Abstract
Between 1917 and 1935, William Carlos Williams’ poetic style shifted from a focus on color to a verbal grayscale of photorealism. Considering this shift alongside of the historical connection between photography and eugenics raises questions about Williams’ status as a physician during an era when medical discourse was dominated by theories of scientific racism. While one might conclude that Williams move from color to grayscale represents a capitulation to public health anxieties regarding the pathologized bodies of the immigrant poor, I argue that it is precisely through his adoption of black-and-white photorealism that Williams overturns hereditary notions of degeneracy.
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Notes
By invoking the term “biocultural,” I am referring to the developing interdisciplinary field of “biocultures,” which seeks to draw out the potentially rich dialogue that might be had between the sciences and the humanities. See Davis and Morris, “Biocultures Manifesto,” New Literary History 38 (2007): 411.
WC Williams, The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams, Volume I (1909–1939), eds. LA Walton and C MacGowan (New York: Directions, 1991), pp. 99, 1–6. All subsequent references to this work appear in the text.
See B Johnson, The Feminist Difference (Boston: Harvard University Press, 1998) in which she explores the impact of gender and psychoanalysis on the difference between figure and ground.
D Batchelor, Chromophobia (London: Reaktion Books, 2000).
The linkage between photography and eugenics is something that I will elaborate upon more thoroughly in the next section, during my reading of An Early Martyr.
J Kristeva, Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), p 220.
Ibid, 220–221.
Ibid, 233.
Batchelor, 23.
See M Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume One (New York: Vintage, 1990).
Ibid, 97.
Ibid, 108.
J Sawday, The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture (New York: Routledge, 1997), p 192.
See TH Crawford, Modernism, Medicine, and William Carlos Williams (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1993), pp. 48–9.
All of these definitions are taken from The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition. Houghton Mifflin Company, 2004.
We might here recall Erving Goffman’s definition of “stigma” as that visible attribure which causes identity to become “spoiled.” See E Goffman, Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1963).
Crawford, 109.
Ibid, 112.
It is worth noting that An Early Martyr does not exclude color altogether. But the speaker’s relationship to color is quite different from the mixture of ecstasy and anxiety that saturated the colors of An Early Martyr. In this later collection, the aesthetic appreciation of color has been replaced by a microscopic gaze on the subject’s situatedness within capitalism. “To Mexican Piggy Bank,” for example, presents the reader with a minute visual description of a static object. On the piggy bank, “The/pig/is painted/yellow/with green/ears /…/ the shepherd/wears/a red/blanket/on his left/shoulder” (382). But these colors are not romanticized; indeed, they have no effect on the speaker’s body (if such a body could even be discerned from this strictly third person description). Where color once made bodies appear, it now effaces the physical body, calling attention instead to the economic exploitation that regulates the body of the laborer. As reader, we can’t discern anything about what the Mexican piggy bank owner looks like, but we can guess at the paucity of his or her income. While the poem includes colors, these colors are part of a larger descriptive framework that offers up the object at hand as metonym for financial inequality and racially inflected systems of labor. While there may have been something romantic about the “swinging haunches” of the farm girl delivering eggs, there’s ultimately nothing romantic about the effects of capitalism on the immigrant poor.
See E Brown, The Corporate Eye: Photography and the Rationalization of American Commercial Culture, 1884–1929 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005); D Green, “Veins of Resemblance: Photography and Eugenics,” Oxford Art Journal 7 (2): 3–16; D Lupton, The Imperative of Health: Public Health and the Regulated Body (London: Sage, 1997); and L Prono, “City of Fiction, City of Fact: The Intersection of Literary and Sociological Discourses,” in Literary Modernism and Photography, ed. P Hansom (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002).
Green.
Brown, 42.
M Vescia, Depression Glass: Documentary Photography and the Medium of the Camera-Eye in Charles Reznikoff, George Oppen, and William Carlos Williams (New York: Routledge, 2005), p 13.
R Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1981), p 81.
Lupton, 30.
Prono, 8.
Vescia, xix.
Crawford, 29.
Ibid, 43.
Ibid, 44.
D Morris, Illness and Culture in the Postmodern Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), p 76.
Ibid, 49.
A Broyard, Intoxicated By My Illness and Other Writings on Life and Death (New York: Fawcett, 1993), p 40.
Ibid, 44.
See P Reilly, The Surgical Solution: A History of Involuntary Sterization in the United States (Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005).
See J Schoen, Choice and Coercion: Birth Control, Sterilization, and Abortion in Public Health and Welfare (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005).
S Sontag, Illness and Its Metaphors and AIDS and Its Metaphors (New York: Anchor, 1990), p 1.
References
Barthes, R. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1981.
Batchelor, D. Chromophobia. London: Reaktion Books, 2000.
Brown, E. The Corporate Eye: Photography and the Rationalization of American Commercial Culture, 1884–1929. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005.
Crawford, TT. Modernism, Medicine, and William Carlos Williams. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1993.
Davis, L and D Morris. “Biocultures Manifesto.” New Literary History 38 2007: 411–418.
Foucault, M. The History of Sexuality, Volume One. New York: Vintage, 1990.
Goffman, E. Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1963.
Green, D. “Veins of Resemblance: Photography and Eugenics.” Oxford Art Journal 7 2: 3–16.
Johnson, B. The Feminist Difference. Boston: Harvard University Press, 1998.
Lupton, D. The Imperative of Health: Public Health and theRegulated Body. London: Sage, 1997.
Morris, D. Illness and Culture in the Postmodern Age. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998.
Prono, L. “City of Fiction, City of Fact: The Intersection of Literary and Sociological Discourses.” In Literary Modernism and Photography, ed. P Hansom. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002.
Reilly, P. The Surgical Solution: A History of Involuntary Sterization in the United States. Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005.
Sawday, J. The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture. New York: Routledge, 1997.
Schoen, J. Choice and Coercion: Birth Control, Sterilization, and Abortion in Public Health and Welfare. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005.
Sontag, S. Illness and Its Metaphors and AIDS and Its Metaphors. New York: Anchor, 1990.
“Strain.” The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition. (Houghton Mifflin Company, 2004).
Vescia, M. Depression Glass: Documentary Photography and the Medium of the Camera-Eye in Charles Reznikoff, George Oppen, and William Carlos Williams. New York: Routledge, 2005.
Williams, WC. The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams, Volume I (1909–1939). Eds. LA Walton and C MacGowan. New York: Directions, 1991.
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Barounis, C. “Undisturbed By Colors”: Photorealism and Narrative Bioethics in the Poetry of William Carlos Williams. J Med Humanit 30, 43–59 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10912-008-9070-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10912-008-9070-4