Srdjan Smajić. Ghost-Seers, Detectives, and Spiritualists: Theories of Vision in Victorian Literature and Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. ISBN: 978-0521191883. Price: US$85.00/£50.00

What do we mean when we say that we see something? And how do we navigate the gap between our assertion of sensory perception (“I see”) and the untrustworthy corollary of comprehension (“Oh, I see!”), that slippage between the material and the epistemological that underwrites, among other things, Othello’s fateful demand for “ocular proof”? It is that question, the nineteenth-century attempts to answer it, and the popular narratives that arose from those attempts, which provide the basis of Srdjan Smajić detailed study Ghost-Seers, Detectives, and Spiritualists: Theories of Vision in Victorian Literature and Science. Over thirteen compact chapters, Smajić lays out the nineteenth-century accounts of the phenomenology of perception, tracing their sources in eighteenth-century and Romantic-era thought as exemplified by George Berkeley, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and Auguste Comte as they were taken up, reworked, and challenged by such Victorian philosophers, critics, and scientists as John Stuart Mill, Herbert Spencer, George Henry Lewes, William Whewell, and John Tyndall. Alongside that history, Smajić reads a number of literary figures—including the canonical (Walter Scott, Edgar Allan Poe, Thomas Carlyle, John Ruskin, Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, Arthur Conan Doyle) and the less canonical (Catherine Crowe and Kate and Hesketh Prichard, among others). He considers how these writers engaged the perceptual, spiritual, and epistemological issues that the scientific debates raised. Broadly, the project of the book is to explore the Victorian phenomenologies and epistemologies of perception as they fall into a series of conceptual poles that literature could engage, tweak, or parody. These include intuitionism and empiricism, materialist sensation and cognitive comprehension, axiomatic truths and assumptions grounded in experience that seem to be axiomatic, and the desire for “fixed, universal semantic value” which moves toward the (mistaken) fantasy of a collapse of knowledge into pure, unmediated sight (112). Smajić draws the genres of the ghost story and detective fiction into the realm of the scientific and philosophical developments in that all call for “a different way of seeing” and offer a challenge to received understandings of the relationship between sight and knowledge (39). “I shall maintain,” Smajić announces, “that representations of ghost-seeing in Victorian ghost fiction are in conversation with contemporary treatments of visual perception, particularly in regard to what these works had to say about the reliability of bodily sight as a channel for knowledge about the world—and the world after this one” (17). He likewise claims that detective fiction, despite its realist aspirations, analogously mobilizes a set of conceptions about perception and comprehension that draw upon the same tropes: “Presumably,” he points out, the “semiotic prowess” of the detective “derives from experience: the sort of visual learning that Berkeley and his Victorian followers argue is required for making inferences” (96-97). But at the same time the fantasy of the detective genre relies upon the portability of that prowess into unfamiliar scenarios: “On the other hand, however, it is necessary for the reader to believe that any kind of prior knowledge and inductive legwork is redundant if he or she is to trust that [Poe’s] Dupin can accomplish a similar feat when scrutinizing a face he has never seen before in order to penetrate a mind about which he knows nothing” (98). Ultimately, as he argues that Collins’s The Moonstone (1868) makes clear, “there can be no seeing without reading, no transformation of raw sense data into knowledge, without the intervention of language—a mediation that is simultaneously an obstacle in the detection of plain meaning and the prerequisite for the detection of anything at all” (115). As the title of the book suggests, Smajić is juggling a lot …