newspaper, because the
passage of time and distance has created a gap between the
once actually seen place, which is now an image recorded on
the heart, and its ordinary state of being “active in
progression”. The mental image, like a photograph, is
associated with what is “old”, of a former time,
static; but it is not presented as modified subjectively,
unless the heightened quality of the mental image signifies
the idealising of the now remote scene. What is subjective
is the joy experienced in response to reading the newspaper
and reading about “scenes thus long forsaken”, a
joy like that which “souls” might experience on
seeing paradise.
In one crucial respect, these mental photographs of
Rosebank are not literally like photographs, because the
recollected images are coloured with a clear intensity of
the kind produced by television or computer images. The
actual medium through which Golder perceives “all
these represented towns” is the newspaper; the effect
of reading he describes as follows:
How like a draught of water cool,So limpid, from the rock upspringing,Unto a parched and fev’rish soul,Those pages are:
Ibid., p.161.
Here it is not the capacity of water to reflect, but its
colourlessness signifying emotional neutrality and therefore
clarity of perception, which figures the quality of the
verbal image. The medium satisfies a deep need for
connection to a distant place by stimulating the
reader’s memories with descriptions which retain their
real difference from those memories. In this account, the
mental photograph is a joint production of medium and reader
for which the real (now and then) is the common point of
reference. The newspaper page and the photograph have in
common as media objects typically a white surface modified
by black marks; for Golder this “cool” surface
signifies the representation of the real, colour as a
quality of the real and as the sign of subjective
investments in the real being a supplement provided by the
reader/perceiver.
The poem itself, sharing with the newspaper and
photograph the black and white medium of print, mediates
“coolly” in another way than through images
between the poet and the distant world of Scotland. The
principal effect of the newspaper report is indicated by
words like see, observe, notice; it is, like the camera or
any other optical instrument, a mode of seeing the real. But
the poem is not a transcription or versification of the
newspaper report; it refers to the places named in the
newspaper, but it primarily represents a state of mind,
reverie, which is indicated by words like memory, mind,
learn, know, virtue, thought, deem, reviewing, musing,
console, rejoice, glad, and so on.
The reader of the poem is encouraged to see the contents
of the poet’s reverie with the same kind of
objectness, as having the same reality, as the places,
things and people described in the newspaper. By
objectifying what is otherwise a private mental experience,
the poem renders it typical, not unique; just as a
photograph represents what Talbot calls the external forms
of things, just as though we saw them, so the poem
represents mind and feeling, just as though we saw them
too. And, strictly speaking, this is exactly what we do,
seeing the record of nature in printed light
This phrase is taken from the title to an
exhibition catalogue, John Ward and Sara Stevenson, Printed Light. The Scientific Art of William Henry
Fox Talbot and David Octavius Hill with Robert Adamson
(Edinburgh: Scottish National Portrait Gallery,
1986).
and the record of thought in printed
language.
Seeing through Pictures
Golder provides an explicit account of his approach to
reading pictures in “The Crystal Palace of
1851”, a poem in two cantos which celebrated the Great
Exhibition and was published in
The New Zealand
Survey in 1865. The poem opens as follows:
“A PICTURE is a poem without words,”I’ve heard it said, or somewhere have it read;But here, I see it,—aye, and something more!I see in this, th’ imaginary pastOf strange romantic story, as a dreamBrought to reality, as with the wandWhich necromancers in their arts employ,To conjure up some spell;—a palace great,Of iron pillars rear’d, inlaid with glass;And of dimensions spacious, vaulting highIts roof o’er lofty trees, as one would takeA child within the shelter of his cloak!The New Zealand
Survey, pp.86-87.
This passage demonstrates a conjunction of dimensions of
thought in its relation to nature and time which are
characteristic of Golder’s writing, the aims and
aspirations of which which are resonant with a statement of
Ruskin’s quoted by Smith:
The greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world
is to see something, and to tell what it saw in a plain
way. Hundreds of people can talk for one who can think,
but thousands can think for one who can see. To see
clearly is poetry, prophecy, and religion, - all in
one.Victorian
Photography, Painting and Poetry,
p.22.
Neither Ruskin nor Golder seeks to substitute the image
for language as a medium of representation, but to redefine
the terms of their relationship as modes of representation
of knowledge. The thing itself, perceived as itself, is the
criterion against which the products of thought are to be
evaluated; both writers can be seen to be working out the
Baconian tradition of empiricism in English philosophy and
science, in which knowledge becomes corrupted over time by
being generated only from within the terms and contents of
the language system, that is, from the circulation of
knowledge within a closed system of society and its
institutions, which are themselves the expression of the
distinctively human capacity to will to be true what is
desired to be true. Poetry, prophecy and religion are not
evacuated and simply replaced by science, but their roles in
comprehending relations between the past and the future, the
natural universe and its inherent significance, the
empirical and the transcendent, and human perception and
intellection are reconstituted in relation to the objectness
of things as apprehended by vision, especially vision
assisted by optical technologies.
The first line of “The Crystal Palace” is
quite deceptive because, while it might appear to contrast
picture and poem, “without words” locating the
reason for the superior truthfulness of the image, in fact
it defines a picture as a kind of poem, a means of
representation and signification, a “written”
object. Furthermore, the idea itself, represented by the
line of poetry, circulates in words, spoken or
written. Confirmation of the truth of the proposition, which
he remembers but cannot source, is through an immediately
present, visible object: “here, I see it . . . I see
in this”. Printed as a preface to the poem is an
“Advertisement” dated March 4, 1853, which
provides a succinct summary of the argument of the poem and
concludes with the observation, “To me such sentiments
presented themselves when contemplating a picture of the
Crystal Palace.”The New Zealand Survey, p.85.
The
poem, therefore, is itself a representation of an act of
reading as observing and producing knowledge from those
observations. The structure of his concluding sentence
signals once again the mechanisation of the act of
perception in its concentration on an object as such and the
attribution of the “sentiments” expressed in the
poem to the effect of this act of seeing in bringing to the
surface of awareness what is “in” the
picture. The human perceiver is not rendered irrelevant;
quite the contrary, it is the act of contemplation which
generates knowledge from the object and it is the act of
writing which makes that knowledge available to the poet and
to others. But the phrasing of the statement insists that
the poem is not the expression of the poet’s will that
the truth should take a certain form, but that the poet is
the medium through which the meaning of the picture makes
itself known.
Which picture of the Crystal Palace did he have in front
of him? As yet I cannot say exactly, but his references
allow me to put forward a picture for the purposes of
investigating his approach to reading in more detail
[Ill.1]. It is an interior view from an official
catalogueThe
Art-Journal Illustrated Catalogue of the Industry of all
Nations, 1851, p.xviii.
of the industrial
products which were displayed in the building, and it is an
engraving, the most likely form of the picture he was
actually looking at.
The picture invokes a domain of knowledge and writing,
that of romance and magic, imagination and fancy, which
seems antipathetic to the values which I have been affirming
that Golder associated with sight and representation. But
here this genre and mode of apprehension serves the same
purpose that it does for Talbot when he describes the images
produced by the camera obscura as “fairy pictures,
creations of a moment and destined as rapidly to fade
away”.The
Pencil of Nature, n.p.
The Crystal Palace,
like a photograph, is a real thing; its difference from the
familiar orders of the real is marked by attributing to it a
power to signify which exceeds that of ordinary things in
nature and society. Here what is usually taken to be the
distinctive quality of a subjective, even if collective,
dream state is actually (not figuratively) seen to be the
objective condition of the real. The conventional contrast
between the real and the imagined, in which the creations of
the imagination are intended to compensate for the defects
of the real in order to gratify the mind with pleasure, is
here displaced; the defects of the real still provide the
point of reference for acts of the imagination, but the
Crystal Palace as a new creation is itself part of the real
and demonstrates that the difference between the real and
its perfection can be overcome in the real, not only in
fiction, whether narrative or pictorial. Hence,
“in” the picture of the Crystal Palace Golder
sees an object which exists in a strange zone of time and
space; it is a present object located in reality but beyond
any possibility of direct experience for him (“living,
I may say, at the ends of the earth”), “destined
like a dream/To disappear as it had never been” (104),
an object which seems to come from “th’imaginary
past” while “Eclipsing quite the visionary
scenes/ Of fairy lore!” (86-7). The building signifies
the transformation of history and of human knowledge, which
he witnesses in the picture and affirms through the writing
of the poem. It marks the advent of a new era, one of powers
which, like traditional magic, modify (“charm”,
“amaze”) the mind and its apprehension of
reality. The proof of these powers and of the work they can
effect in society and history is located in reality, not the
imaginative or dream state traditionally attributed to
poetry. The task of poetry becomes prospective, assisting
those who have limited imaginative capacity —
“the unpoetic mind”, the “driest prosy
intellect that lived” — to grasp the
implications for the future of what these instances in the
present signify about the potential hidden in the
future. For this potential to be realised, Golder affirms
that it depends upon comprehending what the real has to
tell, and applying that knowledge to the transformation of
those domains of the real as yet untransformed.
Poetry as a medium through which to see assumes a
prophetic capability by proposing to offer sights of the
future, not as the fulfilment of Biblical prophecy but by
extrapolation from objects in the present which serve as
potent signs of that future. The ultimate author of these
signs, which is how religion, poetry and prophecy can remain
interrelated as discursive practices, is God; as Golder
affirms, “in [the Crystal Palace] I see the hand of
Providence/Marking the course of great events to come”
(87). But this seeing, as with the writing of the poem, is
not a passive action; as an observer with a poetic mind, he
is responsible for revealing that hand through its
compositions, especially those which have been achieved
through human agency. The whole of the second canto of the
poem dwells on genius and its inventive outcomes for the
betterment of human life; its architect
“Paxton’s genius of construction”, which
is demonstrated by the Crystal Palace is just one example of
how this creative work is “urged by a directing
Providence.” Like Britain itself, these “active
minds” are each “an instrument/For spreading
truth and science through the world!” (103).
The poem provides the words missing from the picture, but
Golder claims that the words of the poem express what is
‘in” the picture, that is, “reality”
and the potential which it signifies. Both poem and picture
are, then, presented as transcripts of the real in different
media. The critical point is that, for Golder, the way each
medium is employed should conform with the criteria
established for accurate observation of real objects through
the medium of the eye; poem and picture serve, like optical
instruments, to expose the reality of the object and the
tendencies in history which it signifies more fully to
knowledge.
Barbara Stafford writes
that, “By the end of the eighteenth century, the word
illustration had become identified largely
with engravings. Its meaning had been extended to embrace
‘embellishment’ as well as
‘explanation’ or ‘intellectual
illumination’. . . The Baconian notion that a
language stocked with the proper word for each object gives
us information that could not have been obtained without
that language was the overt motive behind the rise of the
illustrated travel account, in which text and image were
integral to the process of learning. The writer alone,
however indefatigable his powers of perception, could not
hope to give a complete representation of all the facets of
a scene. An illustration, therefore, is a picture of the
world inserted into a verbal text, and represents a gesture
towards semiotic wholeness” (Voyage into
Substance, p.51). For an assessment of the effect of
photography in disrupting the relationship between written,
drawn and printed lines, see Gerald Curtis, “Shared
Lines: Pen and Pencil as Trace”, in Victorian Literature and the Victorian Visual
Imagination, eds. Carol T. Christ and John O. Jordan
(Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California
Press, 1995), pp. 27-39. He writes that, “in the
Victorian period, ‘the line’, whether drawn or
written, functions as a trace that constitutes the sign of
meaning” (27).
A Monochrome Medium
In the case of the Crystal Palace, the real object is a
human construction, a product of culture which eclipses
nature and incorporates it in itself. It is the
transformation of nature by culture which lies at the heart
of Golder’s poetic work, his sense of poetic vocation
and his work as a settler in New Zealand. The poem gives
language to the Crystal Palace just as it gives language to
nature. But Golder’s whole emphasis is not on language
as the sign of the distorting intrusion of the human into
nature; instead, he places language itself into nature
through the tradition which interpreted the human
supplementation of nature as the ability to decipher the
meaning/truth of nature and to express that truth in
language, making manifest the word of God written into the
things of his creation.
“The New Zealand Survey”, which contains the
other reference to photography on which I want to comment,
was begun in April, 1864, during a survey, and it narrates
the history of New Zealand from the perspective of
geological time. It begins with an invocation:
Who may look back on unrecorded time,And feel unawed at the momentous view;When nothing but what is sublimely greatUnfolds itself in every phase and form?—Then oh! what words can lab’ring thoughts employT’express the feelings felt, or ev’n pourtrayThose scenes majestic passing in reviewBefore th’ imagination, as we aimTo trace their causes, from th’ effects produced?—All stereotyped, and stamped indeliblyOn Nature’s ample page! From such we dareBring forth to light, what long has lain concealedIn darkness—deeds now buried in the past,As deep as those in far futurity,The subject only of prophetic lore!—But of the past, the Muse may dare unfold,Such deeds, traced in the foot-prints of events,Which have transpired, and long since passed away!Nature’s interpreters, if Poets be,While on their souls, as clearly photographedHer features are,—a real image fairReflected, as if in a mirror’s sheenMen see their likeness chastely shewn, and true,— (1)
The full force of the analogies Golder makes between
poetry as a mode of discovery of true knowledge and the
media of printing and photography are demonstrated in these
lines. He does not claim for himself the quality of genius
which he attributes to the inventors who are his subject in
Canto 2 of “The Crystal Palace”; as a poet, his
vocation — “on me imposed/By Him who made
us” — “as interpreter/Of nature’s
language” is similarly instrumental but it lacks
agency. He thinks of himself as Talbot thinks of the camera,
as a mechanism by which an external, non-human power can
write the truth about the world. For both the camera and the
poet, the source of the visual or verbal representation each
produces is an extrinsic “impulse” communicated
through the lens/eye; the specifics which are
“presented to the eye” (2) are not modified in
any way by the mediating apparatus. So, while the poem does
not itself directly produce new objects in the world, like
the inventions displayed in the Great Exhibition, it
participates in the general process whereby God
progressively reveals universal truths to humanity through
minds receptive to the promptings of Providence.
The ability to be an interpreter or decoder of nature is
represented by Golder as equivalent to the ability of the
camera to produce exact images of nature. It is necessary to
be able to see what is external to the poet as it is in
itself. The poet’s soul is therefore likened to the
sensitised paper on which light impressed or inscribed the
true image of the object presented to the camera, or a
mirror’s surface in which the reflected object (and
hence not the object itself) is represented with negligible
interference from the medium itself. While the
mirror’s image does not exclude colour, the link
between “true” and “chastely” makes
a link between the disciplining of imagination and emotion
which submission to the presented image requires, and the
association between true representation and the form of an
object, typically associated with line and the contrast
between black and white.
Lindsay
Smith discusses “the complex and strategic
naturalization of black and white photography [by which an]
ability to see the world in monochrome entails a reading of
black and white as transparent” (108) during the
nineteenth century in “Photographic portraiture and
the forgetting of colour”, Journal of
European Studies, 30 (2000), 91-110.
Some lines from the second Canto, compared with
Moresby’s photograph of Ngauranga [Ill.2] provide a
succinct example of these relationships and the specific
aesthetic effect sought from them:
So here, though clothed in Nature’s vernal robesThis scene delightful, calling forth our praise,And admiration, still, all speak of changeAnd revolutions buried in the past;But which oblivion fails such things to veil,Though such might ’scape the less enquiring eyeThat doats on beauty, willing to admire! (12)
Although the exact image is the model of true knowledge,
Golder also demonstrates that, without the specific
capability of language, knowledge of anything but that which
is immediately present to the observer within the field of
actual observation would be impossible. What does it mean to
“look back on unrecorded time” or into
“far futurity”? Unlike the camera, which can
represent nature as it is at the moment of the photograph,
the poet can create a true account of nature by constructing
images in the mind which are not reflective of nature as it
is in the poet’s present, but which have an equivalent
reality. The imagination is presented as like a cinema
screen, a medium on which a narrative history of the past
can be represented with complete fidelity to nature. The
true representation of what is no longer fully present in
the world but which can explain both the present and how the
future will unfold is to be derived from traces, “the
foot-prints of events” which only those who
“Know how t’unravel” nature’s
language can reconstitute. While vision provides the model
of true representation, it is only in language that the
sequence of relations over time can be expressed. Golder
enters the poetic construction of this true representation
of New Zealand through his situation on a “lofty
ridge, which overlooks/Hutt’s upper valley”, but the
panorama includes the “marks” by which
“Each part . . . its own history [can]
declare” (2-3). While the basic requirement is to see
only what is there in nature to be seen, the poet or
observer in this account is not passive. Golder’s
phrase, “the roving eye” (3) invokes the active
work of the traveller noticing what has not been noticed
before, recognising its difference but able to do so because
the mind is informed, not vacant.
An excellent example of this mode of informed
perception is provided by William Swainson, whom Golder
commemorated in another poem in
The New Zealand
Survey, “Stanzas To the Memory of Wm. Swainson
Esq., F.R.S &c., Departed Hence, December 7,
1855”. See Smith, Framing the
Victorians, pp. 32-44, on “Wanderers and Wandering
Eyes”.
Conclusion
Philippe Ortel demonstrates through a contrast with
representation in writing that photography’s
“historical specificity” as a medium lies in the
relation between light and the present in time:
the photographed present is not the entire present; it
reduces it, leaving only the visible aspect. . . . its
primary value lies in this reduction. In addition, unlike
written accounts which tend to link given moments in time
together, the photographed present is not relative to
anything but exists in its own right through the
picture. . . . Once it is subject to the nature of visible
reality, the present can manifest itself in three ways
which are found in technical operations; instant
appearance, gradual materialization and finally
perpetuation, which ensures that the object will be a
permanent feature in the world. . . . The status of an
event, the duration of its advent and the vocation of
monument which characterize such a construction are an
accurate analogy for the temporality of a photograph,
which starts with the development of a latent image in the
darkness of a laboratory, and ends with the fixation which
allows the picture to be preserved.
Philippe Ortel, “Poetry, the picturesque
and the photogenic quality in the nineteenth
century”, Journal of European
Studies, 30 (2000), 28-29.
The example Ortel gives of the three ways in which the
present manifests itself is the Eiffel Tower, a cultural and
not a natural object, like the photograph itself. The
Crystal Palace would serve equally well, and Golder’s
poem confirms Ortel’s analysis by adopting as a theory
of history and invention, natural and cultural, the same
progression from latency to completed object which Ortel
attributes to the photographic process. The obvious
conclusion is not that Golder himself drew this equivalence,
but that the cultural forces achieving embodiment and
representation in his work as a settler and a poet of New
Zealand are the same forces manifested in the desire for
photography. When Golder inserts the term photography into
his poetry, he signals in a complex shorthand his
recognition of the precise cultural coordinates in relation
to which his project of creating a new literature for a new
nation is being directed.