surface, depth, and the spatial imaginary

MARY THOMAS CRANE

Surface, Depth, and the SpatialImaginary: A Cognitive Reading of The Political Unconscious

When we consider all the ways we read now, we find that cog-nitive approaches to literature have had less widespread effect on modes ofreading than we might expect, given that the “cognitive revolution” has hada huge impact on fields such as psychology, linguistics, and philosophy,where literary scholars traditionally look for theoretical grounding.Although there is an MLA discussion group on cognitive approaches to lit-erature, and although scholars like Elaine Scarry, Lisa Zunshine, MarkTurner, and others have been publishing compelling cognitive literary the-ory and criticism for some years now, cognitive approaches are still not partof the mainstream of literary and cultural criticism.1 There are a number ofpotential reasons for the failure of cognitive literary and cultural criticismto catch on: it sometimes makes truth claims based in an empiricism thatmany literary scholars have learned to distrust; it sometimes argues for auniversalism and essentialism that many scholars question; and it can some-times seem insufficiently historicized. However, even work that eschewsthese potentially controversial claims has not gotten much traction inEnglish departments.

I believe cognitive literary and cultural criticism continues to occupy amarginal place in our methodological tool kit because it has not so fartended to offer a hermeneutic, a mode of reading that allows us to producenovel interpretations of texts. The most successful cognitive criticism exam-ines how and why texts and readers operate as they do: Scarry explains howtexts induce readers to imagine vivid images; Zunshine explains that we readfiction because it allows us to exercise our capacity for “theory of mind,” theability to surmise what other people are thinking and feeling. Occasionally,

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A B S T R A C T This essay argues that cognitive approaches to literature are less widely used than theymight be if they offered a hermeneutic practice in addition to providing insight about the ways in whichtexts are produced and read. It offers a history of the spatial metaphors of surface and depth that structureJameson’s interpretive practice in The Political Unconscious, arguing that Jameson deploys spatial metaphorsin order to negotiate aporiae that are not reconcilable in theory. / RE P R E S E N TAT I O N S 108. Fall 2009© The Regents of the University of California. ISSN 0734–6018, electronic ISSN 1533–855X, pages76–97. All rights reserved. Direct requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article contentto the University of California Press at http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintinfo.asp. DOI:10.1525/rep.2009.108.1.76.

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these explanations produce illustrative readings, but their goal is not primar-ily the interpretation of texts. As Ellen Spolsky acknowledges in the intro-duction to The Work of Fiction, cognitive criticism is focused on theelucidation of “human cognitive processing” and “will only incidentally pro-duce new interpretations of literary works.”2 Reviews of cognitive criticismoften take issue with its lack of interpretive engagement: Bruce Smith, review-ing Spolsky’s Word vs. Image: Cognitive Hunger in Shakespeare’s England in Shake-speare Quarterly, notes how “momentary attention to particular visual imagesor particular verbal passages typically inspires Spolsky to return to moreabstract and generalized accounts of cognitive processing,” so that “somereaders may find the proportion of critical reading” to theory “too slight.”3

I believe that a cognitive approach can offer both a powerful theory ofhow and why we read and a hermeneutic that can produce new and interest-ing readings. I want to argue that cognitive theories about the unconsciousmind, the embodiment of thought, and the metaphoricity of language doproduce a hermeneutic that allows us to see the spatial metaphors in a textas an indication of its author’s most basic imaginative conceptualizations ofkey assumptions about the nature of thought and meaning. These spatialmetaphors are most revealing, and therefore most open to interpretation,when they convey concepts or feelings at odds with a text’s explicit articula-tion of its formative assumptions. The spatial imaginary of a text can be away for an author to resolve contradictions that are irresolvable in abstracttheoretical formulations, since it operates according to a very different logic,one that is image based and inflected by feeling. Cognitive theory lets usunderstand how and why the unconscious is deeply spatial, and also allowsus to notice, and to interpret, spatial metaphors that we would otherwisetake for granted.

Cognitive theory thus lets us see that hermeneutic systems themselvesare based in a particular spatial conception of texts: they tend to imaginethat texts contain both a surface (obvious and open to all) and a depthbeneath the surface that can be accessed only by those who wield that partic-ular hermeneutic system. Frederick Jameson’s theory and practice of “symp-tomatic reading,” articulated in The Political Unconscious, is a particularlyrevealing case in point, since this model of reading, which empowers thereader to wrest hidden truth from the depths of texts, represents an activisthermeneutic with which any cognitive mode of interpretation must com-pete. Jameson bases his theory of reading in the two dominant hermeneuticsystems of his time, psychoanalysis and Marxism. Although the influence ofthese two systems has waned, the practice of reading for symptoms of hiddencontradictions within cultural systems remains central to the methodologiesof new historicism and cultural studies.

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One reason for the lasting influence of symptomatic reading may be theagency it grants to the reader in a theoretical landscape where agency—andeven the integrated selfhood that would have to precede it—is denied toother human actors. Although Jameson’s theoretical apparatus for the mostpart attributes that agency to his hermeneutic system and not necessarily to ahuman reader, the effect of symptomatic reading has been to empower areader who is able to analyze the symptoms that appear on the surface of atext in order to diagnose the deep conflicts that it would conceal.4 As Jame-son describes it, the act of reading sounds almost heroic: he offers the“instruments by which we can force a given interpretive practice to standand yield up its name, to blurt out its master code and thereby reveal itsmetaphysical and ideological underpinnings.”5 A cognitive approach tosymptomatic reading can, however, allow us to put pressure on two basicconceptual structures through which Jameson both champions and disavowsreaderly agency. These structures are his theoretical concept of the uncon-scious mind, which posits a text that conceals meanings that must be diag-nosed or excavated by the reader, and his metaphorical depiction of texts aspossessing a surface and a depth, since it becomes the role of the reader tolook beneath the surface to find what is hidden in those depths. Cognitivetheory lets us understand why Jameson’s definition of the unconscious is toonarrow, and why his account of the symptom is problematic. A cognitivereading of surface and depth images through history and in Jameson’s textallows us to see the kind of work the spatial unconscious can do to reconciletheoretical aporiae around issues of agency and to represent reading as aform of progressive activism.

Alan Richardson helpfully defines the term “cognitive” in psychology asreferring to “an overriding interest in the active (and largely unconscious)mental processing that makes behavior understandable.”6 My own approachto cognitive metaphor is based on several assumptions about language andmeaning derived from work in cognitive science that sees thought as massivelyparallel (that is, the brain processes multiple stimuli simultaneously), complexand ambiguous, imbued with emotion, necessarily embodied, and deeplymetaphorical. These features of parallelism, complexity, feeling, and themetaphorical extension of embodiment are primarily unconscious. Althoughearly work in cognitive science hypothesized a brain that worked according tological rules in ways that were thought to be analogous to the processing ofdigital computers, more recent work holds that mental functions are shapedby their evolution in the human body and are not carried out in accordancewith rule-based formal logic, nor are they analogous to computer programs.7

Some of the most important work in cognitive linguistics and psychol-ogy has established the complex ways in which unconscious structures of

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categorization are fundamental to human thought and also the ways inwhich thought works differently than if it were built on rule-based systems.Categorization is what enables us to recognize two different individuals (twodogs, two chairs, two pieces of furniture) as different instances of the sametype of thing. This research on categorization has also called into questionthe binary system of Saussurean semiotics, in which meaning is based on dif-ference.8 The work of Brent Berlin, Paul Kay, and Eleanor Rosch in particularhas suggested that we conceive of categories as structured by resemblance toa prototype or “best example.”9 We don’t recognize a chair as a chair becauseit matches a list of features that all chairs must have, or because it is differentfrom a table. We recognize it as a chair because it resembles our mentalimage of a prototypical chair.

Like Ludwig Wittgenstein’s work on the category of “game,” such proto-typical categories have “fuzzy” boundaries: there will be instances (studentdesk, chaise longue) that cannot be definitively included in or excludedfrom the category. The category has a radial or gradient structure, with somemembers closer to and others farther away from the prototype.10 Meaning isnot produced, as Ferdinand de Saussure argued, by a system of differenceswithin a linguistic system, but along a gradient of resemblance to a prototyp-ical example and with reference to extralinguistic “patterns of knowledgeand belief.”11 Polysemous words form categories that are similarly structuredby prototype effects, and categories can be extended by metaphor ormetonymy.12

It is important to emphasize that our processes of categorization arenot conscious: we aren’t aware of the ways in which we use our prototypicalimage of a chair to structure that category. Categorization theory alsoemphasizes that meaning is contextual and ambiguous. The work of Anto-nio Damasio has established that even rational thought is crucially depen-dent on emotion, again, in ways we are not conscious of. Studies of subjectswho have experienced injuries to the emotional centers of the brain haveshown that their capacity for rational decision making is significantlyimpaired. Because thought is embodied, it cannot be separated from thesomatosensory centers of the body.13

My mode of reading has been especially influenced by cognitive linguistswho have also suggested that meaning is fundamentally metaphorical.George Lakoff and others have argued that another consequence of theembodied brain is the dependence of thought on kinesthetic and spatialexperiences of embodiment. Infants develop the ability to think and use lan-guage based on prelinguistic and preconceptual “image schemas” derivedfrom spatial structures like inside/outside, up/down, containment, move-ment toward a goal, and so on.14 According to Jean Mandler, these precon-ceptual schemas are unconscious and are not concrete, picturelike images


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but rather “dynamic analog representations of spatial relations or move-ments in space” that form a kind of “architecture” of thought: “its meaningresides in its own structure,” which can be mapped onto conscious thoughtand eventually language.15 More complicated linguistic structures and ratio-nal concepts are built up on these basic spatial schemas. Mandler provides asan example the basic image schema of “containment” and “support,” which,she argues, allow early acquisition of the prepositions in and on in English-speaking infants.16

According to Lakoff, all thought is fundamentally “imaginative in thatconcepts which are not directly grounded in experience employ metaphor,metonymy, and mental imagery—all of which go beyond literal mirroring,or representation, of external reality.”17 We can only think about abstractthings because we can understand them in terms of concrete spatial experi-ence. Thought itself—conceptualization, interpretation, reasoning—is justsuch an abstraction, which can only be thought about through metaphor: weimagine our mind as a space within which ideas are created and housed; weimagine it as a conduit through which ideas are conveyed to other people;we imagine ideas as buildings that are constructed, we imagine ideas as peo-ple, plants, products, and commodities; we imagine understanding as seeingor grasping.18 Thought is conceptualized in terms of a number of differentconcrete spatial metaphors, and we cannot conceive of it without them. Wecan be conscious of these spatial metaphors, but they also work uncon-sciously to structure thought.

One of the most important theoretical interventions that cognitive sci-ence offers to literary study is therefore its account of the unconscious mind.Although Jameson extends Freud’s theory of the unconscious (by way ofJacques Lacan and Louis Althusser) to conceive of it not as an individualreservoir of repressed feelings and desires but instead as a larger linguisticand cultural site of repressed political and social contradictions, he main-tains the psychoanalytic assumption that what is unconscious is unavailableto consciousness because it has been repressed. As he explains it, “interpre-tation proper . . . always presupposes, if not a conception of the unconsciousitself, then at least some mechanism of mystification or repression in termsof which it would make sense to seek a latent meaning behind a manifestone” (60).

From a cognitive perspective, however, repression is not a factor in ourlack of access to much of what the mind does. Most mental processing is sim-ply not available to consciousness—there is too much of it, and it happenstoo quickly.19 Our consciousness provides us with an illusion of consciouschoice—in speaking or writing, we seem to choose between one word andanother. But we aren’t even aware of the complex unconscious processesthat provide us with those seeming choices or that allow us to carry out other


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routine mental and perceptual tasks. As John Kihlstrom explains, “duringperception the viewer may be aware of two objects in the external environ-ment but not of the mental calculations performed to determine that one iscloser or larger than the other. Although we have conscious access to theproducts of these mental processes—in that we are aware of the . . . size ordistance of the objects, and can communicate this knowledge to others—wehave no conscious access to their operations” (1447). Antonio Damasio hasargued that although the psychoanalytic unconscious “has its roots in theneural systems which support autobiographical memory,” it is “only a part ofthe vast amount of processes and contents that remain nonconscious.”20

Kihlstrom has identified three different types of unconscious cognitivemental process: the kind of procedural knowledge described earlier as partof visual processing is “truly unconscious,” since we can never have consciousaccess to it.21 A second level of consciousness is “preconscious,” whichinvolves “declarative knowledge that has not been activated strongly enoughto achieve phenomenal awareness,” as, for instance, in subliminal percep-tion.22 Experiments in word retrieval, where subjects are asked to react to orproduce words, and their responses are timed in thousandths of a second,have shown that very brief subliminal exposure to certain words can influ-ence the speed with which a subject produces a target word.23 Finally,Kihlstrom identifies a “subconscious” that is activated during experienceslike hypnosis, where the stimuli are potentially available to consciousness butremain unconscious.24 There have been a number of attempts to reconcilethe cognitive and psychoanalytic unconscious, and there seems to be generalagreement that what is unconscious because of repression constitutes a verysmall percentage of the mental processes of which we are not conscious.25

In Jameson’s version of symptomatic reading, the symptoms representcontradictions that have been driven into unconsciousness by repression.The act of reading diagnoses the repressed content behind the symptom.Without repression, the symptom loses its status as symptom, since it doesn’tindicate an underlying pathology or contradiction. If the symptom doesn’tmark the site of something that the text wants to hide, there is perhaps nopoint in unmasking it. In providing a cognitive account of the unconsciouscontent of dreams, George Lakoff acknowledges that cognitive science“studies normal thought processes” and is therefore “not concerned withpathology.”26 Lakoff further acknowledges that the cognitive unconscious isnot “highly charged at all” and “consists of the most commonplace aspects ofour conceptual system” (90). As a result, his interpretations of dreams are,admittedly, “mundane” involving “thought of the most ordinary nontabooedkind” (103). The theory of repression is what makes the surface features of atext meaningful: it provides their back story. A text certainly manifests vari-ous signs of the unconscious processes that produced it, but most of those


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processes are just the ordinary workings of the brain as it processes lan-guage. A sign of normal bodily function is usually not considered to be asymptom and is usually not thought to be worth scrutiny. If repression onlyaccounts for a fraction of the unconscious, how do we know whether a tex-tual sign is a “symptom” or not?

Linguistic research in speech errors—so-called Freudian slips—providesa case in point. Research in cognitive linguistics over the years has persua-sively cataloged the structures of word storage and retrieval that such errorsilluminate and has persuasively questioned the role of repression in generat-ing many—even most—such errors. In The Psychopathology of Everyday Life,Freud provides a number of examples of slips of the tongue that, he argued,are caused by “a single thought that has remained unconscious.”27 Theseslips for Freud are symptoms of repressed content that can be revealed onlythrough “searching analysis.” At the time Freud wrote his treatise, there hadalready been research that argued what cognitive linguists would now sayabout most such speech errors: that they “follow predictable patterns” andtherefore provide information about “the underlying mechanisms” of lexicalstorage and retrieval in the brain.28 Freud acknowledges this linguistic inter-pretation, suggesting at one point that he will differentiate between “the twoclasses of slips of the tongue” (60). He provides a number of examples oferrors rooted in repression but, in fact, ultimately refuses to distinguish whathe calls simple errors based in structures of word retrieval from psychologi-cally motivated errors, confessing, “I still secretly cling to my expectationthat even apparently simple slips of the tongue could be traced to interfer-ence by a half-suppressed idea that lies outside the intended context” (83).Although Freud acknowledges the desirability of differentiating the slip assymptom of repression from the slip as sign of lexical structuration in thebrain, he refuses to do so. He acknowledges, instead, that there is “no proof”that his examples are symptoms, but in coy language (“cling to,” “I hope,”“secretly”) maintains that they are.

Of course, we don’t encounter real speech errors in literary texts thathave been copyedited: instead, we find purposeful “errors” that are put intothe mouths of characters in order to achieve particular effects of humor orpsychological revelation. But the relationship between surface “symptom”and its underlying cause remains equally problematic, to the extent that wecan’t differentiate between signs of repression and signs of ordinary mentalfunctioning. Arthur Reber, who studies the cognitive unconscious in rela-tion to implicit learning and tacit knowledge, argues that there is no “cleanboundary between conscious and unconscious processes.”29 He argues, sim-ilarly, that it is impossible to definitively differentiate between “semantic”(or cognitive) and “affective” (or psychological) unconscious activation(68). If the conscious and unconscious functions of the mind exist on a


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continuum (rather than as binary opposites) and if what is processuallyunconscious exists on a continuum with what has been repressed, any attemptto definitively separate symptom from “normal” functioning is doomed tofailure.

Despite these theoretical difficulties, symptomatic readings remainappealing because they are generally strong readings; the interpretation theyoffer is different from what appears obvious on the surface of the text. Thesymptomatic reader claims access to meanings that others do not notice, andof which the author (or text) is unaware or seeks to repress. Cognitive read-ings, however, as Lakoff acknowledges in his essay on dreams, tend to focuson the “mundane,” what is obvious and even commonplace. When cognitivereadings of literary texts focus on structures that provide evidence of thenormally functioning mind of the author, identifying conceptual metaphors,cognitive blends, or theory of mind, these readings can sometimes seemunsatisfying, since they’re identifying symptoms of ordinary neural pro-cesses.30 Rather than diagnosing psychological or cultural ills, such readingsdiagnose a mind that works as it is supposed to. Such readings can provideuseful evidence to cognitive linguists, but this model of reading does notappeal to many critics, perhaps because the reader who performs this kindof analysis does not have the heroic agency seemingly available to the symp-tomatic reader, who is able to bring to light meaning that has been hiddenfrom everyone else.

My practice of cognitive reading offers a kind of agency that is more sat-isfying to me because it looks for deep patterns of spatial imagery with mean-ings that are not immediately apparent on the surface of the text. I do notjust identify the existence of these spatial images as signs of how the cogni-tive unconscious works; I also interpret them, and their interpretation isalways historically informed. Texts, of course, literally consist of wordsprinted or written on a flat page.31 We can’t conceive of or think about theprocess of interpreting or reading this flat text without using some kind ofmetaphor, but surface and depth is only one: this metaphor has a history,and its history and its configuration whenever it is deployed can tell usimportant things about the work that the metaphor itself is doing. A readingof Jameson’s spatial metaphors in relation to the history of metaphors of tex-tual depth can help us understand the historical conditions that produced atheory of symptomatic reading, and also its appeal at a particular historicalmoment.

Concepts of textual depth, in the sense that Jameson employs them, arespecific to the nineteenth-century novel and its interpretation in the early tomid-twentieth century. Jamesonian depth depends on ways of imaginingthree-dimensionality of character and extensionality of a social scene that, as


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a number of critics have argued, were first pervasively present in novelsthemselves.32 His conception of depth is then shaped by images that beganto proliferate in critical texts of various kinds at the end of the nineteenthcentury and beginning of the twentieth: specifically in depth psychology,Marxism, and phenomenology. The images of depth in The Political Uncon-scious are extremely complex, and alternate between a sense that textualdepth is a projection of the reader and a sense that the surface of a text isproduced by its depth as a kind of biological process. Jameson sees the inter-preter as simultaneously producing depth and discovering the already exist-ing secrets to be found in the depth of a text, either by patient scientificstudy or by a violent confrontation. Jameson’s spatial imaginary of the politi-cal unconscious allows him tacitly to resolve several theoretical contradic-tions: he can attribute unity and agency to the reader in practice whilemaintaining, in theory, his or her fragmentation and subjectification. Hecan acknowledge that the reader’s theoretical perspective constructs themeanings that he discovers in a text while also imagining that the reader isable to unmask hidden truths that are already there to be found. He canentertain a fantasy that some palpable meaning or truth can be discoveredin the depths of a text while also acknowledging that this meaning is anabsent cause that can never be definitively located.

Many hermeneutic systems employ metaphors of “levels” or “depth” toconvey the difference between the literal meaning of a text and the mean-ings produced by interpretation, however, they do not inevitably do so. Jame-son begins with the medieval system of biblical exegesis that identified fourlevels of allegorical meaning in scripture, offering it as an example of “a vastinterpretive allegory in which a sequence of historical events or texts andartifacts is rewritten in terms of some deeper, underlying, and more ‘funda-mental’ narrative, of a hidden master narrative which is the allegorical keyor figural content of the first sequence of empirical materials.”33 Advocatesof this system do sometimes posit a kind of depth when they speak of “levels”in the text, but their accounts of the fourfold method do not always explainallegory in terms of depth, and they never imagine that texts possess a three-dimensional spatiality. Ancient and classical accounts of allegory often imag-ine its spatiality in terms derived from the Greek root of the word allegory:allos agoreuein, or “other speaking,” meaning “to speak otherwise,” or to “sayother things.”34 In these accounts, the alternative meaning is imagined asexisting not below or behind the surface meaning, but alongside a primarymeaning.35 Augustine often speaks of allegory in these terms, defining it as“the trope in which one thing is understood by means of something else”(tropus ubi ex alio aliud intellegitur).36

A later Greek concept of huponoia (literally, “over thought”) seems closerto Jameson’s sense of allegorical depth, referring to the practice of seeking


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“the hidden, underlying meaning of a story or myth.”37 Philip Rollinsonargues that the Gnostics, in particular, emphasized the idea that texts con-ceal a hidden meaning in order to suggest something like Jamesonianheroic reading: “The images resist interpretation except under the elitistattack of the Gnostic.”38 Among Christian exegetes, it was Origen who “firstconceive[s] of the different kinds of interpretation as simultaneous tripartite‘depth’ within a given passage rather than simply alternate strategies for dif-ferent passages.”39

When Thomas Aquinas sets out the medieval strategy of fourfold biblicalinterpretation, he imagines the text as having levels, but not as possessingtrue three-dimensional depth.40 He tends, instead, to speak of surfaceimagery as a covering or veil, referring to “divine revelation” that is “notextinguished by the sensible imagery wherewith it is veiled” (non destruiturpropter figuras sensibiles quibus circumvelatur) (1.1.9). His spatial image of veil-ing involves a relatively flat covering. He speaks, similarly, of divine truthsthat are “obscured” (occultantur) from the unworthy (1.1.9), suggesting acovering but not significant depth. He says elsewhere that the “spiritualsense” is “based on the literal and presupposes it” (super litteralem fundatur, eteum supponit) (1.1.10), which carries a double spatiality: the spiritual sense isbased “over” the literal but also supports it from underneath. Often, depth isconveyed only by prepositions like sub or per: sub similitudine corporalium, persensibilia ad intelligibilia (1.1.9). Although the medieval system imagined thatthe biblical text had levels that were above (and concealed) or below (andsupported) other levels, it did not imagine the text as incorporating a three-dimensional world.

The Political Unconscious skips from this medieval exegetical system to theearly nineteenth-century novel. This is probably because, in England at least,the intervening period does not provide a sustained theory of textual depth.For English humanists (or continental humanists who were influential inEngland), texts are imagined as flat surfaces, fields from which flowers canbe plucked or nectar sipped by the discerning reader: “Our student will flitlike a busy bee through the entire garden of literature, will light on everyblossom, collect a little nectar from each, and carry it to his hive”; “We mightfreely make use of little flowers plucked by another hand, but when we our-selves strolling among the greenery of the meadows and with free choicepick what we desire, still breathing scent from the root, a double pleasure isfelt.”41 To the extent that humanism in England involved a system of rhetori-cal education, texts tended not to be interpreted, but rather recycled, as stu-dents were urged to read for short, pithy, moralizing passages that could beexcerpted, copied in a commonplace book, and reused in their own writ-ing.42 The “place logic” of Agricola and the systems of rhetorical inventionadvocated by Erasmus and others (based on the concept of Aristotelian topoi,


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or “places”) view texts as flat surfaces divided into discrete places that can beoverseen by the reader and excerpted for reuse.43 And as Walter J. Ong hasargued, the Ramist system of branching dichotomy is also based on a flattext, laid out for the reader like a map.44 As a result, even an allegoricalpoem like Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene lacks a sustained sense of textualdepth. Although Spenser explains his allegorical method in his “Letter” toSir Walter Ralegh, which refers once to precepts “clowdily enwrapped inAllegoricall devises,” he also imagines its message in the usual humanistimage of gathering: “From thence gathering the whole intention of the con-ceit, ye may as in a handfull gripe al the discourse, which otherwise may hap-pily seem tedious and confused.”45 When he refers to his experience ofwriting the poem in the proems he tends to imagine it as a journey over aflat surface:

The waies, through which my weary steps I guyde,In this delightfull land of Faery,Are so exceeding spacious and wyde,And sprinckled with such sweet variety,Of all that pleasant is to eare or eye,That I nigh ravisht with rare thoughts delight;My tedious travell doe forget thereby. (6.1)

Although early modern practices of reading were imagined as involvinga flat text, the Renaissance provided the first technologies for producingvisual illusions of depth. Techniques of perspective used the horizon as a“vanishing point,” “a pictorial space towards which objects recede” to causethe viewer to produce an effect of depth on the flat surface of a painting.46

Elizabeth Ermarth argues that Renaissance techniques of perspectivedepended on a concept of space and time as “continuous, homogeneous,neutral media . . . populated by objects that exhibit certain consistencies ofbehavior, regardless of changes in position, which enable us to recognizethem as the same” even when viewed from different perspectives.47 She seesa similar sense of space and time behind the illusion of depth created in thenineteenth-century realist novel.

The Elizabethan stage, as Henry Turner, Katharine Maus and othershave argued, was another technology for producing the illusion of depth.48

As characters and stories were materially enacted in a three-dimensionalspace, concepts of depth of character based on a new sense of a hidden inte-riority or inwardness, and also depth of social interaction, were developed.Hamlet’s “that within which passes show” (1.1.85) is perhaps the mostfamous articulation of this new concept of character with hidden depths.49 Itseems accurate to say that Elizabethan and Jacobean drama thematizes thisnew sense of depth but does not represent it in a sustained way, since the


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space of the stage, as Robert Weimann has argued, was both presentationaland representational at the same time.50

A coherent and fully formed sense of three-dimensional textual depthwas not fully realized until the nineteenth century, when depth first came ina sustained way to represent positive qualities, and when readers began toexpect characters in fiction to appear “rounded” or three-dimensional, andwhen the realist novel developed its own technologies for creating a sense ofdepth. The discourse of the sublime contributed to a pervasive imagery ofdepth in Romantic poetry, often to convey a sense of intensification.51 AsDeidre Lynch has shown, late eighteenth-century readers began to expectliterary characters to possess a new kind of psychological depth.52 Englishwriters in the nineteenth century, especially novelists, use spatial images toconvey the depths of thought and feeling that their characters possess; JulesLaw argues that in the novels of George Eliot there are images of “recedingperspective” where “access to a suddenly narrowed and extended visual fieldbecomes the emblem for ‘deep’ meaning” (75, 102). In these novels, “therecognition of deep truths” of character or feeling is life, and plot changing.Lynch argues that nineteenth-century literary historians embraced this con-cept of depth as a defining characteristic of the period and its fictionalcanon.53

Beyond the level of its imagery, the realistic novel of the nineteenth cen-tury works structurally to create the illusion of a three-dimensional world,peopled by rounded characters and projecting a convincing inscape forthem to inhabit. Elizabeth Ermarth has brilliantly connected the Renais-sance technique of perspective in painting to the role of the narrator in therealist novel. For Ermarth, the invisible narrator functions like the vanishingpoint in a painting to create an illusion of a three-dimensional world inhab-ited by characters with convincing interior lives.54 She argues that the narra-tor provides access to multiple characters through time and from differentperspectives, so that “identity becomes series-dependent, which is to say thatit becomes abstract, removed from direct apprehension to a hidden dimen-sion of depth” (5). The narrator provides a “continuous, implicit presenceof future possibility” that creates a “projective extension” of time that is cru-cial to the illusion of depth (42).

Like the nineteenth-century literary historians who saw depth as thedefining feature of their canon, critics often define the depth effects of nine-teenth-century realist fiction against what came before and after. Ermarthargues that eighteenth-century novels like Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa thatlack a central narrator also lack “the consistency that a unified horizonentails,” and thus fail to create the illusions of depth found in novels by Eliotand Charles Dickens (59). For Ermarth, as for Law and others, modernist


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novels avoid the creation of a continuous narratorial perspective, and as aresult they eschew the three-dimensional depth to be found in the high real-ist novels of the nineteenth century.55 Lynch has noted that “the modernistmoment of semiotics” sought to demystify realism when it “dissolved theroundest characters into their qualities (semes), into bundles of narrativefunctions.”56

Several critics have noted that the early twentieth century saw the cre-ation of several hermeneutic systems that replaced the imaginative creationof depth found in realist novels with theories of the self and society based ona contrast between surface and depth. These systems offer techniques foridentifying and analyzing the various levels that can be discerned when theyare applied to the reading of a text.57 Jamesonian depth in The PoliticalUnconscious is clearly based in several early twentieth-century theoretical sys-tems: psychoanalyisis or “depth psychology”; the Marxist theory of base andsuperstructure; structuralist accounts of “deep structure”; and phenomeno-logical concepts of intentionality and horizon, of “world” in the sense of“ultimate perceptual horizon within which empirical, inner-worldly objectsand phenomena are perceived and inner-worldly experience takes place.”58

Jameson calls on these systems in his theorization of interpretation and textualmeaning, but he also repeatedly describes the processes of meaning-makingand reading in spatial terms. His spatial images are self-contradictory in waysthat help him imagine solutions to several theoretical cruxes related to theagency of reader and text, and to the accessibility of historical truth, thattrouble his account of symptomatic reading.

Jameson articulates these potential issues more clearly in an article,“Imaginary and Symbolic in Lacan: Marxism, Psychoanalytic Criticism, andthe Problem of the Subject,” published in Yale French Studies in 1977, a fewyears before the publication of The Political Unconscious.59 This is an espe-cially useful essay because in it Jameson works through the relationshipbetween psychoanalysis and Marxism that produced his concept of the polit-ical unconscious more explicitly than he does in The Political Unconsciousitself. In this essay, Jameson identifies “the most crucial need of literary the-ory today” as “the development of conceptual instruments capable of doingjustice to a post-individualistic experience of the subject in contemporarylife as well as in texts” (382). Jameson feels the need for a theory of the subjectthat would allow for sufficient agency to advance a Marxist society withoutreplicating the individualism that theory had discredited. He acknowledgesthat in both Marxism and psychoanalysis, “there is a problem—even a crisis—of the subject” (390), which involves the inadequacy of two existing models:on the one hand the “‘autonomous individualism’ of the bourgeoisie in itsheyday,” and on the other, “the schizoid part-objects in which the fetishiza-tion of the subject under late capitalism has left its trace” (393). In the essay,


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Jameson can imagine a resolution to this crisis only through “utopian think-ing” and “creative speculation as to the place of the subject at the other endof historical time” (393). In theory, he cannot describe what this subjectwould look like. But in The Political Unconscious he is able to imagine a readingsubject that functions as the “third term” he seeks by describing the processof interpretation through a spatial imagery that allows the subject more inte-gration and agency than theory would permit.

Jameson struggles with an additional problem in this essay, which arisesbecause he identifies history with the Lacanian “Real”: the Real “is simplyHistory itself” (384). Here again, Jameson’s Marxist hermeneutic comes upagainst poststructuralist theory: the goal of symptomatic reading is to findtraces of history left in a text, but for Lacan, the Real is by definition thatwhich we cannot access. Jameson thus concludes in the essay that “a materi-alistic philosophy of language” would be able to “designate the Real withoutclaiming to coincide with it” and to offer “the very theory of its own incapac-ity to signify fully as its credentials for transcending both Imaginary and Sym-bolic alike” (389). As a result, Jameson’s hermeneutic will offer “the study,not of the meaning of the text, but of the limits of its meanings and of theirhistorical preconditions, and of what is and must remain incommensurablewith individual expression” (390). Jameson makes a similar acknowledge-ment in The Political Unconscious, noting that “history is not a text, not a nar-rative, master or otherwise, but that, as an absent cause, it is inaccessible tous except in textual form,” and that “our approach to it and to the Real itselfnecessarily passes through its prior textualization, its narrativation in thepolitical unconscious” (35). As the book proceeds, Jameson imagines thisprocess of “approaching” history through different spatial models that, insome places, allow for access to sedimented traces of history but elsewheresuggest that texts are formed around hollow and inaccessible centers.

Depth is initially introduced in The Political Unconscious through the con-cept of “horizon,” which is for Jameson, as for Renaissance artists, a tech-nology for producing depth.60 Jameson’s three “semantic horizons” are“concentric frameworks” that mark “a widening out of the sense of the socialground of a text” (75). These horizons are “distinct moments of the processof interpretation,” and each one projects a different textual space: that is, it“governs a distinct reconstruction of its object, and construes the very struc-ture of what can now only in a general sense be called ‘the text’ in a differentway” (75–76). The horizon determines the perspective of the reader, and thatperspective in turn projects a different structure of depth within the text. AsJameson remarks about magical narratives: in them, the “world in the techni-cal sense of a transcendental horizon of our experience becomes visible in aninner-worldly sense” such that the text creates “folds in space” that become“perceptual vehicles for world in its larger phenomenological sense” (112).


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The function of the final horizon thus enables “this perpetual cultural revo-lution” to be “apprehended and read as the deeper and more permanentconstitutive structure in which the empirical textual objects know intelligibil-ity” (97). Thus, later on, a reading “reorients the narrative around its newinterpretive center” (163). All horizons, I would argue, function in this wayto project a particular version of textual depth.

When Jameson turns to the interpretation of texts, it’s not surprisingthat his focus is on the nineteenth-century tradition of the realistic novelthat most obviously offers a projection of inner-worldly space. In discussingthese novels, he uses several different metaphors for textual depth that seemto exist along a spatial continuum and provide imaginative solutions to thedilemmas concerning subjectivity and access to the Real spelled out in theYale French Studies essay. First, there are metaphors that imagine textualdepth as formed by layers of sediment, laid down by older ideological formsand subject to study as geological strata. In this case, the reader has access totraces of history in the depths of the text. Second, there are metaphors that,like those used by medieval exegetes, imagine the surface of the text as akind of clothing or disguise that covers and conceals the repressed content,to be unveiled by the reader, who has a greater degree of agency in the act ofunmasking than in geological investigation. Third, in an image that com-bines the first two, he imagines a kind of armor or exoskeleton that issecreted by the deep structures of the text to conceal themselves and subjectto violent penetration by an even more active reader. And finally, in animage that combines the figures of exoskeleton and horizon, the three-dimensional space of the text is seen to be generated by or spun out fromsome central point that may, in fact, be a gap or rupture. By imagining thegenerative center of the text as a gap, Jameson acknowledges the inaccessi-bility of the Real while still imagining a central depth that the reader can dis-cover. The continuum moves from imagining that history secretes the layersof the text as if through an organic process and ends with a return to thehorizon metaphor and its implication that it is the perspective of the readerthat produces textual depth, albeit a depth with nothing at its center. Theagency of the interpreter also shifts, from patient surveying of layers to moreactive unmasking, and finally to the actual generation of depth.

Sedimentation is introduced during the discussion of the third horizon,which allows us to see that “formal processes” are “sedimented content intheir own right” (99). Thus, “sexism and the patriarchal are to be grasped asthe sedimentation and the virulent survival of forms of alienation specific tothe oldest modes of production in human history” (99–100). As a result, an“analysis of the ideology of form . . . should reveal the formal persistence of


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such archaic structures of alienation . . . beneath the overlay of all the morerecent and historically original types of alienation” (100). We learn that “inStendahl, such layering and internal discontinuity can more immediately betraced back to the coexistence of distinct and sedimented types of genericdiscourse, which are the ‘raw material’ on which the novel as a process mustwork” (144), and that “vertical repression and layering or sedimentation isthe dominant structure of the classical modernistic text” (214). Historymoves on, but it leaves behind sediment that hardens into formal structuresthat lie beneath the surface of the text and can be uncovered by analysis. Jame-son speaks several times of using an “x-ray” (139) or “hermeneutic Geigercounters” (215) to detect what has been deposited beneath the surface.

This process of sedimentation suggests that the layers in the text areformed organically by the process of history and can be easily discerned byinterpretive analysis. The metaphor of clothing or disguise, however, attributesagency to the text: it creates its layers in order to disguise what it represses. Inthis system, the reader has to take a more active role to bring the underlyingrepressed content into view. He speaks of “strategies of containment” that“can be unmasked only by confrontation with the ideal of totality which theyat once imply and repress,” and offers “a perspective and a method wherebythe ‘false’ and the ideological can be unmasked and made visible” (53).Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights is “a donor who must wear the functionalappearance of the protagonist,” a “misreading, deliberately projected by thetext” that “serves in fact to disguise his twofold mission as donor” (127). Thecharacter of Heathcliff is thus “in reality a mechanism” for mediating con-tradictory semes in the novel, and the narrative itself is generated by itsneed to resolve a “social contradiction” between capitalism and countrysquiredom (127). Jameson goes beyond the relatively flat “veiling” imagesof medieval allegory when he imagines the text “projecting” or “generat-ing” its deceptive surface as a disguise. Awareness of these processes allowsthe reader to “seize” or “grasp” (149) the repressed content beneath thesurface.

Even more agency is attributed to genre when it is imagined as “a narra-tive ideologeme whose outer form, secreted like a shell or exoskeleton, con-tinues to emit its ideological message long after the extinction of its host”(151). In this mixed zoological image the shell that the text, as organism,secretes to protect its hidden content becomes a separate organism para-sitized by the ideologeme that secreted it. In a homologous image, reificationworks to create the isolated bourgeois individual “to which the protectivedevelopment of a monadic armature alone comes as something of a compen-sation,” a structure to which realistic novels contribute with devices likepoint of view.61 These concealing and protective shells require more strenu-ous efforts on the part of the reader. Readers who perform the semantic


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reconstruction of key terms are able to retrieve “a whole historical ideologythat must be drawn, massy and dripping, up into the light before the textcan be considered to have been read” (245) or to understand materials in adifferent way when they are “wrenched from the realm and categories of theindividual subject to the new perspective of those of collective destiny”(269). This is the reader who is able to “force a given interpretive practice tostand and yield up its name” (58).

For every image that suggests a reader who, through scientific analysis orviolent intervention can unmask or retrieve the deep truth hidden beneaththe surface of the text, there is another image that returns to the concept ofhorizon and suggests that the dimensionality of the text is spun out fromsome central point, which may well be hollow or empty. In this image, whatis or is not to be found in the depths of the text is both produced by theactions of the novel and also dependent on the perspective of the reader.Thus, Jameson speaks of a setting in Honoré de Balzac that functions as “the‘still point’ around which the disorder and urgency of a properly novelistictime will turn” (157), spinning the narrative out of a central point. Similarly,an allegorical interpretation of this novel “reorients the narrative around itsnew interpretive center” (163). The sea in Conrad’s novels similarly func-tions as a horizon, “a strategy of containment and a place of real business: itis a border and a decorative limit” (210) that provides characters with theeffect of perspective: Lord Jim is thus able to “step completely outside allthree class terrains and see them all equally, from over a great distance, as somuch picturesque landscape” (211). Characters in Conrad also function inthis way: “Each new detail, each new perspective on the anecdote, bringsinto being, as the very center of its whirlpool, another new speaker, himselffor the moment the transitory center of a narrative interest that will quicklysweep him away again” (224). This hollow centered whirlpool is echoed inimages suggesting that Conrad’s novels have “a void at the heart of eventsand acts” (257) so that the text offers “a slow analytic rotation around thatcentral act about which we may fear that interrogated too closely, like theonion that was the symbol of being in the Upanishads, from which layerupon layer was carefully removed, it will prove to bear nothingness at itsheart” (271). This “hole at the center of the narrative is itself but an externalemblem of the greater one around which the gigantic system of events of thenovel pivots as on some invisible axis” (272).

The spatial imaginary of the political unconscious thus allows the gener-ation of meaning and the process of interpretation to take contradictoryforms. A text can create its own horizon by generating itself as a three-dimensional space around some central place, event, or gap. Elsewhere, areader, through his interpretive horizon, is able to determine the centeraround which the text is seen to rotate. Sometimes the interpreter is more


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active and is able to peel away the layers formed by the spinning globe of thetext to find the gap at its center. Meaning is generated by both text andreader; reader is both passive discoverer and active unmasker; meaning rep-resents access to traces of history or access to the gap that lies where historyonce was. Spatial imagery allows Jameson to entertain contradictory alterna-tives that may not be satisfactorily resolvable in theory.

My cognitive reading of Jameson’s text is itself a symptomatic readingbecause it identifies a pattern of imagery that reveals and resolves contradic-tions that are implicit, but not directly articulated, in Jameson’s theoreticalexposition. In a way, I have treated Jameson’s spatial imaginary as a symptomof unresolvable tensions that arise between Lacanian concepts of the subjectand a utopian (Marxist) desire to produce readings that change the courseof history.

The cognitive unconscious, however, informs a reading practice that dif-fers in several respects from Jameson’s model. In the first place, it does notinvolve a claim that Jameson’s spatial images reveal contradictions that heseeks to repress. He openly acknowledges that his theoretical models fail tooffer a fully satisfactory account of the subject, and also that history, as theReal, does not allow direct human access. I do not claim to know to whatextent Jameson’s spatial imagery is cultural (clearly it does have a history) orto what extent it is either innate (since spatial imagery is basic to thought) orindividual (since it solves problems particular to Jameson’s thought). Thesespatial images are produced by a mind in which cultural, biological, andindividual are inextricably intertwined. I also make no judgment aboutwhether Jameson was conscious of this pattern of imagery, since cognitivetheory argues that it is impossible to draw a clear line between conscious andunconscious processes. In a way it does not matter whether Jameson was con-scious of these images or not, nor does it matter whether a reader con-sciously apprehends them. What matters is the work they do to reconcileconceptual ruptures and to provide the reader with an inspiring (if partlysubliminal) vision of active readership.

Cognitive theory, then, provides compelling accounts of how and why weread the way we read now, but it can also provide a new way of reading, eventhough it has not primarily been employed as a hermeneutic. It can help usinterpret texts if we recognize the spatial underpinnings of abstract thought,and if we acknowledge that spatial metaphors are inflected differently in dif-ferent cultural contexts, and if we are able to trace the work being done bythe spatial imaginary of a particular text. A cognitive hermeneutic helps usresolve issues of agency similar to those that are managed by Jameson’s spa-tial images, since it allows for a salutary indeterminacy on questions of con-sciousness and cultural construction. Cognitive symptoms are symptoms of


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thought, emerging from the place where conscious and unconscious, biol-ogy and culture meet. They are symptoms of our ability to imagine solutionsto problems that cannot even be formulated in words.

Notes

1. Elaine Scarry, Dreaming by the Book (New York, 1999); Lisa Zunshine, Why WeRead Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel (Columbus, 2006); Mark Turner, TheLiterary Mind (New York, 1996). For a useful survey of cognitive approaches toliterature, see Alan Richardson, “Studies in Literature and Cognition: A FieldMap,” in Alan Richardson and Ellen Spolsky, eds., The Work of Fiction: Cognition,Culture, and Complexity (Aldershot, 2004), 1–30.

2. Richardson and Spolsky, preface to The Work of Fiction, vii–ix.3. Bruce Smith, review of Word vs. Image: Cognitive Hunger in Shakespeare’s England

by Ellen Spolsky, Shakespeare Quarterly 59 (Winter 2008): 509–13, here 510. 4. In The Political Unconscious (Ithaca, 1981), Fredric Jameson speaks of “a method

whereby the ‘false’ and the ideological can be umasked and made visible” (53).His theoretical argument attributes this power to unmask to the criticalmethod, but, as we shall see, his language often speaks as if it is the reader whohas the power.

5. Ibid., 58.6. Richardson and Spolsky, The Work of Fiction, 1.7. For an account of this historical trajectory in cognitive science, see Andy Clark,

Being There: Putting Brain, Body, and World Together Again (Cambridge, 1997).See also the introduction to Mary Crane, Shakespeare’s Brain: Reading with Cogni-tive Theory (Princeton, 2001), esp. 10–13.

8. See John R. Taylor, Linguistic Categorization: Prototypes in Linguistic Theory, 2nded. (Oxford, 1995).

9. See Brent Berlin and Paul Kay, Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution(Berkeley, 1969), and Eleanor Rosch, “Principles of Categorization,” inEleanor Rosch and Barbara B. Lloyd, eds., Cognition and Categorization (Hills-dale, NJ, 1978).

10. Taylor, Linguistic Categorization, 40–47.11. Ibid., 83. 12. Ibid., chaps. 6 and 7, 99–130.13. Antonio Damasio, Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain (New

York, 1994).14. See Jean Mandler, “How to Build a Baby: II. Conceptual Primitives,” Psychologi-

cal Review 99, no. 4 (1992): 587–604; and George Lakoff, Women, Fire, and Dan-gerous Things: What Categories Reveal About the Mind (Chicago, 1987), 271–86.

15. Mandler, “How to Build a Baby,” 591–92. I’m paraphrasing from Crane, Shake-speare’s Brain, 8.

16. Mandler, “How to Build a Baby,” 598; quoted from Crane, Shakespeare’s Brain, 9.17. Lakoff, Women, Fire, xiv; Crane, Shakespeare’s Brain, 9.18. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago, 1980),

46–48; 101–5.


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19. For a history of cognitive approaches to the unconscious, see John F.Kihlstrom, “The Cognitive Unconscious,” Science 237, no. 4821 (September 18,1987): 1445–52.

20. Antonio Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making ofConsciousness (New York, 2000), 228.

21. Kihlstrom, “The Cognitive Unconscious,” 1448. I’m relying on a summary ofKihlstrom’s three stages, which clarifies and condenses his argument, in JoelWeinberger and Joshua Weiss, “Psychoanalytic and Cognitive Conceptions ofthe Unconscious,” in Dan J. Stein, ed., Cognitive Science and the Unconscious(Washington, DC, 1997), 45.

22. Weinberger and Weiss, “Psychoanalytic and Cognitive Conceptions,” 45.23. See Jean Aitchison, Words in the Mind: An Introduction to the Mental Lexicon, 2nd

ed. (Oxford, 1994), 24–25, for descriptions of such “priming” experiments.24. Weinberger and Weiss, “Psychoanalytic and Cognitive Conceptions,” 45.25. For an early attempt to reconcile cognitive and psychoanalytic theories of the

unconscious, see Jean Piaget, “The Affective Unconscious and the CognitiveUnconscious,” Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 21 (1975):249–61. Dan J. Stein and Jeffrey E. Young, “Rethinking Repression,” 147–75, inStein, Cognitive Science, have argued that Freud’s concept of repression is, infact, based on a “folk theory” of mind that is both productive and erroneous.

26. George Lakoff, “How Unconscious Metaphorical Thought Shapes Dreams,” inStein, Cognitive Science, 89.

27. Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sig-mund Freud, trans. James Strachey (1901) rev. ed. (London, 1960), 6:61.

28. Aitchison, Words in the Mind, 18–19.29. Arthur Reber, Implicit Learning and Tacit Knowledge: An Essay on the Cognitive

Unconscious (Oxford, 1993), 23.30. See, for example, readings of cognitive metaphor such as Donald C. Freeman,

“‘Catch[ing] the Nearest Way’: Macbeth and Cognitive Metaphor,” Journal ofPragmatics 24 (1995): 689–708; also Mark Turner and Gilles Fauconnier, TheWay We Think: Conceptual Integration and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities (NewYork, 2003), as well as the works by Scarry, Zunshine, and Spolsky already cited.

31. Scarry, Dreaming by the Book, 5, emphasizes the lack of “sensuous content” in aliterary text whose “tactile features are limited to the weight of its pages, theirsmooth surface, and their exquisitely thin edges.”

32. See Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding(Berkeley, 1967), who argues that the realistic novel is “distinguished fromother genres and from previous forms of fiction by the amount of attention ithabitually affords both to the individualization of its characters and to thedetailed presentation of their environment” (18). Watt sees a connectionbetween space and interiority even earlier in the novels of Samuel Richardsonwhere he notes a trajectory “toward the delineation of the domestic life and theprivate experience of the characters who belong to it: the two go together—weget inside their minds as well as inside their houses” (175). Deidre Lynch, TheEconomy of Character: Novels, Market Culture, and the Business of Inner Meaning(Chicago, 1998), traces the social conditions that contributed to a new sense inthe late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries that literary charactersshould have interior depth. Elizabeth Deeds Ermarth, in Realism and Consensusin the English Novel (Princeton, 1983), argues that novelistic realism is dependent


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on the representation of identity from multiple perspectives, revealing “a hid-den dimension of depth” (4). Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “The Character in theVeil: Imagery of Surface in the Gothic Novel,” PMLA 96 (1981): 255–70, arguesthat the gothic novel uses imagery of surfaces to suggest that “individual iden-tity, including sexual identity, is social and relational rather than original orprivate” (256). A doctoral dissertation by Jules Law, “Surface and Depth:Metaphors for Meaning in Dickens, Conrad, and Joyce” (PhD diss., The JohnsHopkins University, Baltimore, 1983), argues that Romantic poetry and Victo-rian novels use metaphors of surface and depth to convey significant aspects ofcharacter and feeling.

33. Jameson, Political Unconscious, 28.34. Philip Rollinson, Classical Theories of Allegory and Christian Culture (Pittsburgh,

1981), 3, and also Jon Whitman, Allegory: The Dynamics of an Ancient andMedieval Technique (Cambridge, MA, 1987), 263.

35. The dative feminine of allos forms an adverb, alle, which means “in anotherplace, elsewhere”; Greek-English Lexicon (Oxford, 1871), s.v. “Allos.”

36. From On the Trinity 15.9, as cited in Rollinson, Classical Theories of Allegory, 52.Rollinson argues that Augustine does not view allegorical interpretation asinvolving the discovery of hidden meanings because he believed that Godcaused the events of the Old Testament to happen as they did in order to con-vey spiritual meanings relevant to Christianity. These meanings were not hid-den, but were manifest in the text.

37. Ibid., 3. 38. Ibid., 65.39. Whitman, Allegory, 63. Whitman associates Origen’s concept of textual depth

with the Neoplatonic belief that existence itself has levels (64).40. Latin text of Aquinas is from Summa Theologiae (Ottawa, 1953), 1.1.9–10.

English translation is from Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, trans. Fathersof the English Dominican Province (New York, 1946), 1.1.9–10.

41. From Erasmus, De Copia, in Craig R. Thompson, trans., Literary and EducationalWritings 2: De Copia/De Ratione Studii, in Collected Works of Erasmus (Toronto,1978), 24:639; and John Foxe, Pandectae locorum communium (London, 1585),A2v. See my discussion of these passages and this metaphor in Framing Authority:Sayings, Self, and Society in Sixteenth-Century England (Princeton, 1993), 58–59.

42. See Crane, Framing Authority, for a more extended account of this educationalmethod and its centrality to concepts of reading and writing in sixteenth-century England.

43. See ibid., 18: “Although Agricola begins with something like the Aristoteliannotion of place as strategy or technique . . . he persistently textualizes the con-cept until, in books 2 and 3, the space becomes ancient literature and theplaces in it textual fragments that articulate common belief.”

44. Walter J. Ong, SJ, Ramus: Method and the Decay of Dialogue (Cambridge, 1958),argues that both logic and rhetoric underwent spatialization and visualizationduring the late middle ages and early Renaissance.

45. Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, ed. A. C. Hamilton (London, 1980),737–38.

46. Enrique Lima, “Of Horizons and Epistemology: Problems in the Visuality ofKnowledge,” Diacritics 33 (2003): 1. Lima links the concept of the “horizon” inRenaissance painting and twentieth-century German thought.

47. Ermarth, Realism and Consensus, 17–19.


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48. See Henry Turner, The English Renaissance Stage: Geometry, Poetics, and the Practi-cal Spatial Arts, 1580–1630 (Oxford, 2006), 155–65, for an analysis of the waysin which a changing use of stage space was implicated in a shift from “emblem-atic” to “realist” drama. See Katharine Eisaman Maus, Inwardness and Theater inthe English Renaissance (Chicago, 1995), for the role of theater in the develop-ment of subjective interiority in the period. See also the chapter on The Comedyof Errors in Shakespeare’s Brain for the development of stage space to representdepth of character.

49. G. B. Evans, ed., The Riverside Shakespeare, 2nd ed. (Boston, 1996).50. Robert Weimann, Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition of the Theater: Studies in the

Social Dimension of Dramatic Form and Function, ed. Robert Schwartz, 2nd ed.(Baltimore, 1978), who argues that the rear of the stage was the location forrepresentational scenes, while the front of the stage was the location for a pre-sentation mode of drama.

51. See Alice Jenkins, Space and the “March of Mind”: Literature and the Physical Sci-ences in Britain, 1815–1850 (Oxford, 2007), 214–32, for images of chaos andvoid space as a means of representing depth and sublimity in early nineteenth-century epic poetry. See Law, “Surface and Depth,” 1–114, on the connectionsamong the sublime, depth, and intensity in Romantic poetry. Deidre Lynch,“Matters of Memory: A Response,” Victorian Studies 49, no. 2 (2007): 237, notesthat Victorian readers often viewed Romantic poetry as “a privileged locus for adepth of feeling without counterpart in the contemporary [Victorian] world.”

52. Lynch, Economy of Character, 135–37. Lynch cites Margreta de Grazia, Shake-speare Verbatim: The Reproduction of Authenticity and the 1790 Apparatus (Oxford,1991), 223–24, who argues that critics began to look for motivations for Shake-spearean characters “concealed from and mystified by its surface.”

53. Lynch, Economy of Character, 252.54. Ermarth, Realism and Consensus, 4.55. Ibid., 257–73. Law traces the demise of this sense of depth in the modernist

novel—he argues that Joyce’s fiction is “an extended critique of the notion ofdepth” (215), but sees a concomitant rise in images of depth found in philo-sophical and psychological writing. See J. Hillis Miller, Poets of Reality (Cam-bridge, MA, 1965), 9, for the argument that “dimensions of depth” disappearedin twentieth-century art.

56. Lynch, Economy of Character, 15.57. Law, “Surface and Depth,” 195–217. 58. Jameson, Political Unconscious, 111. 59. Frederic Jameson, “Imaginary and Symbolic in Lacan: Marxism, Psychoanalytic

Criticism, and the Problem of the Subject,” Yale French Studies 55/56 (1977):338–95.

60. Lima, “Of Horizons,” 19, connects the horizon in Renaissance pictorial perspec-tive with the concept of horizon in phenomenology, hermeneutics, and reader-response theory in twentieth-century German thought. Although he doesn’tmention Jameson, Jamesonian horizons are clearly related to this tradition.

61. Jameson, Political Unconscious, 154. Here Jameson comes close to Ermarth’sinsight that the invisible and unlocatable consciousness of the narrator worksas a vanishing point to create the effect of depth. Ermarth, however, objects tothe concept of “point of view” because it tends to locate the narrator in space.


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surface, depth, and the spatial imaginary

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