Most Read... Rebecca WattsThe Cult of the Noble Amateur
(PN Review 239)
John McAuliffeBill Manhire in Conversation with John McAuliffe
(PN Review 259)
Eavan BolandA Lyric Voice at Bay
(PN Review 121)
Patricia CraigVal Warner: A Reminiscence
(PN Review 259)
Vahni CapildeoOn Judging Prizes, & Reading More than Six Really Good Books
(PN Review 237)
Tim Parksin conversation with Natalia Ginzburg
(PN Review 49)
Next Issue Hal Coase 'Ochre Pitch' Gregory Woods 'On Queerness' Kirsty Gunn 'On Risk! Carl Phillips' Galina Rymbu 'What I Haven't Written' translated by Sasha Dugdale Gabriel Josipovici 'No More Stories' Valerie Duff-Strautmann 'Anne Carson's Wrong Norma'
Poems Articles Interviews Reports Reviews Contributors
PN Review 275
PN Review Substack

This article is taken from PN Review 113, Volume 23 Number 3, January - February 1997.

Making Secret Visions Visible Marina Warner


The Outer - from the Inner
Derives its Magnitude…

The Inner - paints the Outer -
The Brush without the Hand -
Its Picture publishes - precise -
As is the inner Brand…

The Star's Whole Secret - in the Lake -
Eyes were not meant to know.1
Emily Dickinson, c. 1862


The flow of images these days, swollen by new technologies, brings us a flood of messages about material phenomena, from the structure of a strand of DNA to the beautiful blowing plumes of uncreated stars caught by the Hubble telescope. Optics have never had a longer, deeper reach; optical innovations profoundly influence art and representation, as they have done since the earliest camera obscura or magic lantern. But the ways such images are structured, in form, colour and composition, as well as the ways they are received and understood - as sublime, as pathetic, as rich, as meaningless, as inspirational or ironic - reveal deep connections to iconologies that precede the disclosures and revelations of these scientific breakthroughs.

The language of vision has a syntax, grammar, vocabulary, a history and a changing development over time. Its intelligibility depends partly on handed-down expressions, on habitual ways of envisioning, on codes known assembled and disassembled in cognitive patterns that have been learned and passed on; but in its frequent unintelligibility, also, in its approximations, blur and fumbling, it still grasps at ...


Searching, please wait... animated waiting image