On Speculation and Inspection: Gail Jones and the Writing of the Asterisk

Among Gail Jones’s tangential mini-narratives, Laurence Sterne’s provocative allegory of the ‘Momus glass’ is one of my favourites: if placed in every human being’s chest, the Momus glass would function as a window to others’ inmost thoughts and feelings, it would figure, so to speak, the “primacy of interiority, that which we are privileged to keep invisible and wholly beyond scrutiny”. Likewise, if we were on the planet of Mercury, where bodies are transparent, vitrified by the hot weather, we would be able to see into bodies and know their interiorities. For Jones, however, seeing is not knowing, and the Momus glass is “an offence and an absurdity”. Consequently, what Sterne’s extra-terrestrial speculation tells us about our condition as human beings is that it is the vulnerability of our human condition that causes us to keep a secret hidden.
To discern the corporeality of the invisible, what Wordsworth calls “authentic tidings of invisible things,” Jones invokes, among others, Adam Smith’s doctrine of sympathetic imagination, for it offers an ethic of solidarity that is created in a spectator not by the vision of others but by its occulted circumstances. Premised on this doctrine and on Sterne’s speculative piece of fiction, my paper will thus look into Jones’s work (both scholarly and literary) in order to discuss vision as a form of “errant knowing” and writing as a form of “remarkable seeing,” a form of speculation, if you will.