Reason Dazzled: The All-Seeing and the Unseeing in Turner's Regulus

Abstract

This article proposes a reinterpretation of Turner's Regulus (1827; 1838), an enigmatic painting named after a legendary Roman general whom the Carthaginians, cutting off his eyelids and placing him in the direct light of the sun, first blinded and then killed. "Reason Dazzled", which takes its title from a suggestive phrase in Foucault's account of unreason, reads the painting as an attempt to stage a certain crisis in the Enlightenment, a movement that traditionally identified both light and sight with reason. It takes the picture to be emblematic of the complex, intimate relationship between all-seeing and unseeing states, and relates this to a certain experience, in the early nineteenth century, of the aesthetic of the sublime: to see nothing but light is to see nothing. The article explores this relationship between sight and blindness, in the first instance, through the violent responses the painting provoked in the nineteenth century, especially those of John Ruskin and one Walter Stephenson. After reconstructing their reactions, the article revisits debates about the precise scene the painting depicts, arguing that the composition is best grasped as a kind of "rebus". Finally, emphasising the apocalyptic dimension of the picture, and its powerful assault on the spectator's eye, it returns to the claim that, contradicting the tenets of the Enlightenment, this composition demonstrates, at the level both of form and content, the blinding or death-dealing effect of too much light.