Then let’s add another possibility to the equation: if something’s “puzzling”, there’s less likely to be a concensus among other people about what it means. So, as a writer, you’re having to accommodate a three-cornered relationship between yourself, the object you’re perceiving, and how others - your characters and your readers - perceive it. And that’s not so easy if you’re going to do justice to all the parties concerned. So, as a writer, you have to develop new ways of seeing things. And our regular contributor William Faulkner certainly did. In fact, he developed an extended palette of ways of perceiving reality that perhaps owe more to visual art than literature. Let’s examine one of these - the principle of what he called “dynamic fixation” - in a description of something as mundane as a wagon being hauled by a mule: It seems to hang suspended in the middle distance, forever and forever, so infinitesimal is its progress . . . so much is this so that in the watching of it the eye loses it as sight and sense drowsily merge and blend . . . so that at last the sound of it seems to come slow and terrific and without meaning, as though it were a ghost travelling half a mile ahead of its own shape. If the scene has any significance beyond its physical appearance, Faulkner chooses not to inform the reader of it, nor does he attempt to analyze it. Rather what he’s describing is the act of perception before it’s overtaken by rationality (and that’s assuming it ever is). It’s perception in the raw. Or what the poet, novelist and critic Robert Penn Warren has referred to as “passionate, yet disinterested and patient contemplation.” The sound of the cart can be listened to “without meaning”, and you know in Faulkner’s writing that if his descriptions suddenly resemble a slow-motion camera, or he uses the word “terrific”, this is what he’s doing - trying to write without steering either his (or the reader’s) perceptions in any given direction. You could almost say he was being democratic. And here’s another example of this technique in action - Virginia Woolf’s well-known symbol of the lighthouse in her novel ‘To the Lighthouse’, of which she wrote in a letter to the painter Roger Fry; I meant nothing by the lighthouse. One has to have a central line down the book to hold the design together. I see that all sorts of feelings would accrue to this but I refused to think them out and trusted that people would make it the deposit for their own emotions, which they have done, one thinking it means one thing, one another. I can’t manage symbolism except in this vague, generalized way. Whether it’s right or wrong, I don’t know, but directly I’m told what a thing means, it becomes hateful to me [itals mine]. As one of the characters, James Ramsay, notes “ . . . nothing was simply one thing” because everyone sees it in a different way. And each person isn’t just rationed to one interpretation; each character can have constantly shifting perspectives of the same thing, according to their mood, their upbringing, who’s with them - in fact, any combination of circumstances. So unlike the Imagists, who were determined to lend visual stability to the world, Woolf shows herself quite happy to let it mean whatever it likes while “hold[ing] the design together” by using the lighthouse as a symbol, or focus, for these different ways of apprehending reality. Her characters view it from a distance, then at the end of the book get to see it close up when they take a boat trip to inspect it. And it looks very different on both occasions. As we noted in Part 2, literature can “read” its readers in much the same way as readers interpret a text. And this is what’s happening inside Woolf’s novel with the lighthouse. Each character’s “take” on the structure says something about them. But no one “take” is necessarily more significant than another. For James, it “confirmed some obscure feeling of his about his own character”; Mrs Beckwith thinks it’s wonderfully picturesque; and it fills Mr Ramsey with foreboding and fears for the future. One lighthouse, three interpretations. And all these perspectives are being held together by two things: the writer’s vision; and by the technique she uses to realize that vision - that “central line down the book”. And this is what Principle 4’s all about - the primacy of aesthetic technique to order even the most recalcitrant meaning. But it’s also about that technique reflecting a sort of consciousness that isn’t wedded to external realism. In short, the poetic consciousness which has the writer as its centre. It’s essentially a portrait of the artist. Yet it’s more than that; it’s a portrait of the artist being an artist. And of the ways in which most of us can be said to share an artistic sensibility, whether we’re aware of the fact or not. So it’s no coincidence that many of the significant novels which embrace this aesthetic have artists or terribly sensitive and unusually perceptive artist surrogates as their central characters: Hanno, in Thomas Mann’s ‘Buddenbrooks’; Stephen Dedalus in Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’; Edouard in Andre Gide’s ‘The Counterfeiters’; and, perhaps the best-known of them all, Marcel in Proust’s ‘A La Recherche du Temps Perdu’. These characters are voyagers into the aesthetic unknown that lurks within their own consciousnesses. So unlike, say, the narrator of Henry Fielding’s ‘Tom Jones’ who simply talks us through the novel and comments from a position high above the action, these guys are actually in the novel, but looking at themselves in the novel as they’re creating it. I think that’s right. What I’m trying to say, as politely as I can, is that these artist figures are usually rather up themselves. They’re usually talking us through not just what they’re seeing, hearing, feeling, tasting and smelling, but how they’re synthesizing all these sensory inputs with their thoughts to create meaning. Their senses, as XTC once put it, are working overtime. Whereas for the Imagists the dominant sense is sight, these writers work with the full palette of the senses in creating their artistic representations of the world, because things may not always what they seem at first glance. Back in ‘The Tempest’, Stephano mistakes the comic figure of Trinculo and Caliban under a cloak as a fantastic creature with four legs and two voices; Caliban himself, in his intoxication, imagines Stephano to be a god; Ferdinand believes Miranda to be a goddess when he first sees her, and she thinks him a spirit. It’s like a visual comedy of errors. Because the outward form of an object is often not the place where the eye comes to rest but rather where it starts from. The tendency of many writers’ visual sense often serves the function of dissipating the reader’s attention rather than concentrating it. Witnessing the physical world doesn’t reduce possibility; it expands it. Time for a bit more Faulkner, who understood this better than many. In his novel ‘The Sound and the Fury’, the character of Quentin Compson (an unusually sensitive young lad) informs us that when the mind creates its idea of a physical object, it moves from “unreality” through possibility and probability until it becomes an inescapable fact. The trouble for Quentin is, being neurotic, every time he builds a structure, it tends to unresolve itself into uncertainty and paranoia. He describes this state of dissolution as resembling; . . . lying neither asleep nor awake looking down a long corridor where all stable things had become shadowy paradoxical all I had done shadows all I had felt suffered taking visible form antic and perverse mocking without relevance inherent themselves with the denial of the significance they should have affirmed . . . Quentin’s a bit of a basket case for whom meaning is a problem. He works hard at getting it straight in his mind, but it won’t keep still; it’s always fashioning itself into new random shapes and significances independently of his attempts to master it. It’s out of his control. So the plasticity of physical form is a threat; like the Imagist, he wants light to fall in uncomplicated shadows to help him define what he’s looking at. “Shadowy paradoxical” is not what he wants. And these changing significances eventually lead him to suicide, because he can’t control his perceptions. Changing shapes are not the only threat to sanity - the ability to see “into” or “through” them doesn’t exactly lead to peace of mind either. In Faulkner’s novel ‘As I Lay Dying’, Darl (yet another ‘artist figure’ according to the critics) spouts a brief paragraph of what we might term amended Imagist doctrine: When something is new and hard and bright, there ought to be something a little better for it than just being safe, since safe things are just the things that folks have been doing so long they have worn the edges off and there’s nothing to the doing of them that leaves a man to say, That was not done before and it cannot be done again. Remember our jealous arts fan in Part 2? He’s here again. Darl wants everything to be new, unique and changeless; but to make that happen, it needs to be transplanted from the actual world into a philosophic realm where it will be appreciated for its uniqueness and not subject to the weathering, dulling effects of time and everyday use. But this can never be. In a way, Darl wishes he could stop looking into the meaning of things and allow them to remain “hard and bright”, independent and awesomely themselves. But being of a creative disposition, he finds it nigh on impossible to leave things be. In his masterly novel featuring Virginia Woolf, ‘The Hours’, Michael Cunningham writes, “Virginia imagines someone . . . with a touch of genius . . . who is, technically speaking, insane, because that person sees meaning everywhere.” And that’s our Darl. His neighbour, Tull describes how he hates meeting Darl’s gaze: He don’t say nothing; just looks at me with them queer eyes of hisn that makes folks talk. I always say it ain’t never been what he done so much or said or anything so much as how he looks at you. It’s like he had got into the inside of you, someway. Like somehow you was looking at yourself and your doings outen his eyes. So in one respect, Darl’s a bit like a human version of Woolf’s lighthouse - he forces people to confront themselves. Practically every character in ‘As I Lay Dying’ has a guilty secret which Darl somehow knows about, not through poking around in their private lives but just by intuition. And they know that he knows, which is why, at the close of the book, Darl is removed to an asylum so they don’t have to confront their guilt. And by that time he’s mad as a snake anyway from seeing too much. And to a greater or lesser degree, this is what artists do - they see into the world, looking at essences and not appearances, and then re-fashion it into something that reflects both the object and the way they’ve perceived it. They don’t necessarily leave the object as they found it; rather they adapt it to suit their artistic purposes while preserving at least some of its autonomy. It’s still, at base, itself, even though its significance is not rigidly controlled as it would be from an Imagist perspective. So things can be blurry, fuzzy and indistinct. Adapting Eliot’s terminology, it’s more like a ‘Subjective Correlative’ than an Objective one. We’re not necessarily after precision here.