Resemblance, Signification, and Metaphor in the Visual Arts James A. W. Heffernan The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 44, No. 2. (Winter, 1985), pp. 167-169+171-180. Stable URL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0021-8529%28198524%2944%3A2%3C167%3ARSAMIT%3E2.0.CO%3B2-N The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism is currently published by The American Society for Aesthetics.
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JAMES A. W. HEFFERNAN
Resemblance, Sign@cation, and Metaphor
in the Visual Arts
SOMETHIRTY years ago. Giovanni Giovannini exposed the "impressionism and inconsistency" with which the technical terminology of art had been applied to literature in studies published from 1925 to 1950.' In our own time, the reverse has occurred. Where critics once claimed to see coloring and chiaroscuro in poetry, they now speak of pictures as texts. as readable literary structures complete with metaphors.' But this recent conversion of pictures into texts-really a kind of logocentric empire building-provokes Just as many questions as the old-fashioned habit of treating texts as pictures. Can we now no longer assume that pictures signify objects by means of resemblance rather than by arbitrary or conventional codification'? Has this particular point of difference between graphic and verbal art been obliterated by critical theory, or simply by consensus'? The answer to these questions is by no means clear or decisive. E. H. Gombrich has recently taken pains to define the limits of convention in art, and to affirm that some pictures actually do resemble nature more closely than others.' Likewise. Jonathan Culler has re-affirmed Peirce's version of the traditional distinction between verbal and graphic signification. While the word or "sign proper," he says, signifies by arbitrary convention only, the icon or picture signifies by "natural resemblance. "'
Embedded in this distinction is a history of ambivalence toward the cultural value of the supposed resemblance. On the one hand, we JAMES HEFFERNANis proft~ssar o f Englrsh at Darrmouril College.
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commonly judge pictures by the fidelity with which they seem to reproduce the natural world. and to some extent, we interpret the history of art as a "progress" toward ever more exact resemblance.' Renaissance art is commonly thought to be more sophisticated than medieval art because the techniques of linear perspective make it seem much more '.realistic" than its two-dimensional predecessor. much closer to the three-dimensional world of our natural experience. The possibility of approximating this world with ever-greater degrees of success exerts perennial fascination. In the eighteenth century, English poets took painting as a model precisely because of its lifelike vividness and particularity of detail; in our own time, the Super Realist painters and Verist sculptors have taken photography as their model, striving to reproduce the world exactly as the camera does-with exhaustively detailed precision.When Turner was first shown a daguerreotype, he reportedly said: "This is the end of Art. I am glad I have had my day."' But photography now appears as the stimulus for a new beginning in art: a movement which at once repudiates abstractionism and painstakingly re-asserts the representational function of painting. Indeed, the very phrase "Super Realist" suggests a kind of art which triumphantly achieves the goal we traditionally associate with the visual arts: a special or privileged relation to the natural world." But Super Realism also makes us realize anew what is wrong with resemblance as a criterion of value in art. To see the exhaustive reproduction of natural detail in sculptures such as Duane Hanson's Reclining Mun Drinking (1974) and paintings such as John Salt's '58 Whire Ford Without Hood (1973) is to be reminded of the minute particularity in seven-
1'385 I h e Jotr~.n,rlo f ;\e\thetics a n d .41.rL'riticisrn
168 teenth century Dutch still lifes and genre pieces, and of Turner's complaint that such works 4acrifice "the independence of practice, and originality of invention for transcripts of nature, or servile imitation."' If Turner's loaded words beg the question of just what "transcripts of nature" are, he nonetheless raises the traditional objection to any kind of art which tries to look indistinguishable from the actual world: an objection ultimately traceable to Plato's damnation of all painting for its deceptive appeal to the senses (Republic X. 596-603). Ever since Plato, apologists for art have been periodically moved to claim that its true mission is not to deceive. The fact that Hanson's Reclining Marl has actually been mistaken for a real one would have damned it, for instance, in the eyes of Coleridge. whose concept of art was firmly founded on the distinction between copying and imitating. He wrote. If there be likeness to nature w~thout any check of difference. the result i\ disgusting. and the more complete the deiu\~on.the more loathsome the effect . . . You set out w ~ t ha supposed reality and are disappointed and d~cgustedwith the deception: whilst. In re\pect to a uork of genuine i m ~ t a t ~ o nyou , begin a ~ t han acknowledged total difference. and then every \ the pleasure of an approxlmatouch of nature g ~ \ e you tion to truth "'
Coleridge's distinction between a copy and an imitation cannot. of course, be made to constitute the difference between the visual arts and literature. The distinction cuts through rather than between pictures and words, so that it allows, us. for instance, to classify both Crabbe and Hobbema as copyists of landscape. while Wordsworth and Turner may be called imitators of it. Nevertheless, most theories of language rest on the assumption that language constitutes an advance over picture-making precisely because the fundamental difference between words and what they denote frees the mind from the putatively primitive process of simply replicating natural objects. Howard Nemerov reminds us that the painter's language "has the dignity of being the oldest ever written down."" but its antiquity is usually identified with a primitivism we have collectively outgrown. even as children-with ontogony repeating phylogeny-gradually advance from drawing pictures to writing words and from picture books to pictureless texts. In
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Rousseau's ESSLIJo n the Origitl (fLanguugcs, the movement from pictures to language is plainly defined as a process of cultural ascent. "The depicting of objects." says Rousseau, "is appropriate to a savage people; signs of word and of propositions, to a barbaric people. and the alphabet to a civilized peoples."" Rousseau's essay on language was one of many that emerged from England and France in the eighteenth century, but on this point it was entirely representative. Though theorists disagreed on whether language was naturally derived from sensation or independently generated by the mind, they consistently treated its development in terms of movement away from sensation, away from what can be pictured. Locke stressed the dependence of words on "common sensible Ideasm-i.e.. conceptualized sensations-but he also noted how such ideas are used "to stand for Actions and Notions quite removed from sense . . . unrl ,frorrl obviol~s.set~.sibleIdeas are rrunsfc~rretito more ub.struse Significations, and made to stand for Ideas that come not under the cognizance of our Senses."" In Lord Monboddo's Of the Origin and Progress of Lurtgl~age (1773-1792), this distance between abstract words and the picturable matter of sensation gives way to a fundamental difference between sensation and all words. Monboddo traced words to ideas, and for him. says Hans Aarsleff, "the simplest sensations need the active interpretation of the mind before they can become ideas-ven the sight of a horse will. without 'a discursus mentis, and a conclusion of reason. as I call it,' remain a mere picture in the bottom of the eye" (Aarsleff, p. 38). To say "horse" is to denote not so much a picturable object as an abstract class of objects. a mental construct fundamentally different in form from any member of the class which it denotes. In our own time, this difference between replication and linguistic signification has been emphatically restated by Ernst Cassirer, who posits an absolutely inverse relation between the two. Language, writes Cassirer.
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begins where our immediate relatlon to sensory experi. uttered sound is not yet \peech as ence C ~ C I S ~ SThe long as it purports to be mere repet~tion:a\ long as the specif~cfactor of signification and the mill to "signif~cation" are lacking. The aim of repetition lies in identity-the aim of lingu~sticdesignat~onl ~ e sin difference
Resemblance, Signification, and Metaphor
Plate 1: John Constable, The Hay Wain (1821). National Gallery, London. Reprinted by permission.
Plate 2: John Constable, The Coast at BrightonStormy Evening (c. 1828). Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection. Reprinted by permission.
Resemblance, Signification, and Metaphor
171
already no longer properly present . . . . The perfect representation is always already other than what it doubles and re-presents" (Derrida, Resemblance and signification are thus diametri- pp. 44-45, 291-92). But if pictures do not in fact reproduce what cally opposed, and the history of language is once again presented as the story of a gradual we see, how do we explain the "realistic" look ascent from one to the other. For Cassirer, some pictures have, the apparent resemblance language undergoes three stages: the mimetic between a picture and the natural world? stage of "sound painting." wherein sounds are Gombrich's answer to this question is that the onomatopoetically used to reproduce individual effect of resemblance or the illusion of reality sensory impressions as faithfully as possible; is created by visual clues corresponding to thk the analogical stage, wherein a sequence of bits of information we seek from natural objects sounds designates a sequence of contents; and in order to know what they are. For Gombrich, the symbolic stage, wherein language achieves a picture is not a facsimile of nature but a its "true freedom" by casting off its sensuous "relational model" (Art und Illusion, p. 90) covering and becoming, "precisely in and by which stimulates mental activities similar to virtue of its otherness, . . . the vehicle of a those aroused by natural objects. Thus the new and deeper spiritual content" (Cassirer, I, contrast between white and grey pigment in a picture may lead us to "see" a patch of 189-97). brilliant sunlight on a white tablecloth; a few clearly articulated trees backed by generalized rounded shapes may lead us to "see" a clump If we define the goal of painting as exact of trees; a blurred image represented on a resemblance and the goal of language as an horizon may stimulate the "mechanism of absolute freedom from resemblance, the gap projection," leading us to perceive a particular between words and pictures becomes virtually object t h e r e . ' V o r Gombrich, painting is an impossible to cross. From the vantage point of art of encoding. Its images are not replicas of language, painting seems the embodiment of a natural objects but signals that must be decoded primitive stage from which language has tri- by the viewer before their meaning as repreumphantly emerged. But there is in fact nothing sentations can be understood (Art and Illusion, primitive or instinctive about the process of p. 39). Gombrich's theory seems to put painting creating a picture which seems to duplicate a natural object or natural scene. On the con- within the realm of semiotics, but it stops just trary, as E. H. Gombrich observes, the correct short of doing so. For Gombrich, the percepor convincing representation "is an end product tion of correspondence between a picture and on a long road through schema and cor- a natural object is based not on any conrection," the result of a process in which a ventional or arbitrary associations that we must consciously learn but rather upon natural or conceptual construct-the provisionally "made" figure-is gradually corrected by reference to "automatic" mechanisms: mechanisms that can the natural world and thus "matched" to it.I5 prompt even animals and primitive peoples to Furthermore, the match is never perfect. The respond to pictured creatures as if they were artist can never exactly duplicate the world we real ones.!' Experience will certainly influence see. Between pictures and what they repre- our interpretations; we cannot classify a particsent-as between words and what they sig- ular painted shape as a dog unless we already nify-there will always be distance and differ- have some knowledge of dogs, and even after ence. Quoting Rousseau's observation that "the we have made our identification, cultural habituaprimitive way of writing was not to represent tion will determine how "natural" or "stylsounds, but objects themselves," Denida sharp- ized" the painted dog looks to us. But our ly attacks the implied notion that painting ability to identify markings in certain predictable simply "redoubles nature without any displace- ways is, says Gombrich, either "inborn or ment. " Even in "pure representation," he learned through early imprinting." We are says, "the thing most faithfully represented is universally "programmed" to decode visual . . . The more the sound resembles what it expressec: the more it continues to "be" the other, the less it can "sign~fy" that other."
172 signals, so that "what looks like a leaf to modern Europeans must also have looked like a leaf to predators in fairly distant geological epochs. " I " For all the intricacy of his analysis, then, Gombrich ends up re-affirming the familiar notion that painted objects naturally resemble real ones." This is precisely the notion rejected by Nelson Goodman, who contends that realism is purely a matter of inculcation. Whether or not a picture is realistic, says Goodman, "depend5 at any time entirely upon what frame or mode [of representation] is then standard."'" Though it is risky to assume that only one standard of representation prevails at any one time. the present status of linear perspective in painting gives some support to Gbodman's contention. Dominant in western art ever since the Renaissance, linear perspective is now so thoroughly established that most theorists take it not as a convention but as a law of representation: a law designed to insure that pictures conform to what Gombrich calls "the standards of truth.'"' But the laws of perspective presuppose that the object of vision is what can be seen from one fixed point of view. What then do we say of a picture such as Picasso's Porrruir of Maiu (repr. Illusion, p. 268). where a young girl is represented at once in profile and full face. with both eves and both nostrils visible but with the nose pointing off to one side'! To anyone habituated to the laws of perspective, the picture will seem untrue and unnatural. But as Roland Penrose argues, it is more lifelike than a one-eyed profile would be because it "implies movement in both observer and observed" (Illusion, p. 268). Moreover, it exemplifies the way children and primitive peoples define their object of vision. Evidence about their perceptions clearly indicates that human beings are naturally "programmed" to expect two eyes in anything to be construed as a face, and that the "realism" we commonly impute to the one-eyed profile is indeed the psiduct of cultural habituation (Illusion, pp. 163, 183, 187,268). Does this then mean that "realism" is entirely relative, that what we take as resemblance is really semiotic correspondence? Goodman seems to think it is. "Almost any picture," he says, "may represent almost anything; that is, given picture and object there is
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usually a system of representation, a plan of correlation, under which the picture represents the object" (Lunguuges of Art, p. 38). If Goodman is right, there should be no essential difference between the act of learning to read divergent lines as a sign of depth and-for the speaker of English-learning to read urbre as a sign of what in English is called tree. Yet while we do not have to unlearn the meaning of the English word tree in order to learn the meaning of urbre, which is in fact expressed as tree for the benefit of the learner, we should certainly have to unlearn the meaning of convergent lines in order to see divergent lines as representatives of depth. And 1 frankly wonder whether we could learn to make this change at all." Looking at a picture drawn in correct perspective, we do not interpret its linear convergence as a sign of depth; we are powerless to interpret the convergence otherwise, and we simply surrender to the illusion of depth, the illusion that we are looking at a threedimensional world. We are caught by what has been called our "addiction" to the belief that certain kinds of pictures represent the world as it really is, and no amount of argument will convince us that we are simply making a semiotic connection between things that do not or need not resemble each other at all." In practice, then, the battleground between the naturalist and the conventionalist shrinks to the vanishing point. When the conventionalist points to ethnographical evidence that primitive peoples have difficulty interpreting the significance of converging lines, the naturalist points out that a child with no special training can recognize depicted objects, and that primitive slight prodding (Deregpeoples can als-with owski in Illu.sion, pp. 167-68). Trying to measure precisely how much our interpretation of pictures is governed by acculturation is like trying to calculate precisely how much of our personalities is due to our education. We know in both cases that acculturation plays a large role, but we cannot say exactly how large a role, for no one-including Goodman-has demonstrated that convention is solely responsible for what we see in pictures. Neither side in the debate between nature and convention has established an absolute claim to the truth. On the one hand, when Gombrich says that pictures are decoded by "natural" mechanisms of
Re,er?~blanc-c,Si,qniji;c.ation, and Metciphor interpretation, we have to ask how natural these mechanisms actually are. and what part language learning plays in the development of our capacity to interpret and identify objects in the real world-let alone depicted objects. When Goodman says that "a likeness lost in a photograph may be caught in a caricature" (Languugr.s ( f l Art, p. 14), we have to ask what it means to catch a likeness. Is he proving that representation has nothing to do with resemblance, or is he simply refining our concept of resemblance? Since resemblance is by definition a similarity between appraratzces, there is no way to distinguish between actual and apparent resemblance; we can only say that whatever looks like Churchill does indeed resemble hirn. Just as Gombrich's "natural" mechanisms finally seem to derive from acculturated experience, so Goodman's conventionalism findly resolves into another version of resemblance. Whether or not resemblance itself is something we are taught to see cannot change the fact the we customarily do see it between certain kinds of pictures and what they represent. while we do not see it between words and what they signify. The conviction that certain kinds of pictures actually resemble what they represent is precisely what underlies the distinction between iconographic a d pealistic art, or between iconographic meanings and what Panovsky calls "the primary or natural subject matter" in a single work of art. To "read" iconographic art, we must systematically learn the meanings conventionally associated with certain images; we must know, for instance, that a male figure with a knife signifies St. Bartholemew and that a female figure with a peach in her hand signifies veracity." But what do we have to know or learn in order to identify the "primary or natural" meanings here, to identify the picture of a peach as such-whether or not the peach is part of an iconographic configuration'? What does it mean to speak
173 this formulation hardly explains what system of signification is used in "realistic" painting, and how far that system can be called conventional. The chief problem here is that the degree of illusion or realistic effect produced by any work of art seems to vary inversely with the degree of conventional signification. Conventionalized heraldic paintings of birds and animals, for instance, can be virtually linguistic in their differentiation, in the unmistakable clarity with which they attach themselves to a single meanlng and distinguish themselves from each other. But as Jan Deregowski observes, the very features that make these representations so clear to those familiar with the code of heraldic stylization also makes them "unrealistic" in appearance and therefore hard for others to understand (Illusion, p. 186). The counterpart of these heraldic devices in contemporary industrialized societies are the standardized stick figures and line drawings used to signify such things as toilets for men and women and facilities for the handicapped. These configurations constitute a visual language precisely by virtue of their conventionality, which makes them readily identifiable. But they resemble the ob$cts they signify only about as much as the phrase "choo-choo" resembles the sound of a train. Indeed, the analogy which Gombrich draws between onomatopoeia in language and the illusion of resemblance in depiction (Illu.sion, pp. 36 1-63) can apply only, I think, to images that are standardized-images that generate little or no illusion of resemblance and work largely by conventional association, just as onomatopoeia does. The visual equivalent of onomatopoeia cannot be found in convincingly "realistic" paintings. Given the limitations of onomatopoeia as a model of conventionalized or posited resemblance, Umberto Eco has proposed geometrical similitude: the correspondence between two geometrical figures that may be different in size but have equal angles and proportionally equivalent sides. Such figures, says Eco, are actually and not just conventionally equivalent, but because they differ in some ways, we need a "conventional rule" to guide us to their points of correspondence, or a principle of transformation "by which a point in the effective space of the expression is made to correspond
174 to a point in the virtual space of a content model." The transformation does not suggest the idea of natural correspondence; it is rather the consequence of rules and artifice. Thus even the continuous line tracing the profile of [a] horse may be considered as the institut~onof a relation of similitude by a transformed correspondence point to point between the abstract visual content and an image drawn on a given surface. The image is motivated by the abstract representation of a horse, but it is nevertheless the effect of a cultural decision and as such requires a trained eye in order to be detected as a horse's profile. (Eco, pp. 196-200)
This way of explaining the role of convention in the perception of resemblance is certainly more systematic than the invocation of onomatopoeia, but there is at least one problem here. No theory of systematic transformation or geometric similitude can adequately explain why or how we recognize objects in paintings. In Constable's The Hay Wain ( 1821, Plate l ) , for instance, the facing gable on the cottage at left is undoubtedly the geometrical equivalent of many we have seen, or perhaps even of the "abstract visual content" denoted by gable; but the shapes of the horses-which are turned diagonally away from us and almost up to their bellies in water-are certainly not identifiable by means of any geometrical rule. Indeed, if these rough black shapes were isolated from the pictorial context in which we find them, we would certainly not readily be able to say what they signified. It is precisely here that we begin to see how pictorial signification works. In the pictorial sense, we construe the rough black shapes as horses because they are connected to something which the title of the picture leads us to recognize as ~ we know the a hay wain or ~ a g o n . 'Once meaning of the central shape, we can interpret the shapes attached to it, which signify horses not so much because they resemble them in shape as because they are represented as doing what horses often do. Eco himself illustrates this kind of signification by citing Gombrich's example of the child's hobby horse: the stick that bears almost no resemblance to a horse but can stand for one when it is straddled, when it serves "one of the functions permitted by the horse" (Eco, p. 208-9). Nevertheless, Eco's concept of sign-function must be qualified before it can explain
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pictorial signification. When a stick is actually straddled as if it were a horse, the stick retains its identity even as it serves a "sign function." A picture of a stick being straddled would have to represent the stick as such; if the stick were replaced by a recognizable picture of a horse, the result would be a fundamentally different kind of picture. What usually happens in painting is not that one independently recognizable shape is represented as performing a job we normally associate with another, but that a shape which is indeterminate in itself-and hence not easily recognizable-gains a determinate identity from the function it is represented as performing. The black shapes in the Hay Wain are not sticks doing the work of horses; they signify nothing in particular if not horses-which is the way they are identified by the pictorial context in which they appear. This contextual approach to the problem of pictorial signification is, I think, the only one capable of explaining how we can interpret pictorial elements which are neither conventionally coded nor "naturally" recognizable by their resemblance to real objects. As Eco rightly observes, pictorial elements are not linguistically codifiable. While the words for what in English is called "horse" are essentially fixed and limited in all languages, a horse can be depicted in an infinite and unpredictable number &f ways. Furthermore, while a slight phonemic difference between words (such as between horse and house) decisively separates them in meaning, there is seldom any fixed significance in a slight difference between one pictorial mark and another, such as between a straight line and a minimally curved one." Eco therefore concludes that "The units composing an iconic text are established-if at all-by the context. Out of context these socalled "signs" are not signs at all, because they neither are coded nor possess any resemblance to anything. Thus insofar as it establishes the coded value of a sign, the iconic text is an act of code-making' ' (Eco, pp. 2 14- 16). Suggestive as it is, this formulation too needs an important qualification. If none of the units composing an "iconic text" can be recognized, even with the verbal guidance provided by the picture title, there is no visual way into the code which the picture makes, and we must
Resemblance, Signification, and Metaphor regard its shape and colors purely in terms of their abstract, formal relation. But a theory of iconic signification should be able to account for the difference between a purely abstract picture-such as Ben Nicholson's Mondrianesque, precisely rectilinear Painting ( 1 9 3 7 t a n d a picture in which forms are atmospherically blurred but nonetheless identifiable-such as Turner's Ostend (1844, Neue Pinakothek, Munich). The title of Turner's picture, which designates a port, leads us to recognize the sea, the sky, the horizon, and the two boats in the foreground, though we may also need some familiarity with Turner's way of representing the sea. But in any case, to recognize the basic elements in this picture-those I have just named-is to perceive the context in which all of its other shapes can assume determinate meaning. The crude masses of brown at left and right in the foreground become the piers at which the boats are landing or from which they are departing; the wispy shapes at left become human figures waving to those on the apparently incoming boat; and the distant shapes on the sea-ranging from a dun-colored, slightly rounded triangle to a thin vertical white line just left of center-become sailboats. Together with the expectations generated by a seascape, the combination of rectilinear masts and slightly rounded, dun-colored sails on the boats we first recognize give us the means to identify all other shapes behind them, which would otherwise be unintelligible. The picture thus creates the code by which its elements can be interpreted, but the only way into the code is through primary recognition of the elements which establish it.
The relation between shapes we first recognize and those defined by the pictorial context in which they appear is thus analogous to the relation between literal context and metaphor in a work of literature. Just as indeterminate shapes need a pictorial context of relatively determinate shapes to make them intelligible, metaphor needs a literal context to make it intelligible as metaphor. Roman Jakobson's well-known distinction between metaphor and metonymy tends to obscure this fact. In
175 metonymy, says Jakobson, we connect one word or phrase to another with which it has a continuous or syntagmatic relation, so that hut leads us to thatch, litter, or poverty; in metaphor we substitute one word or phrase for another to which it is similar and by which it is paradigmatically replaceable, so that hut becomes den or burrow." Jakobson's distinction is useful, but it implies that metaphor can be explained purely by the substitution of one word for another in a "vertical" list of terms that is self-contained, free of syntactic connection with any phrase or clause. In fact, however, the meaning of a metaphor is largely elicited by syntax-that is, by its connection with the literal meaning of the terms which surround it. In an essay almost as well known as Jakobson's distinction between metaphor and metonymy, Max Black argues that all philosophically important metaphor involves an interaction between the principal subject and the subsidiary subject; the latter-the metaphorically used term-prompts us to interpret the former in a new way, while the former-the principal subject-restricts the inferences we customarily draw about the subsidiary one." Whether or not we accept the interaction theory as a supplement or as an absolute alternative to the substitution theory, we must, I think, acknowledge what Christopher Bache has recently affirmed: that "the meaning of a metaphorically used term is always idiosyncratic to its context and thus is largely determined by the subject to which it applies.""' Take a sentence such as The skull is the house of the brain. To understand that house is being metaphorically used, to figure out that here it means a kind of container but not a dwelling, we must know the literal meaning of the words around the metaphor, and we must assume that those words are being used literally. Otherwise we cannot understand the codemaking of the sentence, the way in which the literal or conventional meaning of house is transformed. Likewise, if we cannot recognize the sea and the sky and the horizon in Turner's Ostend, we will not know how to identify the various little shapes depicted on the horizon. But to say so much is not to say that those shapes are metaphors, or are being used metaphorically. Unlike a word which is metaphorically used, a shape defined by a pictorial context
176 does not have any "ordinary" or "pre-contextual" meaning. Any meaning it has must be given by the artist, who cannot easily define a shape in such a way that it simultaneously signifies two different things for the eye, or makes us feel that we are suppressing one meaning for the sake of another, as we do when we take a word in a metaphorical sense. In Juan Miro's phantasmagoric Heud of u Womun (1938), the head is displaced by a long-beaked, saw-toothed, grotesquely fat bird, but the image of the bird, though pictorially "abstract," is so vivid and commanding that we cannot-let me say candidly that I cannot-see the bird as a head, suppress it's "literal" identity to the point where a metaphorical identity can emerge. A clearer example of this problem is provided by a picture we can confidently classify as "realistic" ; Andrew Wyeth's Chester County (1962). Here a seated old man is depicted in profile with the angled top of a stove pipe just behind his bald head, and Wyeth himself tells us that as the man sat posing, "the stove pipe became a crown that he wore with great dignity."" The stove pipe may have become a crown for Wyeth's eyes, but for ours--or for mine, let me say again-it remains a stove pipe.'? Indeed, the characteristic precision with which Wyeth renders this object, and its relation to the head in front of it precludes, I think, the possibility that it can appear as anything else. It is entirely possible, of course, to create images which can be seen in two different ways-images such as that of the well-known "duck-rabbit," which can be seen as either a duck or a rabbit. But this is visual ambiguity, and it must be distinguished from metaphor. When an object is visually ambiguous, we can read it in different ways, but no matter how quickly we switch readings, we find that one reading temporarily expels the other; we cannot simultaneously see the "duck-rabbit" as a duck und a rabbit." By contrast, metaphor is co-adunative; it draws together two different things and makes us simultaneously concentrate on both so that we may discover the similarity between them. If we don't know whether a particular image signifies a rabbit or a duck, we can read the image as either one, but not both together, for such an image asserts no identity between the aspect of a duck and
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that of a rabbit. But when Wordsworth says in The Prelude that what he saw one night from the summit of Snowdon was "a silent sea of hoary mist" (XIV, 42), he is explicitly asking us to visualize the mist as a sea. To see it this way, we must suppress some features of the actual sea-the tides and whitecaps, for instance-but we must also focus on other features, such as its billowiness and vastness: features which enable us to imagine how the mist appeared. In distinguishing bdween ambiguity and metaphor I do not mean to depecate ambiguity, whose value in art as well as literature was recognized at least as early as Edmund Burke's Sublime and Beautiful (1757). Indeed, for all his conviction that painting was inherently clearer and therefore less emotive than poetry, Burke acknowledged that even in painting a "judicious obscurity" could be affecting, that painting could re-create the moving effect which "dark, confused, uncertain images" have in nature." Long after Burke, the point was taken up by the Victorian critic and artist Charles Eastlake, who was among other things a friend of Turner. Though Eastlake believed that painted images should be "distinct" and though he endorsed the "poetic" use of chiaroscuro and concealment only in pictures of "mysterious or sublime subjects," he nonetheless noted that nature itself could be indistinct. In nature, he said, some appearances are "so vague and mutable, that they may almost be said to have a Protean character-such as the forms of clouds and distant mountains which are sometimes so interchanged as to be agreeably ambiguous." When we include, he added, "all the fairy transformations produced by atmosphere and light, we find that common objects, either under the influence of such effects, on in momentary states of beauty, may acquire a character far beyond their average reality; and when this passing charm is caught and expressed in art, such appearances really suggest poetic similes quite as much as the original phenomena."" Eastlake might have illustrated his point by citing a picture such as Turner's Buttermere (1798), where the clouds and distant mountain tops are almost indistinguishabty blended. But the problem with Eastlake's formulation is that genuinely ambiguous shapes---shapes we can
Resetnblunce, Signijication, and Metaphor identify as either a rabbit or a duck, either a cloud or a mountain--do not correspond to similes any more than to metaphors. We cannot say that a particular mountain is like a cloud until and unless we have first identified it as a mountain, nor can the painter give us the means to see a painted mountain us a cloud unless he first gives us the means to see it as a mountain. The perception of similarity or of metaphorically posited "identity" between two objects presupposes a perception of their distinctive identities-which is to say of their differences. Can a painter make us see at once the inherent identity of a particular shape and its metaphorical identification with something else'? The question demands something more than most critics have been so far willing to provide. Commenting on the drawings of individual objects in the analytic plates of Diderot's Encylopedia, for instance, Roland Barthes says that "metaphor itself makes an infinitely ambiguous object out of a simple, literal object: the sea urchin is also a sun. a monstrance . . . " (Barthes, p. 38). But this is not metaphor; it is visual ambiguity, or more precisely visual potentiality-the capacity of a particular image to signify different things in different pictorial contexts. An isolated image labelled "sea urchin" might be made to represent the sun if it were placed (without its label) in a pictured sky, or a monstrance if it were placed (again without label) on a pictured altar. But to see metaphor in an isolated image is no more plausible than to find it in an isolated word. All metaphor-whether verbal or pictorial-requires a context. Just as verbal metaphor requires a context supplied by the writer, pictorial metaphor requires a context supplied by the artist-that is, a context created within the picture. Goodman defines pictorial metaphor as the expression of a quality not originally belonging to the picture but "acquired at second hand" (Goodman, p. 89). "What expresses sadness," he says, "is metaphorically sad" (p. 85). But Goodman frankly admits that he has "no test for detecting what a work expresses"-for determining, for instance, just what is the connection between the dull grey colors that actually belong to a picture and the sadness it is said to express (pp. 95, 50-51). In the absence of any definable connection between the two, it is hard to avoid
177 the conclusion that "sad" is the interpreter's metaphor for the picture, not a metaphor created within the picture i t s e l f . ' T h e question, then, is whether or not the artist can create a metaphor by graphic means. I stress the word because it is obvious that a title can be used to declare any picture metaphorical. When Juan Miro entitles the picture of a bird-what Goodman would call a bird-picture-Head of a Wornan, he is clearly saying. if not graphically demonstrating, that the woman's head is a bird." The truly pictorial counterpart of metaphor, however, is an image that graphically declares itself to be metaphorical. Graphic hybrids-pictures which combine two heterogeneous forms into one--can sometimes achieve metaphorical effect with no help at all from words. A caricature of Churchill's head attached to the picture of a bulldog's body is clearly the pictorial equivalent of the metaphorical statement that Churchill is a bulldog. But very few pictures come to us without a verbal context. Pictures have titles; political cartoons have captions; illustrations or illuminations are themselves elucidated by the texts they are made to illuminate. Thus the final plate of Blake's Milton illuminates "The Great Harvest & Vintage of the Nations" by representing two rows of wheat with human heads sprouting from them: a graphic expression of the metaphor already established by Blake's text. Alternatively, the caption may verbally elicit whichever part of the graphic hybrid has been visually subordinated to the other. In 1791 Blake's contemporary James Gillray, the political cartoonist, depicted the head of William Pitt atop a bending stalk and captioned it An Exc.rescence; a Fungus; Alias u Toadstool upon a Dunghill. '" With its softly rounded wig and uplifted profile, the head slightly resembles the caps of the mushrooms represented on either side of it. But we "see" the head as a mushroom largely because the caption has told us to see it that way. Captioned or not, however, graphic hybrids constitute just one kind of pictorial metaphor. Another and more subtle kind is the fundamentally homogenous image which realistically and recognizably represents the whole of one object, yet does so in such a way as to elicit its visual resemblance to another. Thus we are simultaneously led to identify the representation a s one
178 thing but also with something else. A superb example is provided by Constable's Coast at Brighton-Stormy Evming (1828, Plate 2 ) , which shows a thick band of white clouds slanting down from left to right over a blue-green sea, with a corresponding streak of white surf slanting upwards from left to right across the base of the picture. In part, we are led to see these things because the title leads us to look for them: to look for the representation of a sea and a stormy sky. But the picture dramatically assaults the conventions invoked by its title. Though "Stormy Evening" is a phrase that leads us to expect a heavy sea and a wavy horizon obscured by clouds, the sea is predominantly level; the low horizon has a rulel's edge; a n d ~ t h edeep blue-green of the water running up to it is finely set off from the lighter colors of the sky above it. *Constable thus graphically distinguishes what his title may have led us to think would be indistinguishably confused. Yet even as he decisively separates the sea and the sky, he invites us to see the slanting bands of churning white clouds as if it were surf. To see it as surf, we need not invoke any extra-pictorial iconographic code or speculate about the feeling which the picture expresses. We need only note the similarity between the appearance of the clouds and the appearance of what directly signifies surf within the picture. Constable uses the same pictorial code to signify both: gobs and squiggles of white lead applied within the palette knife. The code established by the picture itself, therefore, lets us simultaneously see the clouds as such and as surf. Paradoxically, in fact, since the white gobs used in depicting the clouds are more rounded than those used in depicting the surf, the actual surf appears relatively flat, and the rolling surf we might expect to find near the shore appears instead to be-coming at us from the sky. More oceanic than the water beneath them, the clouds in this picture powerfully show how Constable could make the sky "the chief organ of sentiment"-which is what he believed it should be in every landscape picture." Here, as in Constable's Hadleigh Castle, painted about the same time, the sky assumes an oceanic power over the relatively calm sea stretching beneath it. I have lingered on the problem of defining
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"pictorial metaphor" because it illustrates as well as anything else the larger problem inherent in any attempt to specify the semiotic character of "realistic" painting-painting that is not governed by an extra-pictorial iconographic code. Yet the possibility of a graphic counterpart to metaphor suggests that even a realistic picture can re-make the code with which it works. Realistic pictures with titles or captions-which is to say most realistic pictures-signify the visible world by a subtle combination of verbal cues and recognizable forms. And even as words lead us to recognize the primary meanings of certain forms, the forms themselves establish a visual context in which various kinds of signification become possible. Representing one object by means of a code that we naturally associate with another, Constable can signify the interpretation of the two, can "metaphorically" reveal the presence in one of qualities or energies that properly belong to another. Alternatively, when Turner represents sailboats on the horizon by shapes ranging from a slightly rounded triangle to a thin vertical line, he can signify at once the Protean indeterminacy of their appearance on the water and the effect of the mist and spray on their appearance: the effect, in Hazlitt's words, of "the medium through which they were seen."'" Since all signification within realistic pictures depends on a context that is a least partly established by forms we can recognize through their resemblance to actual objects, pictures such as Turner's Ostend and Constable's Coast at Brighton cannot quite erase the distinction between "natural" resemblance and arbitrary signs. But we have seen I think, that the relation between resemblance and signification in our experience of realistic pictures is far more intimate than the Peircian distinction between the icon and the linguistic sign would allow. Just as pictures and the words which accompany them depend for their meaning on each other, so do signification and resemblance. If we hope to understand the peculiar kind of "textuality" which pictures embody, we must stop thinking of resemblance and signification as mutually exclusive terms.
'
Quoted in John B. Bender, Spenser und Lirerury
Resemblance, Signification, und Metaphor Picrorrulism (Princeton, 1972). pp. 3, 19. See for instance Umberto Eco. A Theor?. of Semiorics
(Bloomington, Indiana. 1976). pp. 215, 260; Louis Marin, "Toward a Theory of Readlng in the Visual Arts: Poussin's Tlte Arcadiun Shepherds" In The Reuder in rhe Texr, ed. Susan Suleiman and Inge Grossman (Princeton, 1980). pp. 293-324: M~chael Fried, "Representing Representation: On the Central Group in Courbet's Srudio" in Allegory und Represmrurion: Selecred Papers from rlte English lnsrirure 1979-80. ed. Stephen Greenblatt (Baltimore, 1981 1, p. 119: Roland Barthes, "The Plates of the Encyclopedlu" in New Crirical Essays, trans. Rlchard Howard (New York. 1980). p. 38: and Jean Staroblnski. 1789: Les EmblPmes de luRuison (Paris. 1973), p. 89.
' "Image and Code: Scope and Llmlts of Conventionalism in Pictorial Representation" in lmuge und Code, ed. Wendy Steiner (Michigan Studies in the Humanities, No. 2, 1981), p. 12. Srrucrurulisr Poerics: Srrucrurulrsm, Lrnguisrics and rhe Srudy ofLrrerarure (Ithaca. 1975). p. 16. Culler firmly
places icons outside the domain of sem~oticsand makes no reference to them elsewhere in Srrucrurulisr Poetics or in The Pursuir of Signs: Semiorics, Literurure, Deconstruction
(Ithaca. 1981). ' E. H. Gombrich. for instance. sees the history of art as a process in which artists become gradually more skillful in forging the "keys" with which to open "the locks of our senses" (Illusion in Nurure und Arr, ed. R. L. Gregory and E. H. Gombrich [New York. 19731, p. 201-hereafter cited as Illusion). "he Photo Realists, says Linda Chase, gives us "a relentlessly factual depiction of an image which has first been photograph~cally recorded and then painstakingly translated into paint on canvas" (Introduction to Super Reulism from rhe Morron G. Neumunn Fumily Collecrion, Exhib~tionCatalogue [Kalamazoo, 19811, p. 4 ) . On the Super Realist movement, see also Linda Chase. Hyperreulism (New York, 1975); Edward Lucie-Smith, Super Reulism (Oxford, 1979); and Super Realism: A Crirical Anrhology, ed. Gregory Battcock (New York, 1975). ' John Gage. Colour in Turner; P o e r n und Trurh (New York and Washington, 1969). p. 121. See Joel Snyder in The Lunguuge of lmuges, ed. W. J . T. Mitchell. (Chicago and London, 19801, p. I I-hereafter cited as Lunguuge of lmuges. The irony of this development in painting is that it coincides with an opposite development in photography, which gains cultural status precisely as it relinquishes its special relation to the natural world. "In most uses of the camera," says Susan Sontag, "the photograph's nai've or descriptive function is paramount. But when viewed . . . in the museum or gallery, photographs cease to be 'about' their subjects in the same direct or primary way: they become studies in the possibilities of photography." On Pltorography (New York, 1977). pp. 132-33. ' For Hanson's sculpture and Salt's painting see Linda Chase Super Reulism from rhe Morron G. Neumunn Family Collecrion, (British Museum, Add. Ms. 46151). Chase makes a persuasive case for the Super Realist painters as a group, and particularly for their heightening of certain effects that we normally associate with photography: its unsentimental sharpness of focus. its capacity to capture a fleeting moment of light, its acute sensitivity to shiny and reflective surfaces (Introduction, pp. 4-7). The work of the
179 Super Realists "says" something undeniably true-which is that photographs have become an integral part of our world, and hence a legitimate object of artistic imitation. Nevertheless, what Turner said about Dutch still lifes and genre pieces can certainly be said about some-if not all-works of Super Realist painting and Verist sculpture. "' "On Poesy or Art" in Biogrupltlu Lireruriu. ed. J . T. Shawcross (London, 1907), 11, 256. " Lunguuge of lmuges, p. 1 I . Quoted in Jacques Derrida, Of Grammrtrology. Gayatri Spivak, trans., (Baltimore, 1976). p. 2 9 6 h e r e a f ter c~tedas Derrida. " Essuy Concerning Humun Undersrunding. Book 111. Chapter I, quoted in Hans Aarsleff, Tlte Study of Lunguuge in England 1780-1860 (Princeton. 1967). p. 31-hereafter cited as Aarsleff. Aarsleff says that after Condillac's Essui sur l'origine des connoisunces humulne (1746). which took Locke's essay as its point of departure, "this passage became the unquestioned rationale for all etymological searching for the history of thought" (p. 31). " The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, trans. Ralph Manheim (New Haven, 1953). 1. 189-hereafter cited as Cassirer. Arr undlllusion (Princeton, 1969), pp. 8 7 - 9 G h e r e after cited as Arr and Illusion. I' Arr und Illusion. pp. 220-22; see also Gombrich on "prognostic" mecbnismh and anticipatory phantoms in Illusion. pp. 208- 16. " See Gombr~chin Illusion, p. 197. and In the same volume, Jan Deregowski. p. 164. Illusron, pp. 206, 203. 200. I q See above, note 3.
'"
Lunguuges of Arr: An Approach ro a Theory of' Symbols (Ind~anapolis,1976). p. 38-hereafter cited as Lunguage.7 ofArr. Italics mine. " Illusion, pp. 163, 183. 268. 187: see also Eco, p.
204. " We can of course learn to "read" Medieval art, where-as Panofsky says--empty space signifies an abstract, unreal background rather than a three-dimensional medium (Srudies in Iconology [New York and Evanston, 19621. p. 10). But this is not the same as learning to understand a new system for the representation of depth. " See Snyder. Lunguuge of Imuges. pp. 222-23; Gombrich, Illusion, p. 242: and Goodman. p. 39. " Meaning in rhe Visuul Arrs (Garden C ~ t y , 1955), pp. 28-29. '' Jan Mukarovsky, "Art as a Semiotic Fact" in Srrucrure. Sign, andFuncrion, trans. and ed. John Burbank and Peter Steiner(New Haven. 1978). p. 83. "' The role of the title must be frankly acknowledged here, but it should not be overstated. The arbitrarily signifying words of the title guide us to look for a particular form, but only our mechanisms of recognition enable us to find it. '-Goodman says that what chiefly distinguishes depiction from descript~onis the "density" of the symbol system in pictures, their total lack of the codified differentlation we find in language (Lunguuges o f A r r , p. 226). In fact the meaning of the difference between an upturned and a downturned curve on the bottom part of a face is as clear and well established as the linguistic difference between "glad" and "sad." But there is no inherenr distinction between the meaning of a straight line and the meaning of
180 a curved one 'n Roman Jakobson and Morris Halle, Fundamentals oflanguage (The Hague, 19561, pp. 76-77. This definition of metaphor takes for granted the distinction between metaphor and synonym. which is ment~oned but not explained '' Max Black, "Metaphor" in Models and Metaphor (Ithaca, 1962), pp. 45-46. Black distinguishes metaphors of interaction from those of comparison and substitution, which he regards as "trivial." "' Christopher Bache, "Towards a Unified Theory of Metaphor," Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 39: 188. While Black offers the interaction theory as a privileged supplement to the substitution theory, Bache takes it as an absolute alternative, arguing that "all living metaphors function in an interactionist fashion" (p. 188) and that even dead ones can be accommodated by the interactionist theory (pp. 189-92). For a recent discussion of metaphor by many different commentators, including Max Black, see On Metaphor, ed. Sheldon Sacks (Chicago and London. 1978). " Andrew Wyeth. Exhibition Catalogue (Boston. 1970). p. 36. ': Rudolf Arnheim finds the same problem with Rene Magritte's Ceci n'est pas une pipe, which shows. says Arnheim, "a tediously painted tobacco pipe on an empty ground . . . . Unfortunately, a pipe is all it is" (Visuul Thinking [London, 19691, p. 141). But here. I think. Arnheim misses Magritte's subversive or deconstructive point about the nature of representation: what we see on Magritte's canvas is not a pipe but a picture of a pipe. " Gombrich says that "we can switch from one reading to another with increasing rapidity . . . but the
H E F F E R N A N more closely we watch ourselves. the more certainly we dlscover that we cannot experience alternative readings at the same time" ( A r t and Illusion, p. 5 . ) . See also Ludwig Wittgenstein on the "flashing of an aspect" in Philosophicul Investigations, trans. G . E. M. Anscombe (Oxford. 1967), pp. 194e-197e.
'' A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin o f our ldeus of rlte Sublime and the Beautiful, ed. James T . Boulton (Notre Dame. Indiana. 1968). p. 62.
" Contributions to rlte Literuture o f the Fine Arts. 2nd ser. (London, 1870), 305-06,318, 344. '' Richard Wollheim believes that Goodman's theory of pictorial metaphor requires some reference to the spectator. to what the perceiver experiences or can experience when he looks at a picture (On Art arul the Mind [Cambridge. 19741. p. 31 I ) . Goodman himself is hard put to separate what a picture expresses from what a presumably sensible commentator might say about it. "Talking does not make the world or even pictures," says Goodman, "but talking and pictures participate in making each other and the world as we know them" (Goodman, pp. 88-89). '' Gombrich says that pictures cannot make proposltions; see "The Evidence of Images" in Interpretation, Theory and Practice, ed. C . S . Singleton (Baltimore, 1969). p. 97. But it is obvlous that pictures with titles do make explicit proposit~ons. " See Ronald Paulson, Representcrtions of Revolution (1789-1820)(New Haven and London, 19831, Fig. 36. 3V John Constable's Discourses, ed. R. B. Beckett (Ipswich. 1970). p. 62. " Complete Works of Willium Huzlitt, ed. P. P. Howe (London and Toronto, 1930-34). 1V. 76n.
