FISCALÍA GENERAL DEL ESTADO DE MICHOACÁN

Throughout this study I have drawn out how recent novels critique, as well as mirror, their wider visual context. In spite of this critique, however, I do not think that we should simply locate these novels as participants in a wider tradition of visual scepticism. Martin Jay has outlined how vision, long the subject of suspicion, fully came under attack in twentieth-century thinking. Jay outlines how, following on from a wider counter-enlightenment movement, various forces in the twentieth century combine to produce a crisis in ocularcentrism. Such forces include the rapid proliferation of visual technologies and images in this period, along with the growth of certain anti-visual theoretical discourses, such as Marxism, existential philosophy, and psychoanalysis.503 For instance, as Mary Ann Doane points out, although the latter relies heavily on ‘scenarios of vision’ such as the mirror phase or the primal scene, psychoanalysis has nevertheless ‘consistently adopted a stance of suspicion in relation to the realm of the visible, intimately bound up as it would seem to be to the register of consciousness’.504

While the work of my three considered authors does register the influence of such suspicion, we should not group them with those texts that aim at an indiscriminate denigration of vision and visual representation. As I hope to have shown, Smith’s and Cole’s writings consider both sides of the argument. They express the visual field’s limitations, especially in relation to representing certain identities, but they also sketch out its possibility. And indeed the texts that I consider, both on account of their discrete surface details and their more wholesale remediations of visual representational forms, can themselves be considered very visual things. I uncover a similar nuance in Oyeyemi’s work. Her fiction reflects and unfolds the visual field in all its variety and, as with Smith and Cole, reclaiming the visual as a space of possibility is a key strand to this enterprise.

Once more, my focus in this section is on how the contemporary novel contributes to our understanding of how vision can produce an ethical access onto the world. I think that, itself at one remove from literal visuality, prose is well

503 _{Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century}

French Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).

504 _{Mary Ann Doane, Femmes Fatales: Feminism, Film Theory, Psychoanalysis}

positioned to articulate responsible viewing practices. In the case of Oyeyemi’s fiction this articulation mostly comes down a consideration of sight’s contribution to intersubjectivity. In this capacity her work recalls many aspects of the similar discussion that plays out in Smith’s work. For instance, the work of both authors stresses the importance of looking with proper attention. And they outline how this attentive looking plays out on an interpersonal level. This commonality between Smith’s and Oyeyemi’s fiction is particularly striking. But Cole’s work also has a place in this. The prose of all three writers, on account of its intricate descriptive surfaces, asks the reader to heed detail closely. And in this way, it demands at the level of reader response that which it advocates at a thematic level.

Across Oyeyemi’s novels, we uncover sensitivity towards the efficacy of given looks. Typically in this author’s work, an adverb accompanies optical verbs. And often the point of the chosen adverb is to stress dedicated or appropriate attention. These adverbs and other similar qualifiers constitute a particularly notable trope in The Icarus Girl: ‘the only thing that she really looked at’; ‘she had sat there all alone, knees pulled up to her chin, seeing, properly seeing’; Jess ‘eyed her mother

attentively’; she ‘continued to contemplate her seriously’; ‘if Jess hadn’t kept her

eyes fixed on her she would certainly have missed it’; ‘the two of them had begun to speak as they did when they couldn’t see each other properly’; ‘she couldn’t see Tilly properly’; ‘she had not quite-seen’.505 The point of such distinction between different kinds of seeing is to suggest that looking itself can be a neutral practice; it is the act’s quality and direction that, Oyeyemi’s fiction tells us, carries the ethical weight.

Faces feature as a key site for the testing out of this premise. By sketching out different scenarios of face-to-face interaction, Oyeyemi’s fiction tries to reach an understanding of how good looking might proceed and what it might produce. In her study of the miniature, Susan Stewart explains why faces can be considered points of access:

If the surface is the location of the body’s meaning, it is because that surface is invisible to the body itself. And if the face reveals a depth and profundity which the body itself is not capable of, it is because the eyes and to some degree the mouth are openings onto fathomlessness. Behind the appearance

505 _{Oyeyemi, The Icarus Girl, p. 30, p. 31, p. 35, p. 40, p. 45, p. 49, p. 187, p. 289}

of eyes and mouth lies the interior stripped of appearances. Hence we “read” the expression of the face with trepidation, for this reading is never apparent from the surface alone; it is continually confronted by the correction of the other. The face is a type of “deep” text, a text whose meaning is complicated by change and by a constant series of alterations between a reader and an author who is strangely disembodied.506

Stewart’s reading of surface as a doorway onto depth keys well to my own study’s understanding of the relation between the two. Highly visual textual surfaces are, for the reading critic, entrance points to deeper meaning. But most important for my present analysis is the link that Stewart establishes between face and subjectivity. The face remains unseen by its owner, and at the same time it is readily available to the other. The face discloses some kind of interior meaning, with this meaning itself being brought forth, and indeed altered, by an onlooker’s gaze. In this way, it is both the locus of subjectivity and a platform for intersubjectivity.

In The Icarus Girl, characters persistently scrutinize faces for information. Following Stewart’s positioning of the face as a text, a lexicon of reading and decipherment stresses the interpretative nature of this act: ‘her mother waited, and Jessamy’s brown wrinkled as she scanned her face, perplexed’; ‘Tilly shot her an unreadable glance’; ‘TillyTilly had her tongue stuck out a little too as her eyes scanned Jess’s face’.507 This terminology of legibility promotes the face as an object capable of offering up understanding, if parsed properly.

Faces figure in this capacity throughout this novel. Jess’s sensitivity towards her mother’s face amounts to a minor narrative trope. She is continually alert to any change in facial expression that might denote a correlative change in mood: ‘she didn’t laugh because her mum looked sort of cross’; ‘she saw her mum’s shoulder’s relax’.508 _{Crucially, both examples pivot on an optical verb. We find this visual}

mode of decipherment writ large across the author’s work. A consideration of the variations in Jess’s mother’s smile even dominates entire narrative sections. Jess returns to her mother’s smile again and again, charting its change over time: ‘Jess knew that the smile wasn’t a particularly happy one, and that her mother hadn’t

506 _{Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the}

Souvenir, the Collection, (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1993), p.

127.

507 _{Oyeyemi, The Icarus Girl, p. 5, p. 64, p. 136.} 508 _{Oyeyemi, The Icarus Girl, p. 5.}

smiled like that in England’; ‘Jessamy saw a real smile spread across her mother’s face, as if she had just remembered sunshine’.509

As with Cole’s camera-like narrators or Smith’s artists, Oyeyemi’s protagonist in this novel demonstrates great visual sensitivity. And, because free indirect discourse is the dominant narrative mode of The Icarus Girl, the texture of Oyeyemi’s prose necessarily reflects this sensitivity:

Her mum smiled at her. There was something in the smile that Jess could only vaguely describe as careful.

It was the same smile that she had worn when they had been going through customs. The official behind the desk had a neat moustache and goatee beard, and his expression had been polite; in fact, overpolite. So solicitous that his face was immobile, and Jess, looking at him from a short distance beneath the counter, thought that he was somehow making fun of her mother. The man had flicked his gaze over her with the same small smile on his face.510 Again, this three-way interaction is based predominantly on how each character looks at, and is apparently perceived by, others. Oyeyemi particularizes these given looks. Qualifiers feature heavily: something, vaguely, over, so, somehow. It seems that smiles, in this novel, are not to be taken as basic indicators of happiness. These surface signs, rather, merit considered attention.

Before reflecting on what Oyeyemi’s novel tells us about the relation between such visually rooted interactions and intersubjectivity, I first want to set out in detail a critical framework for such a reading. Specifically, I turn to Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s consideration of the congruities between emotion and performance. Her 2003 essay collection, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity, while drawing to some extent on previous writings, ‘also represents a distinct project’ on its own terms.511 _{The collection as a whole traces the theoretical afterlife of J. L.}

Austin’s seminal concept of performativity, and it torques this concept to Silvan Tomkins’s affect theory. In the volume’s first essay, this response to Austin and Tomkins targets Henry James’s fiction. For Sedgwick, James’s novels provide the

509 _{Oyeyemi, The Icarus Girl, p. 13.} 510 _{Oyeyemi, The Icarus Girl, p. 13.}

511 _{Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity}

point of access for a consideration of shame, and for a discussion of the slippages and discrepancies between performativity and theatricality. Sedgwick’s readings will prove, I think, helpful for thinking about how visual interaction operates in Oyeyemi’s work.

Reading shame in psychoanalytic terms, Sedgwick outlines the visual markers of this feeling and describes its primal scene:

Recent work by theorists and psychologists of shame locates the proto-form (eyes down, head averted) of this powerful affect – which appears in infants very early, between the third and seventh month of life, just after the infant has become able to distinguish and recognize the face of its caregiver – at a particular moment in a particular repeated narrative. That is the moment when the circuit of mirroring expressions between the child’s face and the caregiver’s recognized face (a circuit that, if it can be called a form of primary narcissism, suggests that narcissism from the very first throws itself sociably, dangerously into the gravitational field of the other) is broken: the moment when the adult face fails or refuses to play its part in the continuation of a mutual gaze; when, for one of many reasons, it fails to be recognizable to, or recognizing of, the infant who has been, so to speak, “giving face” based on a faith in the continuity of this circuit.512

So this emotion’s marker is a visual, and specifically facial, one: the eyes look down, the head turns away. And the very first assumption of this position is a formative moment for psychological development. It is a moment of differentiation, in which the infant no longer simply emulates the expression of the other. ‘Shame floods into being as a moment’, Sedgwick writes, ‘a disruptive moment, in a circuit of identity- constituting identificatory communication’. But this disruption itself also constitutes identity: ‘in interrupting identification, shame, too, makes identity’.513

Although the identificatory relation between mother and child appears to be broken in this instance, intersubjectivity nevertheless emerges out of this rupture. ‘Blazons of shame’, such as the downcast face or the blush, ‘are semaphores of trouble and at the same time of a desire to reconstitute the interpersonal bridge’.514 The point is that while facial cues of emotion serve to delimit and distinguish individuals, these cues are nevertheless outwardly motivated. Sedgwick takes shame as her main example because this particular feeling is ‘both peculiarly contagious

512 _{Sedgwick, Touching Feeling, p. 36.} 513 _{Sedgwick, Touching Feeling, p. 36.} 514 _{Sedgwick, Touching Feeling, p. 36.}