Writing and Seeing: Essays on Word and Image

Writing and Seeing

95

Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft

In Verbindung mit Norbert Bachleitner (Universität Wien), Dietrich Briesemeister (Friedrich Schiller-Universität Jena), Francis Claudon (Université Paris XII), Joachim Knape (Universität Tübingen), Klaus Ley (Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz), John A. McCarthy (Vanderbilt University), Alfred Noe (Universität Wien), Manfred Pfister (Freie Universität Berlin), Sven H. Rossel (Universität Wien) herausgegeben von

Alberto Martino (Universität Wien)

Redaktion: Ernst Grabovszki Anschrift der Redaktion: Institut für Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft, Berggasse 11/5, A-1090 Wien

Writing and Seeing Essays on Word and Image

Edited by

Rui Carvalho Homem and Maria de Fátima Lambert

Amsterdam - New York, NY 2006

Cover painting: Rosa Almeida, Untitled, 2005; Gouache, permanent ink and pencil on paper, 37,5 x 31,5 cm. Le papier sur lequel le présent ouvrage est imprimé remplit les prescriptions de “ISO 9706:1994, Information et documentation - Papier pour documents - Prescriptions pour la permanence”. The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ ISO 9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents - Requirements for permanence”. Die Reihe „Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft“ wird ab dem Jahr 2005 gemeinsam von Editions Rodopi, Amsterdam – New York und dem Weidler Buchverlag, Berlin herausgegeben. Die Veröffentlichungen in deutscher Sprache erscheinen im Weidler Buchverlag, alle anderen bei Editions Rodopi. From 2005 onward, the series „Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft“ will appear as a joint publication by Editions Rodopi, Amsterdam – New York and Weidler Buchverlag, Berlin. The German editions will be published by Weidler Buchverlag, all other publications by Editions Rodopi. ISBN: 90-420-1698-1 (Bound) ©Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2006 Printed in The Netherlands

Acknowledgments This book is largely the result of activities arising from a research project entitled Writing and Seeing, funded by the Portuguese research agency, Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (POCTI\ELT\43425/2001). The editors also wish to express their gratitude to the Institute for English Studies, Universidade do Porto, for the facilities provided. Our warm thanks to both Marinela Freitas and Ernst Grabovszki for their generous help in editing and formatting the book.

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Contents Introduction

11

1. Setting the Tone: The Challenges of Representation I: James A. W. Heffernan Speaking for Pictures: Language and Abstract Art

25

2. Early Modern to Modern: representations, appropriations Derek Brewer Seeing and Writing Venus in Spenser, Shakespeare, Titian

47

Jesús Cora John Donne’s Arcimboldesque Wit in “To Sir Edward Herbert. At Julyers”: A Partial Reading

61

Sílvia Quinteiro Perspective and Framing in Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho and in the Work of Caspar David Friedrich

79

Gabriela Gândara Terenas William Hogarth seen by Pinheiro Chagas: looking at Britain and writing about Portugal

89

Vita Fortunati Visual Portraits and Literary Portraits: the Intertextual Dialogue between Holbein and Ford Madox Ford

97

3. Crossing Images, Changing Places Charlotte Schoell-Glass Fictions of the Art World: Art, Art History and the Art Historian in Literary Space

107

Sonia Lagerwall A Reading of Michel Butor’s La Modification as an Emblematic Iconotext

119

Gabriel Insausti The Making of The Eiffel Tower as a Modern Icon

131

8 Lauren S. Weingarden Reflections on Baudelaire’s Paris: Photography, Modernity and Memory

145

4. Women and the Intermedium 4.1. Portraits and Causes Elizabeth K. Menon Les Filles d’Ève in Word and Image

157

Maria Aline Seabra Ferreira Paula Rego’s Painterly Narratives: Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea – A Dictionary of Images

175

Rui Carvalho Homem Looking for Clues: McGuckian, poems and portraits

187

4.2. Ambivalent Narratives: A.S. Byatt Isabel Fernandes Matisse and Women: Portraits by A.S. Byatt

201

Margarida Esteves Pereira More than Words: the Elusive Language of A.S. Byatt’s Visual Fiction

211

Paola Spinozzi Ekphrasis as Portrait: A.S. Byatt’s Fictional and Visual Doppelgänger

223

5. The Lens and the Print: text, photo, semiotics Caroline Blinder “A Kind of Patriotism”: Jack Kerouac’s Introduction to Robert Frank’s The Americans (1959)

235

Maria de Fátima Lambert 3 (Ultimate) Journeys: Fulton, Weiner & Kiefer

245

Adriana Baptista Karen Knorr and Tracey Moffat: When the photographer chooses the words in order to photograph the images

257

9

Peter ED Muir An Act of Erasure: October and the Index

267

6. Stage and Screen, East and West Rosa Branca Figueiredo The Semiotics of the Body: Ritual and Dance in Soyinka’s Drama

281

Maria Sofia Pimentel Biscaia An Inheritance of Horror: the Shadow of Das Kabinett des Doktor Caligari in Salman Rushdie’s Shame

291

Michaela Schäuble The Ethnographer’s Eye: Vision, Narration, and Poetic Imagery in Contemporary Anthropological Film

301

7. High and Low, Learned and Popular: straying narratives Laura Fernanda Bulger Looking at the Written Text on Television

315

Yoko Ono Listen to Me: Influence of Shojo manga on contemporary Japanese women’s writing

323

Marie-Manuelle Silva The Link Between Text and Image in Voyage au bout de la nuit de Céline by Tardi

331

8. Arts and Crafts: composite skills Anabela Mendes Pulsating Visions – Idioms Incarnate: Wassily Kandinsky Amidst Stage, Pen and Brush

345

Anne Price-Owen From Medieval Manuscripts to Postmodern Hypertexts in the Art of David Jones

355

Dominique Costa Visual and Verbal Representations in the Scottish Novel: The Artistry of Alasdair Gray

369

10 Gil Maia When what you see is what you read

377

9. Postscript: the Long Perspective, or, The Challenges of Representation II José Jiménez The Root of Forms

389

Index

399

Rui Carvalho Homem Maria de Fátima Lambert

Introduction

The present volume derives its impetus and title from a research project, Writing and Seeing, and most of its content from a conference that in October 2003 materialised the project’s rationale. At its simplest, this rationale can be defined as concerning the encounter between word and image, visual and verbal, in a variety of media and codes; describing the scope of that encounter as artistic production would specify our perspective somewhat, but the phrase would remain inclusive of all the contributions to this volume; a further specialisation might find us referring to the word and image nexus in literature and the visual arts – a less accurate formula for representing the range of approaches in the book, and yet true to its dominant emphasis. Above all, the project, the event, and the current publication focus on visual and verbal materials that are defined by a relation; and all three initiatives certainly emerge from a cultural and communicational context in which relational designs take pride of place. Indeed, a variety of discourses in the humanities as in the social sciences, in literary criticism and cultural theory, have for a few decades favoured the liminal, the hybrid and the relational as key concepts, able to inflect a hitherto prevalent cultural and epistemological paradigm. Such discourses foreground an urge to construe all processes of signification and perception in a way that counters the logic of the closed system, and that repeatedly craves for words prefixed inter- and trans-. Cross-boundary concepts and a general querying of any constructs and practices that rest on a presumption of self-containment have been variously theorised in recent years, notably but not exclusively in the plural discursive grounds of poststructuralism and postmodernity. They have thus laid a deep mark on the intellectual environment from which the studies here collected predominantly arise, and which they mean to address. In close connection with such developments, an equally broad-ranging, transdisciplinary emphasis on space and on its relational and dynamic basis has proved increasingly attractive and productive. A measure of its influence can be gauged from the breadth of its enabling references, various as they are in their ideological frameworks and their sources in intellectual history. Such references include Heidegger, ineluctably, on the rootedness of one’s existential reality, as it emerges in his writings on building and dwelling; but also Michel Foucault’s remarks (often endowed today with a close to prophetic resonance) on the advent of an “epoch of space,” of “simultaneity” and “juxtaposition,” somehow to supersede “the great obsession of the nineteenth century” with history; and thirdly (to cite yet another influential pronouncement) Fredric Jameson’s “cognitive cartography,” and its concern with enabling a sense of place to be defined within the global system of late capitalism, as much as its endorsement of the prevalence of spatial

12 Rui Carvalho Homem and Maria de Fátima Lambert categories as a characteristic of postmodernity.1 The convergence of such contributions (despite their disparate sources and orientations) has rescued the “spatial imagination”2 from that connection with stasis that, through its possible opposition to models of reading and analysis informed by a temporal perspective, would rather often be branded as “reactionary;”3 instead, a relational and dynamic import is now vindicated for the “spatial imagination.” These emphases may at first seem alien to our theme, but in fact they can hardly be indifferent to the present endeavour, committed as it is to highlighting the multiple crossfertilisations that query the duality “art of space”/“art of time” – to retrieve one of the most influential argumentative topoi ever in the history of discourse on word and image, as proposed in the latter part of the eighteenth century by Lessing in his Laokoon (1766). The scope and persuasiveness of the current spatialisation of critical discourse has certainly encompassed the verbal arts, so often read (in the wake of that topos) as inscribed in “time” as against “space,” the latter supposedly being the proper domain of the visual arts. A significant number of contributions focuses indeed on the iconic dimension of texts – and, conversely, on instances of textualisation of images – in terms that query the neatness of that categorial distinction. Within the scope of the verbal and visual artefacts considered, instances abound in which inscriptions, captions, signatures, or letterings of some sort blend and combine with the shapes and colours of the pictorial. Several papers in the volume reflect an awareness, for instance, that in current museum culture critical and art-historical discourse on the visual shares the space of the museum (in the architectural as much as the institutional sense) with the art work to which it refers – whether in the more extended form of the catalogue or in the conciseness of titles, labels, and curatorial notes; but this museum culture is also based on the assumption that its space will be experienced temporally, in the organised sequences that its curatorial discourse is supposed to induce and justify. In general, the implications carried by the new spatial rationale find a variety of echoes in the course of this volume – from its broader justification to the substantive evidence offered by the intermedial processes and intents that characterise the verbal/visual objects of the different studies here collected. One should remember, though, that Lessing’s was only one of the mostly dichotomous conformations in which the verbal and the visual have historically tended to be couched, whether their connection was proposed as agon or as affinity and similitude. Fundamental landmarks of that argumentative history based on binary constructions certainly include the Horatian dictum ut pictura poesis – a hugely glossed passage of the Ars Poetica that, literally read, was to spawn the long life of the “sister arts” analogy; they comprise the notion of conflict that in Renaissance culture found such a memorable endorsement in Leonardo’s Paragone delle Arti (c.1510); as well as the no less influential denunciation of

1

2 3

Martin Heidegger, ‘Building Dwelling Thinking’, in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York, NY: Perennial Classics, 2001), pp.141-59; Michel Foucault, ‘Of Other Spaces’, Diacritics, 16 (Spring 1986), 22-7 (p.22); Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London: Verso, 1991), pp.16 and passim. Cf Gerry Smyth, Space and the Irish Cultural Imagination (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2001), p.1. Doreen Massey, Space, Place and Gender (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1994), p.2.

Introduction

13

the easy “sisterly” analogy which marks the Laokoon, a denunciation coupled with a desire for rigour that stamps the proposed opposition of visual and verbal. Even some of the later critique of that opposition, predicated as it has often been on the wish to emphasise collaboration and coexistence rather than conflict, has seldom evaded the temptation to categorise and label the visual and the verbal in terms that retain their dual rapport, and hence reinforce the sense of a divide. Murray Krieger’s historical analysis of the notion of ekphrasis as concerning the unresolved tension between “two opposed impulses, two opposed feelings, about language,” described as respectively a “[craving for] the spatial fix” and a “[yearning] for the freedom of the temporal flow” is particularly revealing.4 The perception that “the history of culture is in part the story of a protracted struggle for dominance between pictorial and linguistic signs” thus seems to retain much of its cogency.5 However, and while it is true that the dichotomous model has proved influential beyond measure, the present currency of a relational nexus, as theoretically averse as it is to binary oppositions, entails a reading of the intermedial that underscores notions like contamination and hybridity. And, whatever the theoretical props that such critical praxis takes on (or refuses), the vantage afforded by the historical perspective can hardly be discarded. On the contrary, it is as often enlisted on behalf of a retrieval of all those memorable instances that foreground the longevity of the impulse to allow visual and verbal to commingle (the fortunes of visual poetry, in a range of periods and literary traditions, promptly spring to mind). Arguably, this impulse has historically run parallel to the no less long-lived urge to discriminate and discursively to construct a neat apartness. A fair share of the studies collected in this volume would indeed seem to endorse, in their broad attitude to the verbal/visual nexus, Liliane Louvel’s unequivocally stated preference for notions of “coexistence,” “simultaneity,” and “continuity” over and against a design based on a sense of “alternative” or disjunction.6 As some of the remarks above will already have suggested, the issue of how one construes the relationship between verbal and visual is intersected at various points by one of the founding concerns of western critical discourse – a persistent and recurrent concern that has gained a renewed emphasis and an added dimension in the past few decades: the problem of representation. Indeed, the various levels of representation that intermediality confronts us with (varying in complexity with the relationship to the real afforded by each medium and by each practitioner’s options) make it a privileged space for the manifestation of a few perplexities that have proved central to the current moment in western intellectual history. Critical consideration of intermediality has foregrounded, in particular, a currently prevalent scepticism that artistic appropriation of elements of the real may, in any medium,

4 5

6

Murray Krieger, Ekphrasis: The Illusion of the Natural Sign (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins U.P., 1992), p.10. W.J.T.Mitchell, Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology (Chicago, Ill: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1986), p.43. Mitchell’s remains one of the clearest assessments of this oppositional topos, in some of its historical conformations; see especially pp.95-115. Liliane Louvel, Texte/Image: Images à Lire, Textes à Voir (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2002), p.223.

14 Rui Carvalho Homem and Maria de Fátima Lambert ever prove “transparent” and unmediated by a consciousness that invests it with meaning. Conditions for such scepticism are especially ripe when the object of a representation is another representation (in a different medium), affording readers/viewers some clear evidence of the mediations, refractions and opacities (to pursue the optical metaphors) that intervene at the various levels of the representational sequence. And this perception remains valid even when the apparent immediacy of visual apprehension suggests that the visual image might be as enviably true as it appears to be stable and fixed. This is, in fact, why such scepticism may enjoy its current intellectual prominence in an era so obviously dominated by visual knowledge. As Mitchell has argued with regard to his much discussed theorising of the “pictorial turn,” pictures form a point of peculiar friction and discomfort across a broad range of intellectual inquiry [...] the pictorial turn [...] is not a return to naive mimesis, copy or correspondence theories of representation, or a renewed metaphysics of pictorial “presence”: it is rather a postlinguistic, postsemiotic rediscovery of the picture as a complex interplay between visuality, apparatus, institutions, discourse, bodies, and figurality. It is the realization that spectatorship (the look, the gaze, the glance, the practices of observation, surveillance, and visual pleasure) may be as deep a problem as various forms of reading.7

By thus arguing the need to borrow a notion of “reading” from the field of the verbal to come to terms with the complexities lurking behind present-day constructions of the visual, Mitchell in fact balances and ironises the converse expectation that the intermedial encounter might generically allow the verbal to borrow and profit from the apparent simplicity of the meanings dispensed by the visual image. The sections into which this volume is organised highlight the word and image nexus as the common focus of the various contributions, and, in their sequence and interrelations, define an internal thematic coherence for the book. This concern is balanced, though, by a diversity and breadth that are both chronological – contributions range from the Early Modern period to postmodernity – and disciplinary: areas of inquiry and their appertaining methodologies vary from literature to typography, from film and video to myth and ritual, from aesthetics to anthropology. A sharp awareness of this diversity is also ensured by the deliberate conciseness of most of the contributions gathered in each section. All in all, the volume cannot claim to draw a map of word and image studies today, but it is nonetheless meant to offer readers some notion of the variety of approaches and contents that presently characterises this area of study, as well as of the extent to which such variety reflects the broad cultural and discursive context outlined above. The opening piece, JAMES HEFFERNAN’s essay on “Language and Abstract Art,” indeed sets the tone by addressing anew one of the field’s recurrent concerns – the issue of representation, and in particular the vexed question of the distinction and borderline between abstraction and figuration. Central as this question is to our reception and perception of modernity in the arts, it has spawned a vast theoretical and critical discourse – 7

W.J.T. Mitchell, Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago and London: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1994), pp.13, 16.

Introduction

15

and this is precisely one of Heffernan’s main points. The urge towards abstraction has also been, to some extent, an urge to cancel the translation of visual into verbal – namely the ekphrastic proneness to describe and narrate, so often prompted by a recognisable appropriation of elements of the real. However, the discursive wealth generated by the perplexities posed by abstract art has rendered an expectation of the viewer’s silence deeply ironical. In Heffernan’s words, “its [modern art’s] very renunciation of what we commonly take to be subject-matter intensifies our compulsion to talk about it, our need to hear someone else talk about it, or both.” Heffernan further considers the way in which “abstract art has been given a history,” thus becoming the object itself of a (historiographic) narrative with its own imputation of a source and a guiding sense. By combining an attention to art theory with a careful consideration of a few artists and their works, Heffernan ultimately allows his argument to rest on the awareness that “the line between abstraction and figuration is no more impermeable than the line between images and words.” Modernity and its discourses on art are thus the book’s point of departure, but its second section, “Early Modern to Modern,” invokes the modern as a point of arrival and a vantage point from which to consider earlier moments in the practice of those “representations and appropriations” that will be also diachronically considered at various stages in the volume. DEREK BREWER’s learned essay on the Venus theme in Spenser, Shakespeare and Titian foregrounds the element of rhetorical effect in the visualisations prompted by verbal constructions, combining this with a strong emphasis on the cultural conditioning of our reading and gaze. As Brewer emphasises (in terms that might concur with E.H.Gombrich’s argument regarding schemata8), “knowledge precedes perception – we have to have some understanding before we see the image, [...] but then the image in turn extends knowledge beyond the visual effect” – and this, as the author further points out, results in a “multiplicity of significance.” These are important remarks, in the light of current theoretical concerns with underscoring the non-linearity and non-transparency that characterises the mutual appropriations of verbal and visual: such characteristics are rather more often discussed in connection with recent literary and artistic practices, but here they are brought up and considered with reference to Early Modern literature and art. JESÚS CORA’s study likewise brings a relatively recent insight to bear on texts from the English Renaissance. Cora sets off from a hypothesis formulated by Roland Barthes in 1978 regarding the range of representational possibilities afforded by Arcimboldo’s famous composite heads, should their various elements be recombined. He argues that such refigurations can actually be found, but not necessarily in visual art: he detects them rather in verbal representations of the early seventeenth century by the English poet John Donne. Beyond the specificity (and the topicality) of his detailed study, Cora’s essay draws on his attentive study of Early Modern verbal and visual rhetoric (including the tradition of the emblem), and such attention to contexts and cultural determinants is indeed to be found in all the contributions to this section of the book. In SÍLVIA QUINTEIRO’s article on Ann 8

E.g., “The artist, no less than the writer, needs a vocabulary before he can embark on a ‘copy’ of reality [...] even to describe the visible world in images we need a developed system of schemata. [...] All art originates in the human mind, in our reactions to the world rather than in the visible world itself” (E.H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation [Washington, D.C.: Pantheon Books, 1960], p.87).

16 Rui Carvalho Homem and Maria de Fátima Lambert Radcliffe and Caspar David Friedrich the main focus is the cultural construction of natural settings and of a prevalent understanding of the relationship betwen self and landscape, with decisive consequences for both literature and painting from the late eighteenth into the nineteenth century; particular attention is given to the conformation of taste and to the cultural determination of points of view. Eighteenth and nineteenth-century contexts and practices also define the chronological range of GABRIELA TERENAS’s article, but in her case the intermedial emphasis is strongly inflected by the intercultural, namely by AngloPortuguese cultural relations. Terenas’s is also the first of several contributions dealing with texts and illustrations in periodicals – in this case, articles published in Lisbon in the second half of the nineteenth century by a then well-known politician and man of letters who comments on some of William Hogarth’s satirical engravings (produced more than a century earlier) in order to make them refract a concern with contemporary Portuguese social mores. The process of appropriation and refiguration is thus rendered more intriguing by taking place across the temporal gap of a (momentous) century, superimposed on the intermedial and intercultural divide. Indeed, the section’s title, “Early Modern to Modern,” defines a historic span that is most completely covered by its closing contribution, VITA FORTUNATI’s essay on Holbein and Ford Madox Ford. Drawing on her expertise both in comparative studies and (specifically) in Ford’s work, Fortunati also brings into the volume an attention to the portrait genre that will be pursued by other contributors, and that will inevitably remind readers of how close the portrait genre has historically been to evolving understandings and representations of the self. Within the book’s internal economy, Fortunati’s study of how an interest in art-critical writing comes to play an enabling role with regard to the writing of fiction also proves productive of a connection with the study that opens the following section. Fictional elaborations on the formative experience and the inner life of visual artists have long been current, as CHARLOTTE SCHOELL-GLASS begins by pointing out. But rather than dealing with the comparatively well-charted genre of the Künstlerroman, SchoellGlass concentrates on representations of the figure of the art historian in recent fiction. Her experience as (herself) an art historian specialising in word and image studies informs her perspective and enables her to gauge the selective strategies at work in the narrative appropriation of features of “the art world” into “literary space.” Such features involve aspects of the economy of that world, as much as of the institutional keeping and maintenance of art collections. These are made all the more exciting by a fictional heightening of such transgressive dimension as allows the art world to be narratively dealt with according to the conventions of (e.g.) the detective novel. The relevance of the title given to section three, “Crossing Images, Changing Places,” is in the case of SchoellGlass’s contribution validated by the figurative transit of the “art world” and the “art historian” into “literary space.” The other articles in this section, though, concern rather more literal representations of places – either as sources and/or destinations of a dislocation, or as stages for a “change,” or yet as themselves the objects of change and refiguration. In SONIA LAGERWALL’s essay this is borne out by the title and theme of her textual corpus, Michel Butor’s novel La Modification. Lagerwall is first of all concerned with reading the novel “as an iconotext in which the images are conveyed by the verbal medium alone,” and this is done in the light of the “main categories” into which she analyses “the verbal

Introduction

17

transformation of images.” But besides her analysis of the intermedial process, her chosen corpus leads her to study a narrative on a physical and psychological transit – a regular dislocation between cities whose heritage (whose image kitty) becomes integral to the characters’ discourse and their sense of themselves, of others, and of their places, as much as of the change of mind recorded in the novel’s title. The two other articles in section 3 concern in fact the same city, Paris, as a source of images of “modernity,” though the images themselves and the “changes” they undergo may differ. GABRIEL INSAUSTI offers a reading of the representational consequence of a major icon of the modern western imagination, the Eiffel Tower, in a variety of media, visual and verbal: poetry, painting, film. Insausti’s research into such a varied case study, from the tower’s opening in 1889 into the 1910s and ‘20s, affords a wealth of insights not just into the contents of the representations, but also into their formal conditions. This involves a consideration of the extent to which the various representations are determined by the practice of their respective media – especially when that practice involves a break with the tradition of the medium, a boldness that strives to match the referent’s own striking “modernity.” LAUREN WEINGARDEN’s title, on the other hand, leaves the reader in no doubt that in her article modernity is balanced by a sense of memory. Photography is in this case the medium that provides the balancing act – the newness (in the latter half of the nineteenth century) of its captured images affording the means for an archive that will prove fundamental for constituting “modernised Paris” into “a national lieu de mémoire” (the operative concept that Weingarden finds in Pierre Nora). But Weingarden also makes clear that such process is enabled not by the production of images in a single medium, but rather by “the dynamics between word and photographic image,” the outcome of this combination lying beyond the local and/or national and indeed amounting to “an international paradigm for a discourse on modernity,” somehow epitomised in “French cultural memory.” Weingarden credits Baudelaire’s “celebratory writings” on “Baron Haussmann’s comprehensive urban renewal scheme” with an instrumental role in this regard, the “word and image interaction” proving decisive for readers/viewers/dwellers to recompose their sense of themselves and of their place(s) in sites that have been subject to drastic re(con)figuration. Late nineteenth-century France is also the time and space for the process, likewise marked by a tension between continuity and rupture, that ELIZABETH K.MENON studies in considerable detail in the opening piece of section 4. But this section, “Women and the Intermedium,” has a rationale of its own: even though not all contributions invoke the theoretical and methodological framework of women’s studies, intermediality is here considered from the vantage point of discourses by and on women. In Menon’s article, such discourse clusters around “the motif of the ‘daughter of Eve’ – or fille d’Ève – (...) in nineteenth-century France,” a verbal and visual motif found to have taken on a diverse or ambivalent significance. The variety of interpretations and uses of the fille d’Ève motif as a favourite way of typecasting women is highlighted by her “survey [of] the meanings the biblical Eve had developed by the nineteenth century,” found to alternate between a topos of weakness and one of empowerment, and between the type of the transgressor and that of the victim. Menon ultimately provides a chapter in the social history of women and of the

18 Rui Carvalho Homem and Maria de Fátima Lambert women’s rights movement, with a focus on the roles envisaged for women both in the private and public spheres from the standpoint of ethical, social, and political expectations. Women’s roles, with all their challenging power, also obtain momentous verbal and visual representations in the texts and images studied by the other two contributors to the first part of “Women and the Intermedium,” styled “Portraits and Causes.” Some of the most memorable images of women in contemporary figurative art can be found in the work of Portuguese-born painter Paula Rego, often grounded on ekphrastic appropriation of literary characters. This is studied by MARIA ALINE SEABRA FERREIRA in her article, geared to delineate the “dictionary of images” (Rego’s own phrase) afforded by the painter’s metanarratives. The article focuses in particular on the patterns defined by recurrrent imagery and on the “transmutation” that Rego’s “painterly narratives” produce with regard to the themes and symbols appropriated from her literary referents – which prominently include narratives about women, such as Brontë’s Jane Eyre and Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea. Portraits of women are also the ekphrastic referents of the poems considered in RUI CARVALHO HOMEM’s article on Northern Irish poet Medbh McGuckian. Sometimes described by critics as self-referential and averse to pronouncing on the predicament of her community, McGuckian in fact develops a slanted verbal relationship to the connections between public and private that is refracted (contentwise) through the domestic, erotic, and artistic experience of women, and formally through the pictorial medium – with a specific concentration on the portrait genre. In fact, portraits continue to loom large in the second section of “Women and the Intermedium,” dedicated to the “Ambivalent Narratives” of acclaimed novelist A.S.Byatt. In the first of these three contributions, ISABEL FERNANDES’s reading of Byatt’s The Matisse Stories is guided by a dual concern with “thematic content (seen as equivalent to the pictorial ‘subject’) and [...] external elements such as graphic layout, illustrations and structural divisions, plus titles and dedication (the ‘peritext,’ that corresponds to the picture’s ‘background’).” This already suggestive equation of textual and pictorial space gains in complexity when combined with Fernandes’s attention to the ambivalence that Byatt’s focus on “the women’s predicament in these stories” introduces in one’s assessment of Matisse himself, as Byatt’s “less obvious intratextual object.” The novelist’s carefully thought-out narrative strategies, her intellectual and writerly assessment of the possibilities inherent in language, and especially the issues that her fiction raises as regards “the limits and the potentialities of representation by the pictorial and the textual” are also central to MARGARIDA ESTEVES PEREIRA’s contribution. The novel Still Life is her main (but not exclusive) textual focus; and her guiding concern is to investigate Byatt’s chosen instruments for achieving “solidity of specification” (the novelist’s own phrase). This is an ambition whose feasibility and limits seem especially challenging to Byatt, and whose attainment may be aided, as Pereira suggests, by “descriptions of pictures” employed “to give [...] precision to the act of communication.” In PAOLA SPINOZZI’s article, though, this sense of the intermedial as complementarity is balanced and checked by an awareness of the possibilities of reading it as agon – or rather paragone –, which she proposes with regard to Byatt’s Portraits in Fiction. This is yet another challenging contribution centred on an attention to portraits – an attention that runs through the volume, down from Vita Fortunati’s article to several others in section 4. Spinozzi points out the ultimate salience of

Introduction

19

the verbal in the paragone between painterly and writerly portraits, according to the insights that Byatt allows the reader to derive from her “meta-literary inquiry” – even though “the genesis of writing is most frequently to be found in the visual arts.” Further, she validates and extends the already suggested connection between the portrait genre and an interrogation of the self, by underscoring how closely involved with self-search and selfrepresentation one’s notion of portraiture emerges from Byatt’s inquiry. Readers will find that the transition from section 4 into section 5 of the volume involves a move from self (selves) to community. Indeed, CAROLINE BLINDER’s essay on Jack Kerouac’s Introduction to The Americans, the photo-text published by photographer Robert Frank in 1959, emphasises the writer’s “belief in photography’s ability to capture the essential nature of America.” Her study does not fail to register the gap “between Kerouac’s romanticism and Frank’s more cynical perspective,” as well as the writer’s attempt to combine the sense of truth in the images dispensed by photography, served by the full force of its “apparent realism,” and “an Emersonian transcendentalism” propounded at a moment in American social and political history “[that] made it nearly impossible for Americans to believe in it.” Ultimately, Blinder’s article offers a combined reading of Kerouac’s text and Frank’s photography in which her perception of the photographer’s offer of “a view and critique of a nation” is balanced by a sharp attention to the writer’s “fascination” with the power of photographs to constitute an iconography and an active memory. This dimension of memory (and its opposite), conjoined with a sense of community, is, in fact, one of the recurrent concerns in this section on “The Lens and the Print.” The art work considered by MARIA DE FÁTIMA LAMBERT in her study of pieces by Hamish Fulton, Anselm Kiefer and Lawrence Weiner has a public dimension to it that cannot conceal its relevance to (and designs on) the polis. This remains true whether their art work, made known to broader audiences by being recorded on film/video and photography, takes the form of a combined visual and verbal record of an itinerary and a landscape (as with Fulton, an exponent of Land Art); of an obsessive and monumental inscription of the inner space of a museum or gallery (as with Weiner, in his play with conventional expectations regarding public spaces, and the dynamics between inside and outside); or the ambivalence of complex and singular books proposed as museum pieces (as with Anselm Kiefer’s records of experience and of earlier creative ventures). Lambert’s chosen trope of the journey for her appraisal of some of these pieces further emphasises the conflation of temporal and spatial in their art. “Is the word the way the photographer has of giving time back to the still image?” If we were to substitute “the visual artist” for “the photographer,” this could be asked of a great number of practices and artefacts that combine word and image; but the stark juxtaposition of caption and picture, as studied by ADRIANA BAPTISTA, lends this apparently simple question a clout and a relevance all its own. Indeed, the seeming greater proximity of the photograph to its referent in empirical reality, combined with the usual brevity of the caption, make it tempting to regard the captioned photo as the clearest instance of many of the tensions and dynamics that the present collection is about. But in Baptista’s close survey of some of the theoretical approaches and ways of reading that the object of her study calls for that sense of the exemplary is counterpoised by an alertness to the wealth of insights

20 Rui Carvalho Homem and Maria de Fátima Lambert that the field has to offer. In fact, her contribution shares some of the theoretical concerns involved in the relationship between the photographic and the linguistic that come to the fore in the fourth and last paper in this section, PETER MUIR’s. Muir bases his study on a careful consideration of some of the issues raised by an art journal that proved influential in determining some of the forms taken by the impact of poststructuralism on the critical appraisal of intermediality. That influence is valued especially inasmuch as it “[provided] the photographic with an art-theoretical rationale that could be used to dissemble the high modernist aesthetic and its modes of representation.” As Muir’s title also suggests, the Peircean notion of the index becomes the main focus of his inquiry. But his paper also explores the possibilities – and queries the limits – of that assimilation of photography to language that has proved so seductive to recent theoretical discourse. “Semiotics” is prominently in the title of the first article in “Stage and Screen, East and West,” but in this section the volume’s theoretical bearings become also anthropological, with an eminently applied emphasis. Also, all three papers included in section 6 approach non-European literary/artistic production for stage and/or screen. ROSA FIGUEIREDO offers a reading of Death and the King’s Horseman, by 1986 Nobel prize winner Wole Soyinka, that highlights the extent to which the Nigerian dramatist draws on elements of ritual. Her study concentrates on the role of dance in drama as a focus for “the audience’s gaze,” as well as a means for “[drawing] attention to proxemic relations between characters, spectators, and features of the set.” SOFIA BISCAIA, on her part, identifies and studies the intertextual links between Robert Wiene’s 1920 classic Das Kabinett des Doktor Caligari and Salman Rushdie’s 1983 satiric novel Shame. Besides identifying a common theme and a correlate gallery of characters, she underscores the affinities between formal visual aspects in Wiene’s film and Rushdie’s narrative technique. And her article defines a range of references broad enough to encompass the topically political – Rushdie’s novel revisits “a politically repressed Pakistan where mindless tyranny was the norm” – and the world of fairy tales – both works resort to topoi best known in connection with Beauty and the Beast and Sleeping Beauty. The world of imaginative re-creation that in various ways defines the scope of the first two articles in this section might seem alien to its closing contribution, to the extent that it ostensibly concerns science rather than fiction – the domain of anthropology and of documentary film. However, MICHAELA SCHÄUBLE proposes “to analyse the cinematic narratives of three contemporary anthropological filmmakers who do not use visual media as mere scientific tools of documentation, but consider them rather an imaginative way of exploring and describing the world.” She argues that, instead of impairing the ability of film to serve “the articulation and transmission of scientific thought,” the three directors’ “unique ethnopoetic manner of creating and communicating ethnographic knowledge” expands the field and yields new insights, made possible by “a new configuration for the relationship between images and words” in anthropological discourse. Cultural anthropologists might also take an interest in the crossovers that become the object of the following section, revealing as they are of definite patterns in present-day culture, best glimpsed in those media and forms where they intersect. The “straying narratives” considered in the three papers in section 7 all concern appropriations that take place between set genres and forms respectively in high and popular culture. In LAURA

Introduction

21

BULGER’s contribution, the focus is on televised versions of canonical works of literature. Bulger considers some of the best-known TV “adaptations” of novels such as Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, with a view to studying some of their specific features, but also delineating “both the grammar of the literary text and the techniques used in television.” If Bulger focuses on verbal/visual narratives that have reached global audiences, YOKO ONO’s paper deals with a composite genre, the cartoon, that belongs within mass culture – but the specific subgenre she considers is little known in the West: Japanese cartoons produced with a specifically female teenage audience in mind. Ono provides readers with a glimpse of the cultural and sociological conditions that both produce and are addressed by Shojo manga, but (crucially) she also highlights the significant resonance this intermedial form has had on “serious,” canonical narrative fiction, in themes as much as in aspects of technique: an instance of “low culture” contributing to determine developments in more “learned” forms and practices. The cartoon, and a dialogue between “high” and “popular” culture, is also the theme of MARIE-MANUELLE SILVA’s contribution, which deals with French cartoon artist’s Jacques Tardi’s appropriation of a novel by Louis-Ferdinand Céline. She highlights the controversy that, despite Tardi’s cult following, has surrounded the translation of such a canonical novel into an eminently popular form, and the sense of iconoclasm that it has involved. But a definite strength of her study is her careful consideration of the complexities (technical, cultural, ethico-historical) involved in the mostly reverential, and indeed “literary,” adaptation – between the cartoonist’s unequivocal respect for the text of the novel to the inevitable refocusing on the visual that his specific intermedial venture involved. The transit between media, genres and forms studied in connection with these “straying narratives” involves inter-authorial dialogues, but three of the four articles in the following section concern rather the multifarious practice of single authors in command of “composite skills.” ANABELA MENDES reminds us of the major contribution to modernity given by Wassily Kandinsky’s art, especially inasmuch as it was “informed [...] by a project of reflection on the performative arts characterised by versatility and by a sharp awareness of the dialogue between painting and the other arts;” this sense of complementarity is extended by an awareness that “Kandinsky’s work as a painter is duly balanced [...] by his theoretical reflections on art.” The Welsh poet and artist David Jones is also acknowledged as endowed with a similar versatility, and in her article ANNE PRICE-OWEN considers a range of formal and aesthetic features of Jones’s work that arguably range from an indebtedness to the medieval (manuscripts and illuminations are in this case the evocative focus) to an anticipation of a postmodern understanding of intertextuality and hypertext. Scotland, rather than Wales, defines the cultural and experiential background of the verbal and visual work considered in DOMINIQUE COSTA’s study of Alasdair Gray. Gray’s various skills are made manifest in the interface between narrative structures and graphic art that Costa highlights in her article, a main focus of which is Gray’s interest in the material production of (his) books. And this is a domain that connects her article with the closing piece in this section, GIL MAIA’s contribution on typography. An area of renewed and growing interest in recent years, boosted as it has been by the emergence of so-called “book studies,” Maia’s article reflects his familiarity with traditional scholarship on the visual dimension of writing and

22 Rui Carvalho Homem and Maria de Fátima Lambert printing; but he combines this with a sharp awareness of a present-day context in which the experience of reading has been culturally and technologically reconfigured. This becomes especially obvious in his remarks on illustration and the perceptional conditions that determine our spatial awareness of the page and the book. These concerns in fact tie in with the volume’s closing contribution. JOSÉ JIMÉNEZ’s article on “The Root of Forms” is an apt postscript, highlighting as it does some of the aesthetic and philosophical complexities involved in a diachronic awareness of notions that are variously studied throughout the book. Jiménez, whose work combines theoretical production in the field of aesthetics with regular activity as an art critic and curator, offers “an overview of a broad range of manifestations of [the materiality of writing] at various moments in the history of verbal and artistic production.” He delves into some of the deeper sources, in western thought, of our visual apprehension of verbal inscriptions – and counterpoints this with “reminders of how our perceptions were in that respect enhanced by the formal boldness of the twentieth-century avant-gardes.” And this in fact rounds off the volume, in its broader design: having opened with James Heffernan’s inquiry into the perplexities that have marked our view of the relation between language and abstraction, under the impact of modernity, it closes with Jiménez’s long perspective on the visually material dimension of language. The two contributions bracket a volume that, in all its diversity, finds one of its guiding concerns in the realisation of how long-lived and exciting the “challenges of representation” have proved to be in our discourse on writing and seeing.

1. SETTING THE TONE: THE CHALLENGES OF REPRESENTATION I

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James A. W. Heffernan

Speaking for Pictures: Language and Abstract Art Because abstract art seems to renounce any reference to recognizable objects and thus to stories we might tell about them, it has become notorious for its taciturnity, its will to silence. Paradoxically, however, the would-be blankness of much abstract art can be a “dumb blankness, full of meaning,” like the enigmatic whiteness of Herman Melville’s great whale. In Yasmina Reza’s play Art, a pure white canvas bought by one of the characters is ultimately construed as the picture of a skier disappearing into a snowstorm. Conversely, the words inscribed beneath an instantly familiar image in René Magritte’s Ceci n’est pas une pipe prompt us to seek its meaning not in tangible objects, but in abstractions. If a work of visual art need not resemble what it signifies, as Nelson Goodman argues, the forms of abstract art can be just as significant as the forms of “representational” art, and just as conducive to discourse – including narrative. By examining the work of Jackson Pollock, Jasper Johns, and Gerhard Richter, I seek to show that the line between abstraction and figuration is no more impermeable than the line between images and words.

I begin with a tale of three cities, or rather of three visits to one city that presented a new face each time I returned to it. I first saw Berlin in the summer of 1967, when its eastern and western halves were of course divided by die Mauer, the notorious wall. In December of 1989, I returned for a conference just as the wall was coming down, and a snapshot preserves my own feeble effort to hack away a piece of it, with my wife looking on in great amusement.1 A little over a year ago, I returned to find the wall totally gone and the city united. But the memory of its division cannot be obliterated. Even if physical traces of the wall did not remain to evoke its history, it could hardly be forgotten. So in some ways, it resembles the border between words and images. Across the border that separates the verbalizing left brain from the visualizing right brain, words and pictures regularly pass back and forth through the Checkpoint Charlie known as the corpus callosum. In the world outside the brain, movie and television and computer screens feed us an endless amalgam of words and images. But no matter how pervasively and how intimately they interact, we feel that a border of some sort still divides them. Here I wish to examine a point at which the border seems particularly stubborn: the meeting point of language and abstract art. In the play called Art by Yasmina Reza,2 a single abstract painting threatens to destroy the longstanding friendship of three Parisian men. One of them – a dermatologist named Serge – spends two hundred thousand francs on a canvas about five feet by four and painted simply white, with a few “fine white diagonal lines.”3 Dumbfounded by Serge’s purchase, his friend Marc dismisses the work as nothing but shit. A third friend, Yvan, tries in vain to mediate between the two, and the play ends only when Marc impudently draws a little picture of his own on the canvas and Serge promptly erases it. One peculiar thing about this play is that the would-be avant-garde work at its center exemplifies a kind of painting long since canonized in histories of twentieth-century art. 1 2 3

All pictures cited in this article may be found on the five-page website http://lab.dartmouth.edu/jim/index.htm. I cite the pictures by web page (1-5) and letter. The picture cited above is Web 1A. Yasmina Reza, Art, trans. Christopher Hampton (London: Faber and Faber, 1996) – hereafter cited as Reza. Reza, p.1.

26 James A. W. Heffernan Abstract art began about 1900, and something very like the painting bought by Serge in Reza’s play was painted in 1918 by the Russian Suprematist Kazimir Malevich, who produced a whole series of white-on-white canvases at that time. In 1951, during the heyday of Abstract Expressionism in New York, Robert Rauschenberg produced his White Painting by rolling ordinary house enamel onto a four-foot-square canvas.4 His white squares take their place with other monochrome works of the mid-20th century: works such Yves Klein’s Blue Monochrome (Web 1C) of 1960 and – from the same year – Ad Reinhardt’s Abstract Painting (Web 1D), one of a series of black paintings that Reinhardt produced from 1954 to the year of his death in 1967. What then can we infer from the immense popularity of a play that challenges or at the very least questions the value of abstract art – of an art that would long since seem to have fought and won its battle for a secure place in the history of art? We may infer, first of all, that abstract art continues to baffle most of us because we have not yet found a fully satisfactory way to talk about it. What sort of story, after all, can be told about an art that apparently turns its back on representation, on reference to any object or figure that we might recognize from our experience of the world outside the painting, and that might thereby give us something to talk about? In 1940, Clement Greenberg saluted abstract art for renouncing depth and perspectival space in favor of “pure” flatness, and for thus scrapping imitation, “literature,” and narrative of any kind.5 So defined, abstract art seems bent on gagging its viewers, leaving us mute. “The flight from interpretation,” wrote Susan Sontag in the early sixties, “seems particularly a feature of modern painting. Abstract painting is the attempt to have, in the ordinary sense, no content; since there is no content, there can be no interpretation.”6 In the late seventies, Rosalind Krauss made the point still more emphatically when she examined the grid as an emblem of modern painting. In works like Agnes Martin’s Untitled (1965) (Web 1E), Krauss writes, “the grid announces, among other things, modern art’s will to silence, its hostility to literature, to narrative, to discourse.”7 This sentence encapsulates the paradox of abstract art. In the very act of proclaiming its silence and its will to silence us, Krauss not only displays the full power of her own rhetoric with a resounding triad of parallel phrases (“to literature, to narrative, to discourse”); she also affirms the eloquence of the would-be taciturn grid by naming only some of the things that it announces. If modern art ever aimed to silence the viewer, it has conspicuously failed. Its very renunciation of what we commonly take to be subject-matter intensifies our compulsion to talk about it, our need to hear someone else talk about it, or both. What has been said of Minimalism applies to all of abstract art. “The less there is to see, the more there is to say.”8 4 5 6 7 8

Daniel Wheeler, Art Since Mid-Century: 1945 to the Present (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1992), p.129 – hereafter cited as Wheeler. Clement Greenberg, ‘Toward a Newer Laocoon’ [1940] in Collected Essays and Criticism, 3 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), I, p.35. Susan Sontag, ‘Against Interpretation,’ in Minimalism, ed. James Meyer (London: Phaidon, 2000), pp.201-02. Rosalind E. Krauss, ‘Grids’ [1978] in The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1986), p. 9. Harold Rosenberg, ‘Defining Art,’ in Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology, ed. Gregory Battcock (New York: Dutton, 1968), p.306.

Speaking for Pictures 27

What then can be said about abstract art? Is it anything more than a painted word, as Tom Wolfe has called it – an empty space that critics rush to fill with all the pictobabble known as “art theory”?9 Wolfe’s disdain for the supposed vacuity of abstract art trails a long history. To begin with, we might pluck a prescient phrase from an early nineteenthcentury essay by the English critic William Hazlitt. Writing about the turbid landscapes of J.M.W. Turner – such as his Snowstorm: Hannibal and his Army Crossing the Alps (1812) (Web 1F) – Hazlitt complained that they were “too much abstractions of aerial perspective. [...] All is without form and void. Someone said of his landscapes that they were pictures of nothing and very like.”10 Hazlitt overstates his case against Turner but nonetheless predicts what would happen to art. For even as Turner’s misted shapes and sweeping vortices anticipate abstract expressionism, the catchy phrase that Hazlitt credits to an anonymous “someone” anticipates the received history of abstract art. In spite of its supposed hostility to narrative, abstract art has been given a history, and the essence of this history is purification: a Hegelian journey to the realm of pure Spirit, or in other words Nothing with a capital N. To quote Krauss again, The twentieth century’s first wave of pure abstraction was based on the goal, taken very seriously indeed, to make a work about Nothing [...] If anything ever drove Mondrian and Malevich, it was Hegelianism and the notion that the vocation of art was defined by its special place in the progress of Spirit. The ambition finally to succeed at painting nothing is fired by the dream of being able to paint Nothing, which is to say, all Being once it has been stripped of every quality that would materialize or limit it in any way. So purified, this Being is identical with Nothing.11

The paradox here – which only a philosophically informed language can explore and explain – is that the pure emptiness achieved by abstract art is somehow a plenitude, that it signifies precisely the opposite of what it presents to the eye. The whiteness of the pure white canvas strikingly exemplifies this complex effect. In recent years, the racial meaning of whiteness has become a whole new field of cultural study based on the recognition that even as white negates and excludes black, it necessarily evokes and includes blackness as something essential to its meaning and history.12 We commonly call Caucasians “white” not because that word accurately describes their color – which is more like “pinko-grey,” as E.M. Forster once observed – but because “white” signifies the antithesis of black and thus supports a system of absolute – or abstract – differences.13 These in turn have supported systems of exclusion and oppression such as slavery, apartheid, and segregation – all of

Tom Wolfe, The Painted Word (New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 1975), passim. Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. P.P. Howe, 21 vols. (London: Dent, 1930-34), IV: p.76n. Rosalind E.Krauss, ‘Reading Jackson Pollock, Abstractly’ [1982] in Originality, p. 237. See for instance Vron Ware and Les Back, Out of Whiteness: Color, Politics, and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002); German Bodies: Race and Representation after Hitler (New York: Routledge, 1999); and Valerie Babb, Whiteness Visible: The Meaning of Whiteness in American Literature and Culture (New York: New York UP, 1998). 13 Treating the work of art as a structure rather than an organism, Rosalind Krauss cites Ferdinand de Saussure’s definition of language as a system of “differences without positive terms.” By this structuralist conception of language, Krauss suggests, neither a word nor a picture signifies a particular object; it signifies rather the negation of possible alternatives or substitutes. See Krauss, ‘Introduction’ to Originality, p. 3. 9 10 11 12

28 James A. W. Heffernan which testify to the interdependence of the pigments they strive to separate: white’s need for black as its racial other, as the embodiment of what it disowns. In Ralph Ellison’s novel, Invisible Man, the black protagonist perfectly illustrates this paradox when he describes his job in a paint factory. To make “the purest white that can be found,” he learned, he had to add ten drops of dead black liquid to each bucket of white.14 But the racial meaning of whiteness merely begins to reveal the complexity of its significance. In Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, published just over 150 years ago, Ishmael – the narrator – explains at great length why he is fascinated and appalled by the whiteness of the whale that Captain Ahab hunts. Besides signifying dominance and “giving the white man ideal mastership over every dusky tribe,” says Ishmael, whiteness can symbolize many good things: gladness, honor, justice, bridal innocence, divine spotlessness, and the sanctity of elders.15 But white, he says, can also terrify the soul because it is “the intensifying agent in things the most appalling to mankind” – such as Polar Bears, white sharks, white squalls, and the bloodless faces of the dead. Why, Ishmael asks, should whiteness itself terrify us? Is it that by its indefiniteness it shadows forth the heartless voids and immensities of the universe, and thus stabs us from behind with the thought of annihilation, when beholding the white depths of the milky way? Or is it, that as in essence whiteness is not so much a color as the visible absence of color; and at the same time the concrete of all colors; is it “for these reasons that there is such a dumb blankness, full of meaning, in a wide landscape of snows – a colorless, all-color of atheism from which we shrink?”16 A dumb blankness, full of meaning: here is one definition of art at its most abstract. Ishmael’s ruminations seem to confirm Rosenberg’s comment on minimalism. Precisely because white by itself offers nothing in particular to see, it can signify a whole universe of beauty, power, innocence, and terror. In Adonais, the elegy that Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote for John Keats in 1821, white signifies Platonic Oneness by transcending all the colors of the spectrum, and thus all the transitory particulars of mortal life: “Life, like a dome of many-colored glass / Stains the white radiance of eternity / Until death tramples it to fragments.”17 We can speak of abstract art, then, as the result of purification leading to paradox: the nothing that becomes everything, the repository of ultimate Being – whether Hegelian or Platonic. But so long as we live on earth, we must reckon with contrariety and particularity – even in art that calls itself abstract. To scrutinize the white paintings of Rauschenberg is to experience something tangible, specific, and measurable, something with a material presence. His friend John Cage, the American composer, called the White Paintings “airports for lights, shadows, and particles,” meaning – writes Daniel Wheeler – “that their emptiness, as the artist intended, was actually illusory, since reflections from the outside

14 15 16 17

Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (New York: Signet, 1952), pp. 175-77. Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, ed. Harrison Hayford and Hershel Parker (New York: Norton, 1967), pp. 163-64. Melville, p.169. Percy Bysshe Shelley, Adonais, lines 462-64 in Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, ed. By Donald Reimann and Sharon B. Powers (New York: Norton, 1977), p. 405 – hereafter cited as Shelley.

Speaking for Pictures 29

world filled the air with moving life.” The result is again a paradox: in Wheeler’s words “a void that can never be truly empty.”18 These comments on Rauschenberg’s work remind us that abstract art is first of all an art of surface. But surface presupposes depth just as surely as white evokes black. Though Greenberg argued that the flatness of this surface – a distinctive feature of abstract art – purged all “fictive planes of depth”19, the surface of an abstract painting may actually be read as a veil or screen for what stands behind it – either spatially, temporally, or both. Charles Harrison, editor of the English journal Art-Language, suggests that behind the pure white of modernist abstraction lies a history of paintings such as Lucas van Valkenborch’s Winter Landscape of 1586 (Web 1G). In this painting a three-dimensional scene that has been painstakingly re-created in paint is partly occluded – or is gradually being occluded – by white dabs of paint on the surface of the canvas. As Harrison says, “It is not the illusion of depth in the picture that holds our sophisticated attention. [...] What gives us pleasurable pause is the strange and distinctive form of scepticism about appearances that is set in play when the allure of imaginative depth meets resistance from the vividness of decorated surface.”20 If modern art results from the artist’s willing surrender to the flatness of that surface, as Greenberg argued, the sixteenth-century Dutch painter would seem to have anticipated not only works such as Monet’s Snow at Argenteuil (Web 1H) but the gradual occlusion of all figurative content in modern art, as in Study for Index: Incident in a Museum 2 (Web 1 I), painted in 1985 by Michael Baldwin and Mel Ramsden of the Art & Language group. “In the conditions of their practice,” Harrison writes, the idea of a surface of falling particles was conceived initially as a kind of indexical sign: as the pulverised residue of figurative content lingering in the studio like motes in the wake of an implosion. The potentially allwhite surface would symbolise both the obliteration of translatable representation and the buildup of a kind of surfeit – the surfeit, as it were, of Modernism’s nuclear winter, in which nothing is signified with increasing depth.21

Just as dumb blankness radiates meaning, the surface of abstract art opens to reveal its depths. For even if modernist flatness aimed to obliterate depth, as Greenberg argued, the language of art criticism keeps retrieving it: rediscovering time and space behind the blank surface, uncovering history and narrative. This is poignantly dramatized at the end of Yasmina Reza’s play. Serge – proud owner of the pure white painting – goads Marc, who detests it, into drawing upon it with a blue felt-tip pen and thus turning it into something representational. As Serge watches impassively and their mutual friend Yvan looks on in horror, Marc draws a line along one of its fine white diagonal scars and then – on the slope thus constructed – he carefully depicts a little skier with a woolly hat. Serge does not protest because he knows that ink from felt-tips is washable, and he promptly obliterates the skier, literally purging his painting of anything representational. But Marc has at last discovered a

18 19 20 21

Wheeler, p.129. Greenberg, p.43. Charles Harrison, ‘On the Surface of Painting,’ Critical Inquiry, 15 (1989), 292-36 (pp. 294-95). Harrison, 303.

30 James A. W. Heffernan way to read this painting, to articulate its meaning, to construe its fine white diagonal scars as the trace of a story. “Under the white clouds,” he says, the snow is falling. You can’t see the white clouds, or the snow. Or the cold, or the white glow of the earth. A solitary man glides downhill on his skis. The snow is falling. It falls until the man disappears back into the landscape. My friend Serge [...] has bought a painting. It’s a canvas about five feet four by four. It represents a man who moves across a space and disappears.22

One might object that this way of talking about abstract art simply evades its challenge by denying its enigmatic taciturnity, by domesticating it, by turning it back into something representational, familiar, and narratable. But familiar images can be just as challenging, elusive, and provocative as abstractions. Consider a painting that seems at first the antithesis of abstract art: René Magritte’s Ceci n’est pas une Pipe (Web 1 J). Painted in 1929, when abstract art was already well established, this work offers something we can recognize at once. Rudolph Arnheim probably speaks for all first-time viewers of the picture when he says, “Unfortunately, a pipe is all it is.”23 But a little more thought about the picture and its legend, or built-in title, leads us to the next step, which is to say that this is not a pipe but a picture of a pipe. (I once heard E.H. Gombrich say this with the greatest of scorns, as if he had exposed some monstrous sham.) Having seen that this is not a pipe but a picture of a pipe, we are now ready to take the next step, which is to consider how the pipe is pictured. Since the pipes we see in the world outside the picture do not usually present themselves in perfect profile or hang suspended in midair with no visible means of support, we must conclude that is not, after all, a picture of a pipe but rather, as Michel Butor observes, a picture of depiction, a picture of the way pipes are commonly represented in advertisements and textbooks: isolated, abstracted from human experience, radically decontextualized, and labelled “pipe.”24 Thus Magritte’s label or legend, which is literally written along the bottom of the painting itself, parodies the textbook labelling of pictures and undermines the assumptions on which such labelling is based. Instead of implying – as labels typically do – that the picture is identical with a particular object, the label denies that identification and turns the picture into an arbitrary sign: a pipe-picture, as Nelson Goodman would call it, just as one might say a round picture or a square picture.25 If, as Goodman contends, images need not resemble what they signify any more than words do, then a pipe-picture can signify any number of things: dreams, complacency, desire, narcissism, Freud, what you will. Its meaning is no more bound to a particular object than is the meaning of the word “Ceci” below it, which can mean any one of several things: “this” image above it, “this” whole painting in which it appears, or “this” very word itself, “Ceci,” which presents itself not only verbally but visually. “Ceci” is at once a sliding signifier and 22 23 24 25

Reza, p.63. Rudolph Arnheim, Visual Thinking (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: Univ. of California Press, 1969), p.141. Michel Butor, Les Mots dans la Peinture (Geneva, Les Sentiers de la Création, 1967), p. 77 “Almost any picture,” writes Goodman, “may represent almost anything; that is, given picture and object there is usually a system of representation, a plan of correlation, under which the picture represents the object.” – Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1976), p. 38. In effect, abstract art edits this statement by deleting its qualifiers, “almost,” and “usually.”

Speaking for Pictures 31

graphic sign, the carefully drawn picture of a written word. In fact the calligraphic shape of the c’s in this word makes them visually rhyme with the pictured shape just above them. Thus Magritte deconstructs the opposition between the “natural” meaning of images and the conventional, arbitrary signification of words even as he cuts the cable binding images to real objects, to determinable reference. In cutting the cable that traditionally binds images to specific objects in the real world, Magritte makes the meaning of his picture radically indeterminate – as indeterminate in its own way as the meaning of Rauschenberg’s canvas of pure white. Different as these two paintings are – one a wordless, imageless tabula rasa, the other a labelled image we can instantly recognize – they each block our impulse to say what they depict. Each becomes a site and source of provocation, prompting us to rethink the way we read pictures. If a pure white canvas can drive us back to something tangible and narratable in quest of its meaning, the words inscribed beneath an instantly familiar image can prompt us to seek its meaning not in tangible objects, but in abstractions. Once we start thinking, talking, and writing about abstract art, we discover that the line between abstraction and representation is no more impermeable than the line between images and words. For a test case of this hypothesis, consider the work of the American painter who more than any other artist of his time epitomizes abstract expressionism: Jackson Pollock. As exemplified by paintings such as Full Fathom Five (Web 1 K), Pollock’s huge, swirling, spattered labyrinths of line – especially in the peak years of 1947-50 – leave us almost literally gasping for words. As recently as 1999, Michael Fried – who has been writing about Pollock for nearly forty years – declared that Pollock’s work is “exceptionally difficult to describe, and – a truly astonishing fact – has remained so to this day.”26 In quest of something to say, critics typically turn to biographical narrative in visual form: Hans Namuth’s photographs of the artist at work (Web 1 L) radiating the energy with which he suffused his canvases.27 “From the moment that Pollock presented himself to Namuth’s lens and directorial eye,” writes Thomas Crow, “the acting out of a new artist’s persona entered the experience of the paintings; once the famous sequential photographs and films came to light, no observer could un-know them.”28 It is startling to realize how ancient as well as how modern is this focus on the genesis of a work of art. In the eighteenth book of the Iliad, Homer draws a verbal picture of Hephaistos making the shield of Achilles by forging upon

Michael Fried, ‘Optical Allusions,’ Artforum, 37:8 (April 1999), pp. 97-101, 143-46 (p.97) – hereafter cited as Fried, ‘Optical.’ 27 Pollock Painting: Photographs by Hans Namuth, ed. Barbara Rose (New York: Agrinde, 1978). For detailed analysis of what we can learn from the visual record of Pollock in action, see Pepe Karmel, ‘Pollock at Work: The Films and Photographs of Hans Namuth’ in Kirk Varnedoe with Pepe Karmel, Jackson Pollock (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1998), pp. 87-137. In 1947, Pollock himself said that he normally began by tacking unstretched canvas to the wall or floor: “On the floor I am more at ease. I feel nearer, more a part of the painting since in this way I can walk around it, work from the four sides and literally be in the painting.” Possibilities I, ed. Robert Motherwell and Harold Rosenberg, 1947-48, qtd. John Golding, ‘Pollock and the Search for a Symbol,’ in Paths to the Absolute (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), p.134 – hereafter cited as Golding. 28 Thomas Crow, ‘Moving Pictures,’ Artforum, 37:8 (April 1999), pp. 91-95, 143 (p.92) – hereafter cited as Crow, ‘Moving.’ 26

32 James A. W. Heffernan it a series of richly detailed scenes. Namuth’s pictures of Pollock at work show him stepping onto giant lengths of canvas tacked to the floor of his barn studio, dribbling paint directly from cans and flinging it from his brush. He strove above all, writes Fried, to fill “every square millimeter of the surfaces on which he worked with a maximum amount of almost bodily energy.”29 But how does the critic get beyond the mere act of witnessing in words the creative energy of the painter and the creative process that generates his work? What can be said about the products of this energy, about the forms – let alone for a moment the meanings – of the paintings themselves? In 1948, just one year after Pollock started his drip paintings, Clement Greenberg proclaimed the birth of what he called “the ‘decentralized,’ ‘polyphonic,’ all-over picture which, with a surface knit together of a multiplicity of identical or similar elements, repeats itself without strong variation from one end of the canvas to the other and dispenses, apparently, with beginning, middle, and ending.”30 Four years later, Greenberg described the “all-over” density of Pollock’s work more concisely: “every square inch of the canvas,” he wrote, “receives a maximum of charge at the cost of a minimum of physical means.”31 Both comments identify a distinguishing feature of Pollock’s work, but the second defines it largely in terms of how it was made, and neither explains how the mildly varied repetition of “identical or similar elements” can avoid becoming “wallpaper patterns,” which is what Greenberg himself imagined that some people might say of them.32 Unsurprisingly, Pollock hated this charge just as much as he loathed its opposite. When Time Magazine called his work “chaos” in November 1950, he sent the magazine a telegram saying “NO CHAOS DAMN IT.”33 Taking their cue from this outburst, critics such as Daniel Wheeler have argued that Pollock’s great “drip” phase did not spring from “mindless spontaneity,” but rather from the bold discrimination of an artist seeking to reconcile “the deepest impulses of the unconscious” with “the lightning dictates of conscious aesthetic decision.”34 Wheeler thus begins to define the complexity of Pollock’s canvasses and to move beyond the polarizing assumption that they give us either monotony or chaos: wallpaper patterns or raw anarchy. Pollock’s work fits neither category. Rosalind Krauss argues that it juxtaposes opposites: “line as opposed to color; contour as opposed to field; matter as opposed to the incorporeal. The subject that then emerges is the provisional unity of the identity of opposites: as line becomes color, contour becomes field, and matter becomes light.”35 Krauss here attempts something like a Hegelian resolution of the would-be chaos that Pollock’s most ambitious work presents to the eye. But since her own terms remain largely abstract, she can hardly offer us an Ariadne’s thread to guide us through the labyrinth of any one painting. For such a thread we might better turn again to Michael Fried, who – to 29 30 31 32 33 34 35

Fried, ‘Optical’, p.97. Clement Greenberg, ‘The Crisis of the Easel Picture’ (1948), qtd. Fried, ‘Optical’, p. 97. Clement Greenberg, ‘Feeling is All’ (1952), qtd. Fried, ‘Optical’, p. 98. Qtd. Krauss, ‘Reading’, p.237 Qtd. Krauss, ‘Reading’, p.226n. Wheeler, p.42. Krauss, ‘Reading’, p. 239

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my knowledge – first wrote about Pollock in 1965 and has not fundamentally changed his account of what Pollock did in the peak years of 1947-50. In his finest paintings of this period, Fried contends, Pollock’s allover line does not give rise to positive and negative areas: we are not made to feel that one part of the canvas deserves to be read as figure, [...] against another part of the canvas read as ground. There is no inside or outside to Pollock’s line or to the space through which it moves. And this is tantamount to claiming that line, in Pollock’s allover drip paintings of 1947-50, has been freed at last from the job of describing contours and bounding shapes. It has been purged of its figurative character. [...] In these works Pollock has managed to free line not only from its function of representing objects in the world, but also from its task of describing or bounding shapes or figures, whether abstract or representational, on the surface of the canvas. In a painting such as Number 1, 1948 [Web 1 M] there is only a pictorial field so homogenous, overall, and devoid both of recognizable objects and abstract shapes that I want to call it optical, to distinguish it from the structured, essentially tactile pictorial field of previous painting from Cubism to de Kooning and even Hans Hofmann. Pollock’s field is optical because it addresses itself to eyesight alone.36

Fried’s statement deserves close scrutiny because it tries to define as precisely as possible just what makes Pollock both decisively original and paradigmatically – or supremely – abstract. “Abstract” means “drawn out of” and is a relative term. In language, the word “horse” signifies a generic concept abstracted from or inductively drawn out of many distinct breeds of horses – all of whom are thereby reduced to a set of qualities they share. In Picasso’s Guernica (1937) (Web 1 N), the figure under the light bulb is constructed of cubist planes abstracted from multiple views of an animal surrealistically distended, but we can still recognize a horse in the painting, along with a bull and several human figures. In painting that is still more abstract, such as Kandinsky’s Composition 8 (1923) (Web 1 O), we find no representational figures – no natural objects of any kind, neither specific nor generic. Instead we find geometric figures abstracted from various material objects. The circles could be seen as abstracted from the eye or from planets, the triangle from the nose, the rectangles from artifacts such as bricks or tiles, and so on. Nonetheless, because these geometric shapes are figures, Fried calls Kandinsky’s painting “clearly figurative” and therefore sharply distinct from what he would see as Pollock’s absolute abstraction, exemplified by Number 1, 1948. According to Fried, Pollock’s “allover line” does not create any figures that stand out against a surrounding ground, as Kandinsky’s geometric shapes do.37 So in Fried’s opinion, quoted just above, Pollock liberates line not only from its traditional duty to represent actual objects “but also from its task of describing or bounding shapes or figures, whether abstract or repreMichael Fried, ‘Three American Painters: Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski, Frank Stella’ [1965] in Art and Objecthood (Chicago, Ill: University of Chicago Press, 1998), pp. 213-65 (p. 224) – hereafter cited as Fried, ‘Three.’ The painting that Fried designates Number 1, 1948 was originally called that by Pollock himself, but in November 1949 his dealer – Betty Parsons – placed the letter “A” after the number 1; See Jackson Pollock: A Catalogue Raisonné of Paintings, Drawings, and Other Works, ed. Francis Valentine O’Connor and Eugene Victor Thaw, 4 vols. (New Haven, Ct: Yale University Press, 1978), II, p.1. In this catalogue the painting is titled Number 1A, 1948 and numbered #186. 37 Pollock himself told an interviewer in 1949 that he tried “to stay away from any recognizable image” and “do away with it” if it crept into his work. Qtd. Kirk Varnedoe, ‘Comet: Jackson Pollock’s Life and Work,’ in Varnedoe, Jackson Pollock, p. 54. 36

34 James A. W. Heffernan sentational, on the surface of the canvas.” By “abstract” Fried means geometrical as distinct from representational, which is to say capable of being construed as the outline of a natural object. This is a slippery distinction, for under certain conditions a geometic form can represent an object in the real world. A triangle, for instance, can represent a sailboat and a circle can represent a head or an eye as it does in Pollock’s own Composition with Donkey Head (c. 1938-41) (Web 2Q). But whether or not we can firmly distinguish between abstract and representational shapes, Fried’s term “figures” includes them both, signifying any kind of shape we can recognize or – presumably – name. Pollock’s line eludes such recognition because, Fried contends, it is absolutely non-figurative. It cannot be caught in the act of describing a space – in the most graphic sense of drawing a line around it – and thus of producing any shape or figure we can identify. Nevertheless, the figurative components of Pollock’s abstractions begin to emerge as soon as we carefully scrutinize its materiality. Pollock’s articulation, writes Thomas Crow, is nothing if not material; it is a matter of grain against slickness, of receding stains against knots, ridges, and swags of relief (one of Pollock’s repeated devices was to scoop up the congealed circle of paint that forms on an open can or enamel and transfer the sticky disks intact to the canvas, where they stand out as cupped, obsidian-like medallions of considerable beauty.)38

Crow finds figures in Pollock’s work. He not only identifies the knots, ridges, and swags shaped by the paint; he can also see circles or disks of paint used as medallions “of considerable beauty,” as in Number 8, 1949 (Web 2 R). Crow thus identifies a crucial part of what makes Pollock’s work so captivating. In spite of Fried’s claim, its webs and labyrinths incorporate figures that can be recognized and named. I do not mean just the figures that Fried himself identifies – such as the humanoid figure conspicuously cut from painted paper mounted on canvas in Pollock’s Cut-Out of circa 1948-50. In Fried’s opinion works like these betray a “recurrent desire for figuration” that checks the freedom of Pollock’s purely abstract line.39 But this would-be retrograde desire for figuration – this failure of abstractive nerve, so to speak – manifests itself even in Pollock’s most radically abstract works. Let’s return to Number 1, 1948, exhibit A in Fried’s case for the absence of figuration in Pollock’s greatest work. If we ignore the handprints ranged across the upper right, no particular shapes leap out at us from this painting, but they gradually present themselves to the patient, searching, attentive eye. At lower right a small, slightly angulated ring of white overlaps a large, broken circle of white that nearly forms the outline of a sphere filled with intersecting lines, like a ball of yarn. At the top – outlined in black – is a phallic projectile, and just below that is a distinctively fish-shaped form outlined in black and white and pointing to lower right. The fine upper outline of this piscatory form draws a thickening, undulating tail behind it: though partly obscured by patches of white and silver, it forms a long S-curve reaching all the way to the upper left of the painting, where it becomes a streaked ribbon of black with a curl at the very end. The S-curve likewise reaches back into

38 39

Crow, ‘Moving’, p.94. Fried, ‘Optical’, p.99.

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the history of art. In the eighteenth century, William Hogarth called it “the line of beauty” – probably because it evokes, among other things, the female body; he featured it in his selfportrait of 1745 (Web 2 T) – on his palette at lower right – and on the title page of his Analysis of Beauty (Web 2 U), where it takes an elegant stand within a crystalline pyramid.40 The same line re-appears in Number 13, 1949 (Web 2 V), where serpentine filaments wind their way around the black legs of triangles. But to return to Number 1, 1948, something else deserves our scrutiny. Just below the midpoint of the painting, within a tent or inverted V of ragged white, a small, broken, somewhat angulated black oval encloses a dot of black (Web 2 W). This figure dimly recalls the eyes of the horse’s head in Picasso’s Guernica (1937), a painting whose fierce surrealism powerfully influenced Pollock, especially in such pictures as Composition with Donkey Head, c.1938-41, and Pasiphae, c.1943 (Web 2 Y). In both of these surrealistic paintings, especially the second, the eyes of human beings and animals are variously represented by black circles, black ovals, and broken black ovals enclosing black dots: figures that abundantly recur in Pollock’s Eyes in the Heat of 1946 (Web 2 Z). Is it mere accident that a broken black oval enclosing a black dot appears just below the midpoint of Number 1, 1948? Might not this roughly circled point signify a human eye struggling to see order – “not chaos, damn it,” but order – in a whirlwind of apparent confusion? (Web 2 ZB). Might not the circled point signify an eye striving to discern through the labyrinth of apparently tangled threads the symmetry of geometrical shapes? At the end of a lecture that he regularly gave at England’s Royal Academy of Arts from 1811 to 1828, J.M.W. Turner quoted a passage of poetry that seems to answer this question, a passage that salutes our capacity to to find “in matter’s mouldering structures, the pure forms / Of triangle, or Circle, Cube, or Cone.”41 The poet is talking about geometrical forms that we might discern in ruined buildings, but Turner’s own work repeatedly prompts us to see how geometry can inform and organize what looks like chaos in the natural world, as in Light and Colour (Goethe’s Theory) – the Morning after the Deluge – Moses Writing the Book of Genesis (1843) (Web 2 ZC). The bubble heads massed at lower right are scarcely more than dotted circles caught in a whirlwind of abstract color and light, but the whirlwind unmistakeably forms a circle – or Turnerian vortex – with a serpentine twist in the center that makes of the whole picture a gigantic, allseeing eye, a fit home for the ghostly figure of Moses writing just above the twisted serpent. Here is history as geometry. Concentrating ages into an instant, Turner’s prophetic vision encircles the temptation and fall of humankind, the story of the flood, the salvific return of light, and the vision of Moses, who sees and captures history in words even as Turner captures it in pigment.

See William Hogarth, The Analysis of Beauty, ed. Ronald Paulson (New Haven, Ct: Yale University Press, 1997), figs. 2 and 9. Figure 9 is Gulielmus Hogarth, the 1749 engraving of the 1745 painting of Hogarth with his dog. Of the figure on the title page Hogarth writes: “the triangular form of the glass, and the serpentine line itself, are the two most expressive figures that can be thought of to signify not only beauty and grace, but the whole order of form” (p.11). 41 J.M.W. Turner, British Museum Add. Ms. 46151 K f.23. Taking some freedom with the punctuation, Turner quotes from ‘Pleasures of Imagination: A Poem,’ Book Second, lines 137-38, in Mark Akenside, Poems (London, 1772), p. 156. 40

36 James A. W. Heffernan How then does Turner shape our vision of Pollock? To suggest that Turner’s geometry prefigures the restless, endlessly venturing line of the great American expressionist can only sound like heresy to those who, like Fried, deplore his “recurrent desire for figuration” and celebrate his daring achievement of “the most defiantly abstract art ever made.”42 But does figuration truly undermine or enervate the power of Pollock’s work? In a painting called Vortex, circa 1947 (Web 2 ZD), Pollock re-creates Turner’s favorite shape as a whirling bowl of intersecting black lines, a spinning web plainly defined by its circular form. Or consider a detail from the upper right section of Full Fathom Five (1947) (Web 3 ZE). The paint has been dripped, spattered, and smeared, but also steered across the canvas, set down in two parallel diagonals of orange crossing an oval outlined in black – as can be seen in the upper right portion of the painting as a whole. “When you’re painting out of your unconscious,” Pollock said, “figures are bound to emerge.”43 Indeed they do. Whether geometric, biomorphic, or anthropomorphic, they inform his paintings, which may be seen or read as veils drawn over shapes we can recognize – and specify. “Veiling and unveiling,” writes Thomas Crow, “are the key terms in the current arguments over Pollock’s significance for artists in the twentieth century.”44 Pollock himself reportedly said that in one of his 1945 paintings (There Were Seven in Eight) he chose to “veil the image” by painting new figures over old ones.45 As a metaphor for abstract art, the veil reminds us of the snow that may cover a landscape or the dabs of white that may eventually merge into a canvas of absolute white. But does abstraction simply cover the familiar world of figures, or does it uncover something hidden beneath them? Shelley once wrote of poetry that “whether it spreads its own figured curtain or withdraws life’s dark veil from before the scene of things, it equally creates for us a being within our being.”46 Metaphor and simile may be seen as figured veils that paradoxically unveil. To say that life resembles a dome of many-colored glass is to veil or cover the life we ordinarily know, yet also to unveil or expose its polychrome fragility, its phenomenal impermanence, and to find beneath it the “white radiance” of eternity, the Platonic “one” of Shelley’s afterlife in Adonais. Shelley’s poetry is driven by his continuing search for what lies beneath the veil of life, as in this early passage on the Ravine of the River Arve beneath Mont Blanc: Thine earthly rainbows stretched across the sweep Of the ethereal waterfall, whose veil Robes some unsculptured image.47

42

43 44 45 46 47

John Haber, ‘The Last Dance’ [1999], www.haberarts.com/pollock.htm, p.1. In rather general terms, John Golding compares the overwhelming effect of Pollock’s large abstractions to the awe-inspiring impact of Turner’s landscapes (Golding, p. 137) but makes no reference to any figural correspondence. Seldon Rodman, Conversations with Artists (New York, 1957), p. 82, qtd. Golding, p. 140. He also said, “I’m very representational some of the time and a little all of the time.” (Rodman, p. 82, qtd. Golding, p. 140). Crow, ‘Moving’, p. 94. Qtd. Crow, ‘Moving’, p.94. ‘Defense of Poetry’ in Shelley, p.505. ‘Mont Blanc,’ lines 25-27 in Shelley, p. 90.

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The many-colored rainbow veils the waterfall, and in turn the waterfall veils the rocky wall looming behind it, which – for all its solidity – veils “some unsculptured image,” some figure waiting to be discovered – found and revealed – by the sculptor who carves it. But this figure lurking beneath a succession of veils – rainbow, waterfall, rock – remains abstract, no more concrete or specific than the white radiance of eternity. So we must ask: does abstraction veil figures, as a snowstorm engulfs a skier, or does it lift a series of figured veils to reveal something abstract – something unfigured – beneath them? For the hint of an answer, consider one of the paintings with which Jasper Johns launched Postmodernism in America in the late 1950s. The painting is called Shade (Web 3 ZG), and in some ways it could hardly be less abstract or more concrete. Insofar as it is made with an actual window shade attached to the canvas, it aligns itself with what has come to be known as minimalism, wherein ordinary, three-dimensional objects – such as a slab or a box – wear titles such as “slab” and “box” and thus defy us to say anything more about them.48 Nevertheless, a shade is virtually a two-dimensional object akin to a veil, and when covered with paint it can generate a whole series of questions about what it hides and reveals. Consider what Leo Steinberg wrote about this painting when it was first exhibited in 1959: But for a narrow margin all around, its entire surface is taken up by an actual window shade – the cheap kind; Johns had to fortify it to keep it flat. It’s been pulled down as if for the night, and obviously for the last time. Over all the visible surface, shade and ground canvas together, spreads the paint itself, paint unusually atmospheric and permissive of depth. It makes a nocturnal space with bursts of white lights that radiate from suspended points, like bursting and falling fireworks misted over. An abstracted nightscape? You stare at and into a field whose darkness is Absolute, whose whites brighten nothing, but make darkness visible, as Milton said of infernal shade. Or a scene of nightfall: far lights flaring and fading move into focus and out, like rainy nights passed on a road. Are we out inside the night or indoors? A window, with its cheap shade pulled down, is within reach, shutting me out, keeping me in? Look again. On a canvas shade lowered against the outside we are given to see outdoor darkness: like the hollow shade our closed eyes project upon lowered lids. Alberti compared the perspective diaphanes of the Renaissance to open windows. Johns’ Shade compares the adiaphane of his canvas to a window whose shade is down.49

As Jasper Johns’ Postmodernism returns us to the world of tangible objects that Modernism had renounced – objects such as flags, targets, and shades – Steinberg returns us to the world of literature that Modernism had supposedly silenced. Steinberg uses both the poetry of Milton and the fiction of Joyce to help him say what he sees in this painted shade. “Darkness visible” describes Hell in the first book of Milton’s Paradise Lost, and in the opening paragraph of chapter 3 of Ulysses, Stephen Dedalus uses the word “adiaphane” to mean opacity, “the limit of the diaphane.” More importantly, Steinberg reactivates most of the rhetorical strategies that have permeated art criticism from Philostratus onward. This See W.J.T. Mitchell, Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago, Ill: University of Chicago Press, 1994), pp. 246-47. One might say that minimalist sculpture tries to affirm what Magritte denies in Ceci n’est pas une pipe, but this would ignore the difference between painting and sculpture. To affirm that a three-dimensional object is a slab is not the same as affirming that a two-dimensional image is a pipe. 49 Leo Steinberg, Other Criteria (London: Oxford University Press, 1972), pp. 44-45. 48

38 James A. W. Heffernan passage is driven by a series of narratives. The Homeric story of how Johns made the painting – by fortifying and flattening the shade on the canvas, then painting over both shade and margin – grounds two other stories about what is represented or signified here. The quotidian tale of a day ending (the shade “has been pulled down as if for the night”) becomes the quasi-apocalyptic story of darkness immutable (“and obviously for the last time”) and then the art-historical narrative of what Johns does with Alberti’s master trope: the open window of Renaissance art, with its sunlit three-dimensional vistas, becomes the impenetrably occluded window of modern or postmodern art, with its resolutely flattened opacity. But Steinberg’s commentary deconstructs this opacity even while seeming to affirm it. With a series of rhetorical questions, he prompts us first to see the painted shade-on-canvas as an abstracted nightscape, then as the representation of nightfall with its own depth (“far lights flaring and fading”) or of a window that cannot help signifying the two worlds it constitutes by separation – inside and outside. Steinberg thus demonstrates that the shade of abstraction may reveal, unveil, or expose just as much as it masks or occludes. Steinberg’s commentary also suggests a profound paradox about abstract art. No matter how daringly it seems to renounce narrative, representation, and language itself, it inexorably evokes all three. For if visual representation does not require resemblance, as Nelson Goodman insists, no essential barrier separates the kinds of signification that abstract and realistic painting can achieve; nothing thwarts their capacity to stand for something we can experience in the real world, or for something we may conceive or imagine. Contemporary German art now offers us a splendid illustration of this point. For no one complicates the opposition between abstraction and realism more richly, persistently, and provocatively than the German painter whose work has given abstract art a new life at the beginning of the twenty-first century: Gerhard Richter. Born in Dresden in 1932, Richter crossed from East to West Berlin in 1961. Since then he has been crossing back and forth between photographic realism and blank – or nearly blank – abstraction. In the nineteen-sixties, he painted oils based on photographs, such as Woman Descending the Staircase (Web 3 ZH) and Ema (Nude on a Staircase) (Web 3 ZI), a realist riposte to Marcel Duchamp’s famous icon of cubism, Nude Descending a Staircase (1912) (Web 3 ZJ). Yet Richter’s would-be realistic nude evokes the blurred effect of softfocus photography; the woman is ghostly, and the stairs behind her melt into shadow. In 1968, Richter’s Schattenbild (Web 3 ZK) renders precisely and photographically the shadows cast by a grille but at the very same time evokes that hallowed icon of abstract art, the grid. In the early seventies Richter plumbs the depths or scales the heights of abstraction with a series of paintings called simply Grau, Gray (Web 3 ZL). In the mid-eighties his work ranges from more abstraction to the photographic realism of works like Wiesenthal (Web 3 ZM), as if to defy us to classify him. But whatever else he is, I think it is fair to call him a painter of abstract pictures, for Abstract Picture (Abstraktes Bild) is the title he repeatedly used for many of the works he produced in the nineties, culminating in a series of six rhomboidal canvases that he completed in 1998. For this particular series Richter found a precedent in the work of Barnet Newman, the American abstractionist who started painting in monochrome about 1950 and went on to complete, in the mid-sixties, a series of fourteen largely monochromatic canvases titled

Speaking for Pictures 39

Stations of the Cross. Newman’s series concludes with a wholly monochromatic work in pure white on white – yet another example of quintessentially white abstraction. But coming at the end of a series titled Stations of the Cross, this particular white canvas was inevitably construed as a sign of transfiguration.50 Thus the power of language, or of a cultural context evoked by language, generates the meaning of an otherwise inscrutable work. Richter, who greatly admires Newman, undertook a similar project when Roman Catholic officials asked him to paint the stigmatization of St. Francis for a modern church designed by Renzo Piano.51 When Richter produced a series of six largely monochromatic rhombuses, they were rejected as too abstract for the church and purchased instead for a temple of art in Texas: the Houston Museum of Fine Arts. In the peculiar culture of our time, it seems, secular institutions welcome mysterious icons even as churches banish them.52 So what can we say of these mysterious icons? In his abstract paintings, Richter eschews anything that resembles a real object, for otherwise, he says, “all you can see is that object.” But he has also said that in abstract painting, “there is always some sort of narrative or reference,” and that “we only find paintings interesting because we always search for something that looks familiar to us.”53 If we know the story behind the making of the stigmata series – as I venture to call it – we know what to look for in these Abstrakten Bilder. The question is, then, can language help us to see it? Let us start with the full title used for each of the six paintings: Abstraktes Bild (Rhombus). Even as it calls the Bild, the picture, abstract, the title gestures toward specificity, for a rhombus is a slanting square. More precisely, Richter’s rhombus is a square that has been set on one corner and then pressed down from the opposite corner into the shape of a diamond (Web 3 ZN). So here is not a painting of a rhombus but the thing itself. In calling this rhombus a rhombus, Richter evokes the minimalist practice of redundantly labelling ordinary objects – like slab and box – as such, and thus apparently forestalling any effort to construe or interpret them, to infer or say what they mean. But a rhombus is not a physical, three-dimensional object like a slab or cube. It is a conceptual, Lucy Lippard, ‘The Silent Art,’ Art in America 55 (January 1967), pp. 58-63 (p. 60). Robert Storr, Gerhard Richter: Forty Years of Painting (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2002), p. 82 – hereafter cited as Storr. 52 The Rothko Chapel in Houston interestingly complicates this formulation. Originally Catholic but now interdenominational, this octagonal chapel houses a series of giant, largely black canvases commissioned for it and painted by Mark Rothko in 1965-66. They are “works thematically devoted to the Passion of Christ but executed in a formal idiom that verged on the most reductively abstract of [Rothko’s] career. Comprised of two triptychs and one panel displaying black hard-edged rectangles on maroon fields and one triptych plus four single all-black panels filtered by thin washes of maroon, the Houston series hangs, silent and solitary, in a twilit space whose simple void echoes the paintings’ mournful witness to the death that inevitably brings to an end life and all its earthly promise. But the pale, evanescent illumination also rewards the attentive viewer with the inkling of a dark afterglow from deep within the paintings’color, like the last embers of some inner fire, banked but still alive although engulfed by penumbral bleakness.” (Wheeler, p. 50). The Rothko chapel thus makes explicit the religious implications of Rothko’s abstract art. Rothko himself told an interviewer: “The people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when I painted them. And if you, as you say, are moved only by their color relationships, then you miss the point!” (qtd. Wheeler, p. 50). 53 Storr, pp.303-4. 50 51

40 James A. W. Heffernan two-dimensional object that squeezes the square and thus rivals its most conspicuous precursor: the tilted square of Malevich’s Suprematist Composition (Red Square and Black Square (Web 3 ZO), whose original title furnished the model for Richter’s title. Of Black Square, another painting by Malevich, Richter has said, “You can interpret [it] as much as you like, but it remains a provocation; you are compelled to look for an object and come up with one.”54 The same word – provocation – aptly identifies the first effect of Richter’s own canvases (Web 3 ZN). By turning each one on its corner and then squeezing it down, he spurns the conventional practice of painting on rectangular canvases that are then hung on the level – a convention normally followed by even the most daring of abstract artists, Pollock included. What can be inferred from Richter’s tilting and squeezing of the canvas frame? Consider first the purely physical requirements of such a frame. To keep the rhombus in shape, squeezed down vertically and pressed out horizontally, Richter needed not only four stretchers for the sides of the canvas but two more intersecting at the midpoint, forming a cross whose extremities touched and braced each corner. The shape of this cross recalls another that Richter cast in silver and gold two years before the stigmata series (Web 3 ZQ): a Christian cross with a very short top and a crosspiece as long as the upright. According to Richter himself, he modelled this cross on the proportions of the human body – more precisely his own – so that Robert Storr reads it as “a discreet self-portrait.”55 Just as easily it could also be an abstract version of Vitruvius’ formula for any human body, or at least any male body, as diagrammed and explained by Leonardo (Web 3 ZR): “the span to which the man opens his arms is equivalent to his height”.56 Either way, it is clear that Richter links the shape of the cross to the shape of a human being standing straight with arms outstretched. The cross used to brace the rhombus is less obviously anthropomorphic because the crosspiece has been lowered to the midpoint of the vertical. But since a wooden cross braces the frame of each canvas in a series meant to represent the stigmata of Francis, we may reasonably infer that this particular rhombus helps to signify a crucified body. Is this too big a leap? “Abstract paintings,” says Richter, “are fictive models that make visible a reality we can neither see nor describe but whose existence we can postulate.”57 Wittingly or not, Richter echoes what Paul the apostle says about faith in his letter to the Hebrews: “Faith is the substance of things hoped for, and the evidence of things not seen” (Hebrews 11.1). Though we cannot see the cross beneath this canvas, we can – in Richter’s words – postulate its existence there. The canvas that veils the cross also reveals it. Its hidden presence is confirmed by what we can see on the canvas itself, where vertical and horizontal bands of predominantly reddish-orange pigments intersect. In Rhombus #5, for instance (Web 4 ZT), the band of paint across the middle is literally underscored by a

Storr, p.304. Storr, p. 83. Richter told Storr: “I tried to make it my shape. It’s not everybody’s shape” (p. 83). But the equality of height and armspan is evidently normative for the human body; at least – as I just now discovered – it works perfectly on my own. 57 Storr, p.306. 54 55 56

Speaking for Pictures 41

groove that cuts right through the row of vertical bands. Here is yet another version of the grid – that paradigmatic icon of abstract art. Far less uniform than Agnes Martin’s grid (Web 1 E) or Richter’s own Schattenbild (Web 4 ZU), Richter’s orthogonal bands recall the random crosses of Piet Mondrian’s early Pier and Ocean (Web 4 ZV), where the squeezed circle anticipates Richter’s rhombus. But Richter had been refining the grid for several years before the stigmata series, as in two highly textured abstractions: Kine of 1995 (Web 4 ZW) and AP of 1997 (Web 4 ZX). In the stigmata series, therefore, Richter’s grid is far more subtle and suggestive than any of its precursors. The intersecting bands of red and orange seem woven into or out of the very warp and woof of the canvas itself, whose intersecting threads endlessly repeat the form of the cross beneath it. We cannot see those threads, of course, anymore than we can see the cross, but we can read the painted canvas as a representation of them both. We can also plainly see that the reddish-orange surface of the paint on each canvas has been scraped away at various points to reveal an undercoating of black and blue flecked with yellow, green, and white. At first glance these abrasions seem randomly made, haphazard products of accident, caprice, or the flaking of paint. But careful inspection shows the principle of order that governs their deployment. Though they nowhere form an obvious cross in the center of the canvas – something Richter carefully avoids – they are made like the intersecting bands of reddish orange, with predominantly vertical and horizontal strokes. In the lower part of number 3, for instance (Web 4 ZZ), vertical streaks of black descend to a thin black channel that cuts across them; at the bottom of number 4 (Web 4 ZZA), a ghostly column of black shrinks to a needle standing on the line scraped straight across the bottom tip. Even the diagonal row of abrasions at left in this picture are made with vertical strokes, as one can see by examining them closely. So the abrasions subtly reinforce the cruciform structure of the picture as a whole. Furthermore, in clustering chiefly along the edges of the canvas rather than intersecting at the center, the abrasions remind us that four of the five wounds of Christ – the originals of the stigmata of St. Francis – were made in his outstretched extremities: his hands and feet. Richter’s great enigmatic diamonds thus become eloquent signs of mutilation and blood. Richter’s latest work takes him one step deeper into the forest of abstraction, or rather shows even more daringly how its seemingly inscrutable shapes can be made to branch into something like words. In previous years, Richter has sometimes deconstructed his own “realistic” works by taking close-up photographs of certain details and then depicting those details in paintings that present themselves as abstract: one more way of erasing the line between abstraction and realism. His latest work presents photographs of details from a painting called No 648-2 (Web 4 ZZB), which he produced in 1987. To my eye, this magnificent abstraction evokes the elements. Its great black vertical bands suggest columns, or tree trunks rising from the earth amid lush green vegetation; its ragged tongues of orange and yellow suggest rising flames; its patches of blue suggest patches of sky or of water, or of sky reflected in water – the watery reflection of a forest ambushed by fire. Here then is something like a temple to Empedocles, the ancient Greek philosopher who first defined the universe as a compound of earth, water, fire, and air.

42 James A. W. Heffernan To compose his latest work, which has just appeared as an illustrated book entitled War Cut (Web 4 ZZC), Richter photographed 216 details from this painting and juxtaposed them with blocks of prose (Web 4 ZZD): passages cut from articles published in a German newspaper (the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung) on March 20 and 21, 2003 – during the first days of the war in Iraq. Each pair of facing pages presents two photographed details with two paragraphs on topics that are sometimes quite distinct – though they all pertain to the war. On the web page just cited, for instance, the first paragraph concludes an article on the role played by American Jews in the Congressional debate leading up to the war; the second paragraph describes desert sandstorms in Kuwait, where American and British troops awaited orders. How shall we read or view this juxtaposition of journalism and abstract painting, this collage made up of news paragraphs and rectangles of abstraction squared, so to speak, redoubled by the abstracting power of photographic concentration and enlargement on the details of what is already an abstract painting? We might observe, first of all, that there is nothing new about the invasion of art by newsprint. Newspaper cuttings entered works of art almost a hundred years ago, when Braque, Picasso, Matisse and other Cubists used them to make collages. But the scraps of newsprint pasted into or onto their collages do not demand to be read so much as to be caught immediately by the eye, just as we can recognize a column of newsprint as such without reading a single word of it. By contrast, the words in Richter’s book have been transplanted from newspaper columns to the printed pages of a book, so that they may gain the permanence of literature, which is the way Richter wants them to be read.58 He does not want them to be read as we might read a lexigraph, a postmodern painting of words such as Joseph Kosuth’s red (Web 4 ZZE), where the word “red” is defined by a text that is black and white and yet obviously meant – in the words of the tired old pun about newspapers – to be “read” all over. Richter’s new work does not iconize its words in this way. Neither collage nor lexigraph, it presents itself rather as an illustrated book that stretches the concept of illustration to the breaking point. Some of Richter’s images may perhaps illustrate parts of his text; the daubs of pink and red ranged across the broad yellow band of one picture (Web 4 ZZF) might conceivably signify soldiers caught in one of the sandstorms described by the accompanying text. But since Richter says that he read most of the texts only after pairing them off with specific pictures,59 we are challenged to see for ourselves – to find out for ourselves – what kind of meaning each image assumes when we view it, or read it, in light of the accompanying words. According to Richter himself, the book shows how “texts and images influence one another, change their meanings, with the images changing incomparably more because they are much more open and ambiguous.”60 This seems to imply that Richter’s images are as pliable as Rorshach blots, capable of signifying anything that a block of words projects onto them. But Richter’s images radiate a shaping power of their own. More precisely, they play a crucial role in constituting the form Jan Thorn-Priker, ‘A Picture is Worth 216 Newspaper Articles,’ [an interview with Gerhard Richter, trans. by Tim Nevill] New York Times, July 4, 2004, Arts and Leisure, p. 26 — hereafter cited as ‘Picture.’ 59 ‘Picture’, p.26. 60 ‘Picture’, p.26. 58

Speaking for Pictures 43

that this book seeks to impose on the ways in which we record, remember, and commemorate the opening of the war on Iraq. Consider an image (Web 4 ZZG) that accompanies two paragraphs drawn from two different articles: one about the mood at a German housing area for American troops who have left for Kuwait, the other about worldwide demonstrations against the war. Neither of these topics can be easily illustrated. The mood of an evacuated housing area might be suggested by the picture of an empty street, and worldwide demonstrations might be exemplified by the picture of a single urban crowd brandishing placards, but neither picture would be self-explanatory; each could deliver its meaning only with the obstetric aid of words. What sort of meaning, then, do the words about a housing area and antiwar demonstrations help to deliver from this image? Or conversely, what sort of form does this image bring to the upheavals that marked the beginning of the war? I begin with some observations on form. Two contrasting kinds of form dominate this image (Web 4 ZZH). One kind of form is rectilinear: streaks and bands of orange and black that result from photographing a detail of the original painting at a tilt of ninety degrees, so that its strong verticals become horizontals. Set against this rectilinear background are a set of curvilinear forms: rounded, sinuous, protoplasmic blobs of blue and white, with a flowerlike shoot of gold in the very center. Whatever this whole image signifies, or can be plausibly said to signify, must spring at least in part from the contrast between its two basic kinds of form. So let me try one more step. Though I have not yet figured out how to link this image with the evacuation of housing areas, its juxtaposition of rectilinear and curvilinear forms can fairly readily serve as a way of imagining worldwide demonstrations against the war. War and its instruments are pitilessly levelling. The terrorist attacks of 9/11 first levelled the World Trade Towers; in response, tanks streaking across the deserts of Iraq levelled many of its people while bombs levelled buildings in Baghdad and elsewhere. Bombs are typically dropped, of course, but bullets travel horizontally, and it is not hard to see the streaks of black and orange as the sign of relentless gunfire, or – for that matter – as the red and white stripes of the American flag drastically discolored by the rocket’s red glare. In this light, literally as well as figuratively, the curvilinear blobs of white, blue, and gold could be viewed as explosions, bombs bursting in air, chaotic eruptions paradoxically generated by the relentlessly levelling uniformity of war machines and of men trained to march in straight lines. But the rounded and sinuous forms may also be viewed as signs of resistance and protest streaming irresistibly into the battlefield of our vision from nearly every corner of the picture and taking possession of its center. If the American flag once again became a battle flag, this image may suggest that millions of protestors refused to be caught up in its fabric, that they would sooner rend it than be wrapped within its folds – like the nearly one thousand American soldiers who have now come home in coffins draped with flags. * * *

44 James A. W. Heffernan War Cut, as I say, is a brand new book, and these are just my first impressions. But I think I can confidently say that the recent work of Gerhard Richter shows two things. Abstract art is anything but dead, and it thrives on its symbiotic relation to language. In spite of its socalled “will to silence,” abstract art has always prompted us to think and to articulate our thoughts about what we see. If we think about abstract art in terms of pure abstraction, which is in fact very difficult to do, we will see very little. But it remains possible to think and talk about abstract art in specific and sometimes surprisingly traditional terms. When critics like Michael Fried argue that Jackson Pollock liberated line from figuration, he is telling a story of what Pollock did and at the same time making a statement about what his pictures mean – even while simply seeming to describe their formal properties. But if geometrical forms are figures, as Fried himself says, then Pollock’s work is geometrically figural, and we can recognize and name its figures just as readily as we can recognize the vortices of Turner. To talk about abstract art, even in rigorously formal terms, is to begin the work of translating it into words that return us to the world of specific objects in space and time, like the shade of Jasper Johns that separates night and day, inside and outside. As the twentieth century gives way to the twenty-first, Gerhard Richter’s restless alternation between photographic realism and enigmatic abstraction suggests, I think, that the wall between the two is beginning to fall. And his very latest juxtaposition of abstract images and news stories about the war in Iraq seems to tell us one more thing. If the wall between realism and abstraction is falling, it is falling right into the meeting place of language and abstract art.

2. EARLY MODERN TO MODERN: REPRESENTATIONS, APPROPRIATIONS

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Derek Brewer

Seeing and Writing Venus in Spenser, Shakespeare, Titian The goddess Venus, known to the Greeks as Aphrodite, is one of the oldest figures in Greek and Latin European mythology and literature. Representations of her drew on yet more ancient sources yet she is easily invoked even today, in the form of a beautiful, usually naked woman. Many stories have been told about her, her lovers, and her son Cupid. The multiplicity of references has evoked in general terms and in many variants two main responses, either of approval, often with divine associations, or disapproval, usually with sensual associations. She was also early associated with the planet we call Venus, which exercised ambivalent astrological influences. The good aspect of Venus became associated with divine love, and with generation; the bad with lust. About the end of the fifth century A.D, the Latin writer Fulgentius wrote a book on mythology which was influential until the nineteenth century in European art and literature in demonising Venus, but there were always influential writers and artists in favour of her, and the contest between the two aspects is the subject of this paper concentrating on three great Renaissance names, Spenser, Shakespeare, Titian. In The Faerie Queene (1590, 1596) Spenser is famous for vividly descriptive “writing for seeing” but his descriptions are “rhetorical” not realistic; they always have further meaning of different kinds, as analysed in the paper. Spenser was perhaps the last great poet in English to respond naturally to the archaic symbolic world in which vision is the vehicle of many united but not always mutually consistent moral and intellectual propositions. He draws on many sources portraying Venus as either good or bad but in the end the good Venus, symbol of generation, “mother of all forms” is the subject of the climactic vision of Venus in Book IV of The Faerie Queene. By contrast Shakespeare in his narrative poem Venus and Adonis (1593) tells the Classical story of the doomed love of the mature voluptuous Venus and the handsome boy Adonis in naturalistic terms. The great Italian painter Titian (c.1487 – 1576) portrayed Venus in many pictures sometimes differently interpreted but gorgeously colourful, usually naked. His paintings may have influenced Shakespeare but often retain something of Spenser’s symbolic power.

Venus represents sexual love and no European reader of Spenser comes to her without some preliminary knowledge that enables perception, as well as deriving from perception. Venus has more multiple significations than any other figure in traditional European mythology and because she represents sexual love evokes responses from other traditions, most notably Biblical, and medieval Christian. In the philosophical tradition of Greek there are from Plato two Venuses, one heavenly, one earthly. Cicero summarises tradition to find four Venuses, heavenly, earthly, lustful, and of human origin. Venus was the name of the earliest planet to be named, and had much influence, mostly beneficial and fertilising. The great poem by Lucretius De Natura Rerum, not known in the Middle Ages but rediscovered in the early fifteenth century begins with an invocation to Venus as the principle of creation. It was known and briefly referred to by Spenser in The Faerie Queene (IV, X, 5). But Lucretius in his fourth book has an attack on the passion of love. Virgil presents a divine but maternal Venus, ultimate ancestress of the Roman emperors. There are a huge number of references to Venus as the goddess of all kinds of love, with many attributes good and bad, several lovers. Love is a many-pictured thing, arousing much sympathy. Who is not touched by love?1

1

The basic account of the use of mythological figures in European literature remains that by Jean Seznec, The Survival of the Pagan Gods: The Mythological Tradition and its Place in Renaissance Humanism and Art,

48 Derek Brewer But against this is to be set the power of the early Christian church best represented by St Augustine’s mighty work The City of God (412-27), in which the heathen deities retained some power but were seen as malicious demons. Of these Venus was not the least. An example of the power of this work is given by one Fulgentius, a minor writer but a major influence in mythography. About 500 AD he wrote in Latin a collection of Mythologiae which is a most convenient collection of summaries of the characters and actions of the pagan deities, with allegorical interpretations much to their disadvantage. I refer here to his principal though not his only reference to Venus. In this extract Fulgentius has just referred to the competition between the goddess Juno, and Minerva for the approval of the young shepherd and future prince of Troy, Paris. Juno and Minerva have just been described and allegorised. They have taken Venus as the third one, as the symbol of the life of pleasure. Venus they explained either as the good things of life according to the Epicureans, or as the empty things of life according to the Stoics, for the Epicurean praise pleasure but the Stoics condemn it: the first cultivate licence; the others want no part of it. Whereby she is called Aphrodite, for in Greek afros is the word for foam, either because lust rises momentarily like foam and turns to nothing, or because the ejaculation of seed is foamy. Then the poets relate that when Saturn’s genitals were cut off with a scythe and thrown into the sea, Venus was born from them – a piece of poetic folly meaning nothing less than that Saturn is called Chronos in Greek, for in Greek chronos is the word for time. The powers of the seasons, that is, crops, are totally cut off by the scythe and, cast into the liquids of the belly, as it were into the sea, needs must produce lust. For abundance of satiety creates lust, as Terence says: “Venus grows cold without Ceres and Bacchus.” Also they depict her naked, either because she sends out her devotees naked or because the sin of lust is never cloaked or because it only suits the naked. They also considered roses as under her patronage, for roses both grow red and have thorns, as lust blushes at the outrage to modesty and pricks with the sting of sin; and as the rose gives pleasure, but is swept away by the swift movement of the seasons, so lust is pleasant for a moment, but then disappears forever. Also under her patronage they place doves, for the reason that birds of this species are fiercely lecherous in their lovemaking; with her they also associate the three Graces (Carites), two turned towards us and one turned away from us, because all grace sets off alone but returns twofold; the Graces are naked because no grace has any part of subtle ornament. They also depict her swimming in the sea, because all lust suffers shipwreck of its affairs, whence also Porfyrius in his Epigrams declares: “The shipwrecked sailor of Venus in the deep, naked and destitute.” She is also depicted carrying a sea-shell, because an organism of this kind, as Juba notes in his physiological writings, is always linked in open coupling2

Fulgentius a few pages further on re-tells from Homer the story of how Venus, being married to Vulcan, committed adultery with Mars (Odyssey, 8.266-369) which is the oldest popular comic story in the Western tradition, endlessly repeated, e.g. in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. For Fulgentius, what “the prating poets” really mean by this story is that valour is corrupted by lust.3 Later Fulgentius refers to the marriage of Peleus and Thetis, where the original rivalry of the three goddesses for the golden apple is explained, the apple having been given by Eris, Discord, the wicked fairy not invited to the marriage feast of Peleus and

2 3

Bollingen Series XXXVIII (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1953). There is an enormous secondary literature, only quoted here when of immediate use. Fulgentius, Fulgentius the Mythographer, transl. L.G.Whitbread (Columbus, Oh: Ohio State University Press, 1971), pp.66-7. Fulgentius the Mythographer, p.72.

Seeing and Writing Venus 49 Thetis. According to the allegory the goddesses now represent parts of the body. Venus is the kidneys and sex organs, connected rather oddly to the heel, which was the only vulnerable part of Achilles, son of Peleus and Thetis – thus showing that human power is subject to lust, whose seat is said to be in the heel and big toe. Lust itself is a sweet nothing, a phrase which has its history.4 Venus is also the lover of Adonis, son of the incestuous union of Myrrha and her father. Adonis represents a sweet taste as well as myrrh and Venus fell in love with Adonis “because this kind of liquid is very fiery.”5 Adonis becomes strong drink. Nothing Venus represents can be good. Consistency of interpretation is nothing. This account is constantly referred to by mythographers as late as the sixteenth century, though much built upon. It represents what many would say is only the earthly or bad Venus, but for some it became the dominant image because it linked up with the medieval Christian church’s hostility to sexuality and to women. This became particularly powerful after the Hildebrandine reforms of Gregory VII in the eleventh century, in which the claims of virginity were seen as superior to married faithfulness and there was an enormous effort to enforce the celibacy of the clergy. Sixteenth-century Puritanism and Spenser, will never be understood until we appreciate that they rated married chastity higher than virginity or celibacy.6 Perhaps the most astonishing development in the iconology of Venus was within the force of Neoplatonism especially of the Florentine school of Marsilio Ficino (1433-99). The three rival naked goddesses who appeared to Paris are interpreted by the Italian mythographer Caldiera about the middle of the fifteenth century as Faith, Hope and Charity, while Paris represents the Apostle Paul. The central thesis of the Neoplatonists was that love governs the universe – not an original theory, but put forth with a new intellectual complexity and idealism. Venus therefore occupied a key position though she was not the only representative of love. The result was the great wave of mythographers of the sixteenth century, where word and image are so intimately conjoined, Giraldus, Comes, Cartari, of whom Comes (or Conti) was certainly known to Spenser.7 Fifteenth- and sixteenth-century mythography is a great luxuriant garden, or jungle, or swamp, according to your critical taste, of mythographical creation, catalogue and analysis, where creation and analysis are fully intermingled. It has been studied by brilliant scholars but hardly accords with current or fashionable views of “the Renaissance.” It was archaic, archaicising, backward-looking, inventive, pictorial, allegorical, internally inconsistent, full of serious good will and intensity. In it word and image are deeply entangled in bizarre designs. It was not the way of the future, of new science, of Enlightenment. It held enormous appeal for Spenser. Here I quote C.S. Lewis as a starting point for the way or rather the ways in which we should approach Spenser’s work. 4 5 6 7

Cf. Fulgentius the Mythographer, p.91. Fulgentius the Mythographer, p.92. For a brief account see David Daniell, The Bible in English (New Haven and London: Yale U.P., 2003), pp.376ff and passim. See Lilio Gregorio Giraldi, De deis gentium (Basel, 1548); Natale Conti, Mythologiae sive explicationis fabularum libri X (Venice, 1551); Vincenzo Cartari, Le imagine colla sposizione degli dei antichi (Venice, 1556). All of these went through many editions.

50 Derek Brewer We now know that symbols are the natural speech of the soul, a language older and more universal than words. This truth, if not understood exactly as modern psychology would understand it, was accepted and acted upon by the ancient and medieval world, and had not yet been lost in Spenser’s day. He came, in fact, just in time, just before the new outward-looking, rationalizing spirit which was going to give us victory over the inanimate while cutting us off from the depths of our own nature […] Spenser was the last poet who could use the old language seriously and who had an audience that understood it8

To examine Spenser’s method I leave for a moment the complex image of Venus to begin at the very beginning of The Faerie Queene. The Proem sets the scene of historical chivalric fiction. The first image is of a noble knight riding over the plain in armour with a silver shield. Even nowadays a knight in armour is a recognisable image with chivalric implications. His armour has dents of old wounds, he wears a red cross, recently much vulgarised as an English icon but taken seriously by Spenser, while in the following stanza we are told he serves the Queene of Faerie land who we have been told in the Letter to Raleigh also represents Queen Elizabeth I of England. At first this looks very discordant with modern taste, until we think of The Lord of the Rings, and when in the next stanza we hear of the knight’s foe the Dragon, horrible and stern, we may even think of Harry Potter. The fourth stanza of the poem is of the same kind but less familiar. A louely Ladie rode him faire beside, Vpon a lowly Asse more white than snow, Yet she much whiter, but the same did hide Vnder a vele, that wimpled was full low, And ouer all a blacke stole she did throw, As one that inly mournd: so was she sad, And heauie sat vpon her palfry slow: Seemed in heart some hidden care she had, And by her in a line a milke white lambe she lad.9

This has an extraordinary combination of the visual and verbal, and my main point here is that Spenser uses visual and verbal image constantly to lead us beyond representation to significance. The picture is simple, archaic; Knight, Lady, Lamb. It is amazingly rich in significances. A lovely lady is herself an attractive image we immediately respond to as an image of feminine sweetness and beauty. The ass has biblical significance of humility, whiteness is purity, and truth; blackness veils it; the lamb is innocence and truth, as well as Christ. I concentrate on two points which relate to Spenser’s narrative method and style. First, the extreme whiteness, a commonplace in medieval romance. It is emblematic and vivid, taken for granted but in fact quite non-naturalistic. Of course medieval and Elizabethan ladies were praised for white skin. They were not sun-tanned peasant girls. Nor was there the modern cult of a woman’s skin the colour of leather. But surely no one ever took this degree of whiteness literally. If we did it is horrible, reminiscent of Coleridge’s phrase, “as white as leprosy.” The idea of whiteness, social and moral, dominates the literal 8 9

C.S. Lewis, Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Literature, ed. W. Hooper (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966), p.137. Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, ed.A.C.Hamilton (London and New York: Longman, 1977), I, 1, iv, p.30. Hereafter cited by Book, Canto and stanza.

Seeing and Writing Venus 51 fact. Moreover, if we took Spenser’s description literally we could not see her whiteness because it is covered in a black cloak, with other moral implications. Spenser tells us she looked sad, and again this is more a matter of easily realised significance than visual description. My other point concerns the milk-white lamb. It is a vivid image. Yet in terms of visual truth it is an obvious absurdity – a lamb led on a lead, going along by a horse like a well-trained dog. The lamb is never mentioned again, and I am willing to bet that no reader has ever worried about what happened to it. Several principles emerge. First, we are dealing with a rhetorical use of the image. Second, knowledge precedes perception – we have to have some understanding before we see the image, to know already about knights and ladies and lambs, but then the image in turn extends knowledge beyond the visual effect. The result is not abstraction but the multiple significance of the image beyond immediate perception. The multiplicity of significance is to be noted: there are more meanings than one, and they may be realistically incompatible. The lack of further reference to the lamb shows also the kind of narrative we are dealing with, which we can sum up as sequence without realistic causation. But we have only just started on the story. To anticipate, what we shall find connects the narration is not causation but what we must call purpose – the Redcross Knight is on a quest, which is a general quality, a factor of life, a sensation of life. We can sum up a great deal of life as either quest or conflict; but the most interesting story is one that combines quest with conflict. And when we refer to “purpose” in the narrative we are implying an underlying pattern such as is found in myth or, more familiarly, fairy story. Book I is the foundation level of The Faerie Queene, telling of Holiness through the imagery of the Redcross Knight’s quest and his relation to the lady, who is a lovely lady, but is called Una, that is “One,” because Truth is One in Biblical and philosophical teaching, and is also Holy Church, and innocence and goodness. The meanings unfold through the story and in every case we must maintain the ultimate unity of image and significance together with the variability of their relationship. The story develops through Book II, the book of Temperance, consolidating Holiness, then changes its quality in Book III and Book IV. Up till now the point of view has been masculine, though women have a plentiful part to play for both good and ill, but in Books III and IV the point of view is female, feminine, even feminist when Spenser reaches the greatest variety and the richest mythopoeic power. After the open plain the Forest is the main setting, the ancient European source in romance, folktale and practical life, of the surrounding mystery of life, of fear and promise, further resource, the wider world. The hero is now the heroine, Britomart, who is also a powerful knight armed with a magic spear, which is chastity. Again the image is extended to the metaphor. The metaphor refers to a spear which defeats all opponents, a purely external image, but it refers to an inner quality of mind as well as a physical and not purely passive state. Chastity we may take as the moral quality which extends virginity, since chastity is proper to faithful marriage; and the whole set of values and virtues has, for cultural reasons, become like most Christian teaching in modern Britain both unknown and incomprehensible. The important point to make here is the nature of Puritan teaching about sex, as Spenser then proceeds to make clear through glowing imagery. Virginity has its own supremacy as he makes clear in his praise of his sovereign lady, Queen Elizabeth I, the Virgin Queen.

52 Derek Brewer Virginity is imaged in the flight of the beautiful Florimel from the lustful Forster who appears so suddenly All suddenly out of the thickest brush, Vpon a milk-white Palfrey all alone, A goodly Ladie did foreby them rush, Whose face did seeme as cleare as Christall stone, And eke through feare as white as whales bone: Her garments all were wrought of beaten gold. And all her steed with tinsell trappings shone, Which fled so fast, that nothing mote him hold, And scarse them leasure gaue, her passing to behold.

(III, I, 15)

Florimel is praised in terms of medieval English love-lyric “as white as whales bone” (I, 15, 5). She is also dressed in gold and such detail has its significance too. But imagery may have variable meaning. Early in Book I the vile enchantress Duessa, whose name signifies “doubleness” appears in royal golden magnificence (I, 4, 8ff.) But she is disdainful and vain and has a dreadful Dragon at her feet. The poet leaves no doubt that she is both attractive and evil – as gold may be. The interpretation is clear but Spenser at first allows some ambiguity. In the next Canto Duessa declares herself “the daughter of Deceipt and Shame.” Spenser shows that objects in themselves are morally ambiguous; what is beautiful may be good or evil. So we notice another principle, that “context determines meaning” both visual and verbal, even when the image is attractive. So Florimel’s gold dress signifies both beauty and goodness. Again do not press the realistic detail. A garment of beaten gold would surely be less than convenient for riding a horse, though tinsel in the sixteenth century was just shiny material with no bad connotation. We do best to think in terms of a medieval picture, and not in terms of more “realistic” and figurative modern pictures which aim to represent the solidity, the finite reality of the object pictured, with the viewer firmly “outside.”10 By contrast to the modern, in The Faerie Queene the reader’s point of view changes and the participation of the reader, who is also the viewer, is part of the pleasure.11 Norman Bryson, in his Vision and Painting: The Logic of the Gaze (London: Macmillan, 1983), attacks the twentieth-century mode of thought which sees a picture as attempting to be “the Essential Copy” of a real object, representing an “external” reality, rather than its own activity. One may disagree with various aspects of the argument but it is useful in emphasising the independent activity constituted by a work of art and of denying the aim of art to be a conclusive “realism,” as exemplified by E. Auerbach, Mimesis (whom Bryson does not quote) or as he avers is exemplified by E. Gombrich, Art and Illusion (London: Phaidon, 1960). Bryson finds even Titian’s Bacchus and Ariadne too detached and static, with the viewer conceived of as firmly external (Bryson, pp.94-6). 11 Of course in all reading sympathetic participation by the viewer in creating the meaning of the text must be taken for granted. How much participation, how much preliminary knowledge, must be provided by the reader will vary. Apart from the inevitable demands on linguistic and historical knowledge made by the passage of four hundred years we must take into account the development of the desire for objectification which is part of Bryson’s argument. Spenser, though an older contemporary of Shakespeare’s, emphasises by his deliberate choice of “antique” subject-matter and a somewhat artificially “antique” language, that he places himself at an earlier but not necessarily deficient, stage of cultural development, as did his models Ariosto and Tasso, who were in the forefront of their times. In Elizabethan England Spenser’s natural antithesis, also a younger 10

Seeing and Writing Venus 53 The “pictures,” or “pageants” as Spenser himself would call them, portray moments of action, the persons move across our mental stage, whether in stately walk or, like Florimel, fleeing rapidly out of our sight and knowledge to reappear at a later stage of her story. Their significance is always complex. Florimel is part of the complex presentation of love and thus of Venus which is at the centre of The Faerie Queene, and shown at all the levels of imagery we have so far discussed. To understand the nature of Venus is to understand The Faerie Queene. Venus is only one of the representations of love in The Faerie Queene but she is a key figure, and very typical of Spenser’s method of aggregation of apparently incompatible images. The images are separate aspects of a larger whole. Spenser has no single controlling point of perspective, though he has a general purpose and pattern. Venus first appears as described in a set of tapestries telling of her love of Adonis. This is in the Castle Joyous which we shall eventually learn belongs to the evil but beautiful Malecasta, unchaste and promiscuous love. Such a description is highly rhetorical and usually described as an ecphrasis.12 The significance is thus compromised, physical lust has an unhappy end. Spenser’s protagonist now becomes the heroine, Britomart, beautiful and chaste, brave and chivalrous. In her the virtues of both gentleman and lady are combined. Here Spenser is in advance of his own and much later time in making chastity a chivalric virtue. Chastity is a part of honour, but traditionally was so only for women. For Spenser it is crucial. But it cannot remain unchallenged and this is the point of Britomart’s adventure in the Castle Joyous. It is also the point of this particular use of ecphrasis. The verbal description of action in a picture makes it more remote than the direct description of action. We stand back, and admire, but may also judge. The story of Venus and Adonis in this tapestry is told with only moral implications and hints from the poet, though usually vivid. Adonis is called Venus’s “paramour,” a dubious word. Venus seduces him with all the traditional charms of garlands, a shady place, a bath in a fountain (stanza 35) laying him to sleep under her mantle And whilest he bath’d with her two crafty spyes She secretly would search each daintie lim (III, i, 36, 5-6)

contemporary, would be Bacon (1561-1626). (Cf. C.S. Lewis, p.137, on Spenser’s use of symbol and archetypal imagery.) 12 For ecphrasis in general see Heffernan, J.A.W. Museum of Words: The Poetics of Ekphrasis from Homer to Ashbery (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press,1993). See also S.Alderson, ‘Ut pictura poesis and its discontents in late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century England and France’, Word and Image 11, (1995), 256-63. Mario Klarer (guest ed.), Ekphrasis: Word and Image 15:1 (January-March 1999). On Spenser generally I have greatly benefited from the annotation in A.C. Hamilton’s above cited edition of The Faerie Queene. I am also indebted to John Manning’s learned entry on Venus in The Spenser Encyclopaedia, ed. by A.C.Hamilton (Toronto, On: Univ of Toronto Press, 1995). In the huge accumulation of scholarship and criticism on Spenser I note only those works to which I owe a very specific point. For a sketch of Venus according to mythographers c500-c1800, see Derek Brewer, The Fabulous History of Venus, Sandars Lectures in the University of Cambridge, 1991, unpublished text in the University Library of Cambridge, with further references.

54 Derek Brewer So did she steale his heedlesse hart away.

(III, i, 37, 1)

The words tell us this is the sensual Venus, and goes on to tell how the tapestry shows he was Deadly engored of a great wild Bore And by his side the Goddesse grouelling.

(III, i, 38, 1-2)

It does not take much more description of the whole tapestried room, full of beds, damsels, knights, dancing and revelling, to realise that they are swimming deep in sensual desires And Cupid still amongst them kindled lustfull fires. (III, i, 39, 8-9)

There is no doubt both of the pleasure and its wrongfulness, so we are well prepared to meet the beautiful Malecasta and the further comic incident when Malecasta slinks into bed with the sleeping Britomart. We see all this as interested spectators from the outside, with enough visual clues to imagine the scene, enough further comment to know how to judge it. It is one of several variants of erotic love portrayed in Books III and IV. Malecasta has six knights whose allegorical names show stages of lechery, Gazing, Chatting, Courtly Play, Kissing, Drunkenness, and night-time Copulation, but Britomart defeated them earlier and now they are only shadows to her (III, i, 45, 1-9), as they are to the reader. The theme of chaste love has many variants in Book III, but I have to leave them aside to pick up the portrayal of Venus in very different guise in Book III, Canto VI, differing in significance from the first Adonis episode. This is one of the richest examples of Spenser’s mythopoeic power, and multiple meanings. The core of it is a presentation of Venus which holds together many earlier strands. It is the control point of Spenser’s thought on love, based on strongly visual impressions but only occasionally of a kind that might be painted. We start with the miraculous birth of the beautiful Belphoebe who in some ways represents Queen Elizabeth I but embodies imagery far beyond. She is first described astrologically but briefly where Jove laught on Venus from his soueraigne see. (III, vi, 2)

Then, says the poet Her berth was of the wombe of Morning dew,

(III, vi, 3)

a marvellous evocation of spring morning and freshness. The meaning is mysterious until we recognise a quotation from the Psalms “Thy birthes dew is the dew that doth from the wombe of morning fall” (Psalms 110, 3). Another echo is of the miraculous dew that fell on Gideon’s fleece (Judges VI, 36-40) alluded to in that delightful medieval lyric

Seeing and Writing Venus 55 He cam also stille As dew in Aprille.

All these are references to the Incarnation. They in turn blended with Neoplatonic ideas of the act of embodiment of the Platonic Idea.13 There is much here to respond to. This is only the beginning of the wealth of allusion in this canto. It tells how Venus lost Cupid, seen partly as a fractious child, partly as a rebellious teenager, since he may be off with some girls. As Venus searches she has a confrontation with Diana which is reminiscent of Actaeon’s discovery of Diana bathing, which was a favourite Renaissance illustration and bore many allegorical meanings, but the argument between Venus and Diana, invented by Spenser, is also like a family quarrel between sisters. Spenser finally shows Diana and Venus reconciled. Venus is both a planetary deity and an anxious mother searching for her straying son in Court, City, Country, Forest, with satirical comments by the poet on the pains, or the absence, of love. It results in the discovery of Belphoebe’s twin, also a product of miraculous birth, called Amoret, who represents suffering and tempted chaste love, eventually marital love. But the story then goes on to the most astonishing of Spenser’s adaptations of the story of Venus. We come to the Garden of Adonis, an ancient idea, originally of a practical forcing-bed for plants, touched on briefly in Plato’s Phaedrus (276b), but now central to a mythological picture of continuous creation where sexual love is the driving force. It sited was in fruitfull soyle of old, And girt in with two walles on either side; The one of yron, the other of bright gold, That none might thorough breake, nor ouer-stride: And double gates it had, which opened wide, By which both in and out men moten pas; Th’one faire and fresh, the other old and dride: Old Genius the porter of them was, Old Genius, the which a double nature has. He letteth in, he letteth out to wend, All that to come into the world desire; A thousand thousand naked babes attend About him day and night, which doe require, That he with fleshly weedes would them attire: Such as him list, such as eternall fate Ordained hath, he clothes with sinfull mire, And sendeth forth to liue in mortall state, Till they againe returne back by the hinder gate. After that they againe returned beene, They in that Gardin planted be againe; And grow afresh, as they had neuer seene Fleshly corruption, nor mortall paine. 13

T.P. Roche, The Kindly Flame, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1964), p.108. Roche does not note the allusion to Gideon’s fleece.

56 Derek Brewer Some thousand yeares so doen they there remaine; And then of him are clad with other hew, Or sent into the chaungefull world againe, Till thither they returne, where first they grew: So like a wheele around they runne from old to new.

(III, vi, 31-3)

Yet even here Time is the enemy who grieves “their great mother Venus.” Yet pittie often did the gods relent, To see so faire things mard, and spoyled quight: And their great mother Venus did lament The losse of her deare brood, her deare delight: Her hart was pierst with pittie at the sight, When walking through the Gardin, them she spyde, Yet no’te she find redresse for such despight. For all that liues, is subject to that law: All things decay in time, and to their end do draw.

(III, vi, 40)

But we must go further. And in the thickest couert of that shade, There was a pleasant arbour, not by art, But of the trees owne inclination made, Which knitting their rancke braunches part to part, With wanton yuie twyne entrayld athwart, And Eglantine, and Caprifole emong, Fashiond aboue within their inmost part, That nether Phoebus beams could through them throng, Nor Aeolus sharp blast could worke them any wrong.

(III, vi, 44)

There seems no doubt that this is a sexual reference, though rather bizarre. The myrtle, traditionally associated with Venus, is also a sexual image. Uninhibited yet not licentious pleasure is the climax. There wont faire Venus often to enjoy Her deare Adonis ioyous company, And reape sweet pleasure of the wanton boy; There yet, some say, in secret he does ly, Lapped in flowres and pretious spycery, By her hid from the world, and from the skill Of Stygian Gods, which doe her loue enuy; But she her selfe, when euer that she will, Possesseth him, and of his sweetnesse takes her fill. And sooth it seems they say: for he may not For euer die, and euer buried bee In balefull night, where all things are forgot; All be he subiect to mortalitie, Yet is eterne in mutabilitie,

Seeing and Writing Venus 57 And by succession made perpetuall, Transformed oft, and chaunged diuerslie: For him the Father of all formes they call; Therefore needs mote he liue, that liuing giues to all.

(III, vi, 46-7)

Adonis now lies in eternal bliss enjoying his goddess and enjoyed by her, while the wild boar is in a strong rocky cave beneath the Mount. The wound that killed Adonis is now interpreted as lust which had surfeited him, by a pun on “cloyed” meaning both “to pierce” and “to surfeit,” but is now safely buried under the very mount of love. Freed from mere lust, love is now the creative force of the world. The description of the mount in Paradise is at one level typical of ordinary natural description, and painting might reach even to suggest the dropping gum. Educated knowledge would be needed to appreciate the Ovidian list of flowers, which I have not quoted, and of sad lovers “transformed of yore” (III, vi, 45) but sixteenth century painters could have relied on that kind of knowledge. There is the transformation of suffering into beauty and the further suggestion that though the individual dies the species endures. Adonis is the Father of all Forms, descending into the womb, and suggests the entire biological cycle, defeating the boar, who represents not only controlled lust, but death itself. For the moment we now leave Venus. In The Faerie Queene themes and topics appear and disappear like themes in a Wagnerian opera. After a fabliau-like episode Britomart enters the house of the enchanter Bisurane who tyrannises over the lovely lady Amoret. Britomart passes through fire to a room depicting the loves of the classical gods with more ecphrasis giving luscious detail of the metamorphoses of love, culminating in the masque of Cupid emblematic of the stages of Britomart’s love for Artegall, who will eventually be her husband. Book IV is about the friendship which even the highest form of sexual love aspires to. The general subject is Harmony, or Concord, and soon we learn of the girdle of the heroine Florimel, which once belonged to Venus. Spenser takes over a story told as early as Homer of Dame Venus girdle by her steemed deare What time she vsd to liue in wiuely sort But layd aside, when so she vsd her looser sport.(IV, v, 4, 7-9)

There is no attempt at consistency or naturalistic characterisation, simply aspects of love, or sex, which everyone knows exist. So we have a brief account of the loves of Venus, Vulcan and Mars, and the first mention of the three Graces who had always been subject to further interpretation, for which the word allegory seems too heavy. There is even more to come. The knight Scudamour who loves Amoret tells of his adventure forcing his way past various such representative foes as Doubt, Delay etc, to come to yet another beautiful garden where Art supports Nature, a parallel to the Garden of Adonis, and equally richly described. But here one of the people in the story is describing it, so that there is both a sort of indirectness, and a special inwardness. Within the garden is a temple, richly described, and there at last “the Goddesse selfe did stand / Upon an altar of

58 Derek Brewer some costly masse, excelling all in beauty.” Spenser always emphasises the supremacy of beauty which in the end is synonymous with goodness yet has its own strangeness. This supreme image of Venus is covered with a veil, And both her feete and legs together twyned Were with a snake, whose head and tail were fast combined (IV, x, 40, 8-9)

and the reason is, “she hath both kinds in one,” Both male and female, both under one name: She syre and mother in her selfe alone Begets and eke conceives, ne needeth other none.

(IV, x, 41, 7-9)

Many lovers lie about her. She is Great Venus, Queene of beautie and of grace,

(IV, x, 44, 1)

who made all the world, “the root of all that ioyous is” Great God of men and women, queene of th’ayre Mother of laughter and welspringe of blisse. (IV, x, 47, 7-8)

This is the climax of Spenser’s Puritan version of the rich fertility of the world, yet with nothing of that distrust of imagery which was an important part of so much of Puritanism. Most English churches are now visually the poorer for that Taliban-like hatred of the visual and consequently of the historical which characterised too much of the Reformation. Spenser here shows himself in a great ancient tradition in which the image and the word are joined like Spenser’s own hermaphrodite of love. At last, in the fragmentary Book VII Venus is taken up into the image of all-creating Nature, a figure for God himself, transcending sex and gender (VII, vii, 5ff.). By comparison how different is Shakespeare while using the familiar Venus and Adonis imagery. Shakespeare begins his almost contemporary poem Venus and Adonis with Venus’s ardent wooing, pulling the sweating Adonis from his horse and rather comically Over one arm the lusty courser’s rein Under the other was the tender boy Who blushed and pouted in a dull disdain.

(31-3)

Backward she pushed him as she would be thrust And govern’d him in strength though not in lust.

(41-2)

This is plain with no hinterland of magical suggestion and so the whole poem goes on with realistic description enlivened by disdainful though remarkable natural similes as where Adonis, hoping to escape, raises his head Like a dive-dapper peering through a wave

(86)

Seeing and Writing Venus 59 I have seen these charming birds in Cotswold streams, flickering about, walking under the water, bobbing up. It is a wonderful image but with only naturalistic liveliness and slightly comic appropriateness, like the famous later image of Adonis’s superb horse rushing to catch a mare, a contrast with his master, a contemptuous animal inverse comparison with Venus (259-318) especially as the mare assuages the stallion’s sensual urge. Adonis contrasts her lust with true love. Love comforteth like sunshine after rain But Lust’s effect is tempest after sun. (799-800)

He tears himself from Venus’s over-warm embraces. She rages around until she finds Adonis dead from the boar’s attack, and the poet elaborates on her grief with no mythical or allegorical references, except in her spiteful condemnation of all love (1132-64). Then the magic metamorphosis into a flower takes place, and she flies away in her chariot, drawn by silver doves to Paphos (1188-94). This and a passing reference to a myrtle grove (865) is all that remains of mythological Venus. Although the poem is rich in country imagery there is real disgust at unregulated lustful female desire. Shakespeare has a vein of disgust at sexuality which occurs elsewhere in his plays and sonnets, a counterpart of his occasional coarse bawdiness, equally realistic. When we recur to our theme of Venus we find the mythological symbolic world, as Lewis remarks, now lost in Shakespeare. And this is the case too with Titian, despite, or rather because of the luscious sensuous beauty of his paintings. There is a connection with Shakespeare here. Titian is not so far advanced along the road of objective reality, dissociated from symbolic powers, as Shakespeare. In time he is earlier than either Spenser or Shakespeare, born about 1492, dying at a great age (c 1578). He is still sensitive to the ancient symbolic world, still makes copious use of classical mythology in beautiful pictures. He was acquainted with Neoplatonic philosophising about love, and the doctrine of the two Venuses of which the most notable in comparison with Shakespeare is Adonis taking Leave from Venus in the Prado. Only here, as in Shakespeare’s poem, is Adonis shown as a recalcitrant lover and Panofsky makes an excellent case for the possibility of Shakespeare having seen it.14 Much of Titian’s own interest in the picture seems to have been in the technical details. No doubt this is always true of a painter but one must remark how in Titian all of Venus’s traditional attributes have disappeared. The same is true of the famous, gloriously luscious Venus of Urbino in the Uffizi, to such an extent that the question has been raised whether it is indeed a picture of Venus at all, or of what is politely called in art historical circles a

14

Titian painted the famous “Sacred and Profane Love” in the Borghese Gallery which Panofsky thought should be called “The Two Venuses” (Geminae Veneres), where the nude woman symbolises universal, eternal but “purely intelligible beauty” while the clothed woman represents the “generative force” that creates visible, tangible but perishable beauty. Titian painted other Venuses, see E. Panofsky, Studies in Iconology (London and New York: Oxford University Press, 1939; repr. New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1962), pp.152-69. See also E. Panofsky, Problems in Titian Mostly Iconographic (London: Phaidon,1969). On the relation to Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis see pp.118, 151-9.

60 Derek Brewer “courtesan” (in other words an upper-class prostitute).15 The painting has been the subject of much discussion. It may even have marital significance. I am not competent to judge, but the fact of the controversy is enough for my argument, that the symbolic vein is weakening in favour of a simple though sensuous materialism. First, let it be said that Titian’s mythological pictures do in many cases draw on that ancient symbolical world which I have quoted Lewis as seeing once a common possession of which Spenser is the last great poetic exemplar. But as we move to Titian’s Venus of Urbino and the many other Venuses he painted we are conscious of moving into a more objective world where the spectator is less inside the picture. Critics write increasingly, as Titian would, of technical constructs, as well as of the conscious creation of erotic images. Some have remarked how nearly pornographic such paintings are. Pornography is the product of the modern world’s view of things as external objects, beginning in the sixteenth century. Titian’s great friend was Pietro Aretino, notorious for his pornographic sonnets and their illustrations.16 A major theme of Western art is the female nude. It seems to have begun with Giorgione’s Sleeping Venus and reaches perhaps a natural conclusion in Manet’s Olympia where (they say) the subject is obviously a prostitute, representing sex as object, gratification of male desire, nothing to do with love, or generation, subject of the objective gaze, a different kind of seeing. But we still have earlier representations of Venus which may fill out the picture. To summarise, we have moved from a situation where, after the collapse of Classical Antiquity, word and image have been intimately linked, objectivity and subjectivity closely related; from the visible world as an image of the invisible world of greater reality, through to a progressive later objectification, a division between symbol and actuality, to a disappearance of the sense of the underlying symbolic reality of the world. Spenser is the last great poet in English to catch that remarkable sense of the real beauty of the visible world as reflecting the real beauty of what for him is the real ultimate truth of the world, where symbol is reality.

Rona Goffen (ed.), Titian’s ‘Venus of Urbino’ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1997). A valuable study. See also C.Hope, J.Fletcher, J.Dunkerton, M.Falomir, D.Joffé, with contributors, Titian (London: National Gallery / Yale, 2003). 16 Derek Brewer, ‘Some Observations on the Development of Literalism and Verbal Criticism’, Poetica (Tokyo:1974), 71-95. 15

Jesús Cora

John Donne’s Arcimboldesque Wit in “To Sir Edward Herbert. at Julyers”: A Partial Reading In this paper I discuss the first and last stanzas in John Donne’s verse letter “To Sir Edward Herbert. at Julyers” in the light of four paintings by Giuseppe Arcimboldo (1527-1593): Earth, c. 1570; Autumn, c. 1573; Summer, c. 1573; and The Librarian, c. 1566, together with an anonymous portrait of Sir Edward Herbert possibly after Sir Isaac Oliver (c. 1605-1608). In fact, John Donne used these and other Arcimboldo paintings as inspiration for his conceits in the poem. Donne’s language reproduces in an ekphrastic way the main elements of Arcimboldo’s composite heads, as well as their metamorphic, excessive, mannerist, grotesque quality. Donne grounds his wit both on the appropriation of these images to symbolise other concepts than those they originally represent and on the linguistic reproduction of the paradoxical visual tensions between integration and separation of the constituent elements of the whole, the inside and the outside, the container and the contained elements, and the metaphor and concepts of incorporation and assimilation. Donne uses the animals and human head of Earth as the starting point in his reflection on foolishness, on the instability of human self-consciousness, on reason and knowledge. Earth is the base for building these paradoxical relationships and for developing his equally paradoxical consideration of human reason and knowledge. Reason, if underdeveloped, reduces humans to animals, beasts, and its own devils that make them suffer because of selfinflicted evils. Conversely, if overdeveloped, it “chaw[s]” (i.e. chews) the whole world, and therefore is informed by its integration and incorporation, but, at the same time, is deformed and made infirm and ill, because of sheer excess. After the expression of these notions by chained conceits based on the juxtaposition of Arcimboldo’s paintings, Donne addresses Sir Edward Herbert in an equally unstable form of eulogium that in fact must be read as a grotesque, satirical criticism or, at best, a friendly warning. Donne unmistakably models this mock praise on Arcimboldo’s “The Librarian” that he uses in connection and comparison to the rest of Arcimboldo’s composite heads and to Sir Edward Herbert’s very portrait in order to express the latter’s far too bookish knowledge and lack of true, balanced self-consciousness and assessment of others, and the gossip that these limitations and the errors they provoke elicit among his friends.

In 1978, Roland Barthes wrote his brilliant essay “Arcimboldo, le mage et rhétoriqueur,” later translated into English as “Arcimboldo, Magician and Rhétoriqueur.” In it he shrewdly analyses Giuseppe Arcimboldo’s composite heads by establishing an analogy between Arcimboldo’s pictorial techniques and rhetorical figures of speech. In the course of his argumentation, Barthes explains: “I imagine that an ingenious artist could take all of Arcimboldo’s composite heads, combine them with a view to a new effect of meaning, and from their arrangement produce, for instance, a landscape, a city, a forest.”1 1

Roland Barthes, ‘Arcimboldo, or Magician and Rhétoriqueur’, The Responsibility of Forms. Critical Essays on Music, Art and Representation, trans. from the French by Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1985), pp. 129-48 (pp. 141-42). This paper includes quotations and references to the theories of several authors such as Roland Barthes, I.A. Richards, Noam Chomsky, etc. The reader may perhaps find surprising their being quoted and related in one way or another in the same piece of writing. My aim is to establish and explain the close relationship between John Donne’s poem and Arcimboldo’s paintings and not to follow any particular literary criticism theory or linguistics school. I have practised a healthy eclecticism and subordinated all my references to and quotations from the works of these authors to the need to find conceptual elements and terms that allowed me to be develop my extra-close visual (iconic) reading of the language of the text. With this move, I indeed believe to have identified and decoded Donne’s original

62 Jesús Cora Such an “ingenious artist” does actually exist and although he did not use all of Arcimboldo’s composite heads, indeed he used a considerable number of them in combination “with a view to a new effect of meaning” to create with their arrangement in a sequence, not a landscape, a city, or a forest, but a verse letter. As I will show in my paper, the artist that matches Barthes’s imagination is the English metaphysical poet John Donne and the text, the Arcimboldesque verse letter entitled “To Sir Edward Herbert. at Julyers” (ca. 1610). In his essay Barthes proposes that Arcimboldo had employed visual paradox, metaphor, metonymy, etc. as elements of a painterly rhetoric. In my paper I will show how Donne’s rhetoric in this particular poem, especially his technique of the extended conceit, is primarily based on a Renaissance adaptation of the ancient mnemotechnics of the Art of Memory. This particular technique is used here not to memorise a text, but to create it. The imagines agentes employed to build the text are not original mental images created by the rhetorician and set in an imaginary building that the mind’s eye of the speaker is to traverse to deliver a previously memorised text. Donne relies on an iconographic sequence that incorporates real visual materials existing outside the poet’s mind which his words reproduce and have as a source of imitation and derivative wit in the composition of a new, original text. These visual materials are eight of Arcimboldo’s paintings of composite heads (Earth, Autumn, Summer, The Cook, Water, Air, Fire, and The Librarian), an anonymous engraving The Fool’s Head World Map, – sometimes attributed to Arcimboldo –, and the portrait of Sir Edward Herbert by an unknown hand, possibly after a miniature portrait by Sir Isaac Oliver.2 It has been pointed out that this poem is “in part a reply to Herbert’s satire ‘The State Progress of Ill,’” a philosophical poem in which Sir Edward Herbert considers the origin of Ill in the world (evil, sin, and political ambition).3 Herbert expounds a disabused analysis of

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composition technique and the real humorous purpose and nature of the text. I do believe that it is still possible to do and say such a thing in these our postmodernist and poststructuralist days. The classical work on the Art of Memory is Frances A. Yates, The Art of Memory (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966; repr. London: Pimlico, 1997). Yates traces the history of the development of the Art of Memory from classical times to the Renaissance. It is a brilliant piece of scholarship but limited to tracing the evolution of this part of rhetoric. Yates, p. 100, records the mnemotechnical function of this rhetorical technique, but she also points out that from the influential use and definition of the Art of Memory by Thomas Aquinas in the Middle Ages, it could be used to generate imagery: “The art of memory was a creator of imagery which must surely have flowed out into creative works of art and literature.” Unfortunately, despite this affirmation, Yates does not identify, much less analyse, any literary text that was generated by the application of the Art of Memory. My field of research is precisely that: proving that a good number of Donne’s poems are a product of this technique in which the imagines agentes, the imagistic sources that inspire the conceits of the text, correspond to contemporary printed and painted iconographical materials. For another example of Donne’s use of iconography as materials for the Art of Memory (Alciato’s emblem CXXI) as a source for his conceits in Holy Sonnets I, see my article: Jesús Cora, ‘Donne’s Holy Sonnets I and Alciato’s Emblem CXXI’ SEDERI (Yearbook of the Spanish Association for English Renaissance Studies) 9 (1998), 91-134. John Donne, The Complete English Poems, Everyman’s Library, 5, with an intro. by C.A. Patrides (London: Random Century Group, 1985, repr. 1991), p. 271; all the quotations from Donne’s ‘To Sir Edward Herbert. at Julyers’ in this paper are taken from this old-spelling edition, pp. 271-72. See also John Carey (ed.), John

John Donne’s Arcimboldesque Wit 63 how the enlightened mind (“Exalted Spirit that’s sure a free Soul,” l.90) realises that “the Art of th” Ill” (l. 56) conceals sin and evil in politics and maintains power and control over most of the population by means of corruption and religious manipulation, emphasis on self-knowledge and self-control, and displacement of ambition to holy matters instead of earthly ones (“while whom Ambition swayes, / Their office is to turn it other wayes”, ll. 109-10). Herbert discusses these issues by resorting to metaphysical-poetry style, using paradox and conceits in a generally convoluted syntax and argumentation. Thus, he explains sin as poison to the soul and links the monarchy and contemporary social distinctions to painting, a conceit that identifies class divides with “Prospective” (perspective), an illusion device that cannot delude the free-thinker, for to him, except for the Painter’s Art, “All in the frame is equal […]” (l. 96) and “[…] Honours are / Figures compos’d of lines irregular” (l. 100). At the end of the poem, Herbert expresses his contempt for both monarchy and the masses that allow it to exist, and he concludes with a sceptical and misanthropic image in which the world and Noah’s ark are analogous, since only a few real men control the rest as if the latter were mere animals: “The World, as in the Ark of Noah, rests, / Compos’d as then, few Men, and many Beasts” (ll. 125-26). I do accept this relationship of Donne’s verse letter to Sir Edward Herbert’s poem, but it is my contention that Donne’s text, besides retaking some notions in Herbert’s poem, is also the result of the combination of the Arcimboldo composite heads and the portrait of Sir Edward Herbert I mentioned before as an underlying iconographic programme on which the metaphors and other figures of speech in the text are based. Donne’s language in his letter has an ekphrastic function intentionally devised to reproduce the elements of Arcimboldo’s composite heads. As a result, the appreciation of Donne’s display of wit and ultimate satirical intention towards Herbert depends on the identification of Donne’s ekphrastic reproduction of Arcimboldo’s composite heads. However, this ekphrastic nature of his language is not simple or evident or direct at first, for in fact the poem is not devised to be a mere, facile description or reproduction of the pictorial details of the paintings – such as, for instance, Cardinal Gregorio Comanini’s poems describing Arcimboldo’s Flora, Vertumnus, or his description and commentary of Earth included in his Platonic dialogue on painting, Il Figino overo del fine della Pittura (1591).4 The ekphrastic nature of Donne’s poem is crucial to appreciate its complexity in full, but it is indirect in the sense that it is elusive,

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Donne: The Major Works. Including ‘Songs and Sonnets’ and Sermons, Oxford World Classics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990, repr. 2000), p. 460 n 200. Lord Edward Herbert of Chirbury, The State-Progress of Ill, transcribed by Anniina Jokinen from Occasional Verses of Edward Lord Herbert (1665), facsimile edition of Occasional Verses, London, 1665, 8º. Bodleian Library, shelfmark: Bliss A. 98, Wing (Menston: Scolar Press, 1969) Bodleian Library, shelfmark: 2199. e. 723, Luminarium by Anniina Jokinen, [accessed 16 March 2003]. The poems inspired by Flora and Vertumnus are translated into English in the fragment from Comanini’s Il Figino included in Piero Falchetta, ‘Anthology of the 16th-Century Texts’, in Pontus Hulten et al., The Arcimboldo Effect: Transformation of the Face from Sixteenth to the Twentieth Century (Milano: Bompiani, 1987), pp. 143-202 (pp. 185, 185-89). See also the complete translation of Comanini’s treatise: Gregorio Comanini, Il Figino, or On the Purpose of Painting. Art Theory in the Late Renaissance, trans. and ed. by Ann Doyle-Anderson and Giancarlo Maiorino (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001), pp. 19-25. For the description and commentary on Earth, see pp. 25-27.

64 Jesús Cora very skilfully disguised, but indeed present as the basis for encoding the apparently fantastic, thick array of conceits (characteristic of the so-called metaphysical style) that form this poem. Donne’s technique of the extended conceit, that is, the articulation of different metaphors, paradoxes and puns, works like an algorithm, a general system of encryption, that both hides and reveals the true meaning of the poem depending on whether the reader is in possession of the key to crack the code open or not.5 The algorithm of the poem, its reliance on iconography for its rhetoric, is achieved by having the conceits work on two different levels: the conceptual and the iconic. Ideally, the reader must process both simultaneously in the course of reading, in order to decode the text properly and duly assess the true tone, intention, nature, meaning, and genre of the verse letter. These two levels correspond to the two parts of a metaphor according to I.A. Richards’s vintage Formalist theory: the tenor and the vehicle, the tenor being literally the content, the meaning of the metaphor, and the vehicle being the actual words in which that content is conveyed. A metaphor is formed when the tenor and the vehicle are linked by some kind of analogy or resemblance, that is, the common ground between them, that makes it possible to “take” or “transport” meaning “beyond,” as both the Greek etymology of metaphor and the very word “vehicle” indicate.6 The tenor of the conceits is responsible for the building of the poem’s argument. Apparently, this verse letter exclusively consists in a development of a philosophical and religious consideration of the nature of man and his possession or lack of wisdom and knowledge; and of how this affects his ideas about fate, illness, and divine providence, as prolegomena to an elegant, laudatory identification of Sir Edward Herbert, the addressee of the verse letter and philosopher-in-the-making, as a true man that has achieved perfect knowledge and wisdom. The philosophical and religious ideas developed in the poem might erroneously be used to brand the poem as “metaphysical,” and thus it may have contributed to John Dryden’s and Dr. Johnson’s creation of the misnomer “metaphysical poetry” that caught on among historians of English literature as a label for the poetry of John Donne, George Herbert, Henry Vaughan and other poets of the first half of the 17th century.7 The “metaphysical” discussion of the poem is fully cogent and coherent in itself but it is developed, as I say, in a concatenation of conceits. Each single notion that contributes to the reasoning in the poem is a tenor that is expressed with a vehicle. In this poem, Donne apparently draws his vehicles from such various sources as the Bible, the medical works of Paracelsus as well as contemporary everyday and commonplace notions and references to baking bread, agri5

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For the notion of algorithm, I follow Simon Singh, The Code Book. The Secret History of Codes and CodeBreaking (London: Fourth Estate, 1999), p. 11. This book is a basic and accessible history of codes and cryptanalysis. Barthes, p.137, also speaks of cryptograms, codes and decoding in connection with Arcimboldo’s paintings. I.A. (Ivor Armstrong) Richards, The Philosophy of Rhetoric (New York: Oxford University Press, 1936; repr. Galaxy Book 131, New York: Oxford University Press, 1965, repr. 1967), passim. John Dryden, ‘[Donne “Affects the Metaphysics”]’, from A Discourse Concerning the Original and Progress of Satire (London: 1695) and Samuel Johnson, ‘[“The Metaphysical Poets”]’, from Lives of the Poets (London: 1779-1781), in John Donne’s Poetry. Norton Critical Editions, ed. by Arthur L. Clements, 2nd edn (London and New York: W. W. Norton, 1992), pp. 142-45.

John Donne’s Arcimboldesque Wit 65 culture, textile dyes, and theology in a display of a wide, encyclopaedic knowledge. This undoubtedly proves Donne’s familiarity with the texts he refers to and also suggests that he writes within the dual tradition of rhetorical composita imitatio (composite imitation) and the Art of Memory; and that he pursues their common practices of combining startling figures of speech, afforded not by the rich, original, creative capacity of the author, but by the host of diverse florilegia, polyantheae, commonplace anthologies, thesauruses, books of emblems, dictionaries of symbols, and other contemporary reference materials — including paintings — conceived as aids to rhetorical invention, especially poetic and homiletic.8 These materials played a key role in this clockwork-like game of intertextual and literary allusions, and, together with the construction technique to which they were put to use, they were a part of the cultural codes and practices of the Renaissance, which, unfortunately, have been neglected at least in Anglo-American criticism from the New Criticism to poststructuralism. Vehicles are in fact the part of the metaphor that is responsible for the broad, vague denomination of metaphors as “images.” Vehicles are images, words that prompt the formation of an image in the mind’s eye that must be processed on a symbolic level in order that the reader will find its common ground with the tenor and understand the metaphor. It is here that I depart from Richards’s theory. I do not agree with his observations against the need for “the presence of images […] in the mind’s eye” or visualisation of the text: “visualisation is a mere distraction and of no service.”9 My contention precisely relies on the “visual,” ekphrastic function of the language in Donne’s text and on its identification as a necessary step for ascertaining the true nature of the poem. In the case of poems generated by an underlying structure of illustrations as an application of the Art of Memory, and in many others that include visual references or symbolic details, it is of the utmost importance to visualise these images for a full study of the text. It is in the apparently fantastic array of Donne’s concatenated vehicles that resides the hidden, subtle ekphrastic effect of the poem. The vehicles of these metaphors express not only the tenors that contribute to the reasoning programme of the poem, but they simultaneously reproduce Arcimboldo’s paintings and the other iconographical materials I mentioned earlier. Although the vehicles are allusions to different texts and fields of knowledge that are apparently completely unrelated to Arcimboldo’s composite heads, in fact they also reproduce some of the features of these paintings and both demand and seek the activation of the reader’s visual memories of Arcimboldo’s composite heads or their reproductions. The vehicles of the conceit acquire an iconic supplementary value here and as a consequence these vehicles convey not only tenors but also other images that in turn suggest other meanings, i.e. they turn into a double metaphor. This iconic supplementary value corresponds to what has been defined as “intermedial iconicity.”10 “Iconicity” is a Sagrario López, ‘Los libros de emblemas como “Tesoros” de erudición auxiliares de la “inventio”’, in Emblemata aurea. La emblemática en el arte y la literatura del Siglo de Oro. Arte y Estética, 56, ed. by Rafael Zafra y José Javier Azanza (Madrid: Akal, 2000), pp. 263-79. Richards, pp. 98, 130. 9 10 Werner Wolf, ‘Intermedial Iconicity in Fiction. Tema con Variazioni’, in From Sign to Signing. Iconicity in Language and Literature, 3, ed. by Wolfgang G. Müller and Olga Fischer (Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2003), pp. 339-60 (p. 339). 8

66 Jesús Cora term derived from Peircean semiotics in which an “icon” is a signifier that resembles what it signifies, whereas “intermedial” points to its capacity to establish relationships between different media or arts. Thus, in literature, “intermedial iconicity” consists in the imitation or reproduction with words of a work belonging to any other non-literary medium so that this work and medium can be experienced as a presence in the imagination.11 Intermedial iconicity is sometimes identical with the traditional term ekphrasis (εκφράσεις),12 and it is responsible for much of the relationship between painting and literature, especially under the interconnections fostered by the erroneous interpretation of “ut pictura poesis” in Horace’s Ars poetica.13 By virtue of ekphrasis or intermedial iconicity, some of the words that form the vehicles in Donne’s poem do actually correspond to the elements that form Arcimboldo’s composite heads apart from the value that enables them to express the abstract meaning. In some cases the terms that form the vehicles retain a literal value that corresponds to some detail in the external, concrete referents that the Arcimboldo paintings are. In other cases, some of those terms that form the vehicle are not related to the paintings in any evident way; however, they work like puns and their double meanings provoke the association with one or various details of a composite head in particular. Also, the succession of conceits and secondary conceits and close-knit relationships, and their gradual, mutual semantic modification throughout the poem reproduce the same paradoxical effects and connotations that the composite heads provoke in the observer, and which Barthes identifies in his essay: the liminal and antithetical tension between integration and separation of the constituent elements of the whole; the antithetical dynamic opposing long and short distance of the viewer from the painting – a factor that prompts integration or disintegration of the head –; and, finally, the related connotations of incorporation and decomposition and the seething and swarming in life (copulation, multiplication) and death (putrescence and its fauna of worms and insects).14 Indeed, the iconic and ekphrastic element of the conceits also allows Donne to add to these qualities and achieve what in principle only exists in Barthes’s imagination, that is to say, the combination of Arcimboldo’s composite heads into a new meaning. For, together Wolf, pp. 339-40, explains this in the following way: “Among the forms of intermediality in this narrower sense that involve literature, iconicity plays a role in only one variant: in the verbal imitation of features of a non-literary medium or in the creation of analogies to it. In such intermedial imitation an implicit reference to a non-literary medium in general, or to a particular work transmitted through such a medium, is made by shaping the literary text so that it somehow becomes similar to the other, non-literary medium. As a consequence, this other medium can, to a certain extent, be experienced as an imaginary presence while reading the literary text.” 12 Wolf, p. 342. 13 For the history of the “ut pictura poesis” tradition, see Mario Praz, Mnemosyne. The Parallel between Literature and the Visual Arts, The A.W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts, 1967, Bollingen Series, XXXV, vol 16 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1970), Chapter 1. I have used the Spanish translation: Mario Praz, Mnemosyne. El paralelismo entre la literatura y las artes visuales. Ensayistas, 184, versión castellana de Richardo Pochtar (Madrid: Taurus, 1979). 14 For the antithesis of upside and downside, see Barthes, pp. 135, 140-141; for that of integration and separation, pp. 141-42; for the antithetical dynamic opposing the viewer’s long and short distance from the painting, p. 142; for repulsive decomposition: pp. 143, 145-46; for movement and seething, pp. 142, 146. 11

John Donne’s Arcimboldesque Wit 67 with the dynamism and mobility inherent in the antithetical nature of each head, Donne also achieves a brilliant, smooth, dynamic, magical, playful, and witty effect of concatenated metamorphoses of one composite head into the next in quick succession that only stops and culminates in the association of Arcimboldo’s The Librarian with Sir Edward Herbert’s portrait, thus revealing the key to the algorithm of the poem and allowing us to crack the code and discover the ambivalent, antithetical nature of the poem, identical to that of the paintings used in its creation – as I will show later in my partial commentary on the poem. Barthes, still writing in the structuralist vein, explains that Arcimboldo’s composite heads are characterised by a double articulation that parallels the double articulation of language. The individual items that compose the heads behave like words because they are “namable objects.” These objects do not signify anything at all if taken in isolation, so very much like phonemes composing a word they need the rest of the constituents to integrate the allegorical heads and thus form meaning. Following this connection between the linguistic levels and Arcimboldo’s paintings, it is possible to say that Donne inverts the relationship between rhetoric and painting that Arcimboldo establishes according to Barthes. In fact, the ekphrastic value that Donne includes in his vehicles works like a deeper structure on which the superficial linguistic and conceptual level is built using a sort of Chomskyan Transformational Grammar model that converts the subjacent visual structure into language.15 In a fresh, first-time reading we tend to privilege the ideas over the expression and subordinate the vehicles to the tenors in the poem, thinking that any connection between the vehicles and the paintings of Arcimboldo is either a happy coincidence or the product of a fanciful, far-fetched reading. However, as I.A. Richards points out, the relationship between vehicle and tenor is variable: At one extreme the vehicle may become almost a mere decoration or coloring of the tenor, at the other extreme, the tenor may become almost a mere excuse for the introduction of the vehicle, and so no longer be “the principal subject.”16

Therefore, the relationships between the iconographical materials and the text of Donne’s poem are precisely the reverse, the text is modelled on a selection of images and both the vehicles, their sources and their tenors are all subordinated to reproducing the Arcimboldesque paintings and their effects. The iconic element of Donne’s text must be foregrounded and privileged over the conceptual content in order to visualise Arcimboldo’s images and thus identify its ultimate satirical intention. So far I have discussed the relationship between Donne’s verse letter and Arcimboldo’s paintings in an abstract, general form. My analysis of the poem will offer a concrete and evident proof of such a dependence. The first two lines (“Man is a lumpe, where all beasts kneaded bee, / Wisdome makes him an Arke where all agree”) form a sententious introduction to the poem in which Donne contrasts Man’s confused wild, animal-like impulses and the beneficial effect that Wisdom Noam Chomsky, Reflexions on Language (New York: Pantheon Books, 1975). I have relied on the Spanish translation: Noam Chomsky, Reflexiones sobre el lenguaje. Obras maestras del pensamiento contemporáneo, 27. Traducción de Joan A. Argente y Josep María Nadal (Barcelona: Planeta-Agostini, 1984). 16 Richards, p. 100. 15

68 Jesús Cora has in exerting control over them. John Carey points out that the idea of the first line is based on Plato’s allegory of the passions of man in The Republic (Book IX), and the reference to Noah’s Ark is in fact taken from the image of the world being inhabited like Noah’s Ark more by beasts than by humans at the end of Herbert’s poem that I quoted above.17 Quite significantly, and I think nobody has noticed this before (Carey, at least, does not mention it), in his text Plato has Socrates use the image of the soul as if it were the representation of a composite head. The instructions that he gives Adeimantus so that he forms that image in his mind are very similar to Arcimboldo’s paintings, so much so that at a given stage they sound like an ekphrastic description of one such head that anticipates the painter’s work by nearly two thousand years.18 I think that it is possible to reconstruct the possible web of associations that Donne used as the sources for his verse letter as subtle dialectic disputatio. Indeed he seems to have picked up Herbert’s reference to Noah’s Ark in his discussion of evil and politics, but he focused especially on the word “Compos’d” and related it to Plato’s text, for, after all, it discusses precisely the same issues that Herbert deals with in his poem. Certainly, Donne’s ideas in the first lines of the poem are very close to Plato’s explanation of the symbolical meaning of the composite head. Plato’s idea of the composite head in turn prompted the association with Arcimboldo’s heads and Donne selected a few of them to inspire his images in a move to surpass his friend’s well-contrived conceits involving the art of painting as well as have the upper hand in this contest of wit by fashioning the poem, as I will show, as satire aimed at Sir Edward Herbert himself.19 This naturally poses the question of how and when Donne saw Arcimboldo’s paintings. Actually, Donne travelled on the Continent on several occasions, the three longer trips that are in some way documented being the one with his friend Sir Walter Chute to Paris and Carey, p. 460 n. 200. Comanini, pp. 25-27, describes Earth in detail and interprets the allegorical meanings of the animals in connection with human psychology very much as in Plato’s The Republic (Plato in Twelve Volumes, Loeb Classical Library, vol VI, The Republic, with an English translation by Paul Shorey, 2 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; London: William Heinemann, 1935, repr. 1987), II, 590-591D, pp. 409, 411, 413. Comanini identifies the head as a portrait of Emperor Rudolph II, Arcimboldo’s patron. It is possible that Arcimboldo based Earth on Plato’s text, given his neoplatonic interests, and that the painting may serve as a laudatory representation of the Emperor’s reason and wisdom. Quite surprisingly, it seems that no one has established Plato as a possible source for Arcimboldo’s Earth if not for all his composite heads. Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann does not mention in any way the key section in Plato’s The Republic in connection with Arcimboldo in either ‘The Allegories and Their Meaning’, in Pontus Hulten et al., The Arcimboldo Effect: Transformation of the Face from Sixteenth to the Twentieth Century (Milano: Bompiani, 1987), pp. 89-108, or The Mastery of Nature. Aspects of Art, Science, and Humanism in the Renaisance, Princeton Essays on the Arts (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), pp. 100-28. Kaufmann, p. 107, even refers to these composite heads as chimera (following some of Arcimboldo’s contemporaries) very much like Plato does, but he seems to be unaware of the relevance of Plato’s text. On the other hand, Kaufmann, The Mastery of Nature, pp. 129-35, establishes Propertius’s metaphors in the elegy on Vertumnus as the textual source for Arcimboldo’s own pictorial wit in Vertumnus. 19 Don A. Keister, ‘Donne and Herbert of Cherbury: An Exchange of Verses’, Modern Language Quarterly 8:4 (Dec 1947), 430-34, establishes the parallelism between the last verses in Herbert’s poem and Donne’s first as well as other parallelisms. However, he misses the analogy as to conceits involving painting. 17 18

John Donne’s Arcimboldesque Wit 69 Venice, and possibly Spain in 1605-06; the second one with his friend Sir Robert Drury and his family to France and as far as Heidelberg in 1611-12; and the third one with Lord James Hay, Viscount of Doncaster as member of the embassy to the German states and Austria in 1619. Some of Arcimboldo’s paintings, mainly the originals of the four elements and the four seasons were kept in the Prague Hapsburg imperial Kunstkammer, which has been related to a sort of memory theatre, a three-dimensional structure for the application of the Art of Memory, a fact that points to Donne’s own use of Arcimboldo’s paintings in imagines agentes of the Art of Memory to structure his text and create its conceits.20 The possibility that Donne may have visited Prague and seen the original paintings cannot be ruled out, but it seems that the most likely date is 1619, during his travels with the Doncaster embassy. Clearly, this is a late date because Sir Edward Herbert wrote and sent Donne The StateProgress of Ill while staying in Merlou, France, in 1608, and Donne wrote his verse letter as a response two years later, when Herbert was fighting at Juliers (Jülich), as the title of the poem indicates.21 However, in the 1570s emperor Rudolf II got Arcimboldo to paint copies of his series of his composite heads representing the four elements and the four seasons and had them sent to friends in other courts as diplomatic and also propagandistic presents.22 Some copies of Arcimboldo’s composite heads (Summer, Autumn) are housed in the Louvre and may have been presents of Rudolf II to be added to the French royal collections of art. Thus, in the absence of further information, Paris is the most likely city where Donne could have seen Arcimboldo’s paintings. I have not to date been able to find indisputable proof or external information confirming that Donne did see the Arcimboldo composite heads, but the parallelisms between the text and the paintings are in themselves powerful and persuasive evidence of Donne’s having used them as sources and inspirations for his poem. Coming back to Donne’s text, then, the meaning of the first lines is that the confused beastly nature of man is actually transformed into internal order, reason, self-control and moral and religious principles by the development of wisdom and knowledge, very much like Plato recommends in The Republic, Book IX. In the first line, both the words “lump” and “kneaded” form the vehicle of the conceit that conveys the idea of a confused shapeless mass formed by the agglutination of its different ingredients into unity and uniformity very much as water, salt, and yeast integrate to form bread dough. This conceit introduces the dynamic element of integration and disappearance of the animals into a mass that is in fact Man, so we actually imagine the different animals mixing and losing their individuality as they form the human figure. The allusion to Noah’s ark and the Flood in Genesis 6-9 forms another conceit that works contrariwise to the preceding one and engages in an antithetical relationship with it. This new image takes up Sir Edward Herbert’s conceit at the end of The State Progress of Ill and seems to reproduce this antithesis in connection with Plato’s allegory of the composite head. By activating the reader’s memories or knowledge of the Genesis text, Donne transforms man from a confused mass of animals into an ordered space, or container, the ship where Noah, following divine instructions, placed every 20 21 22

Kaufmann, The Mastery of Nature, p. 181. Keister, p. 430. Werner Kriegeskorte, Arcimboldo, traducción de José Lebrero Stals, (Köln: Taschen, 2002), pp. 26, 30.

70 Jesús Cora creature in its allotted place according to a rationale conceived to prevent the different species from fighting, killing and preying on one another, or in other words, to make them “agree” as the poem puts it. That is to say, they not only abstain from fighting and devouring one another as Socrates indicates in Plato’s dialogue too, but also accord, harmonise, even fit or match together, side by side in the ark. This conceit opposes to the dynamics of integration of the first conceit an antithetical dynamics of internal division, collocation, order and separation of the animals, and consequently that of the individual view and identification of every single species within the shape that contains them. In short, these two lines are devised to make the reader visualise in his imagination the confused, blurry figure of a man that is quickly formed by animals that lose their individual definition and disintegrate into the larger figure of a man and, almost simultaneously, while this human figure still retains a recognizable human shape, they distinctly reappear perfectly placed within that human figure. It is possible to surmise that Donne combines the reference to Genesis from Herbert’s poem with Plato’s key section in The Republic, Book IX. But Arcimboldo’s Earth also comes to mind as it precisely shows an apparently chaotic multitude of animals that form a man’s head when viewed as a whole from a distance or by forcing the eye not to focus on each individual animal and its perfect representation in utmost realistic detail. Conversely, the man’s figure seems to decompose or fragment into its constituent animals when seen closely or by paying attention to each individual beast. This composite head builds an antithetical tension between integration and disintegration, confusion and order, detail and composition, realism and illusionism. The animals are realistic, rich in detail, but their grouping is totally unrealistic. Such a mass or lump would only be possible if the animals were dead and not alive as they are represented. On the other hand, the place allocated to each beast transforms each of them into a part of the human face thus working a visual metaphor. For instance, a hare’s back is the man’s nose, a leopard, his chin, an ox, his neck, a wolf his cheek, they are all examples of agnomination as Barthes points out in his essay,23 while the elephant’s ear is precisely that, the man’s ear in an example of visual tautology.24 Donne employs his conceits to reproduce both the details of the conflicting dynamics of this composite head. He achieves the outstanding feat of creating a language that by virtue of intermedial iconicity replicates the antithetical movement of integration and disintegration of the animals through his conceits but disguises it by expressing tenors that develop the argumentation of the poem. In the next couplet, lines 3 and 4 (“The foole, in whom these beasts do live at jarred, / Is sport to others, and a Theater”), Donne elaborates on the previous conceits and as contraposition to the beneficial effects that wisdom has in man and his capacity to control his inner passions, he focuses on human foolishness and its consequences. If wisdom is responsible for the order, agreement and stillness of the beasts, foolishness is responsible for discord among the animals, that is, foolishness is responsible for man’s dehumanisation. And human foolishness becomes a spectacle, a show, i.e., “sport,” “theatre” for other human beings. Quite evidently here, the actual words of the poem point to a tenor that 23 24

Barthes, p. 136. Barthes, p. 139.

John Donne’s Arcimboldesque Wit 71 contributes to the abstract line of argumentation, but at the same time they ekphrastically reproduce the details of the painting in line 3, while they even stress the element of display in line 4, a common feature to a spectacle and a painting that is wholly theatrical and artificial. Lines 5 to 8 again elaborate on the antithetical dynamics of the painting and now render the fragmentation of the human figure into the different animals: Nor scapes hee so, but is himselfe their prey; All which was man in him, is eate away, And now his beasts on one another feed, Yet couple’in anger, and new monsters breed;

Line 6 means that a man is dehumanised if he is overruled, controlled, that is, “eaten away” by his beastly impulses, so the verse reproduces the disappearance of the human figure and the permanence of the animals; but lines 7 and 8 rather than underline the confusion of a man’s mind, pick up both Socrates’s reasoning in Plato’s The Republic, Book IX, and the contradictory connotations of Arcimboldo’s animals in Earth, especially the wolf and the hare, who also seem to be about to devour one another or engage in wild, promiscuous, interspecies sexual intercourse, with the foreseeable consequence of fabulous hybrid or even monstrous births, according to pre-scientific beliefs. These are the monsters that the text refers to, but also, as Barthes points out, Arcimboldo’s heads are monstrous because they all refer, whatever the grace of the allegorical subject (Summer, Spring, Flora, Water), to a malaise of substance: seething or swarming. The swarm of living things (plants, animals, babies), arranged in a close-packed disorder (before joining the intelligibility of the final figure), evokes an entire larval life, the entanglement of vegetative beings, worms, fetuses, viscera which are at the limits, not yet born and yet already putrescible.25

In lines 9 to 11, Donne retakes the idea of place and order from the conceit of Noah’s ark – used in the first place by Herbert in his own poem – and focuses on their importance in the development of reason and wisdom: How happy’is hee, which hath due place assign’d To’his beasts, and disaforested his minde! Empail’d himselfe to keepe them out, not in;

The word “disaforested” in line 10 provides the key to follow the chain of associations in these verses. On the visual, imagistic level of the vehicle, “disaforested” works retroactively and has the animals associated to the real forest where they live. Then the disorder, density, impregnability and danger associated with a forest become the common ground for the tenor on the abstract level which is the confusion of the human mind. This “forest,” the turmoil of the passions of the human mind must be eliminated to achieve mental order and happiness. Undoubtedly, with “hath due place assign’d / To’his beasts,” Donne now reverts and foregrounds the order and the stillness of the animals. These are precisely the inherent 25

Barthes, p. 146.

72 Jesús Cora characteristics of Earth on which ultimately depends the recognition of the mass of animals as a human figure. “[A]nd disaforested his minde!” concentrates the force of integration and the disappearance of the animals to form a recognisable human figure. Thus, with these words, Donne iconically reproduces stillness, order, and integration, the other dynamic forces that engage with swarming, confusion, and disintegration in a tense, antithetical balance to which the constituent elements of the painting (the animals) are subject. It is precisely this tension of antithetical dynamics that constitutes the difference between Socrates’s image in The Republic and Arcimboldo’s painting and enables us to identify the latter as the true, most important source of Donne’s poem. Clearly, a close reading of Donne’s text allows us to see that it is characterised by intermedial iconicity (or ekphrasis) that reproduces the complex features of Arcimboldo’s Earth, not the simplicity of Plato’s image. However, Donne relates both Plato’s composite head and Arcimboldo’s painting precisely because of the analogies between the textual image (also characterised by intermedial iconicity for it alludes to, or reproduces, other possible, real and concrete images and pictorial representations of antiquity) and Arcimboldo’s composite head painting. These analogies prompt Donne to create a strategy characterised by two moves: a) the reproduction with words of Arcimboldo’s painting modelled on the intermedial iconicity or ekphrastic nature of Plato’s own text, thus forming the vehicle of his conceit and also making it possible to reproduce the ground or relationship between vehicle and tenor in Plato’s text; b) the transfer of the meaning (the tenor), i.e. control of beastly passions, ascendancy of reason in man’s life, from the metaphor of the composite head in Plato’s text to his own vehicle, a textual reproduction of Arcimboldo’s painting (which in principle has no evident, immediate meaning and therefore has been subject to different interpretations by art critics and historians). The benefits of this strategy are double. On the level of signification, i.e. of tenors, Donne is able to reply to Herbert’s poem and deal with related issues such as Plato’s emphasis on self-control and Herbert’s consideration of the origin of evil and sin. On the level of vehicles, Donne certainly picks up Herbert’s elements of wit (the reference to Noah’s Ark and the art of painting) as if they were the glove in a rhetorical challenge; but also, and further, he develops them in an inverse order, only to centre on the pictorial aspect. Indeed, he institutes Arcimboldo’s Earth as the first element in a concatenation of conceits where the intermedial iconicity of their vehicles reproduces other composite heads (by Arcimboldo, or ascribed to him), each metamorphically rendered into the next, their tenors contributing to the development of the poem’s logical reasoning. This strategy reveals the poem as an overwhelming display of wit that wins Donne a victory in this coterie rivalry by tightly coupling both tenors and vehicles at the end of the poem in an exercise of personal satire against Sir Edward Herbert himself, whose poetic efforts are thus reduced almost to the poor exercises of an amateur. Line 11 (“Empail’d himselfe to keepe them out, not in”), with the image of the protective pale that keeps the wild animals out reproduces the disappearance and integration

John Donne’s Arcimboldesque Wit 73 of the animals into the human figure, whose contour is suggested by the phrase “Empail’d himself”, too. Both the phrases “disaforested his mind” and “keep them out, not in” are conceits that introduce the idea of the disappearance of both forest and wild animals, replaced by crops. It may be argued that this part of the poem reflects a passage in Plato’s The Republic, Book XI, and points to Plato’s text as a source, rather than to the linking of two of Arcimboldo’s paintings. Donne’s conceit expresses human evolution, the change from a beast-like existence to self-consciousness, self-discipline, inner order, wisdom, moral and religious principles that are the result of the cultivation of the mind. Here individual evolution parallels that of civilisation., the transformation of the wild forest of the mind inhabited by animals and vermin into arable land where crops are grown. This transformation is a metaphor that lies in the very etymological meaning of such words as “culture” and “cultivated,” and it is indeed a metaphor that was prompted by images such as the comparison Plato uses in The Republic, Book XII: And on the other hand he who says that justice is the more profitable affirms that all our actions and words should tend to give the man within us complete domination over the entire man and make him take charge of the many-headed beast – like a farmer who cherishes and trains the cultivated plants but checks the growth of the wild – and he will make an ally of the lion’s nature, and caring for all the beasts alike will first make them friendly to one another and to himself, and so foster their growth.26

Although I do admit the parallelism between Plato’s and Donne’s texts, I do also see that this is where, quite impressively, Donne manages to convey with words the transformation of Earth into other composite heads by Arcimboldo: Summer and Autumn. Again, Donne’s words are characterised by intermedial iconicity. “Empail’d himself” suggests the boards of the barrel (or even a pail) that also resemble a pale or palisade in Autumn, and it is also wordplay pointing to an outstanding detail in Arcimboldo’s Summer. The neck in this composite head looks like some kind of pale or protection. Most strikingly, Arcimboldo painted his name in a tromp l’oeil effect pretending that it is woven with wicker or perhaps wheat chaff. The inscription reads “GIVSEPPE ARCIMBOLDO F,” that is, “Giuseppe Arcimboldo fecit” [Made by Giuseppe Arcimboldo]. Thus, “Empail’d himself” corresponds to the real details of the painting for indeed Arcimboldo’s name appears on what seems to be a palisade to protect the corn and also stands for the ruff of the human figure. It is no coincidence either that line 12 (“Can sow, and dares trust corne, where they have bin”) establishes an exact correspondence between the position corn occupies and where the animals used to be (“where they have bin [i.e. “been”]). A comparison between Earth and Summer shows that the corn or chaff pale-ruff with the name of the painter on it exactly occupies the place where some of the animals – especially the ox – were before in Earth.

26

Plato, p. 403.

74 Jesús Cora Lines 13 and 14 (“Can use his horse, goate, wolfe, and every beast, / And is not an Asse himselfe to all the rest”) retake Earth and this time there is even an enumeration of some of the animals that are perfectly identifiable in the painting.27 In yet another antithetical move, Donne now points out that it is possible to tame and use some of the animals, i.e., that culture and wisdom make it possible for man to employ his capacities and potential and avoid being considered an ass by his fellow human beings (“And is not an ass himself to all the rest”), thus continuing the idea in lines 3 and 4. The rest of the poem is based on the same technique, having the conceits build up the argument, but also indirectly alluding to and playing with the rest of the composite heads through the vehicles taken from Giuseppe Arcimboldo, Autumn, 1573 (Musée National du Louvre, Paris) different sources. As I said earlier, restrictions of space prevent me from offering a reading of the whole poem in the light of its relationship with the Arcimboldo composite heads. Nevertheless, I would like to turn to the end of the poem and show how Donne actually provides the key to decode his poem, and how this proves the iconicity of the poem, that Arcimboldo’s composite heads must be borne in mind above any other possible source. From line 15 to line 44, the theme of the text changes and it focuses on a) man’s imperfect skills to understand himself and the world, and how as a result he can worsen his life; and b) how knowledge can also affect human minds in different, not always positive ways. Lines 44 and 45 (“As brave as true, is that profession than / Which you doe use to make; that you know man”) make a comparison between Sir Edward’s frequent declaration that he knows man and the previous lengthy discussion on the imperfection of knowledge. Because of its cryptic style, with such a profusion of conceits, the reader, especially if s/he does not realise the importance of Arcimboldo’s paintings, is bound to get lost in the

27

This is another detail that sustains my contention that Donne’s text is characterised by ekphrasis or intermedial iconicity that represents Arcimboldo’s painting, rather than Plato’s composite head. As it is evident in the quotation above, Plato has Socrates speak of “a multitudinous, manyheaded monster, having a ring of heads of all manner of beasts, tame and wild”, and then a lion and a little human figure within the larger group of the monsters, and the whole set inserted or wrapped up in a larger human figure.

John Donne’s Arcimboldesque Wit 75 rhetoric of the poem and fail to identify this comparison as a negative one and miss that “brave” and “true” and later “credible” in line 47 are in fact used ironically. In lines 47-50, Donne introduces his last conceit based on an Arcimboldo composite head: This makes it credible, you have dwelt upon All worthy bookes; and now are such an one. Actions are authors, and of those in you Your friends finde every day a mart of new.

But he does so in such a condensed style that it is necessary to resort to a minute reading to unravel its rich meaning. What makes Sir Edward Herbert’s claim to know Man “credible” is that he has pored on books, has studied (“dwelt upon”) them profoundly, has assimilated them. The syntax of line 49 is ambiguous: the antecedent of “and now are such an one” seems to be “man” in line 46, and consequently it identifies Sir Edward Herbert with a real man because of his education and wisdom; but the antecedent can also be “books,” therefore it also means that Sir Edward Herbert’s has become a book as a result of having studied so many texts and authors, and he can now be considered a huge volume of knowledge acquired from his readings. However, the phrase “and now are such an one” also paradoxically implies that Sir Edward Herbert is an open book that can be easily read and interpreted by his friends, as the last two lines indicate. The last two lines form a sententious couplet that closes the poem with an equally ambiguous reflection on Sir Edward Herbert’s character and behaviour. Donne identifies actions with authors in an expression that implies and relies on the adage “actions speak volumes,” in which “authors” is a synecdoche for the works they write, that is to say, the “volumes” in the old idiom. As a result of this identification of actions and authors, the phrase “those in you” has actions and authors-volumes as its antecedents. Consequently, Sir Edward Herbert’s friends find a “mart of new” in his actions. In connection with these antecedents, “mart of new” seems to be meaningless, but in fact, it benefits from and develops further the ambiguities of the preceding words, for “mart of new” is also a pun. If we understand “those in you” as referring to “Actions,” then the final line activates the reader’s knowledge of Sir Edward Herbert’s personality and biography and links with the title of the poem implying that “Actions” are in fact Sir Edward’s martial feats at the siege of Juliers (Jülich). Thus, the last line apparently identifies Sir Edward with a Mars redivivus for “[M]art” is an alternative form of the name of the Roman god of war.28 The poem seemingly ends with a hyperbolic praise of Sir Edward Herbert’s warrior skills and establishes him as a paragon of soldiers, a “new Mars” on Earth. However, this is an exaggeration that surpasses the limits of praise and enters into the domain of the ironic and grotesque for those in the know – his friends, Donne among them – of Herbert’s other facet coexisting with that of being a philosopher: his violent personality, his rash, troublesome behaviour so much prone to fighting duels and accepting challenges, a trait that prompted

28

“Mart. † sb3. Obs. [ad. L. Mart-em: see Mars]. 1. Mars, the Roman god of war. […] 2. War, battle. (In equal mart = L. æquo Marte.).” The Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1933, repr. 1978) VI, p. 189ab.

76 Jesús Cora one of his most maverick adventures precisely at the siege of Jülich. Herbert himself tells this in his autobiography almost thirty years after the incident. In the course of the siege, a French fellow Protestant nobleman identified him, left the trenches and ran towards the walls of the besieged city – the Protestants were attacking the city –, shouting a challenge to the effect that he would like to see who would do best. This irresponsible act ended with the two of them unhurt, despite the fact that a barrage of shots came from the city walls all around them.29 No doubt, this is the kind of “actions” during Herbert’s time in Jülich that Donne alludes to in the poem. This negative aspect of Herbert’s personality introduces a second meaning of “mart of new.” “[M]art of new,” in connection with “those in you” interpreted as “actions speak[ing] volumes,” i.e. as actions that reveal the true character of individuals, develops further the implication that Sir Herbert is “such an one,” an open book, in other words, that his actions provide his friends with so much information about his true character and nature that this amount of information is hyperbolically comparable to a new “[M]art,” i.e. the annual Frankfurt book fair held at Easter, or the whole English book production of a year.30 However, what is more important is that the rather cryptic reference to the Frankfurt book market or the English publishing season, in connection with “those in you” read simultaneously with the first sense in which Donne represents Herbert as a dignified new Mars, works very much like lines 1 to 10, that reproduce Arcimboldo’s Earth. The substitution of “Actions are authors” for “Actions speak volumes” (whose meaning it actually has), by having “authors” work as a synecdoche of “volumes,” together with the secondary meanings of “those in you” and “mart of new,” also entails an intermedial iconic, ekphrastic value if one reads literally – “those in you” referring then to the books Herbert has “in him,” that he has assimilated in the course of his readings. Consequently, they represent another of Arcimboldo’s composite heads, this time The Librarian, in which the human head is made of books or the books can be said to be “in” the head and human figure (“those in you”). Again, as in previous uses of Arcimboldo’s paintings, a human head, in this case the figure of Sir Edward Herbert appears in our mind’s eye and it is briefly transformed into a Mars-like figure in the encomium, but simultaneously, as with the antithetical dynamism of Arcimboldo’s paintings, his image is both formed by and decomposes into its constituent elements, in this case books. Actually, it is my contention that this metamorphosis was inspired by the imposing demeanour of Herbert’s 1605 portrait, which surely Donne knew and had often seen for he was a close friend and visitor of the Herbert family (especially Lady Magdalen Herbert and George Herbert, the metaphysical poet, mother and brother to Sir Edward Herbert). Both this portrait and Arcimboldo’s The Librarian depict the same posture, the hand of each man is placed in an almost identical position and in both the left shoulder is covered: a heavy curtain drapes

John Carey, ‘Sex and Violence’, The New Statesman January 7 (1977), p. 22. Some articles on Literature Collected on the Internet by Magda Amundsen. [accessed 22 April 2004] (para. 2 & 3 of 6). 30 Clements, p. 95 n. 2. “Mart. sb4. 1†b. spec. The German booksellers’ fair, held at Easter, originally at Frankfort, and afterwards at Leipzig. (Sometimes app. used transf. For the ‘publishing season’ in England.)” The Oxford English Dictionary, VI, p. 189b. 29

John Donne’s Arcimboldesque Wit 77 over The Librarian’s shoulder and some kind of cloak rests on Sir Edward Herbert’s. Just as the analogy between Plato’s text in The Republic IX and Arcimboldo’s Earth prompted the association between the meaning (tenor) of the first and the form (vehicle reproduced through ekphrasis or intermedial iconicity) of the latter, the visual analogy between the two paintings allows for and prompts an identification between “you” (Sir Edward Herbert) and Arcimboldo’s The Librarian. The identification of Sir Edward Herbert with Mars is a eulogy, but the simultaneous transformation of his figure or portrait into The Librarian renders this praise completely ironic and the sheer exaggeration of both takes them to the domain of the grotesque to which the Arcimboldo paintings also belong: the poem reveals itself as a mock encomium. Just as Arcimboldo’s composite heads decompose in its constituent elements, the double meanings of lines 47 to 50 deconstruct and cancel the laudatory possibilities from line 45 and render them ironic. The ironic corollary of the poem is that it is through Sir Herbert’s irresponsible actions, rather than through his rational philosophical works and poems that his friends really know the man. His wisdom, his readings have not made him able to attain self-control and selfknowledge. These last lines show, because of the personal application substantiated in the direct apostrophe to Sir Edward Herbert and the analogy between his portrait and Arcimboldo’s The Librarian, that the previous argumentation on the evils that afflict man, the reply to Herbert’s poem, is applicable to Herbert himself whose actions – like those at the siege of Juliers/Jülich – are sometimes everything but wise and rational, despite his accumulated knowledge. The text thus turns onto itself, it works retroactively and provokes the revision of its real meaning. The clear personal aim of the text Giuseppe Arcimboldo, The Librarian, ca. 1566 makes us realise that the whole (Skoklosters Slott, Sweden) philosophical and religious consideration of wisdom is not serious at all, but it is used as a starting point that soon loses its argumentative pre-eminence to its ekphrastic or iconic aspect. The latter reveals the text to be the product of the Art of Memory, in which the succession of Arcimboldo’s composite heads serves as the models for the rhetorical conceits, and it shows that its wit depends on familiarity with (or knowledge about) the paintings on the part of the readers – a coterie of common friends and

78 Jesús Cora fellow poets. The whole poem is actually devised to excel Herbert’s conceit involving perspective in lines 82-103 in The State-Progress of Ill, and it has the upper hand by turning the conceit and the argumentation of the poem into a satire ad hominem. Lines 47 to 50 have the same humourous effect as that of a final punch line in a lengthy joke. Such an ironic and humorous ending is an appropriately witty reply to Herbert’s The State Progress of Ill and an apt rejoinder to a man who was tremendously vain and loved to boast not only of his sexual prowess and the brawls he engaged in, but also of his encyclopaedic knowledge.31 As a conclusion, then, it is clear that Arcimboldo’s paintings form a subjacent structure upon which Donne builds his reply to Sir Edward Herbert’s poem and shows his wit with a vengeance, a kind of wit that must be definitely labelled as Arcimboldesque.32

Carey, ‘Sex and Violence’, (para. 2, 3 & 5 of 6); John Butler, ‘Edward, Lord Herbert of Chirbury (1582/31648)’, Luminarium by Anniina Jokinen. [accessed 22 January 2003] (para. 4 of 7). 32 Donne’s humorous use of Arcimboldo’s composite heads as the inspiration for a satirical poem seems to deny Kaufmann’s interpretation of the paintings as serious imperial allegories, and connects rather with several testimonies of Arcimboldo’s contemporaries and modern critics who interpreted them as jokes, grotesques, and parodies of the theory of correspondences between microcosm and macrocosm (see Kaufmann, ‘Metamorphoses of Nature’, p. 102, passim). 31

Sílvia Quinteiro

Perspective and Framing in Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho and in the Work of Caspar David Friedrich This article compares the works of Ann Radcliffe and Caspar David Friedrich, examining the relationship that is established between the observer and the landscape. By analysing the selected perspectives and framings, we explore ways of representing this relationship, focusing upon compositional and organisational strategies of landscape, and also upon thematology, an ineluctable way of approaching both these works.

The encounter between observer and landscape, which takes place in a very particular context in the histories of literature and painting, is one of the most characteristic aspects of the works of Ann Radcliffe and Caspar David Friedrich.1 In fact, the increased interest in the relationship between self and landscape from the end of the eighteenth century and throughout the nineteenth had a decisive influence upon the course taken by artistic creation, both in literature and in painting. The evolution of pictorial representation towards landscape painting,2 and of literature towards the novel, is a consequence of the public’s/reader’s acceptance of a new kind of representation. This period, indeed, witnessed a change in taste: the public began to appreciate representations less centred on the actions of the characters, thus opening up the way towards description in the novel and landscape in painting. At the turn of the century, “‘Landscape’ was something of a magic word.”3 As the action of the character is no longer the central issue, the role of nature in constructing both the meaning of the work and the figure of the observer can now be emphasised. In their works, Ann Radcliffe and Caspar David Friedrich do not represent an individual or a setting but the way the individual experiences landscape. Being the only object of representation in a picture, and meaningful in itself, landscape becomes the central element of the pictorial text, dispensing with the need for any human element, at least apparently. A similar phenomenon occurs in literature: descriptive passages become more numerous and are central to the structure of the gothic novel. In The Mysteries of Udolpho,4 for instance, there are a great many descriptions, which closely accompany the development of the narrative. By examining the positioning of the descriptive excerpts in this work, we 1

2

3 4

For an earlier and substantially longer version of my study of this intermedial relationship, see: Sílvia Moreno Jesus, A Relação Sujeito Observador/Paisagem em The Mysteries of Udolpho de Ann Radcliffe e na Obra de Caspar David Friedrich (The Relationship Between Observing Self and Landscape in Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho and in the work of Caspar David Friedrich), unpublished diss (Lisbon: Faculdade de Letras da Universidade de Lisboa, 1998). See also Claudio Guillén, ‘El Hombre Invisible. Paisaje y Literatura en el Siglo XIX’ (The Invisible Man: Landscape and Literature in the Nineteenth Century), in Paisaje, Juego y Multilingüismo, ed. Darío Villanueva and Fernando Cabo Aseguinolaza (Santiago de Compostela: Servicio de Publicácions e Intercambio Científico, 1996), pp.67-83 (p. 69); and J. H. van den Berg, ‘The Subject and his Landscape’, in Romanticism and Consciousness: Essays in Criticism, ed. Harold Bloom (New York and London: Norton & Company, 1990), pp.57-65 (pp.60-63). Caspar David Friedrich: His Life and Work (Berlin: German Library of Information, 1940), p.22. Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, [1794] 1988).

80 Sílvia Quinteiro see that description is an essential element of the narrative process, invariably appearing at moments of great reflection and tension – e.g., when decisions are made at crucial points in the narrative structure. In this article, the comparison of the works of Radcliffe and Friedrich is based on an analysis of the relationship established between the observer and the landscape and on ways of representing this relationship. This analysis involves an interpretation of selected perspectives and framings. Thus, in the case of The Mysteries of Udolpho, we will focus necessarily on the descriptive passages. These play a similar role in the gothic novel to that performed by the representation of landscape in painting in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In fact, pictorial and literary representations/descriptions of landscape followed parallel courses until they were ultimately affirmed as meaningful texts. As Francisco Ayala says, in “El Paysaje y la Invención da la Realidad” (Landscape and the Invention of Reality), Romanticism was the period when landscape became a character.5 The analysis that we present here is a comparison of the texts as regards compositional and organisational strategies of landscape, but also on the level of thematology, as this is an inescapable way of approaching both these works. There are, of course, many other aspects that could be considered in a further study of the relationship between the observer and landscape in the works of Radcliffe and Friedrich: the meaning of landscape, the impact it has over the observer, and the different ways of accessing the landscape (the selection of perspectives and framings). The role of the observer is fundamental, since nature is of course represented from the point of view of one individual and according to the descriptive organisation s/he chooses (such as the objects selected for representation). In Friedrich’s works, the observer can be placed in two different locations. The first, and the most usual in landscape painting, is setting the observer outside the landscape. He is located at a selected exterior point, from where he focuses upon the elements he finds the most representative. The second kind of observer is not exclusive to Friedrich, even though this observer became a recurrent and identifying element of his work: the Rückenfigur is the figure of an individual that gazes upon the landscape with his back turned.6 In Friedrich’s work, this individual is more than a simple landscape painter, he is an observer (“Schauender”): someone who takes pleasure in observing nature, someone whose only objective is to share a mood that is common to the individual and his landscape.7 As we can infer from the designation, the Schauender does not mean to create any kind of artistic representation of the landscape observed – he is just someone who takes pleasure from gazing upon the scenario that surrounds him. The act of observing is both the means and the end, process and objective. In Friedrich’s work, the act of observing is measurable in the size and strategic placement of the Rückenfiguren in the paintings. It is significant that, in 5

6

7

Francisco Ayala, ‘El Paysaje y la Invención da la Realidad’, in Paisaje, Juego y Multilingüismo, ed. Darío Villanueva and Fernando Cabo Aseguinolaza (Santiago de Compostela: Servicio de Publicacions e Intercambio Científico, 1996), pp.23-30 (p.24). Werner Hofmann refers to the presence of the Rückenfigur in the works of the seventeenth century authors and he points out that in Friedrich’s work this figure represents a pure landscape observer, something that happened for the first time in the eighteenth century (Caspar David Friedrich, 1774-1840 [München und Hamburg: Prestel Verlag und Hamburger Kunsthalle, 1974], p.40). On the definition of Schauender, see Hofmann, p.40.

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landscape painting, landscape does not always occupy most of the canvas. The Rückenfigur is always very much in evidence in the composition, similarly to the cross on the top of a mountain, the ruin or some other element that stands for human presence and which allows the landscape to be read. By becoming the focaliser, Friedrich’s Rückenfigur erases the narrator’s presence. Comparing the Rückenfiguren to the figures gazing upon the landscape in Ann Radcliffe’s work, we can state that, by positioning himself inside the landscape, the human figure determines what is visible. In The Mysteries of Udolpho, for example, St. Aubert says that he used to climb a chestnut tree that existed in La Vallée in order to be able to enjoy the landscape: “How often, in my youth, have I climbed among its broad branches [...]. How often I have sat [...] looking out between the branches upon the wide landscape, and the setting sun, till twilight came.”8 Placing her character high up is a recurrent strategy in Radcliffe’s work and one which is also present in Friedrich’s paintings, particularly, and paradigmatically, in Der Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer (The Wanderer above the Mists, 1818). This is decisive for the process of constructing the landscape. As Van den Berg pointed out in “The Subject and his Landscape,” and Guillén in “El Hombre Invisible,” building a landscape is a paradoxical process because it depends on man’s capacity to exclude himself from it.9 In fact, the Romantic subject has distanced himself from landscape, and it is this distancing that has allowed him the possibility of recognising himself and the world surrounding him. The human element is finally able to understand its relationship to that world. In Radcliffe’s work, placing St. Aubert outdoors and high up gives the character a privileged perspective, one that allows him to realise how vast the landscape before him is. In The Mysteries of Udolpho, this quest for privileged perspectives is particularly explicit when St. Aubert travels between La Vallée and Languedoc for medical reasons. Instead of choosing the simplest, most direct route, St. Aubert decides to cross the Pyrenees at its highest points because that will allow him to enjoy better, more romantic views: “St. Aubert, instead of taking the more direct road, that ran along the feet of the Pyrenées to Languedoc, chose one that, winding over the heights, afforded more extensive views and greater variety of romantic scenery.”10 In fact, by emphasising certain elements and characteristics of landscape, the human figure orients the way we read it. The human eye that makes the selection not only chooses what and how we can see, but also eliminates whatever may disturb the picture it creates.11 Like the characters that gaze at the landscape in Ann Radcliffe’s novel, Friedrich’s Rückenfiguren are a fundamental element for the staging of focalisation. They are not merely objects represented in the scene, but also construct their own mechanisms of representation. One of the most common motifs in the works of Friedrich and Radcliffe is the window. Although the representation of the window as an independent motif dated from the Flemish and Tuscan schools of the fifteenth century,12 it was effectively in the nineteenth century

8 9 10 11 12

Radcliffe, p.13. Van den Berg, p.62; Guillén, pp.67-8. Radcliffe, p.27. See Ayala, p.25. See Charles Sala, Caspar David Friedrich: The Spirit of Romantic Painting (Paris: Éditions Pierre Terrail, 1994), p.190.

82 Sílvia Quinteiro that it became noteworthy as a theme. In one of the most significant Romantic paintings on this subject, Jungfrau an dem Fenster (Maiden at a Window, 1822), Friedrich offers a variation on a motif that is recurrent in The Mysteries of Udolpho – a woman gazing upon the landscape from a window. In effect, there are numerous representations of Emily in this situation, in which the function of the window is to simultaneously permit and limit observation. The window becomes the boundary, an ambivalent and paradoxical element that illustrates the relation between what is at the same time ours and unfamiliar to us – in Yuri Lotman’s words, “our pogany.”13 Being a boundary, the window is the place where the individual can make what is external to him his own, a place that belongs to two different worlds, where the separation between them is established, but also where they meet and mingle. In Ann Radcliffe’s work, the window is the type of boundary that best represents Lotman’s definition of the concept: it is a place of exclusion, but also and simultaneously of inclusion. The window is the frontier between interior and exterior. It is a privileged space of separation, but also a place of union, because it allows the individual to become an observer and thus to reach with the eye the otherwise unattainable landscape. In fact, we could even claim that the window as boundary allows the observer to see beyond what his eye can reach – it can be a link to past events and a means of bringing them to the present: The windows of this room opened upon the garden. As Emily passed them, she saw the spot where she had parted with Valancourt on the preceding night: the remembrance pressed heavily on her heart, and she turned hastily away from the object that had awakened it.14

The same window that forms the boundary between the room and the exterior, keeping Emily from the garden, also opens onto it, allowing the heroine’s gaze to pass through and transforming that incursion, not only into a visual act, but also into an evocation of the past. Located at the window Emily plays alternate roles, Schauender and Zeichner: “[Emily] took her instruments for drawing, and placed herself at a window, to select into a landscape some features of the scenery without.”15 In fact, in this passage, Emily is before the landscape, selecting the features that she wants to draw. She acts like an artist (Zeichner), valuing essentially the aesthetic features. Nevertheless, when characters contemplate landscape, they transform this act into a theme of representation, and the aesthetic aspects invariably lead to the spiritual and the moral, as we can see in the following passage: At her favourite pavilion at the end of the terrace, where, seating herself at one of the embowered windows, that opened upon a balcony, the stillness and seclusion of the scene allowed [Emily] to recollect her thoughts, and to arrange them so as to form a clearer judgment of her former conduct.16

As in Friedrich’s Jungfrau an dem Fenster, the woman that here gazes upon the landscape uses the window as a means through which to gain access to the landscape, as the axis that Yuri Lotman, ‘The Notion of Boundary’, in Universe of the Mind. A Semiotic Theory of Culture (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), pp.131-142 (p.137). 14 Radcliffe, p.161. 15 Radcliffe, p.276. 16 Radcliffe, p.126 13

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links the interior and exterior and therefore as the link between the terrestrial and the revelatory. Through her gaze, the window becomes a passage between the darkness of the studio interior (a representation of Friedrich’s own spiritual darkness at that time) and a vision of an exterior world that is bright and spiritualised. It is the woman’s eye – a duplication of the artist’s eye, subsequently reduplicated by our own eye – that allows access to the landscape and to spiritual possibility. A window can be opened and can lead to the air and light; it is a symbol of the receptive. The square window stands for earthly receptivity to what comes from Heaven. For that reason, the window in Jungfrau an dem Fenster draws a Christian cross over the head of the observer and opens onto a landscape that is filled with elements of religious significance. The poplars we see on the margin opposite the one where the woman stands are a symbol of suffering, pain, sacrifice and the desire for death; they are funerary trees, evoking the regressive forces of nature and the past, and emphasising the absence of hope in the future.17 The masts of the ships that cross the river (which in this context is a clear reference to the river Hades) lead to a reflection about the passage from life to death.18 Being then essentially a symbol of revelation and of the entering of the divine light,19 the sort of window that is most frequently represented in Ann Radcliffe’s work is the “casement.” This kind of window can be opened and closed like a door, permitting both observation and concealment, particularly the concealment of the interior and thus the preservation of intimacy.20 In The Mysteries of Udolpho, the half-open window that enables Emily to observe is also the source of the revelation and illumination that guides her conduct. We should of course remember that a half-open window is at the same time half closed. So if the act of opening transforms it into a source of revelation, then closing it makes it a mechanism of occultation. So, although Emily can now make a “clearer” judgement about her conduct, there is always a veil of obscurity that partially occludes her. In Radcliffe’s work, the implicit geometric Caspar David Friedrich, Woman at a Window, 1822 (Nationalgalerie, Berlin) opposition of inside and out goes beyond the Cf. Helmut Börsch-Supan, Caspar David Friedrich (München: Prestel-Verlag, 1990), p.134; Jean Chevalier and Alain Gheerbrant, Dictionary of Symbols (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), pp.26-27. 18 Cf. Sala, p.193. 19 Cf Chevalier and Gheerbrant, p.432; also Horst S. and Ingrid Daemmrich, ‘Window’, in Themes & Motifs in Western Literature (Tübingen: Francke Verlag, 1987), p.252 20 Gaston Bachelard, La Poétique de l’Espace (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, [1957] 1970), pp.200-1 and passim. 17

84 Sílvia Quinteiro domain of the purely visual and aesthetic.21 The window allows the character’s moral nature to be revealed – Emily’s interior tensions and conflicts, her feelings of inclusion