Venice to India and Back: Masked Foundations of Adrian Stokes’s Aesthetics of Whiteness

“Venice,” writes Adrian Durham Stokes at the opening of his 1945 study of the city, “excels in blackness and whiteness; water brings commerce between them.”[1] This is a confident blasé opening gambit characteristic of the period and of this Faber and Faber contracted writer earlier heralded by Ezra Pound as one of the “only important writers” living.[2] Venice bothered Stokes throughout his writing and viewing life, yet Venice’s, and other, problematic whitenesses disappear in his writing through immaterial afformations (meaning that which cannot solely appear in his writing through material formations).[3] However, if we trace these aesthetic forms back from Venice: An Aspect of Art to his early reading of the then-recently imperially restored Taj Mahal complex in The Thread of Ariadne (1926), we begin to be able to reconstruct a singular claim for whiteness that is not as phenomenally naïve nor as problematically idealist a material/aesthetic romance the sentence as quoted above may make it seem.

From the 1930s onwards Stokes began to write deliberately in a rhetorical mode I call a masked or masking whiteness, made obvious through his continued concentration on, if not obsession with, material/aesthetic and architectural whitenesses considered in vacuo. By the 1940s, the writer was on the cusp of further masking whiteness under the system of representation presented by Kleinian psychoanalysis. To see these later maskings, one must look to the earlier writings like Ariadne. Here, we see more, because Stokes, working through a quasi-dialectical aesthetics formulated through readings of Kant, Hegel, Bradley, and Freud that he first called “Interdependence” and subsequently “identity in difference,” and has not yet substituted the colonially problematic east/west opposition of his early writings for a no less problematic Europeanized north/south.[4] Indeed, his early articulations allow us to begin observe the depth, complexity, and masking of his later—no less problematic—articulations of whiteness.[5]

Before we travel South-East, first to identify the quasi-dialectic which allows for such complexity and masking: whiteness in Stokes is, as John Middleton Murray implies in the preface to Ariadne, a formative formulation against formulation itself (Stokes, Ariadne, vi). Its symptom is in deftly analyzed material forms, and Stokes often masks cultural and economic complexities. Such whitenesses are simultaneously more interestingly contingent and obscure as the obvious binaries are unpicked. For instance, Stokes’s Venice gambit, above, is characteristically subtle in its overt privileging of the material over the political and cultural whilst simultaneously gesturing towards political, imperialist, gendered, and racial dialectic complexities which may be read in the apparently innocuous poetic use of commerce. The nuances of commerce make possible, haunt, and are a pendant to the binary of “blackness” and “whiteness.” The inflections of the masked whitenesses are extrapolated from this syntactic pendant as fundamental economic-cultural difficulties. Such difficulties are easy to forget when faced with the simple material aesthetics of different varieties of white stone (marble, limestone, pietra Istria) and the interplay of these whiteness with a surrounding environment in which they themselves are another form of “commerce,” if you will.

But what is “commerce” if not imperial trade? What are the distances and hierarchies thus established and quickly hidden behind the guise of concrete material observation and aesthetics? What are the variable properties of subjects and representation that simultaneously give rise to and mask the concrete material qualities of an operative aesthetics of whiteness? We must return to a beginning, The Thread of Ariadne, Stokes’s first book. It presents, uncharacteristically, an extra-European, even a-European, project; it is “a clinical record of the birth-pangs of a new consciousness in the English, and perhaps in the European mind [. . .] the birth of a new faculty” (Stokes, Ariadne, vi, viii). And in Ariadne, significantly, Stokes recounts a visit to the Taj Mahal which bears comparison to his later writings on Venice.

His first attempt to visit the “pale and imminent” Taj Mahal is thwarted (Stokes, Ariadne, 162). He lies awake and ruminates: “I saw the futility of my alternatives and comparisons and my unconscious Europeanisation of all my values. I had a glimpse of the possible inadequacy […and] of something different” (Stokes, Ariadne, 158). Travel allows for self-critique, and—potentially—quasi-epiphany followed by philosophical and aesthetic shift. The next day is spent in contemplation of the Taj Mahal complex, as Stokes meditates on the materiality of the whiteness which, as in the later Venetian work, is significantly tempered and enhanced by its “commerce” with water (i.e. opposition of the luminous and surface color). And as with Venice of the 1940s, this reading of the Taj Mahal is neither unproblematic nor original:[6]

Forbidden to me the night before, the Taj had the air of a fairy palace. I was tired, but I tried hard to analyse its beauty. It worried me. I spent twelve hours altogether at the Taj, but I never mastered it. Yet since then, in its absence, I have become more confident. I feel the secret of its beauty lies in the marble. [. . .] above all, the Taj is felt to be ageless and weatherless. Surely that marble cannot be sullied by anything, one feels—the rain only dances on marble—the Taj is weatherless—an indoor effect successfully defying the elements . . . Marble and these proportions . . . I can analyse no further. (Stokes, Ariadne, 159–60)

For Stokes, the white marble has primacy in both the observed and the remembered Taj.[7] Yet this whiteness, an apparently ideal curation of perspective towards an “ageless and weatherless” appearance, is not only a visible anachronism but has been made possible by the imperial cleaning (or restoration) project led by Curzon and completed only a decade before Stokes’s visit. This framing of the Taj’s whiteness and his doubled movement—at once turning away from and ascribing mystery to the whiteness of an architectural or sculptural object—is a familiar move. It posits an aesthetic neutral or universal, and, in turn, a “negation of representation” that is, of course problematically, posited as beyond critique.[8] It is a move toward whiteness’s invisibility, well-documented in critical whiteness studies, that must be attended to.[9] However, Stokes’s Taj is a de-doubling: more complex than its surface appearance—neither “primitive” “magical” regime nor Coleridgian Xanadu, the “formulat[ion] against formulation” Stokes signals in his afformative moves uses rhetoric as much as subject matter.[10]

And so to matter: it is through the form of the writing—the turning away as a practical demonstration of reaction to aesthetic effect, contained in the refusal of sustained empirical analysis—that the foundation of the Stokesean aesthetics of whiteness is established at the Taj. The memory of the Taj relies on a prolonged observation of the architectural forms of the complex. The consideration is environmentally particular, affected by the concrete emphasis in the central buildings on rustication and intarsia of marble, mock-Italianate pietra dura inlay, and carefully manipulated reflective effects of the polished white chuna. The material whiteness is observable, but all other aspects are significant in their disappearance; in thus disappearing they demonstrate their essential (symbolic, cultural, political, economic) fugitive whitenesses. And the formal materialism of the narrative allows the momentary unmasking of fugitive whiteness through literary style rather than lexical content. Materiality is enfolded in the persistence of whiteness in Stokes’s regime of the aesthetic. We strain for that which the writer quite self-consciously shows us by allowing us to not see. Ariadne’s thread is both the key to and fact of the labyrinth.

It is with both formal and structural materialism working in concert with the lexical that we return to Stokes’s Venice. The Faber edition of Venice: An Aspect of Art mirrors in the material form of the book its author’s request to attend to the variant shades of white and black and what falls between. The black and white plates are on white photopaper, but the paper upon which the text is inked is an unconventional blue-grey. The book’s blue-grey text-commentary is both founded upon and highlighted by the images on the inset photopaper. There, should we choose to look for it, is an engagement with the different meanings of white stone’s whiteness; foundational to Stokes’s Venetian aesthetics, these stones are also literally Venice’s foundations. Foundational but not originary: for centuries the stones have been quarried on the Dalmatian coast and brought to Venice precisely because of their material properties. As with Stokes’s description of the Taj, form is instructive, demanding our complicity in the process of experience. In this instance, the book’s material presence emphasizes the vision of Venice as a city literally highlighted by trade as evidenced by and symbolised in the nature and use of the white pietra Istria or kirmenjak (often referred to erroneously as marble) which is for Stokes both subject and form.

In complex foundational parallel, Stokes also attends to the colonial foundations of the city from the tale of St Mark’s dream vision in the marshes of what was soon to be Venice, to the explicit and continual acknowledgement of the Byzantine and the Gothic, of the trade in and importation of material, and, above all, of the aesthetic effects that this “interdependence,” predicated on the complex possibilities of whiteness, create.  An object-based “commerce” gives rise to the contrasts we so often associate with “whiteness,” but also links to, exposes, and continually subjects to interpretation and complication the two so-called neutrals within the regime of aesthetic representation: white (as blank), and water (either transparent or pontic), highlighting and masking the “commerce” “between” and through “fantasies evoked by textures and chromatic interchange, purely aesthetic matters, expressed in terms of the senses” (Stokes, Venice, 61).

Such a rhetoric of wonder does not last for long in Ariadne or Venice. Stokes continues to pick up the thread and make it more complex, and, as I pull together a long study on the aesthetics of stone in modernism, the afformative nature of Stokes’s writing gains commerce as it embodies an interrogation of whitenesses in political, cultural, and aesthetic traditions that interacts, always problematically, with racialized whitenesses which serve as too-invisible counterpoints to orientalizing aesthetic claims. From his quasi-dialectical search for a theory of “interdependence” in Ariadne rises the necessity of a writing which, in its very practice, breaks with cultural presuppositions. There rises, too, on levels quotidian and abstract, a concern with the “inadequate,” the peripheral, and ambivalent, as approached through material as well as textual forms. From these texts the possibility emerges of an aesthetics of whiteness which is yet pervasive but now with properties:  a category that is violable, ephemeral, contingent, material. What emerges is a concrete materiality; whitenesses which, no longer masked or invisible, no longer without its constituent matter, “intensely yet gradually amassed” and “formulate[d] against formulation,” whose very commerce must be made subject to critique (Stokes, Venice, 1; Stokes, Ariadne, vi).