Great Eyes - Intense Looking

Titus Groan, from the Gormenghast Trilogy, by Mervyn Peake, 1946, Eyre & Spottiswoode.

Swelter’s eyes met those of his enemy, and never was there held between four globes of gristle so sinister a hell of hatred. Had the flesh, the fibres, and the bones of the chef and those of Mr. Flay been conjured away and away down that dark corridor leaving only their four eyes suspended in mid-air outside the Earl’s door, then, surely, they must have reddened to the hue of Mars, reddened and smouldered, and at last broken into flame, so intense was their hatred – broken into flame and circled about one another in ever-narrowing gyres and in swifter and yet swifter flight until, merged into one sizzling globe of ire they must surely have fled, the four in one, leaving a trail of blood behind them in the cold grey air of the corridor, until, screaming as they fly beneath innumerable arches and down the endless passageways of Gormenghast, they found their eyeless bodies once again, and re-entrenched themselves in startled sockets.

Page 364

His [Swelter’s] eye, moving around the panel of the door, is like something detached, self-sufficient, and having no need of the voluminous head that follows it nor for that matter of the mountainous masses undulating to the crutch, and the soft, trunk-like legs. So alive is it, this eye, quick as an adder, veined like a blood-alley. What need is there for all the cumulus of dull, surrounding clay – the slow white hinterland that weighs behind it as it swivels among the doughy, circumscribing wodges like a marble of raddled ice? As the eye rounds the corner of the door it devours the long line of skinny apprentices as a squid might engulf and devour some long-shaped creature of the depths.

Page 361-362

The Tell-Tale Heart, from Edgar Allen Poe: The Complete Stories. 1908, Random House, Everyman’s Publishing. New York / London.

It is impossible to say how first the idea entered my brain; but once conceived, it haunted me day and night…I think it was his eye! yes, it was this! One of his eyes resembled that of a vulture – a pale blue eye, with a film over it. Whenever it fell upon me, my blood ran cold; and so by degrees – very gradually – I made up my mind to take the life of the old man, and thus rid myself of the eye forever.

Page 657

It was open – wide, wide open – and I grew furious as I gazed upon it. I saw it with perfect distinctness – all a dull blue, with a hideous veil over it that chilled the very marrow in my bones; but I could see nothing else of the old man’s face or person: for I had directed the ray as if by instinct, precisely upon the damned spot.

Page 659

The Self-Aware Image: An Insight into Early Modern Meta-Painting, by Victor I. Stoichita, Translated by Anne-Marie Glasheen, Cambridge University Press (English Language), 1997.

Anonymous, The Formation of the Retinal Image, engraving for Descartes'
Dioptrics, Leiden, 1637

Who then is this character? His own retina is receiving the retinal image produced by (in) another eye, and, together with this experimental eye, the surrounding space. In the context of the experiment quoted, the bearded person is a real person, in a dark room looking at a white screen placed at the back of a real but dead eye. in relation to the whole book, that is to say, in the context of the Discourse on the Method and these ‘experiments’, the engraving has a much greater significance: Its subject is that of sight watched.

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