NOTES ON THE ‘IMAGE’
In literature ‘image’ has a
general sense of how a writer manages to make a picture, or sound, or taste or
touch, come clearly into the reader’s mind.[1] Katherine Mansfield does this often. In Miss Brill she makes us ‘see’ the
conductor waving his arms about like a rooster.
In An Indiscreet Journey she makes us see the momentary carriage that
‘flung’ past the window, or the soldier suffering from gas wounds in the
café. We can all think of images from
our reading, the theatrical image of Hamlet holding the skull, the ghosts of the sailors rising up in The
Ancient Mariner, that rock seeming to
glare down on Wordsworth when he’s stolen the boat, T S Eliot’s image of ‘the pleasant whining of
a mandolin’ from inside a London pub.
These are all more or less
‘local effects’. But in the early
twentieth century writers – mainly but not exclusively poets - began to use the image in a more central way. The Imagist poets wanted a poem to in some
way hinge on the image. Their movement, ‘Imagism’ [2]was in part influenced by
Japanese poets who did this. The idea
was that the image is presented not just as a representation and evocation of
what it stands for but as a way of making the writer think and feel beyond the
immediate thing represented.
Katherine Mansfield, of course, know some figures in the imagist
movement, for example T S Eliot and (to an extent) D H Lawrence (think of the
image of the child sitting under the piano listening to his mother playing, an
image of memory).
And although the movement was
mainly one of poets at that time, we can see aspects of imagism in the stories
of Chekhov where he leaves the story as it were ‘in the air’ for us to complete
in our minds. Or in Maupassant the
image of the necklace is not just an element in the plot of the story The
Necklace, but also a summing up of the whole theme of the ‘artificial’.
You can see how the image is
used structurally and ‘semantically’ in Katherine Mansfield if you think about
the fur in Miss Brill. It is a visual
image in itself, of course, as (depending on your point of view) a little
rascal or a fried whiting, but at the end when it seems to cry from inside its
box, Mansfield does not go on to explain what she means by that. We are left with the reverberations in our
own minds. And indeed questions. Has she simply given up? In other words is the fur her own
self-respect? Or has she simply packed
away the nasty experience she’s had and used it as a kind of scapegoat, still unable to face her own
loneliness?
In Je ne Parle pas
Français, the nickname ‘Mouse’ is used
not just to give a picture of the retiring languageless girl, but also to
contrast with the ‘cat’ of a Madam. The
sleazy bar at the end has two images of other women, the (alleged) virgin which
the narrator is offering the old man, and the fat Madam whom he almost wants to sleep with, but
whom he suspects, under the surface is covered in ugly moles. But
his inability of get involved with anyone perhaps also makes him a kind of
grotesque ‘virgin’. And beyond that,
how far is the sum of the images we get of the narrator a composite image, not
just of a vain harmed young man, but of the writer’s position as such? James Joyce’s young writer, Stephen Daedelus
thinks of the writer as detached from the nitty gritty of experience, pairing
his fingernails. But then, what does
that imply? But then Joyce is not
condoning the kind of superficiality of Mansfield’s hero when he writes, from
the point of view of young Stephen,
'The artist, like the God of the creation,
remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined
out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.''
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