ON LONGING Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection Susan Stewart14, simultoneous and mediate. An ye akaays he problems of horizon and stance, the problems of dept an brenith. Ase tgif tates the fel of vision, the tragedy of our partial brawl lis bind us. Te disance Became infinite, each step a sion of progres and erent Or delight in ling comes from the vetcain of countryside a ky an se, rom the transcendence we experince oer ws spats. Yet sec the thin ad ty pearing signature of he et i 1 ae he per of hs ight ocnscence ‘nv ech photo appears the grim machinery of wing. I the nation of = tur, of eye ofthe reclamation of lnsap, Fis the uty and practice pasty of noon making Toro the city ist experience the disjuture of partial visinlpertah conciousness. The nary of ths waking i aid by simultane Inno ard yet camer experience. Awe turns corner, Sure disp ters ‘ound the next corner. The sides of the ste! capi agin ux ach Atteton suppresses aiid of psiite. The douse ofthe city fe 4 Synereticdiszurs, politcal in uniranslatabiity. Hence te language of thestate lest Unable to spate ie ty engages, una a spe al 4 one, the sates liguage becomes momenta, the ence of hendgar. les the sence of the bk In this ascondet ae anonymous sence the miming of corporate relations, Beker th night workers the dy workers lies the interace of ight the rotating hi, the dsebadiment of ost lime, The wales of he city tne! at diferent spd, thi sop te hand tang of personal mobility. Inthe mln of the crowed ithe haking of ls relations, he intron of sped, andthe chine Hence the barb fam of police on horses, the sue terror ofthe risen ania, Hire are three landscapes, landscapes complete” and token from one nother es paragraph. Ad atthe edge of tn, the camp of the gypsies. 1. ON DESCRIPTION AND THE BOOK SS Stilt Life tof these landscapes, the distinc. tion of point of ew. In a world where acces to speed is access to tanscendence, poiat of view Is pertculsely” a’ narrative gesture ‘The point of view of landscape is no longer stil is instead a matter Of practice and tanslormation Modernism’ suspicion of point of view ean be seen asa equ of bmalsience, but a erique rooted Ina selfconsciousness that pro: dlaims an omniscience of ts own ontology, is own history. Point of view offers two possbiies: partial and complete. What remains s- lent isthe third and anonymous possibiity-blindness, the end of vwrkng Tnallegory the vision ofthe reader is larger than the vision ofthe text the reader dreams to an excess, to an overabundance, To ead an allegorical narzation [so see beyond the relations of narration, chat- acter, desire, To read allegory is olive inthe future, the anipation {of elosure beyond the closure of narrative. This vision is eechatlogh- fas i obseaions are not with origins, For Bunyan at the end of Pe Pilgrin’s Progress, for example, the readers fairest close wil re sult in repetition, @ further inscription of the namative upon the World, For Bunyan, repetition proclaims the cyclical and sential patterns of history Each urn through the text wil result inthe same ‘reading. The locus of action ia notin the text but in the transformation ofthe reader. Once this transformation is effected, point of view Is4 ow Loncing complete fled out tothe edges. And wherever we lok, we se the work ofthis closure—the mage is ndelibly stamped pon the world “This confidence in th circulaityof history and the complete vision ‘of dosure is broken with the advent ofthe industrial revolution, the Advent ofa new kind of realism and a novel kindof "psychological Iiterature, AS Tan Watt has told us,? two shifts in the concept of realism took place et the beginning ofthe eighteenth century. Fist, {rom the Renaissance onward, a tendency to repace collective expert ‘nce with individual experience had evolved, nd second, the paric- tulaity of everyday ie and he individuals experience in Hs world ‘became the locus of the real Thus the realism of allegory has been displaced, has moved from the readed's “quickening,” an internal ecogrition of signs through reading, to che readers apprehension of an immediate environment that is nevertheless external and con tinualy changing. The reader Is in an observer's position, yet his oF her vision remains partial because of this externality of time and space. The eschatological vision of allegory makes the reader the producer of the tet in the sense that closure can be achieved only though conversion. But the production of the eighteenth-centary rowel i divided between the author and his render, and the readers production is subsidiary to, and imitative of the author's work, We ‘may se the picaresque onthe interface beeen these two forms, the piaro an outsider @ “reader” ofa sot of locations onthe one hand, Seton the ather hand, simply another character, whove partial vision 25an outsider makes him or her ridiculous, In this generic progres. son, the convention of the “wandering viewpoint” has emerge 2 convention whereby the reader is situated mith the text, moving slongside a diversly coordinated set of textual ime systems, Thus 3 rev process of reading evolves from this nev form of reals, @ reading which gives the reader the status of a character, The render ‘comes to “dently sith” the position of Tom Jones, Pamela, Josep Andrews, wit the “proper name” and not with a lesson, a signified. ‘The reader becomes a character, 8 figure who looks for signs of ‘ues—not a reader of signs and clues that ft together into moral ppuze solved through the eschatology of close, but reader of Signs for theis oven sake, a reader of correspondences between the signs ofthe worl, the immediate environment of everyday life, and the signs a the novel. Ths the sign in the relistic novel leeds otto the revelation ofa concealed meaning uncovered but to frther signs, signe whose signified becomes their own inferiority, and. hence ‘whose function isthe production and reproduction of particular form of subjectivity. Th this productive mapping of sign upon sign, world upon word, DESCRIPTION AND Tie 800K realty upon realty, the criterion of exactness emerges as @ value And @actness always. matter ofa concealed slippage between me- dia, is moved from the abstract, the trae forall-times-and-places of allegory, 10 the material, the looking justike, that sleight of hand Which isthe basis for this new realism, The allegrial igure who ‘moves in a binary fashion within a wosld by means of correct and lncorectsetons i replaced by a member looking for signs. Exactness ‘sa miror, not ofthe world, but ofthe ideology ofthe world, And ‘what is described exactly inthe realistic novel "personal space,” the space of property, and the rial relations that take place within that space. We must remember that Crtoe ses the social asa ark ‘upon, a tainting of, hs private space, and greets the race of the hnuman with “terror of mind”: “Then terrible Thoughts rack my Imagination about their having found my Bost, and that there were People here; and that if so, {should certainly have them come again In greater Nambers, and devour me; that if should happen so that ‘hey should not find me, yet they would find my Enclosure, destroy all my Cor, carry away all my lock of tame Gonts, and 1 should pera at last for meer Want” Yet the Hlusion ofthe emperor sur rounded by his riches, the ilusion of Crusoe, Jord of the iland, the ‘most inimically socal of al illusions The movement from realism to madersm and postmodernisen is stmavement rom the sign 38 material othe signiffing process self ‘The reflexivity ofthe modernist use of language cals attention not to the material existence ofa world Iyng beyond and outside language but to the world-making capacity of language, a capacity which points to the arbitrariness of the sign a the same time that it point 0 the world asa transient creation of language. Like the fist Juncure between pre-and posteighteenthcentary fiction, this shift toward the sgn self canbe linked tothe development of the political econo ny. The exchange value of language, a value we see at work in ora genres even in modern society (eg, the reiproity of pans, the joke Swapping session), is replaced bya form of what we might in analo- {yell surplus value. Lterary discourse ie performed not within the “ongoingnes of conversation but the largely private production and apprehension ofthe text, and the relationship between iterary pro duction and consumption becomes one of increasing distance in me and space. The forms of alienation arising from preferences for dif ‘ity and the exotic as qualities of the modernist text reflect an in ‘teasing distance between the forces of iterary production and those of literature’s general consumption. At the saute tine, they reveal the concentration of those productive forees reiting in and from the hegemony of mass culture