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 and exclusion, and the pain that results from this kind of interior aggression. Windows, then, are not only a means of acceding landscape; the presence of the window in Jungfrau an dem Fenster leads our eye in the direction of what is beyond the window, but it also tranforms us effectively into beings that long for the unattainable, separated as we inevitably are from the observed landscape. There is an insuperable separation, but there is simultaneously a meeting between the inner and outer worlds that makes the individual long for the infinite that exists beyond the window in a landscape that is almost dematerialised by luminosity. Joseph Koerner calls this an exile, and disagrees that the observer is immersed in the landscape that she gazes upon: Is this really the case in Friedrich’s landscapes, though? In the great Woman at the Window from 1822, now in Berlin, pictorial symmetry expresses not an identification with, or immersion in, the landscape, but rather a separation from it. [...] As window the canvas does not invite any easy entrance into the painted world, any fiction of homogeneity real and represented space. Rather, the picture-window sequesters us, like the woman, in a position of exile from, and longing for, what we can always only partially see.22

In The Mysteries of Udolpho, as in Friedrich’s representations of the inside of the studio, the description of what is located on this side of the window is so austere and contained that our attention is fixed on the landscape revealed by the window, its luminosity which contrasts with the severity of the interior. In fact, Friedrich’s “barren cell-like studio”23 is represented in many other paintings by the author and by other artists that portrayed him in his atelier. If we focus, for instance, on Friedrich’s Blick aus dem linken Atelierfenster (View from the Left Window of the Studio, 1805), and Blick aus dem rechten Atelierfenster (View from the Right Window of the Studio, 1805); or on Georg Friedrich Kersting’s (1787-1847) Caspar David Friedrich in seinem Atelier (Caspar David Friedrich in his Studio, 1812), and Caspar David Friedrich malend in seinem Atelier (Caspar David Friedrich Painting in his Studio, 1811), we can see that there are only a few objects in the atelier

Caspar David Friedrich, View from the Left Window of the Studio, 1805 (Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna)

Cf Bachelard, pp.191ff. Joseph Leo Koerner, Caspar David Friedrich and the Subject of Landscape (London: Reaktion Books, 1990), pp.112-13. 23 Barbara Maria Stafford, Visual Analogy: Consciousness as the Art of Connecting (Massachusetts: M.I.T. Press, 1999), p.68 21 22

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and that they are generally essential to the act of painting. Unlike most artists, Friedrich does not fill his atelier with objects that might stimulate the mind to artistic creation. Instead, he finds his inspiration precisely in the absence of exterior objects of reference. This atelier is characterised by a starkness that is reflected in his works and which leads Karl Kroeber to consider him a “pre-minimalist” painter.24 Indeed, it is probably because of this austerity (Wieland Schmied suggests in Friedrich) that the woman in Jungfrau an dem Fenster is in a sense compelled to gaze out. Her impulse is a “confirmation of our own impulse” to look at what is beyond the window and consequently it is a mechanism of pictorial orientation and organisation.25 The fascinated woman at the window makes us follow her example and allows us to share her experience, as Emily does in The Mysteries of Udolpho: Soon after, she caught, between the steep banks of the road, another view of the chateau, peeping from among the high trees, and surrounded by green slopes and tufted groves, the Garonne winding its way beneath their shades, sometimes lost among the vineyards, and then rising in greater majesty in the distant pastures. The towering precipices of the Pyrenées, that rose to the South, gave Emily a thousand interesting recollections of her late journey; and these objects of her former enthusiastic admiration, now excited only sorrow and regret.26

In this excerpt, we find detailed information about the different aspects of the landscape that Emily observes from the window of the carriage on her way to Udolpho. But there is also a description of the heroine’s feelings that clarifies the kind of relationship that is established between her and surrounding nature. Emily feels that nature shares her moods, and so the “former enthusiastic admiration” is replaced by the “sorrow and regret” that the undesired destination of the journey causes for the heroine. The window, as an instrument for the construction of landscape, may also be used to generate several different landscapes from the same central point. Using a house, pavilion or carriage,27 different landscapes may be created according to the positioning of the windows: Three windows presented each a separate and beautiful prospect; that to the north, overlooking Languedoc; another to the west, the hills ascending towards the Pyrenées, whose awful summits crowned the landscape; and a third, fronting the south, gave the Mediterranean, and a part of the wild shores of Rousillon, to the eye. [...] It was of octagonal form, the various landscape. One window opened upon a romantic glade, where the eye roved among the woody recesses, and the scene was bounded only by a lengthened pomp of groves; from another, the woods receding disclosed the distant summits of the Pyrenées; a third fronted an avenue, beyond

Karl Kroeber, ‘The Clarity of the Mysterious and the Obscurity of the Familiar. Friedrich and Turner’, in The Romantic Imagination: Literature and Art in England and Germany, ed. Frederick Burwick and Jürgen Klein (Amsterdam/Atlanta: Rodopi, 1996), pp.398-412 (p.410). 25 Cf Wieland Schmied, Friedrich (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc.,1995), p.100. 26 Radcliffe, p. 116. 27 This central point of observation, that allows the individual to observe whatever he chooses to without being seen from the outside, functions here as a kind of Panopticon. See Michel Foucault, Vigiar e Punir. Nascimento da Prisão (Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison) (Petrópolis: Editora Vozes, [1987] 1998), pp.165-167. The house, the pavilion and the carriage protect the intimacy of the individual that is kept under their obscurity, and is only revealed by the values and tensions that are reflected on the pictures that he creates. 24

86 Sílvia Quinteiro which the grey towers of Chateau-le-Blanc, and a picturesque part of its ruin were seen partially among the foliage.28

In both excerpts, the windows are, rather than simple objects, an essential element for the framing of landscape. They are the representation of the subject that constructs that landscape; they are the subjects that select the perspective and afterwards frame the landscape. Windows have the function of opening themselves upon the landscape (“One window opened upon a romantic glade”) and of exhibiting it (“Three windows presented each a separate and beautiful prospect,” “a third, fronting the south, [...] gave the Mediterranean [...] to the eye”). There is no other character in these passages, and even the way verbs are used suggest that the act of observing is not individual or particular. The act of looking is generalised into impersonality because, although the presence of the individual is not suppressed, the observer cannot be precisely identified (“where the eye roved,” “were seen”). The window is simply an opening upon a space that is actualised by the characters looking through it: The windows of this room were particularly pleasant; they descended to the floor, and, opening upon a little lawn that surrounded the house, the eye was led between groves of almond, palm-trees, flowering-ash, and myrtle, to the distant landscape, where the Garonne wandered.29

The use of anthropomorphism (“descended”) and the fact that the narrator attributes to the window a characteristic that actually belongs to the landscape (“pleasant”) reveal the true value of this mechanism of landscape construction. The window itself is mere potential, but it is the human eye that particularises the elements of landscape, that distinguishes them and apprehends them as meaning. In this sense, the window is an opening through which we can reach the landscape. But it is only the human eye that can make that transition, actualising and giving meaning to something that was only a hypothesis. Like any other point from which landscape can be apprehended, the window functions mainly as a means to place the individual before the landscape, even if apparently there is no one at the window. This because constructing a landscape is a process that has its origin in the cognitive act of observing. A similar effect can be found in Friedrich’s paintings of the windows in his studio, Blick aus dem linken Atelierfenster and Blick aus dem rechten Atelierfenster. Once again the window is represented as if its opening upon the landscape were independent of the human eye. Friedrich’s studio windows almost make us forget that our eye is a duplication of the artist’s eye. Having both been represented from the same point of the room, it seems the windows are simply there and that they exist regardless of the intervention of an artistic eye that would determine the point of view. This absence of the 28 29

Radcliffe, pp.479, 482. Radcliffe, p. 3. In The Lost Travellers Bernard Blackstone analyses the human presence in nature, namely the presence of the traveller, and comes to the conclusion that “if nature is a cryptogram, intelligent travel is an exercise in interpretation. The traveller is a moving eye, passing from letter to letter, from word to word, appreciatively. Rocks, trees, waves, birds, bees – here is a divine alphabet” (The Lost Travellers. A Romantic Theme With Variations [London: Longman, 1962], p.36). It is then the human eye that shapes nature transforming it in different landscapes with different meanings.

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artist would also justify the complex and very unusual perspective that was chosen for the representation of the left window. Effectively, a frontal perspective would allow a vaster vision of the exterior, but would also indicate the absence of the individual’s organising eye. Nevertheless, the observer is present in both paintings: in Blick aus dem linken Atelierfenster, on the right side of the window, we can see a mirror that reflects the image of a door, which must be located behind the observer. In Blick aus dem rechten Atelierfenster, the presence of the individual is also very discrete but still much more visible than in Blick aus dem linken Atelierfenster – we can see the reflection of the artist’s head on the mirror, on the left side of the canvas. But it is meaningful that the artist’s presence can only be noticed through its reflection on the mirror, because this is a paradoxical affirmation of both the individual’s existence and his non-existence, since, as Foucault states, the mirror is the place where the individual can be seen, but where he does not exist.30 To sum up, we can assert that, both in The Mysteries of Udolpho and in Caspar David Friedrich’s work, the representation of landscape is based on a process of perception and representation that always depends on the presence of an observer (either explicit or implicit) – an eye that selects and organises the elements, choosing the perspective and the framing. The apparent impersonality of the representation of certain landscapes is in fact a simulacrum that results from a more or less generalised use of a set of aesthetic and religious principles that are dominant during the Romantic period.31 These principles make us forget the presence of the “cultural eye”32 and transform the observed landscapes into something more than simple descriptions. Landscapes become a link and a passage between interior and exterior, between the earthly and religious revelation. They become a passage in which both the observer and the unknown eye are always and inevitably a duplication of the “cultural eye” of the artist.

Michel Foucault, ‘Of Other Spaces’, in Diacritics, Spring, 16:1 (1986), 22-27 (p.24). Namely the notions of picturesque, as defined by Uvdale Price, and the concepts of beautiful and sublime in the sense that they are used by Edmund Burke in his A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful. Cf Uvdale Price, ‘from An Essay on the picturesque, as compared with the sublime and beautiful (1794)’, in The Sublime, a Reader in British Eighteenth-Century Aesthetic Theory, ed. Andrew Ashfield and Peter de Bolla (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, [1794] 1996), pp.271-275; Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (London: Basil Blackwell, London, [1757] 1990), passim. 32 Cf Helena Carvalhão Buescu, Incidências do Olhar: Percepção e Representação (Lisboa: Editorial Caminho, 1990), p. 67. 30 31

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Gabriela Gândara Terenas

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

Pinheiro Chagas, a late nineteenth-century Portuguese politician and man of letters, appears to have been fascinated by reproductions of the work of William Hogarth, which he discussed at some length in articles published in periodicals of the time. The present article discusses the extent to which Pinheiro Chagas’s discourse on the paintings and engravings of the eighteenth-century English artist involved an indirect commentary on the ills of contemporary Portuguese society.

In the years 1866 and 1867, the celebrated Lisbon weekly, O Panorama. Semanário de litteratura e instrucção (Panorama. A Weekly of Literature and Instruction; 1837-1858 and 1866-1868),1 published a series of reproductions of works by the great eighteenth-century satirical artist, William Hogarth (1697-1764). They were “O Infeliz poeta,” originally entitled “The distressed poet” (1736), “O músico enraivecido” or “The enraged musician” (1741), “O casamento à moda” or “Marriage-à-la-mode” (1745) and “A contradança ridícula” (The Ridiculous Contredanse), or “The analysis of beauty. Plate II” (1753). The reproductions of Hogarth’s work in O Panorama were accompanied by a number of articles, all of which were written by Manuel Joaquim Pinheiro Chagas (1812-1895), who demonstrated a particular interest in Great Britain in his writings in the nineteenth-century periodical press, covering a wide range of topics: history, economy, politics, social and cultural life, literature and, of course, the arts.2 Although his fame during his lifetime may have been exaggerated and, in fact, a number of his works were greeted with great acclaim,3 the manner in which he is ignored and underestimated by the critics today is equally difficult to justify. Such neglect may be a consequence of Pinheiro Chagas’s opinions on the famous “Coimbra Question,” a controversy and battle of pamphlets that opposed the new European scientific spirit, represented by an emerging generation of intellectuals led by Antero de 1 2

3

From now on the periodical will be referred to only as O Panorama. Elected Member of Parliament for Covilhã by the Regenerador Party; Minister of the Navy and the Overseas Territories in 1883; a prolific and multifaceted writer, parliamentary orator and academic, Pinheiro Chagas was involved in a wide and diversified range of activities including translation, poetry, narrative, dramaturgy, politics, journalism and history. Amongst his translations, the following four works exemplify his interest in Great Britain: Physiologia das Escolas (Physiology of the Schools), by Caroline Bray; John Bull e a sua Ilha (John Bull et son île), by Max O’Rell; A Vida e as aventuras de Robinson Crusoé (The Life and adventures of Robinson Crusoe), by Daniel Defoe; and A Ruina de Inglaterra (La Ruine d'Angleterre), by Camille Debans. Irrespective of whether these translations were done from French or English, Pinheiro Chagas did, in fact, know the English language, as can be proved by several translations directly from English sources, namely articles published in British periodicals, such as Blackwood’s Magazine, Longman’s Magazine, the Daily Chronicle, The Times, or The Edinburgh Review. It is possible, therefore, that his knowledge of the language may have contributed to his evident interest in English culture. See, for example, the cases of the novels, Tristezas à beira-mar (1866) and A Mantilha de Beatriz (1878) or the drama A Morgadinha de Valflor (1869).

90 Gabriela Gândara Terenas Quental (the Geração de 70, or “Generation of 1870”), and the ultra-Romantic sentimentalism of the so-called “Castilho School” (after the highly influential António Feliciano de Castilho). One of Chagas’s works, O poema da mocidade (Poem of Youth), published in 1865, actually sparked off the so-called “Question of Good Sense and Good Taste,” for it was in the preface to that work that Castilho first examined the negative consequences of the advent of the new Coimbra Generation, in the form of a letter to the publisher. The stance taken by Pinheiro Chagas towards the institutional conservatism, in both literature and politics, which the “Generation of 1870” strove to oppose, was, to say the least, controversial.4 Nevertheless, this provides inadequate justification for the subsequent neglect of his poetical and narrative work, which is endowed with undeniable creative and structural qualities, as the Portuguese scholar Helena Carvalhão Buescu has noted.5 The present article will be concerned precisely with some of his narrative texts, those that Pinheiro Chagas wrote to accompany the reproductions of Hogarth’s engravings in O Panorama, and with the dual role they played in offering a view of Britain and a commentary on Portugal. Whilst drawing attention to the qualities of British art and artists, Pinheiro Chagas paid tribute to the genius of William Hogarth, the great satirical engraver and painter of the eighteenth century. Hogarth had enjoyed tremendous popularity in his day, principally due to the way he succeeded in using his art to satirise British morality and customs. Pinheiro Chagas lays particular emphasis on the simultaneously pedagogical and moral aims of Hogarth’s representations: [the] celebrated painter and engraver Will [sic] Hogarth, upon whom the Fine Arts have conferred a leading role amongst their exponents […], became well known as a result of his originality, and the veracity with which he was able to portray the passions and scenes of everyday life. All of his paintings […] are comedies in paint, criticising human vices with the aim of correcting them; everything in them is action, movement, interest, truth, and no character can be found who is not a spitting image of nature.6

William Hogarth is generally considered to be the founder of narrative painting, which was to become so important in Victorian England. Indeed, the portrayal of everyday life, not infrequently anecdotal in theme, enjoyed remarkable popularity in the first half of the nineteenth century (up to the end of the seventies or thereabouts). Many of Hogarth’s works are distinguished by the satirical way in which he portrays his characters, by the theatrical

4

5 6

Pinheiro Chagas sided with the supporters of Castilho in the battle of words which followed the publication of his text and defended, firstly in the press, and afterwards in parliament, the decision taken by the government to close the Casino Conferences. Pinheiro Chagas was also responsible for the report which led to the exclusion of Eça de Queirós’ work A Relíquia, from the competition for the Lisbon Academia das Ciências literary prize in 1887, having criticised Eça’s anticlerical and agnostic aims. See her entry on Chagas in Dicionário do Romantismo português, ed. Helena Carvalhão Buescu (Lisboa: Editorial Caminho, 1997), pp.88-89. Anonymous [Manuel Joaquim Pinheiro Chagas?], ‘O infeliz poeta’ (The Distressed Poet) in O Panorama, 5ª série, XVI: 4, (1866), pp.28-29; my translation. This attribution is supported by the fact that all the other articles published on Hogarth in the same periodical were unquestionably by Pinheiro Chagas, who regularly contributed to O Panorama.

William Hogarth seen by Pinheiro Chagas 91 nature of his compositions, and by his profound, detailed and humorous scrutiny of society. According to certain critics, Hogarth succeeded in raising comedy, in pictorial art, to the level it had risen to in literature.7 Joseph Burke, a Hogarth specialist, claims that the painter’s masterpieces – The Harlot’s progress, The Rake’s progress and Marriage-à-lamode – are comparable, in their vivacity, moral strength and unwavering criticism, to the novels of Smollett and Fielding, who pays tribute to him in the preface to Joseph Andrews (1742).8 As far as Pinheiro Chagas was concerned, many of the scenes caricatured by Hogarth and reproduced in O Panorama, whether ironic, satirical or malicious, were still eminently topical in the mid-nineteenth century. On the one hand, this justified their publication in a contemporary periodical, whilst on the other, it provided evidence of the ageless appeal of Hogarth, whose works were, in the words of Pinheiro Chagas, true and immortal, satirical poems: There is […] a remarkable man […] whose engravings are bound to live on forever, admired and appreciated by all […]. The caricatures of the celebrated English painter […] possess this priceless gift of satire. […] With just two quick and powerful lines Hogart [sic] sketches out a scene. His mischievous talent turns these two lines into a satirical poem, and a satirical poem into a step towards immortality.9

Hogarth’s works can be appreciated as works of art, but can also be “read” as pictorial narratives.10 For Joseph Burke, the editor of Hogarth’s complete works, the value of the prints depends as much on the quality of the drawings as on the commentaries made upon them.11 Thus a reproduction of a Hogarth engraving, in which several small episodes take place simultaneously, as fragments of a wider scene, lent itself to analysis and description almost as if it were a story told in serial form – or, in Portuguese, a folhetim –, which undoubtedly appealed to readers’ tastes during the period in question, and particularly to readership of the periodical in which they were published. Let us examine what Pinheiro Chagas had to say regarding “The enraged musician”: On this question, see Joseph Burke and Colin Caldwell, Hogarth. The complete engravings (London: Thames and Hudson, 1968), p.8. Fielding considers that Hogarth was responsible for the creation of an art which is, at once, elevated, and 8 truthful about the nature of Man. Fielding defined the artist as being situated halfway between historical painting – in which the pictorial drama is constructed deliberately far from real experience – and the low genre of caricature, consisting in the distortion of a section of reality to achieve comic effect. This halfway position does not imply the portrayal of gods or grotesque figures, but what Hogarth calls character, or rather a process that Fielding describes as the expression of human affection on canvas. Caricature is for Hogarth what burlesque is for Fielding, a physical distortion which reduces a person to a peculiar characteristic. A character, on the other hand, may show Man in his entirety, as a thinking being with feelings. On the mutual influence of Fielding and Hogarth see David Bindam, ‘The connoisseurs and comic history painting’ in Hogarth (London: Thames and Hudson, 1997), pp.105,107. Anonymous [Manuel Joaquim Pinheiro Chagas?], ‘O infeliz poeta’ (The Distressed Poet) in O Panorama, 5ª 9 série, XVI: 7, (1866), p.52; my translation. 10 On this question, see Innes and Gustav Herdan, ‘Introduction’ in Lichtenberg’s commentaries on Hogarth’s engravings, (London: The Cresset Press, 1966), p.X. 11 See Burke and Caldwell, pp.5-29. 7

92 Gabriela Gândara Terenas [Hogarth] catches red-handed an inoffensive, ridiculous episode, a comic situation; he takes possession of it with inextinguishable laughter, and mischievously, rather than sarcastically, he reproduces the scene in which he found inspiration for the comedy. […] And smiling mischievously to himself, the painter sets down the different characters of the comic scene on canvas. Each brushstroke reveals the story-teller; and we say without hesitation, “The enraged musician” is, indeed, a folhetim.12

In fact, the folhetim, which was generally presented at the foot of the page in nineteenthcentury magazines, not only included the usual serialised novels, but also articles on theatre, science, religion, philosophy, travel, social events and also the visual arts.13 Indeed, the folhetim was one of the factors which made nineteenth-century journalism acceptable to the public in general, and it developed into a kind of ‘popular recipe’, precisely with the aim of attracting the attention of the wider reading public.14 As we shall see, Pinheiro Chagas used the “technique” of the folhetim to win over the readers of O Panorama to Hogarth’s work, readily abetted by his prints. O Panorama was a publication with educational and recreational leanings, aimed at a relatively wide readership, and which, above all else, endeavoured to be instructive in an entertaining fashion, whilst attempting to cover every area of knowledge. To this end, illustrations provided an added attraction for its readers and gave the magazine an agreeable and picturesque appearance, which was typical of this kind of periodical. Consideration of the visual arts can be a precious aid in acquiring a greater knowledge of attitudes, of history and everyday life, and a vitally important tool for understanding a particular culture. To that extent, the visual can offer an immediate confrontation with otherness, or rather with its representation. Indeed, the visual image was used in nineteenthcentury periodicals, not just to illustrate the subjects being dealt with, but also as a means of providing information about another culture – British culture in this case. But, besides their offer of a means of perceiving otherness through the visual image, the articles written about Hogarth’s engravings, or rather about the reflections they elicited, were often more revealing about the Self, who was writing about them, than the Other who was the original object of the exercise. The two issues I would like to address at this juncture – and which are defined by the title of this paper – are, on the one hand, the stereotyped view that Pinheiro Chagas gave of the British people through his analysis of Hogarths’s work, and on the other, his critique of contemporary Portuguese society.

[Manuel Joaquim] Pinheiro Chagas, ‘O musico enraivecido. Caricatura de Hogarth’ (The Enraged Musician. A caricature by Hogarth) in O Panorama 5ª série, XVI: 15, (1866), pp.116, 118; my translation. 13 Maria de Lourdes Costa Lima dos Santos establishes, in fact, a clear distinction between the “romancefolhetim” (serialised novel) and the “folhetim-crónica” (serialised chronicle). The latter can be defined, in her words, by a kind of “informative and anecdotal inventory with pretensions to social analysis,” an aspect which becomes clear in Pinheiro Chagas’s writing. See Maria de Lourdes Costa Lima dos Santos, Intelectuais portugueses na primeira metade de oitocentos (Portuguese Intellectuals in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century) (Lisboa: Editorial Presença, 1988), pp.174-176. 14 On this subject, see Ernesto Rodrigues, Mágico folhetim. Literatura e jornalismo em Portugal (The Magic Serial: Literature and Journalism in Portugal) (Lisboa: Editorial Notícias,1998). 12

William Hogarth seen by Pinheiro Chagas 93 In Pinheiro Chagas’s opinion, “The analysis of beauty. Plate II,” which he entitled “The ridiculous contredanse” in Portuguese, was a typical example of British humour, which he described as being possessed of great seriousness in everything comic, and imbued with total impassibility towards the eccentric and the absurd. The way in which the almost funereal figures of the contredanse move around, with icy gravity, to occupy hilarious poses, is seen as paradigmatic of one of the characteristics of Anglo-Saxon people: eccentricity. Examples of British eccentricity, which were frequently recounted in the nineteenthcentury press, were normally associated with unlikely marriages, bizarre love affairs, astonishing crimes, the extravagant antics of the world’s wealthiest classes (the British aristocracy and middle class), an exaggerated love of animals, extremes of pragmatism and stiff-lipped behaviour in dramatic situations, and also exaggerated formality and etiquette in social affairs. By portraying the characteristics of a different culture – that of Britain –, Hogarth’s images arguably responded to the tastes of a public thirsty for knowledge about the customs and attitudes of a civilisation which, in many aspects, it considered to be exemplary. On the other hand, whilst analysing the scenes produced by Hogarth in the eighteenth century, the writer painted a picture of nineteenth-century Portugal, and more particularly, of society in the Lisbon of his day: the chaos of the city, the marriages of convenience, and the vices of a newly ennobled middle class. The following are examples of the approximations the writer made, in his descriptions and commentaries on Hogarth’s prints, between the scenes satirised by the artist and the Portuguese situation at the time. This was yet another reason for the presence of Hogarth’s work in nineteenth-century periodicals, and one which arguably confirmed the artist’s universal appeal. In his commentary on the reproduction of “The enraged musician,” Pinheiro Chagas compared the scene Hogarth had caricatured, situated somewhere in a London street, with the hubbub of mid-nineteenth century Lisbon. A musician, attempting to have his daily practice session, is enraged by a cacophony of deafening and horrendous noises: the cries of street vendors, the sounds of different instruments like the drum and the oboe being played outside in the street, the clatter of a road mender plying his trade, and even the barking of dogs and the howls of frightened cats. Next comes a scene that Hogarth painted in 1741 and O Panorama published in 1866: the musician, now desperate, runs to the window with his hair standing on end, his eyes blazing, screaming and damning everyone outside in the street, who, unconcernedly, go on playing their atrocious tunes. The victim’s commotion is drowned by the strident street noises.15 In his critique of the vices of the bourgeoisie and the new aristocracy, and of marriages of convenience, Pinheiro Chagas focused his attention on the series entitled “Marriage-à-lamode,” which was made up of six scenes, although only one was reproduced in O Panorama. This was “The breakfast scene,” which was published under the name of “The salon.”

15

[Manuel Joaquim] Pinheiro Chagas, ‘O musico enraivecido. Caricatura de Hogarth’ (The Enraged Musician: A Caricature by Hogarth) in O Panorama 5ª série, XVI: 15,(1866), pp.116-118.

94 Gabriela Gândara Terenas It should be remembered that in Portugal, Liberalism had brought fundamental changes to prevalent social values, but it had not created a truly bourgeois society, as it had in Britain. In fact, the Portuguese nineteenth-century bourgeoisie did not possess the spirit of class which gave the European bourgeoisie its strength, especially the British middle class, and whilst the country aspired to be an urban society, it continued to be essentially rural, illiterate and lacking in civic awareness. However, the alliance between the nobility and the bourgeoisie to create a new Portugal, and the opening of the doors of the nobility to the middle classes, did create a new attitude of compromise in which the fascination of the aristocratic tradition and formality of etiquette were allied to bourgeois values. The proliferation of new barons and viscounts in Portugal created a need for the recently elevated noblemen – the so-called parvenus16 – to acquire a knowledge of the rules of conduct within the social group in which they aspired to move, as well as a need for the celebration of marriages to meet the requirements of a bourgeoisie which yearned for titles, and an aristocracy which was short of cash. Thus, “Marriage-à-la-mode” was readily adaptable to the situation in Portugal, particularly with regard to the previously mentioned changes in the social hierarchy, the marriages of convenience, and the vices caused by idleness and money. The plot, which was common in the melodramas of the period,17 tells the tale of a poor nobleman who married his son to the heiress of a wealthy, but plebeian, businessman. According to Pinheiro Chagas, the former wanted to gild his coat of arms, and the latter to confer nobility upon his money. The groom, in his turn, needed money to squander and to allow him to maintain his style of living, whilst the heiress wanted a title so she could look down on her friends. The marriage takes place but the outcome is a disaster: the money is frittered away in balls and parties, the aristocrat sees his good name gradually go up in smoke and the wealthy businessman witnesses the rapid disappearance of his fortune, which he had accumulated over a lifetime of hard work. The husband ends up by dying in a brothel brawl, leaving his widow to spend her life in poverty.18

In fact, the parvenu would never be a protester against the established order of things, as the enlargement of the privileged group to include him, was to safeguard and protect the status quo. Interestingly enough, this was also true of the dissemination of Victorian attitudes, with the implicit aim of ensuring the peaceful behaviour of the classes upon whose labour depended the economic power of the country, as well as the wellbeing of the ruling classes. In the end the objective was the same: to maintain order in a changing society. On this subject, see Vitor Quaresma, ‘Constantes e mutações na mentalidade portuguesa’ (Continuity and Change in the Portuguese Mentality) in Portugal contemporâneo, ed. by António Reis (Lisboa: Publicações Alfa, 1989),vol. II, pp.315-330; and also Filipe Furtado and Maria Teresa Malafaia, ‘Introdução. Tendências, mitos e valores’ (Introduction: Tendencies, Myths and Values) in O Pensamento vitoriano. Uma antologia de textos (Victorian Thought: An Anthology) (Lisboa: Edições 70, 1992), pp.14-15. 17 Inspired by moralistic objectives, the so-called “drama de actualidade,” attempted to relate to the political and social situation of the time, without, however, attacking the framework of established order. The action would generally revolve around a sentimental plot, with all the ingredients of a romantic melodrama. Despite the allegations, often made nowadays, of lack of quality of the plays then staged, it should be said that they frequently played a socialising role towards a rising class in society and, undoubtedly, corresponded to the taste and expectations of the theatre-going public. 18 See M. [Manuel Joaquim] Pinheiro Chagas, ‘O casamento á moda. (Gravura de Hogarth)’ (Marriage-à-laMode. An engraving by Hogarth) in O Panorama 5ª série, XVII: 7, (1867), pp.52-53. 16

William Hogarth seen by Pinheiro Chagas 95 Revolving around the engraving entitled “The Salon” or “The breakfast scene”, the plot is a paradigmatic example of the life of the couple. Just as Pinheiro Chagas relates, it is apparent that there has been a ball the previous evening. The servants, who evidently were not under their masters’ supervision, left everything in disorder the night before, as chairs are lying on the floor, sheets of music are scattered around, and the whole room is in an untidy mess. The husband appears, yawning and gazing blankly around, his clothes unkempt, his face livid, possibly having just returned from an orgy. The woman stretches, half asleep, picks up a cup of tea and stares contemptuously at her husband. The butler, who had come in to present creditors’ bills, has been summarily repulsed, and withdraws, raising his hands to the heavens.19 Employing an intergeneric discourse, comprising art criticism and narrative in the style of the folhetim, and taking reproductions of William Hogarth’s work in the Portuguese periodical press as his starting point, Pinheiro Chagas comments on the scenes painted by the eighteenth-century artist, whilst reflecting upon the specificity of a different culture and, simultaneously, on the Portuguese situation. The pictorial works showing scenes of Great Britain thus constitute the point of departure for the creation of texts whose explicit aim is to provide images of an Other, whilst implicitly analysing and, above all, criticising Portuguese nineteenth-century society.

19

Chagas, ‘O casamento á moda’, pp.52-53.

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Vita Fortunati

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

Hans Holbein The Younger (1905), by Ford Madox Ford, is an investigation into the portrait genre which, by intertwining literary and art criticism, constructs a metacritical discourse situated in between the visual and the verbal medium. Ford’s thorough study of the categories of “vision” and “invention,” as developed by Holbein, aims to draw cultural connections between his portraits of Renaissance lords and ladies and their iconographic and historical context, as well as to draw a comparison with Albrecht Dürer’s aesthetics. Furthermore, Ford’s analysis of Holbein’s sitters, widely ranging from family members to political figures, allows him to establish an intertextual dialogue with the genre of the “literary portrait,” namely with Partial Portraits (1888) by Henry James, who portrays real subjects, and with Imaginary Portraits (1887) by Walter Pater, who conjures up fictional portraits. Ford’s comparative study of visual and verbal portraits will play a crucial role in the writing of The Fifth Queen (1906) trilogy and Ancient Lights (1911, also known as Memories and Impressions), as well as in the elaboration of his critical theories on narrative, especially on technique as craft.

Dürer and Holbein, Holbein and Dürer: the two for most of mankind stand up like lighthouses out of the sea of Germanic Painters […] the two greater masters are for the Germanic nations the boundary stones between the old world and the modern, between the old faith and the new learning, between empirical, charming conception of an irrational world and the modern theoretic way of looking at life.1

Rereading Hans Holbein The Younger: A Critical Monograph, which Ford Madox Ford wrote in 1905, means re-questioning the interesting relationship that the proto-modernist author developed with the arts. Much has already been written about the debt his narrative poetics owes to the figurative arts. My aim here is to try and demonstrate how the meeting of Ford and Holbein was not only a significant moment for the clarification of crucial aspects of Ford’s poetics, but also a point of convergence between tradition and innovation. In his monograph Ford elucidates what he means by “real artist” and by “real art,” confirming what he had already said in his previous works of art criticism, Ford Madox Brown: A Record of His Life and Work and Dante Gabriel Rossetti: A Critical Monograph, and continued to say in The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood: A Critical Monograph.2 Real art is always that which creates in the spectator a feeling of amazement, of wonder, and the real artist is one who, free from the patterns and pictorial practices of art academies, conjures up a new vision and articulates a new, creative perception of reality. In this way the real work of pictorial art is not “a mere re-hash of pictures,” but rather a “product of real outlook upon life” (PB 35). Emblematic instances of such a conception of art are the best paintings of the Pre-Raphaelites, who consciously distanced themselves from the conventions and rules established by Joshua Reynolds. As Ford points out, these works were “exceptional, vivid, or startling.” Ford takes up the same concept in his impressionist poetics on the “new novel”: the novelist must possess an acute visual perception which is able to “make you [the 1 2

Ford Madox Ford, Hans Holbein The Younger: A Critical Monograph (London: Duckworth, 1905), p.1. Henceforward referred to in the text as HH, followed by page numbers. Respectively: London: Longmans, Green, 1896; London: Duckworth, 1902; London: Duckworth, 1907. The latter will be henceforward referred to in the text as PB, followed by page numbers.

98 Vita Fortunati reader] see” and highlight the unusual, thus grasping the intimate essence of reality. This kind of vision can be achieved only by a process of critical distance (or “aloofness”, in Ford’s words) from reality. Only in this way can reality be seen from a perspective of “estrangement”.3 Ford was fascinated by Holbein, because the painter’s use of a highly codified style, as in his portraits, overrules artistic conventions. Holbein is a superb exponent of defamiliarisation. His eye is capable of perceiving reality like a vision, transforming it into a creative event. It is not by chance that in describing Holbein’s abilities, Ford uses the verb “to render,” which would become of central significance in his impressionist poetics, where the new novelist no longer describes reality mimetically, but rather renders it through a transfiguring interpretation.4 Holbein is a great “Renderer,” because he is capable of representing his characters and the reality that surrounds them without interfering, without imposing any moral fervour or didacticism, such as that displayed by great Victorians like Ruskin: From his father he inherited a gift far more valuable, a gift that has survived the Renaissance itself, a gift that leaves Holbein still far enough ahead of the most modern of the moderns – a gift of keenly observing his fellow-men, and of rendering them dispassionately. (HH 4, our emphasis)

Hans Holbein the Younger, Erasmus, 1523 (Musée du Louvre, Paris)

3 4

Holbein does not describe his portrait characters mimetically, so they appear almost as objective images; nevertheless, in reality, subtle psychological interpretations are contained within the paintings. Only inattentive viewers, whose concern does not go beyond the more obvious visual signifiers, such as the precious jewellery or the luxurious clothes, could be deceived into interpreting the picture purely in terms of mimetic realism. What fascinated Ford was that Holbein was able not only to render the psychology of the various subjects of his portraits – bankers, men of state, humanists, kings and queens – but also the atmosphere of the entire epoch. In Ancient Lights (1911) and Thus to Revisit (1921), following the tradition of Walter Pater’s Imaginary Portraits (1887), Ford himself engaged in biography as a literary genre by portraying not only the great Victorians he had met at the house of his grandfather, the painter Ford

Ford Madox Ford, ‘On Impressionism’, Poetry and Drama, II, (June 1914), pp.167-75; II, (December 1914), pp.323-34. For Ford Madox Ford’s poetics of vision see Laura Colombino, Ford Madox Ford. Visione/visualità e scrittura (Perugia: Edizioni scientifiche italiane, 2003), in particular chapter 1, ‘Ford e la visione in pittura’, pp.29-53.

Visual Portraits and Literary Portraits 99 Madox Brown, but also the writers that were his contemporaries, such as Wells, Bennett, Conrad, and the younger writers, Hemingway and Lewis. In the gallery of verbal portraits which Ford built up, references to the tradition of portraiture can be found in the pictorialism of his language, through which he describes certain features of the face and movements of the writers. In the impressionist biography Joseph Conrad. A Personal Remembrance (1924) the evocative portrait of the Polish writer takes shape through a detailed description of his physical characteristics and physiognomy, which become indelibly imprinted on the mind of the reader. Ford focuses his attention on Conrad’s dark complexion, the blackness of his hair, his sparkling and penetrating eyes, the particular way he had of moving his head when he entered a room, with a semicircular movement which allowed him to know at an instant, with his hawk-like gaze, every aspect of that particular environment.5 In Ford’s writing, the eye and the way in which it perceives have a central significance. His mode of perception, like Holbein’s, did not stop at the surface of things but sought to understand their intimate essence. It is a vision of the eye that becomes a vision of the mind. Holbein, therefore, is for Ford a painter of modernity, able to capture in the faces of his sitters the new European society, a society where intellectual thought was interwoven with the traffic and commerce of the owners of land and capital. Indeed, Ford pauses to describe Basel, the lively centre of humanistic and Renaissance though where Holbein worked for a few years, and contrasts his world with that of Dürer. Through his analysis of two self-portraits, Ford infers the different characteristics of the two painters. Firstly, there is Holbein’s expression, his gaze, in which the intensity of the eyes reveals the will to dominate the reality which surrounds him. Then there is the nervous, intense gaze of Dürer, a man profoundly immersed in religious and mystical questions: It is the head of a reliable and good-humoured youth, heavy-shouldered, with a massive neck and an erected round head – the head of a man ready to do any work that might come in his way with a calm self-reliance. The expression is entirely different from that in say, Durer’s portrait of himself; from the nervous, intent glare and the somewhat self-conscious strained gaze. (HH 45-46) Dürer, then, had imagination, where Holbein had only vision and invention – an invention of a rough-shod and everyday kind. (HH 146-148)

The reading/interpretation of these two self-portraits reveal the method used by Ford in his art criticism. The portrait becomes for him a way of entering into a dialogue with Holbein. Indeed, for Ford portrait painting gave rise to a dialogue between the artist, subject and spectator. Ford questions the portraits, much as he imagines Holbein himself questioning his sitters. The portrait originates from a dialogue between the artist and the subject, which then arouses new questions and issues in the viewers. The portrait-painter inevitably infuses the painting with characteristics connected to his own personality, and Ford also imagines that the sitters themselves are asking their own questions of their audience. 5

See Vita Fortunati, ‘Introduction’ to Ford Madox Ford, Joseph Conrad: un ricordo personale (Ferrara: Gallio, 1991), pp.I-XXIV.

100 Vita Fortunati The eyes in Holbein’s portraits of queens are half closed, sceptical, challenging, and disbelieving. They look at you as if to say: “I do not know exactly what manner of man you are, but I am very sure that being a man you are no hero”. [...] It is a common belief, and very possibly a very true belief, that painters in painting figures exaggerate physical and mental traits so that the sitters assume some of their own physical peculiarities. (HH 7-8)

The Fordian hermeneutics of Holbein’s paintings retrieves the function of the portrait in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Europe, founded on the continual dialogue among the painter, the subject and the art critic. The circulation of art and literature presupposed an emotional relationship and allowed for the exchange of social and political interests. It is no accident that books are featured in prominent positions in the paintings of the great humanists Erasmus of Rotterdam and Thomas More, and it is no accident that Holbein himself illustrated Praise of Folly (1509) by Erasmus. As Stephanie Buck has recently pointed out, the portrait was not only a token of affection for a distant friend, but also served as a means of constructing a family tree which would be handed down to subsequent generations.6 Indeed, many of Holbein’s portraits were sent to European heads of state to display the physical appearance of potential young brides and grooms such as Christine of Denmark, Duchess of Milan (1538), painted for Henry VIII; however, pendant portraits of husband and wife also circulated as visible proofs of the status of notable families and their social cohesion, such as the twin portraits of Jakob Meyer zum Hasen and his wife Dorothea Meyer (1516), where the painter represents the couple’s dialogue through their mutual gaze which extends beyond the frame. The portrait, as a genre, gives rise to dialogue and narration, and for a novelist such as Ford the significance of the famous portrait of 6

Hans Holbein the Younger, Christina of Denmark, Duchess of Milan, 1538 (National Gallery, London)

Stephanie Buck, ‘Hans Holbein the Younger: Portraitist of the Renaissance’, in Hans Holbein the Younger: Painter at the Court of Henry VIII, ed. by Stephanie Buck and Jochen Sander (London: Thames & Hudson, 2003), pp.11-36. See also Omar Calabrese (ed.), Persone. Ritratti di Gruppo da van Dick a de Chirico (Milano: Silvana Editoriale, 2003).

Visual Portraits and Literary Portraits 101 More’s family stands out prominently: it is the first great narration of the family novel, where each member of the various generations of More’s family is attributed a role according to their position within the portrait. Being the painter of modernity, Holbein is a constant reference point in Ford’s poetics. A year after having written his critical monograph, Ford prepared himself to write his first volume of The Fifth Queen trilogy, which appeared in 1906. Ford’s study of Holbein was refashioned in terms of poetic narrative: in telling the story of Catharine Howard, the fifth wife of Henry VIII, Ford’s writing, like Holbein’s paintings, strives to suggest to the reader the atmosphere of an epochal transition, the complex passage of Medieval England into the Renaissance. The dense array of characters in the trilogy is delineated according to whether they belong to the old world or to the new. More importantly, their psychological traits and elaborate apparel are represented with great precision; Ford developed this narrative technique by studying Holbein’s paintings, as well as the numerous historical paintings by his grandfather Ford Madox Brown. The Fifth Queen marks the reappearance of the great characters portrayed by Holbein and the return to the world of Tudor England,which winds through interiors, corridors, candlelit rooms with tapestries and staircases, a world that had just turned its back on the woods and the countryside.7 Ford’s trilogy goes back therefore to the contrast between the medieval world of Dürer, a world populated by knights who act out in the open, and the world of politicians, statesmen and dignitaries, who plot and whisper, contriving schemes to seize power: Holbein’s lords no longer ride hunting. They are inmates of palaces, their flesh is rounded, their limbs at rest, their eyes sceptical or contemplative. They are indoor statesmen; they deal in intrigues (HH 6)

Two passages from the Fordian gallery of portraits remind the reader clearly of Holbein. The first is the image of Henry VIII, a king who, for Ford, was always poised between the old and the new orders. He existed in a state of tension between the new regime proposed by Cromwell, which promoted new alliances between the Lutheran princes, and a nostalgia for the past, represented by the indestructible faith in the Catholic Katherine. In his description of the enormous size of Henry VIII’s body which according to Ford, Holbein had already made the object of an “unconcerned rendering of an appallingly gross and miserable man” (HH 148), one is struck by the detail in the bloodshot eyes, heavy and tired, a detail which suggests not only a vulnerability, but also serves to deconstruct the iconographic rhetoric layered around this historical figure: The King was pacing the long terrace on the river front [...] His great brow was furrowed, his enormous bulk of scarlet, with the great double dog-rose embroidered across the broad chest, limped a little over his right knee and the foot dragged. His eyes were bloodshot and heavy, his head hung forward as though he were

7

For a deep analysis of the transition from late medieval to Renaissance society in Ford Madox Ford’s The Fifth Queen, see Elena Lamberti, ‘Reading Ford through Marshall Mac Luhan: The Fifth Queen in the Light of the New Media’, in Modernism and the Individual Talent / Moderne und Besondere Begabung, ed. by Jörg Rademacher, Anglistik – Amerikanistik Lit, Band 6 (Münster: Lit Verlag, 2002), pp.45-53.

102 Vita Fortunati about to charge the world with his forehead. From time to time his eyebrows lifted painfully, and he swallowed with an effort as if he were choking.8

The second extract regards Cromwell, Lord Privy Seal and stout supporter of the “New Order,” whom Ford describes while he is making a mental survey of his enemies. As Cromwell imagines them, their faces are described with particular attention to the eyes: The very faces of his enemies seemed visible to him. He saw Gardiner of Winchester, with his snake eyes under the flat cap, and the Duke of Norfolk, with his eyes malignant in a long, yellow face. He had a vision of the King, a huge red lump, beneath the high dais at the head of the Council table, his face suffused with blood, his cheeks quivering (FQ 31)

Ford had learned well the lesson espoused by James in his 1884 essay, The Art of Fiction, about the “supreme virtue of a novel,” which consisted in being able to suggest for the reader “the air of reality,” and “the solidity of specification,” something which was only possible with the lessons of the great painters in mind: It is here, in very truth, that [the author] competes with life; it is here that he competes with his brother the painter in his attempt to render the look of things, the look that conveys their meaning, to catch the colour, the relief, the expression, the surface, the substance of the human spectacle.9

There are two more reasons why Ford considered Holbein a great example to imitate. He is the painter that best expresses the Fordian concept of craft, of the artist able to use the tools of his own particular work with skill and competence. Ford considers Bach and Richardson artists of the same calibre as Holbein, as all three are craftsmen in the highest sense of the word, they know the tricks of their trades, and in their hands a mere instrument becomes a powerful means for conveying their epistemological theories. Substantial parts of Ford’s art criticism monographs are devoted to the study of pictorial techniques; when he examines Holbein’s works he focuses on the preparatory sketches for his oil paintings. Silverpoint, the pouncing technique and red chalk are amongst a range of techniques that create subtle nuances when translated into the brushstrokes of the features of the face. Ford is also an acute observer of Holbein’s various technical skills, which included jewellery design, decorating, engraving and miniatures. This versatility pleased and fascinated the young Ford, for two contrasting reasons. The first reveals his PreRaphaelite heritage, which is expressed in the appreciation of the practice of Arts and Crafts conceived as individual acts of creation, a practice which in the modern era made it possible to render works of art reproducible and therefore exposed to the loss of their uniqueness, of their aura, in Benjamin’s words. Holbein interested Ford not only because of his work, but also because he was able to create forms, faces and bodies which became the quintessence of pictorial art. It is not by chance that Ford preferred portraits from 1536 on, the more mature phase of Holbein’s 8 9

Ford Madox Ford, The Fifth Queen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), p.39. Henceforward referred to in the text as FQ, followed by page numbers. Henry James, The Art of Fiction, in Henry James. Literary Criticism, ed. by Leon Edel and Mark Wilson, 2 vols (New York: Library of America, 1984), I, p.53.

Visual Portraits and Literary Portraits 103 career, such as the portraits of Henry VIII and Christine of Denmark. He chose to paint these portraits on flat surfaces, with no architectural supports in the background and no ornamentation. The characters stand out on the flat coloured surface, with the contours of the faces and bodies delineated with great precision. These character portraits are so striking precisely because the painter has managed to reconcile the paradox between their concrete corporeal presence, which is almost tangible, and a sense of complete timelessness. Ford prefers these portraits to the more famous ones, such as Portrait of Georg Gisz or The Ambassadors, because the spectator is not distracted by the large amount of objects that appear in the other two paintings; instead, the eye is drawn only to the human figure. In the case of the beautiful portrait of his wife and children, it can penetrate the folds of the shoulders and focus upon the marvellous play of the woman’s hands on her two children: The woman’s hands are particularly worth looking at – the masterly way in which the one on the boy’s shoulders shows in its lines that it rests heavily, and the way in which the pressure on the baby’s waist is indicated. (HH 128)

The play of forms, the harmony of different colours and chiaroscuro: these are the characteristics which lead one to the conclusion, “This is a Holbein!”: It is a quality; it is a feeling; it is a method of projection that one admires – that one might well speak of – in the peculiar phraseology that is reserved for one’s admiration of musicians (HH 154).

Holbein’s portraits are therefore pure, perfect shapes, and it is precisely for this reason that they touch us so profoundly. It is no accident that Ford compared Holbein’s work to Bach’s fugues – two great masters of “rendering”. These are kinds of music and pictorial art which produce patterns, forms, designs that put art beyond morals and beyond content: And both move one by what musicians call “absolute” means. Just as the fourth fugue of the “Wohltemperierte Klavier” is profoundly moving – for no earthly reason that one knows – so is the portrait of Holbein’s family. The fugue is beautiful in spite of a relatively ugly “subject”, the portrait is beyond praise in spite of positively ugly sitters. (HH 150)

The Fordian interpretation of Holbein’s portraits reveals a sensibility that has filtered the teachings of the pre-Raphaelites and of Whistler. We are talking about pictures that go to the extremes of mimesis in order to then move towards abstraction. In entering between the folds of the garments, the viewer’s desire for corporeal proximity is satisfied. The abundance of clothing and brocades generates the illusion of reality, but in fact other things are evoked: the portraits become emblems of moments of epiphany. Ford’s reading is exemplified in the portrait of the young Christine, the Duchess of Milan, which Holbein painted for Henry VIII. According to the legend, the king saw the portrait and fell instantly in love. The figure of the young woman is in relief against the blue and green background, wearing a dress of mourning black, which highlights the opalescent light of her face, her red lips shining. The language of the body, facial expression and above all the gaze, challenge the viewer, suggesting for Ford self-awareness, temperament and determination.

104 Vita Fortunati We mentioned at the beginning that Ford’s monograph on Holbein represented an important point of convergence between tradition and innovation: Ford is a proto-modernist writer who develops a continuous dialogue, a dialectic continuity, with tradition. The postmodernist writer A.S. Byatt, who is an admirer of Ford and has recently investigated the function of the portrait in narrative, seems to me to have hit the nail on the head in describing Ford’s rewriting of the genre of romance with The Fifth Queen, which she described as “a highly visual historical romance.” Ford’s interest in the Tudor period and in Holbein was not an act of nostalgia. Rather the English past and more generally Europe’s past, constituted an integral part not only of his experience as a writer but also of his understanding of the present. And it is for this reason that his poetics is an interesting interplay of the iconoclasm and the tradition. Great Art, which would consist of the classics, great painters and great musicians, always has for Ford the ability to give rise to a movement of revision and rewriting. Precisely because it represents the human condition, Great Art has had and still has the power to germinate thought and rewriting. Holbein is a great painter and above all, a painter of modernity. For this reason, Ford writes: “He got out of his time – as he got into our time – with a completeness that few painters have achieved – hardly Velasquez or Rembrandt.”10

10

A.S. Byatt, Portraits in Fiction (London: Chatto & Windus, 2001), p.15.

3. CROSSING IMAGES, CHANGING PLACES

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Charlotte Schoell-Glass

Fictions of the Art World: Art, Art History and the Art Historian in Literary Space While artists’ novels have been around for over two hundred years, and have been studied extensively, the literary art historian has so far almost escaped attention altogether. Art historians, however, have increasingly been introduced into contemporary fiction as figures situated between scholarship and the active life. This article shows how art history and art historians are used in different ways in the works of Thomas Bernhardt, Paul Auster, W.G. Sebald, and others. While for Thomas Bernhard art historians personify the unbridgeable rift between art and language, in Sebald’s Austerlitz the art historian is a symbol for the incorporation of the visual in the novel itself, via fictional photographs. Conceptualism is shown to be a structuring device in Paul Auster’s novels, contrasting the art history of painting (as in Moon Palace) with “Project Art” as an art form. Art history’s occupation with objects and the visual are shown to inform such texts, reflecting also an increasing interest in visuality and the image, and in art forms situated between the creation of objects and the enactment of rituals.

In the past ten or so years, a plethora of novels and stories has been published on all levels of contemporary literature, using art history in many different ways. Having collected such fictionalised art and art history since the early eighties, I noticed that, during the 1990s, they were beginning to multiply noticeably. In Hamburg in 2001, we organised a series of readings of fiction featuring art and art history. Questions and suggestions from colleagues and students persuaded me to describe, albeit sketchily, this somewhat unploughed field.1 There is, of course, a huge body of literature, in which art and especially artists feature either in passing or extensively. In particular, painters’ and artists’ novels have a long tradition in Germany and France and in English Literature. The first German artist’s novel, Ardinghello, by Wilhelm Heinse,2 was published in 1787. It is at once a typically libertine eighteenth-century product and the beginning of the Romantic view of the artist, emphasising his status of adventurer and outsider. The ideology of genius surrounding the artist may be among the most important factors contributing to the interest in painters’ and artists’ novels during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Those painters’ novels are not my concern here. However, the role of the artist and the cult of the genius are still fascinating and may contribute to the attraction of the field of art history for authors and readers, even when artists themselves may not be at the centre of a particular text. The art historian Ulrich Middeldorf (who died at the age of 82 in 1983)3 had collected art in fiction all his life. Not only his collection of about 1200 volumes, but also his correspondence of around 250 letters with the Canadian librarian/art historian Sybille Pantazzi on their shared interest in this are today preserved in the Getty Research Library. The Getty’s collection of “art in fiction” materials is still growing: their holdings today 1 2 3

My thanks to my co-organiser Wolfgang Kemp, and to Sebastian Hackenschmidt, Bruno Reudenbach and Dietmar Ruebel who read from their favorite art history novels. Wilhelm Heinse, Ardinghello und die glückseligen Inseln. Eine italienische Geschichte aus dem sechzehnten Jahrhundert (1787) (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1975). 1901-1983.

108 Charlotte Schoell-Glass amount to about 1600 volumes.4 It almost goes without saying that Middeldorf, a specialist in Italian art, never published anything about his, apparently wholly private, interest. The Middeldorf collection comprises books like Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisisted, in which portraits of aristocratic country houses are painted in view of their imminent demise. I am, however, concerned with texts that are, unlike Brideshead Revisited and countless other novels, dominated or structured in various ways by the use of the figure of the art historian or of visual art. Art history is predominantly fictionalised within the genre of mystery and detection. The art historian Gary Schwartz, best known for his work on Rembrandt and himself the author of an art history mystery, Bets and Scams,5 wrote to me on the question: “Kunstkrimi is an up and coming genre.” Crime and art, art history and detection are fictionally drawn to each other. And indeed, in fiction as in real life, the aspect of our profession that most fires the public’s and writers’ imagination concerns thefts of priceless Leonardos or Benvenuto Cellinis, the uncovering of forgeries of Vermeers or the discovery of unknown or forgotten Rubenses. Art history, in some of its aspects, is much closer to the world of big money and (consequently) crime than, say, literary history. Books, of course, can be priceless too, but the art market’s passions and figures are not easily matched elsewhere in the humanities except in art history. Since 1979, when Carlo Ginzburg published his seminal studies on the methodological importance of the interpretation of the clue in art history, psychoanalysis and detection since the late nineteenth century, things have come full circle. For all these fields have come together in fictionalised art history under the aegis of the clue and the interpretation of the visual.6

Art Historians The novels, stories, and plays featuring art historians give us a picture of how they are normally perceived, clichés and all. In Wendy Wasserstein’s Heidi Chronicles7 (“a brilliant feminist art historian trying to keep her bearings and her sense of humour on the elevator ride from the radical sixties to the heartless eighties”), the student Heidi explains to her friend Scoop, when they first meet: “I’m planning to be an art historian.” – “Please don’t say that. That’s really suburban.” Heidi: “I’m interested in the individual expression of the human soul. Content over form.” Scoop: “But I thought the point of contemporary art is that the form becomes the content. Look at Albers’ ‘Homage to a Square.’”8 In this brief dialogue we recognise American academic art history of the sixties (a hint of Panofskyan iconology) clashing with art criticism in the Greenberg mode. Heidi turns out to be a new 4 5 6 7 8

The Getty Research Institute is to be found at http://www.getty.edu/research/institute/. The library catalogue is accessible from there. 1996; first published in Dutch as Dutch Kills, 1994. Carlo Ginzburg, Clues, Myths and the Historical Method (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989). Wendy Wasserstein, ‘The Heidi Chronicles’, in The Heidi Chronicles and Other Plays (New York: Vintage Books, Random House, 1991) (first produced and published in 1988). Heidi Chronicles, p.171.

Fictions of the Art World 109 type, however: she is among the first feminist art historians who put “new” (women) artists on the agenda, all neglected or suppressed until then. In that sense, she is a pioneer and a true heroine – blessed also with wry humour and self-irony. The play is framed by two slide lectures before undergraduates. Those lectures seem to have acquired a certain amount of fame among American art historians, connecting as they do the discourse of art history (“Of course, in my day, this same standard text mentioned no women ‘from the dawn of history to the present.’ Are you with me? Okay.”9) with the personal: As for Mrs. Lily Martin Spencer and “We Both Must Fade” (1869), frankly, this painting has always reminded me of me at one of those horrible highschool dances. And you sort of want to dance, and you sort of want to go home, and you sort of don’t know what you want. So you hang around, a fading rose in an exquisitely detailed dress, waiting to see what might happen.10

And so the play unfolds from a painting and a high school dance in 1965. Heidi, a professor of art history in New York, is shown to be passionately involved with her subject, her friends and the problems of her generation. Urban, in every sense, rather than “suburban.” Her senior colleague in New York, Leo Hertzberg, narrator in Siri Hustvedt’s novel What I loved,11 lives his life as an academic but is also quite close to an artist, Bill Wechsler, and his family. “I’ve always thought that love thrives on a certain kind of distance,” says Hertzberg. As one reviewer remarked, It’s an idealistic comment, but entirely forgivable in light of Leo’s profession. As an art historian, his job is to place things in proper context. Distance, for him, is an essential way of seeing something close up. While the art world permits such exquisite remove, domestic life, Leo discovers, does not.12

To be a figure of distancing is often the function of fictional art historians in their narrative context. What is here seen to belong to two worlds – distance and closeness – in other texts may be ascribed to one and the same protagonist. W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz (2001) takes its title from the name of an art historian who, while paying attention to the smallest detail, is also a traveller, spending a lifetime on the move to collect material for a study of the architecture of the late nineteenth century. The scope of his research encompasses the last European epoch but his clues are small-scale architectural forms. In those last three instances, art historians have various functions. They are introduced as belonging to the world of art, yet do not belong to it entirely, as artists do. They embody both an intimacy with and a distancing from the visual world and the realm of objects. Fictional art historians, especially in the detective novel, stand for the ability to construct meaning in situations when the visible, and sometimes the invisible, needs to be interpreted; they are the descendants of Panofsky or, in some cases, Berenson – iconologists or connoisseurs.

9 10 11 12

Heidi Chronicles, pp.160ff. Heidi Chronicles, p.161. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 2003. John Freeman, Review for the Star Tribune, (March 2, 2003).

110 Charlotte Schoell-Glass That is – if they are appreciated in the first place. In other texts, especially in German and Austrian literature, art historians are less flatteringly portrayed. In Thomas Bernhard’s Old Masters,13 art historians drown the museum visitors with their blather. They are destroyers of art, their purpose in life seems to be to exorcise art from peoples’ lives. “So, all my life, I hated nothing with a deeper hatred than art historians, said Reger.”14 However, this diatribe against art historians by a music critic who had visited the Bordone room in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna twice a week for thirty years to look at Tintoretto’s Man with a White Beard for hours, is embedded in a stream of abuse directed at all sorts of cultural institutions from theatre to music to the Old Masters themselves. We recognise the Viennese disgust with the world as it is (Lebensekel). Although art, in all its manifestations, is portrayed as the only escape for “world-haters,”15 Reger concedes in a touching passage towards the end of the text that it is ultimately impossible to replace living with and for others by a life for art of any kind. Bernhard’s “comedy” leaves us with a feeling that art historians are not that much worse than, say, composers or teachers or the artists themselves. Bernhard’s view of art historians is focused on their role as mediators and on the problematic relationship of the visual and language. It contrasts Reger’s “immediate” meditative experience with formulaic translations into language in which all that is important in art is lost. While we need not be quite as pessimistic about what an explanatory discourse does to paintings (“destruction”), it is not difficult to see how the relationship between text and image, which never correspond perfectly, can irritate an author who insists on his yearning for a utopia of immediacy and authenticity. There are a number of other fictional German art historians, among them Dr. Institoris in Thomas Mann’s Doktor Faustus, a delicate aesthete with a craving for blood and violence as subjects of great art.16 Often, art historians in fiction are portrayed as charlatans of dubious character. As interpreters of images (and perhaps more generally, as John Banville’s The Untouchable17 suggests), they cannot be trusted: substituting their words for works of art, not ever doing them justice in the light of the experience of art itself. In another telling context, however, they may escape their own endless suasion and switch to action mode: this is for instance the realm of the art history mystery series by Ian Pears, a writer/art historian whose dissertation on the growth of the interest in the arts in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries precedes such titles as The Titian Committee, The Immaculate Deception, The Raphael Affair and others, most of them available in airport bookshops. The dilettante detective, Jonathan Argyll, who finds it difficult to finish his dissertation, is a young Englishman living in Rome. Rather than working on his research, he gets himself involved in case after case of art crime, both historical and contemporary, and early on teams up with Flavia di Stefano who works for the Rome police in the art crime Thomas Bernhard, Alte Meister. Komödie (Frankfurt / M.: Suhrkamp, 1985). Alte Meister, p.35. Alte Meister, p.190. Willibald Sauerländer, ‘Alte Meister oder die Kunsthistoriker in den Romanen’, Kunstchronik, 39 (1986), pp.81-86; also in: Geschichte der Kunst – Gegenwart der Kritik, ed. By W. Busch, W. Kemp et al. (Köln: DuMont, 1999), pp.330-37. 17 John Banville, The Untouchable (New York: Knopf, 1997). The novel in part fictionalises Anthony Blunt’s double life. 13 14 15 16

Fictions of the Art World 111 department. In this way, the potential for romance is set up, so indispensable in popular fiction. These are entertaining and art historically credible stories, playing on the flashier aspects of the discipline, and, indeed, the colourful settings of high art and low life.

Some Fictitious Works of Art Decidedly English, complete with country life and neighbouring country house, Michael Frayn’s Headlong18 conjures up a missing painting in Breughel’s series of the Seasons. The mysterious long-lost painting is found and (of necessity) lost again in a remote setting, one of many fictitious art works – albeit made credible by thorough research on the author’s part – at the centre or in the margins of novels or stories. The methods and skills of art historians are described lovingly, as both husband and wife are involved in art historical projects, and once again, the description of the tasks of the art historian centres on iconography and connoisseurship by analogy with the tradition of the detection genre. As in the real world, there is third-rate art and interesting art in fiction. The work of Bill Wechsler in Hustvedt’s What I love is described in scrupulous detail and conjured up before one’s inner eye, only to turn out to be modelled on Joseph Cornell’s work but robbed of its magic qualities. A really bad painting is at the centre of Stephen King’s Rose Madder19 but the author makes it clear that art is not the point of this story – and an even worse painting haunts the protagonist of The Girl with the Lizard20 by the author of the The Reader, Bernhard Schlink. The latter two are stories in which the plot is driven by the potential of magic that we suspect to be present in painted pictures – modelled in part upon Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. The artworks themselves become agents; they allow for a second layer of magic or psychological reality behind the fictional reality of the story, playing on the question of realism or, in Dorian Gray’s case, of likeness in art. Nineteenthcentury realism and the flood of visual art in the public imagination at that time may have rekindled the sense that things could be happening in pictures while we look away. This is borne out by Montague Rhodes James’s story “The Mezzotint”21: in an unremarkable print showing a nocturnal landscape with a country house in the picturesque mode a crime takes place both before the eyes and behind the back of a Cambridge college curator of prints. Whenever he leaves the print behind, the scene changes subtly: barely visible shadows move across an open lawn, and closed and opened French windows are clues to mysterious events happening within the mezzotint. The astonishing verisimilitude offered by the mezzotinto technique invites such ventures into the uncanny, something at which M.R.James, the Cambridge don, excelled. His Ghost Stories of an Antiquary (several collections written between 1904 and 1931) are as deeply involved with antiquarianism, the Michael Frayn, Headlong (London: Faber and Faber, 1999). Stephen King, Rose Madder (New York: Viking Penguin, 1995). Bernhard Schlink, ‘Das Mädchen mit der Eidechse’, in Liebesfluchten. Geschichten (Zurich: Diogenes, 2000), pp.7-54. 21 Montague Rhodes James, ‘The Mezzotint’, in Casting the Runes and Other Ghost Stories, ed. by Michael Cox (Oxford and New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1987), pp.14-25. 18 19 20

112 Charlotte Schoell-Glass prehistory of art history, as they are are imbued with an acute perception of the paradox of absence and presence in the artefacts of the past. In this sense an underlying structure governs his texts, which leads us to writers, who, beyond the word–image opposition, use art and the visual precisely to formulate and represent their own artistic questions. So far, I have argued that art historians in fiction may be interesting protagonists because they are close to but also at one remove (at least) from the long-standing myth of the artist. They retain some of the artist’s traits of being colourful and unpredictable, as opposed to the more inward figure of, for example, the professor of literature, so prominent in comparable fiction. Yet they also often fail to live up to their subject, and may look slightly ridiculous in their aspirations, leaving space for ironic detachment on the author’s part. The art historian is at once a specialist and excluded from artistic creation, vicariously bridging a gap for his or her public. Such gaps, being spanned or (as Thomas Bernhard reminds us) fallen into, also stand for the vexing problems of representation in general. This is how Paul Auster uses art and art history as a structuring principle in his work, both written and cinematographic.

Conceptualism During the 1990s, a Paul Auster cottage industry emerged, which has been growing steadily.22 Clearly, Auster has hit a nerve with his highly readable and at the same time enigmatic novels, among them the New York Trilogy (City of Glass, Ghosts, The Locked Room, 1987-88), The Country of Last Things (1987), Moon Palace (1989), The Music of Chance (1990), Leviathan (1992), Mr.Vertigo (1994), and The Book of Illusions (2002). These novels were all praised by critics and enthusiastically read by a sizable public, particularly, perhaps, in Germany. Among the underlying themes in Auster’s work are: his preoccupation with language as a means of representing and knowing the world and others; the conditions for and the possibilities of writing as a postmodernist; postmodern urban space; the postmodern sublime; self-reflexivity and intertextuality; the probing of the genres of fiction. An author, in short, who conforms perfectly to the assumptions and preoccupations of literary criticism of the 1990s. Many of his novels, and both his films (Smoke, Blue in the Face, 1995), make use of certain features from contemporary art of the last decades – indeed to such a degree that a collaboration developed out of Leviathan (1992) with the French artist Sophie Calle (Double Game, 2000).23 Conceptual art and “project art” are not only used in Auster’s narrative, but similar principles of ordered arbitrariness are brought to bear in both the artworks and the novels. Cf. Dennis Barone (ed.), Beyond the Red Notebook: essays on Paul Auster, Penn studies in contemporary American fiction (Philadelphia: Univ. of Philadelphia Press, 1995); Annick Duperray (ed.), L’Oeuvre de Paul Auster: approches et lectures plurielles, Actes du Colloque Paul Auster (Arles: Actes Sud, 1995); Andreas Lienkamp et al. (eds), ‘As strange as the world’: Annäherungen an das Werk des Erzählers und Filmemachers Paul Auster (Münster: Lit, 2002). 23 Double Game. With the participation of Paul Auster (London: Violette Editions, 1999). 22

Fictions of the Art World 113 This side of the “end of art history,” where everything is possible because nothing is left that has not been explored already, a number of artists and writers began to give themselves grids and constraints to work with or, perhaps, against.24 Those projects could involve excursions into the realm of sociology, by interviewing inhabitants of an arbitrarily chosen set of houses or streets, taking their photographs and collecting an item from each interviewee. They could consist of series of photographs taken every day from a certain vantage point, as has been ascribed to the owner (Harvey Keitel) of the tobacco corner shop in Smoke. They could be walks in a certain area, covering every byway and lane, carefully documented on a map, as in the early work of Richard Long. Such projects may, as in On Kawara’s work, consist of writing daily postcards with prefabricated texts on them (“I got up at ...,” “I am still alive”) to varying recipients, or, as in his date painting series, of the date of that day, painted in one session on that day on pre-prepared canvasses of a limited range of colours and formats, all of them later packed in prefabricated boxes, lined with the first page of the newspaper of that day from the city in which the painting was made.25 To On Kawara we owe an urban variation of Richard Long’s country walks, done as a series under the heading “I went” (wherever he was on a given day), complete with a description of a day’s comings and goings and a map inscribed with those moves.26 On Kawara’s work could be said to reveal a fascination with the passage of time and the concomitant inevitability of our ties (however tenuous) to places, documented on the iconographical level, its subject matter; but also testified to by the seriousness with which the artist’s own, lived time is given over regularly and measurably to different series of projects. The artistic project is turned into a new metaphor of life itself, radically different from earlier artistic and painterly practice (“what is commonly defined as art,” as Auster says in Leviathan27) but related to some of the stories or parts of them in the New York Trilogy, Moon Palace, The Music of Chance, or Leviathan. Leviathan is the story of Benjamin Sachs, a writer. He and his wife are friends of the narrator Aaron who, after Benjamin’s death in an explosion, reconstructs the life of his friend, who had been thrown off-track twice: once by falling from a fire-escape on the 4th of July, and, again, by a tragic, thoroughly American, accident in which he shoots a man by mistake, who turns out to have been an agent of some secret police force, with a huge cache of money in his car. Ben decides to move to California to live with the widow of his victim. His elaborate ploy is designed to atone for the killing by handing over the agent’s money in daily instalments of one thousand dollars. The project abruptly ends in dissonance, and we then read: “On January 16, 1988, a bomb went off in front of the court house in Turnbull, Klaus Honnef, Concept Art (Cologne: Phaidon, 1971); Art conceptuel I: du 7 octobre au 27 novembre 1988, Musée d'art contemporain, Bordeaux: Art & Language,Robert Barry, Hanne Darboven, On Kawara, Joseph Kosuth, Robert Morris, Lawrence Weiner (Bordeaux: Musée d'art contemporain de Bordeaux, 1988) ; JeanMarc Huitorel, Les règles du jeu: le peintre et la contrainte = The rules of the game: the painter and his constraint (Caen: Frac Basse-Normandie, 1999). 25 On Kawara: Date Paintings in 89 Cities (Rotterdam: Museum Boymans Van Beuningen, 1991). Texts by Teresa O'Connor, Anne Rorimer, and Karel Schampers. 26 On the work of On Kawara, the series “I went”: On Kawara, I Went, I Met, I Read. Journal: 1969, 4 vols (Cologne: Walther König, 1992). 27 Paul Auster, Leviathan (London and Boston: Faber, 1993), p.60. 24

114 Charlotte Schoell-Glass Ohio, blowing up a small, scale-model replica of the Statue of Liberty.”28 This is how we learn of the political project of Benjamin Sachs, who comes as close as a terrorist can to creating a work of conceptual art. His political crusade across the United States is foreshadowed by the conceptualist who is introduced as one of Benjamin’s and Aaron’s friends earlier in the novel. Sophie Calle, the real-life artist, emerges in Leviathan as the fictional artist, Maria Turner. Her project work is described as an original, or rather, eccentric life-style of “private rituals.” Every experience was systematized for her, a self-contained adventure that generated its own risks and limitations, and each one of her projects fell into a different category, separate from all others. […] Maria was an artist, but the work she did had nothing to do with creating objects commonly defined as art. Some people called her a photographer, others referred to her as a conceptualist, still others considered her a writer, but none of these descriptions was accurate, and in the end I don’t think she can be pigeonholed in any way.29

Some of the projects described in Leviathan are actually Sophie Calle’s works, such as her series of birthday parties with as many guests as the number of years celebrated and a collection of all presents given her on these occasions collected in a glass case for each year. Other projects, the “chromatic diet” consisting of food of the same colour for a given day in the week (“Tuesday red: tomatoes, persimmons, steak tartare”) or “days spent under the spell of the letters b, c or w,”30 were invented by Auster. Eventually, Calle went back to the novel and worked her way through the projects Auster had invented for her fictional alter ego. Double Game With Other, her answer to Auster’s challenge, even contains outlines for further works for Sophie Calle by Paul Auster, realised by her during 1999.31 Describing Maria Turner as an artist whose production had nothing to do with “objects commonly defined as art” is a conscious pose – more naive than any New Yorker can possibly be about what is or is not art these days. In Leviathan, Fanny, the wife of the main protagonist and writer Ben Sachs, is an art historian writing her dissertation on American landscape painting and eventually going on to be a curator at the Brooklyn Museum of Art (where, incidentally, Paul Auster had studied American landscape paintings for Moon Palace). She may be representing what is commonly considered the realm of art, and, as a character, is assigned the role of witness to the unfolding drama, unable to join in the action. While the artist/photographer/writer Maria conceives of projects that she herself and the narrator (like Sophie Calle) call “therapeutic,” Ben Sachs, by accidents and turns of fate, abandons the book he is writing midway to embark on projects of inscribing his text in the real world. When Sachs moves on to his second, fatal project, crisscrossing the United States like Maria on one of her quests, he begins to blow up those replicas of the Statue of Liberty, of which there are, we learn, one hundred and thirty scattered around the country in 28 29 30 31

Leviathan, p.215. Leviathan, p.60. Leviathan, pp.60 and 61. One of the projects assigned to Calle by Auster, the (private) decoration of a New York public telephone and a documentation of its use on site, were bought by the Hamburger Kunsthalle in 2003.

Fictions of the Art World 115 public places. Every bombing and destruction of one of the monuments to liberty entails, we are told, an elaborate and systematic planning phase, complete with ever new coverstories to justify the bomber’s presence in provincial towns, safety precautions so as not to kill people accidentally, and messages to the public. After each bombing the terrorist leaves or publishes messages and statements of the kind: “Each person is alone, and therefore we have nowhere to turn but to each other. […] Neglect the children, and we destroy ourselves. We exist in the present only to the degree that we put our faith to the future.”32 The parallels to Maria’s ritualistic and elaborate schemes, often also involving clandestine movements, sleuthing and spying, can hardly be overlooked, even if, in her work, moral considerations are markedly absent. Her project of spending two weeks in every American state and thus devoting almost two years of her life to “a totally meaningless and arbitrary act”33 seems to foreshadow and to qualify the terrorist inscriptions on the map of America. Sachs’ transition from writing to doing is highly dramatised and serves to illustrate the narrator’s creed: because another can become the emblem of the unknowable, as Ben Sachs became to his wife and friends, anything can happen at any moment.34 In Leviathan structures of Project Art are used to order the narrative, itself concerned with patterns that connect the tale of the friend turned terrorist with earlier novels by Auster. In The New York Trilogy, in Moon Palace or The Music of Chance we now recognise such patterning of the actors’ moves, both topographically and intellectually. Auster’s art lies in his ability to disguise what we ultimately realise to be extended allegories into flowing, suspenseful narratives. This magic act takes some of its cues from artworks belonging to the vast global movement of Conceptualism of the 1970s and 1980s of which On Kawara’s work is a prominent example. In City of Glass one of the characters, Stillman, in search of the prelapsarian language, subjects his son to solitary confinement in order to bring him up isolated from human company and language. He hopes that young Stillman, when he will begin to speak, will do so in the Ur-language beyond all misunderstanding. Of course this horrid ploy fails, Stillman Sr. (like Ben Sachs in Leviathan) eventually resorts to inscribing his obsession into the urban space itself. His son, now grown up, engages Quinn as his sleuth to follow the old man, Stillman Sr., around Manhattan. For Quinn, nothing makes sense: not the way the old man seems to move around aimlessly, nor what his own task might eventually achieve, nor even how and why he was chosen for it. It is when Quinn studies the map of Manhattan where he has recorded the old man’s walks that the sinister story of his client begins to make sense, or what has to be accepted for sense or meaning here. He deciphers the fragments of what he believes to be OWER OF BAB which he emends, like a good philologist, to “Tower of Babel.”35

32 33 34 35

Leviathan, p.217. Leviathan, p.61. Leviathan, p.160f. Paul Auster, City of Glass, in: The New York Trilogy (London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1992), pp.1-132; here: pp.65-72.

116 Charlotte Schoell-Glass

[Fragmentary message – walks inscribing urban space in Paul Auster’s City of Glass.] From Paul Auster’s City of Glass. Script Adaptation: Paul Karasik and David Mazzucchelli (New York: Avon Books, 1994) p. 63.

[Quinn walking the map and trying to make sense in Paul Auster’s City of Glass.] From Paul Auster’s City of Glass. Script Adaptation: Paul Karasik and David Mazzucchelli (New York: Avon Books, 1994) p. 63.

Here, we cannot completely endorse this time-honoured metaphor for the complexities of language and, above all, for our own fate, condemned as we are to misunderstand, misread and misconstrue each other and the world, perceived as the ultimate and fundamental punishment for being human. The painfulness of it, perhaps, is felt most immediately by those who most passionately wish to tell stories, to “make” sense by doing so, to find and construct meaning through writing and reading: writers and intellectuals. Is it for this reason that a message is being bodily inscribed in the city? Were Richard Long and On Kawara also driven by an impulse to decipher a hidden script or else to inscribe a new message? Paul Auster’s use of the image of mapping, the inscription of a private message into the urban space in City of Glass is structurally related to the inscribing of moral messages onto the map of America in Leviathan, and, for that matter, stands behind the entire work of Jenny Holzer, an artist who felt and still feels that the world needs to be confronted with

Fictions of the Art World 117 “Truisms” and statements through her work in the public space.36 The impulse of these fictional characters to “get real,” as the saying goes, is mirrored by and mirrors artists who try in vain to capture life and time as lived in the objects they make or the traces they preserve. This motif comes up time and again in Auster’s books: in Moonlight Palace, he turns boxes full of books into a project by using them as furniture (“real” objects), then reading them one by one to the end, thus reducing an apartment to a cave; while in Music of Chance, the building of a wall is as purpose-free as any sculpture you might think of by Richard Serra. These artists, this writer meet in a place where it is “all in the doing.” They still work within institutional boundaries, the systems of literature and the visual arts; but those boundaries are being pushed and blurred toward the ritual, structuring art practice and narrative alike.

An Art Historian and the Widening Domain of the Visual Boundaries of genres are also questioned in other ways. Winfried Georg Sebald, the author of Austerlitz, recently introduced another fictional art historian to the reading public.37 Jacques Austerlitz had arrived in England on a train with one of the children’s transports out of Nazi Germany. He had come from Prague and had lost his parents in Theresienstadt. When the narrator meets him, he is working in one of London’s art history departments or maybe even in the grim institution described by Lucy Ellmann in Varying Degrees of Hopelessness,38 the Courtauld Institute. As mentioned above, he researches and collects material for a comprehensive study of architecture around 1900, of what he calls “the capitalist style in architecture.” As he travels around Europe he meets and befriends the narrator who tells us Austerlitz’s story, and the story of his generation, which is also, in a sense, the history of Europe in the twentieth century. Already there is a growing body of critical literature on Sebald, including two very recent collections of essays in memory of the author who died prematurely in 2001.39 Sebald was a professor of German literature who lived in England while writing in German. His books are available (and successful) in English translations. It is generally agreed that Sebald’s style is informed by his intimate knowledge of earlier and contemporary German literature and therefore unmistakably “old school,” and yet so distinctive that one critic speaks of the “Sebald sound” (Michael Rutschky). Sebald’s Austerlitz draws one irresistibly into the text although it has nothing in common with the usual “page-turner”; rather, it is quietly addictive in an almost dreamlike way. To this “sound” is added (or maybe even created by) an intensely visual quality: not only are there many pages of descriptions of rooms, buildings, and landscapes but “fictitious” photographs are used throughout the book to form an integral part of the text in unprecedented numbers and to unique effect: “It is as Jenny Holzer is present in Europe and America through frequent exhibitions and installations. Her Texts are published in: Jenny Holzer, Writing = Schriften, ed. Noemi Smolik (Ostfildern-Ruit: Cantz, 1996). 37 W.G. Sebald, Austerlitz (Munich and Vienna: Hanser, 2001). 38 London: Hamish Hamilton, 1991. 39 Akzente. Zeitchrift für Literatur 50, (February 2003); Text + Kritik. Zeitschrift f. Literatur 158, IV (2003). 36

118 Charlotte Schoell-Glass if all these photos, tales, encounters, books, newspaper articles, pictures, texts (Textstellen) had waited only for him, the narrator.”40 They are not, it should be emphasised, illustrations as we commonly know them from countless modern biographies, for example. This also has been commented on – the compelling effect of “truth” these pictures produce, the doubling of what is written and shown or sometimes even only shown in the flow of the text. When we learn that Austerlitz worked in a not very senior position in London, we peep into his office; when he talks about a small museum of natural history, we glance at a showcase with specimens; Austerlitz’s travels to Belgium and the violent architecture of the bunkers is documented by pictures and a plan; a stamp showing an idyllic housing project with the inscription “Theresienstadt” is reproduced; landscapes, people, artworks, objects are present not only in the text but also as photographic images. While the narrator ostensibly only reproduces these pictures, Austerlitz relates how he took them with his camera (“an old Ensign”) and collected them. This technique of verbal/visual fiction and storytelling had already been developed by Sebald in earlier works, Rings of Saturn or The Immigrants. In Austerlitz, fictive images – photographs – are, as one commentator put it, spaces of resonance for what is related in the text, extensions of language, as it were. They change the process of reading, and while they are seamlessly integrated in the narrative, they have a shadowy life of their own, as photographs do. Why would Jacques Austerlitz have to be an art historian when his academic career ends early on in the book, and his project of an architectural history is abandoned dramatically for a more personal quest? I should like to answer at this point: it would seem that the figure of Austerlitz as art historian is, in a sense, the personification of Sebald’s method of literary visuality or visual writing. Austerlitz lends his voice to objects. His descriptions are as detached as they should be when an art historian goes about his business; they are inevitably subjective but corroborated by visual evidence. Text and images in Austerlitz are connected by a long chain of associations leading from travel to Austerlitz’s biography to childhood memories to the exploration of a lost past of earliest beginnings and disaster. The art historian Jacques Austerlitz, then, is a figure of life lived in transition and in search of history, of life for and through memory. Art history as a profession becomes a figure of thought and a metaphor for a way of thinking situated midway between language and images. Indeed, this is what I hope it is.

40

Andrea Köhler, encomium on the occasion of the Joseph Breitbach Award 2000 for Sebald, quoted on the dust jacket of Austerlitz.

Sonia Lagerwall

A Reading of Michel Butor’s La Modification as an Emblematic Iconotext In this paper I present a reading of Michel Butor’s third novel, La Modification, published in 1957, as an iconotext in which the images are conveyed by the verbal medium alone. Focusing on the relationships between verbal and visual elements in the novel, I distinguish three main categories of the verbal transformation of images: ekphrasis, pictorialism and iconicity. The unity of text and image thus brought forth in La Modification is analysed in the light of an emblematic mode with its origins in the Renaissance emblem. The emblem was a hybrid art form with didactic aims in which known motifs were put together in new configurations in order to bring about new meanings. In the emblematic composition, each component refers to another, thus prompting a circular, ongoing reading-process in which the different elements comment and nourish each other throughout the reading. The study of La Modification as an emblematic iconotext sets out to establish how the unity of text and image prestructures the reading process and inscribes the reader into the text, as a co-author.

At the age of seventy-eight, Michel Butor is still a very productive writer. His lifelong passion for the visual arts has led to innumerable critical essays, travel works, poetry, and various types of mixed-genre works, in which he explores the interartistic relationship between painting and literary discourse. As a young man Butor seriously considered becoming an artist, but was ultimately “kidnapped”, as he puts it, by literature.1 Having abandoned painting, he has nevertheless made visual arts a recurrent theme in his writing. For the last forty years or so his friendship with painters, photographers and graphic artists has brought into being hundreds of texts in which he collaborates with an artist. These livres-d’artistes, as Butor likes to call them, are often published in very small editions, some of them actually exist only in two handmade and signed originals, one for the writer and one for the artist.

The term ‘iconotext’ and its two applications In such works of collaboration, text and visual image are present together on the page for the reader to contemplate. Since the two media are simultaneously exploited, I would like to categorize these works as bimedial iconotexts. The term iconotext was originally coined by Michael Nerlich in order to describe the fusion of text and photographic image in Evelyne Sinnassamy’s work La Femme se découvre.2 The term has since been recycled and modified by scholars like Liliane Louvel or Peter Wagner to include “not only works which really show the interpenetration of words and images in a concrete sense but also art works

1 2

Michel Butor, Curriculum Vitae. Entretiens avec André Clavel (Paris: Plon, 1996), p.22. Michael Nerlich, ‘Qu’est-ce qu’un iconotexte? Réflexions sur le rapport texte-image photographique dans La Femme se découvre d’Évelyne Sinnassamy’, in Iconotextes. Actes du Colloque des 17-18 mars, 1988 à l’Université Blaise Pascal, Clermont-Ferrand, ed. by Alain Montandon (Clermont-Ferrand: C.R.C.D./ OPHRYS, 1990), pp.255-302.

120 Sonia Lagerwall in which one medium is only implied.”3 A novel in which the images are conveyed by the verbal medium alone, through explicit references or through more allusive hints to the visual arts, may thus be considered a unimedial iconotext.

The novel as iconotext To a larger French audience, Butor’s name remains forever associated with his novels, written in the fifties.4 Together with Alain Robbe-Grillet, Natalie Sarraute and Claude Simon, he was then one of the leading representatives of the group of writers known as the Nouveau Roman, the New French Novel. Published in 1957, his third novel, La Modification, won the Renaudot prize in France, became a commercial success and was rapidly translated into many languages. It is this novel, which includes more than ninety different references to existing art works, many of which belong to the European artistic canon, that I would like to focus on in the present paper.5 I would like to propose a reading of La Modification as an iconotext in which the images, rendered by the verbal medium alone, play an essential role in the way the reader constructs meaning, the unity of words and ‘images’ forming a narrative that prepares for a certain mode of reading. This mode of reading strikes me as reminiscent of the circular reading process characteristic of the Renaissance emblem, a hybrid art form with didactic aims inscribing the reader into the text, as a co-author. As the American scholar Daniel Russell has argued, the Renaissance emblem may in many respects be considered as a forerunner to modern conceptions of literature and reading.6

The emblem – a reading process wavering between word and image In his study The Emblem and the Device in France Daniel Russell defines the Renaissance emblem as a hybrid art form in which text and image were brought together into a composition with didactic aims, teaching the reader universal truths on matters such as morals, religion, politics etc.7 The Renaissance emblem makers recycled motifs that were sure to be known to their readers since they were borrowed from a familiar repertoire including the Bible, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Cesare Ripa’s Iconologia, fables and bestiaries, illustrated proverbs and manuals of symbol. Once detached from the works of 3

4 5

6 7

Peter Wagner (ed.), Icons – Texts – Iconotexts. Essays on Ekphrasis and Intermediality (Berlin, New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1996), p.16. Cf. Liliane Louvel, L’Œil du texte. Texte et image dans la littérature de langue anglaise (Toulouse: Presses Universitaires du Mirail, 1998). Michel Butor, Passage de Milan (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1954); L’Emploi du temps (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1956); La Modification (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1957); Degrés (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1960). For a full discussion and analysis of La Modification as an emblematic iconotext, see my Ph.D. thesis Quand les mots font image. Une lecture iconotextuelle de La Modification de Michel Butor (Diss.), (Gothenburg: Göteborg University, Department of Romance Languages: French and Italian Section, 2002). Daniel S. Russell, The Emblem and Device in France (Lexington, Ky: French Forum, 1985). Russell, The Emblem, p.103.

A Reading of Michel Butor’s La Modification 121 other authors, these motifs were then combined, mosaic-like, into new configurations in order to bring about new meanings. In an emblematic structure, each component refers to the others, thus prompting a circular, ongoing reading process in which the different elements comment on and nourish each other throughout the reading. Verbal and visual motifs thus converge into a highly condensed discourse that urges the reader to explore its metonymic as well as its metaphoric axis of composition. The prototypic Renaissance emblem was a bimedial iconotext. But Daniel Russell tells us that there soon emerged all-verbal emblem books in which the visual images were replaced by verbal descriptions, scenes, motifs or metaphors. The emblematic vogue enjoyed a wide popularity in Europe and though the emblem as a distinct art form disappeared at the beginning of the eighteenth century, Russell argues that it fundamentally influenced both habits of reading and literary composition in general: In the emblem the individual must discover the right position in which to perceive the univalent meaning of the composition. Accordingly, the emblem at least points forward to the dynamics of modern textual creation in which it is implicit that every point of view will produce a different meaning in interaction with the same text.8 the emblem books […] taught the common reader to take a more active role in relation to a text or a piece of plastic art than had previously been possible. The reader of the emblem books is not yet independent, but he is no longer passive; he is active in finding and appropriating the point of view that gives access to meaning.9

The story in La Modification – A quest for authenticity La Modification is the account of a trip from Paris to Rome on board a train. The hero and narrator, Léon Delmont, heads the Parisian office of an Italian typewriter company and has just turned forty-five. He leads a grey and unfulfilled bourgeois life in Paris together with his wife Henriette, to whom he has been married for twenty years and with whom he has had four children. Every month Léon travels to Rome on business and for the last two years these trips have been enlivened by the presence of a young French woman, Cécile, living in Rome, who has become his mistress and who has initiated him in Italian art. Léon has been fascinated by art since his very first visit to a museum as a teenager. If during his lunch hours in Paris he likes to visit the Louvre, in Rome, since his encounter with Cécile, he has systematically explored the great eras of Roman art, giving precedence to the classical art of the Roman Empire and to the Baroque Catholic era. Through Cécile, Léon has come to be aware of a much more sensuous dimension of art than he had previously experienced in the museum in Paris. In the Louvre the visitor finds the work detached from its context and exhibited next to pieces with which it originally had no connection whatsoever. In Rome, in contrast, the buildings, churches, arches, forums and frescoes visited by the two lovers are still situated in the very surroundings for which they were actually conceived and created. As André Malraux observed in his famous Le Musée 8 9

Russell, The Emblem, p.179. Russell, The Emblem, p.179.

122 Sonia Lagerwall Imaginaire from 1947, the modern museum has transformed man’s perception of art in a radical way over the past two hundred and fifty years.10 Since it harbours works from all over the world that have been assembled into arbitrary collections, the museum blots out their original representative functions and meanings, reducing paintings and sculptures to mere aesthetic objects. What once was held to be a symbolic representation of life is now admired first and foremost as texture, form and colour.

Art as ideology and world vision – The Pax Romana The world vision that so many of the city’s art works were originally designed to express gradually comes alive before Léon as he is guided through Rome by Cécile. The Italian capital with its great past as the centre of the world, whether it be the political centre during the Empire, or the spiritual centre during the Catholic era, endows Léon with a sense of authenticity that makes his Parisian self look more and more like a caricature of a man. In Paris, the modern secularised city of Léon’s everyday life, his marriage is failing and his work for the typewriter company seems to have lost its meaning. In Rome, on the other hand, Léon is given access to a long-lost mythical realm, the city’s art works transmitting the memory of the world as having a centre, a stable point of reference that gives man a sense of belonging. Weary of the pitiful image of himself leading a double life, Léon has decided to finally comply with Cecile’s wishes and leave his wife. Coming unannounced to Rome on the early morning train he intends to break the news to her and ask her to go back with him to Paris. Of course, what he doesn’t yet realize when he boards the train in Paris is that what he really wants to bring back home is Rome, the mythical Rome with its promise of stability and authenticity, a dimension so desperately lacking in his contemporary Parisian life. When he arrives in Rome though, having spent endless hours on the train reflecting upon his decision, Léon has abandoned his plan to bring his mistress back to France. Instead he has decided to write a novel about the trip. In doing so, he hopes to better understand the change of heart that he has undergone during the journey. Through the writing/reading-process Léon hopes to better grasp the complexity of his relationships to the two women in his life and the ways in which these are linked with the multitude of, often ambivalent, representations that the city of Rome evokes in a modern imagination.

A reader’s novel The promise of this “future novel” supplies the reader with one possible explanation for the highly innovative narrative device in La Modification, which consists of telling the story, throughout, in the second person plural. This “Vous” – “you” in the English translation – can be apprehended in a twofold manner. For the one, since the book we are reading may well be the novel that Léon sets out to write in Rome, the “vous” may be understood as the 10

André Malraux, Psychologie de l’art. Le Musée imaginaire (Genève: Albert Skira Éditeur, 1947).

A Reading of Michel Butor’s La Modification 123 traveller speaking to himself, only now in the literary retelling of the trip. For the other, the second person plural “vous” of course simultaneously apostrophizes the empirical reader. Experiencing the journey through the eyes and the mind of the narrator, the reader is invited to participate in Léon’s change of heart and to undergo the same mental and visual transformation as does the hero/narrator. Various intertextual reminiscences and allusions to Virgil and Dante set up the underlying structural metaphor of the journey as an initiation, at the end of which the old Léon, and – why not? – the reader, will end up newborn, seeing the world through different eyes. The way in which this realization comes about, involving a series of actual Parisian and Roman visual art works, is the reason why I would like to read the novel as an emblematic iconotext. Starting out as a story of adultery, La Modification gradually expands its semantic realm to embrace an important historic dimension, making the real purpose of Léon’s journey the coming to terms with a paradigm shift. It is the shift from premodern man’s experience of the world as having an uncontested political and spiritual centre to a modern paradigm presenting a fragmented world of change and instability, competitive centres, different views and perspectives challenging one another. Being itself a child of that very shift, the emblematic composition – and the reading process that it generates – is well suited to help bring Léon to insight.

The heuristic function of the image In the following, we will examine the interconnectedness of three distinct scenes or episodes in the novel in which pictures are evoked by various modes of verbal transformation. In doing so, we will get a clearer idea of what the emblematic organization of textual elements means here. In Museum of Words James Heffernan distinguishes between three main categories of verbal transformations of images: ekphrasis, pictorialism and iconicity.11 Butor’s novel provides us with examples of all of these. While ekphrasis, being “the verbal representation of visual representation,”12 makes an explicit reference to the visual arts, pictorialism and iconicity are of a more allusive nature. In the first case, the dynamic world is described so as to suggest to the reader analogies with a painting, whereas in the latter case the material dimension of the text is exploited for iconic purposes.13 Such

James A. W. Heffernan, Museum of Words: The Poetics of Ekphrasis from Homer to Ashbery (Chicago, Ill: The University of Chicago Press, 1993), passim. 12 Heffernan, p.3. 13 Heffernan discusses pictorialism in the following terms: “Pictorialism generates in language effects similar to those created by pictures, so that in Spenser’s Faerie Queene, for instance, John M.Bender has found instances of focusing, framing, and scanning […]. But in such cases Spenser is representing the world with the aid of pictorial techniques; he is not representing pictures themselves” (Heffernan, p.3). As for the term iconicity, Heffernan writes: “visual iconicity […] is a visible resemblance between the arrangement of words or letters on a page and what they signify […]. Like pictorialism, visual iconicity usually entails an implicit reference to graphic representation. The wavy shape of an iconically printed line about a stream, for instance, will look much more like Hogarth’s line of beauty than like any wave one might actually see from a shore. But once again, iconic literature does not aim to represent pictures; it apes the shapes of pictures in order to 11

124 Sonia Lagerwall implicit references to pictures in the text depend a great deal on the reader for their actualization. The three scenes I wish to discuss here are all, then, characterized by various ways of introducing the image into the verbal code. The first relates Léon’s most recent visit to the Louvre and explores the art of ekphrasis through the description of a diptych hanging in the museum. The second one concerns the descriptions of the view from the train compartment windows and offers examples of iconicity as well as of pictorialism. The third one, finally, is the ultimate sequence in a dream in which Léon’s alter ego finds himself standing before Michelangelo’s representation of the Last Judgment in what he takes to be the courthouse in Rome; and again we are dealing with an example of ekphrastic discourse. Though they are relative to distinct settings and times within the fictional universe, I propose to read these three scenes as variations on the same set of themes and motifs, all vital to Léon’s gradual coming to insight. Through these scenes or, more precisely, through the verbal transformation of images at their centres, crucial aspects of the novel’s Roman theme are being addressed and examined, in a series of variations. Whether it is the image’s motif, technique or frame that is being foregrounded in the scene, the iconic code, then, becomes one of the principal means by which the fundamentally ambiguous topic of Rome is circumscribed and questioned throughout the novel. In this respect, the visual arts play an important heuristic role in the writing/reading-experience which is La Modification, enabling the reader to discover links between seemingly disparate episodes. And, just as the hours spent on board the train exercise Léon in the art of adopting multiple perspectives, the organization of the text promotes an active reader whose presence and involvement are necessary for the many textual layers to interplay.

The emblematic structure. Part 1: Art as illusion – the Baroque Let us, then, take a brief look at the three scenes to see how the gradual unfolding of the emblematic structure which they form allows for the semantic expansion of the journey. As hinted above, an ekphrasis will be the starting point for my discussion of the emblematic structure operating in La Modification.14 I will briefly point out a few of the themes and motifs it introduces and which subsequently are varied throughout the text. They reappear in episodes of the narrative that involve not only the description of artistic representations but also of dynamic reality. The reader’s attention is thus drawn to an important feature of the narrator’s personality: an ambiguity between art and real life characterizes Léon’s perception of the world. This ekphrasis concerns two of Léon’s favorite paintings, the panels of a diptych hanging in the Louvre in Paris. They were painted by Giovanni Pannini (1691-1765), an Italian artist who became famous in Rome as the leading painter of real and imaginary views of the city. The panels, which are given a lengthy description in the first of the represent natural objects” (Heffernan, pp.3-4). See also Max Nänny’s excellent article ‘Iconicity in literature’, Word and Image. A Journal of verbal/visual enquiry, 2: 3 (1986), 199-208. 14 Butor, La Modification, pp.55-56, 58-59.

A Reading of Michel Butor’s La Modification 125 novel’s three parts, depict two similar picture galleries in which visitors move about among art works. The panel on the left bears the title Picture Gallery with Views of Ancient Rome and represents a collection of art from Roman antiquity. The one on the right is called Picture Gallery with Views of Modern Rome and here the walls are covered with paintings showing samples of the Baroque and Catholic art of the city. Needless to say, the visual motifs integrated in the paintings refer to many of the works that Léon and Cécile have admired together in Rome. In being the artistic representation of visitors gazing in awe at paintings on the gallery walls, the canvases also echo the particular scene of Léon standing in front of them in the Louvre. The principle of mirroring, hereby highlighted by the text, also governs the internal relationships between each of the components in the emblematic structure that we are interested in here. One of the main points stressed in the ekphrasis is the artistic rivalry that animated the Baroque artists who were fascinated with Roman antiquity. The architects, painters and sculptors of the Baroque had tried to compete with the grandeur of the real monuments and buildings of Ancient Rome by excelling in the art of perspective. Using a language of signs, they created the illusion of space and magnificence, light and movement. If the similarity in aesthetics between the Empire and the Catholic era is obvious to Léon, the ideological correspondences between the two periods are not yet clear to him at this point, and we need to move to the third and last part of our emblematic structure in order for this dimension to be explicitly addressed. But I am getting ahead of myself. The ekphrasis of the panels foregrounds the illusionary nature of artistic representation in more than one way. Pannini’s illusionist painting is said to be so convincing that it is only the frames surrounding the paintings on the walls which make it possible to distinguish between what is represented as art and what is represented as reality. Also, looking closer at the spectators studying the works in the galleries, Léon compares their astonishment and admiration before the illusion of art to the expressions one may find on the faces of the spectators in the Sistine Chapel. For readers particularly attentive to the ways in which Butor integrates the visual arts into the discourse, a first reading of the novel may well suffice for the three episodes with which we are concerned to establish their network of connections. For others, it may well take a second reading, in which case the explicit references in the ekphrasis of Pannini’s diptych to the frame motif and to the Sistine Chapel will point forward to the two following movements in our emblematic structure, linking disparate scenes together in a dialogue that invites the reader to consider them as a whole. The frame motif introduced in the ekphrasis is now developed and expanded in the many sequences relative to the train compartment. The reader’s attention will thus move from the views of Rome, painted by Pannini, to the views of the passing landscapes, framed by the compartment windows.

126 Sonia Lagerwall

The emblematic structure. Part 2: Framed landscapes – dynamic reality as representation The second part of our emblematic structure thus concerns the train compartment in which Léon is riding and, more precisely, his descriptions of the landscapes that present themselves to him in the two opposite windows as he looks out. Since the narrative is an arrangement of seven distinct periods in the life of Léon (ranging from his student years to the near future upon his return to Paris), the referential context of each discursive sequence in the novel must be identifiable to the reader. The text is so constructed that each time the narration is back in the present of the train journey, this is pointed out to the reader by the insertion of a descriptive strophe always relative to Léon’s view from the train windows. This strophe is characterized by a set of recurring verbal motifs, a sort of refrain formulas which the reader soon learns to recognize, such as “de l’autre côté”, “un homme passe” (on the other side, a man passes) etc. In the first half of the novel, when Léon is still convinced that his decision to leave his wife is the right one, these refrain formulas come in pairs. One begins the strophe and another one closes it, thus forming a distinct frame around the description of the views. The iconical framing device operated by the verbal motifs suggests the possibility of a pictorialist reading of the dynamic landscapes, forming analogies with a painting. Corroborated later on by the comparison between a window view and a painting by Claude Lorrain,15 the suggestion that we read the landscapes as representations reinforces an earlier association between the views in the windows and the views painted by Pannini – one that had been implied by the textual distribution of the ekphrasis. Let us therefore go back, just for a brief moment, to the ekphrasis of the panels in the Louvre to look at the way in which the descriptions of the paintings were integrated into the discourse. Form mirroring content – the Pannini ekphrasis and its iconic features The reader is told that the two Pannini panels are hung on each side of a window in the Louvre. Looking from one panel to the other, Léon lets his eyes travel hastily over the window glass, thereby intercepting the museum façade on the other side of the courtyard. The movement of his eyes goes from static representation to dynamic reality and back again. It is fascinating for the reader to discover that the text mimes this wavering between different ontological realities by alternating between painting and real life in a similar way. In a perfect analogy with Léon’s visual travel, the ekphrastic discourse is, in fact, interrupted by a snapshot from real life: between the descriptions of the two canvases the reader is suddenly faced with the account of Léon’s first encounter with Cécile, two years earlier in a train similar to the one he is sitting in now.16 The textual distribution of the ekphrasis thus iconically mimes the eye movement, wavering between representation and reality.

15 16

Butor, La Modification, p.104. Butor, La Modification, pp.56-58.

A Reading of Michel Butor’s La Modification 127 After three pages the narration returns to the description of the second panel of the diptych. It does so by beginning with the phrase “De l’autre côté” (on the other side).17 The reader of course recognizes this verbal motif as being one of the six refrain formulas introducing Léon’s view from the compartment window. Through the appearance of this verbal motif in the ekphrasis of the second panel, a first relationship is thus established between the static views of Rome painted by Pannini and the dynamic views of the landscape passing by outside the windows. The landscape views – a first crack in the frame At the beginning of the journey the frames that are formed around the landscape descriptions by the pairs of verbal motifs suggest that Léon’s decision is a stable one. With the continuation of the journey however, the two women seem more and more to resemble each other and so do their two cities. The closer Léon gets to Rome, the more uncertain he feels about his decision. The framing device around the window views is simultaneously affected, and the reader observes an increasing number of landscape descriptions with only one verbal motif or refrain formula, thus leaving an opening, a crack in the frame. This gradual dismantling of the frame is preliminary to the vast restructuring of human experience that must take place before the journey is over for the traveller. In order for the crisis to reach its peak, let us move on to the final movement of our structure.

The emblematic structure. Part 3 – The picture speaks ... This third and ultimate movement is introduced as night falls. Here the real landscapes in the windows of the train are replaced by the four photographs of landscapes and city views hanging inside the compartment which now become reflected in the window. Léon falls in and out of a dream in which his alter ego undergoes an initiation rite that brings him to Rome. Here he will answer before a judge and a jury and be reborn. The trial takes place in the middle of a visual representation which becomes animated and speaks to him. The picture which comes alive is Michelangelo’s fresco The Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel, previously alluded to in the ekphrasis of Pannini’s two panels.18 Up to this point Léon has refused to concern himself with any correspondences between the Empire and the Catholic Church other than the purely aesthetical. Despite his Catholic upbringing, he thinks of himself as a secularised man and prides himself in seeing right through the illusion-making and the sordid commerce around the Vatican. Cécile, obviously a better judge of character than he in this regard, is convinced of the opposite. She instinctively interprets his reluctance to leave wife and children as characteristic of a conventional Catholic middle-class attitude. Since she refuses to set foot in the Vatican, they have not been able to visit the Sistine together, despite the great interest they both take in the work of Michelangelo.

17 18

Butor, La Modification, p.58. Butor, La Modification, p.217.

128 Sonia Lagerwall In the courthouse within the dream, Léon will finally be forced to recognize the ideological affinities that link the Pax Romana, ruling the world, with the monotheistic religion represented by the Catholic Church and the Vatican. An ultimate “diptych” is set up in the dream, for Léon’s alter ego finds himself in an imaginary space projecting the Sistine Chapel onto the Golden House of Nero, the extraordinary palace that the Emperor Nero built for himself, the walls of which were covered with illusionist paintings in a Pompeian style. It is in this setting that the figure of Christ painted by Michelangelo detaches itself from the wall and speaks to the dreamer. Judgment falls but not so much on the dreamer as on the old world that he wanted to revive. The old world of popes and emperors now crumbles before his feet, leaving only ruins behind.

A need for new representations – continually redrawing the world map The initiation is thereby completed, the journey is at its end. But what is the hero to make of these heterogeneous images that have appeared with such persistence during the trip? Once afoot on the streets of Rome, Léon will head for his hotel were he will begin to write his book. It may very well be the book we have just read. As such it reminds the reader that whereas art surely should not be confused with reality, it is a great means of making reality reveal itself. Léon is convinced that only a novel can help him see the pattern, bring the necessary coherence to the puzzle and enable him to make sense of the journey. Interestingly, it is not so much for the writing experience as for the reading experience that Léon turns to fiction. The journey having meant a constant revaluation of past beliefs, it is through the process of reading that Léon ultimately hopes to integrate this new, still unfamiliar experience. With its open, polyphonic structure the novel seems to him to be the answer. The literary work, in Wolfgang Iser’s words, is “a whole system of perspectives […] not just the author’s view of the world, [but] itself an assembly of different perspectives.”19 Because it is the reader’s task to restructure these perspectives into a meaningful whole along the guidelines provided by the text, literature offers us unique possibilities to challenge established values within ourselves and to integrate new experience. The metaphor presenting the act of reading as a journey is perfectly suggestive in this regard. La Modification thus turns out to be very much a novel about reading. The actual consequences of Léon’s change of heart cannot be made explicit to the hero unless he himself becomes a reader, unless – within the fictional universe itself – the train journey becomes a book, a work of art. Just as in the Renaissance emblem, the didactic potential of the iconic code is given a predominant role in La Modification. It is through the variations on the theme of “visual representation” that the textual interconnections are established between Léon’s personal situation and a geopolitical organization of the world, allowing the fairly simple story of adultery to expand into a more universal, ideological realm. The reader is guided through the different movements of the emblematic constellation in which 19

Wolfgang Iser, The Act of Reading. A Theory of Aesthetic Response (Baltimore, Md: The Johns Hopkins University Press [1978], 1980), p.96.

A Reading of Michel Butor’s La Modification 129 these links become evident through the text’s reading instructions. As we have seen, these instructions come in the form of a limited number of recurrent themes and motifs all relative to images (representation as illusion-making, the frame motif, representation as ideology) that are constantly being varied throughout the movements identified above: the Pannini ekphrasis, the views in the train window, and, finally, Michelangelo’s The Last Judgment in the dream. Moreover, we have seen how the articulations between these three movements are provided by verbal and visual motifs alike. An obvious example of the first is the refrain formula “de l’autre côté” (on the other side) linking the views from the train to the views painted by Pannini (second and first movements), but also iconic strategies such as the verbal framing device around the landscape descriptions (second movement). Examples of the latter include references to paintings like the Louvre diptych, the Claude Lorrain landscape and Michelangelo’s fresco (first, second and third movements). The emblematic structure thus presents itself as a device by which the text prestructures the reading process, pointing the reader towards possible ways of creating meaning out of the abstract signs printed on the page. Familiar repertoire elements (such as the Sistine Chapel, Rome, landscapes viewed from a train, etc.) are arranged within the text in ways to produce the deformation of the initial schemata during the act of reading. Detached from their original semantic context, the selected elements take on new meanings according to their new environment and the way in which the reader interacts with the text. These dynamic principles, discussed by Wolfgang Iser as being characteristic of literary texts, are at the core of the Renaissance emblem and the reason why scholars like Daniel Russell want to trace modern conception of writing and reading back to the hybrid genre of the emblem. No more than the modern world has an uncontested centre does a book have an uncontested meaning. It is through the encounter between the textual structure and the individual reader (conditioned by cultural and literary experience as much as by social and linguistic identity) that meaning comes about. And, needless to say, the same text allows for different readings not only as a result of its encounter with different readers, but also as it is reencountered throughout the same reader’s life. In fact, it is tempting to say that Léon’s decision to become a reader is in itself a guarantee against the totalitarian use of representation, so well exposed by this train journey, that wishes to fix meaning once and for all. As such, Léon’s decision to read can be seen as a token of his newly won wisdom. In one respect, then, the journey is over. In another, it has only just begun.

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Gabriel Insausti

The Making of The Eiffel Tower as a Modern Icon Although somewhat controversial at first, the building of the Eiffel Tower in 1889 was a milestone in the struggle of modern art. The Tower soon became an icon of modern times and a challenge for artists, who used it not only as a subject in painting and cinema (Seurat, Rousseau, Chagall, René Clair) and poetry and drama (Apollinaire, Cendrars, Huidobro, Cocteau), but also as a device with which to make a statement about avantgarde art.

The Eiffel Tower was built in 1889 for the Universal Exhibition in Paris both as a national monument to commemorate the centenary of the French revolution (its lower part includes an arch with no functional purpose) and as a public demonstration of the possibilities of new materials, such as steel, and of the new building techniques that Eiffel had already developed in some of his previous projects. In spite of some criticism from nostalgic aesthetes like Maupassant and Huysmans, the Tower rapidly gained popularity as an icon of modern Paris and modern times, and has occasioned an infinite number of works of art ever since, ranging from the most exquisite to kitsch. In this paper I will try to describe a few of these re-creations of the icon in painting, literature and cinema, and point to some common developments. This will be done in three main steps: first, painting; second, literature; and third, cinema.

Rousseau and Delaunay under the Tower’s spell The first canvas ever painted of the Eiffel Tower was by Georges Seurat in 1888-89,1 in which the Tower appears as a luminescent spire that sparkles with the pointillist technique characteristic of this post-impressionist artist. The Tower, viewed from afar, appears as a bizarre, unclassifiable but unavoidable monster. We do not wish to approach it but we cannot avoid viewing it. More interesting, though, is Henri Rousseau’s picture Myself, portrait/landscape (1890).2 In this, we can see the quays, the boats and the flags he so much enjoyed painting. But the comparatively large figure of the artist is set against a background where there are several elements that demand our attention: flags, of course, but also a balloon, clouds and the Tower, almost hidden by the buildings and the rigging of the boat. There are two events in Rousseau’s life around 1890 that may provide us with a clue to this. Firstly, he had become a widower two years before and remarried in 1889; and if we turn the picture upside down we can see that, on the palette he is holding in his left hand, he had written the names of both his first wife Clémence and his second, Joséphine. Secondly, it was at that time that he first considered giving up his job at the customs office, which he did two years later in order to devote himself completely to painting. In fact, it would seem Rousseau is about to paint now, as he is holding both a palette and a brush. But the scenery is also significant: the painter has his back to the quays of Saint 1 2

Collection Mr and Mrs Germain Seligman, New York. Národní Gallery, Prague.

132 Gabriel Insausti Nicholas, where he had worked for years, and stands midway between the Louvre and the École des Beaux Arts. Moreover, the artist has ignored all rules of scale and perspective. As a result, it looks as if he is being lifted off the ground by some supernatural power and his enormous figure almost reaches the clouds and the balloon: he is even taller than the Eiffel Tower itself! And the spatial relationship with the figures sitting on the bank of the river is impossible according to the laws of perspective. The fact that Rousseau has picked this spot that he is so familiar with in his professional capacity, in order to show himself committed to a different profession tells us a lot. We can imagine his former workmates meeting him and being somewhat surprised at the direction his life has taken, amazed at his self-characterisation as a great or maybe preposterous artist, and privately mocking him and his megalomaniac attitude as soon as he turns his back. Thus, we may conclude that Henri Rousseau le Douanier uses the Tower as an element within the urban landscape to express some kind of challenge or covenant. Rousseau promises his wives he will become a real artist and summarises here his longing for universal recognition, symbolised by the flags, his thirst for acceptance by the academic milieu, suggested by the closeness of the Louvre and the École, and his aspiration to artistic acomplishment and triumph with the Tower as a model. His art, he seems to be arguing, is to become as great as Eiffel’s. The huge monster perceived by Seurat was no longer terrifying; instead, it was comparable to the artist himself. Did he gain universal acknowledgement, as he wished? One of the few who attended Rousseau’s funeral in 1910 was Robert Delaunay, who after his early impressionistic phase admired Rousseau’s fanciful and naïve style. In 1911 he began an essay, Henri Rousseau, His Life and His Work, in homage to his late master, but soon he abandoned his worship of that saint-martyr-doomed artist and instead came under the spell of Cézanne. He shared some of his main concerns, such as how to create the illusion of space and volume through colour without the resource of linear perspective; and in doing this, he was in fact somehow still an heir of Rousseau, for, as we have seen, Le Douanier was one of the first to disobey the traditional laws of perspective. At the same time, during the summer of 1909, Delaunay started collecting postcards of the Eiffel Tower and that year he painted his first picture on this theme, with the inscription “La Tour à l’univers s’adresse” and “La Tour Eiffel, baromètre de mon art” (The Tower addresses the universe, and The Eiffel Tower, barometer of my art) on the surface of the canvas. As with Rousseau, the Tower represented both an artistic challenge and a bid for universal acknowledgement. From Cézanne, Delaunay learned to observe the effect of light falling upon an object, how it obliterates its outlines, breaking its continuity and thus destroying its unity. Now, the Eiffel Tower itself appeared as a living demonstration of this, as its structure had abandoned the compact look of common architecture. Inner and outer space were no longer absolutely alien to each other, but communicated between themselves: the Tower proved that a space could be defined without being completely filled by massive elements before the eye of the observer. In other words, the Tower rendered visible not only volume, but also space itself.

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In paintings such as Eiffel Tower with Trees (1909), or the two simply titled The Eiffel Tower (1910-11),3 Delaunay showed how it was the action of light that shaped the picture: light cut away different parts of the Tower and the buildings surrounding it, creating contrasting patterns of light and colour that turned the Tower into a riot of energy and constant action. Thus, his view of the Tower as an object, though a deconstructed one, insists on its built nature, its non-natural status, and leads to a dynamic view of the universe, such as the one we find in Sun, Tower, Airplane (1913)4 – an optimistic hymn to modern life which reminds us of man’s faith in science, technology and progress, and the new concepts of space and time that this implied. The Tower was not a monster any more: it was approachable.

Cendrars and Apollinaire: the foundation of avant-garde The second stage leads us into poetry and shows that not only can we approach the Tower, we can also climb it. In 1909 Delaunay met Blaise Cendrars. They used to take long walks together along the Seine, and inevitably their stroll would take them to the bend in front of the Eiffel Tower, where they would sit and gaze for a while. So in 1912 Cendrars wrote his poem “La tour,” which is obviously dedicated to his friend Delaunay: 1910 Castellamare Je dînais d’une orange à l’ombre d’un oranger Quand, tout à coup,... Ce n’était pas l’éruption du Vésuve Ce n’était pas le nuage de sauterelles, une des dix plaies d’Égypte Ni Pompeï Ce n’était pas les cris ressuscités des mastodontes géants Ce n’était pas la Trompette anoncée Ni la grenouille de Pierre Brisset Quand, tout à coup, Feux Chocs Rebondissements Étincelle des horizons simultanés Mon sexe O Tour Eiffel! Je ne t’ai pas chassée d’or Je ne t’ai pas fait danser sur les dalles de cristal Je ne t’ai pas vouée au Piton comme une vierge de Carthage [...] O Tour Eiffel Feu ‘artifice de l’Exposition Universelle!

3 4

Respectively at The Solomon Guggenheim Museum, New York; Folkwang Museum, Essen; and Kunstmuseum, Basel. Private collection, France.

134 Gabriel Insausti Sur le Gange À Bénarès Parmi les toupies onanistes des temples hindous El les cris colorés des multitudes de l’Orient Tu te penches, gracieux Palmier! [...] En pleine mer tu es un mât Et au Pôle Nord Tu resplendis avec toute la magnificence de l’aurore boréale de la télegraphie sans fil Et tu flottes, vieux tronc, sur le Mississippi En Europe tu es comme un gibet [...] Au coeur de l’Afrique c’est toi qui cours Girafe Autruche Boa Équateur Moussons.5

The poem first evokes Cendrars’ sense of surprise, strangeness and novelty at the sight of the Eiffel Tower; for it is a most unusual object (but is it an object?), an unclassifiable monument (but is it a monument?), or a revolutionary building (but is it a building?). It is a threatening presence such as Seurat first depicted it and as Delaunay and Cendrars himself had viewed it from the other side of the river, at the beginning of their friendship. It is also a source of energy, an active astonishing event, like the eruption of a volcano, and alludes to a number of historical sites, such as Pompey and Ancient Egypt and also to the story of Exodus, the Apocalypse, Babel, Carthage, Greece... But in itself it is not any of those things, for the poet denies he has looked for it in those places or that the Tower actually belongs to any of those landscapes. We know what the Tower is not. But what is it? Finally, the poet attempts his own definition: the Tower is a universal monument indeed, for in some magical way, it is at the North Pole, in Africa, in Europe, at sea, on the river Mississippi, etc., and can be associated with many different living things, like a giraffe, a serpent, or an ostrich. Somehow the Tower epitomises both the struggle of modern art for a non-European-centred approach (we should remember the importance of African art in those days for Picasso, Derain and others) and Cendrars’s own thirst for change, movement, travel, adventure as part of his quest for universal communion – an experiential bond with reality that drove him everywhere, from Russia to New York, and turned him into a worldly clochard. Guillaume Apollinaire met Robert Delaunay too. In fact, one of the pictures of the Tower the artist painted is dedicated to Apollinaire and his simultanéisme, his aesthetic doctrine of a new perception of time in modern cities as a result of the new technological devices that transformed early twentieth-century sensibility. In response, Apollinaire (who had included Delaunay in his book about the Cubist painters and had coined for his painting the term Orphism, which it would retain ever since) wrote a very significant simultaneist

5

Blaise Cendrars, Dix-neuf poèmes élastiques (Paris: Sans Pareil, 1919), pp.6-7.

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poem, “Zone,” which is the opening piece, the longest and the most ambitious of his book Alcools: A la fin tu es las de ce monde ancien Bergère ô tour Eiffel le troupeau des ponts bêle ce matin Tu en as assez de vivre dans l’antiquité grecque et romaine Ici même les automobiles ont l’air d’être anciennes La religion seule est restée toute neuve la religion Est restée simple comme les hangars de Port-Aviation Seul en Europe tu n’es pas antique ô Christianisme L’européen le plus moderne c’est vous Pape Pie X .6

The Tower here provides a panoramic view, even a cosmic view, which takes Baudelaire’s flâneur into a different dimension: he is not on the street any more, delighting in the everyday urban comedy of variety, change and movement, but up there, godlike, observing the whole scene in a single gaze. For not only can he see the whole city, but also the whole of Western civilisation: his panorama is diachronic as well as synchronic. The city becomes less a matter of space and more a matter of time. It is now a multiplicity of stages on which different plays are being performed at the same time, not only the city, but the whole postChristian world. This is what we find in Apollinaire’s poem, “Zone.” As with Cendrars’s, the Tower operates here as a symbol of modern times, the opposite of that old world the poet is tired of. But whereas Cendrars’s communion with everything that lives was predominantly spatial, involving America, Africa, the North Pole, etc., Apollinaire’s is temporal: the text takes us on a journey through the poet’s memories in a succession of discontinuous cinematographic stages; he remembers his schooldays, the street where he lived when he was a child, his arrival in Paris and the feeling of being a part of the crowd, as in Baudelaire’s poems, and his trips to Amsterdam, Marseille and Rome, before concluding that experience only leads to pain and disapointment. Apollinaire indeed fulfils the romantic idea of the poet endowed with a visionary power. The “vision and the faculty divine”, as Wordsworth called it, the poet’s imagination, collapsing together several images or attaching them to each other, makes everything happen at once; his use of the second person and present tense reminds us of a film script and points to one end – the convergence of all those past images and events in the present, simultaneous with everything that is real.

Huidobro’s Tour Eiffel This is what we find in Huidobro as well, with a slight difference: in 1918, when he wrote Tour Eiffel, Western civilisation had been shaken by the First World War. In fact, the 6

Guillaume Apollinaire, Oeuvres poétiques (Paris: Gallimard, 1965), p.9.

136 Gabriel Insausti Tower provided the backdrop for a number of poems before becoming the central theme in Tour Eiffel. For example, in “Matin,” the sun awakens the city and above the Eiffel Tower crows a tricoloured cock, which provides an element of synesthesia in addition to the patriotic symbolism (the Eiffel Tower represents the French capital, and the cock, as well as suggesting a weather vane and herald of the morning, is also symbolic of France with a clear reference to the French flag). In Ecuatorial, amidst an imaginary syncretism in which appear telegraphs, dirigibles, packet boats, and locomotives, together with saints, and the Three Wise Men, a plane is transformed into the cross of Jesus (in an overtly visual play on associations), an airplane carries an olive branch in its hands (an obvious allusion to the Deluge in the Old Testament), and in the final verse there sounds “the trumpet, still fresh, announcing the end of the universe” (a reference to the Apocalypse). War is equivalent to universal disaster and the death of Christian civilization, as the poet says that he has seen “dead among the roses / the amethyst of Rome”. So in contrast to the dark or apocalyptic vision of the war presented by those poems, Tour Eiffel is about victory for peace. The Tower speaks of the triumph of civilisation, if not its survival, over the threats that civilisation has concocted for itself. The chronology is once more significant: Tour Eiffel appeared in 1918 as an expression of hope in view of the imminent armistice. The poem says: Tour Eiffel Guitare du ciel Ta télégraphie sans fil Attire les mots Comme un rosier les abeilles Pendant la nuit La Seine ne coule plus Télescope ou clairon TOUR EIFFEL Et c’est une ruche de mots Ou un encrier de miel Au fond de l’aube Une araignée au pattes en fil de fer Faisait sa toile de nuages Mon petit garçon Pour monter à la Tour Eiffel On monte sur une chanson Do ré mi fa sol la si do

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Nous sommes en haut Un oiseau chante Dans les antennes Télégraphiques

C’est le vent De l’Europe Le vent électrique Là-bas

Les chapeaux s’envolent Ils ont des ailes mais il ne chantent pas Jacqueline Fille de France Qu’est-ce que tu vois là-haut La Seine dort Sous l’ombre de ses ponts Je vois tourner la Terre Et je sonne mon clairon Vers toutes les mers Sur le chemin De ton parfum Tous les abeilles et les paroles s’en vont Sur les quatre horizons Qui n’a pas entendu cette chanson JE SUIS LA REINE DE L’AUBE DES PÔLES JE SUIS LA ROSE DES VENTS QUI SE FANE TOUS LES AUTOMNES ET TOUTE PLEINE DE NEIGE JE MEURS DE LA MORT DE CETTE ROSE DANS MA TÊTE UN OISEAU CHANTE TOUTE L’ANNÉE C’est comme ça qu’un jour la Tour m’a parlé Tour Eiffel Volière du monde Chante

Chante

Sonnerie de Paris Le géant pendu au milieu du vide Est l’affiche de France Le jour de la Victoire Tu la raconteras aux étoiles.7

7

René De Costa (ed.), Vicente Huidobro. Poesía, n° 31 y 32 (Madrid: Ministerio de Cultura, 1989), pp.127-130.

138 Gabriel Insausti Tour Eiffel can be interpreted as Huidobro’s supreme effort to find a place in the Parisian avant-garde and to be included as one of its most distinguished members. The first edition, appearing in Madrid in 1918, bore on its cover an illustration of one of the most representative painters of the avant-garde: Delaunay. The musician Edgar Varèse (whom Huidobro probably met through Satie, who often visited his house in Montmartre) included a fragment of Tour Eiffel in his work Offrandes, entitling it “Chanson de là-haut.” The voice of Nina Koshetz would give life to its New York debut which, according to Louis Varèse, was a great success, winning praise for the text. In short, Tour Eiffel appears in Huidobro’s portfolio as his letter of introduction, his most definitive credential in the eyes of the writers and artists whose recognition he sought. In this way, Huidobro’s Francophile nature is manifested in his attempts at enculturation of which the Eiffel Tower is an excellent example. It is evident in the rhymes, most of which are lost in Spanish, since the original text was written in French: Eiffel-ciel, Eiffelmiel, garçon-chanson, télégraphiques-électrique, Terre-vers. Only in 1919 would the Spanish version come to light, with the translation by Rafael Cansinos-Assens for his magazine Cervantes. Huidobro fulfilled his claim that “one should write in a language which is not one’s mother tongue.” In abandoning the vernacular and adopting French, Huidobro, together with his friend Juan Larrea, was joining a large group which was to include Ionesco and Beckett. But his doctrine had been to write “in a language which is not one’s mother tongue,” not in French specifically.8 Why did he not write in Italian, English, German, Croatian, or Malay? The answer harks back to Huidobro’s vanguardism: in French one finds the path to universality (French: lingua franca). As such, the French of Tour Eiffel is not that of the shopkeeper of Les Halles, the clochard of the docks of the Seine or the concierges of the boulevards; it is the French of international diplomacy, haute culture, and European aristocracy. The Francophile Huidobro, as such, is a cosmophile. Far from worshipping localism, his incorporation into the Parisian avant-garde conceals a desire for canonisation by the world. Far from looking for local color and scenes, the images of his poems of 1916-1926 recreate the most universal icons of the Parisian imagination, of which the foremost is the Eiffel Tower. So Rousseau and Delaunay’s image of the Tower as a beast that had to be tamed in order to show the artist’s skill, is also valid here.

In the Heart of the World Lyrical chauvinism was nothing new. The notion that Paris was the centre of the world had long been espoused by Huidobro’s vanguardist friends with abundant eloquence. But that the Eiffel Tower should be considered the centre of the centre requires further scrutiny, since this is emphasised in various ways in Huidobro’s poem. In the first place, there is its centripetal nature, in that the Tower, transformed into an immense radio antenna, “attracts words like a rose attracts bees.” It is the nucleus of a universe communicated by invisible wires or, as was said during the era and repeated by Huidobro, by “the wireless telegraph.” 8

De Costa, p.145 (my translation).

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Other metaphors stress this definition of the Tower as an attraction and repeat the image of the rose and the bees, or its ornithological variant: in verses ten and eleven, the Tower is “a beehive of words” and “an inkpot of honey”, meaning a trap for attracting insects (only that in this case the insects are words), and verse forty-eight speaks of the “perch of the world” where all birds gather. Finally, verse thirty-eight states that the “song” of the Tower (communication by way of its radio antenna) is heard “on the four horizons,” a clear reference to the cardinal points of the compass, and implying that the Tower itself is a windrose. This geographical motif was used by Delaunay for his illustration, which shows an opaque monocolour tower in vermilion red, unmodelled and unfaceted, in the style of the painter’s first renderings of the monument before undertaking the Cubist series. The arches of the Tower stand rise over concentric disks in colors reminiscent of those Delaunay and Kupka adopted after 1913, which are bordered by the four cardinal points, using a typographical layout similar to that used in sign printing. The Tower sits equidistant from each of the four points. Moreoever, the lift – one of those magical objects that Huidobro loved – is replaced by a musical scale, here presented in the form of a stairway, effectively a path of ascension. Huidobro employs calligrams in order to make use of all the ways of producing meaning at the poet’s disposal. The drawing accompanies the word, in the tradition inaugurated (or resurrected) by Apollinaire: the line traces a stairway, with each note as a step. But in addition, the calligrammic game enriches the characterisation of the Tower as axis mundi and as a vehicle for reaching the heavens. The Tower qua scale repeats Jacob’s dream, where the patriarch “beheld a ladder set up on the earth, and the top of it reached to heaven: and beheld the angels of God ascending and descending on it” (Gen 28, 12). From that axis one dominates the universe.

The Imagery in Tour Eiffel What is that universe like? Stated in another way: Huidobro’s poem, like Apollinaire’s and Cendrars’ before it, represents upheaval and describes a changing world; but where is the change leading to? What imago mundi is he proposing? One answer to that question may be found by examining the images which appear in Tour Eiffel. Rather than merely listing and classifying the images, it is much more interesting to examine the connections between them; for almost all are based on a similar process, namely the perception of nature as a man-made device, often a machine. This phenomenon is not unique to Tour Eiffel but rather had emerged in Huidobro’s work two years earlier. In “Tam”, he referred to airplanes as “birds of the horizon”; in “Paisaje”, we are asked not to step on the “recently painted” grass; and in “Vide” a tree is a broom. In Ecuatorial, a volcano is a smoking pipe, the dirigibles that fly above Paris bleed when a “wild boar hunter” improves his aim, and the sun is expected to land on an airfield in the afternoon. His unrestrained use of imagery, based on fancy, humor and ingenious associations, usually tended towards visual analogies, although sometimes they are acoustic.

140 Gabriel Insausti In Tour Eiffel, the presence of these images and the analogy between nature and a device are particularly intense. The radio (the “wireless telegraph”) is a rose bush and the words it attracts are bees. As well as being a rose bush, the Tower is also a beehive, an image that extends the previous one, or, more graphically, a spider whose hairy legs look like wire and whose web weaves the clouds. Upon reaching the platform, the radio broadcast mimics the song of a bird and the wind, and transmits and communicates things in a way similar to electricity. From that height, the hats of the passers-by look like birds because they also have wings and fly in the wind. Finally, in a darker analogy, the Tower is a rose that always withers in the autumn and a perch where all the birds of the world alight. As such, it can be said that this type of imagery forms the backbone of the poem. The images form a series of apostrophes to the Tower, up to four, among which the rest of the representation unfolds. This device of rendering nature as a contrivance and contrivances as nature has various aspects worthy of discussion. On the one hand, it parallels the process of assimilation of the new technology by the artistic imagination already in evidence in Turner’s Rain, steam, speed and Monet’s series about La Gare Saint Lazare, for example, and which, extending the train motif, goes as far as symbolically incorporating the man against machine theme in cinema. The society of the fin-de-siécle and Belle Époque experienced the invasion of new technology as never before. There were new lighting and heating systems, electricity, the telephone, the telegraph, the typewriter, the elevator, the bicycle, the automobile, the aeroplane, the dirigible, etc. The familiar landscape, especially urban, had embraced these creations wholeheartedly. City life would never be the same again. And the avant-garde began by recognising the introduction of a new age and by celebrating it in Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto of 1909. The machine was already part of a world humanised against the clock, with the disputes between conservationism and innovation that were caught up in its wake. A friend of Huidobro, Fernand Léger, outlined an apparently irrefutable argument in favor of that “assimilation” of the technology to the artistic imagination: The examples of change and of rupture appearing in the visual perception are innumerable [...] The large billboard, imposed by modern commercial requirements that brutally disrupt the continuity of the landscape, is extremely displeasing to people said to be of good taste. It has even resulted in the creation of that surprising and ridiculous organization which pompously calls itself the Society for the Protection of the Landscape. Following their criteria, we should erase all traces of Man, from the telegraph posts to homes.9

As well as having an assimilative function, the rendering of nature as a contrivance in some cases provides a strategy for the “humanisation” of the machine itself. “Humanise things” was the first point of the “poetic theory” which Huidobro enunciated in the manifesto Horizonte cuadrado. “Everything that passes through the poet’s body should harness the greatest amount of his heat.”10 “Humanisation” meant, to be more precise, the reenchantment of the world. Weber had called attention to the process of disenchantment of a conceived physis, more cartesiano, as mere res extensa despoiled through scientifictechnical reasoning, with no misgivings whatsoever from any authority, moral, political or 9 10

Fernand Léger, Funciones de la pintura, Trad. Antonio Alvárez (Barcelona: Paidós, 1965), p.26. Cf De Costa, p.61.

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otherwise. The worship of nature was impossible after this reasoning had laid bare its secrets. The temple of Baudelaire’s “Correspondances” had been desecrated and in its interior nothing of divinity remained, having been replaced by machinery. It needs to be mentioned that, underlying Weber’s warning, was an idea reminiscent of the analogy between nature and the contrivance – the terrible, random, inscrutable, threatening world of primitive man, ignorant of the processes of nature, had been converted into a mechanism, and was predictably altered; Huidobro’s moon was revealed to be only a clock when the habits, rhythms and behavior of the heavenly bodies had been understood. Huidobro’s mechanicism (the description of nature in terms of a device) had its antecedents in eighteenth-century materialism, except that what Holbach, Condillac, Godwin, etc., proclaim with ingenuous enthusiasm here appears clad in the rhetoric of irony. How did art adjust to this new reality? And what role did the machine play here? The “knowledge that makes us masters of nature” that Descartes demanded and which underlay arguments such as Holbach’s, was presented as full of promise, promises that would satisfy the most utilitarian and functional side of life but which were vulnerable aesthetically. With strategies such as Huidobro’s, valuing the machine was a way of reenchanting the world, of reinforcing that flank of modernity. To the common user, the functioning of modern products or services like electricity, the aeroplane, etc was as wondrously significant as the most spectacular natural phenomena had been to prescientific man. “Man,” commented Huidobro in a letter to Juan Larrea, “loves the marvellous, especially the poets, and the marvellous has passed into the hands of science.”11 This modern mirabilia had the advantage of being useful to Man while also being magical to the poet; indeed, Huidobro was fascinated by a sense of the magical.

The narrative approach: Giraudoux, Cocteau, Clair The last step in this process of icon-making takes us into the 1920’s. First, there was Cocteau’s Les amants de la Tour Eiffel, a piece of avant-garde theatre from 1921 that takes place on the highest platform of the Tower and in which the characters communicate by means of loudspeakers, as if they wished their words to be heard by everybody in Paris. Then there was Jean Giraudoux’s Prière sur la Tour Eiffel, written in 1923 and later included in his 1924 novel Juliette au pays des hommes. The story is quite simple: a nice young provincial girl runs away from her solid, trustworthy, but also very predictable fiance one month before the date agreed upon for her wedding, after leaving a letter for him in which she promises she will return after a month to live with him forever. Naturally she winds up in Paris searching for adventure, and there she meets all kinds of men – the young bohemian, the stranger who follows her on the street, the archaeologist, the scientist, etc. In the sixth chapter, Juliette pays a visit to the archaeologist and he reads his Prière sur la Tour Eiffel for her. What do we find there?

11

De Costa, p.388.

142 Gabriel Insausti C’est le premier mai. Chaque mal infligé à Paris est guéri aujord’hui par le grand spécialiste. Quand un plomb saute dans un ministère, c’est le fondateur même de l’École Supérieure d’électricité qui accourt [...] La journée de Paris, que trois millions d’ouvriers ont reposée, tourne sur ses huit rubis [..] C’est le seule jour où on l’entend en France le burin des graveurs gratter, la plume des écrivains grincer.12

So everything is still and quiet today in Paris. Only some mechanical birds, like Huidobro’s, sing from the heights of the Eiffel Tower. What is more, the radio at the Tower sends the news from its centre, Paris, all over the world and the poet feels “an orchestra playing throughout the whole universe,” of which the Tower is again the centre of the centre. Who do those mechanic birds sing for? Who does the radio sound for? They are paying homage to both the Age of Reason and man’s power over Nature, epitomised here by the Tower itself. Giraudox’s text manages to recover the original monumental significance of the building; it is a reminder of modern faith in science and technology. The Eiffel Tower, Giraudox says, would have been suitable as a huge pulpit from where Émile Zola could have shouted his J’accuse in the face of Paris. This is a way of saying that the beast – Seurat’s distant monster, Rousseau’s model of the sublime, Delaunay and Cendrar’s amazing presence – has been tamed at last. But is that really the case? Rene Clair’s films Paris qui dort (1922) and La tour (1928) take this taming a step further, by means of an iconic appropriation, the re-presentation of the unusual in such a way as to make it familiar. In the first of these films, Paris qui dort, we are once again given the panoramic view of Apollinaire’s “Zone,” the city seen from a unique, new and fascinating perspective, that of the warden of the Tower, who lives on the top floor. This man wakes up on an ordinary morning in Paris, and goes out onto the platform to watch the usual show. However, he suddenly notices there is something awkward about this morning: nothing or nobody moves. The following scenes show various images of stillness and solitude, almost supernatural in normal city streets, that recall Giorgio De Chirico’s lonely logie; we meet different characters and situations that more or less comical, as the warden tries to find out why Paris “sleeps,” as the name of the film says, or rather why everything and everybody has stopped. Clair shows here he is George Meliés’s direct and most prominent heir, with his taste for tricks and magic: a motionless Paris permits us to see a man about to jump into the Seine in order to commit suicide, a thief about to be caught by a policeman, etc. Finally, in the futuristic fashion of Apollinaire, Huidobro and Delaunay, another four characters arrive in town and help the warden in his search. What has caused that mysterious stillness in the ever-moving city? Soon we learn it is due to a device invented by some scientist, a magical ray that makes movement cease; only this ray does not reach above three hundred feet from the surface of the earth, which explains why both the Tower and the plane remain unscathed, protecting the heroes of the film. Obviously the eccentric scientist is forced to restore normal life and movement and everything ends happily. Thus, Paris qui dort, René Clair’s first film, keeps pace with the avant-garde taste for humour, magic, the irrational, the unexpected (no wonder why he made friends so easily with

12

Jean Giraudoux, Oeuvres completes (Paris: Gallimard, 1990), p.423.

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Picabia, Duchamp, Léger, etc.) and, as he himself pointed out several times, proves he works in the spirit of the early pioneers, such as Meliés. La tour (1928), on the other hand, takes an utterly different approach to the Tower, revealing another side of Clair’s craftsmanship. First it pays homage to the man, Eiffel, here characterised as a constructor. Secondly we are shown the object as a project, with all the designs and plans the engineers had to draft in order to make the Tower possible. We catch a glimpse not only of the finished product but also of the process involved in achieving an aim, bringing into being an idea conceived by a genius. Thirdly we can follow the steps of the process in a beautifully arranged sequence of photographs that skilfully create the illusion of growth. Finally, we return to the present, are shown a view of the city and as the camera pans upwards we realise we are in front of the Tower with its arch functioning as a secondary frame for the picture within the shot. What follows next is a long series of shots of the Tower as it would be seen by a visitor: the lift, the stairs, a notice leading to the second floor, again the lift, the stairs, another notice leading to the third floor, and so on. As we go up, the close-ups show the Tower as a regular drawing, a pattern of straight crossed lines, often arranged symmetrically. What is more, the peculiar translucency of the architecture, from which the traditional opaque wall has been banned, allows us to view exterior space at the same time – the buildings, promenades and gardens, whose linear layout interacts with the iron bars of the Tower itself. The idea of regularity and symmetry is also conveyed by the editing or découpage, which reiterates the same pattern over and over again: lift/ Tower from the inside/ plattform/ insert/ lift... A simple constructivist or tectonic structure. Then comes the return. As we begin to descend after reaching the top, we notice that symmetry rules not only each image, but also the whole development of the film: bottom/ top/ bottom. So, ironically, the great aficionado of Dada and surréalisme, the man who was so keen on the playful, the magic, etc., here reveals a taste for constructivism, an aesthetic ideology of the kind that motivated Bauhaus, De Stijl, Vitebsk etc, which stresses reason over imagination, order over chaotic existence, regularity over the unexpected. This is evident not only in the structure of the film but also because of its subject – the Tower as an object, a construction. We see it is no monster, it has been built; we see it from the inside, deprived of any sublime-extraordinary-superhuman quality. The beast Seurat did not dare to approach has been tamed once and for all.

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Lauren S. Weingarden

Reflections on Baudelaire’s Paris: Photography, Modernity and Memory Charles Baudelaire’s 1859 essay “The Painter of Modern Life” (published in 1863) provides a point of departure for reconsidering his celebratory writings on the Haussmannization of Paris in terms of a photographic archive that both shaped and was shaped by his verbal meditations. This topic is the basis for arguing that the dynamics between word-and-photographic-image codified modern Paris as a national lieu de mémoire (the symbol of technological achievement, cultural continuity and orderly social reform) and generated an international paradigm for a discourse on modernity (French cultural memory becomes synonymous with modernity).1 By looking more closely at Baudelaire’s idea of modernity and the material culture from which it issued, I argue that the photographic archive corroborated Baudelaire’s essay and that this word-and-image interaction provided a recipe, not only for painters (such as Édouard Manet and Gustave Caillebotte), but for photographers in accommodating both disorientation and reorientation that took place under Baron Haussmann’s comprehensive urban renewal scheme.

To argue that Baudelaire was motivated by or was an advocate of contemporary photography is contrary to most art historical scholarship.2 It is generally held that Baudelaire was diametrically opposed to photography because its mechanicity robbed the artist of his imaginative faculties. This interpretation is based on Baudelaire’s Salon of 1859, where he chastised artists who appropriated the mechanical realism that photography offered. From this perspective, scholars have overlooked Baudelaire’s advocacy of photography as an aide de mémoire and the impact that photography had on his own formulation of a modern episteme. My focus on Baudelaire and Paris photography does fit within a smaller corpus of literary scholarship that interprets Baudelaire’s Fleurs du Mal and Le Spleen de Paris as the verbal counterparts of the photographs, representing “living” records of Baudelaire’s melancholy and disaffection with the moral and social decadence of modern Paris.3 My approach also differs from these: I interpret this word-image dynamic based on “A Painter of Modern Life,” and related critical writings on art, in which Baudelaire celebrates modernity and mandates a modernist agenda of artistic practice. A snapshot view of Baudelaire’s essay and his modernist tenets here provides a backdrop for my argument. In “The Painter of Modern Life” Baudelaire elaborates upon a definition of beauty he first postulated in The Salon of 1846 as having “something eternal and something transitory.”4 In the later essay, he specifically defined modernity, and its attendant beauty, as a constant flux between “the transient, the fleeting, the contingent,” and “the eternal and immoveable,” the unchanging “soul of art.”4 As this maxim suggests, 1

2 3 4

The phrase “lieu de mémoire” is here borrowed from Pierre Nora, Realms of Memory (1992/1998). An earlier version of this paper was presented to the 50th Annual Congress, Society of French Historical Studies (Session: "Memory and the Construction of Modern Histories: Baudelaire, Moreau and Gide"), Paris, France, June 2004. Here I am using the phrase coined by Pierre Nora in ‘Introduction to Realms of Memory, Volume III’, in Realms of Memory: The Construction of the French Past, ed. Pierre Nora; trans. Arthur Goldhammer (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), pp. ix-xii. See, for example, Shelley Rice, Parisian Views (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), and note 9 below Baudelaire, ‘The Painter of Modern Life’, in Selected Writings on Art and Literature, trans. and ed. P. E. Charvet (London and New York: Penguin Books, 1992), pp. 390-435 (p. 403). ‘The Painter of Modern Life’, pp. 402, 406-07.

146 Lauren S. Weingarden dualities and doublings are at the centre of Baudelaire’s critical method. In fact, under the heading “Mnemonic Art,” Baudelaire explained how memory fosters a doubling effect, in both the artist’s reception and representation of ambient phenomena of modern urban setting. He also explained how memory provides a collective storehouse of aesthetic expectations, through which the modern artist disrupts the viewer’s response by signalling the old in the new and thereby triggering paradox, shock, and surprise. Within this system, the painter of modern life embodies the double nature of the modern experience, since “selfdoubling” (se dédoubler) is the crux of the creative process.5 When published in 1863, Baudelaire’s essay mirrored and anticipated the actual events of social and physical disruptions that were daily encountered during the Second Empire’s modernization of Paris. These changes began in 1853 with Baron Haussmann’s comprehensive plan, and continued through the turn of the century. Thus, while “The Painter of Modern Life” pays homage to Constantine Guys, a (little-known) illustrator of Parisian mores and fashions, it also mirrors the photographic archive, dating from the 1850s-1880s, which meticulously documents the city’s urban transformations.6 In fact, one could even say that the essay was a product of both urbanization and the burgeoning commerce and technology of photography. In this regard, photographic Paris is both a mirror and mnemonic symbol of a work in progress writ large — that of an entire urban landscape. The very state of transience it captures is what makes the photographic archive analogous with the ephemeral figurative appearances that Guys captured in ink and watercolour sketches. When viewed together with Baudelaire’s art criticism, the photographic record of Paris assumes a function comparable to that of memory. I thus extend Pierre Nora’s example and use the rubric “memory” to describe the formation of a discourse that is both verbal and visual and, ultimately symbolic. To that end, I have collapsed the functions of memory and the photographic image into a mirror-metaphor. Here, I want to identify three ways that the mirror figures as an interpretive device throughout this paper. 1) Both memory and photography have mimetic or mirroring functions in relation to the experiences and events they record. Taking the position of the nineteenth-century viewer, we can further regard the photograph as a “mirror” image of a new visual reality. Haussmann’s newly widened streets and boulevards and new building technologies transformed irregular clusters of buildings into uniform blocks of glass-and-masonry facades, with sheet-glass windows at the pedestrian level. These transparent surfaces reflected and refracted indoor and outdoor spaces, and spaces in between, transforming all of Paris into a kaleidoscopic spectacle of mirrors. 2) On a more theoretical level, the mirror is a metaphor for the cognitive experience of modernity and memory’s transformative function. Nostalgia and optimism are two such responses to Paris transformed. Together, they form a mirroring relationship, between the 5

6

Baudelaire spoke in “De l’essence du rire” of the philosopher’s “force de se dédoubler rapidement” which closely resembles the artist's creative process as defined in ‘The Artist of Modern Life.’ See ‘De l’essence du rire’ in Baudelaire: Oeuvres Complètes, ed. Michel Jamet (Paris: Robert Laffont, S.A., 1980), pp. 680-701 (p. 694). My research here is based on the photographic archives at the Bibliothéque Historique de la Ville de Paris, especially the albums: Blancard-Evard, Paris et ses environs (1888) and H. Blancard, Vues de Paris (c.188789) and the photothèque of the Caisse nationale des monuments historiques et des sites (Paris), albums Nadar and Atget.

Reflections on Baudelaire’s Paris 147 present and a pre-existing order, a mirroring that the photograph helps to effect. However, ambiguity constitutes a third cognitive response, since the past and present, that memory reflects, are always in flux.7 In “The Painter of Modern Life,” ambiguity is reified in the paradoxical referencing of the old in the new, the source of shock and surprise endemic to Baudelaire’s modernism. 3) I extend the mirror metaphor to memory as a kaleidoscopic device for uniting disparate parts of a dynamic whole and its incessant metamorphosis. This kaleidoscopic view is consistent with analogies Baudelaire attributed to Constantine Guys’s cognitive experience and that of the modern painter: The crowd is his domain [...]. His passion and his profession is to merge with the crowd. For the passionate observer it becomes an immense source of enjoyment to establish his dwelling in the throng, in the ebb and flow, the bustle, the fleeting and the infinite [...]. He, the lover of life, may also be compared to a mirror as vast as this crowd; to a kaleidoscope endowed with consciousness, which with every one of its movements presents a pattern of life, in all its multiplicity [...]. It is an ego athirst for the non-ego, and reflecting it at every moment in energies, more vivid than life itself, always inconstant and fleeting.8

Théophile Gautier’s 1854 review of Édouard Fournier’s city guidebook, Paris démoli, mosaïque de ruines, provides the grounds for restoring a Baudelairean celebration of modern Paris. Like Baudelaire, whom he befriended and mentored, Gautier expressed a general malaise in his literary writing but in his critical writing expressed wonder for the élan vital of modern times. Thus although the title, Paris démoli, evokes a nostalgic response to Paris transformed, Gautier’s review evokes the opposite response, giving voice to the immediacy of his and Baudelaire’s shared cognitive experiences and their mutual fascination with the rapidly changing urban terrain: Paris démoli est un livre tout à fait à l’ordre du jour. Il ne saurait arriver plus à propos. De profondes tranchées, dont plusieurs sont déjà de magnifiques rues, sillonnent la ville en tous sens ; les îlots de maisons disparaissent comme par enchantement, des perspectives nouvelles s’ouvrent, des aspects inattendus se dessinent, et tel qui croyait connaître son chemin, s’égare dans des voies nées d’hier. La physionomie de Paris est en beaucoup d’endroits changée de fond en comble. (Paris démoli . . . could not have appeared at a better moment. The deep trenches, several already splendid streets, crisscross the city in all directions; the small islands of houses disappear as if by magic, new prospects open, unexpected views take shape, so that anyone who believed to know his way, is misled by streets born yesterday. In so many places, the face of Paris is changed from ground to rooftop.)

He continues: C’est un spectacle curieux que ces maisons ouvertes avec leurs planchers suspendus sur l’abîme, leurs papiers de couleur ou à bouquets marquant encore la forme des chambres, leurs escaliers qui ne conduisent plus à rien, 7

8

For the more in-depth discussion of these attributes see: T.J. Clark, ‘Introduction’ and ‘The View from Notre Dame’ in The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and his Followers (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), pp. 3-22, 23-78; Claude Pichois and Jean-Paul Avice, Baudelaire/Paris (Paris: Éditions Paris-Musées, 1993), pp. 27-32. Clark also identifies “ambiguity” as a Parisian attitude towards modernity in general and specifically towards Haussmann’s modernization of Paris, p. 21. ‘The Painter of Modern Life’, p.400; emphasis added.

148 Lauren S. Weingarden leurs caves mises à jour, leurs ornements et leur ruines violentes [...] Ce bouleversement n’est pas sans beauté; l’ombre et la lumière se jouent en effets pittoresques sur ces décombres, sur ces accidents de pierres et de poutres tombées au hasard, mais voici que les terrains se déblayent et s’aplanissent, que les constructions neuves s’élancent patientes dans leur jeune blancheur, et que la vielle ville revêt une tunique de palais toute brodée de sculpture. (It is a curious spectacle, these open houses with their floors suspended over the abyss, their colored or floral wallpapers still marking the shape of the rooms, their staircases that lead to nowhere, [...] their bizarre ornaments and their violent ruins [...] This upheaval is not without its beauty; shade and light play picturesque effects on this debris, [...] but here the grounds are cleared and leveled, new buildings shoot up in their youthful whiteness, and the old city returns in a palatial gown, completely embroidered with sculpture.)9

The pictoriality of Gautier’s description is noteworthy here, especially since Fournier’s book was not illustrated. Rather, Gautier’s own eyewitness account responds to some of the earliest photographs of Paris and its demolition sites. Take for example, Henri Le Secq’s photographs dating from 1852-3 that expose open rooms and dangling stairways of buildings demolished along the rue de Rivoli or the “ruines violentes” of the former royal stables in the Place du Carrousel.10 This word-and-photographic-image reciprocity provides an equally viable portrait of Baudelaire’s Paris in 1846, already changed by earlier, sporadic urban renewal schemes. It was here that Baudelaire wrote “The Heroism of Modern Life” as part of his 1846 Salon review and first defined an aesthetic of dualities. He announced, “All forms of beauty [...] have within them something eternal and something transitory [...]. The specific element of each type of beauty comes from the passions, and just as we have our particular passions, so we have our own type of beauty”. Baudelaire extols Paris as a storehouse of and stimulus for capturing such beauty, and thus argues, rather than extol “our victories and our political heroism,” artists should find inspiration in “scenes of high life and of the thousands of uprooted lives that haunt the underworld of a great city, criminals and prostitutes; [as our journals show] we have only to open our eyes to see and know the heroism of our day.”11 While these uprooted lives become the heroes of Baudelaire’s poetic works, in his critical writing, particularly “The Painter of Modern Life,” the artist becomes the hero, impassioned by the dynamism of an uprooted urban landscape. Given these correspondences between Gautier’s and Baudelaire’s celebratory, verbal images of modernity, we can return to Baudelaire’s Salon of 1859, where he ostensibly Théophile Gautier, ‘Paris Démoli,’Le Moniteur Universel du 21 janvier 1854; rpt.: Paris et Les Parisiens, ed. Claudine Lacoste-Veysseyre (Paris: La Boîte à Documents, 1996), pp. 39-44 (p. 39). Author’s translation; emphasis added. 10 Several of Le Secq’s photographs of demolition sites have been published in Rice, Parisian Views, from a private photographic collection known as the Album Berger at the Bibliothèque Historique de la Ville de Paris. An inscription inside the Album Berger states: “Don de M. Amedi Berger, président de la Cour des comptes, fils de M. J. Berger ancien prefet de la Seine, mort le 27 janvier 1881”. At the time of demolition, Gautier lived in the Louvre forecourt facing the Place du Carrousel – the site of the former royal stables, where an assemblage of building structures formed a virtual town. See Patrice de Moncan and and Claude Heurteux, Le Paris d’Haussmann (Rennes: Les Éditions du Mécène, 2002), p. 43. 11 Baudelaire, ‘Of the Heroism of Modern Life,’ Salon of 1846, in Selected Writings on Art and Literature, pp. 104-107. Emphasis added. 9

Reflections on Baudelaire’s Paris 149 condemned photography. Here I want to suggest that he himself used photography as a memory aid to more fully develop his aesthetic of modernity when he began, in 1859, “The Painter of Modern Life.” To be sure, Baudelaire begins the 1859 Salon review by chastising those painters who use photography to perfect pictorial realism and, in so doing, “greatly contribute to the impoverishment of French artistic genius.” This condemnation, however, provides a segue for Baudelaire’s endorsement of photography, so long as it returns to its “true duty” – “as a (‘very humble’) handmaid of the arts and sciences.” He continues: “Let photography quickly enrich the traveler’s album, and restore to his eyes the precision his memory may lack; let it adorn the library of the naturalist, [...] let it, in short, be the [...] record-keeper of whomsoever needs absolute material accuracy for professional reasons.” Baudelaire’s agenda for photography allows us to identify him, and Gautier, as travelers among the ruins and renovations of their beloved city, for whom photographs served as “record-keepers.” Baudelaire’s elaboration on the benefits of photography provides further evidence of this practice: “Let [photography] save crumbling ruins from oblivion, [...] all those precious things, vowed to dissolution, which crave a place in the archives of our memories; in all these things, photography will deserve our thanks and applause.”12 Baudelaire’s final words on photography are cautionary still: “But if once [photography] be allowed to impinge on the sphere of the intangible and imaginary, [...] then woe betide us! [...] [Will not] a people, whose eyes get used to accepting the results of a material science as products of the beautiful, [...] singularly diminish its capacity for judging and feeling those things that are most ethereal and immaterial?”13 I have quoted these last sentences at length, to explore the reciprocal side of the wordand-photographic image correspondences: that of the urban photographers’ response to Baudelaire’s agenda for the modern painter. In doing so, I will focus on two photographers – Charles Marville and Eugène Atget. Marville’s work forms a photographic archive that spans the heyday of Haussmann’s transformations of the urban fabric. Among the most spectacular of these changes is the demolition, excavations and construction of the new Opera building site, the edifice and the avenue that bears its name, which Marville chronicled between 1861-75. This series represents only one facet of Marville’s oeuvre, yet it mirrors the extensive record-keeping he performed as the city’s official photographer of Paris, new and old. He was first commissioned in 1865 to take 425 views of existing streets tagged for demolition, for the city’s official publication Topographie historique de Vieux Paris, a project he completed in 1869. Subsequently, he was commissioned in 1877 to record Haussmann’s new streets. Whether viewed separately or together, each project responds to, and documents, Gautier’s and Baudelaire’s written descriptions of the city transformed. Newly built streets and buildings and those yet to disappear trigger the collective memory of the rapidity and inevitability of change. At the same time, this corpus evokes that third response to Paris transformed, that is, a collective, albeit, official ambiguity. On the one hand, photographs of Baudelaire, ‘The Modern Public and Photography,’ Salon of 1859, in Selected Writings on Art and Literature, pp. 296-298. 13 Ibid., p. 297. 12

150 Lauren S. Weingarden the new Haussmannized Paris are deserted of human presence, yet Marville’s pictorial compositions emphasize precision, harmony and sanitization, in which most Parisians took pride. The first commission, however, acknowledges a city’s loss, but sanctions photography’s capacity for “sav[ing] crumbling ruins from oblivion.” This nostalgia is not only the city’s but Marville’s as well. Close-up views, as opposed to the wide-angled, distant views of the new boulevards, emphasize irregular pathways and buildings, and often include human figures. Here, working-class inhabitants hold still, waiting for the camera to save them – like their streets – from oblivion.

Charles Marville, Percement de l’avenue de l’Opéra, vers 1877, from Marie de Thézy, Marville: Paris (Éditions Hazan, 1994), p. 447

In the following decades photographers took advantage of the camera’s faster shutter speed, fostering a Baudelairean celebration of modern life. New boulevards are now animated by an urban populace, with each figure fixed in a single transient moment. Likewise, the photographer moves from an elevated vantage point to street level, so as to become part of the crowd – and yet, still hidden, given the black hood used for blocking out ambient light.14 In conclusion, I want to argue that the photographer’s dual existence – at once present and absent – accords with Atget’s Paris photographs and ranks him as a Baudelairean photographer par excellence, thanks to his paradoxical mirrorings of the urban

14

Marville had already adopted this street-level vantage point, but moving figures were blurred by technical limitations – the slower shutter speed and longer exposure time needed for fixing the impression on the glass plate negative.

Reflections on Baudelaire’s Paris 151 ambience. For this interpretation we should consider how the Baudelairean painter par excellence, Édouard Manet, mediated Atget’s practice, as mirrored in A Bar at the FoliesBergère.15

Anonymous, H. Blancard, Vues de Paris, t. 3, no. 976 (vers 1887-89); Bibliothéque Historique de la Ville de Paris

In “The Painter of Modern Life” Baudelaire identifies how the artist can achieve an aesthetic dualism, by rendering the familiar unfamiliar – what he called “the shock of surprise.”16 But to do so, the artist must find a technical means to render visible his own ironic self-doubling or se doublement. During the creative process the artist first loses himself in the flux of the urban ambience. He then isolates himself to reflect upon the I have elsewhere treated this aesthetic dualism as a matter of visual parody. See: Lauren S. Weingarden, ‘The Place of Art Historiography in Word&Image Studies,’ in The Pictured Word: Word & Image Interactions 2, ed. Martin Heusser et al. (Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi, 1998), pp. 49–63; and ‘Baudelairean Modernity and Mirrored Time,’ a paper presented to the 2000 conference of the Comité de l’Histoire d’Art (London), forthcoming in Kunsthistorisches Jahrbuch Graz, ed. Götz Pochat. My definition of modern parody is based on Linda Hutcheon’s study, A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth-Century Art Forms (New York: Methuen, 1985). 16 Baudelaire, ‘The Painter of Modern Life,’ pp. 395-402. See also The Universal Exhibition of 1855: The Fine Arts, ‘Critical Method: Of the modern idea of progress, applied to the fine arts,’ in Selected Writings on Art and Literature, pp. 115-24, where Baudelaire elaborated on “surprise” and the “bizarre” as necessary components of artistic creation and the aesthetic experience: “[I]n the manifold productions of art, there is always something new, something that will eternally escape from the rules and analyses of the school! Surprise, which is one of the greatest sources of enjoyment produced by art and literature, derives from this very variety of forms and sensations [...] . Beauty always has an element of the bizarre” (pp.118-19; in my own reading, I have retained the original French word “bizarre”, rather than the English translation, “strange”). 15

152 Lauren S. Weingarden capacity of his medium to trigger the viewer’s self-reflection upon the multifarious modern conditions. For Baudelaire, the fragment form and a technique of imperfection offered the best means to this end. As seen in Manet’s painted mirror, fragmentation and sketch-like brushwork have “shock” effects; as paradoxical formal means they contradict expectations for the finished, illusionistic work of art. These effects, in turn, render the painted mirror parodic – subverting the viewer’s conventional way of “entering” the painting, it refuses to be an illusionistic extension of the objects’ space and effaces the reflected man’s figure from the frontal, picture plane. In more ways than one, Atget adapted the double nature of Baudelaire’s painter of modern life. As a photographer, Atget promoted his photographs “simply as documents” for use by artists and other “professions” in need of memory aids.17 Like Marville, Atget chronicled Paris in transition, exposing demolition sites, old venues and new. However, having briefly practised painting, he also followed Baudelaire’s mandate for mastering an art of shock and surprise. As an artist, Atget adapted Manet’s techniques of fragmentation and lack of finish to the photographic image. This was doubly subversive: first, of conventional expectations for an exact reproduction of reality; and second, of the limitations that Baudelaire ascribed to the photographer and his medium. Atget’s parodic strategy is especially prominent in his series of glass shopfronts and doorways. Here, window- and door-frames enclose rippling reflections of ambient urban spaces that mingle with and dematerialize displays behind glass. These window surfaces are paradoxical – at once transparent and opaque, and the figures behind them are equally so. At once subjects viewed and viewing, they stand inert or dissolve into a myriad of reflections. Taken together, these personages signify the photographer’s double nature of presence and absence, as seen in this 1908 double portrait. At first glance, the head, facing frontally, appears to belong to the figure reflected in the window, standing beside the draped camera tripod, so that the head and body appear to be a self-portrait. If this is so, the other figure, standing behind the window, returns the photographer’s gaze, deflecting the viewer back upon himself. However, upon closer inspection, the frontal visage is that of another man, standing behind the window, whose appearance, like the photographer’s, is immersed in a mélange of buildings, pavement and trees. Baudelaire’s foreboding aside, Atget’s photographs succeed by making eternal the fleeting and contingent, the recognition of which the modern survives. In order to narrow the traditional, historiographic gap between Baudelaire’s aesthetic idealism and his technological skepticism, I have collapsed the photographic image with the painted image into the verbal context of “The Painter of Modern Life.” In doing so, I have blurred the boundaries between Baudelaire’s direct experience and articulation of modernity and that of his subsequent readers, those artists who transformed his particular modernism into a discourse on Baudelairean modernity. This blurring was intentional – to mirror the intermedia dynamics at hand. In closing, I want to sharpen the focus on the later discourse. What is important here, is that through the agency of word-and-photographic 17

In Atget’s Seven Albums, Molly Nesbitt quotes Atget, “These are simply documents I make,” and argues for viewing his photography as such, in an attempt to rescue them from later, particularly, Surrealist misreadings: Atget’s Seven Albums (New Haven: Yale UP, 1992), pp.1-9, 14-18.

Reflections on Baudelaire’s Paris 153 image, and the ongoing Haussmannization of Paris, modernity became consonant with this particular site and its transformations. Word, image and cognitive experience converged to make Paris the lieu de mémoire in a collective modernist episteme. Replete with its symbols, aptly codified by Baudelaire’s aesthetic of the shocking, fugitive, and paradoxical, this lieu de mémoire joins Manet to Atget, as well as to the early twentieth-century avantgarde – here represented by Pablo Picasso’s cubist paintings and collages. In these works, unresolved doublings are sustained at the centre of the aesthetic experience: interiors and exteriors, figure and field, signs and signifiers, both painted and real, at once converge and diverge, amidst grid-lines and painterly passages. As Picasso demonstrates, for the early twentieth-century avant-garde, Paris was both the mecca and model for tracing and erasing “the eternal and immutable,” the unchanging “soul of art” to make way for “the transient, the fleeting, the contingent,” the inescapable contemporaneity of art. For these artists, and the art that Paris enabled, memory attains a symbolic function, as does the lieu de mémoire – each is transformed into an ephemeral resemblance, a reality mirrored by the associations its fragments render.

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4. WOMEN AND THE INTERMEDIUM 4.1. Portraits and Causes

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Elizabeth K. Menon

Les Filles d’Ève in Word and Image The motif of the “daughter of Eve” – or fille d’Ève – became a charged symbol in nineteenth-century France. In one sense all women were considered to be metaphorical “daughters of Eve.” The biblical subtext is found in contemporary writing devoted to the relationship between the sexes, even though the authors did not necessarily intend to literally refer to the Bible or consciously interpret its messages. Nevertheless, critical facets of the story of Creation were questioned. Was Eve destined to sin or did she sin by choice? Was she a femme fatale because she succumbed to destiny or because she brought about the downfall of mankind? Did Eve have a greater responsibility than Adam or the serpent? These persistent questions informed French literature and imagery of the nineteenth century, and they applied to contemporary women by proxy as daughters of Eve. Artists working for illustrated periodicals embraced Eve’s ambiguity, focusing most frequently on her curiosity, weakness, and sin. This essay compares literary and visual culture depictions of the nineteenth-century fille d’Ève created by both feminists and anti-feminists against the backdrop of the women’s rights movement in France.

The motif of the “daughter of Eve” – or fille d’Ève – became a charged symbol in nineteenth-century France. In one sense all women were considered to be metaphorical “daughters of Eve.” The nineteenth-century use of the term did not simply refer to a biblical episode, but rather carried with it a connotation of evil. The biblical subtext is found in contemporary writing devoted to the relationship between the sexes, even though the authors did not necessarily intend to literally refer to the Bible or consciously interpret its messages.1 Nevertheless, critical facets of the story of Creation were questioned. Was Eve destined to sin or did she sin by choice? Was she a femme fatale because she succumbed to destiny or because she brought about the downfall of mankind? Did Eve have a greater responsibility than Adam or the serpent? These persistent questions informed French literature and imagery of the nineteenth century, and they applied to contemporary women by proxy as daughters of Eve. Honoré de Balzac initiated the popular use of the term fille d’Ève in a two-part essay by that name published in the Le Siècle on December 31, 1838, and January 1, 1839; later that year, it was released as a book. Three years later, it appeared as part of the first volume of his Comédie Humaine.2 The story revolves around two virtuous sisters named Marie, the elder Marie-Angélique and the younger Marie-Eugénie. The older marries a caring man who allowed her liberties; the younger marries a controlling, dominant banker. Both sisters are miserable. Angélique’s freedom exposes her to the jealousies of society women, who convince her to take a lover, described as “forbidden fruit,” to deliver her from the “purgatory” of marriage.3 Once she finds her “well-regulated Eden monotonous,” her husband cannot prevent the inevitable. Balzac explained those women’s coquetry, coldness, tremors, tempers and unreason causes them to “demolish today what yesterday they found

1 2 3

Jeanne-Hélène Roy discusses this issue in with reference to Rousseau in Rousseau’s Floral Daydreams: Cultivating an Aesthetics in the Rêveries, Ph.D. dissertation (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University, 1997), p.162, n.60. Honoré de Balzac, Une fille d’Ève, trans. Clara Bell and R. S. Scott (Philadelphia: John D. Morris, 1897). Balzac, p.32.

158 Elizabeth K. Menon entirely satisfactory.”4 Angélique’s desire is characterised as a “symbolical serpent,” which Balzac claimed approached the first woman, Eve, who was likely feeling bored. Angélique’s lover becomes “insidious serpent, bright to the eye and flattering to the ear.”5 When her husband learns of the affair and exposes her lover as deceitful, Angélique begs for forgiveness. Balzac declared her husband triumphant for realising that society women are to blame for stimulating Angélique’s curiosity. Thus, while Balzac initially cast Angélique’s lover as the serpent from Eden, eventually it is other women who are given that role – and the responsibility for the transgression is placed solely on feminine shoulders.6 In 1858, Pierre Jules Hetzel (1814-1886) and Louis Julien Larcher dedicated the first section of their Anthologie Satirique le mal que les poetes ont dit des femmes to “Les Filles d’Ève.”7 Successive chapters discussed coquetry and beauty, different characteristics and types of women, and examined the positive and negative aspects of love and marriage as described by famous authors of the past. The section entitled “Les Filles d’Ève” includes an interpretation of the Bible by J.B. (sic) Rousseau, in which the serpent’s motivation is to triumph over human nature, and concludes, “Et de tout temps la femme l’est au diable”8 (And from time immemorial the woman is with the devil). Destouches asked “Les Femmes iront-elles en paradis?” (Shall women go to heaven?), and Alfred de Musset declared that women have a “fatal power.”9 From Molière there is a contribution entitled “La Valeur des femmes,” which includes the rhyming couplet “La meilleure est toujours en malices féconde; / C’est un sexe engendré pour damner tout le monde”10 (Even the best is full of evil spells / A sex designed to send us all to Hell). Eve’s alluring and fatal characteristics are described by many authors cited by Hetzel and Larcher, for example, Anseaume, in “La Femme est Changeante,” claimed female characteristics change in response to the time of day. During the day, a woman’s behaviour was said to be charming, elegant, engaging, caressing and obliging; during the night it was turbulent, ennervating, petulant, distressing, and provoking.11 His essay provides the transition from discussions of Eve’s nature to those treating contemporary women of Paris in the remainder of the book. Each author at will modified the concepts of Eve and filles d’Ève – which by the nineteenth century were nearly synonymous. Charles Valette, who apparently did not associate the terms negatively, dedicated his 1863 poem Filles d’Ève to all the beautiful

Balzac, p.27. Balzac, p.42. The polarisation of masculinity and femininity in Balzac’s La Comédie Humaine is discussed by Martha Niess Moss in ‘Balzac’s Villains: The Origins of Destructiveness in La Comédie Humaine’, Nineteenth-Century French Studies v. 6 nos. 1&2 (Fall/Winter 1977-78), 36-51. However, ‘Une Fille d’Ève’ is not among the Balzac stories discussed. 7 P. J. Martin and L.J.Larcher, Anthologie Satirique le mal que les poetes ont dit des femmes (Paris: Hetzel, 1858). Hetzel used the pseudonym P.J. Martin. 8 Martin and Larcher, p.7. Unless otherwise indicated, all English versions of French sources are mine. 9 Martin and Larcher, pp.8 and 18, respectively. 10 Martin and Larcher, p.22. 11 Martin and Larcher, p.32. 4 5 6

Les Filles d’Ève in Word and Image 159 women of Paris.12 The anti-feminist Arsène Houssaye declared in the preface to his 1852 novel Les Filles d’Ève, “Ce livre est vieux comme le monde, mais il est toujours nouveau” (this book is as old as the world, and yet always new). Houssaye, who had previously written about the women of the eighteenth century, now turned his attention to those of the nineteenth, to create a tableau vivant of “toutes ces physionomies variées, vivantes, rêveuses, passionnées, mélancholiques, qu’il appelle Les Filles d’Ève” (all these varied types – the vivacious, the passionate, the dreamy, the melancholy-known as the Daughters of Eve). Houssaye’s story focuses on the lives of three very different women – a “grande dame,” a “comédienne,” and a “religieuse” (the aristocrat, the comedian, the nun). Houssaye chronicled their adventures and misadventures with men in order to demonstrate (much as Balzac had) that all women are basically the same due to their connection to Eve, their “real” mother. Houssaye’s text evidently continued to resonate with the late nineteenthcentury Parisian audience – later editions or reprints were published in 1858, 1863, 1870, 1876, and 1892, without the explicatory preface indicating that it was no longer necessary for the author to explain his intentions. Artists of the last quarter of the nineteenth century imagined the filles d’Ève as encompassing a variety of types of Parisian women. J.Beauduin in his illustration “Èves Parisiennes” for Paris s’Amuse (1883) included a fashionable woman wearing a veil and carrying a muff, who, we are told, loves her mirror too much.13 Also depicted are an actress, a maid, a ballerina, and an artist. Both wealthy and poor classes are represented through dress and setting (the street Henry Gerbault, Histoire Naturelle versus the opera, for instance). Charles Valette, Filles d’Ève (Paris: G.-A.Pinard, 1863). Valette’s use of rhyming verse was satirised in a review which appeared in Le Hanneton (January 4, 1863), p.3. The author (identified only as “Puck”) also pointed out the apparent contradiction between Valette’s title and his intended audience. 13 (April 14, 1883), pp.376-377. 12

160 Elizabeth K. Menon The message is that the “Ève Parisienne” is any and every woman; a perverted sexuality is suggested with the inclusion of the partially undressed “Lesbos,” who touches her breast. Henry Gerbault’s Histoire Naturelle dramatically posited two very different types of women, both considered filles d’Ève. These two descendants of Eve – one feminine and fashionable, the other more masculine – represented so-called dangerous elements in society. The more fashionable type is the consumer model – the woman who is fascinated by new accessories and fashions increasingly available and increasingly desired. This woman stands for the ambiguous type that would encompass certain prostitutes – certainly those who would sell their bodies for luxuries – but also the leisure-class wife of the uppermiddle classes – those most likely to find a lover according to popular novels of the period. The second woman represented is the stereotypical feminist, who has, in her quest for freedom and equality, somehow compromised her femininity and has therefore taken on a masculine appearance.14 Both types of women had in common an increasing visibility and freedom, which threatened men in French society.

Fatal Traits To understand the choices made by artists and writers in their depictions of the fille d’Ève, it is important to survey the meanings the biblical Eve had developed by the nineteenth century. Dee Woellert has stated that Eve, despite being a religious image, was “generalized and secularized to support and justify attitudes, institutions, practices and expectations.”15 Woman’s nature was given specific definition and purpose, involving both her appearance and submissive behaviour. Eve’s deception condemned successive generations of women to obey man’s rule; her redemption was through the pain of childbirth. While Eve’s character vacillated from the role of dupe to seductress, two important factors remained – she sought knowledge, and led man astray. The narrative of Genesis III: 1-8 supports neither the idea that the snake was Satan in disguise nor that Eve’s convincing Adam to eat the apple was part of a sexual seduction. In Genesis, the snake is just a snake, and Eve promises Adam a higher order of knowledge should he eat the apple. St. Augustine (b. 324) however, reconceptualised the snake in a chapter titled “How the Devil used the Serpent.”16 At the same time, Eve was recast as

The loss of grace and charm suffered by women who wore masculine clothing is described in many journal articles. See for instance Jack, ‘Les Femmes en hommes’, Le Charivari (July 26, 1880), p.2; Arsène Alexandre, ‘Les déféminisées’, Le Figaro (March 12, 1897), p.1; the anonymously-written ‘Les pantalons réhabilités et le manifeste féminin’, La Revue des Revues, vol. 7 (1893), p.635; and Victor Jozé, ‘Le Féminisme et le bon sens’, La Plume, (September 15, 1895), pp.1-2. 15 Dee Marie Woellert, Eve: The Image of Woman, Ph.D. dissertation (DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University, 1988), p.4. Woellert has studied interpretations of Eve by analysing theological and psychological works from different time periods in order to show a shift from discussions of the archetypal Eve to women in general. An overview of the changes made to Eve’s meaning also appears in Katharine Rogers, The Troublesome Helpmate: A History of Misogyny in Literature (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1966), passim. 16 The City of God, Book 2, Chapter 27. See recent translation by R.W.Dyson, The City of God against the Pagans (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 14

Les Filles d’Ève in Word and Image 161 lacking the moral character to discern the Devil’s disguise. Tertullian (ca. 160-230) extended Eve’s guilt to all women with the statement: “Do you not know that every one of you is Eve?”17 Women’s desire was specifically identified as foreshadowing death – for it was Eve’s desire for the apple that ultimately caused the Son of God’s death. The cases of Augustine and Tertullian provide two examples of how biblical interpreters, for reasons often wholly their own, recast the light in which Eve was seen. The common understanding of Eve as a femme fatale who caused mankind’s downfall through her voice and sexuality was not a notion put forward in the Bible, but rather evolved gradually through the writings of successive theologians. These interpreters no doubt took into consideration Lilith, Adam’s first wife in the Judaic tradition, as they wrote their descriptions of Eve, either deliberately or due to confusion. Lilith, created as Adam’s “equal,” refused to submit during intercourse with her husband, and was cast out of Eden.18 Subsequently, she was responsible for abducting newborn children and fostering men’s erotic dreams. She was not present in the Garden during the fall, but by some accounts she encouraged Satan to tempt Eve with promise of dominance and independence. When Christianity separated from Judaism, mention of Lilith was suppressed and Eve became the submissive partner created from Adam’s rib. Creation from a part of the body not involved in walking, talking, or thinking sealed her inferiority. Eve also came to be intimately associated with the serpent, later identified as Satan. John Phillips has explained how Eve could be seen as the devil’s mouthpiece or could be “seen in some way to be the forbidden fruit, or the serpent in paradise, or even the fall.”19 Many of Eve’s traits have been described as weaknesses: “her curiosity, vanity, insecurity, gullibility, greed, and lack of moral strength and reasoning skill – combined with her supposed greater powers of imagination, sensuality and conspiracy...”20 Eve’s nineteenth-century characteristics were derived from the biblical narrative – either implied by the original text or later interpretations of her underlying motivations. Andrew of Saint Victor (d. 1175) believed Eve’s “great simplicity” explained her lack of surprise when the serpent began to speak.21 But Eve’s motivation could also be thought selfish because she gained special knowledge and used it immediately “in a devious and manipulative way to gain power over Adam.”22 The misogynistic reading of Genesis acquired a “status of canonicity”: by the nineteenth century, both feminists and anti-feminists could agree upon

17

18

19 20 21 22

Quintus Septimus Florens Tertullian, ‘On the Apparel of Women’, in The Ante-Nicene Fathers: Translations of the Writings of the Fathers down to A.D. 325, 10 vols., ed. Rev. Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdman, 1969-1973), II, pp.18-19. John Phillips, Eve: the History of an Idea (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1984), p.39. See also Aviva Cantor Zuckoff, ‘The Lilith Question’, Lilith vol. 1 (1976), 5-38; and Michèle Bitton, ‘Lilith ou la première Ève: un mythe juif tardif’, Archives de science sociale des religions no. 71 (July-September, 1990), pp.113-136. Phillips, p.41. Phillips, p.62. Henry Ansgar Kelly, ‘The Metamorphoses of the Eden Serpent during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance’, Viator [UCLA] vol. 2 (1971), 301-28 (p.303). Margaret Hallissy, Venomous Woman: Fear of the Female in Literature, (NY: Greenwood Press, c. 1987), p.15.

162 Elizabeth K. Menon what the original text meant, even if they did not agree upon the implications.23 Artists working for illustrated periodicals embraced Eve’s ambiguity, focusing most frequently on her curiosity, weakness, and sin. The latter, specifically connected to sexuality, became frequently equated with prostitution. Henri Gerbault illustrated “typical” female traits in “Leurs etats d’âme” for La Vie Parisienne.24 A woman sprouting like a plant represents the qualities of naiveté and innocence, while the reclining nude “âme Danaë” is showered with coins and paper money. The curious “soul” is illustrated by a woman robed in a snakeskin climbing toward the apple of knowledge. Curiosity was a fatal characteristic that linked Eve to Pandora. Denis Caron took this further when he stated “Toutes les femmes sont curieuses, et la curiosité leur est toujours fatale”25 (All women are curious, and their curiosity always proves their undoing). Eve’s curiosity was treated by Maria Deraismes in Ève dans l’humanité: Cela est si vrai que, dans cette vieille légende de l’Eden, si mal interprétée, la femme, Ève, a pris l’initiative du progrès. A quel tentation succombe-t-elle? A celle de savoir et de connaître. Elle cède à la curiosité scientifique.26 (This is so true that, in the old myth of Eden, so badly interpreted, the woman – Eve – took the initiative in making progress. What was the temptation she succumbed to? That of discovery and knowledge. She gave way to scientific curiosity)

Eve’s sin called into question for some whether women could truly possess a “soul” at all. In Larcher’s La Femme jugée par l’homme, a woman’s soul is thought to be designed and consecrated by Satan, and is thus different from man’s.27 The richer implication of the French term “âme” (which has no equivalent in English and can be only approximated 23

24

25 26 27

Phyllis Trible, God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1978), p.73. Trible summarises some of the aspects that have achieved a consensus, including that the creation of the man first and female second means that the woman is inferior, that woman is created as a helpmate, that since the woman is made from the man’s rib she is dependent upon him for life. She is derivative, therefore does not have an autonomous existence. Since man named woman he has power over her and that God has given man that right. Since woman tempted man to disobey she is responsible for sin in the world, as well as being untrustworthy, gullible and simpleminded. La Vie Parisienne promoted tourism by highlighting fashion, sports and leisure activities undertaken by women. Valerie Steele has termed it the “Playboy of its day,” which overstates the nature of the illustrations compared to other available “pornography” in the Bibliothèque Nationale’s ENFER collection. David Kunzle has more accurately referred to this publication as providing a “rich panorama of Parisian life” and an attempt to provide a “physiologie de la toilette.” He reports that the magazine was written “by men for women and for the male ‘gourmet de la femme.’” Kunzle discusses the magazine in part six of his article “The Corset as Erotic Alchemy,” in Woman as Sex Object: Studies in Erotic Art, 1730-1970, ed. Thomas Hess and Linda Nochlin (New York: Newsweek, 1972), pp.116-121. Reproduced in Larcher’s La Femme jugée par l’homme, p.301, where “curiosity” appears as part of an alphabetical list of uncomplimentary characteristics of women under the collective title of “Petite Mosaique.” Maria Deraismes in Ève dans l’humanité (Paris: Côté-femmes, 1990 [1895]), pp.166-167. “Les femmes font-elles partie du genre humain? ont-elles une âme? Telle est la double et puérile question qui, pendant plusieurs siècles, a très-sérieusement préoccupé des philosophes, des savants, des évêques, des prêtres de toutes les religions” (Are women part of the human race? Have they a soul? Such is the twofold and puerile question that, for several centuries, seriously preoccupied philosopher, scholars, bishops and priests of every religion) (L.J.Larcher, La Femme jugée par l’homme [Paris: Garnier, 1858], p.120).

Les Filles d’Ève in Word and Image 163 through contemplation of the words heart, soul, spirit and sentiment) suggests Gerbault’s image is doubly encoded with cause (Eve’s weakness) and effects (a constellation of characteristics driven by “impure” desires). Eve’s “weakness” was linked to the specific and somewhat trendy illness – neurasthenia – in another work by Gerbault, “Consultation gratuite pour jeunes Neurasthéniques”.28 This visual history of neurasthenia past and present depicts Eve as “La première neurasthénique.” The text blames Eve’s neurasthenia on boredom with Eden: the monotonous sunshine, butterflies and flowers caused her to become “l’éternelle malade.” Luckily the serpent – first doctor and phallic stand-in – is present to deliver the cure. It is significant that Eve is described as the “first neurasthenic” in Gerbault’s image – for the cause of this “nervous suffering” or “weakness of the will” was attributed to “the excessive collisions and shocks of modernity.”29 Gerbault’s humour promotes sin as responsible for both the technological progression of society and the presence of Eve’s daughters within it. Neurasthenia was one of many fatigue disorders and “stood above all others for its ubiquity and relentless attack on the core of psychic and physical energy.”30 An American doctor had invented the term in the 1860s. George Miller Beard intended it to describe nervous exhaustion stemming from the brain or spinal cord and caused by the American lifestyle in the industrial age. Before long, French doctors embraced neurasthenia. Despite Beard’s insistence on modernity as the cause, French doctors at first considered the disorder to be hereditary – thus Gerbault suggested that if Eve was the first neurasthenic, then all women must be predisposed to it.31 The claim that the phallic snake is the doctor sent to “cure” the patient is a reference to the longstanding belief that sexual desire – too much or too little – was at the root of many “feminine” illnesses, including hysteria – and that intercourse could provide relief. The most important modification to Eve in later interpretations was her responsibility for the fall. Once shared by Adam, the fall eventually became Eve’s fault alone. The original biblical text suggested that Adam was very near Eve at the moment of her transgression. This is confirmed in Early Christian and Renaissance images. But Milton’s Paradise Lost depicted Eve alone when the snake approached.32 Several works completed by Félicien Rops in preparation of a frontispiece for Joséphin Péladan’s Un coeur perdu (1888) demonstrate how a nineteenth-century artist wrestled with Eve’s relative responsibility. Péladan was a prolific symbolist writer, leader of the alternative religious society

La Vie Parisienne (Feb. 28, 1903), 118-119. Anson Rabinbach, The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity (New York: Basic Books, 1990), pp.154, 155. 30 Rabinbach, p.153. 31 Neurasthenia is linked to hysteria in this sense of being diagnosed more often in women (who, according to Darwinian thinking were “weaker” in the intellectual, emotional and physical sense). Jean-Martin Charcot, director of the Salpetrière, made hundreds of diagnosis of both conditions. On the hereditary theories of French doctors studying neurasthenia see Robert C. Nye, Crime, Madness and Politics in Modern France: the Medical Concept of National Decline (Princeton, NH: Princeton University Press, 1984). 32 On the proximity of Adam to Eve at that moment see Jean M. Higgins, ‘The Myth of Eve: The Temptress’, Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 44 (December 1976), 639-47, especially pp.645-646. 28 29

164 Elizabeth K. Menon named the Rose-Croix and Rops’ close friend.33 In his book Péladan described the “vie supérieure,” by which he meant a life of passion, which he traced to mythological and biblical figures, including Eve. Rops executed several designs focusing on the Genesis story in preparation for the frontispiece. “Eritis similes Deo” (“you will be similar to God,” ca. 1880-90) depicts two figures in the tree – Both Adam and Eve or Eve and a semi-transformed representation of the serpent – in either case, both a masculine and feminine presence. A later engraving of this image was entitled “Tentation ou la pomme” (Temptation, or. The Apple).34 An 1896 engraving bearing the title “Eritis similes Deo” has a more detailed representation of the snake-like tail, which now clearly belongs to the male figure; the tree behind the couple is more detailed and lacks leaves, suggesting that it is dead or dying.35 In the version used for the frontispiece, “Le Pêcher mortel”, the serpent takes on the appearance of a rope binding Eve to the tree – thus giving her sole responsibility for the Fall. Here the tree sports abundant foliage and fruit and a banner reading “Eritus similus Deo” floats among the branches. Phallic Jack-in-the Pulpits sprout around Eve’s feet.36 In an even later version of “Le Pêcher mortel” (1905), Eve no longer holds the apple; her hands grasp her face as she shrieks before a dying tree.37 The most common characteristic associated with Eve was sin – and this generality was expanded dramatically in a series of illustrations and texts that subdivided sin into different categories and levels of severity. Gerbault completed two series on the “péchés veniels” and the “péchés capitaux” (venial and capital sins) for La Vie Parisienne.38 These were later gathered into a volume that was advertised with a depiction of Eve, a basket of apples, and a snake wrapped around a potted tree – a now completely domesticated version of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Eve was not the subject of the series – the contemporary Parisienne was. The most consistently depicted sins were those associated with woman’s sexuality. As Édouard de Pompery concluded in La Femme dans l’humanité: sa nature, son 33

34 35 36 37 38

Anatole France, ‘Joséphin Péladan’, Oeuvres v. VII, La Vie Littéraire (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1926), p.226. See Christophe Beaufils, Josephin Peladan (1858-1918) Essai sur une maladie du lyrisme (Grenoble: Jérôme Millon, 1993); and Jean-Pierre Laurant and Victor Nguyen, Les Peladan (Lausanne: L’Age d’homme, 1990). Rops provided the frontispiece illustrations for the four volumes in the first septenaire of La Décadence Latine — Le Vice suprême, “diathèse morale et mentale de la décadence latine”; Curieuse, “phénoménisme clinique collectif parisien”; L’initiation sentimentale, “les manifestations usuelles de l’amour imparfait, expressément par tableaux du non-amour”; and A coeur perdu as “réalisation lyrique du dualisme par l’amour; réverbération de deux moi jusqu’à saturation éclatante en jalousie et rupture; restauration de voluptés anciennes et perdues.” (Concordance schema published in each volume). Maurice Exsteens, L’Oeuvre Gravé de Félicien Rops (Paris: Éditions Pellet, 1928), no.440. Exsteens, no. 866. The engraving after the original drawing (Exsteens, 438) has foliage on the tree but no flowers and no banner. The actual frontispiece is listed as Exsteens, 520. Exsteens, no. 863. In the series “Leurs Péchés veniels” (Their Venial Sins) were “Le Mensonge,” July 18, 1896, pp.414-415; “La Jalousie,” Oct. 3, 1896, pp.572-573 and “L’Hypocrisie,” May 22, 1897, pp.298-299. The series “Leurs Péchés Capitaux” (Their Capital Sins) as originally published in La Vie Parisienne included “Orgueil,” Oct. 5, 1895, pp.572-573; “L’Avarice,” Nov. 30, 1895, pp.684-5; “La Luxure,” January, 1896; “L’Envie,” Feb. 22, 1896, pp.103-104; “La Colère,” March 21, 1896, pp.160-161; “La Gourmandise,” April, 1896; and “La Paresse,” May 16, 1896, pp.280-281. The advertisement for the album appeared December 4, 1897, p.700.

Les Filles d’Ève in Word and Image 165 role et sa valeur sociale, “La femme, c’est le péché, c’est Satan, c’est l’ennemi!”39 Here, as elsewhere, the invocation of Eve was merely a prelude to the “real” problem: the place of woman in contemporary society. The woman that most obviously manifested the ills of society, from a medical as well as a social and moral point of view, was the prostitute.40 Armand Silvestre entitled his collection of stories about courtesans Le Péché d’Ève (Eve’s Sin).41 Pol de SaintMerry dealt with prostitution in two of his twelve volumes of the Petite Bibliothèque du coeur: Le Péché and Pécheresses (Sin and Woman Sinners).42 In the former text, the “first sin” is deemed the “sin of love” – and this is love in its most seductive aspect. The Henry Gerbault, Leurs Péchés Capitaux latter text describes “pécheresses” as the “irregularities” of love – women that in biblical times were called “vierges folles” (foolish virgins).43 Pol de Saint-Merry attributed sin associated with prostitution only to the women involved, not the male customers. He intended not to give instruction in moral behavior, but rather to treat the issue from an “aesthetic” point of view. The prostitute is responsible for fostering an illusion, something that only resembles love. In this sense, the “professionelle de l’amour” is deemed a type of “artiste d’un genre particulier,” who considers love as nothing more than an accessory.44 In successive chapters, Saint-Merry explained how a woman became a “pécheresse,” aided by a society in which virtue existed as trompe l’oeil – a fragile veneer convincing onlookers of its reality.

39 40 41 42

43 44

Édouard de Pompery, La Femme dans l’humanité: sa nature, son role et sa valeur sociale (Paris: Hachette, 1864), p.14. On the medical implications of the “corps de la pécheresse” (the sinner’s body), see Yvonne Knibiehler and Catherine Fouquet, La Femme et les Médecins: Analyse historique (Paris: Hachette, 1983), pp.47-62. Armand Silvestre, Le Péché d'Ève – Contes gaillards et nouvelles parisiennes (Paris: Rouveyre & G. Blond, 1882). Pol de Saint-Merry, Petite Bibliothèque du coeur, 12 vols (Paris : H. Geffroy, 1898). 1. La Femme 2. L’Amour 3. La Jalousie 4. Les Baisers 5. La Beauté 6. Le Coeur 7. Le Péché 8. L’Amante 9. L’Epouse 10. Pecheresses 11. L’Adultère 12. Le Divorce. Saint-Merry, Pécheresses, p.6. Saint-Merry, Pécheresses, p.10.

166 Elizabeth K. Menon

Eve’s Daughters and the feminist cause In the last decade of the nineteenth century and the first decade of the twentieth, Eve was employed in literature by both male and female authors. While their purpose, content and audience varied, these texts were written with a full understanding of the rich symbols traditionally associated with Eve. The authors also understood and mobilised references to Eve’s daughters, those Parisiennes of the nineteenth century seen as threatening, whether because of their agitation for suffrage, their excessive sexual power, or their increased visibility. Jules Bois wrote two distinct types of books – novels, including his L’Eternelle Poupée (The Eternal Doll) and treatises concerned with morality, religion, and women’s rights.45 His theoretical work L’Ève Nouvelle (The New Eve) appeared between 1894 and 1897. Portions of this book were published in major journals, including the avant-garde literary magazine La Revue Blanche and the mainstream La Revue Encyclopédique.46 L’Ève Nouvelle substantially re-evaluates the Eve paradigm. Bois’s main concern was to link the figure of Eve with the continued subjection of women in French society. He predicted that his suggestion of equal rights for women would be met with sceptical smiles given the common view that a woman was in need of protection, or that she was the “goddess of the foyer, angel, eternal mother.”47 Bois argued with Pierre Joseph Proudhon, who had dictated that a woman remain either “courtisane ou ménagère” or an instrument of “félicité ou de nécessité” for man, which Bois deemed a monstrous injustice.48 Bois not only voiced his own opinions, but those of others who had participated in the 1896 Feminist Congress in Paris. It was here that such issues as morality, motherhood, and economics were discussed and debated.49 One of the primary declarations of the congress was that a woman, before being a spouse, lover, or mother, was a woman: “Il faut la laisser libre; elle est ce qu’elle est et non point que l’homme veut qu’elle soit” (we should leave her free: she is what she is, and not what men would have her be).50 Society would only benefit from the equal treatment of women. In the first part of L’Ève Nouvelle Bois recounted the history of the subjugation of women. He hypothesised that prehistoric man realised his physical strength as well as the existence of his ego; he also realised that woman was different. Darwinian thought emphasised the physical differences of woman, such as her “wound” that caused her 45

46 47 48 49 50

Bois’ oeuvre includes the “études sociales” Les Petites religions de Paris (Paris: L.Chailley, 1894), Le Satanisme et la magie (Paris: L.Chailley, 1896) and L’Ève Nouvelle (Paris: Flammarion, c. 1896) and the novels L’Eternelle Poupée (Paris: P.Ollendorff, 1894), La Douleur d’Aimer (Paris: P.Ollendorff, 1896), La Femme Inquiète (Paris: P.Ollendorff, 1897) and Une Nouvelle Douleur (Paris: P.Ollendorff, 1900). Karen Offen has incorrectly characterised L’Ève Nouvelle as “a mystico-romantic” novel in ‘Depopulation, Nationalism and Feminism in Fin-de-Siècle France’, American Historical Review 89 (1984), pp.648-676. Jules Bois, ‘La guerre des sexes’, La Revue Blanche, vol. 9 no. 81 (October 15, 1896), pp.363-368); Jules Bois, ‘La Femme Nouvelle’, La Revue Encyclopedique 6 (November 28, 1896), pp.832-40. Bois, L’Ève Nouvelle, p.3. My translation. Bois, L’Ève Nouvelle, p.4. Much of the proceedings were published as Congrès français et internationale du droit des femmes (Paris: Dentu, 1889). Bois, L’Ève Nouvelle, p.7.

Les Filles d’Ève in Word and Image 167 monthly bleeding. Woman became the “first slave” and the home became the symbol of the unjust domestication of woman.51 It was not marriage, but the home that enslaved woman, yet while she may have a million reasons to hate her situation, home was also her only true sanctuary. She may feel like no more than a prostitute, but she has the love of and for her children. In the chapter “Ève bienfaitrice de l’humanité” (Eve, benefactress of Humankind), Bois explained Eve’s centrality in nature and connected the biblical figure to goddesses in other religious systems. Elsewhere in the book the development of the Virgin Mary as an “ideal” was discussed, to counter Eve’s perceived sexual power. The second portion of the book turned from a consideration of the genesis and development of the male-centered model to the “genesis of the New Woman.” The “New Eve” admired by Bois followed a moral path and had a greater love for family than for commercial products. This is the type of woman he wanted to emancipate, the “real” feminist whose tears he heard, “like a grand flood forming, a flood of purification for all humanity.”52 While some claimed the “femme nouvelle” was no longer a woman, but a monster, “homme manqué,” Bois demonstrated the ignorance of this belief while also criticising the common perception that masculinised women in turn created feminised males. According to Bois, the “real woman” remained unknown to most men, certainly to men of letters who simultanously shaped false ideal women and miseducated women readers. He spoke not of the New Eve, but of the ordinary French woman, in whom dwelled something sacred – she was the very backbone of the nation. Bois charged that it was the anti-feminists – not the feminists – who were the enemy of family and society. In 1897, Bois published La Femme inquiète, whose female subject he saw as standing midway between L’Éternelle Poupée and L’Ève Nouvelle: “les femmes modernes, pleines d’élans, proches de chutes, admirables et incomplètes” (the modern Woman, full of impulses, always on the verge of a fall, admirable and incomplete).53 At the end of the book he defended himself against critics that reviewed L’Ève Nouvelle unfavorably in the Parisian press.54 In 1912, Bois published Le Couple Futur, in which he renewed many of the arguments of L’Ève Nouvelle and again answered critics – suggesting that his text was still controversial within certain circles.55 The audience for Bois’ book L’Ève Nouvelle was clearly sympathetic to the feminist cause.56 The opposite is true of the science fiction novel L’Ève Future (1886), by Auguste de Villiers de l’Isle-Adam (1838-1889), a principal writer of the Symbolist movement. Interest in this work was such that one chapter – “L’auxiliatrice” – appeared in the periodical La Vogue several weeks before the book’s publication.57 A reviewer concluded Bois, L’Ève Nouvelle, pp.23 and 358n. Bois, L’Ève Nouvelle, p.103. Bois, La Femme inquiète, p. v. François Coppée (Le Journal), Maurice Guillemot (Gil Blas), Claude Frollo (Petit Parisien), Albert Monniot (Libre Parole) and Adolphe Brisson (Annales politiques et littéraires). 55 Le Couple Futur attacked the double moral standard and the inequality inherent in contemporary notions of love and marriage. 56 Jules Bois, Le Couple Futur (Paris: Librairie des Annales politiques et littéraires, 1912), notations on the “ouvrages de Jules Bois,” inside cover. 57 ‘L’Ève future’, La Vogue, no. 5 (May 13, 1886), pp.170-175. 51 52 53 54

168 Elizabeth K. Menon that Villiers de l’Isle-Adam had “thrown into relief the impossibility of any entente between the male and female of our race.”58 A short notice in Le Chat Noir found that the story demonstrated that “Positive Science provides you with, at least, the infallible means to possess, physically, the woman of your dreams” and declared Villiers de l’Isle-Adam a Christopher Columbus in the new world of love.59 The popularity of the text is demonstrated by the publication of unedited fragments in the widely read Le Mercure de France.60 Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’s book drew on the anti-feminist science of psychology, and other “scientific” developments of the nineteenth century.61 The future Eve is a female robot that resembles the object of the inventor’s desire although she has no freedom of thought or speech. The laboratory of American inventor Thomas Alva Edison is the setting for the action. An old friend of Edison’s, Lord Ewald, tells the inventor of his intent to commit suicide over an affair with the beautiful singer Alicia Clary, as he was repulsed “by the disparity between her exquisite body and her vulgar, infantile intellect.”62 Ewald finds her personality absolutely foreign to her body and calls her a “living hybrid.”63 Even her profession seems alien, her singing mechanical not unlike that one would expect from a puppet.64 Edison proposes to cure Ewald of his “poisoned existence” by creating for him a robot-woman that would have female anatomy but whose nervous and circulatory systems would be controlled by wires. The mechanical woman, named Hadaly, would assume Alicia Clary’s appearance. Thus Ewald would possess a woman of incredible intellect who resembled the woman with whom he was helplessly in love. This creation, of course, results in just another puppet, for Hadaly’s intellect is not authentic, but rather composed of the recorded words of male poets and novelists. From a feminist perspective it is significant that the female robot is denied her own voice, bringing to mind the belief that Adam’s downfall was brought about because he listened to a woman. With the voice and intellect completely under the control of man, the Eve of the future was free of the problems associated with either the biblical Eve or her nineteenth-century daughters. But there is a

‘Les Livres — L’Ève future’, La Vogue, no. 10 (June 28-July 5, 1886), pp.357-360. Émile Pierre, ‘L’Ève Future par Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’, Le Chat Noir (May 29, 1886), p.712. Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, ‘Fragments inédits de “L’Ève Future”’, Mercure de France (January 1891), pp.1-16. See Marie Hope Lathers, Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’s L’Eve future: Sculpture, Photography and the Feminine, Ph.D. (Providence, RI: Brown University, 1990). Lathers recounts recent re-evaluations of the meaning and significance of the text, which have only recently turned to a consideration of the gendering of Hadaly. Lathers sees Hadaly as having a more complex heritage than Eve, being fashioned with the participation of four male and four female characters. “Edison, who builds her; Ewald, whose belief allows her to exist; Edward Anderson, whose tragic affair with a femme-fatale induced Edison to begin constructing a race of gynecoids and Martin, Edison’s assistant (largely absent from the text); Alica, whose positivism pairs her (although uncomfortably) with Edison; Hadaly, Ewald’s new love; Evelyn Habal, Anderson’s poisonous courtesan and Any Sowana (formerly Annie Anderson), like Martin an assistant to the scientist.” pp. 42-43. 62 Esther Rashkin, ‘The Phantom’s Voice’, in A New History of French Literature, ed. Denis Hollier (Cambridge. Mass: Harvard University Press, 1989), p.805. The idea of the body being a type of “machine” was not new, and was likely stimulated by anatomical studies. Julien Offroy de la Mettrie’s L’Homme-machine had already put forth this type of argument in 1748. 63 Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, p.36. 64 Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, pp.43 and 41. 58 59 60 61

Les Filles d’Ève in Word and Image 169 surprise ending: Ewald commits suicide, and it is revealed that the person in control of the female robot was not Edison, but a woman – a Mrs. Anderson – who sought to avenge womankind. Villiers de l’Isle-Adam thus expressed anxiety over contemporary women in Paris as much as he predicted a frightening future. Indeed, Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’s L’Ève Future is a description of hybridisation of the present and future woman. Henri Desmarest used an approach similar to that employed by Villiers De l’Isle-Adam in La Femme Future (1890). In this text, which is less well known than L’Ève Future but just as riddled with references to technology, the author travels in time, to the year 1999. In Desmarest’s future, women are completely in control of the government and society. Shortly after his arrival he is married – an event he has no control over. The word “Mademoiselle” is banned; “Madame” is universally used for all women irrespective of age or position. Since the women of the future, described by the term “femmes-hommes,” dress like men, carry briefcases, and smoke cigars, Desmarest finds himself fantasising about the past. Luckily he discovers a mostly deserted community outside of Paris, where he finds one woman who has not “evolved.” He conspires to leave his wife Néolia Cortive for his dream-wife Nadia. But ridding himself of the appropriately named Néolia is not easy – for only she can initiate divorce. It is clear that Desmarest was not really envisioning a future so much as depicting the complete reversal of gender roles. This is also indicated by the space devoted to two issues of the day: marital/divorce rights and suffrage. While initially the book seems to condemn equal rights for women, a more careful reading reveals a subtle critique of the irrationality of patriarchy. By showing men in precisely the same predicament that historically had been that of women, the universal control wielded by one sex over the other seemed unjust and outrageous. While it is difficult to establish the precise audience for Desmarest’s book, it is likely that the author walked a narrow line that allowed feminists or anti-feminists to find support for their own arguments, thus guaranteeing successful sales. At the end of the story, Desmarest runs for political office on a platform of “letting women be equal, but still women.” However, before the outcome of his candidacy and the fate of society is decided, he abruptly finds himself transported back to 1890 and happily delivered from the “artificial life” of 1999. Most male writers did not significantly alter Eve’s significance as a symbol. With the notable exception of Jules Bois, they utilised her traditional associations to more firmly solidify the patriarchal system. The daughters of Eve were an especially useful literary device because of their dualities of attraction and repulsion. The Symbolist Jean Floux, in a long poem entitled “Les Filles d’Ève” published in Gil Blas in 1891, described their daytime appearance as demure women with dainty hands, long hair and nonchalant gaits, contrasting this with their night-time personae as temptresses with poisonous but savoury kisses and claw-like fingernails. Floux declared these women to be “Épouses d’un soir, mères de hasard, – Et jamais vraiment épouses, ni mères” (Spouses of a single night, chance mothers, – And never truly spouses or mothers).65 Women writers in France at this time also used Eve to comment on contemporary society. At century’s end women also continued to have Eve and the descriptions of her “daughters” firmly in mind. Like male writers, each had a unique viewpoint from which the 65

Jean Floux, ‘Les Filles d’Ève’, Gil Blas Illustré (December 20, 1891), pp.2-3.

170 Elizabeth K. Menon Eve myth was re-evaluated or re-positioned. In Marie Krysinska’s 1890 poem in the Revue Indépendante in 1890, Eve, Helen of Troy and Mary Magdalene are considered as three positive feminine types.66 Adam is absent from Krysinska’s consideration of Eve, who is described as beautiful and independent. The lascivious serpent is hopelessly attracted to her and their amorous encounter is conducted “in ignorance of their prodigious destinies.” Sibylle-Gabrielle Marie-Antoinette de Riquetti de Mirabeau, comtesse de Martel de Janville, assigned the name Eve to the title character of her 1895 play, Mademoiselle Ève.67 By this time, the comtesse, who adopted “Gyp” as her male literary persona, was practically accepted as an “homme de lettres,” having written dozens of short stories, books, and articles in, among other journals, La Vie Parisienne.68 In fact, she published a shortened version of the story in La Vie Parisienne in December of 1881, using her pseudonym of “S” for “scamp.” Her use of Eve as a character was related to her study of the women of contemporary Paris, which she detailed in a manuscript “La Femme de 1885.”69 While the word “femme” had previously evoked a gentle, sensual creature, with “absolute ignorance” and “ferocious coquetry,” in Gyp’s estimation the woman of 1885 was more independent and was not limited to “the woman of science, sport and gambling.” The woman of 1885 was deemed “a peculiar hodgepodge of schoolgirl, bookmaker and bluestocking.” She gave Mademoiselle Ève these characteristics and made her a triumphant heroine. Appropriately named, Mademoiselle Ève was natural, even wild, and transformed by outdoor exercise. Eve was raised mostly by men and she was quite content without female role models but as the play begins she is placed in the care of her grandmother, who is charged with finding her a husband. Eve, however, is intent upon marrying a childhood friend, Robert. In a society where women and men alike use any method – no matter how unsavoury – to secure a match that will benefit them financially, Eve appears relatively naive in her motivations. Pierre Moray, a friend of Eve’s grandmother, finds Eve intimidating and intriguing. He is sent by the grandmother to dissuade Eve from marrying Robert. But things go awry when he finds himself falling in love with her. He tells her that other than himself, she could not find a better man than Robert. When Eve asks him on his Marie Krysinska, ‘I. Eve II. Hélène III. Magdelaine’, Revue Indépendante (January 1890), pp.442-447. Reviews included Jacques de Tillet, ‘Théatres’, (Revue Bleue) La Revue Politique et Littéraire (March 23, 1895), pp.379-382; and Jacques des Gachons, ‘Autour des Théatres’, L’Ermitage (April 1895), p.240. The play was published in La Revue des Deux-Mondes (June 1, 1899), n.p. 68 See Willa Z. Silverman, The Notorious Life of Gyp. Right-Wing Anarchist in Fin-de-Siècle France (Oxford University Press, 1995) and Patricia Ferlin, Gyp, Portrait fin de siècle (Paris: Indigo/Côté-femmes éditions, 1999). Gyp polarised society with her personality and writings. People loved her or despised her. At her death, the American Journalist Flanner credited her with detailing the “rise of the impolite modern generation with its uncorseted jeunes filles and its divorcing duchesses” (Silverman, p.222). “Gyp’s case exemplifies the new nationalist formula of the late nineteenth century – authoritarian, populist, anti-Semitic, drawing strength from both Right and Left. [...] It was Gyp’s class and eclectic political background that partly conditioned her reaction against the grounding of a liberal and democratic bourgeois republic, lead to her defense of traditional institutions as bulwarks against social decay, and explained her attractioin to ambiguous populism – all features of this revolutionary Right. And it was her complex relation to her gender that channneled itself, to a certain extent, into both a call for a strong, male authority, and, at the same time, a vindication of the rights of the oppressed against such authority – again features of the Right.” (Silverman, p.223) 69 Gyp, ‘La Femme de 1885’, reprinted in Le Figaro (July 16, 1932), from a manuscript in a private collection. 66 67

Les Filles d’Ève in Word and Image 171 own situation, he admits that he is unhappily engaged to be married. Returning the conversation to Eve’s impending marriage, Moray is surprised to find that Eve desires a large family (which was currently deemed passé). When she declares, “I’m not like everybody,” he’s taken aback at her ability to speak her mind. A few days later, Eve is involved in a strange incident in the middle of the night, which on the surface appears to compromise her morals. There is an innocent explanation, but Robert does not believe her, and she breaks off the engagement. She chooses to marry Pierre Moray – despite the age difference and the disapproval of her grandmother – because he stood steadfastly by her when the rest of society assumed the worst. Gyp’s conception of Eve was consistent with her own experience as a woman, who had had a great deal of independence and freedom, but who was not technically a feminist. Other reinterpretations of Eve were published in so-called radical feminist publications in the 1890s. Maria Martin’s Journal des Femmes printed “L’Ève Future” (1894) – an article which consisted of portions of an interview with Eugenie Potonié-Pierre. While not alluding to Villier de l’Isle-Adam’s story by the same name, it is clear that they sought to refer to it through their choice of title. In the article, Potonié-Pierre declares: La femme de l’avenir sera, je crois, ce qu’est celle du présent, qui voit plus loin que des lois oppressives et des moeurs idiotes.70 (The woman of the future will, I’m certain, be the same as today’s, able to see beyond oppressive laws and idiotic customs.)

Blamed for the current state of affairs is education and the restrictive costume imposed upon women as part of the “terreurs masculines,” Potonié-Pierre hopes that in the future women will not be dependent upon men. In order to obtain this, women would need to transform themselves both intellectually and physically. The “Eve of the Future” envisioned in this feminist article would base her costume on that of the bicyclist, who was allowed liberty of movement. An entire series of articles entitled “La Révolte d’Ève” ran in the feminist paper La Fronde in 1898.71 Written by Marcelle Tinayre, these articles detail the social situation of women while predicting the future of their status. The first in the series was initiated with a description of a secularised Eve brought into the future and no longer content with her role. A conversation ensues with Adam who, in a magnanimous gesture, decides not to silence her or replace her. Adam argues that Eve’s very nature has determined her state; she counters that rather than working together to serve their common interests, everything that has transpired over the past six thousand years has been calculated to serve only his ego. Eve demands the right to establish the conditions of her own happiness. Successive articles find Adam and Eve in discussions about the introduction of sin into the world and the very biblical interpretations that ascribed blame to woman alone. Eventually the subjects of the right to divorce and the right to vote are treated. Marcelle Tinayre, rather than accepting the biblical Eve as a symbol of woman’s servitude to man, 70 71

Eugenie Potonié-Pierre, ‘L’Ève Future’, Journal des Femmes no. 33-34 (September-October 1894), p.1. Marcelle Tinayre, ‘La Révolte d’Ève’, La Fronde (September 5, 1898), p.2; (September 6, 1898), p.2; (September 7, 1898), p.2.

172 Elizabeth K. Menon actively transformed her by making her a part of the feminist movement in nineteenthcentury France. Just two years later, the announcement of Maria Deraismes’ collected writings (an “oeuvre de bonnes féministes” entitled Ève dans l’humanité) appeared in the Journal des Femmes, which similarly appropriated Eve as a feminist symbol.72 In 1909, Claire Galichon published Ève Réhabilitée as a sequel to her earlier work Amour et Maternité (1907). As a woman of the early twentieth century, she desired to “rehabilitate women and surround them, through the power of Spiritualism, with a more healthy atmosphere of social justice and logical morality.” Her preface explained how and why she became a feminist. Having grown up in a family where her parents appeared to her to be equal partners, it was only at age fourteen that she became “converted to an ACTIVE form of feminism.” However, when she met her husband, she found herself to be an antifeminist. “Why declare war on men?” she asked, “Do we really want to take their place?” For Galichon, being a feminist in 1909 meant dressing like a man and the emancipation of woman seemed to her a ridiculous pretention. She proposed that the “revised” version of feminism was “the affirmation of women’s humanity,” but added that it was necessary to make a distinction between the “femme feministe,” who revolts for her sex and the “femme non-feministe,” who revolts only for herself, when she was so inclined. In order to discover the origins of feminism, one had to look for the source of man’s abuse of power, that is, in Genesis. In other words, “masculinism” created the response of feminism. The Eve of Genesis, the “guilty, submissive” Eve – had been replaced by the “revolting” Eve of the radical feminists Maria Deraismes and Maria Martin – who were equally problematic for Galichon at the beginning of the twentieth century. In their place, Galichon called for “the conscientous, rehabilitated Eve,” the perfect spouse for the regenerated man or the “Adam of the future.”73 Galichon identified early in the twentieth century a conflict that remains within the feminist movement today. No universal definition of feminism exists. Women and men continue to struggle with the legacy of the Genesis story (and similar stories in non-JudeoChristian traditions), which, despite attempts to ignore it or rewrite it, is still responsible for stubborn gender stereotypes. The memory of the biblical Eve and the spectre of her contemporary descendants permeated every facet of French society during the nineteenth century. Analysis of the literary manifestations of the filles d’Ève reveals the uneasy nature of the symbol, subject as it was to the desires of individual users, and has allowed insight into societal changes of the period. Since these changes were often radical, they were most often broached in the realm of popular culture, following a tradition predating the 1789 French Revolution. Contemporary illustrated journals and other forms of popular literature demonstrate the gradual evolution from the fille d’Ève to the femme fatale, in response to increasing feminism and the desire by men to halt its spread. While anti-feminists in France were certainly alarmed by the vocal minority of feminist activists, they were more fearful of the masses to whom their “radical” message might spread. Anti-feminist writers were schooled in France’s tradition of the popular press to mobilise individuals to think and act 72 73

Maria Martin, ‘Ève dans L’Humanité’, Journal des Femmes, no. 104 (November, 1900), p.3. Claire Galichon, Ève Réhabilitée: plaidoyer “pro femina” (Paris: Librairie générales des sciences occultes, 1909), passim.

Les Filles d’Ève in Word and Image 173 in unison. Their strategy was to flood the market with messages about “real” women in society, occasionally referring to biblical or allegorical references directly, but more often indirectly. In their link to Eve, these nineteenth-century publications mapped the difficult territory between the sexes. The story they tell is one of struggle for control and domination. Women wanted equality and independence; men, fearful of depopulation and the dissolution of the “family,” wanted women to remain domestic and deferential. The complex negotiations between nineteenth-century man and woman are today manifest in this popular literature, replete with its parallel ambiguities and double-entendres.

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Maria Aline Seabra Ferreira

Paula Rego’s Painterly Narratives: Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea – A Dictionary of Images In this paper I will analyse some of Paula Rego’s painterly narratives, namely the series she created inspired by Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, novels which are intricately connected. My focus will be on Paula Rego as a narrative artist, a painter who is also a storyteller, whose paintings engage with both her own and other’s stories. I concentrate on the intertextual echoes between the novels and the paintings, dealing at greater length with the complex psychological contours suggested by the visual, iconic representations of Rego’s work as it engages with its source texts, as well as its imagery patterns and the way themes and symbols are transmuted in Rego’s work.

In order to paint one needs a story (Paula Rego)1 Toda a arte é uma forma de literatura, porque toda a arte é dizer qualquer coisa (All art is a form of literature, because all art is saying something) (Fernando Pessoa)2

Henry James once remarked that “every good story is of course both a picture and an idea, and the more they are interfused the better the problem is solved.”3 In Paula Rego’s case it could appropriately be argued that every good picture is of course both a story and an idea, and the more they are interfused the better the problem is solved. Indeed, visual image and narrative are so inextricably linked in Rego’s work that one cannot exist without the other.4 As Rego herself has stated, “The whole world is stories and I may as well paint them. This is a way of making sense of life through stories.”5

1 2 3

4

5

Interview conducted by Rodrigues da Silva, ‘Inocências e travessuras’, Jornal de Letras (3 June 1998), 9-11 (p.9). Signed by Pessoa’s heteronym Álvaro de Campos. Fernando Pessoa, ‘Nota’, in Crítica: Ensaios, Artigos e Entrevistas, ed. by Fernando Cabral Martins (Lisboa: Assírio e Alvim, 2000), p.411; my translation. Henry James, ‘Guy de Maupassant’ (1888), in Literary Criticism: Volume Two: French Writers, Other EuropeanWriters, The Prefaces to the New York Edition, ed. Leon Edel (New York: Library of America, 1984), pp.521-554; quoted in Alberto Manguel’s Reading Pictures: What We Think About When We Look at Art (New York: Random House, 2002), p.2. Rego herself explains: “I'm always looking for new stories for my work. They can come from literature, Walt Disney or anywhere. They must relate to something I know. Not directly, but through the feeling they evoke and that I recognize in the process of drawing”. She further elucidates: “I always start with an idea, some story. It has always been like this, but I always lose that first idea because the work always evolves into something else, suggesting another story – which changes as the work itself changes. You look for the story through the painting. We tell ourselves what is happening in the painting and what is going to happen” (quoted in Vasco Graça Moura’s As Botas do Sargento [Lisboa: Quetzal, 2001], p.40; my translation). Quoted in ‘Paula Rego: The sinister storyteller’ (http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/arts/highlights/010822rego.shtml, 5/6/2003, p. 3.

176 Maria Aline Seabra Ferreira Intertextuality has been from the beginning a fundamental structuring feature of Paula Rego’s work. To cite only a few examples of this influence, interpenetration, and visual resonance one can mention Rego’s series of the Vivian Girls (1984), inspired by Henry Darger’s depictions of little girls in the fifteen volumes of his fictional work, The Story of the Vivian Girls in What is Called The Realms of the Unreal or the Glandelinian War Storm or the Gaudico-Abbiennian Wars as caused by the Child Slave Rebellion, which describes an alternative world and recounts the adventurous lives and exploits of the Vivian girls in a fantasy world.6 Rego’s monumental painting The Prole’s Wall (1984), for its part, engages in a critical dialogue with George Orwell’s dystopia Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), while The Return of the Native (1993) was inspired by Thomas Hardy’s novel The Return of the Native (1878).7 Rego’s The Barn (1994) drew inspiration from a story by Joyce Carol Oates, “Haunted,” included in Tales of the Grotesque, while in Pendle Witches (1996) she illustrated Blake Morrison’s poems. More recently, Rego produced three illustrations for contemporary Portuguese poet Adília Lopes’s Obra (2000), her collected poems.8 The latest examples of Rego’s attraction to English literature and her adaptations of selected texts are her paintings and lithographs which engage with Caribbean writer Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), as well as her Jane Eyre series (2001-2002), based on Charlotte Brontë’s novel Jane Eyre. Rego’s work has also inspired other artists and writers. Elspeth Barker’s short story “The Dance” was motivated by Rego’s 1988 painting of the same name, while Vasco Graça Moura, a well-known Portuguese writer, translator and literary critic, wrote As Botas do Sargento (The Sergeant’s Boots) as a response to Rego’s paintings.9 In this essay I wish to concentrate on Rego’s encounter with Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, and to explore the artist’s “visual thinking,” to borrow Rudolf Arnheim’s concept,10 her visual renderings of scenes from those novels, which are intricately connected. Arnheim emphasises the crucial importance of visual perception for cognition, arguing that even extremely abstract concepts, such as logical propositions, can only be grasped with the help of visual imagery. This idea was already articulated by Aristotle in De anima, where he contends that “for the thinking soul, images take the place of direct perceptions; and when the soul asserts or denies that these images are good or bad, it either avoids or pursues them. Hence the soul never thinks without a

See Henry Darger: art and selected writings, ed. Michael Bonesteel (New York: Rizzoli, 2000). See also John MacGregor, Henry Darger: In the Realms of the Unreal (New York: Delano Greenidge Editions, 2002). For a discussion of these influences see Maria Aline Seabra Ferreira’s ‘Echoes of English Literature in the 7 Work of Paula Rego’, Portugal e o Outro: Uma Relação Assimétrica?, ed. Otília Martins (Aveiro: Universidade de Aveiro, 2002), pp.45-55. Adília Lopes, Obra. Com três gravuras originais de Paula Rego e posfácios de Elfriede Engelmeyer e de 8 Américo António Lindeza Diogo (Lisboa: Mariposa Azul, 2000). Elspeth Barker, ‘The Dance’, in Writing on the Wall: Women Writers on Women Artists, ed. by Judith Collins 9 and Elsbeth Lindner (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1993), pp.7-14; Vasco Graça Moura, As Botas do Sargento (Lisboa: Quetzal, 2001). 10 Rudolf Arnheim, Visual Thinking (Berkeley, Cal: University of California Press, 1969); New Essays on the Psychology of Art (Berkeley, Cal: University of California Press, 1986). 6

Paula Rego’s Painterly Narratives 177 mental image.”11 For G.E. Lessing, on the contrary, painting and narrative are not reconcilable since the endeavour to represent stories through visual imagery instead of language results in painting “abandoning its proper sphere and degenerating” into allegory.12 Robert D. Newman attributes Lessing’s “exclusion of picture from narrative [...] to an ignorance of the figural genesis of narrative,”13 a notion that has been advocated by several contemporary critics, endorsing Barthes’s premise that “all images are polysemous.”14 Ellen Handler Spitz, writing against the grain of “traditional approaches to art and still prevalent intellectual fashion that exalts the word over the image,” supports a “reconsideration of the artistic image as a primary, originary ordering of inner and outer, conscious and unconscious, perceptual, cognitive, affective, and kinaesthetic experience.”15 For W.J.T. Mitchell, since ideas are conceived as images, “ideology, the science of ideas, is really an iconology, a theory of imagery.”16 On a related note, António Damásio claims that “thought is made largely of images.” He further argues, It is often said that thought is made of much more than just images, that it is made also of words and nonimage abstract symbols. Surely nobody will deny that thought includes words and arbitrary symbols. But what that statement misses is the fact that both words and arbitrary symbols are based on topographically organized representations and can become images. Most of the words we use in our inner speech, before speaking or writing a sentence, exist as auditory or visual images in our consciousness. If they did not become images, however fleetingly, they would not be anything we could know.17

Rego’s term for the pool of visual images that we all carry with us and which is often deeply buried in the unconscious or subconscious under layers of repressed memories is a “dictionary of images.” When Tim Marlow, interviewing her, remarked that her painting The Betrothal “reminds some people of Velasquez’s Las Meninas,” Rego commented: “There are similarities — the mirror, the little girls and the short person at the back — but I wasn’t thinking about it when I did the work. It’s maybe a subconscious thing — a dictionary of images.”18 This can be equated with what Malraux described as “the

11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18

Aristotle, De anima, Book III, chapter 7:431, 15-20, trans. W. S. Hett (London: Loeb Classic Library, 1936); quoted in Manguel, Reading Pictures, p.7. G.E.Lessing, Laocoön: An Essay upon the Limits of Poetry and Painting, trans. Ellen Frothingham (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1969), p.x. Robert D. Newman, Transgressions of Reading: Narrative Engagement of Exile and Return (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1993), p.31. Roland Barthes, Image-Music-Text, essays selected and trans. by Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), pp.38-39. Ellen Handler Spitz, Image and Insight: Essays in Psychoanalysis and the Arts (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), p.109. W.J.T.Mitchell, Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), p.164. António Damásio, Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain (London and Basingstoke: Papermac, 1996), p.106. Paula Rego used the phrase “a dictionary of images” in the Tate Interview (interview no. 4, December 2000), conducted by Tim Marlow on the 9th of June at Tate Modern, p.14.

178 Maria Aline Seabra Ferreira imaginary museum,”19 the pool of artistic and other images one accumulates throughout one’s life. What James A.W.Heffernan, for his part, called a “museum of words” (that is, all the words used to name and explain art works, ranging from the titles of pictures in museums to all the institutions “that select, circulate, reproduce, display, and explain works of visual art, all the institutions that inform and regulate our experience of it — largely by putting it into words”) can be perceived as the verbal equivalent of Rego’s “dictionary of images” and Malraux’s “imaginary museum.”20 Like Rego’s “dictionary of images,” Heffernan’s “museum of words” is buried deep in our psyche, from where it is activated or reactivated at the sight of particular paintings, pictures or scenes. Another version of this notion is the Baconian view which suggests that according to the ancients all the mental images we carry with us have been there since birth,21 in what might be described in Jungian terms as a kind of visual “collective unconscious.” In Rego’s work, the visual and narrative strands are inextricably and irrevocably intertwined. Rego has been producing painterly narratives from the beginning of her career. If every picture can be said to tell a story, or several different stories to each viewer, many of Rego’s paintings can be aptly described as self-consciously, doubly narrative, for they not only engage explicitly with a given text; they are also metavisual in their intertextuality. As Rego maintains, “we interpret the world through stories [...] Everybody makes in their own way sense of things, but if you have stories it helps.”22

From Wide Sargasso Sea to Jane Eyre Interestingly Rego departs from Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea to then engage with Jane Eyre. As she herself explains, “I came to Jane Eyre from Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea. Wide Sargasso Sea tells the story of Bertha (Rochester’s wife) before she arrives in England and is imprisoned in Thornfield Hall. Bertha is mad. She is a victim.”23 In 2000, Rego painted Wide Sargasso Sea, a work swarming with figures resting and interacting on the verandah of a big house. The coloured lithograph that Rego produced in 2002, Wide Sargasso Sea, again portrays a similar scene to the one in Wide Sargasso Sea (2000). Rego explains that

André Malraux, Le musée imaginaire (Paris: Gallimard, 1947). James A.W.Heffernan, Museum of Words: The Poetics of Ekphrasis from Homer to Ashbery (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1993), p.139 and passim. 21 Cf Francis Bacon, ‘Essay LVIII’, The Essays, ed. John Pitcher (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1986), pp.158-60 22 In Germaine Greer’s ‘Paula Rego’, Writers on Artists, Ed. Craig Burnett (London: Dorling Kindersley, 2001), pp.62-71 (p..65). 23 T.G.Rosenthal, Paula Rego: The Complete Graphic Work (London: Thames and Hudson, 2003), p.166. 19 20

Paula Rego’s Painterly Narratives 179 it’s actually a kind of memory of a large house I used to have in Ericeira with all the family, with lots of things going on in it. I called it Wide Sargasso Sea because they have the same clothes as the characters in the novel. And of course there’s the marriage of “the white cockroach” as they called the white people there.24

This scene crowded with family and friends contrasts sharply with Bertha’s extreme solitude and complete confinement in Thornfield Hall, so poignantly depicted in several paintings in Rego’s Jane Eyre, the series of lithographs inspired by Brontë’s novel that Rego produced from the end of 2001 all through 2002.25 Like Charlotte Brontë, Rego does not glamourise Jane Eyre, who is still plain, although Rego’s portrayals of Jane Eyre tend to fill the whole canvas. Indeed they seem so big they appear to take it over and almost spill out of the frame. This is the case with Jane Eyre (2001-2002), as well as Jane (2002), Come to Me (2001-2002) and In the Comfort of the Bonnet (2001-2002). In Jane Eyre Jane is standing tall with her back to us, looking firm, although her particular expression is hidden from us. In this, she conforms to Brontë’s unromanticised, plain figure. However, despite her determination, her potential vulnerability is revealed by the almost childlike curve of her naked neck. In Up the Tree (2002), despite Jane’s serene expression, with eyes closed as if asleep, the way the tree trunk and branches are depicted, perpendicular to each other and crossing behind Jane’s chest, suggests a sort of crucifixion. She is thus seen proleptically as a victim of Mr Rochester’s lies, since he omits to mention the existence of his first wife, Bertha, ultimately leading to the dramatic interruption of his and Jane’s wedding. Another symbolic crucifixion can be seen in a painting in the series The Children’s Crusade, The Voices II (1996-98). In this, a girl with bare feet is carrying on her shoulders a long tree trunk suggestive of a cross, which hints at victimisation and sacrifice.26 In Come to Me Jane hears Mr Rochester calling her after his house has burnt down through a sort of telepathic communication. The scarlet sky suggests the fire that killed Bertha Mason, left Mr Rochester maimed and partially blind and destroyed Thornfield Hall. Jane is straining to hear the call and reflecting on whether to heed it. She does, but as Rego interjects, “she’d better have her doubts of course. It’s not such a good deal.”27 Indeed, Jane

Rosenthal, p.166. Another fascinating work that engages with Brontë’s Jane Eyre and Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea is After Mrs Rochester (2003), a play by Polly Teale which was performed at the Duke of York’s Theatre in London, between 16th July and 18th October 2003, which Paula Rego praised highly, in conversation with me in October 2003. After Mrs Rochester skilfully interweaves the story of Jean Rhys with that of the character Antoinette in Wide Sargasso Sea, as well as Charlotte Brontë’s own Jane Eyre and Bertha Mason. 26 Rego herself makes this connection explicit when she remarks that Voices II, which together with Voices I and III were thought of as a “trilogy” (T. G. Rosenthal, 135), is “like a crucifixion, but a pretend one. She’s only carrying one piece of wood across her, so it’s as if they’re pretending to do something on the Calvary [...] They are group[ed together because in crucifixion scenes Christ is usually pictured with another crucified figure on either side” (135). As Rego further explains, “the girls in my triptych are having a really bad time, and they have burdens and responsibilities that are beyond their age. In fact they’re enacting a scene that is not appropriate to children, not as they might do at school, in a Christmas play, but for real” (135). 27 Rosenthal, p.176. 24 25

180 Maria Aline Seabra Ferreira is never portrayed as subservient to Mr Rochester: even in terms of pictorial scale, she is a “winner,” as Rego describes her.28 Significantly, as Rego informs us, both women, Jane Eyre and Bertha Mason, are played by the same model,29 thus emphasising their representation as psychological doubles in her Jane Eyre. Rego explains that “one is the extreme and destructive side of the other one.”30 According to Rego, Bertha is always dependent on other people, “biting, is not her own person,”31 while Jane is stronger and independent.32 In Scarecrow (2002), meaningfully, we see the two women hanging a scarecrow, a doll-like man they can do what they like with, who can be interpreted symbolically as standing for Mr Rochester. Jane is shown as a diminutive doll in Inspection (2001), and Bertha is portrayed erotically playing with a doll that looks like a monkey in Bertha (2003); this same monkey also appears to represent her, a doll in Mr Rochester’s hands. In Scarecrow, on the other hand, Jane and Bertha are depicted as taking their revenge on Rochester, who is now the mannequin, in what amounts to a reversal of power roles. Indeed, in many important ways, Paula Rego’s narrative paintings can be said to be all about power struggles. Rego herself has said, “I can make it so that women are stronger than men in the pictures. I can turn tables and do as I want. I can make women stronger. I can make them obedient and murderous at the same time.”33 Bertha Mason is both victim and victimiser, aspects which are graphically suggested in The Keeper (2002) and in Bertha (2001), which shows Mr Rochester’s first wife sitting dishevelled on the floor, her dress falling around her shoulders in disarray while her expression suggests that she is poised for revenge. In another painting also called Bertha (2003), she is manifestly unsatisfied and unfulfilled, probably harbouring murderous instincts towards Mr Rochester. Rego tells us that she is “cross. Very cross at being shut up in the attic. But she’s really more like a Dog Woman isn’t she?,”34 – a reference to a series of paintings Rego did in 1994 entitled Dog Woman, where the carnality, ferociousness and drive to action of the female canine figures was abundantly stressed.

28 29 30 31 32

33 34

Ana Marques Gastão, ‘Jane Eyre, a bruxa’, Interview with Paula Rego, Diário de Notícias (19 July 2002), 4041 (p.40). Rosenthal, p.166. Gastão, p.41. My translation. Gastão, p.41. My translation. According to Ana Gabriela Macedo, Jane Eyre can be inscribed “in the genealogy of strong, courageous women Paula Rego has been painting, from the tryptic Crivelli's Garden, in the National Gallery, to Ostriches, the Dog Women, Celestina” – ‘Histórias de Mulheres’, Jornal de Letras (12/11/2003), 32-33 (p.33); my translation. I would only add that strong figures of women and girls, as well as adolescents can be found in Rego’s work much earlier, such as the Vivian Girls (1984), and in the numerous paintings depicting girls and animals. Quoted in ‘Paula Rego: The sinister storyteller’, (http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/arts/highlights/010822rego.shtml, (5/6/2003), 1-2. Rosenthal, p.178.

Paula Rego’s Painterly Narratives 181

Loving Bewick: Women and Birds I would like now to turn to another piece in the Jane Eyre lithograph series, Loving Bewick (2001), which also engages with the subject of the intimate correlations between women and animals. Loving Bewick can be seen as the latest in a series of paintings that take women and birds for their subject, as well as bird women and women’s wish to fly. Towards the beginning of Jane Eyre, Jane is sitting by the window reading Bewick’s History of British Birds and enjoying her solitude, away from her cousins and aunt who do not respect her and do not treat her kindly. In a double mise en abîme, Jane’s narratorial voice tells us that “every picture told a story; mysterious often to my undeveloped understanding and imperfect feelings, yet ever profoundly interesting.”35 This is a concept that finds a powerful resonance in the whole of Rego’s oeuvre. As Ruth Rosengarten similarly remarks, Rego’s work “gives body to the narrative impulse that informs the very way we live our lives: the intertwining of dreams, desires, and pasts that constitute the stories we tell ourselves.”36 In Loving Bewick Jane seems to be in a sort of erotic and/or religious trance, waiting for the pelican’s beak to touch her lips. In mythology the pelican is associated with the bleeding Christ who through His suffering redeems humankind, while the pelican, biting its chest until it bleeds, in order to feed its young, is similarly connected with the nurturing and salvational qualities of Christ.37 Following this order of ideas, it can be suggested that Jane is symbolically partaking of Holy Communion, of the body of Christ, metonymically represented by the pelican. This is a subject that had already been broached, although from a different perspective, in Communion (2001), a painting after a poem by Adília Lopes which shows a woman giving Holy Communion to a genuflecting girl. Both paintings deal with transgressive and subversive acts, mixing religious heresy with forbidden sexuality.38 In Sleeping (1986) a little girl in the background seems to be holding open her apron presumably for a pelican to feed from it; while in The Little Murderess (1987) a pelican, also in the background, looks at a little girl supposedly about to murder someone or something. A contrast is thus offered between the pelican’s symbolism of nurturance and salvation, and the menace of death that pervades the painting. This juxtaposition of woman and bird, often in erotic poses, inevitably recalls the myth of Leda and the Swan and its numerous representations in painting.39 Rego’s portraits of women and birds can be inscribed within this tradition. The bird can also be seen as a phallic symbol, as made evident in representations of the winged phallus that appear in antiquity. In The Interpretation of Dreams Freud describes the bird as a “symbol of an Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre, ed. by Q. D. Leavis (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983), pp.40-1. Ruth Rosengarten, ‘Possessed: Love and Authority in the Work of Paula Rego’, Paula Rego, [Catalogue of the Exhibition of Rego’s work in Museu de Serralves, October 15, 2004 through January 23, 2005], ed. João Fernandes, trans. Thomas Kundert (Porto: Fundação de Serralves, 2004), pp.18-46 (p.38). 37 For a discussion of the pelican motif see Maria Manuel Lisboa, Paula Rego’s Map of Memory: National and Sexual Politics (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), passim. 38 See Ruth Rosengarten’s discussion of the painting Loving Bewick – Rosengarten, passim. 39 See Marina Warner’s Fantastic Metamorphoses, Other Worlds: Ways of Telling the Self (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp.96ff. 35 36

182 Maria Aline Seabra Ferreira absolute liberty.” According to Freud, birds “don’t seem to be submitted to the same laws of gravity as us,”40 a notion that Rego endorses in her many depictions of flying figures, mainly women. Loving Bewick, a highly erotic painting, can be seen as following on from such paintings as Girl Swallowing Bird (1996), Woman and Marabou (1996), Girl with Bird (1997) and Carmen and Bird (1997), which stress the contiguity between women and birds, and propose the latter as erotic vehicles and/or companions. The strong and tight embrace between woman and pelican, in Girl Swallowing Bird, the pelican pushing its phallic beak down the woman’s apparently welcoming throat,41 is a precursor of and companion piece to Loving Bewick in the Jane Eyre series.42 Flying has always been a recurrent theme in Rego’s work. Flying spells adventure, lightness of being, the opening up of possibilities, but also danger, the risk of a potential fall. In the Nursery Rhymes series (1989) two paintings address the theme of flying: Old Mother Goose and How Many Miles to Babylon? In the first, Old Mother Goose is portrayed gleefully flying on the back of a huge goose, waving to the people looking up at her from the farmyard. In the second, a string of girls walk between a line of lit up candles, while another row of girls flies over them, disappearing into the distance, in a way that is reminiscent of Peter Pan and the Darling children flying to Neverland. The Peter Pan series (1992) is packed with flying characters, or figures that yearn to be able to fly, as is the case with Learning to Fly (1992) and Flying Children (1992). The latter is a brilliant composition portraying the three Darling children ecstatically flying through a blue sky, while on the left corner an Icarus–like figure (Peter Pan?) seems to be trying to avoid a big black bird, thus introducing a note of fear and disturbance in this picture, otherwise filled with happy ebullience and promise. Neverland (1992), in turn, is a profoundly disquieting painting which mixes figures of death and threatening animals with a large image of Wendy joyously flying above the whole disturbing scene with its alarming landscape. One of the preparatory drawings Rego did for her famous picture, The Dance (1988), which shows a group of young women raising themselves up as if to fly, is a dazzling scene of delight and jouissance in the upward movement of communal dancing, in the forbidden pleasure of flying . Both Tilly in Kensington Gardens (1989) and Bear and Harpies (1992) feature harpies, hybrids of woman and reptile with wings, menacing entities that with their flying capacities terrorise and overpower those they choose. In Bear and Harpies the victim is a bear tied to a post, while in Tilly in Kensington Gardens, with its echoes of Peter Pan, the mythological harpies seem to be playing with but also attacking the women and girls gathered around a Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, The Penguin Freud Library, vol. 4, ed. by Angela Richards (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991), p.518. 41 T.G.Rosenthal explains the genesis of this painting in the Yiddish play The Dybbuk by Sholom Ansky, “a Gothic tale of a girl possessed” – Rosenthal, p.225. 42 Marina Warner describes Jane Eyre’s expression in Loving Bewick as one of “eucharistic pleasure.” She goes on to observe that Loving Bewick “recalls the picture of Baa baa black sheep from Nursery Rhymes [...] and it also harks back to a Renaissance Leda” – ‘An artist’s dreamland: Jane Eyre through Paula Rego’s eyes’, Paula Rego: Jane Eyre, Int. Marina Warner (London: Enitharmon Editions, 2003), pp.7-15 (p.9). 40

Paula Rego’s Painterly Narratives 183 tree. The women, however, do not appear to be frightened, and the one in the foreground, riding a broomstick like a witch and holding a knife on her left hand is far from scared and defenceless. The series Dancing Ostriches from Disney’s Fantasia (1995), for its part, portrays female ballet dancers in black tutus, middle-aged women who persist in their efforts at dancing and flying, although they mostly appear to be too heavily built to be able to soar, in spite of the forward and upwards movement of their arms. Interestingly they are described as Harpies, the mythological entities that had already featured in Tilly in Kensington Gardens (1989) and Bear and Harpies (1992). Rego explains that there is “something very ancient” about the ostrich women “in the story telling sense. Like some Greek tragedies, it happened many centuries ago and still goes on. As animals they’ve been born knowing what to do, but they also have an animal’s innocence.”43 Again, the connection between narrative and visual representation is emphasised by Rego, as well as that between women and animals, in this instance women and birds,44 an association that in Rego’s case is considered as enabling and productive, potentially enriching. In Bird Women Playing (1995) the women are trying to fly and some of them are portrayed as actually doing so, in what can be interpreted as a sign of power, of effort rewarded, having achieved what the Ostrich women could not manage to do, being too heavy and thickset.45 Another productive line of investigation would be to trace the influence that Max Ernst exerted on Paula Rego’s work, namely his abundant use of bird imagery. Both Rego and her husband, Victor Willing, were great admirers of Max Ernst.46 Bearing this in mind, and considering that women and birds, and indeed many bird-women, abound in Max Ernst’s collage novel Une Semaine de Bonté (1934; A Week of Kindness),47 it is tempting to read productive reverberations and intertextual echoes between Ernst’s Une Semaine de Bonté and a number of Rego’s pictures. Another interesting example of woman and pelican, for instance, suggestive of an erotic undercurrent not unlike Rego’s, occurs in Max Ernst’s For Violette Nozières (1933), where a pelican appears to be touching a woman’s pubic area. I would like to argue that Rego’s work can be seen as crucially displacing predominant “master” tropes and replacing them with a feminine ocularcentric vision, deconstructing the traditionally preponderant male visual logic. In thus providing a shift of perspective, Rego is concretising at the visual level a subversion of what Donna Haraway describes as “the See John McEwen’s Paula Rego, 2nd Edition (London: Phaidon Press, 1997), p.229. Robert E. Bell explains that the Harpies “at first might have personified storm winds, but little by little they assumed a distinct physical identity. [...] Initially they were described as fair-haired and winged, surpassing birds and the winds in their speed of flight [...] but later they were conceived as ugly and disgusting creatures, having the heads of young women but the bodies of birds. Their faces were pale, and they had long claws for snatching food or individuals” – Robert E. Bell , Women of Classical Mythology: A Biographical Dictionary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), pp. 216-217). 45 T.G. Rosenthal comments on the “Witches’ Sabbath atmosphere” of this painting, while explaining that the diminutive man in the centre is Blake Morrison – Rosenthal, p.224. 46 See Rosenthal, p.26 and Maria Aline Ferreira, ‘O Grotesco é Belo: Entrevista a Paula Rego’, Ler, no. 58, (Primavera 2003), pp.54-67. 47 For a thorough discussion of Ernt’s work see Werner Spies’s Max Ernst: Collages: The Invention of the Surrealist Universe, 1988, and M. E. Warlick’s Max Ernst and Alchemy: A Magician in Search of a Myth, 2001. 43 44

184 Maria Aline Seabra Ferreira standpoint of the master, the Man, the one God, whose Eye produces, appropriates and orders all difference.”48 With the numerous metamorphoses and fusions of woman and animal in her work, as well as with her use of the grotesque, in that Bakhtinian sense in which “the borderlines that divide the kingdoms of nature in the usual picture of the world were boldly infringed,”49 Rego is in many ways challenging that hierarchical world view, adumbrating a state of greater flexibility of physical and conceptual boundaries – and indeed, through the debunking of a predominant androcentric look, prompting a translation into a state of greater equality and freedom.

Conclusion With her series of paintings and lithographs on Wide Sargasso Sea and Jane Eyre, Rego is continuing a long-standing tradition of engagement with fictional works, while giving graphic expression to what Robert D.Newman describes as “the figural genesis of narrative.”50 Rego’s paintings can therefore be seen as always already doubly narrative, since they not only tell a story but also often directly interpellate a given text, thus producing a painterly narrative about other stories, in what can be described as a prismatic, narrative and painterly mise en abîme. If ekphrasis is the art of portraying works of art through verbal representation, then what Rego does is the reverse, bringing to life through visual illustration the images conjured up by fictional objects, in this case Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea, producing an “iconology of the text,”51 that is, generating a rereading of those novels through the lens of visual culture. I will conclude with a remark by Portuguese modernist poet and critic Fernando Pessoa. Through Álvaro de Campos, one of his numerous heteronyms, he produced a few observations on the intersections of literature and the visual arts, maintaining that “Toda a arte é uma forma de literatura, porque toda a arte é dizer qualquer coisa” (All art is a form of literature, because all art says something). And he adds, “Há duas formas de dizer—falar e estar calado. As Artes que não são a literatura são as projecções de um silêncio expressivo. Há que procurar em toda a arte que não é a literatura a frase silenciosa que ela contém, ou o poema, ou o romance, ou o drama” (There are two ways of saying something Donna Haraway, ‘Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective’, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (London: Free Association Books, 1991), pp.183-201 (p.184). In this context, I have to take issue with Robert D. Newman who considers, following David Freedburg, that “looking is masculine and possessive” – Transgressions of Reading: Narrative Engagement of Exile and Return (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1993), p.32. While doubtlessly this used to be the case, I believe we should no longer assume that a preponderantly masculine gaze dominates Western societies, where the female look has been acquiring increasingly greater visibility, namely in the arts. Rego’s work is a prime instance of a feminine perspective which clearly addresses both men and women viewers. 49 Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), p.32. 50 Newman, p.31. 51 I am here alluding to W.J.T.Mitchell’s Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), passim. See also W.J.T.Mitchell’s Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1994). 48

Paula Rego’s Painterly Narratives 185 — to speak or to be silent. The arts, apart from literature, are the projections of an expressive silence. In all arts that are not literature one has to look for the silent phrase it contains, or the poem, or the romance, or the drama).52 Rego makes that initial search easy for us, since one often knows the source texts of her inspiration, although to decipher and articulate the many “silent sentences” in her work, to borrow Álvaro de Campos’s apt phrasing, is a perennial challenge and delight.

52

Fernando Pessoa (Álvaro de Campos), ‘Nota’, Crítica: Ensaios, Artigos e Entrevistas, ed. Fernando Cabral Martins (Lisboa: Assírio e Alvim, 2000), p.411. My translation. Still according to Álvaro de Campos, controversially and cryptically, “o caso parece menos simples para as artes visuais, mas, se nos prepararmos para a consideração de que linhas, planos, volumes, cores, justaposições e contraposições, são fenómenos verbais dados sem palavras, ou antes, por hieróglifos espirituais, compreenderemos como compreender as artes visuais, e, ainda que as não cheguemos a compreender ainda, teremos, ao menos, já em nosso poder o livro que contém a cifra e a alma que pode conter a decifração” (The case seems to be less simple for the visual arts, but if we are prepared to consider that lines, surfaces, volumes, colours, juxtapositions and counterpositions are verbal phenomena expressed without words, or rather, by spiritual hieroglyphs, we will know how to understand the visual arts, and even if we do not manage to understand them, we will at least possess the book that contains the cipher and the soul which may hold the key to deciphering them) – ‘Nota’, p.411. My translation.

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Rui Carvalho Homem

Looking for Clues: McGuckian, poems and portraits This paper considers the recurrent interest in visual representations, particularly painting, that characterises the work of contemporary Northern Irish poet Medbh McGuckian. Special attention is given to poems that relate to portraits of women, from the dual standpoint afforded by both domestic and/or erotic experience, and against the broader canvas of history and the public space. Further, the article will address the ways in which the construction of a poetic self tests the frontiers of a medium and queries the defining marks of genre and of gender.

Few contemporary poets with well established careers and near-canonical status will have been so hounded by one single critical topos as Northern Irish poet Medbh McGuckian. That topos concerns her supposed obscurity, mentioned vociferously, dismissively, apologetically, or with some enthusiasm, depending on the critical perspective and on the ensuing degree of sympathy.1 A fairly consensual critical explanation for this recurrent diagnosis of obscurity is that McGuckian tends to surprise the reader with the contrast between a deceptively conventional syntax and a use of reference that appeals to reading strategies other than those ordinarily required by a discursive type of writing.2 In other words, apparently “fluent” and grammatical utterances, which would seem to promise (in their very conventionality) a “transparent” relationship to the real, are often found to involve a use of the lexicon and a range of representations that challenge the reader with a recurrent mis- or non-recognition of the specific referents summoned by the poem, line after line. Hence, the reader will probably be led to relinquish any expectations that this might ever be a poetry of statement, or that every one of those referents might prove identifiable. The result will be a reading experience centred instead on close attention to rhetorical patterns, and deriving its semantic yield from the juxtapositions and contiguities of McGuckian’s characteristic imagery. McGuckian’s elusive referents are often intertextually mediated: criticism of her poetry, albeit scant, has already given proof of that, even though the breadth of her textual sources renders their identification close to unfeasible.3 Nonetheless, the scope of her imagery may seem to afford the newly arrived reader the “comfort” of a predictable world, since it institutes an ostensible familiarity of diction; on closer critical scrutiny, however, this is belied by the complex verbal structures that such imagery is found to serve. McGuckian’s imagery has consistently – sometimes controversially – had its origin in the “feminine” 1

2

3

Cf Michael Allen, ‘The Poetry of Medbh McGuckian’, in Contemporary Irish Poetry: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Elmer Andrews (Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 1992), pp.286-309 (passim); Clair Wills, Improprieties: Politics and Sexuality in Northern Irish Poetry (Clarendon Press: Oxford: O.U.P. 1993), p.76; Peter Sirr, ‘“How things begin to happen”: Notes on Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin and Medbh McGuckian’, The Southern Review, 31-3 (Summer 1995; special Irish issue), 450-67 (passim). Cf Edna Longley, The Living Stream: Literature and Revisionism in Ireland (Newcastle: Bloodaxe, 1994), p.54; Elmer Andrews, ‘“Some Sweet Disorder” – The Poetry of Subversion: Paul Muldoon, Tom Paulin and Medbh McGuckian’, in British Poetry from the 1950s to the 1990s: Politics and Art, ed. Gary Day and Brian Docherty (Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 1997), pp.118-42 (p.135). Cf Shane Murphy, ‘“You Took Away My Biography”: the Poetry of Medbh McGuckian’, Irish University Review 28:1 (Spring/ Summer 1998), 110-32 (passim).

188 Rui Carvalho Homem world of home, garden, and obliquely verbalised “private” emotions; but, again, this apparent placidity and secludedness is countered by its use as a standpoint from which to approach issues that concern the world at large – issues from spheres which, in a context less characterised by the collapse of such boundaries, one might style “public.”4 McGuckian’s images are very often of a visual type, reflecting her interest in (and practice of) painting. Any cursory reading of her verse will not fail to notice the omnipresent references to colours, with a conspicuous insistence on blue – one has only to think of titles such as “The Blue She Brings with Her” or “Displaced to the Blue.”5 Such chromatic references may be indices of states of mind, or of poignant moments (emotionally or sensorially) in the subject’s experience: “And my yellow life / with its downy blacks / takes rainbow widths of grey sky / from the first inverted flames / of the dewy turn of his wrist / into the purple that bees love;” “a thin line of gold braid edging / the predominantly silver canal of my desire.”6 But they may also serve one of those characteristically oblique moments when her poetry touches upon political issues (be they general or specific), as in “Condition Three” – a poem whose title, in eco-terminology, refers to the notion that “the physical basis for the productivity and diversity of nature must not be systematically deteriorated:”7 “I am listening in black and white / to what speaks to me in blue” (DB 16). The experience of watching, combined with a perception of the eyes as both uncompromising agents and fascinating objects of a gaze, also looms large in McGuckian’s visually charged diction, seemingly attracted to the notion of the gaze as the closest of scannings or readings: “The storm colours and the outer purple / of your stronger eyes laid my essence down / as bone” (Shelmalier 44). This gaze “lays down” an “essence” – records or inscribes it, or rather establishes it; in the latter sense, this amounts to acknowledging the signifying power of that gaze, its capacity to invest meaning in otherwise lifeless, somehow invisible (because unviewed) objects: “We do not see everything / as something, everything that is brown,/ we take for granted the incorruptible / colouredness of the colour. But a light / shines on them from behind, they do not / themselves glow” (Shelmalier 40). This somewhat indistinct boundary between viewing and reading, depicting and inscribing, is reinforced by the many instances in McGuckian’s work in which the insights and the practices proper to writing and painting are intersected and confounded. Their conflation may be found adequate to the representation of relationships: “you, who were the spaces between words in the act of reading,/ a colour sewn on to colour, break the blue” (SP 69); and it may emerge as a propensity to read the vistas afforded by domestic crafts as books and text:

4 5

6 7

Cf Wills, passim; Edna Longley, Poetry & Posterity (Highgreen: Bloodaxe, 2000), p.311. Medbh McGuckian, Selected Poems, 1978-1994 (Oldcastle: Gallery, 1997), p.44; The Face of the Earth (Loughcrew: Gallery, 2002), p.43. Henceforth referred to in the text respectively as SP and FE, followed by page numbers. Medbh McGuckian, Shelmalier (Oldcastle: Gallery, 1998), p.54; Drawing Ballerinas (Loughcrew: Gallery, 2001), p.23. Henceforth referred to in the text respectively as Shelmalier and DB, followed by page numbers. Cf http://www.sustainablesonoma.org/keyconcepts/naturalstep.html (last accessed 20 March 2005).

Looking for Clues 189 Yesterday was a gift, a copy of the afternoon, a heavily wrapped book, a rolled manuscript. Its paper was buff with blue lines, the sheets ragged at the top, and not quite legal size. It was secured on three sides by green ribbons [...] I arranged the Christmas tree in its green outfit, producing its green against the grey sky like handwriting that has been traced over (“The Partner’s Desk”, SP 66)

This tendency to foreground the graphic and the material dimension of writing is confirmed in a poem titled after a typeface, “Cancelleresca Bastarda” (Shelmalier 22), and it is accompanied and matched by the poet’s assumption of the painter’s eye, recurrently relating to the real as a series of “possible setting[s]” (SP 70), of painterly scenes to be captured and framed. A few of McGuckian’s titles have an explicit painterly reference: these include “The Sitting,” “Scenes from a Brothel,” “Self-Portrait in the Act of Painting a Self-Portrait,” “Impressionist House,” “Sky Portrait,” “Drawing Ballerinas,” and “The Pochade Box.” Several poems expand this interest onto other forms of visually capturing and representing the real, as with “Reading the Earthquake” and “Studies of her Right Breast,” two poems in which the pictures can be X-Ray images (“those rays,” “the rivulet of smooth silver” – FE 26), and “Viewing Neptune through a Glass Telescope” (FE 30), obviously on astronomy. The former instances inflect the tendentially erotic drift of other representations of the body in McGuckian’s poetry towards the diseased body, offering a hint of its entrails, rather than a glimpse of its mellow surfaces: “one lung” (FE 26), “Heavy breasts” associated with the perception of an “angry pallor, all-blinding white”; when the memory of “gentle / processions to churchyards” (FE 35-6) is introduced, that note of disease is compounded by a sense of mourning and ontological malaise. As for the astronomic instance, it is unlikely to jostle the reader with a glimpse of diseased flesh, but it represents observations of celestial bodies that bring a paradoxical awareness of the limitations of one’s knowledge, rather than a celebration of extended possibilities; from the outset, “Viewing Neptune” underlines an awareness of perspective, of how the specific conditions of the self determine and limit one’s capacity to see and know, despite the optical apparatus: “From my place on the coloured earth,/ with my inner face of travel, / I could see nothing but the world as a whole” (FE 30). And it is no less paradoxical that, even if the stance is outward-looking (from Earth to Neptune), an awareness of the earth as “coloured” should only be made possible by the external viewing that space travel afforded. This play of perspective, with all its epistemological implications, is far from specific to this poem – it rather pervades much of McGuckian’s visually charged writing, insisting as it does on the non-linearity of a gaze that disturbingly tends to be returned. Objects of depiction refuse to be passive (or mute), as in the domestic scene of “The Sofa in the Window with the Trees Outside,” and the shifting frame of “Blue Doctrine”: And door and window fell upon each other as if they were living, not speechless with dust (Shelmalier 20)

190 Rui Carvalho Homem The boundary of the light will not coincide with the edge of the window (Shelmalier 90)

A poem called “Film Still” cannot escape the perception that its title is an oxymoron, as well as a keen awareness of the gaze on the part of its object: The gesture of to-be-looked-at-ness has gone on, though the space inside it is where his body stood (Shelmalier 114)

And a dynamic construction of the gaze is felt to be a condition of living, as well as a source of empowerment and order, so long as the subject of the gaze withstands its return, its reciprocity – as in the tellingly named “The Dead are More Alive”: It [the sky] spread out, way, way out in the moment with such wide-open eyes, you yourself felt viewed. You were shielded against what you saw only by never looking away, [...] Your seeing did not change you, your eyes grew accustomed to remaining open, and gathering the senselessly scattered things. (DB 12)

Needless to say, this sense of mirroring and of mutual agency will only be made more complex when, from the outset, the deliberate object of depiction is also its subject, both verbally and pictorially, as in the circumstance announced in the title of the poem “SelfPortrait in the Act of Painting a Self-Portrait” (Shelmalier 65). Among many others in McGuckian’s canon, this one, however, from the intricacy of its title to the relevance of title to text, confirms the basis for the already mentioned critical diagnosis of obscurity. One of the most persistent fallacies surrounding visual representation concerns the supposed literalness of its appropriation of the real, in particular when it purports to be figurative or illusionistic – a consequence of the apparent immediacy of sight, when contrasted to the other senses. This expectation hardly ever stands the test of an empirical matching of art works to their ostensible real-life referents. The pictorial genres that might be said to loom largest (or at least to enjoy a more explicit presence) in McGuckian’s verbal representations of painting, the still life and the portrait, would seem to endorse and favour that expectation of the figurative, of literalness and “transparency” – but such ostensible favour may prove as elusive as her conventional syntax. Recognition of this particularity of her work should have a bearing both on an understanding of McGuckian’s attitude to the arts, and on the way social and political reality is constructed and construed in her work. Indeed, because of the fallacy of transparent appropriation, her verbal representations of the visual may shed some light on her oblique relationship to power and history, to the public scope of reference that her

Looking for Clues 191 poetry has so often seemed to shun, and to its appertaining narratives. Within those representations, the following pages will be focusing on McGuckian’s lyrical appropriations of the portrait genre. Indeed, the portrait might be construed as the pictorial equivalent of the lyric, in its traditional understanding since Romanticism. Portrait art characteristically attempts to depict a subjectivity, the success of any one piece largely depending on the artist’s ability to portray an inner landscape through and beyond external depiction. As I will be arguing, McGuckian seems at first glance to write the conventional lyric on conventional portraits of women, only to frustrate the expectation that access to an inner landscape will be mediated in her work by a literal and “accurate” representation of externals; in the process, she exposes the permeability of all boundaries – be they intergeneric, intermedial, or experiential. “The Flitting” was one of the first of McGuckian’s poems on paintings to have attracted critical attention (it appeared in 1982 in her first collection, The Flower Master). It takes its raison d’être from the domestic uprooting signalled in its title, which in Scots and in northern English dialect means to move house: one of those dis-locations that (within a conventional social order) have always proved both exciting and traumatic in women’s experience. The female subject acknowledges the shock, made concrete in the physical harshness of walls still in need of being smoothed over, and she ironically covers the rough surfaces with reproductions of Dutch paintings of women involved in domestic chores or small indoor pleasures. The final example is plainly identifiable as one of the best-known and most intriguing examples of seventeenth-century Dutch portrayals of women: Now my own life hits me in the throat, the bumps and cuts of the walls as telling as the poreholes in strawberries, tomato seeds. I cover them for safety with these Dutch girls making lace, or leaning their almond faces on their fingers with a mandolin, a dreamy chapelled ease abreast this other turquoise-turbanned, glancing over her shoulder with parted mouth. (SP 26)

Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring is here the pictorial referent, as Neil Corcoran noted years ago,8 and it is somehow beyond the pale of the placid domesticity that the previous lines briefly characterise. The piece is indeed singled out not only by the mystery of a face that gazes at us at much closer range than most other contemporary depictions of women (e.g. Vermeer’s own, or Pieter De Hooch’s), but also by the exotic note introduced by the turban, and by the dark background that denies the viewer the conventional surroundings of a bourgeois home. McGuckian’s ekphrastic gesture will discreetly add a historical dimension to the painting: by imagining the girl as “clove-scented,” the poet reminds the reader that from the early seventeenth century the Dutch were in control of the Spice Islands, renowned and coveted precisely for their cloves and mace. But this crossover from the gaze of the anonymous girl and her close surroundings onto the broader stage of history, 8

Neil Corcoran, English Poetry since 1940 (Harlow: Longman, 1993), p.224.

192 Rui Carvalho Homem greed and possession is characteristically understated. This is in tune with McGuckian’s aversion to the more heavy-handed treatment of the politico-historical scene one might find in other poets’ interrogations of identity. The main emphasis of the poem remains on the personal and the domestic, on the bland still world of delusive placidity and of a “casual talk” which papers over the broadest of issues (in the same way the reproductions of paintings covered the rough walls), as it dwells on the possibilities of self-projection that this portrait offers the writer as viewer – and ultimately as hypothetical painter: Her narrative secretes its own values, as mine might if I painted the half of me that welcomes death in a faggotted dress, in a peacock chair, no falser biography than our casual talk of losing a virginity, or taking a life, and no less poignant if dying should consist in more than waiting. (SP 26)

The speaker thus contemplates a fictionalisation of the self, curiously through painting rather than through writing, and hints at a moral and emotional darkness of background as stark as that which physically surrounds the girl on Vermeer’s canvas. But the closing section of the poem suggests the speaker’s contentedness with present domestic and familial rootedness, and a deferral of her “immortality for my children” (those who, Shakespeare-sonnet-like, immortalise her); in this present-day book of hours, the latter are told by a “digital clock,” anyway. If “The Flitting” rehearses the possibility of painting a “half of me,” “The Sitting,” a poem in McGuckian’s following volume, would seem to enact that possibility from its first line: “My half-sister comes to me to be painted” (SP 33). But this painterly confrontation with her “female alter ego”9 will fail, at least to the extent that the procedure will not be pursued to the end. Reluctant from the start – “she is posing furtively, like a letter being / pushed under a door” – the poet-painter’s “half-sister” will disagree with her modus operandi and will refuse to proceed: I am painting it hair by hair as if she had not disowned it [...] and she questions my brisk brushwork, the note of positive red in the kissed mouth I have given her, as a woman’s touch makes curtains blossom permanently in a house: she calls it wishfulness, the failure of the tampering rain to go right into the mountain, she prefers my sea-studies, and will not sit for me again (SP 33)

9

Allen, p.295.

Looking for Clues 193 Rather than just a squabble over technique, the source of that refusal lies both in the painterpoet’s “wishful” figurative strategy, and in the supposed housewifely attitude that is akin to it, as McGuckian self-parodically suggests with the simile about the uplifting and literally flourishing virtue of “a woman’s touch.” This most declarative and explicit of McGuckian’s meta-artistic poems ultimately takes on the heuristic value that Michael Allen, in a revealing pictorial analogy, has ascribed to those “excellent poems [of hers] which are not obscure at all,” as enlightening as the “naturalistic works of [otherwise] abstract painters” may prove to be with regard to the rest ot their work.10 The countervoice and counterperspective provided by the speaker’s half-sister will literally have the last word, to the extent that her refusal to complete “The Sitting” will leave the poem’s pictorial referent unfinished, as the closing lines make clear: “something half-opened, rarer / than railroads, a soiled red-letter day” (SP 33). However, the rhetorical uplift of its alliteration and assonance gives this ending a celebratory ring which, in turn, endows the failure to complete the painting with a paradoxical sense of achievement, and converts its truncated outcome into a visual correlative for a poetics that proves averse to the punctilious, the explicit, and the fully finished. In “The Sitting” McGuckian offers us for once a discursive and explicit ekphrasis – but she does so with relation to a painting that never really comes to exist; if and when her pictorial referent is achieved, public, and celebrated, then representational transparency will tend to be denied to us, as if out of the same impulse to refuse close figurative propriety that triumphs in “The Sitting.” A poem that can be read as an epitome of such strategies of indirection and obliqueness with regard both to the relation between verbal and visual representations, and to the boundaries between public and private, is her rather more recent “Hazel Lavery, The Green Coat, 1926” (DB 34-5). The title, again, makes the ekphrastic design obvious from the start, this time by integrating the title of the painting and its date, preceded by the model’s name. As so often happens in ekphrastic poetry, the title is identical to the text one might find next to the painting on the museum wall, thus suggesting a substitutive relationship between the poem and its pictorial referent; but, as equally often happens, that relationship proves on inquiry to be anything but linear or transparent. “Hazel Lavery, The Green Coat, 1926” will rather tread the line between that selfrepresentation which traditionally finds its proper scope in the lyric, and an oblique referential rapport both to the woman named in the title and her historical consequence. That woman was the celebrated second wife of painter Sir John Lavery, author of the portrait in question (on show at the Ulster Museum, Belfast), who after her marriage became a London society hostess hobnobbing with pillars of the British establishment; these included Winston Churchill, who reputedly was taught to paint by his neighbours, the Laverys.11 But she also famously made her husband’s studio in London the setting for the negotiations that led to the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921, and she would go on to take a central role in the visual memory of independent Ireland. Indeed, her supposed distinction as the country’s most beautiful woman would be given a particular edge when one of

10 11

Allen, p.287. Sinéad McCoole, Hazel: A Life of Lady Lavery 1880-1935 (Dublin: Lilliput, 1996), p.58.

194 Rui Carvalho Homem

Lady Lavery on Irish one-pound note

several paintings of her by her husband was chosen to figure on Bank of Ireland notes for several decades. Her image would in fact remain the notes’ watermark until the advent of the Euro put an end to the Irish punt; the portrait in question was then sent on an indefinite loan (in February 2002) from the Bank of Ireland to the National Gallery of Ireland.12 This makes Hazel Lavery a singular embodiment, in the Irish imagination, of both erotic and material desire: having had love affairs with heroic and/or famous protagonists of Irish independence, like Michael Collins and Kevin O’Higgins,13 she would also lend a face to the country’s money, becoming its “face value,” as it were (or, to pursue the pun, a woman who might be said to look like a million punts, while many million punts looked like her). McGuckian appropriates much of this biographical and historical data in the form of allusion, but, as suggested above, the poem at no point offers to relate descriptively to the portrait: in other words, no reader would reconstruct the portrait from reading the poem. It opens with an apostrophic gesture, an invocation which indicates a willy-nilly identification of the viewing writer with the portrayed object of her gaze, together with a hint of moral guilt over “using [her] [...] body [...] for some clues” – an admission that verbal representation of the portrait is a means rather than an end. Further, the suggestion of material comfort in the acknowledgment of her body as “heated” (in the portrait, Hazel Lavery stands in front of a fireplace), together with the equivocal reference to that body’s “easy mark of beauty” (which may allude to the watermark in which she ghosted Irish currency for decades), cannot cancel the ascription of “sadness” to this “agreed image” of a public personage:

12 13

Cf www.centralbank.ie/data/AnnRepFiles/2001AReport.pdf (last accessed 20 March 2005). Cf McCoole, passim.

Looking for Clues 195 Agreed image, of your open self, your personhood, do not put me into a sadness like your own, though I am using your heated body with its easy mark of beauty, its narrow grip on a segment of the abstract world, for some clues. (DB 34)

A tension also develops in the second stanza between recognition of the painter-husband’s success in portraying a radiant inner life (the ambition of any portrait painter), freezing her image for posterity in its vivid beauty and thus “immortalising” her, and the awareness of impending death and decay which is paradoxically set off by that vividness: He has been able to bring your inner sun to full view, a real heartbeat and a lucid mind inhabiting a body degrading into matter (DB 34)

This awareness becomes one of the points at which consideration of the female figure admired on the canvas is intersected by the poet-viewer’s knowledge of Hazel Lavery’s biography and of the roles she played in Irish history. The ensuing lines are crucial in this respect: “your hospitality towards death / is the light of my own country.” These may rest on the awareness that she would live for less than a decade after The Green Coat was done; that her husband would famously paint her on her deathbed; and that the best-known literary reference to her may yet be Yeats’s “Hazel Lavery living and dying,” in “The Municipal Gallery Revisited.”14 Further, those lines may allude to the reverence for sacrifice and death that has played such an important and in some respects fatal role in Irish culture: after all, some portraits of Hazel Lavery are situated in the tradition of representing Ireland as the beautiful woman who calls on her men to give their lives for her. Rather more topically, the passage is also a reminder of the “hospitality” she extended to the negotiators of the Anglo-Irish Treaty, and of how that process would bring with it both the “light” of the country’s independence (of which she would herself become an important icon), and the “death” of many, including her lovers Collins and O’Higgins: “so that the living seem to go to bed / with the dead” (DB 34). Despite Hazel Lavery’s reputation for torrid adultery, and the ironical relationship between that feature and her embodiment of some of Ireland’s best-known (and desirably chaste) female representations in the twentieth century, McGuckian’s invocation of her “sense of chastity” is hardly sardonic. The phrase is rather a response to the eerie beauty of the painting and a salute to a life lived to the full; the same response and salute will also help account for the remark, close to the end of the poem, that “it is as though you actually wore armour, / with nineteen horses killed under you” (DB 35), which somehow glosses Virgil’s dictum that Fortune favours the bold (although it is of Napoleon that nineteen horses are said to have been killed under him, supposedly proving the good luck afforded by audacity).15 And yet, despite the apparent sincerity of the poet’s response to the woman in the portrait, the poem treads a daringly thin line between pathos and satire, between an 14 15

W.B.Yeats, Collected Poems (London: Picador, 1990), p.368. Cf http://www.ljhammond.com/notebook/nap-right.htm (last accessed 20 March 2005).

196 Rui Carvalho Homem acknowledgment of grandeur and a hint of fraud. In the passage “that moon- / ark body you had so often laid down,” the words insinuate a (hardly tenable?) sacrificial dimension in Hazel Lavery’s gift of her body (as if for the cause...) both to her revolutionary lovers, to be portrayed and stand for Ireland on museum walls, and to be fingered by every owner of Irish currency. The suggestion of sacrifice may be pursued with the characterisation of her supposed “military bearing” as “that of a child asleep on a cross,” and with the image of her “seated upon the clouds,” an apocalyptic scene also anticipated by the encounter (even if in “bed”) of “the living” and “the dead.” But McGuckian’s reading and rewriting of the portrait also juxtaposes the glamour of the socialite’s magnificent dress and coat with the false colours of maceration and mortification put on by cheating beggars in the freakish, public holiday environment of “hanging days” at Tyburn, in eighteenth-century London: the whitish patina of verdigris and rose carmethian that begging soldiers forge on the eight hanging days (DB 35)

The uncertainty, for the reader, of some of the allusions and associations which pervade the latter part of the poem also remind us that it is less about the painting, and the biography and the historical import of the woman portrayed, than it is about the consequence that viewing the painting finds in the poet’s consciousness of self, history, and art, as she explores Hazel Lavery’s “heated body [...] for some clues” – somehow countering Clair Wills’s argument that “[McGuckian] presents women’s experience as unknowable and therefore useless”16. One of the passages that are most explicit about the meta-artistic nature of the tensions set off by that “use” of her body somehow pursues its erotic implications up to the point of an engenderment, even if a “sense of chastity” is here the begetter: Your sense of chastity starts a shape in me attached to life at all four corners, saying what your beauty means to you. (DB 34)

Revealingly, and even though her artistry is here verbal, as acknowledged in the “saying what” formula of the line quoted last, McGuckian opts for the spatial and visual “shape” to specify what is “started” in her; this indicates the concern with further blurring the distinction between visual and verbal, since she is substituting “shape” for “imaginative work” – a phrase from none other than Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own: Imaginative work [...] is like a spider’s web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. [...] But when the web is pulled askew, hooked up at the edge, torn in the middle, one remembers that those webs are not spun in midair by intercorporeal creatures, but are the work of suffering, human beings, and are attached to the grossly material things, like health and money and the houses we live in.17

16 17

Wills, p .6 9 . Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own (1929) (London: Granada, 1981), p.41; my emphasis.

Looking for Clues 197 Once recognised, this intertext becomes a revealing gloss on McGuckian’s ethics and poetics, confirming her empathy with the woman in the portrait and a wish to consider her in her context; as seen above, “the grossly material things” loom rather large, in many different ways, in the memory left by Hazel Lavery, whereas “the houses we live in” are a fundamental aspect of McGuckian’s own referential scope. In view of Woolf’s iconic status within women’s studies, quoting her also brings the rapport established in this poem by McGuckian, a woman artist, to one of the most memorable muses of twentieth-century Irish art into a distinct cultural and literary-critical context, with all its appertaining expectations – an issue which is hardly indifferent, in view of McGuckian’s sometimes controversial relation to feminism.18 Further, it reminds us of how ambivalent a citational procedure can be as regards authorship/authority: while it may seem to dilute the power traditionally ascribed to the original authorial gesture, it also entails an appropriation of another’s authori(ali)ty, especially when that other voice is canonical and authorised.19 Those apostrophic lines in the poem also reinforce an indistinction of reference which is pursued through the ensuing stanzas: is the poet reading the portrait? reading the self? commenting on Sir John Lavery’s art? on her own? This can identified in the play between first and second person pronouns: the final pronoun in “what your beauty means to you,” referring as it does to an utterance (“saying”) encapsulated in the poem, could as easily be “me,” since the “meaning” of Hazel’s beauty to herself is being read into the painting by the poet as viewer – even if it is ascribed to the “personhood” watched on the canvas. Similarly, that “fire” which “leaves a blue path through / the warm cinder of your head” concerns (yet again) the consequence in the viewing self of whatever is being glimpsed, and that consequence can be identified with the metonymic contiguity of visual and verbal in “much of what flames in my eyes, the world / of speech.” The grammatical subject of “You throw a veil / of sinewy deception, of half-grown leaves, / over your eyes” could also be easily replaced by the voice that enunciates a poem so oblique in the constitution of its referent, even when it is ostensibly the painting summoned by the title before one’s eyes. All through, the poem addresses the tension in ekphrastic discourse between the visible and the invisible, as if its rapport to John Lavery’s painting were meant to demonstrate W.J.T.Mitchell’s remark that “we can never understand a picture unless we grasp the ways in which it shows what cannot be seen.”20 At its most superficial, the diagnosis of obscurity which has adhered for so long to Medbh McGuckian’s work would seem to be confirmed by most of her ekphrastic poetry, in its refusal of an explicit, descriptive mediation of its referents. But, rather than a curtailment of meaning, such “obscurity” proves to be an expansion of semantic possibilities. Rather than resulting strictly from an encounter with visual referents (which Cf Thomas Docherty, ‘Initiations, Tempers, Seductions: Postmodern McGuckian’, in The Chosen Ground: Essays on the Contemporary Poetry of Northern Ireland, ed. Neil Corcoran (Bridgend: Seren, 1992), pp.191210 (p.191); Wills, passim; Kimberly S.Bohman, ‘Surfacing: An interview with Medbh McGuckian’, Irish Review, 16 (Autumn/Winter 1994), 95-108 (passim). 19 In this regard, see Danielle Sered, ‘“By Escaping and [Leaving] a Mark”: Authority and the Writing Subject of the Poetry of Medbh McGuckian’, Irish University Review 32:2 (Autumn/Winter 2002), 273-85. 20 W.J.T.Mitchell, Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology (Chicago and London: The Univ of Chicago Press, 1986), p.39. 18

198 Rui Carvalho Homem are not restricted to the painting named in the poem’s title), in “Hazel Lavery, The Green Coat, 1926” that expansion is buttressed by a broad range of intertextual links – Yeats, Virginia Woolf, Napoleonic lore, biographies, the Bible. This list will certainly be incomplete, as it is always bound to be with the citational obliqueness proper to McGuckian, but her practice (as indeed that of a few other contemporary Irish poets, Paul Muldoon in particular) seems designed in that respect to validate Michael Riffaterre’s argument that a “presupposition of intertext,” rather than a definite and unequivocal identification of an intertext, will often be enough for the intertextual process to be started, as an enablement of signification.21 This can be articulated with the play of perspective, the way McGuckian verbally institutes a dynamic and dialectical directioning of the gaze, pluralising its agency. In all three portraits approached in the poems considered above – Vermeer’s Girl with a Pear Earring, the poet’s unfinished portrait of her half-sister, Lavery’s The Green Coat – the model is represented by McGuckian as challenging the viewer, an attitude which is at its most explicit in the “half-sister’s” vocal rebellion against the staidness of a placid portraiture with placid models. And yet the triumph of that rebellion in no way coincides with an apology for an explicit, pamphlet-style poetics, be it of the word or the image, with reference to the politics of art or the art of politics. As shown above, McGuckian’s poetry is hardly indifferent to history and to a politically charged reality, but the way it is assumed into her practice has its best key in a note she appended to the title poem of Drawing Ballerinas; after dedicating the poem to the memory of a “schoolfellow and neighbour” killed in an explosion thirty years earlier, she adds: “The painter, Matisse, when asked how he managed to survive the war artistically, replied that he spent the worst years ‘drawing ballerinas’” (DB 15). It is a motto for a poetry of indirection, and one that would not be out of place next to Seamus Heaney’s better-known remark, in The Government of the Tongue, that “lyric action constitute[s] radical witness.”22 Generationally and aesthetically, McGuckian may be more aptly read as representing a postmodern turn in Irish poetry, which has challenged “the formal order” instituted by the previous poetic generation.23 But this should not be read, in her case at least, as amounting to an autotelic, de-localised, strictly self-referential writing.24 Even if finding and offering no easy “aesthetic refuge,”25 her gaze is informed by a sense of culture and a keen awareness of history, as much as it is humane – as if directed, to quote some of her words on Hazel Lavery, by “a real hearbeat and a lucid mind” (DB 34).

21 22 23 24 25

Michael Riffaterre, ‘Compulsory reader response: the intertextual drive’, in Intertextuality: theories and practices, ed.Judith Still and Michael Worton (Manchester: Manchester U.P., 1990), pp.56-78 (p.56). Seamus Heaney, The Government of the Tongue (London: Faber, 1988), p.xix. Cf Longley, The Living Stream, p.52. As suggested, for instance, by Docherty, passim. Wills, p.191.

4. WOMEN AND THE INTERMEDIUM 4.2. Ambivalent Narratives A. S. Byatt

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Isabel Fernandes

Matisse and Women: Portraits by A.S. Byatt The starting point for this reading of A.S.Byatt’s The Matisse Stories (1993) is Henri Matisse’s own dictum on the identical value of “the subject of a picture and its background.” Hence, equal attention will be given to the stories’ thematic content (seen as equivalent to the pictorial “subject”) and to external elements such as graphic layout, illustrations and structural divisions, plus titles and dedication (the “peritext,” that corresponds to the picture’s “background”). An analysis of relevant features in the “background” of the book (namely its use of Matisse’s paintings and drawings and its tripartite division, indirectly evoking a triptych) suggests that here, Byatt is paying homage to the French painter. At the level of the “subject,” however, the figure of the painter is almost entirely obliterated in favour of several impressive female characters and their problems. Byatt thus subjects her less obvious intratextual object, Matisse, to a process of indirect scrutiny in that the scattered references to the painter’s works and life throughout the texts force the reader to re-evaluate Matisse from a radically new vantage point – the one that is gradually built by the successive fictions on women. But, at the same time, the reader is also asked to judge the women’s predicament in these stories from a critical perspective that takes Matisse’s achievement into account. By drawing her own fictional portraits of women, Byatt is also indirectly sketching her own ambivalent portrait of Henri Matisse, thus qualifying her praise of him.

The subject of a picture and its background have the same value, or, to put it more clearly, there is no principal feature.1 What frightens me […] is that I’m going to have my interest in literature taken away by women who see literature as a source of interest in women. I don’t need that. I’m interested in women anyway. Literature has always been my way out, my escape from the limits of being female.2

Introduction As a starting point for my approach to A.S.Byatt’s book The Matisse Stories (1993) I have chosen Henri Matisse’s above-quoted dictum on the identical value of “the subject of a picture and its background.” His recognition of a relationship between subject and background that dissolves a previously accepted hierarchy, disperses our gaze and thus creates a new perception of the pictorial space can, I think, be usefully transposed to our reading of Byatt’s collection of stories. For this transposition to be operative, I will have to translate the terms of the pictorial equation into literary terms. I will therefore identify the pictorial “subject” with the obvious thematic content of the text(s), while equating the “background” with such extraneous aspects as the graphic layout, the peripheral elements that help to frame the text proper3

1

2 3

Henri Matisse, ‘On Modernism and Tradition’ (1935), in Matisse on Art by Jack Flam (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1973; rev. edn. 1995), p.120. A good example of the equal importance attributed by Matisse to “background” and “subject” would be his Harmonie en rouge (Harmony in Red) (1908). A.S.Byatt interviewed by Juliet A.Dusinberre in Janet Todd, ‘A.S.Byatt’, Women Writers Talking (New York: Holmes and Meyer, 1983), pp.181-95 (p.186). For my use of the term “text” see Vítor Manuel de Aguiar e Silva, Teoria e Metodologia Literárias (Lisboa: Universidade Aberta, 1990), pp.185-88.

202 Isabel Fernandes (which I will call the “peritext,” following Gérard Genette),4 and its structural divisions (into parts and chapters or, in this instance, into stories). I would like to suggest that in the case of Byatt’s book (as in Matisse’s painting) both types of elements – external or peripheral, and internal or textual – are of similar relevance, and that we should bear in mind the nature of their relationships as a means of better understanding Byatt’s achievement.

The “Background” Let us first consider the graphic and peritextual features of the front and back covers of Byatt’s collection. The front cover reproduces one of Matisse’s paintings, Le silence habité des maisons (The Lived-in Silence of Houses) (1947) upon a bright blue background and bears the title at the top, The Matisse Stories (the name of the painter standing out as an autograph in larger, bolder letters and almost visually “dancing” against the blue). Beneath the reproduction of the painting, the writer’s name, A.S.Byatt, appears in a lettering that suggests continuity with part of the title at the top, namely, The ... Stories, thus making a partition clear: the “stories” belong to Byatt, whereas the impressive yellow signature of the painter goes with the golden hues of his painting, thus unequivocally signalling its authorship. If we now consider the back cover, we still have the same blue background with two more paintings by Matisse, namely, one at the top (a bit to the right), Le nu rose (Pink Nude) (1935) and one at the bottom (slightly to the left), La porte noire (The Black Door) (1942). Once we read the book, we realise that each of these paintings is referred to and is more intimately related to one of the stories: Le nu rose with “Medusa’s Ankles,” Le silence habité des maisons with “Art Work,” and La porte noire with “The Chinese Lobster.”5 However, when we turn the pages of this book we also find before each story, and on its title page, a reproduction of a Matisse drawing (thus doubling the number of visual referents for each narrative): La chevelure (Hair) (1931-32) announces Susannah’s experiences and final outburst of rage and despair at the hairdresser’s salon; L’artiste et le modèle reflétés dans le

4 5

According to Genette, the “peritext” includes titles, subtitles, prefaces, dedications, epigraphs, titles of chapters, notes, etc. Cf. Gérard Genette, Seuils (Paris: Seuil, 1987), p.10. The English titles of Matisse’s paintings were taken from Nicholas Watkins, Matisse, Colour Library , 2nd edn. (London: Phaidon, 1992; repr. 1998). In the case of Le silence habité des maisons, however, I would prefer The Inhabited Silence of Houses, following Byatt’s own suggestion in the quotation from “Art Work” below.

Matisse and Women 203 Miroir (The Artist and his Model Reflected in the Mirror) (1937) hints at the self-reflexive nature of the middle story (appropriately called “Art Work”), where, as we shall see, duplications are central; Nymphe et faune (Nymph and Faun) (1931-32) connotes a predatory sexuality that haunts the universe of the last story. The dedication, coming immediately after the title page, reads: “For Peter, who taught me to look at things slowly. With love.” It calls attention to the importance of the act of careful perception in relation to life (and art) in general and it comes as a sort of indirect reminder to the reader of the need to apply to these stories a “slow look” as synonymous of a close reading. For this reason it can be linked to the contents of the picture on the front cover where the act of reading is central, since Le silence habité des maisons represents two people (one adult – presumably the mother – and one child) reading a big blank book propped on a table. The fact that it is precisely this painting that is ekphrastically evoked6 at the outset of the middle story (a story that reflects upon artistic creativity, artistic production, its nature, aims and constraints) further reinforces the centrality of the act of reading and of Matisse’s haunting presence as predecessor and inspiring figure. Therefore it comes as no surprise that, following the narrator’s description of this picture, we have what could be considered a wonderful display of verbal and narrative virtuosity in prose segments that constitute the equivalent linguistic rendering of another domestic interior peopled by unseen human presences (at first, as devoid of features as Matisse’s two figures). Here, Byatt resorts to the suggestive reference to various sounds and to the use of onomatopoeic sounds themselves in order to create an atmosphere; and, by doing so, she is indirectly calling attention to the differences between her own medium – sounds and words – and Matisse’s art of colours, lines and forms:7 There is an inhabited silence in 49 Alma Road, in the sense that there are no voices, though there are various sounds, some of them even pervasive and raucous sounds, which an unconcerned ear might construe as the background din of a sort of silence. There is the churning hum of the washing-machine, a kind of splashy mechanical giggle, with a grinding note in it, tossing its wet mass one way, resting and simmering, tossing it the other. [...] In the front room, chanting to itself, for no one is watching it, the television is full on in midmorning. Not loudly, there are rules about noise. The noise it is making is the wilfully upbeat cheery squitter of female presenters of children’s TV, accented with regular, repetitive amazement, mixed in with the grunts and

6

7

Though I am aware of more recent developments in the theory and concept of ekphrasis, I am here using the word in the sense defined by James A.W. Heffernan, as the verbal representation of a graphic representation. Cf. James A.W. Heffernan, ‘Ekphrasis and Representation’, New Literary Criticism, 22 (1991), 297-316. For a discussion of Heffernan’s view and an account of other contributions to a more operative and updated definition see Maria Fernanda Conrado, Ekphrasis e Bildgedicht: Processos ekphrásticos nas Metamorfoses de Jorge de Sena (unpubl. Diss. Universidade de Lisboa, 1996), pp.46-62. On Byatt’s self-consciousness regarding her own art much has been written. I could here cite critics such as Olga Kenyon and Richard Todd, but I prefer to quote from the opening paragraph of Byatt’s own Portraits in Fiction: “Portraits in words and portraits in paint are opposites, rather than metaphors for each other. [...] A portrait in a novel or a story may be a portrait of invisible things. [...] Even the description in visual language of a face or body may depend on being unseen for its force.” (A.S.Byatt, Portraits in Fiction (London: Chatto and Windus, 2001; repr. London: Vintage, 2002), p.1).

204 Isabel Fernandes crackles and high-pitched squeaks of a flock of furry puppets [...] [...] On the first floor, behind a closed door, the circular rush and swish of Jamie’s electric trains can be heard. Nothing can be heard of Natasha’s record-player, and Natasha cannot hear the outside world, for her whole head is stuffed with beating vibrations and exploding howls and ululations. She lies on her bed and twitches in rhythm. [...] From Debbie’s room comes the sound of the typewriter. It is an old mechanical typewriter, its noises are metallic and clicking. It chitters on to the end of a line, then there is the clash of the return, and the musical, or almost musical “cling” of the little bell. Tap tap tap tap tappety tappety tappety clash cling tappety tap tap. A silence.8

An architectural trait that should also be considered is the structural division of the text which, in itself (so rhetoric has taught us),9 can be revealing. In this case we are faced with a tripartite division: the volume is split into three stories, and thus we may speak of a trilogy. The size of the stories in the sequence gives a certain symmetry to the whole – the centre piece being the longest and bounded by two shorter narratives – and reminds us of its pictorial equivalent: the triptych. Originally a three-panelled painting or carving devised for an altarpiece, the triptych was devoted to the celebration of some biblical episode or religious figure for the benefit of the congregation assembled for mass.10 As time went by the triptych was adopted for profane subjects.11 But of particular interest to our present purpose is Henri Fantin-Latour’s (1836-1904) Hommage à Delacroix (Homage to Delacroix) (1864),12 which, without being a triptych stricto sensu, is spatially organised as a tripartite structure. The centre is occupied by a Delacroix portrait with flowers underneath (the flowers are held by American painter James McNeill Whistler); this detail, which equates the centre of the picture with an altar, further reinforces the suggestion of a tribute paid to a near predecessor – a situation apparently similar to the one we encounter in The Matisse Stories. In fact, the choice of a tripartite volume with a central story, longer and thematically more ambitious than the side stories, by indirectly evoking the triptych, inherently suggests the idea of homage; in this case homage is paid to Henri Matisse by A.S. Byatt. Thus at the three levels we have so far considered (the graphic, the peritextual, and the structural) all semiotic elements tend to reinforce the idea that these stories are pieces A.S.Byatt, The Matisse Stories (London: Chatto and Windus, 1993; repr. London: Vintage, 1994), pp.32-35. Further quotations from this work will be indicated in my text by MS followed by the page number(s). According to rhetorical precepts, a speech can either be divided into two or into three parts, depending on the 9 intended nature of the argument. Whereas a division into two parts emphasises their tension, a division into three parts enhances the speech completeness without breaches. Cf. Heinrich Lausberg, Elementos de Retórica Literária, trans. by Rosado Fernandes, 3rd. edn. (Lisboa: Fundação Gulbenkian, 1982), pp.97-98. 10 Cf. Nancy Frazier, The Penguin Concise Dictionary of Art History (New York: Penguin Books, 2000), p.680. 11 As in the case of a painting by Portuguese artist Constantino Fernandes (1878-1920), called Marinheiros (Sailors) (1913), celebrating the life of anonymous seamen in its various aspects, including their recurrent painful separations from their families in the central panel. For a reproduction of the painting see Arnaldo Serrano and others, Constantino Fernandes: In Memoriam 1878-1920 (Lisboa: Biblioteca Nacional, 1925), plate XIX. 12 The picture is reproduced in Michel Laclotte, Geneviève Lacambre and Claire Frèches-Thory, Orsay Paintings, trans. by Judith Hayward (Paris: Éditions Scala, 2000), p.54. 8

Matisse and Women 205 written in honour of the painter. But what happens at the textual level? What do these narratives tell us? What are they about?

Henri Fantin-Latour, Hommage à Delacroix, 1864 (Musée d’Orsay, Paris)

The “Subject” Contrasting with Matisse’s pervasive presence at all three levels referred to earlier on, it comes as a surprise that in the text of the three stories in this volume, the figure of the painter is almost entirely obliterated by the conspicuous presence of impressive women characters that dominate the action.13 This takes the form of portraits of women of different ages, at different stages in their professional and personal lives, in different fields of activity, of different classes and even races, but still portraits of women with their anxieties and fears, their unfulfilled dreams, their day-to-day courage and small victories, but also with their frustrations and defeats. Byatt is once more deliberately dealing with feminine issues in her work, but ironically (and this will be the first of a series of other ironies) she is doing so by conspicuously evoking a man who has been attacked by feminists for his treatment of women in his paintings. Allegedly, these critics tell us, he submitted them to the male gaze, a case nowhere more evident than in his “erotic or quasi-erotic”14 female Women dominate both technically, by being chosen as focalisers, and thematically. Susannah’s story in “Medusa’s Ankles” thematises women’s anxieties about the process of growing old; in “Art Work”, Debbie and Mrs. Brown enact the difficulties and constraints that make it especially hard for women to assert themselves as artists, but the story also optimistically points out new possibilities for them; Gerda Himmelblau and Peggi Nollett show how women’s lives run the risk of being disastrously barren if they are unable to overcome their fears and to open themselves up to otherness. 14 Cf John Elderfield, Pleasuring Painting: Matisse’s Feminine Representations (London: Thames and Hudson, 1995), p.53, n. 7. 13

206 Isabel Fernandes nudes as well as in his stereotypical representations of odalisques15 (in what is known as the “Nice period” – roughly from 1919 to 1930).16 By doing so, Byatt is subjecting her less obvious intratextual object, Matisse, to a process of indirect scrutiny in that the scattered references to the painter’s works and life, which steadily grow in number, length and explicitness from the first to the third story, force the reader to re-evaluate Matisse from a radically new vantage point – the one that is being built by these successive fictions on women. But, at the same time, the reader is also asked to judge the women’s predicament in these stories from a perspective that takes into account Matisse’s achievement and the goal of his own art, namely, that “he looked to art for the undisturbed, ideal bliss of living.”17 The result of this double act of reading is an increase in critical insight in both directions. By looking at Matisse from a feminine standpoint (which Byatt shares with her characters) we gain a clearer perception of the painter’s faults and shortcomings (especially, but not exclusively, as a man). On the other hand, by bringing him in as a recurring reference and thus implicitly establishing him as a standard in the fictional universe of these stories, we become aware of his importance and how (in spite of his human limitations) he can still contribute to human lives (be we men or women, real people or fictional characters, laymen or artists), provided we are able to consider him in an unprejudiced way and grasp the full extent of his artistic achievement – an argument that is fully developed in the final story, “The Chinese Lobster.” By drawing her own fictional portraits of women (and here Byatt is creatively doubling Matisse’s own favourite subject – which happens to be also her own but for different reasons), she is at the same time indirectly and interstitially sketching her own ambivalent portrait of Henri Matisse. Let us now see how this is done in the text(s). I will focus on the central story since, as I have said, it is thematically more ambitious and structurally more complex than the other two. Its centrality can be attested by a curious feature that unequivocally and literally alludes to its nature as a replica of an altar piece. Inside “Art Work” we have indeed an altar, though of a special kind: the male painter Robin Dennison’s so-called “fetishes” (carefully collected assorted objects, each of which is evocative of a pure colour) “have,” we are told, “a table of their own,” and even though “once they were mantelpiece ‘things’ [...] as they took on their status of ‘fetishes’ they were given this solidly unassuming English altar [...] They were the small icons of a cult of colour” (MS 62 – emphases added). Anyone familiar with Matisse’s work and with his own ideas about his painting, knows about the centrality of colour in his art and how important it became for him to discover

See, for instance, Carol Duncan’s article, ‘Virility and Domination in Early Twentieth-Century Vanguard Painting’, Artforum (Dec. 1973), 30-39. 16 Cf. Lawrence Gowing, Matisse (London: Thames and Hudson, 1979), p.142. Gowing suggestively gives the title, “1919-1930 Wish Fulfilment” to the chapter devoted to this period. See also Pierre Schneider’s chapter on the same period, ‘The Richness of Nothingness’ (pp.495 ff) in his Matisse (London: Thames and Hudson, 1984). 17 Gowing, p.56. 15

Matisse and Women 207 new, more daring colour combinations and explore their effects.18 One might even say that he continued to experiment with colour virtually to the end of his long life. The fact that in his devotion to colour Robin Dennison echoes, in a caricature-like way, the French painter’s own obsession only underscores the differences between them. Robin’s immaturity as a man goes hand in hand with a certain hopelessness in his career in spite of a serious commitment to his art, and could not be farther removed from Matisse’s own position as a key figure in the field of twentieth-century art. Byatt is using an ironic strategy here which is after all in accordance with her paradoxical use of “background” and “subject.” She is drawing a parallel or analogy, in this case involving two figures, in order better to distinguish between them.19 Let us look at those other features of Robin as man and artist that obviously echo Matisse’s own. Like the painter, he is selfishly obsessed with his work (to the point of ignoring everything else around him, entirely leaving the burden of domestic and family duties to his wife, Debbie, “breadwinner and life-manager” – MS 58). This reminds us of Matisse’s own self-absorption in his work and of his relinquishing of any domestic duty or worry to the women around him, his wife and his beloved daughter Marguerite, both of whom strove to protect him all the time from external trouble and any disturbance to his work.20 Like Matisse, Robin awakened to painting in his late youth by being given “a set of gouache paints” (MS 55),21 “even though by upbringing and temperament he should have been a solicitor or an accountant” (MS 55);22 and (perhaps in an emulating gesture) he even goes to the South of France in search of light as the French painter did.23 These factual coincidences, however, cannot hide the more glaring fact of the gulf that separates Byatt’s fictional character from the Post-impressionist painter: Robin is inarticulate, immature and something of a failure as an artist (a fact obvious to anyone but his self-sacrificing wife); his theories of colour (on which he lectures to Mrs. Brown, the cleaning lady) are a caricature of Matisse’s self-reflective thoughts collected in “Notes d’un peintre” (Notes of a

18

19

20

21 22 23

Cf. Gowing, p.50-51. As Jack Flam notes, it is not only colour in itself that interests Matisse but rather its “structural use” and “the coordination of structural colour with structural brushstroke.” Cf. Jack Flam, Matisse: The Man and His Art 1869-1918 (London: Thames and Hudson, 1986), p.111. I refer here to a special kind of irony: immanent or presented irony (as distinct from verbal irony). This kind of irony is “defined in terms essentially akin to the characteristic mechanisms of irony both in its strategy and in its structure,” namely “to approach in order better to contrast.” For a full explanation, see Isabel Fernandes, ‘Jane Austen’s Emma: Beyond Verbal Irony’, Logomachia: Forms of Opposition in English Language/Literature, Inaugural Conference Proceedings – Hellenic Association for the Study of English, 1994, ed. E. Douka-Kabitoglou (Thessaloniki: Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, 1994), p.313. However, unlike Debbie, only during a time of particularly serious financial troubles did Mme. Matisse contribute with her earnings as milliner to the family budget. At that time (1899) even Matisse had to look for a job and worked for a short period for a decorating workshop. Cf. Flam, The Man, p.78. The protective attitude of Marguerite and Mme. Matisse, however, is amply alluded to by Matisse scholars who even refer to their utter discretion when imprisoned by the Gestapo in 1944, in order not to upset the painter (a fact that is ominously evoked in the last story of the volume “The Chinese Lobster”). Cf. Schneider, p.739. For a similar episode in Henri Matisse’s life see Gowing, p.9 and Frazier, p.430 Matisse started life as a professional lawyer (according to his father’s wish), but soon discovered his true vocation. Cf. Gowing, p.9 and Flam, The Man, p.27. In 1898, Matisse decided to go south because of the light. Cf. Gowing, p.20 and Flam, The Man, pp.51 ff.

208 Isabel Fernandes Painter).24 Thus, by drawing these ironic parallels between the two, the story makes us even more aware of their differences. Robin Dennison masquerading as a Matisse surrogate is only one of the several characters in these stories that are ironically connected to the painter,25 but maybe the most unexpected of Matisse’s travestied representatives is Mrs. Brown (the black charwoman who so enrages Robin whenever she comes to clean his studio). Remarkable for her colourful and disconcerting attire, she has been working for this “‘artistic family’” (MS 39) for the past ten years without raising the slightest suspicion as to her solitary, secretive artistic activity, which she carries on in her spare time with total devotion. Sheba Brown has in herself the will and determination to create her art out of her own imaginative experience of her own life and outside the rules of any art school (which she perforce ignores and never attended). She resembles Matisse who, in spite of his academic training, worked most of the time according to his own intuitions and convictions and very often going against the grain of established rules and schools of painting.26 Both are obsessed with colourful fabrics and with elaborate patterns that they use freely and unconventionally in their respective compositions.27 Mrs. Brown’s compulsion always to be on the look-out for new materials, that she gets “‘from everywhere – skips, jumble sales, cast-offs, going through other people’s rubbish, clearing up after school fêtes’” (MS 83-84) and her “‘urge to construct’” (MS 84) are similar to Matisse’s compulsion to try his hand at new materials and media as a means to better understand and compose his painting.28 In both cases, this openness to experiment is the sign of the born artist. And yet again they could not be more different: she, a black working-class woman, abused by her man, obliged to go out to work in other people’s houses to support and educate two children and, in spite of it all, industriously knitting and sewing her own “‘soft sculpture’” (MS 84) against all odds – silently pursuing a dream. Matisse, the son of a middle-class family (dealing first in textiles and later in grain and seeds), only knew trouble in his late youth when he had to oppose his father’s wish for him to continue as a lawyer,29 though for most of his life he had the financial means to devote himself solely to his art, and the material conditions for that too.

24

25 26 27

28 29

‘Notes d’un peintre’ (1908) in Flam, On Art. According to Schneider, Matisse, “in spite of his advice to painters to ‘cut out their tongues,’ (…) enjoyed talking about painting” (Schneider, p.732). For the selfreflexive nature of Matisse’s art (a feature he shares with Byatt), see also Schneider: “No painter has treated the theme of art more often and more constantly than Matisse. Internal references to his own work form an almost unbroken chain from the beginning to the end of his career” (Schneider, p.131). Others would include Lucian (in “Medusa’s Ankles”), Perry Diss and even Peggy Nollett (in “The Chinese Lobster”). According to Gowing, “Matisse, as he said later, did not paint by theory” (Gowing, p.22). For relevant passages on Matisse’s artistic independence see also Gowing, pp.59, 69, 108, 142, and 173. The love of costumes and fabrics (as seen in screens, hangings, tapestries, rugs, etc that form such an important part of his pictorial compositions), together with Matisse’s preference for the private sphere and domestic interiors, has led André Salmon to qualify him as a “painter of feminine gifts” which he also finds in his “modiste’s taste whose love of colour equals the love of chiffon.” Quoted in Elderfield, pp.18 and 55 n.32. For a justification of Matisse’s “deeply engrained” love and knowledge of textiles, see Schneider, p.715. Matisse’s use of different media – sculpture, woodcuts, and prints and, later in life, paper cuts (“papier découpé”) – illustrates his need for experiment till the very end. Cf. Schneider, pp.715-16.

Matisse and Women 209 But maybe the most striking difference between them is the image of the world reflected in/from their respective work. Though both of them share a healthy enjoyment of life – manifest in Sheba Brown’s vibrant colours and in her good-humoured inventive wit with no trace of resentment, and in Matisse’s sensual delight in colour as the source of light and in fanciful lines inspired by natural forms – she, however, comments critically “‘on the trivia of [women’s] daily life’” (MS 83) and on their troubles, whereas he devotes himself selfindulgently time and time again to the depiction of the beauty and charm of the female body, his most recurrent subject. We are thus made aware by Sheba Brown’s art of what was left out of Matisse’s work. Once more, in this case, the analogies bring out the differences in a more emphatic way – this time differences based on gender, race, class and art. Mrs. Brown is a travestied version of Matisse30 just as Robin is his caricature. The ironic parallels, however, do not stop here: Debbie, Mrs. Brown’s employer, can herself be seen as somehow reflecting another of Matisse’s facets as an artist; her wood-engravings echo his own woodcuts and prints of 1906 if not in subject matter at least in the chosen medium.31 And yet again, what is a side experiment for him to indulge in, in order better to explore what haunts him – the achievement of a reclining female figure suggestive of a tranquil, relaxed voluptuousness – is what is denied Debbie. She feels compelled to support her husband’s devotion to his art by sacrificing her own career as an artist, and this act of self-denial, though willingly undertaken, is nevertheless resented by her (Cf. MS 54). Examples of this ironic strategy could be multiplied in an analysis of the other stories in the volume, but what I would like to emphasise now is how this device works both ways: enabling the reader to critically apprehend both Matisse and his fictional surrogates.

Conclusion Just as the levelling and paradoxical relationship between “subject” and “background” was an indirect way of warning the reader of an ambivalent response to Matisse, mixing open reverence with cautious reserve, so the drawing of ironical analogies forces the reader to engage in a critical, qualified appraisal of Matisse as man and artist.32 What we know of his life and art is implicitly brought into contact and subjected to comparison with Byatt’s characters. But the writer uses these parallels not so much to diminish but rather to qualify the nature of her admiration for the painter. Byatt salutes Matisse across decades, admitting her reverence for his work but also writing about him as she, a woman artist at the end of the twentieth century, sees him and reacts to his paintings and to his lifestyle: a complex of multiple responses fictionally Note the self-reflexive (and self-conscious?) use of the word “travesty” at the end of this story (MS 90). According to Gowing, Matisse was then characteristically trying to simplify and to refine the nude reclining figure from Luxe, calme and volupté (Luxury, Calm, and Delight) which for him epitomised “the ideal [he] envisaged for painting” (Gowing, p.67). On the other hand, Debbie’s subject is fairies, a theme which selfreflexively evokes Byatt’s own choices for much of her writing. 32 Note that Matisse himself was very much obsessed with analogies and duplication processes. Cf. Gowing, p.173. 30 31

210 Isabel Fernandes enacted in her stories. Along with an enthusiastic endorsement of Matisse’s sensual commitment to life (nowhere more evident than in “Art Work” and “The Chinese Lobster”), we sense her sympathy for Mme. Matisse and her resentment of Matisse’s selfish self-engrossment in his work, only possible because he was a man (as I have tried to illustrate in my brief approach to “Art Work”). Again, her admiration for his serious commitment to his art and incessant thriving to make it respond to his engagement with life and the natural world is qualified by her critical insight into the self-indulgent nature of some of his representations of women (also suggested in the first and last pieces). Finally her decision (as manifest in these stories) to make her feminine art speak out and (like Sheba Brown’s) tell the stories about women that his paintings of them had left out is a sign that she is creatively responding to him. Like her characters as well as through her characters, Byatt identifies with Matisse only to make her own difference all the clearer. Moreover, she is using some of the painter’s methods and techniques and adapting them to her own art. I would describe her stance in these stories by applying to her what John Elderfield has said about the French artist: she “struggles in various ways for identity in, and not in opposition to, difference.”33 In other words, she identifies with the other artist – a male French painter of the first half of the twentieth century – by means of various male and female characters in stories told from a woman’s perspective at the end of the twentieth century, in order better to enhance her own specific position. Her “responsible reading”34 of Matisse invites her own reader to both reread Matisse and (in turn) read her Matisse Stories responsively and delight in them.

33 34

Cf. Elderfield, p.51. The expression “responsible reading” is used by Derek Attridge (in ‘Ethics, Otherness, and Literary Form’, European English Messenger, 12-1 (Spring 2003), 33-38) in the sense of “to read inventively, to respond to the inventiveness of the work in an inventive way, and thus affirm and prolong its inventiveness. […] [A] reading that attempts to do justice to the alterity, singularity, and inventiveness of the literary work” (Attridge, p.33); and also, “a singular act, registering the here and now of the reader while it attempts to do justice to the otherness of the [work]” (Attridge, p.38).

Margarida Esteves Pereira

More than Words: the Elusive Language of A.S. Byatt’s Visual Fiction In her work, the English novelist A.S.Byatt has raised interesting theoretical questions concerning the limits and the potentialities of representation by the pictorial and the textual. This article analyses question with regard to the novel Still Life (1985), so as to understand the comparisons the author makes between the languages of fiction and of painting. It also addresses questions the way A.S.Byatt evokes specific works of art in her narratives so as to enhance the visual quality of her writing. This is particularly the case in Still Life, where we find a clear evocation of Van Gogh’s paintings.

The English painters I most admire are the colorists, Heron and Hodgkin, the elegant, the flamboyant, those who reject the native suspicion of brightness, and delight in Matisse’s revelation of color as form. I love them partly because what they do is the opposite of verbal narrative, an art-form that can’t be reduced to, or adequately described in, words.1

In her “Introduction” to The Oxford Book of English Short Stories (1998), A.S.Byatt justifies some of her choices of stories, because they contain what she, using Henry James’s phrase, calls “solidity of specification.”2 In her words “solidity of specification” may be defined as a detail in characterisation provided by the exhaustive description of the objects, or at least of those objects that are important for the narrative. For Byatt it is this detailed description of an object, which she refers to as “the thinginess of things,” that enhances the dramatic effect of the narrative. In the same manner, in an article about Madame Bovary, published in The Guardian (July 27, 2002),3 Byatt stresses Flaubert’s “accurate rendering of things” and his ability to make “real objects” stand out as metaphors, one of the most striking and innovative elements of his novel in her opinion: [t]his precision and simplicity has the effect of making the whole book into one worked image, memorable for a reader simultaneously as a direct physical experience and as a whole as an articulated image for a certain state of things, the world of ennui, romantic longing, and physical restriction. [...] [Flaubert] says somewhere that great art can appear almost silly, stupid, in its self-sufficiency. His descriptions have exactly that selfsufficiency, a simplicity of presence that is meaning.4

As I hope these examples may demonstrate, A.S.Byatt’s concern with the way language is apt (or not) to accurately transmit meaning pervades both her vision of narrative and, apparently, her drive to write, as she has confessed elsewhere: “It is not too much to say that this unwritten work [Byatt’s unwritten doctoral dissertation on religious metaphor in 1 2 3

4

A.S.Byatt, ‘Patrick Heron,’ in Writers on Artists (in Association with Modern Painters) (London, New York, Munich, Melbourne, Delhi: DK, 2001), pp. 244-51 (p.244). A.S.Byatt (ed.), The Oxford Book of English Short Stories (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. xvxxx (p.xviii). A.S.Byatt, ‘Scenes from a Provincial Life,’ in The Guardian (July 27). Available online in http:// books.guardian.co.uk/Print/0,3858,4468532,00.html and http://books.guardian.co.uk/Print/ 0,3858,44685328, 00. html. Acessed on 22/01/2003, 2002. Byatt, ‘Scenes from a Provincial Life.’

212 Margarida Esteves Pereira the seventeenth century], with its neoplatonic myths, its interest in the incarnation, in fallen and unfallen (adequate and inadequate) language to describe reality, has haunted both my novels and my reading patterns ever since.”5 What I would like to discuss here is the extent to which the descriptions of pictures that appear in Byatt’s novels are an attempt to give a certain sense of precision to the act of communication, as well as the extent to which they fail to do so; furthermore, I will try to demonstrate my arguments by giving specific examples of the way Byatt uses descriptions of actual paintings, and even sculptures, to help her convey a visual image, which, try as she will, she is unable to do through language. In order to do this, I will use examples taken, particularly, from the novel Still Life (1985), the second of a tetralogy focusing on English society from the 1950s to the end of the 1960s. The other novels of this quartet (also known as “The Frederica Quartet”), which I will also be referring to whenever necessary, are The Virgin in the Garden (1978), Babel Tower (1996), and A Whistling Woman (2002). The novels centre upon the same characters, and have as their central consciousness the character of Frederica Potter, who to a certain extent can be read as an autobiographical figure; we accompany this figure through the novels from her years at secondary school in Blesford, Yorkshire (The Virgin in the Garden) to university at Newnham College, Cambridge (Still Life) and, later on, in her ordeals as a married, divorced (Babel Tower), and professional woman in London (A Whistling Woman). As anyone familiar with Byatt’s fiction knows, her narratives are highly intertextual, and culturally and literarily charged; they contain references to different kinds of real and imagined texts, literary, scientific, critical. But, as has also been noticed by other critics, the importance of intertextuality in Byatt’s work cannot be reduced to the verbal, for, as Michael Worton argues, “[the] references throughout Byatt’s writings to works of art and especially to paintings are crucial both to the narrative drive of her fictions and to the central image-clusters of the individual texts.”6 In Byatt’s fiction we will find many references to paintings and to painters, which are put to different narrative usages.7 For example, in The Matisse Stories (1993), the evocation of certain pictures by Matisse not only helps set the atmosphere of the stories, but also makes us critically rethink Matisse’s representations of womanhood. Other major examples of the use of paintings can be found in most of the short stories in Elementals: Stories of Fire and Ice (1998), particularly in the one entitled “Christ in the House of Martha and Mary,” which is a story created from the painting by Diego Velázquez with the same title. In Still Life the work of Van Gogh lingers in the background and presides over the discussions about art and literature, painting and writing. This text also provides us with references to and extracts from the Letters, as well as direct descriptions of several of Van Gogh’s paintings. These descriptions enhance the differences between writing and painting, which are part of the ongoing aesthetic

5 6

7

A.S.Byatt, Passions of the Mind: Selected Writings (London: Vintage, 1993), p. 3. Michael Worton, ‘Of Prisms and Prose: Reading Paintings in A.S.Byatt’s Work’, in Essays on the Fiction of A.S.Byatt: Imagining the Real, ed. by Alexa Alfer and Michael J. Noble (Westport, Connecticut and London: Greenwood Press, 1994), pp. 15-29 (p. 16). As Michael Worton states: “Byatt’s textual inscription of paintings takes a variety of forms, ranging from description and interpretation through evocation and allusion to creation and invention” – Worton, p. 17.

More than Words 213

discussions recurrent in this novel, (as indeed in all of Byatt’s fictional and non-fictional work). My argument here is that, in many instances, these paintings are intended as the ultimate signs of the narrative text, trying to defy linguistic interpretation and striving to attain that condition of art that for Byatt is one of the most impressive features of painting, which is “that element in the visual which completely defeats language,” as she declares in an interview with Boyd Tonkin.8 Although, as I will try to demonstrate, this proves impossible, they are intended to act as Flaubert’s self-sufficient descriptions, the presence of which is in itself, and according to Byatt, meaning. This argument derives from Byatt’s reflections on language and the importance she gives to narrative as an ordering device, as opposed to the chaotic and impressionistic appraisal of modernist narrative, crystallised by Virginia Woolf in “Modern Fiction.”9 Contrary to Woolf’s dictum about the impressionism and randomness of all narrative, for Byatt, narration must entail an ordering principle; she says as much in a 1990 interview with Nicholas Tredell (just after the publication of Possession): When Virginia Woolf says that life hits us as a series of random impressions, it jolly well doesn’t. It hits us as a series of narratives, though they may be mutually exclusive narratives. We may be hit by random impressions, but if we’re intelligent we immediately put them in order.10

Thus, for Byatt, narrative and language are intrinsically and potentially ordering devices which structure reality; in that sense, she is continually at odds with theories such as structuralism and poststructuralism, which view language as a self-referring system. When discussing her novel Still Life and the motivations behind it, she claims that she “wanted to work on the assumption that order is more interesting than the idea of the random [...]: that accuracy of description is possible and valuable. That words denote things.”11 Paradoxically, though, for Byatt this denotative potential of language is, in many ways, puzzling and, as I hope to demonstrate here, an ever deferred potential at that; for a writer whose frame of mind is particularly metaphorical, as she herself admits,12 denotation may indeed become an ever “deferred action,” to use Roland Barthes’s words. Ultimately, Byatt finds herself at the crossroads between her desire to render reality with that Jamesian “solidity of specification” to which I referred at the beginning and the inability of language to sustain unequivocal meaning; in that sense, she would have to admit, with Roland Barthes, that “[the] Text [...] practises the infinite deferment of the signified, is dilatory; its field is that of the signifier and the signifier must not be conceived as “the first stage of

Boyd Tonkin, ‘Antonia S. Byatt in Interview with Boyd Tonkin’, Anglistik 10.2 (1999), 15-26 (p.17). Virginia Woolf, ‘Modern Fiction’, in The Common Reader (First series annotated edition, ed. and with an introduction by Andrew McNeille), (London: Harcourt Publishers, 1984), pp.146-154. 10 Nicolas Tredell, ‘A.S.Byatt’, in Conversations with Critics, (Manchester: Carcanet, and New York: Sheep, 1994), pp.58-74 (p.60). 11 Byatt, Passions of the Mind, p.11. 12 In Passions of the Mind, Byatt attributes this inability to use non-figurative language to herself, saying, in this respect: “I came to the conclusion that I was doing violence to something in my own mental constitution to try to write like Flaubert, or Proust’s Flaubert, or Pound’s Flaubert” (p.14). 8 9

214 Margarida Esteves Pereira meaning,” its material vestibule, but, in complete opposition to this, as its deferred action.”13 On the other hand, through painting, artists, according to Byatt, seem to achieve a certain uniqueness of meaning that is embedded in the very materiality of the paint, as the initial quotation underlines. This materiality is, for Byatt, impossible to attain through writing, where, for example, portraits of people conjure up different visual images for different readers, as the author herself explains in Portraits in Fiction: “Writers rely on the endlessly varying visual images of individual readers and on the constructive visualising work those readers do.”14 Thus, Visual images are stronger than verbal half-images, and a good novel exploits the richness of the imprecision, the hinted. Painting, as Patrick Heron said, is a materialist art, about the material world. The novel, however it aspires to the specificity of Zola’s naturalism, works inside the head.15

This materiality of art is what the novel lacks, as is implied in the preceding quotation. Thus, Byatt is aware of the inability of language to convey reality accurately; notwithstanding her continuing attempts at accurate and precise meaning, she is conscious of the chimerical impossibility of such an effort, for language will always elude representation. In a more recent piece of writing, Byatt brings forth the scientific argument to prove the differences between painting and writing, or more specifically, colour and language, by mentioning the physiological differences in our perception of colour and language, as explained by neuroscience. She writes: “We know that we make up images from widely separated parts of the brain – and that the word ‘green’ doesn’t come from the part that perceives greenness but from the part that stores words and their associations.”16 Indeed, one may find that Byatt is asking neuroscience to corroborate the assumption put forth by structuralist linguistics about the arbitrariness of the linguistic sign. Physiological differences apart, however, we know that language, being so culturally charged, is imbued with a sense of all the references and connotations carried by each word. In Still Life, the narrator foregrounds the incommensurable cultural weight of words: I do not think the compulsion to write about foreign places can be very closely compared to a painter’s sensuous delight in new light, new forms, new colours, Monet seeing the Cap d’Antibes in blue and rose, Turner seeing the bright watery Venetian light in Venice, Gauguin in Tahiti. Pigment is pigment and light is

Roland Barthes, ‘From Work to Text’, in Image, Music, Text, Essays Seleted and Translated by Stephen Heath (London: Fontana, 1982), pp.155-64 (p.158). 14 A.S.Byatt, Portraits in Fiction, (London: Vintage, 2002), p.2. 15 Byatt, Portraits in Fiction, p.93. Also in Still Life, the character Alexander Wedderburn reflects upon the differences between painting and writing in the following terms: “You cannot have trompe l’oeil in writing, or any other form of pleasurable mimetic titillation and deception. Language runs up and down, through and around things known and things imitated in a way paint doesn’t: no one ever painted ‘Put those apples in the basket and help yourself.’” A.S.Byatt, Still Life (London: Vintage, 1995 [1985]), p.201. 16 A.S.Byatt, ‘Why Painted Portraits?’, in BP Portrait Award 2003 (London: National Portrait Gallery, 2003), pp.11-18 (p.16). 13

More than Words 215

light in any culture. But words, acquired slowly over a lifetime, are part of a different set of perceptions of the world, they have grown with us, they restrict what we see and how we see it.17

True it is that this might say more about Byatt herself – who claims to be (and is) a “greedy reader,”18 for whom language is so fused with experience that it is experience –, than about the real differences between art and literature, or painting and writing. In fact, in Byatt’s novels we perceive a certain filtering of the characters’ experiences through what they read; in other words, we are confronted with a sense of a second-hand reality – that of the books – taking priority over lived reality. The following extract from Still Life is an example, amongst many, of how Frederica Potter keeps referring to her own experience of things through the books she reads: She was taken everywhere. To the covered fish market at dawn to buy fish for a bouillabaisse, which held no romance for her for she had not then read Ford’s description of the great bouillabaisse in the Calanques, nor Elizabeth David’s description of the colours and patterns of fish on the stalls.19

As becomes apparent, the lived experience of eating a bouillabaisse, though chronologically prior, is invested with significance only when the character reads about it in novels. In the same manner, we are confronted with Frederica’s growth and perception of the world through the books she reads, which mould her own personality: She believed, with a mixture of “realism” and resignation, that women were much more preoccupied with love than men were, more vulnerable, more in pain. There were imposing tags in her mind. “Man’s love is of man’s life a thing apart/’Tis woman’s whole existence.” “He for God only, she for God in him.” “In those days I could not see God for his creature.” “I claim only this privilege for my sex – you need not covet it… this distinction of loving longest when life, when hope is gone.” She was conditioned to desire to be abject. This desire was reinforced by the behaviour of Rosamond Lehman’s heroines and of Ursula Brangwen (whom some other part of Frederica was ready to despise heartily).20

Thus, in Byatt, reading does, in many instances, take over living; art precedes life, and literary experiences become as real as, or more real than lived ones. Byatt is, thus, as Michael Worton notes, “a very ‘wordy’ writer.”21 In a more recent novel, The Biographer’s Tale (2000), which deals with language and writing (as indeed all Byatt’s works), the homodiegetic narrator, Phineas Gilbert Nanson, is a clear example of this characteristic. The novel starts with Nanson’s intention to give up literary theory, and his refusal to be immersed in language, when he states that “he must have things,” but in the

17

18 19 20 21

Byatt, Still Life, pp.71-2. In A Whistling Woman, the last novel of the so-called “Frederica Quartet,” the Latin teacher advises his students to be aware of the culture behind all languages and their ultimate untranslatability: “Languages, said Mr Shepherd, show us that our way of seeing the world is incomplete. You must learn to translate English into Latin, Latin into English, precisely and beautifully, but you must never suppose that the one is the same as the other.” A. S.Byatt, A Whistling Woman (London: Chatto & Windus, 2002), p.107. Vide Byatt, Passions of the Mind, p. 3. Byatt, Still Life, pp.153-4. Byatt, Still Life, p.68. Worton, p 19.

216 Margarida Esteves Pereira end we are confronted with the admission that he is “addicted to writing,” addicted to words, as he confesses at a certain point in the narrative: So I am going to stop writing this story. The problem is I have become addicted to writing – that is, to setting down the English language, myself, in arrangements chosen by me, for – let it be admitted – pleasure. I have become addicted to forbidden words, words critical theorists can’t use and writers can.22

One suspects that for the author too, this drive to write derives from an addictive compulsion regarding language and literature. Not only does Byatt have an extraordinary mastery of the English language, which permits her to play with the etymology of the words in order to extract double (or triple) meanings from them,23 but she revels in such wordplay; the reader can sense that the pleasure of arranging words into a certain pattern, mentioned by the narrator in The Biographer’s Tale, permeates all Byatt’s narratives. Nevertheless, this cultural overload of language seems to denote, according to Byatt, a fall from the garden of “accurate rendering,” which makes her confront the impossibility of a mimetic language, and the difficulty of the Flaubertian mot juste. A “Still Life”/”Nature Morte,” being a picture made of objects projects us, precisely, to a universe of things, where reality stands for a clear visual object, as we are constantly reminded throughout the novel. When Alexander Wedderburn (a playwright already known to us from the previous novel in the series) is staying with the Pooles in London, the conversation between the couple centres upon objects to avoid the difficulty, at that point in their lives, of dealing with more abstract ideas and feelings, because, as Alexander asserts, “you could see things before saying them, indeed without saying them.”24 As the narrator in Still Life notices, the materiality of paint, although in itself distant from reality, relies on the author’s own vision more accurately than words: Do we have enough words, synonyms, near synonyms for purple? What is the greyish, or maybe white, or whitish, or silvery, or dusty mist or haze or smokiness over the purple shine? How do we describe the dark cleft from stalk-pit to oval end, its inky shadow? Partly with adjectives: it is interesting that adjectives in a prose or verse style are felt to be signs of looseness and vagueness when in fact they are the opposite, at their best, an instrument for precision.25

What adjectives cannot do, however, is restrain either reader or writer from association and metaphor, which relies on a different kind of vision, on a different kind of connection: The nearest colour Alexander could find, in his search for accurate words for the purple of the plum, was in fact the dark centre of some new and vigorously burgeoning human bruise. But the plum was neither bruised nor a bruise nor human. So he eschewed, or tried to eschew human words for it.26

A.S.Byatt, The Biographer’s Tale (London: Vintage, 2001), p.250. In A Whistling Woman, for example, Byatt gives us a lesson in etymology, through Josh Lamb’s (or Joshua Ramden’s) Latin teacher, which is instructive in relation to her knowledge of languages in general and of the English language in particular (pp.107-10). 24 Byatt, Still Life, p.198. 25 Byatt, Still Life, p.199. 26 Byatt, Still Life, p.199. 22 23

More than Words 217

According to Byatt’s account, when she started writing Still Life, her idea was to write a novel “as plain as possible,” which would even try to forgo metaphor. She writes about this project and its failure in an article published in her first collection of essays,27 in words that are similar to the ones used in the novel, when the intrusive author/narrator confesses: I had the idea, when I began this novel, that it would be a novel of naming and accuracy. I wanted to write a novel as Williams said a poem should be: no ideas but in things. I even thought of trying to write without figures of speech, but had to give up that plan, quite early.28

The experience of such a task and of its failure is also mentioned early on in the novel through the character Alexander Wedderburn, who is, precisely, trying to write a play about Van Gogh’s life, under the title The Yellow Chair, using non-figurative language: “At first he had thought that he could write a plain, exact verse with no figurative language, in which a yellow chair was the thing itself, a yellow chair, as a round gold apple was an apple or a sunflower a sunflower.”29 Obviously enough, for any slightly attentive reader, the “round gold apple” is no more the thing itself than the “sunflower”; and thus, Alexander, as Byatt herself, is confronted with the impossibility of his mimetic desire: “But it couldn’t be done. Language was against him, for a start. Metaphor lay coiled in the name sunflower, which not only turned towards but resembled the sun, the source of light.”30 In the previously mentioned essay of Passions of the Mind, where Byatt discusses Still Life and its projected mimetic character, she mentions two important influences on the reflections on language that pervade the novel in question: one is Paul Ricoeur’s La Métaphore Vive (1975) [The Rule of Metaphor]; the other is Michel Foucault’s Les Mots et Les Choses (1966) [The Order of Things].31 It becomes evident, as we read Byatt’s discussions on language, that there is a kind of nostalgia for a mimetic stance that seems to be lost in modern theories that focus on the arbitrariness of language, since Saussure’s structuralist view of language as a self-referring system. We can detect such a nostalgia in words that reverberate with a belief in the materiality of the real, when Byatt asserts, for example, “that words denote things,” or that she is “afraid of, and fascinated by, theories of language as a self-referring system of signs, which doesn’t touch the world.”32 In this sense, there is in Byatt’s work, and particularly in the so-called Frederica Quartet, a sense of a Babel-like loss of non-arbitrary language, which we can link, following Byatt’s own direction,33 to Foucault’s theory of an archaeology of the human sciences in Les Mots et Les Choses. Byatt specifically quotes from Foucault’s assertion that in the sixteenth century

27 28 29 30 31 32 33

Byatt, Passions of the Mind, p.9. Byatt, Still Life, p.364. Byatt, Still Life, 2. Byatt, Still Life, 2. Passions of the Mind, pp.15-18. Passions of the Mind, p.11. Byatt herself points us in this direction in Passions of the Mind; in the article entitled ‘Still Life/Nature Morte’, she writes: “Foucault, in Les Mots et les choses, describes the Renaissance idea of language and the world, words and things, thoughts and sensations, in a way that is analogous to the theories of the dissociation of sensibility current in my youth. In that time there was no ‘gap’ between words and things: [...]” (p.16).

218 Margarida Esteves Pereira language was not an arbitrary system and invokes the Foucauldian influence in Still Life – “My second [novel] became – in a playful way – informed by Foucault’s vision of postRenaissance nomination.”34 Like Foucault, Byatt is interested in the processes whereby language informs our perception of the world and, particularly, she is interested in a certain loss of transparency in language after Babel, as is described by Foucault in Les Mots et les Choses: In its original form, when it was given to men by God himself language was an absolutely certain and transparent sign for things, because it resembled them. The names of things were lodged in the things they designated, just as strength is written in the body of the lion, regality in the eye of the eagle, just as the influence of the planets is marked upon the brows of men: by the form of similitude.35

According to Foucault, residues of this conception remained in language up to the sixteenth century, when language was conceived of as a ternary system, constituted by the significant, the signified, and the “conjuncture,” whereas in the seventeenth century it turned into a binary system. As Foucault writes, from that point onwards language lost its limiting primary meanings and developed infinitely – “For now we no longer have that primary, that absolutely initial, word upon which the infinite movement of discourse was founded and by which it was limited; henceforth, language was to grow with no point of departure, no end, and no promise.”36 In Still Life and, even more so in the third novel of the tetralogy, Babel Tower, there is a strong sense of this loss of correspondence between words and things, and of the subsequent corrupted, but simultaneously ever-expanding, nature of language. Thus, in Babel Tower, the linguist and mathematician, Professor Wijnobel, sits in his car thinking about language, which he has thought about “all his life, always with a sensation of an impossible endeavour.”37 Like his grandfather before him, who had been obsessed with the discovery of the traces of “the Ur-language, the original speech of God,” a language before Babel, when “the occult tradition went, words had been things, and things had been words, they had been one [...],”38 Wijnobel predicts the discovery of an invariable deep structure in language, which may return us to the Edenic state of life before Babel: He believes too, that in some distant future the neuroscientists, the geneticists, the students of the matter of the mind, may find out the forms of language in the forest of the dendrites, in the links of the synapses. The genes are aperodic crystals, dictating to the matter they control, the structures, the forms, the substances that matter shall become. Somewhere in the future the understanding of their invariable form may lead to the understanding of the web of grammar and its invariable deep structure.39

34 35 36 37 38 39

Passions of the Mind, p 17. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (London and New York: Routledge, 1989), p.40. Foucault, The Order of Things, p.49. A.S.Byatt, Babel Tower (London: Vintage, 1997 [1996]), p.190. Byatt, Babel Tower, p.190. Byatt, Babel Tower, p.193.

More than Words 219

To return now to my initial argument, A.S.Byatt’s discussions of painting vis-à-vis language and writing are instructive as to the way she, so often in her fictions, uses actual pictures that suggest a specific image to the reader. In a certain sense, then, the use of pictures by Van Gogh, or by Matisse, Rembrandt, Vermeer, Velázquez, among others, evoke in the readers specific images of place, atmosphere, people. As Michael Worton says: “it is not so much a question of meaning, but a question of textual meaningfulness.”40 A clear instance of this meaningfulness of an image is to be found in the opening of the sixth chapter, entitled “Seascape,” with its evocation of Van Gogh’s Fishing Boats on the Beach at Saintes-Maries: Frederica arrived when the beach party at Les Saintes-Maries was posed. It was at some distance from other groups, in those days not yet numerous, on that beach. It had arranged itself around bright canvas bags and wicker baskets in the part-shade of a fishing boat. In those days also the boats were unchanged since Vincent Van Gogh had spent one week there in June 1888 and had painted them, red and blue, green and yellow, with coloured delicate masts erect, and the slanted, tapering yard-arms crossing each other on the pale mackerel sky.41

The image evoked by Van Gogh’s painting is the one that lingers in the head of those readers who know it, giving a distinct light and colour to the scene, and striving to achieve that “solidity of specification” to which I referred at the beginning. However, no matter how Byatt strives to attain that condition of visibility in her writing, she knows only too well that language hides more meanings than may be apparent at first reading, and metaphor does indeed lie coiled in it. But also in Van Gogh’s paintings there are more meanings than may be apparent at first sight, meanings that transcend the sheer materiality of form and colour, as the extracts of the painter’s letters, quoted in Still Life, make evident. At the beginning of the novel we are confronted with the picture The Poet’s Garden, given to us through the point of view of Alexander Wedderburn, who pauses in front of it at an exhibition at The Royal Academy: He sat down and saw a bifurcated path, simmering with gold heat round and under the rising, spreading blueblack-green down-pointing vanes of a great pine, still widening where the frame interrupted its soaring. Two decorous figures advanced, hand-in-hand, under its suspended thickness. And beyond, green green grass and geraniums like splashes of blood.42

As the simile at the very end of the quotation once again indicates, language makes connections that go beyond the painting, laying bare its incapacity to render the materiality of the picture. On the other hand, the way Van Gogh explains the title of the picture, in a letter quoted in the text – where the painter likens the garden to a Renaissance garden with poets43 – brings to the surface other connections that expose the deep metaphorical and metonymic character of painting itself. Byatt is, of course, well aware of the metaphorical character of painting; it would be naïve of us to think otherwise. At another point in the 40 41 42 43

Worton, p.17. Byatt, Still Life, p.89. Byatt, Still Life, p.1. Byatt, Still Life, p.3.

220 Margarida Esteves Pereira novel, the narrator asserts: “Paint itself declares itself as a force of analogy and connection, a kind of metaphor-making between the flat surface of purple pigment and yellow pigment and the statement ‘This is a plum.’”44 She writes elsewhere about this, underlining the point at which writing and painting become more similar than dissimilar, in contrast to the differences that she then pinpoints between painting and photography. In fact, in spite of all the materiality that Byatt stresses in the art of painting she is conscious that both in painting and in writing it is the acting subject that has the ultimate choice. Apparently for Byatt, the artist is the site where, more than anywhere else, the ultimate meaning of the work of art rests, as I think is implied in the following assertion: “The soul of a photographed is his or her own, even if sneaked up on, or surprised. The soul of a painted person is what the painter has made of what he or she has seen.”45 The pictures that, apart from the Yellow Chair, most profoundly pervade Still Life, Van Gogh’s The Reaper and The Sower, project us into a metaphorical world that is at the core of the very significance of the text. Not surprisingly, the novel ends with these two pictures, which for Van Gogh represented the opposition of life and death, as is expressed in one of the letters quoted in the novel – “[...] I saw then in [the reaper] the image of death, in the sense that humanity would be the wheat one reaps. So it is, if you like, the opposite of that sower I had tried before.”46 In a work intended by its author to be “a bare precise novel, telling things (birth, marriage, death),”47 this reminds us, precisely, of the most extreme images of the novel – the birth of Will and the death of Stephanie. Just as the apparently simple image of Van Gogh’s chair signals the opposition between light and darkness, day and night, in contrast with Gauguin’s, as we are told at a certain point in the novel, so too the images of the Reaper and the Sower connect beyond themselves. As Alexander looks at his own reproductions of The Reaper and The Sower hanging in his apartment he is reminded of the extremes of light and darkness, life and death that pervade the play The Yellow Chair and are reflected in the novel: On his walls Alexander had large images of the Sower and the Reaper (…), larger than life, or canvas, swarming with yellow and violet light. He knew very well that a casual visitor, most visitors, might see in them the usual bourgeois brightening-up. He knew also that the painter had wished to make images that anyone, that everyone, could hang in their room to cheer themselves up. Daniel’s gaze passed them indifferently. Alexander lived with them to live with the idea of extremities he didn’t, perhaps couldn’t, know.48

The pictures on Alexander’s wall stand for themselves in their sheer materiality – Daniel, Stephanie’s husband, who was then living the extreme situation of loss was indifferent to the metaphorical meaning of the pictures. And yet, they do have another meaning, both for Alexander and the reader – they may very well stand for the extremities of Daniel’s life, with the children on one side and the death of Stephanie on the other.

44 45 46 47 48

Byatt, Still Life, p.200. Byatt, ‘Why painted portraits?’, p. 16. Van Gogh, The Complete Letters, quoted in Still Life, p. 375. Passions of the Mind, p. 24. Still Life, p. 433.

More than Words 221

The title of the novel – Still Life – does indeed refer to the author’s project to write a plain bare novel on things, birth, death, marriage, representations of concrete objects that are paralysed as in a still life painting, crystallised in paint, or in words; but in the end, just as Van Gogh’s pictures exist in his vision before existing in paint, so too these things exist in language and, as such, reflect if not the artist’s visual bias, the linguistic bias with all its cultural weight. In the end, in both painting and writing, we are confronted with representations, mediations of a vision, of several visions, which, just as in the seascape with the fishing boats at Saintes-Maries, pervade our confrontation with reality, transforming it. Thus, our vision of the real remains immersed in art and in the artist’s vision of reality, Byatt seems to be indicating. Still Life is, in a way, filled with Byatt’s projections of Van Gogh’s vision in a complex web of visual intertextualities, or intervisual representations, through which the writer tries to construct the equivalent of a “mot juste,” an ever failing projection of “pure vision.”

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Paola Spinozzi

Ekphrasis as Portrait: A.S. Byatt’s Fictional and Visual Doppelgänger In Portraits in Fiction (2001) A.S. Byatt further develops her meta-literary enquiry into the creative sources of writing by diachronically re-tracing what can be defined as “portraiture with ekphrasis.” Painterly and fictional portraits confront each other in a “paragone” of the arts in which verbal language stands out as a more challenging mode of expression. According to Byatt, a portrait by a painter primarily discloses a portrait of the painter to the beholder; instead, a portrait by a novelist is a doppelgänger which disfigures, and refigures, the other, real self. While choosing not to delve into the complex cultural processes involved in the iconography of portraits on canvas, the author highlights the hermeneutic tools needed by the reader who peruses ekphrastic portraits in search of the unsaid. Byatt’s conception of ekphrasis as portraiture raises, once again, crucial arguments about the predominance of verbal representation in rendering the world. Her logocentric conceptualisation of “material” painting and “cerebral” literature prompts deeper enquiries because, if Portraits in Fiction emphasises that the verbal system of representation expresses a form of knowledge more composite and layered than the visual one, it discloses that the genesis of writing is most frequently to be found in the visual arts.

your pen will be worn out before you can fully describe what the painter can represent forthwith by the aid of his science. And your tongue will be parched with thirst, and your body will be overcome by sleep and hunger before you can show with words what a painter can show you in an instant.1

I. Re-framing ekphrasis in postmodernity Ekphrasis is a highly codified conceptual site which hosts inquiries into logocentrism, aesthetic autonomy, and the interplay of description and narration. Postmodern ekphrasis reveals mutations of the structural and thematic constants which have been constitutive of that site since antiquity. With A.S. Byatt ekphrasis challenges the tradition of the painterly and of the literary portrait She recuperates the rhetorical and literary ekphrastic tradition in order to shift the emphasis from the “content of ekphrasis” to “ekphrasis as container.” Portraits in Fiction2 bears witness to my contention that the question postmodern writers pose is no longer what can be in ekphrasis?, but rather what can ekphrasis be? The critical discourse on visual and verbal modes of portraying developed in Portraits in Fiction demonstrates that ekphrasis is both a container and a maker of visual images, meta-artistic inquiry, logocentrism and, more intriguingly, narration.

1 2

Leonardo, ‘Paragone delle Arti’ (Comparison between Poetry and Painting), in Trattato della pittura (Treatise on Painting), Part I (circa 1500) (Catania: Brancato, 1990), p.13; my translation. A.S. Byatt, Portraits in Fiction (London: Chatto & Windus, 2001). Henceforward referred to in the text as PF, followed by page numbers.

224 Paola Spinozzi

II. Maker/container of images, maker/container of meta-artistic questions Ekphrasis is constituted by hermeneutic acts which transpose the visual into the verbal and decode the verbal/visual nexus. The Matisse Stories and Babel Tower3 testify to Byatt’s conception of ekphrasis as both maker and container of visual images but also, in a metaartistic perspective, as maker and container of questions on the ontological status of representation. In Babel Tower the poet Hugh Pink highlights the bifurcation between poems on painting and poems like painting. All these floating discs and brilliant fields of saturated colour. It’s like seeing the elements of creation, it’s like seeing angels, except you shouldn’t use analogies for it, it simply is. It makes me feel ill. […] Because it makes me want to write, as though that was the only sensible thing to do. But I hate poems about paintings, I hate the second-hand. I want to do something like that with words, and there isn’t anything, or if there is, I don’t have access to it. (BT 340)

Visual images on a canvas are made of pigments and colours, painted and solid; verbal images in a poem are typographical signs apprehended as images in the reader’s mind. The underlying aesthetic question is whether there may exist forms of verbal creativity which use words on the page like paintings use colours on the canvas. The inquiry into specifically verbal modes of expressing visual imagination opens up a new perspective on ekphrasis, no longer regarded as a recipient of images drawn from a visual artwork, but as a producer of “other” images. With images ekphrasis produces meta-artistic questions, as the ones raised in “Artwork,” included in The Matisse Stories, by Debbie’s synthetic ekphrastic description of her husband’s paintings: “a serious attempt at a serious and terrible problem, an attempt to answer the question every artist must ask him or herself, at some time, why bother, why make representations of anything at all?” (MS 52). Ontologically, ekphrasis is constituted by verbal elucidation of the image. However, while representing visual art, postmodern ekphrasis represents and questions the representational skills of the verbal art. In the very last passage of Portraits in Fiction Byatt points out that images and their verbal descriptions originate in a proliferation of acts of seeing, reading and figuring. “Writers rely on the endlessly varying visual images of individual readers and on the constructive visualising work those readers do” (PF 2). While further speculating on topics tackled in Babel Tower and The Matisse Stories, in Portraits in Fiction she opens up a more controversial ground for discussion on logocentric, meta-artistic issues and, more intriguingly, on the sources of narrativity.

3

A.S. Byatt, The Matisse Stories (London: Vintage, 1994); A.S. Byatt, Babel Tower (London: Vintage, 1996). Henceforward referred to in the text respectively as MS and BT, followed by page numbers.

Ekphrasis as Portrait 225

III. Logocentric ekphrasis The circulation of visual artefacts made intelligible by massive outputs of verbal aid presupposes that visual art has an enigmatic core that is verbally explainable. Michel Butor’s remarks on the pervasiveness of “pictorial pedagogy” sound as cogent now as they did more than three decades ago. Toute notre expérience de la peinture comporte en fait une considération partie verbale. Nous ne voyons jamais les tableaux seuls, notre vision n’est jamais pure vision. Nous entendons parler des œuvres, nous lisons de la critique d’art, notre regard est tout entouré, tout préparé par un halo de commentaires […] De tels procédés de pédagogie picturale se répandent de plus en plus, et aucun musée aujourd’hui ne peut se considérer comme moderne, s’il ne propose à ses clients des audio-guides. 4 (Actually, our experience of painting always involves a partly verbal thought. We never see just paintings, our vision is never a pure vision. We hear about artworks, we read art criticism, our eyes are surrounded, trained by a halo of commentaries […] Such pictorial pedagogy is becoming more and more current, and nowadays no museum would be considered modern if it did not offer audio-guides to its visitors.)

Reading visual artefacts is a cultural practice deeply embedded in the logocentric view that images engender a hermeneutic impasse which words can overcome, because the metaartistic potentialities of writing are to be found in no other art. Only the verbal code can speak of itself by means of itself, because it is vehicular; the visual code cannot, as W.J.T. Mitchell points out: “visual representation cannot represent itself; it must be represented by discourse.”5 Verbal meaning attributed to the image is founded on the bias that the image cannot be wholly comprehended without verbal interpretations. Byatt’s ekphrastic descriptions of portraits from the Renaissance to the contemporary age sustain the logocentric conception that visual art is a powerful source of inspiration for verbal art. Portraiture with words competes with and even surpasses portraiture with the brush: the representational power of the visual image is overcome by the evocative power of the image verbalised which, functioning as the verbal substitute for something absent, stimulates acts of figuration by the reader. Byatt’s conceptualisation of ekphrasis as portraiture revolves around a hierarchical view of relations between word and image: visual representation lacks the epistemological multi-layered-ness and depth that verbal representation can achieve. What a novelist can do, which is difficult for a painter, is convey what is not, and cannot, be known about a human being” (PF 91-92). In Byatt’s distinction between portraits in painting and in fiction one can but hear the echoes of the conception, formulated in Victorian culture, which classified the exteriority of painting as inferior to the moral, intellectual depth of literature. In Pre-Raphaelite paintings like The Awakening Conscience (1853) by William Holman Hunt and The Huguenot (1852) by John Everett Millais, John Ruskin saluted the expression of a visual art that goes beyond mimesis because, although it represents subjects whose outward appearance on the canvas is

4 5

Michel Butor, Les mots dans la peinture (Géneve: Skira, 1969), pp.8, 9; my translation. W.J.T. Mitchell, ‘Ekphrasis and the Other’, in Picture Theory (Chicago, Ill: The University of Chicago Press, 1994), pp.151-81 (p.157).

226 Paola Spinozzi realistic, it yet endows representation with a poetical quality originating in the artist’s personal view of the world: a certain distinction must generally exist between men who, like Horace Vernet, David, or Domenico Tintoret, would employ themselves in painting, more or less, graphically, the outward verities of passing events — battles councils, etc. — of their day ([…] properly so called, historical or narrative painters); and men who sought, in scenes of perhaps less outward importance, “noble grounds for noble emotions”; — who would be, in a separate sense, poetical painters, some of them taking for subjects events which had actually happened, and others themes from the poets; or, better still, becoming poets themselves in the entire sense, and inventing the story as they painted it. Painting seems to me only just to be beginning, in this sense also, to take its proper position beside literature, and the pictures of the Awakening Conscience, Huguenot and such others, to be the first fruits of its new effort.6

The antithesis between the mere representational faculty of the outward visual medium and the mythopoeic potentialities of the inward verbal one was made explicit by Wilde in the argument sustaining his preference for ekphrastic depictions of La Gioconda (1503-1506): Prose appreciations of Ruskin and Pater are […] greater, I always think, even as Literature is the greater art. Who, again, cares whether Mr Pater has put into the portrait of Monna Lisa something that Lionardo never dreamed of? […] And so the picture becomes more wonderful to us than it really is, and reveals to us a secret of which, in truth, it knows nothing, and the music of the mystical prose is as sweet in our ears as was the flute-player’s music that lent the lips of La Gioconda those subtle and poisonous curves.7

Wilde responds to the supremacy Leonardo attributes to painting in his “paragone” by contending that portraits in fiction possess an epiphanic quality which painterly portraits lack altogether. Furthermore, the portrait is

6

7

William Holman Hunt, The Awakening Conscience, 1853 (Tate Gallery, London)

John Ruskin, Modern Painters, Book III, Part IV, Chapter VII, Of the True Ideal:— Secondly, Naturalist, in The Works of John Ruskin, 39 vols., edited by E.T. Cook and A. Wedderburn (London: George Allen, 19031912), pp.126-127. Oscar Wilde, ‘The Critic as Artist’ (1891), Intentions (London: Methuen & Co., 1913), pp.93-217 (p.144).

Ekphrasis as Portrait 227 there to be verbally interpreted, to be deconstructed and reconstructed in endless images, to be un-veiled, metamorphosed, and charged with “other,” symbolic meanings by means of verbalisation.8 Byatt, in whose gallery of ekphrastic portraits the ones Wilde made of Dorian Gray come into prominence, further emphasises the concept that reading a verbal image is a more challenging and creative act than decoding a visual image. Readers need subtle, ingenious hermeneutic tools while perusing a fictional portrait of what cannot be seen and is verbally made visible, “the visualised unseen”: But readers will see as many Manets, as many Watts, as many imaginary photographs as there are readers, all connected, all different […] For this reason – the energy which is generated by the visualised unseen, and the further energy that springs from trying to bridge gaps and reconcile or connect discrepancies in limited descriptions – a novelist, particularly a visually minded novelist, will always feel anxious, even afraid, about the portrayal of their characters by actors. […] Visual images are stronger than verbal half images, and a good novel exploits the richness of the imprecision, of the hinted. Painting […] is a materialist art, about the material world. The novel […] works inside the head (PF 92-93).

A logocentric bias impinges on the distinctions Byatt draws between a visual and a verbal portrait. The former unfolds one, and one only, representation and constrains the observer’s apprehension within a surface – canvas or screen –, while reception of the latter expands in unconfined cognitive spaces. The emphasis on the verbal system of representation as more cerebral, composite and layered reveals that visual art appeals to Byatt not per se, but because it nourishes verbal art; it is a source of creativity for writing. Moreover, when she declares that seeing a portrait on a canvas mainly involves seeing the painter incorporated in it, she restricts her assessment to a highly personal plane of interaction between painter and sitter and disregards the social and cultural implications connected with the iconographic construction of a portrait: every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not the sitter. The sitter is merely the accident, the occasion. It is not he who is revealed by the painter: it is rather the painter who, on the coloured canvas, reveals himself. The reason that I will not exhibit this picture I that I am afraid I have shown in it the secret of my own soul. […] The Picture of Dorian Gray is of course also a Portrait of the Artist, who was Oscar Wilde. All three main characters have large elements of Wilde in them, Dorian’s aesthetic detachment, Lord Henry’s cynicism, Basil Hallward’s gentle love for the younger man. […] My imaginary Manet, my imaginary Watts, my imaginary poets, are part of Roland, and they are all of course part of me. (PF 56, 64, 93)

While she undervalues the signifying processes involved in portraiture by sustaining that a portrait by a painter discloses a portrait of the painter to the beholder, she magnifies the uncanny evocative power of a portrait in fiction; indeed, reading such a verbal artefact 8

I have explored Victorian mises en abyme produced by verbal artworks that originate in the envisioning of a figurative artwork in ‘Pittura in poesia. Metamorfosi interartistiche nei poemi iconici di William Morris’, Il Lettore di provincia, anno XXVIII, fasc. 98 (aprile 1997), 55-80; and in ‘As Yet Untitled. A Sonnet by Walter Crane for a Painting by G.F. Watts: Ekphrasis as Nomination’, in Literature and the Arts, ed. Stephen Bann and Vita Fortunati, Textus: English Studies in Italy, vol. XII:1 (January-June 1999), 114-34.

228 Paola Spinozzi means encountering a Doppelgänger, whose figuration conflates with the other, real self, disfigures it and prompts endless acts of re-figuring: those who find themselves “in” people’s novels […] know that they will be haunted thereafter by an almost certainly unwanted doppelgänger, a public image or simulacrum whose sayings, feelings, and even life history, will be confounded with their own. Portraits in novels feel to the portrayed most often like attacks. (PF 41)

Conceptual ambiguity can be detected by comparing her critical evaluation of Ford Madox Ford’s and Wilde’s use of portraits in The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) and The Fifth Queen (1906). Byatt’s interest in uncanny, entangling psychological components involved in the artist-sitter-observer relationship as dramatised by Wilde contrasts with her critical assessment of Ford as a historical novelist. Wilde speculated on the Art/Life nexus, while Ford developed his theories of fictionalised history in critical response to Pre-Raphaelite hyper-realistic detail, to Ford Madox Brown’s historical painting and to portraits by Holbein and Dürer, who bore witness to two distinct phases of European history. Wilde’s self-reflexivity and Ford’s rendering of a historical atmosphere constitute polarities between which Byatt oscillates. On the one hand, she highly appreciates Ford’s ability to empower his own craft by appropriating the painter’s capacity to make events visible as well as to render them evocative. On the other hand, Wilde’s apprehension of the world through and within art elicits Byatt’s propensity to self-reflexivity and meta-narrativity.

IV. Postmodern Appropriations of Ekphrasis: Narration/Narrativity Byatt’s arguments about fictional and painterly portraits constitute the conceptual framework for subtler inquiries into the nexus between ekphrasis and narration. Her wideranging diachronic, comparative study of portraiture on canvas and with words interlaces ekphrasis and narrativity and provides an insight into the creative sources of postmodern verbal artworks. After modernists became aware that cognitive gaps and referential hiatus affect the subject’s apprehension of the world and its verbal rendering, after they proved that “real life cannot be truthfully represented as having the kind of coherence met with the conventional, well-made or fabulistic story,”9 postmodern writers have employed ekphrasis as a response to the de-narrativisation of the novel. Modernist description thematised the narrator’s need to expose cognitive faculties affected by epistemological fissures: rather than disclosing knowledge and substantiating narration, descriptions of characters and events un-ground verbalisation by making it the object of unremitting revisions. Instead, the mise en scène of ekphrasis shows that verbal representations of visual representations are potentials for narrative. Canonical and fictional masterpieces of painting appear as objets d’art, which the

9

Hayden White, ‘The Ironic Poetics of late Modernity’, interview to Angelica Koufou & M. Miliori, Historein. A Review of the Past and Other Stories, vol. 2 (Athens 2000), http://www.historein.gr/vol2_interview.htm

Ekphrasis as Portrait 229 writer metamorphoses into stories and introduces as threads of narration while weaving the plot. Postmodern ekphrasis calls for a thorough revision of theories which have opposed spatial, located, stabilised painting to temporal, mobile, dynamic literature and have regarded descriptions of visual artworks as “foreign bodies” able to turn verbal representation into formal works for aesthetic contemplation: The spatial work freezes the temporal work even as the latter seeks to free it from space […] I see [ekphrasis] introduced in order to use a plastic object as a symbol of the frozen, stilled world of plastic relationships which must be superimposed upon literature’s turning world to “still” it.10

Krieger’s contention that the ekphrastic piece slows down, even paralyses the flux of the narrated events by describing a static artwork has been further expanded by Grant F. Scott’s definition of ekphrasis as “all that is ‘other’ to the central elucidating narrative and all that subverts an overriding telos.”11 Krieger’s and Scott’s fear of the neutralising power of ekphrasis has been counter-weighed by James Heffernan’s view of ekphrastic description as a polarity which attracts the reader with its energeia: Krieger stretches ekphrasis to the point where it no longer serves to contain any particular kind of literature and merely becomes a new name for formalism […] Traditionally ekphrasis is narrational and prosopopoeial, it releases the narrative impulse that graphic art typically checks, and it enables the silent figures of graphic art to speak.12

More recently, Mieke Bal has enunciated the theoretical basis of “descriptive narratology” by contending that description is a “natural” rhetorical form of narration and of the novel.13 Description, redefined as that which gives motion to narration and related to ekphrastic portraiture, opens up new grounds for discussion. While being introduced into another logos, ekphrasis presupposes its own logos. It is autonomous because as a description it suffices for comprehension even when extracted from its verbal context; to that very context, nonetheless, it belongs and refers. Ekphrasis marks a change in the narrative rhythm; indeed, it introduces a rhythm into the narration, it creates a deviation/deviance from what has been narrated before and what will be narrated thereafter. Ekphrasis acts as an interruption and a source of narrativity, it exists in symbiosis with narration. Ekphrastic portraiture as conceptualised and expressed by Byatt demonstrates that ekphrasis is a driving force, because the subject portrayed with vividness empowers the rhythm of narration. Why and how narrative and descriptive ekphrasis are interlaced can be elucidated by examining the majestic Elizabeth I (1575) which opens Portraits in Fiction: Murray Krieger, ‘The Ekphrastic Principle and the Still Movement of Poetry; or Laokoön Revisited’, in The Poet as Critic, ed. F.P.W. McDowell (Evanston , Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1967), p.5. 11 Grant F. Scott, ‘The Rhetoric of Dilation: Ekphrasis and Ideology’, Word & Image: A Journal of Verbal/Visual Enquiry 7: 4 (October-December 1991), 301-10 (p.306). 12 J.A.W. Heffernan, ‘Ekphrasis and Representation’, New Literary History 22: 2 (Spring 1991), 297-316 (p. 304). 13 Mieke Bal, ‘Descrizioni, costruzione di mondi e tempo della narrazione’, in Il romanzo II. Le forme, ed. Franco Moretti (Torino: Einaudi, 2002), pp.189-224. 10

230 Paola Spinozzi There she stood, a clear, powerful image, in her airy dress of creamy stiff silk, embroidered with golden fronds, laced with coral tassels, lightly looped with pearls. She stood and stared with the stillness and energy of a young girl. The frozen lassitude of the long white hands exhibited their fineness; they dangled or gripped, it was hard to tell which, a circular feathery fan, whose harsh whirls of darker colours suggested a passion, a fury of movement suppressed in the figure. There were other ambiguities in the portrait, the longer one stared, doublenesses that went beyond the obvious one of woman and ruler. The bright-blanched face was young and arrogant. Or it was chalky, bleak, bony, any age at all, the black eyes under heavy lids knowing and distant. […] I had been obsessed since childhood with the figure of the solitary clever woman (PF 3-4)

Byatt corresponds to the varieties of hues, the richness of detail and the preciousness of ornament, through which the painter renders the supreme polish of the queenly figure, with an ekphrasis made of overabundant adjec(unknown artist), Elizabeth I, c.1575 tives and symmetrical verbal constructions. (National Portrait Gallery, London) “Embroidered with golden fronds, laced with coral tassels, lightly looped with pearls”: in the description of the dress, three past participles bring specific details into iconic prominence. Postmodern ekphrasis “makes sense” not as a verbal translation of images, but as a spacious archive of images turned into narration. Ekphrastic portraits are poietic ganglia which thrive on iconic material and from which endless narrative routes depart. Conceived as the site of narrativity from which a multiplicity of narrations may begin, ekphrasis answers urging postmodern questions such as, “How to begin narration?,” “Where does narration begin?” Ekphrasis is a mode for initiating narration as well as a mode of narration, it gives rise to the construction of a plot but also implements it. Indeed, “a fury of movement suppressed in the figure” (a phrase in the passage above) sounds like a metaphor for the narrative tension aroused by Byatt’s ekphrasis. In Portraits in Fiction the proliferation of ekphrastic portraiture, juxtaposed with colour reproductions of portraits exhibits Byatt’s ability to create narrations. Her descriptions of paintings generate narration. The dislocation of portraits and their relocation in her writing exhibits that they have another existence, in written form, through ekphrasis. Each ekphrastic portrait is “other” from the one on canvas, it is its ekphrasis. Ultimately, ekphrastic portraiture as container and maker of narrativity stands out more prominently than its content, namely the subject of the painting. The metonymic shift between “what is in ekphrasis?” and “what is ekphrasis?,” as developed by Byatt, reveals that ekphrastic portraiture is a source of narrativity.

Ekphrasis as Portrait 231 When she appropriates the legacy of nineteenth-century French writers and painters by presenting Zola’s account of Manet’s Emile Zola (1868), she discloses ekphrastic portraiture in its most cerebral form: In 1868 Zola was challenged by a friend to include Manet’s portrait of himself in his account of the Salon. It is one of the most interesting records of the thoughts of a man who works with words, watching himself appear on the canvas of a man who worked with colour and light. The thoughts he records look forward to L’Œuvre twenty years later. I remember the long hours of posing. My limbs grew tired with staring into bright light, and the same thoughts floated perpetually in my head, with a soft, interior sound. The stupidities out in the streets, lies and platitudes, all this human noise that runs away uselessly like dirty water, water far away, very far away. It seemed to me that I was outside the earth, in an air of truth and full of disdainful pity for the poor creatures who floundered about below. (PF 45-46)

Ekphrastic portraiture endows the writer with the unique gift of turning the subject of the portrait into a narrational core. Byatt’s fascination with Zola’s ekphrastic portrait arises from her awareness that it is much more than a description of a painting, it is the germ of a story. A story so powerful as to be able to engender a mise en abyme of narrativity. Zola writes his own portrait of the artist as portrait-maker. From time to time, out of the half-sleep of the pose, I watched the artist, standing in front of the canvas, his face tense, his eye clear, intent on his work. He had forgotten me, he no longer knew I was there, he was making a copy of me, as he would have made a copy of any other human animal, with an attention, an artistic awareness, that I’ve never seen anywhere else. (PF 46-47)

Ekphrastic portraiture not only writes its own portrait of the artist as portrait-maker but also of the writer as a subject for a portrait. Images cannot be kept enclosed within ekphrastic description: from ekphrasis “other” images proliferate and spread.

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5. THE LENS AND THE PRINT: TEXT, PHOTO, SEMIOTICS

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Caroline Blinder

“A Kind of Patriotism”: Jack Kerouac’s Introduction to Robert Frank’s The Americans (1959) Dismissed as anti-American at the time, the photographer Robert Frank’s choice of Jack Kerouac as the introductory writer for his seminal photo-text The Americans (1959) was influenced both by an idea of a vernacular modernism hailing from the 1930s and by contemporary Beat poetics. In Kerouac’s introduction photography is described in terms of both movement and temporality, as something that enables a return to and a prophecy of a more spiritually sound America. Asked by Frank to provide an introduction, Kerouac in The Americans poeticises as well as questions the possibility of a democratic vision of America untainted by the Cold War. Between Kerouac’s romanticism and Frank’s more cynical perspective thus lay a radical transformation of the documentary project; one in which Kerouac’s beat aesthetic reclaimed an Emersonian transcendentalism for photography at the very point in time when American politics made it nearly impossible for Americans to believe in it. As Jack Kerouac puts it in the introduction, “The humour, the sadness, the EVERYTHING-ness and American-ness of these pictures!” This notion of an “everything-ness and American-ness” is the belief in photography’s ability to capture the essential nature of America, to supply a vision both cohesive and “true” because of its apparent realism. For Kerouac, Frank’s “eye” is that of the poet first and foremost. Nevertheless, The Americans is more than simply a visual example of a 1950s Beat tradition, although it shares a great deal with it, just as Kerouac’s introduction is a statement of poetic intent as much as an introduction. This paper seeks to examine, on the one hand, Kerouac’s fascination with the mnemonic and iconographical power of the photograph, and on the other, how this is linked to Frank’s photographic aesthetic where the “everything-ness” of America becomes both a view and critique of a nation.

A lesson for any writer ... To follow a photographer and look at what he shoots ... I mean a great photographer and look at what he shoots ... I mean a great photographer, and artist ... And how he does it. The result: Whatever it is, it’s America. It’s the American road and it awakens the eye every time.1

Robert Frank’s iconic black and white photographs of America in the 1950s, published in book form as The Americans in 1958 in Paris and in a U.S. version in 1959, is commonly seen as a departure from earlier photo-texts seeking to identify a quintessentially American landscape. With its focus on people on the move both physically and emotionally in terms of shifting social and racial alliances, The Americans has become synonymous with a vision of America that is both wistful and critical at the same time.2 Nevertheless, despite the acclaim of Frank’s photographs, the book – as a book and not merely a selection of images – has seldom been analysed in a literary sense. Hence, while a combination of social analysis and lyrical intensity has been used to validate the photographs, the extent to which a written form of lyricism informs the book overall is still underestimated. In doing so, critics have had a hard time deciphering what could be seen as a curiously romanticised vision of the 1940s and 50s co-existing with a vision of alienation, 1 2

Jack Kerouac, ‘On the Road to Florida’ (1955), in Literature and Photography: Interactions 1840-1990, ed. by Jane M Rabb (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995), pp.394-397 (p.397). Frank was deeply disappointed by the editorial alterations in the French edition in which he had no discernible say. The publisher Delpire had inserted a selection of sociological and factual information to accompany the images, marketing it more as a straightforward piece of critical investigative documentary photography than a work of art.

236 Caroline Blinder conservatism and segregation in the McCarthy era. The issue is not so much whether the images should be read as ironic commentaries on the American dream or simply as an outsider’s impressionistic vision, the fact remains that the book – despite an ongoing focus on the images – also operates within a distinct literary context. One way to decipher the incongruities of the book’s political and aesthetic stance is precisely through a reading of the book’s introduction, which in many ways breaks with conventional prefaces and introductions to photographic material. Frank’s choice of his friend and occasional collaborator, Jack Kerouac, as the writer for a brief introduction to the American version, was more than simply a way of anticipating the book’s antiestablishment reputation.3 It was, in effect, a deliberate choice based on both a sense of artistic affinity and a deep-felt desire to convey a particular reading of the photographs. Frank chose a writer for whom The Americans, rather than a sociological treatise, was about “the humour, the sadness, the EVERYTHING-ness of … pictures.” The subject of this book was nothing less than “the vast promise of life”; the images represented, in Kerouac’s words, the “humankind-ness” and “human-kindness” of that “speechless distance,” the “cemeterial Californian night” of a personal America that not merely reflects but transcends contemporary politics.4 Kerouac’s intense poetic vision of Frank as a “tragic” troubadour of America both confirmed and subverted the more commonly held view at the time that The Americans was, according to the critic James Zanutto a “sad poem for sick people” and largely about the “wild, sad, disturbed, adolescent, and largely mythical world of the Beats.”5 For Frank, who actively collaborated with both Ginsberg and Kerouac, this sense of melancholy towards America was also about a particular aesthetic, an aesthetic in which seemingly anecdotal visual events could be given great emotional significance. Drawn to the sense of candour and intensity that Kerouac’s image-led writing provided, Frank found in the Beats a way of conveying both a love for America and a natural distrust of its politics. Despite this context, it is too easy to simply see the Frank/Kerouac connection as, above all, an affinity between two misunderstood countercultural critics, both of their moment and time but ultimately both at odds with and dependent on the establishment they critiqued. 3

4 5

According to Terence Pitts, The Americans “captured the breadth of the American continent, the despair, hypocrisy and loneliness that seemed to pervade American society, and the emptiness that lay behind the façade of Hollywood and consumer hype that masqueraded as the good life” – Terence Pitts, Reframing America, (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995), p.86. Similarly, Sarah Greenough writes that while Frank was able to “describe those people, places, and things that seemed true and genuine, with a spiritual integrity or moral order,” the book was nevertheless primarily about the “profound malaise of the American people of the 1950s;” a malaise that ultimately reveals “the deep-seated violence and racism, and the mind-numbing conformity, and similarity of the ways Americans live, work, and relate to one another.” Greenough’s point is that even though Frank was not “formulating a conscious, rational polemic” in ideological terms – the book is primarily a criticism of the American way of life. Sarah Greenough, ‘Fragments that make a whole: Meaning in photographic sequences’, in Robert Frank: Moving Out, ed. by Sarah Greenough and Philip Brookman (Washington: National Gallery of Art, 1994), pp.96-142 (p.115). Robert Frank, The Americans, (New York: Grove Press, 1959), p.6. Joel Eisinger, Trace and Transformation – American Criticism of Photography in the Modernist Period (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995), pp.130-131.

“A Kind of Patriotism” 237 Such a reading, however tempting, neglects the careful photographic and literary lineage that both artists signpost continuously throughout the book. As is not uncommon, the popular image of Kerouac and Frank as groundbreaking radical artists has somehow worked against an investigation of the various traditions which they both laboured under and paid homage to. Conversant with previous poetic homages to American photography, Kerouac would undoubtedly have read both the poet William Carlos Williams’s writings on Walker Evans and Lincoln Kirstein’s introduction to American Photographs (1938), both of which set the tone for a reading of photography in terms of a regionalism configured in a distinctly lyrical vein. Williams’s famous statement concerning Evans deserves to be quoted at length because it sets the scene for all subsequent tributes to photography as a native art form: It is ourselves we see, ourselves lifted from a parochial setting. We see what we have not hitherto realized, ourselves made worthy in our anonymity. What the artist does applies to everything, every day, everywhere to quicken to elucidate, to fortify and enlarge the life about him and make it eloquent – to make it scream [...] gurgle, laugh and speak masterfully when the occasion offers. (By this, by the multiplicity of approach [...] Men are drawn closer and made to feel their separate greatness. Evans is that. He belongs.6

Williams’s delineation of a manifesto for American photography – entitled “Sermon with a Camera” – set out to define photography as an enlarged vision of democracy, an art designed to unite the subject, the photographer, and the reader in one continuous action. For photography to be able to do this, it was crucial to insert it into a democratic heritage in which its sacred and secular ability could co-exist, a mechanism not dissimilar to what Kerouac would later foreground in Frank. Likewise, it was photography’s duty, according to Williams, to convey its ability to recognise the American landscape as both an internal and external entity. “The parochial setting” always forms the basis for what becomes an eloquent discourse on the nature of America. In this sense, Kerouac’s vision of “humankind-ness and human-kindness” not only mimics Williams’s assertion that “men are made to feel their separate greatness,” it manifests a respect for location, for regionalism, and landscape in a wider sense, without which, there can be no true American art. As Williams says, “of only one thing, relative to a work of art, can we be sure: it was bred of a place.”7 While Williams was stressing the importance of photography as a native art form with the indigenous eye of the photographer taking precedence, Lincoln Kirstein’s afterword to Evans’s American Photographs stressed the moral component of the images. For Kirstein the “recording of the presence of every fact” was in itself a way “to create out of a fragmentary moment its own permanence.” This sense of permanence could, if done without any “pretensions to accuracy” or “promises of sensational truth,” reveal our “disasters” as well as our “claims to divinity.” Once the photographer was able to embrace “the isolated and essentialized” within American culture, “the unrelieved, bare-faced, revelatory fact” of our existence, it would confirm that photography was indeed a sacred art 6 7

William Carlos Williams, ‘Sermon with a Camera’ (1938), in Rabb, Jane M. editor, Literature and Photography: Interactions 1840-1990 (Albuquerque: U. of New Mexico Press, 1995), pp.308-312 (p.311). Williams, p.311.

238 Caroline Blinder form. Again, like Kerouac later on, Kirstein unflinchingly designates the photographer’s eye the poet’s eye, the images “finding corroboration in the poet’s voice.”8 Hence, like Williams and Kirstein, Kerouac sets up a manifesto, which slots itself into existing photographic discourses, discourses that both mediate and question what photography can and cannot do. While it is about recording what Kirstein called the “simplicity” and “spirit” of indigenous things, on a wider level it is also about the dichotomy between writing and photography when both function as a form of artistic selfaffirmation as well as social analysis. For Kerouac, Frank’s personalised perspective on the phenomenal world succeeded in giving a measure of this simplicity and spirituality and it did it by transforming the everyday, the ordinary, through an intense investigative look. Resonating with his own writing, Kerouac saw Frank as enabling a vision of the American landscape in which the seemingly innocuous – the parking lot, the supermarket etc – becomes emblematic of life, not just as it is lived, but as a series of poetic gestures grounded in real lives and yet timeless; a form of double vision. The idea of a double vision is, then, about the synthesis between art and lived life and about the transformation of the American people, seen in ordinary situations as extraordinary human beings. Haggard old frowsy dames of Los Angeles leaning peering out the right front window of Old Paw’s car on a Sunday gawking and criticizing to explain Amerikay to little children in the spattered back seat – tattooed guy sleeping on grass in park in Cleveland, snoring dead to the world on a Sunday afternoon with too many balloons and sailboats9

This ability to comment on events as seen when they happened, and as they appear symbolically charged after the fact, not only mirrors Kerouac’s fundamental aim as an artist but spells out a vision of photography as transcendent, as occupying a space where temporality gives way to certain essential truths about America far beyond the political context of the 1950s. In illuminating the mnemonic and iconographical power of the photograph, Frank’s ability to show the “everythingness” of America becomes less a listing of the component parts of American civilisation than a deliberate attempt to portray the potentially contradictory meanings inherent in so much American iconography. Like “the retired old codgers on a bench in the busy mainstreet leaning on their canes and talking about social security,” Frank’s vision is always both localised and universal in its implications.10 In the introduction, Kerouac moves from particular images of people, as described above, to an enlarged vision of movement and space; a move which does not necessarily accord with the actual sequencing of the images. It does, however, accord with Kerouac’s interest in the “charging restless mute unvoiced road” of America as a crucial opening up of the photographic aesthetic.

Lincoln Kirstein, ‘Photographs of America: Walker Evans’ in American Photographs, (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1938), pp.193-198. The Americans, p.9. 9 10 The Americans, p.9. 8

“A Kind of Patriotism” 239 Madroad driving men ahead – the mad road, lonely, leading around the bend into the openings of space towards the horizon Wasatch snows promised us in the vision of the west, spine heights at the world’s end, coast of blue Pacific starry night … orangebutted west lands of Arcadia, forlorn sands of the isolate earth, dewy exposures to infinity in black space … the level of the world, low and flat.11

Kerouac’s stress on the emotive and introspective ability of the photographs, the black space of the interior, pushes towards an interiority that he can only describe through movement, and it is a movement that crucially enables both an “opening” of space and an infinite sense of Frank’s “vision of the west.” In some ways, the black space is the absence of those faces and groups, which might otherwise politicise the landscape and in this respect, Kerouac’s desire to represent Frank as a partially non-politicised artist is fundamentally different from that of Williams and Kirstein on Evans. Partly it has to do with the marked difference in Kerouac’s literary style, a style which brings its own pitfalls and which, one could argue, rather than diffuse the political content of The Americans, simply re-positions it to fit Kerouac’s own agenda. Kerouac’s focus on “starry nights” and “forlorn sands” as an entry into a more emotive reading of the photographs may allow him to engage in his own spontaneous prose, but it also merges his own distaste for political discourse. As Kerouac puts it, “the faces don’t editorialize or criticize or say anything but ‘This is the way we are in real life and if you don’t like it I don’t know anything about it ‘cause I’m living my own life my way and may God bless us all.’”12 The “opening of space” towards a “promised horizon,” in this respect, becomes a way of defining America as above all a safe haven. For Kerouac, Frank’s ability to point out such “sins” as racism proves that at its heart the photographic project can be redemptive as well as critical. Inherent in the belief in photography’s redemptive potential is a simultaneous acceptance of an inward thrust within the photographic project as a whole. Once again, this places Kerouac and Frank’s so-called “countercultural” reputations in a different context, not unlike Williams’s 1930s demarcation of a photography in which the vernacular, the everyday is seen as the stuff of both democracy and art; a photography whose potential – in other words – is independent of its political context. Oddly enough, this intrinsic paradox has never been taken into account in any assessment of The Americans and it explains why straightforward readings of the book as primarily a critique of racism, materialism and patriotism inevitably fall short. Most critics will go so far as to acknowledge that The Americans is a narrative on American values as well as on two men’s inward journey through a particular landscape, but they neglect the fact that it is also a narrative on what it means to be a photographer and a writer at the tail end of a particular photographic tradition; a tradition that saw no discrepancy between photography’s role as social commentary and personal art. The real dichotomy faced by both Frank and Kerouac was, of course, how to visualise something inherently political through an already idealised American iconography. This was the same problem faced by a Beat aesthetic wanting to be both Emersonian in its belief in the so-called “common man” and innovative in intellectual and artistic terms. Frank was

11 12

The Americans, p.8. The Americans, p.6.

240 Caroline Blinder well aware of this and the use of Walker Evans as a referee for the Guggenheim application that enabled Frank to go across the U.S. is no coincidence and is well documented.13 Keen on disseminating a particular vision of America at a particular moment in time, the early creative alliance between Frank and Evans positions The Americans within a tradition of documentary photography in more ways than one: I am applying for a fellowship with a very simple intention: I wish to continue, develop, and widen the kind of work I already do, and have been doing for some ten years, and apply it to the American nation in general. I am submitting work that will be seen to be documentation – most broadly speaking. Work of this kind is, I believe, to be found carrying its own visual impact without much word explanation. The project I have in mind is one that will shape itself as it proceeds, and is essentially elastic. The material is there; the practice will be in the photographer’s hand, the vision in his mind. One says this in some embarrassment but one cannot do less than claim vision if one is to ask for consideration.14

Frank’s claim for vision as paramount to the photographic process was allegedly encouraged by Evans, but more importantly, Evans allowed Frank to define photography as a spiritual endeavour rather than a straightforward sociological and/or historical one. As Frank writes under the guidance of Evans, his intention is simple, the work essentially documentary, and yet he wants to spiritualise “the things that are there, anywhere and everywhere – easily found, not easily selected and interpreted.”15 This paradigm of documentary integrity as an elevated and prophetic art form is more than simply reminiscent of Evans’s practice as set out by Williams and Kirstein. Similar to Evans’s choice of subjects in American Photographs (1938), Frank searches for “the things that are there, anywhere and everywhere.” The implication is not, however, that the mundane or trivial be elevated, but rather that a vernacular quality is illuminated, as symptomatic of something spiritual. The ability to “select and interpret” – like Evans’s – becomes a marker for a documentarism in which the vernacular is made synonymous, not just with the cultural artefacts of the average American, but with something beyond the utilitarian value of the objects and places portrayed. One of the political ramifications of such a vision is precisely to illustrate that there are no “average” Americans. Thus Kerouac’s “mad man resting under American flag canopy in old busted car seat in fantastic Venice California backyard” is a thing of beauty even when not portrayed in heroic terms.16 This quality is fundamental to a romantic thrust within Frank’s ethos as well. It is romantic, partly because it mystifies the photographic process, but more so because it maintains the illusion of an America heroically struggling to survive such things as industrialisation, racism, and urban alienation. Hence beyond Williams and Kirstein, the alignment of photography and poetry, Frank “taking rank among the tragic poets of the world,” heralds back in large measure to Walt Whitman, another writer of the American scene for whom the idea of democracy, language and representation cannot be separated. In

See Jeff L. Rosenheim and Alexis Schwarzenbach (eds.), Unclassified: A Walker Evans Anthology (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000), p.85. 14 Rosenheim and Schwarzenbach, p.87. 15 Rosenheim and Schwarzenbach, p.87. 16 The Americans, p.6. 13

“A Kind of Patriotism” 241 order for the poetic quality to be present in the writing and the images, both have to convey the beauty of the indigenous language and culture from which they stem. In this sense, it is not just the equation between the photographic image and poetry that is crucial, although Kerouac categorically states: “Anybody doesn’t like these pitchers don’t like potry, see?”; it is also about capturing the vernacular speech patterns of the subjects themselves, their veracity and authenticity in linguistic terms. Describing an image of a truck driver’s profile, Kerouac writes: “Car shrouded in fancy expensive tarpolian (I knew a truckdriver pronounced it ‘tar-polian’).”17 Kerouac’s sounding out of words, in this case as a way to contextualise an image, again links photography and writing, Frank’s “beautiful visual entirety in words.” For Kerouac, then, the translucent nature of the vernacular in a spoken and visual sense works on a number of levels. On one level it aligns itself to the American landscape’s ability to point to the godly and the transcendental through an embrace of vernacular culture, while on another, it provides Kerouac with an allegory for the process of writing itself. “In old busted car seat in fantastic Venice California backyard, I could sit in it and sketch 30,000 words … and Robert’s here to tell us so.”18 If photography operates as an allegory for the process of writing, it also refers back to the archetypal exploration of America as Kerouac’s “great” theme. Photography in this sense is as much about defining the utilitarian value of American ideals and dreams as it is about creating a new voice: That crazy feeling in America when the sun is hot on the streets and the music comes out of the jukebox or from a nearby funeral, that’s what Robert Frank has captured in tremendous photographs taken as he travelled on the road around practically forty-eight states in an old used car (on Guggenheim fellowship) and with the agility, mystery, genius, sadness and strange secrecy of a shadow photographed scenes that have never been seen before on film. ... After seeing these pictures you end up finally not knowing whether a jukebox is sadder than a coffin. That’s because he’s always taking pictures of jukeboxes and coffins – and intermediary mysteries like the Negro priest squatting underneath the bright liquid belly mer of the Mississippi at Baton Rouge for some reason at dusk or early dawn with a white snowy cross and secret incantations ... I never thought could be caught on film much less described in its beautiful visual entirety in words.19

The spiritual quality that permeates the landscape is indefinable and permanent, luminous and dark at the same time. Rather than elevate the iconographical status of objects Kerouac demarcates the ontological status of the photograph itself, its ability to catch intermediary mysteries without having to rationalise them. Instead of a rationalised version of the photographic process, Frank chooses to see the images as markers for an intermediary state, one that exists, on the one hand, between life and death, and on the other, between material reality and the spiritual, again the dark interior space of America. Arguably, Kerouac’s work in general hinges on the idea of art as a mediation between life and death, but in this instance, it uses the photograph specifically as such a mediator. The photograph’s mnemonic quality lies in its ability to refer to all those things in America, the jukeboxes, the coffins, “the cemeterial night” that will eventually be lost. What photo-

17 18 19

The Americans, p.8. The Americans, p.6. The Americans, p.5.

242 Caroline Blinder graphy accentuates is not just the element of time but the ability to synthesise what Kerouac aims for in his own writing: the creation of a narrative that derives from image and always leads to image. Kerouac’s definition of photography locates the action, the narrative thrust in The Americans in the very process of recording. The photograph transcends its subject because of its simultaneous ability to convey American culture, as it exists symbolically, in the torn flags and neon signs, and in the individual’s actual experience of that culture. In this lies an impossible desire; the desire to eliminate the dichotomy between actual lived experience – as portrayed in the photos of people going about their everyday lives – and Kerouac’s imagined and oftentimes idealised experience of those lives. Whether these contradictions convey the complex processes involved in the book’s composition is a different issue as they do little to clarify exactly what editorial, creative, and sequential means were adopted by Frank to unify his material. In his eagerness to spiritualise Frank’s effort there is little sense of the social and political terrain charted in the process. The politics of juxtaposing white and black, both photographically and racially, become subsumed in Kerouac’s obsession with the photograph’s ability, as he sees it, to do nothing less than reconcile the artist with his own mortality. Is Kerouac’s introduction, then, fundamentally a search for spiritual confirmation, a confirmation found partially in that idealised sphere that Frank’s images, according to Kerouac, are able to access? In this respect, the funeral references to coffins and crosses are crucial, and not merely in relation to American politics in the Cold War era, for example. For Kerouac, the snowy cross is also the cross that the artist has to bear and Frank’s images enable a redemptive version of that process. Frank’s ability to convey “the sad eternity” and the “sweet little white baby in the black nurses arms both of them bemused in heaven, a picture that should have been blown up and hung in the street of Little Rock, showing love under the sky and in the womb of the universe the mother –” functions as a reminder not only of America’s need for absolution in spiritual terms but of its possibility.20 For Kerouac there is ultimately no distinction between the politics of Little Rock and the womb of the universe. What enables photography’s position as a sacred art is its ability to acknowledge this. Arguably, such alignments occur frequently throughout the beat canon, both in poetic and fictional terms. According to Allen Ginsberg, “Art lies in the consciousness of doing the thing, in the attention to the happening, in the sacramentalisation of everyday reality, the God-worship in the present conversation, no matter what.”21 As another way to define “The humour, the sadness, the EVERYTHING-ness” it seeks (perhaps naively) an essentialist vision of America through the sacred nature of its citizens, a vision that has little to do with realism and everything to do with the redemptive strength of the photographer’s eye. Once the redemptive strength of the photographer’s eye enables the translation of the sacred into an actual image, Kerouac is free to create an America in which the physical landscape, by being photographed, becomes godly:

20 21

The Americans, p.8. Allen Ginsberg, ‘The Great Rememberer’, in Visions of Cody (London: Deutsch Ltd. 1973), p.7.

“A Kind of Patriotism” 243 Drain your basins in old Ohio and the Indian and the Illini Plains, bring your big Muddy rivers thru Kansas and the mudlands, Yellowstone in the frozen North, punch lake holes in Florida and L.A. Raise your cities in the white plain, cast your mountains up, bedawze the west, bedight the west with brave hedgerow cliffs rising in Promethean heights and fame – plant your prisons in the basin of the Utah moon – nudge Canadian groping lands that end in Arctic bays, purl your Mexican ribneck, America – we’re going home, going home.22

Although it has elements of an encompassing indexicality, this vision is more than just a Whitmanesque exercise. On a fundamental level, it is about the writer adopting the photographic stance in order to create a certain type of America. While the listing of places refers obliquely to a sense of movement and travel, Kerouac’s descriptions seem more Ansel Adams-like, more picturesque and ultimately less personal than Frank’s focus on people in The Americans. Here, the natural habitat is described in terms of an idealised homeland, curiously devoid of human faces. It is not that human activity isn’t present; the raising of cities like children, the setting of prisons and so forth, but these activities, rather than potentially politicised visions of territorial encroachment are once again more synonymous with a vision of America as a safe-haven; a pastoral grandeur rising in “Promethean heights.” Frank might not have accepted a reading of The Americans as a safe-haven per se but would have for photography itself, not for the general absolution of the American public, but for the artist himself. In numerous comments, Frank indicates that he too is trying to capture an interior emotional space as much as a politicised external one: Above all, I know that life for a photographer cannot be a matter of indifference. Opinion often consists of a kind of criticism. But criticism can come out of love. It is important to see what is invisible to others. Perhaps the look of hope or the look of sadness... Also it is always the instantaneous reaction to oneself that produces a photograph. [...] There is one thing that the photograph must contain the humanity of the moment. This kind of photography is realism. But realism is not enough there has to be vision, and the two together make a good photograph. It is difficult to describe where this thin line, where matter ends and mind begins.23

Frank’s turning of the photographic subject away from America itself and onwards to that “instantaneous reaction to oneself” accentuates the belief in photography as always ethical and political, personal and emotive.24 For Frank, his kinship with Kerouac is clear in this respect. With Kerouac I did like very much what he wrote, the way he writes. Because he really did love America in a very simple and direct way, and in a quiet way ... I thought he wrote very well about the pictures and how he felt about them. If I continued with still photography, I would try and be more honest and direct about why I go out there and do it. And I guess the only way I could do it is with writing. I think that’s one of the hardest things to do –

The Americans, pp.7-8. William S. Johnson (ed.), The Pictures are a necessity: Robert Frank in Rochester, NY November 1988 (Rochester: George Eastman House, 1989), pp.40-42. 24 “1960, Decide to put my camera in my closet. Enough of observing and hunting and capturing (sometimes) the essence of what is black or what is good and where is God” – Johnson, p.75. 22 23

244 Caroline Blinder combine words and photographs. ...That would be the only way I could justify going out on the streets and photographing again.25

When John Szarkowski, the director of photography at the Museum of Modern Art wrote on Frank in 1968, he – like most critics before – downplayed the possibility that the book’s political, moral and lyrical stance resided in a literary tradition as well as a photographic one. Frank’s insistence that photography must be born out of the “instantaneous reaction to oneself” was side-tracked in favour of what Szarkowski saw as the most important aspect of the Americans, namely the creation of “a new iconography for contemporary America, comprised of bits of bus depots, lunch counters, strip developments, empty spaces, cars, and unknowable faces.”26 Szarkowski’s comments say a great deal about how Frank has been and continues to be used by critics of photography. The bus depots, lunch counters and unknowable faces that Szarkowski considered a new iconography for contemporary America, had of course been part of documentarist photography as well as the Beat movement for well over a decade when The Americans was published. For Szarkowski, as for many others, the desire to radicalise Frank simply superseded any assessment of Kerouac’s introduction. For Frank, the choice of Kerouac as the introductory writer for his preferred version of The Americans was nevertheless a fundamental reflection on the photograph’s ability in a larger sense. In Kerouac’s writing the photograph collapsed the boundaries between an internal, personal perspective and an external vision of America: “I’m always looking outside, trying to look inside. Trying to tell something that’s true,” Frank stated repeatedly, a view that according to Allen Ginsberg was very “romantic […] from someone so severe, but so human. So some humour, the humour of existence itself, travelling towards holy immortality.”27

Johnson, p.65. Jane Livingstone, The New York School Photographs 1936-1963 (New York: Stewart, Tabori and Chang, 1992), p.304. 27 Livingstone, p.306. 25 26

Maria de Fátima Lambert

3 (Ultimate) Journeys: Fulton, Weiner & Kiefer This article will approach the work of three different contemporary artists from the perspective afforded by the tradition of evocation, presentation and/or representation of the journey – a particularly potent theme in European art and literature. Although their work is substantially diverse, in all three cases writing and seeing are intrinsically connected, and this relation articulates the very nature of their art. Hamish Fulton pursues his walks and then registers them both in photographs and accurate writing notes. One can accompany him in his journeys through natural landscapes around the world, without ever having been there, just by reading his walk-texts and seeing his photographs. Lawrence Weiner “invades” the urban landscape, buildings and galleries with his writing, which he construes and practises as sculpture. He regards language as a means and a material for sculpture, relating it to the concept of space, and he promotes a journey through real places, in which writing has a strong graphic materialisation in the various sites and areas. Anselm Kiefer almost always inscribes phrases or words in his paintings, in accordance with a philosophical or historical dimension: his is a journey through time and through the history of mankind, with a special bearing on the experience of World War II. He uses his own calligraphy in an ontological sense, emphasising both history and thought.

Ver sempre o poema como uma paisagem. Esta paisagem é dinâmica. […] Mas a paisagem move-se por dentro e por fora. Encaminha-se do dia para a noite, vai de estação para estação, respira e é vulnerável. Ameaça-o o seu próprio fim de paisagem. Pela ameaça e vulnerabilidade ela é viva. E é também uma coisa do imaginário, porque uma paisagem brota do seu mesmo mito de paisagem.1 (Always to see the poem as a landscape. This landscape is dynamic. [...] But the landscape is moving both inside and outside. It proceeds from day into night, from station to station, it breathes and is vulnerable. It is threatened by its own confines as a landscape. It lives on the threat and vulnerability. And it is also a thing of one’s imaginary, because a landscape emanates from its own myth of a landscape.) Language to be looked at and/or things to be read2

This study is guided by a basic purpose: to trace and consider the variety of plastic/visual values that words themselves (as signs, as well as icons) may generate in aesthetic compositions – whether they are photographs, paintings, or in situ projects. I will be referring respectively to Hamish Fulton, Anselm Kiefer and Lawrence Weiner; and I will be reading their achievement, materialised in the bi- and tridimensional work they have produced over several decades, as the paradigm of a journey embodied in words and able to conquer space and overcome time. My own journey with these three artists began some time ago, afforded by the many books, good pictures and excellent exhibitions that have shown me the full scope of their work. My particular concern here will be to focus on what they have in common: a strange and extraordinary way of seeing, living, painting and sculpting with words, highlighted by their accurate recording of their progress on film/video and photography, which allow any viewers to travel with them. 1 2

Herberto Hélder, ‘(guião) ([script])’, Photomaton & Vox (Lisboa: Assírio & Alvim, 1995), p.140. Title of a short essay by Robert Smithson, ‘Language to be Looked at and/or Things to be Read’, in Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, ed. Jack Flam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), p.61.

246 Maria de Fátima Lambert Indeed, we might wonder if we are considering “not words and pictures but poems as visual objects (read: subjects). Not poems about pictures but pictures that are poems.”3

1. Hamish Fulton

The “Landscape” is not in the gallery. [...] The physicality of walking helps to evoke a state of mind and a relationship to landscape. Fulton believes that there is a very strong correlation between his state of mind and his walking performance.4

Going on a walk or a journey, with or without a clear destination, often involves an observation of nature and a visual enjoyment of the landscape. If others are interested in our 3 4

Charles Bernstein, ‘Preface’, in Poetry Plastique, ed. Jay Sanders and Charles Bernstein (New York: Marianne Boestky Gallery, 2001), p.7. Jeffrey Kastner and Brian Wallis, Land and environmental Art (London: Phaidon, 2001), p.129.

3 (Ultimate) Journeys 247 wandering, they can follow it by listening to our narrative or by looking at any images we may have captured and be willing to show. These words and images are both documents and records of one’s private memory; but they may take on yet another significance if they are conceived with an aesthetic or artistic purpose in mind. The journey, or rather its catalogue (as record and inventory) becomes a unique work if the artist intends it to be so. When we do not design or experience the journey ourselves, but are rather confronted with an account or a record of somebody else’s progress, an outside/inside perceptional exercise is involved: either our knowledge of that progress is externally materialised or not. In either case, what happens is of the nature of an ambulation and of a dual displacement: the real displacement of the artist and the virtual displacement of ourselves as viewers. It entails, for the self, an experiental play between external and inner attainment. Indeed, this transposition of one’s anthropological boundaries further involves the possibility of taming “human time,” of escaping its damnation. Hamish Fulton, a Land Art exponent, has developed his walking projects on various sites around the world, and they have become a privileged means of his artistic communication. His art work is crucially based on walking along a certain path and recording his experience of it; his reaction to the landscape can be gauged from the length of his journey and from the number of photographs he takes. Characteristically, he will exhibit those photographs accompanied not by a mere title, but by language that completes the visual record, words and utterances chosen in accordance not only with the place but also the time of his walks. His walks, his journey(s) can be viewed as a sort of pilgrimage – a kind of escape from the wrong feelings of our past or present life: Only this thin pane of glass separates us from the world outside – the way to the mountains starts here – reaching the summit is only my half journey – right shoulder, way of the sun – midnight sun – rocks falling, onto a frozen lake – one stone thrown into a pond – full moon5

He represents what he sees as a row of visible words, one after the other, repeatedly, generating a sound alongside it. This takes a form that is similar to a litany: images and words running and running, again and again. He points us to the sky, and the tree, and then again the sky; and afterwards the cloud, and maybe another cloud, and the sky (the same one, but in a different mood?), and then again sky and tree… and coastline, which is at the core of a particular walking journey. He indicates “PATHS” (and this is actually another word he employs), and the series is resumed again with tree and sky, until (almost) finally he reveals where we are: the “KAMENO RIVER IN WAKAYAMA,” a location that he situates precisely – “JAPAN” – together with a date – “1996” –; after which we are given again the “TREE” and at last are prompted to watch (to see) the “SEA SEA SEA.” All these words are isolated from one another and at the same time they are intimately related to one another in semantic terms. Their meaning runs alongside, but also in between them. Their status as as an aesthetic product is enhanced by their visual and/or iconographic hold over reality, but also by the conceptuality they are referred to. 5

Hamish Fulton, ‘Shadow’, Hamish Fulton (Milano: Edizioni Charta, 1999), p.27

248 Maria de Fátima Lambert They evoke their author’s field of experiences, but they are also able to be shared by every single viewer: a nexus of projection-introjection-projection, in psychoanalytical terms. By resorting to a combined medium and juxtaposing photographs with words, Hamish Fulton helps us; he makes it easier for us. He provides the ultimate “walkscape”: walking along becomes “an aesthetic practice,” in Francesco Careri’s phrase.6

2. Lawrence Weiner But our own path through this article leads us towards the discovery of other approaches to words and writing, and to images and seeing. Lawrence Weiner offers us a different type of pilgrimage: also known as a practitioner of Land and conceptual art, Weiner is committed to different concepts from those explored by Fulton – but they can be said to bear a family resemblance. In the 1990s in particular, Weiner enjoyed working the inside space of art galleries and museum rooms. He literally wrote all around them, pursuing a graphic aim on their walls as if he were walking outside, moving in an open space. Such was the case of the Cadmium Project, carried out in Germany (as we shall see). But he began his aesthetic path by narrowing his referential landscape down to its primary basis. He goes for the major ontological terms and concepts: origin and end, birth and ruin – of a person’s life, as much as of the world at large. 6

Lawrence Weiner. The Sky and the Sea (1986)

Francesco Careri, Walkscapes: El andar como practica estética / Walking as an aesthetic practice (Barcelona: Gustavo Gili, 2002).

3 (Ultimate) Journeys 249 He resumes the Bible, religious phrases and aphorisms. With a sharp sense of synthesis he forces us to focus on the essential: dust, earth – nature, both awake and asleep. But nature is never by itself: we ourselves are in between, placed on that peculiar line that compounds “dust + water” and divides “the sky” from “the earth.” That is definitely where we are: in between. For Lawrence Weiner, language is sculptural material. He appropriates space by recreating it through the resources of language. One of his first projects was Statements, in the nineteen seventies. It was followed by several others, some of which have been recorded in books that are themselves singular art works, such as The Sky and the Sea (1986), memorably formatted as a box. In the artist’s own words, when referring to pieces of this kind, What could I call it? I call them “works”, I call them “pieces”, I called them whatever anybody else was coming up with that sounded like it was not sculpture. Then I realised that I was working with mass, I was working with the materials that people called “sculptors” work with. I was working with mass, I was working with all of the processes of taking out and putting in. This is all a problem of designation. I also realised that I was dealing with very generalised structures in an extremely formalized one.7

Placing a sculpture in a public place, in a specific environment prompts the general public to approach it. People are allowed to deal with it; they are induced to reach out to the hidden structures of the pieces. The Münster Project – Dry Earth & Scattered Ashes – involves writing on steel plates from construction sites, the pieces’ basic material: Weiner wanted his first works to be received as an extension of the pictorial, a venture that would situate itself beyond the pictorial experience and accomplish his wish to overcome it. Indeed, the indoor-outdoor nexus in Weiner’s work should be read in the context of those attempts to triumph over human boundaries of which we have also seen instances in Hamish Fulton’s work; likewise, Weiner’s production takes on an anthropological dimension by retrieving basic cosmogonic elements. He exposes individually the primordial concepts, sharply inscribing each and every one of them. We accept a gesture as constituting a sculpture. The minute you suggest that language itself is a component in the making of a sculpture, the shit hits the fan. Language, when it’s used for literature, when it’s used for poetry, when it’s used for journalism, constitutes an assumed communicative pattern. […] It [Language] represents something. I am interested in what the words mean. I am not interested in the fact that they are words. I am capable of using words for their meaning, presenting them to the other people.8

He performs with his text-pieces. He experiments with different trajectories. He exposes his ideas and goals through these text-pieces, as material and formal units conjoined in a sculptural mode to enact an intentional invasion of space. How does he achieve his intents? How does he accomplish his primordial aim: to change grammar through art, to change language as art?

7 8

Lawrence Weiner interviewed by Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, Lawrence Weiner (London: Phaidon, 1998), p.12 Buchloh, p.19.

250 Maria de Fátima Lambert My use of language is not any way designed and it has never been. I think I am really just a materialist. In fact I am just one of those people who is building structures out in the world for other people to figure out to get around. I am trying to revolutionize society, not building a new department in the same continuum of art history.9

Weiner had to fight against conventional definitions and models of sculpture that, even when based on various types of materials, always seemed to be conducive to some kind of representation, entailing an accepted recognition of some sort. When he introduced the idea of language itself as a primordial component of sculpture, he had to face a harsh reaction from both the general public and a more intellectual audience. It was not at all assumed or accepted that his practice might belong within a communicative pattern, as seen in the use of language in literature, poetry, or journalism. And so Weiner decided to activate the graphic dimension of language the way a graphic designer might do, and thus created a language system of his own, released from conventional linguistic or grammatical responsibilities. Language as wielded by Weiner reveals both its performative and analytic dimensions, as well as a strong awareness of its effectiveness and strength. His choice and arrangement of words will therefore not conform to any established rules and models, since Weiner allows himself to reinterpret and reorganise them, generating in the process a totally other rationale for language. He is not a fanatic follower of Derrida’s deconstruction or of Lacan’s critique of language; but he was certainly aware of Chomsky’s generative grammar, which may have contributed to Weiner’s personal elaboration of language as sculptural material and as (communicative) aesthetic object. When we view the effects of his programmatic attitude to language inscribed on the walls of an art gallery or museum; and explore the trajectories he designs in such sites, his inner/outer images may suggest diverse visions of one’s landscape and inscape. The connections to be acknowledged between words define a gliding stream, capable of yielding multiple readings and implications, as a result of Weiner’s formal/graphic strategies. On the other hand, his work lends itselt to consideration in the light of the Greek notion of tekné. The line drawn by the sequence of words in the space he redesigns retrieves Walter Benjamin’s well-known queries regarding the differences between drawing and painting. In effect, Lawrence Weiner develops his visual grammar mostly along a transversal line (as usually happens in drawing and writing), although he also uses the diagonals and verticals that are more characteristic of painting. Weiner intersects both or even more directions in order to build up a tridimensional work of art. And he does so by striving for the sculptural as materialised in writing, beyond time and intrinsic space.

3. Anselm Kiefer There is another world in a gaze that sees more than the world can see. […] A gaze that will not stay still. There were also those gazes that could not return to that they were looking at To halt there. […]

9

Buchloh, p.13.

3 (Ultimate) Journeys 251 Gazes of a kind that anything other than themselves will devour and corrode. Gazes that will ever persist in that elsewhere of their anguish. […] Gazes already elsewhere, forever from those whose life is emptying beyond themselves.10

The titles of Anselm Kiefer’s works are not found at random. They indicate diversity, invention, accuracy; they demonstrate an inner intention to achieve precise and yet mediate significations. The link between language and iconography, between conventional (iconographic) themes and his very singular motifs will not always be easily played out. Nevertheless, he will not deny any myth, form of art or cultural heritage. Indeed, he constantly journeys to and fro – from the cabalistic tradition to alchemy, from the Bible to German myths, or yet over the vast territory of European philosophy. His literary and iconographic sources are as plural as they prove challenging for narrow-minded viewers. He will solve any so-called ambiguities in a highly personal manner. The timeline of his paintings transcends conventional chronology: he will frequently retrieve at a later moment themes he had deeply worked out and that might seem definitively overcome. This fact about his work, and its underlying attitude, reveal a personal approach to the temporal that will not be ruled by linearity.

Anselm Kiefer. Pathways to Worldly Wisdom: The Battle of Hermann (1993) 10

Pascal Quignard, Vie Secrète (Paris: Gallimard, 1998), p.265; my translation.

252 Maria de Fátima Lambert Indeed, he constantly journeys to and fro – from the cabalistic tradition to alchemy, from the Bible to German myths, or yet over the vast territory of European philosophy. His literary and iconographic sources are as plural as they prove challenging for narrow-minded viewers. He will solve any so-called ambiguities in a highly personal manner. The timeline of his paintings transcends conventional chronology: he will frequently retrieve at a later moment themes he had deeply worked out and that might seem definitively overcome. This fact about his work, and its underlying attitude, reveal a personal approach to the temporal that will not be ruled by linearity. He summons our attention by actually writing both with his own bare hands and with paint brushes: they make calligraphy their skill. He retrieves in its full original sense the concept of manuscript, of anthropological palimpsest, even. And so he steps into essences – or at least he tries. Those books, as well as those photographic series that are more directly related to his war sequence – Die Überschwemmung Heidelbergs (1969) – are dramatic allegories and melancholic acts of liberation in which the author’s calligraphy embodies a sharp consciousness of the human condition. In this work the beauty of the landscape photos is defeated by the intense drama within. His most extreme act appears between the covers of Cauterisation of the Buchen Rural District (1975): this book is made of previously painted canvas (painted fragments, views of that specific rural landscape) that he has burnt, enacting a metaphorical or symbolical representation of destruction and power. He overcomes any dimension of fictional narrative – either literary or painterly – and presents in the very material of the book the idea it should represent. Books are not a secondary product of his creative process: they connect all his skills and achievements – performance, paintings, sculptures, installations, engravings… Books both carry his past and point forward to the future. As noted above, Kiefer’s conceptual approach positions him on a contemporary path that nonetheless veers again and again towards the historic or mythic past. Sometimes the irony in this procedure is undisguisable, as in the case of his book (yet another singular piece) Donald Judd hides Brunhilde (1976); but the ludic element does not entail that he ever discards the pathos or the phantoms of the German historical legacy. The importance of books in his artistic procedure, according to Daniel Arasse,11 is that the complex achievement they represent is ultimately to be recognised as the general structure of his whole work. The very fact that his books integrate tributes (for instance) to Jean Genet or Martin Heidegger, underscores the intrinsic relationship they establish between poetry, philosophy and the visual arts, and emphasises how profound that relationship is. And this leads us to the final stage on this path: that which concerns essence and existence, that concerns being – that has to do with us, with each one of us. That is one of Anselm Kiefer’s painterly obsessions. He inscribes such words as these in several of his works. The concern with existence is especially bound to call our attention: whether construed as pain or happiness, it depends on facts; but normally, not just because Sartre 11

Cf. Daniel Arasse, Anselm Kiefer (Paris: Editions du Regard, 2001), passim.

3 (Ultimate) Journeys 253 says it, we have a clearest notion of existence when the pain is deep and the way out is blocked. Kiefer steeps himself in Heidegger’s ontology – one of this artist’s major philosophical references – and transports it into colours and forms. Indeed, the importance of Heidegger’s thought proves pervasive – and this holds true even when Kiefer’s work may disclose an ironic or critical view of the role and personality of the philosopher, in the context of recent German and European history. The influence of Heidegger’s ontological reflections, which denunciate and bring out the inner borders of the human person in one’s first and simultaneously ultimate stage of being, is strongly to be seen in the painter’s fears and obsessions, themselves a reflection of the failure of a common social and historical past. We might consider that Kiefer’s two paradigmatic aquarelles titled Essence and Existence – the two fundamental concepts in Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit – are to a certain extent ironical. But in view of the intensity of the philosopher’s hidden or manifest presence in Kiefer’s whole career, they should be given due attention. The Essence and Existence tableaux meet each other at an almost ontological level in Kiefer’s iconography. The existential dimension hints at a melancholic spirituality hidden behind the lucid and rough arguments. Essence and Existence – both as words and as painterly elements – are conjoined in another painting by Kiefer, where the letters and the words lose their prime function and become the background, the scenery. As a metaphor of the ephemeral, words turn into a horse running through a pinewood. The landscape remains but the animal runs away, escapes and only leaves his track for us to gaze at. Words are tracks, leftovers of experience, thoughts, ideas or arguments; they allow us to recall long lost visions of life – of inner life. Kiefer’s writerly interventions in his paintings may at times seem very subtle, almost as if they were not to be seen… but they reach painfully out to our incorporation of the boundaries of the human.

Coda As Xavier de Maistre told us in his eighteenth-century narrative A Journey Around My Room, we can set off on a journey and yet stay still in that same and only place where we consent to be.12 Such unique experience is only made possible by self-knowledge and a will to wander, and offers a powerful instance of the concepts of imaginary space and psychological time. This is also related to the concept of flânerie, that recurs in Baudelaire, Apollinaire, and later in Benjamin. All three authors, writing in different contexts and with different philosophical assumptions, were crucially nurtured by this idea. Not only in a poetic sense, but also (one might say) in the sense of an anthropology of the self. Curiously enough, the journey Walter Benjamin refers to in his work One way Street was accomplished during his childhood years in Berlin.13 His woods are the city woods. The shops, the people, the house he lived in, his mother and family are the actors of both the real and fictional life he pursues. In these short poetic stories to be told in whispers, and 12 13

Xavier de Meistre, A Journey Around My Room (London: Hesperus Classics, 2004), passim. Walter Benjamin, One Way Street and Other Writings (New York: The Verso Classics Series, 1997).

254 Maria de Fátima Lambert certainly not in a loud voice, he concentrates the inner path of the initiated. It is a book about how the images around us, visually apprehended, direct the whole person, particularly its most inner substance. So in this case essence and existence are conjoined in a painful game of anguish and doubts, only redeemed by the intensity of their course, both iconographic and poetic. The place described in the book was a particular place, not where one lived of course, but not far either, I know exactly where it was.14

Conclusion In James Cowan’s A Mapmaker’s Dream Fra Mauro reflects on one’s tendency to believe that, even when seeing the world through the eyes of others, we really saw the world we found in their accounts.15 Their experience and ventures become our own undertaking, and Fra Mauro indeed believed that through his writings he could go even farther: he was deciphering and translating what others had been unable to describe. This in fact happens all the time, through a sort of common vicarious process. We tend (and we try) to possess the vision and images of others, their words and/or stories. And, in a strange, mysterious way we tend to believe those aesthetic, poetic objects have really come under our authority – and even that they can thus become better and more grandiose than when written, drawn or told by their actual author. And so, in the fulfilment of the three journeys undertaken in this article each and everyone of the works of the authors in question have somehow been made our own. Through their creations in word, image or both, their achievements have become our painfully attained aim, our much desired final goal: writing and seeing secure one’s aesthetic property. To conclude, an attempt to classify the three cases considered above, considering the nature of the relationship they pursue between writing and seeing: Writing is used by FULTON as a signal complement that enhances the visibility of his work, of his aesthetic achievement; his walks are the basis for the art materials that his walk-texts and photographs confront us with; the emptiness of mind he attempts to achieve during his walks subsequently gives way to the fulfilment afforded by these walk-texts and photographs, which match the meditative quality he constructs for himself; Writing is in most cases used by WEINER as artistic work itself; writing is an instrument of change, a tool to achieve a transformation of grammar; writing is the substance, the content and the form of the work; in other projects it is also used as a complement – as in Fulton’s case; language is a sculptural material;

Peter Handke, Der Kurze Brief zum Langen Abschied [A brief letter for a long goodbye] (Berlin: Dt. Buchgemeinschaft, 1972), p.80; my translation. 15 Cf James Cowan, A Mapmaker’s Dream – The Meditations of Fra Mauro, Cartographer to the Court of Venice (Boston: Shambhala, 1996), pp.78-9. 14

3 (Ultimate) Journeys 255 Writing is used by KIEFER as an infatuation with the imagetic values within the pictorial composition; his keen approach to writing is focused on a peculiar assumption of calligraphy that yet retains the accuracy and relevance the painter invests in the transmission of ideas or concepts related to literary, mythical or philosophical subjects, in all their extent and scope. In paradigmatic cases the painted object/subject, the calligraphic matter and/or the solo word synthesises an important concept that is welded to the diverse visual elements in the painting: the solo word concentrates the different substances featured, both in their hermeneutic and iconographic dimensions.

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Adriana Baptista

Karen Knorr and Tracey Moffat: When the photographer chooses the words in order to photograph the images Attaching a text to a photograph raises a number of questions, even when Vilém Flusser states that both texts and images are systems that share the characteristic of mediation.1 For Flusser, images are mediations between man and the real, while texts are mediations between man and images; nonetheless, photography – though it cannot be considered a totally isomorphic system of representing reality – is a more immediate system, whereas verbal language (nowadays oral as well as written language) is radically a non-isomorphic (i.e., mediated) reference system. The articulation of these two systems queries the advantages of the word vis-à-vis the image, at a time when the process W.J.T. Mitchell has termed “the pictorial turn” seems ineluctable.2 How can a system removed from reality support the interpretation of another, which executes zooming and framing strategies upon real life capable of returning much clearer forms than the ones we originally perceived? Is the action of the text, when attached to an image, driven indeed by the intention to reduce the polysemy of the word, as Barthes suggested?3 Is the word the way the photographer has of giving time back to the still image? When we take into account Nancy Newhall’s distinction between text, heading and caption, and Karen Knorr’s own suggestion that the texts that surround her photographs should be read as “légendes,” in the sense that evokes “mythological wonder,” rather than as headings or captions, we feel the need to know if the contribution these texts attempt to give to the images they accompany is indeed that of clarification.4 The typology elaborated by Newhall for the caption, namely in the particular case of the “additive legend,” needs, therefore, to be reconsidered, if we are to try and understand the (in)distinction between narrative and descriptive texts, taken as instances of a hybrid text composed of photograph and word.

In today’s culture we may feel we are the compliant and gratified hostages of a productive interpenetration of image and writing. It would be wrong to assume, from a synchronic or a diachronic perspective, that the text is or ever was more important than the image, or vice versa. According to Anne-Marie Christin, not even the notion that writing may originally have derived from the iconic image should entail that we assess one above the other.5 What seems to be important to point out here is that, despite the fact that we are talking about two representational systems with different semiotic characteristics (due to their different degrees of isomorphism in regard to reality), they are not of necessity mutually exclusive or opposed. Rather, the two systems are able to relate to each other in ways that enable complex and heterogeneous meanings to emerge. As W.J.T. Mitchell argues, “The

1 2 3 4

5

Vilém Flusser, Ensaio sobre a Fotografia. Para uma filosofia da técnica (Towards a Philosophy of Photography) (Lisboa: Relógio d’Água, 1998), passim. W. J. T. Mitchell, Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1994), passim. Roland Barthes, ‘Rhétorique de l’image’, Communications, 4 (1964), 40-51. Nancy Newhall, ‘La legende: l’interrelation des mots et de la photographie’, (first published in Aperture, 1, 1952), Les Cahiers de la Photographie, 2, Litterature, Photographie (1981), 5-12; Karen Knorr, Marks of Distinction (London: Thames and Hudson, 1991), passim. Anne-Marie Christin, L’image écrite ou la déraison graphique (Paris: Flammarion, 1995; repr 2001), passim.

258 Adriana Baptista interaction of pictures and texts is constitutive of representation,” and “all media are mixed media, and all representations are heterogeneous.”6 In an essay on photography, Vilém Flusser – who argues that texts and images are systems that share the characteristic of mediation, since images are mediations between man and the real; texts, mediations between man and images – gives such importance both to written texts and to “technical images” that he claims human cultural structure has undergone two revolutions. The first one, around the middle of the second millennium B.C, would have corresponded to the invention of linear writing; and the second, which we are currently going through, “can be captured under the label of the ‘invention of technical images.”7 And if “images are mediations of the world”8 – in other words, if like “screens” of reality they interpose themselves between human beings and the world, at the risk of being taken for the world –, in Flusser’s writings it is made clear that the image’s representational capacity is not independent from how we observe it. Therefore, its interpretation will not exclusively depend on its greater or smaller isomorphic dimension. Further, the way we look at images is deeply dependent on how our gaze organises time, and on how time organises signification. It is Flusser once again who tells us that the time spent observing a picture is a time of magic, different from linear time, which only establishes casual relationships between events; this time of magic is the time when “an element explains another one, and this in turn explains the first”9 (1998: 28). Therefore, the image is, simultaneously, an object of representation and of observation; on this peculiarity, Flusser proceeds: While wandering over the pictorial surface, one’s gaze produces temporal relationships between the various elements of the image: it sees one after the other. The gaze reconstitutes the dimension of time. Its wandering is circular: it tends to return to contemplate elements of the image it has already seen. Thus, “before” can become “after,” and “after” can become “before.” The time projected by the gaze onto the image is the time of the eternal return. One’s gaze renders the synchronicity of the image diachronic, and it does so in cycles. While circulating over the surface, one’s gaze always tends to return to the elements ir prefers. Such elements become central.10

However, it is not easy for us to know what, in the image itself, governs our perception, since what is essential in its production may prove accessory in our reading, and vice versa. The concept, as developed among others by Abraham Moles,11 of the pregnancy of an element over another could shed some light on this issue, especially if we obtained visual Mitchell, p.5. Flusser, p.21; my translation. In this essay, published in Brazilian Portuguese by Flusser himself (in an edition that considerably expanded the original German text), the author distinguishes technical images from traditional images. The technical image is produced by an apparatus (itself the product of a technique, i.e., of an applied scientific text); hence, it is an indirect product (and therefore a successor) of highly evolved texts. On the contrary, traditional images are quite previous to texts, chronologically speaking. Flusser, p.29; my translation. 8 Flusser, p.28; my translation. 9 10 Flusser, pp.27-8; my translation. 11 Cf Abraham Moles, L’image, communication fonctionelle (Paris: Casterman, 1981), p.45. 6 7

Karen Knorr and Tracey Moffat 259 processing data (through eye-tracking systems); however, the concept of pregnancy may no longer function when the image intersects with texts. Situations where oral and visual texts combine, in forms that can be generically described as bimedial presentation, have become increasingly common in the transmission of information, both printed and virtual. The relationship between image and text is so evidently plural, however, that it is impossible to debate it in a way that will ignore the particularity of its instances, since most of the pictures we are faced with can and do appear surrounded by various types of texts. We will be concentrating only on a particular type of picture: printed photographs, when they are presented in a bimedial situation, i.e., when they share their perceptional area (the page, in this case) with a particular type of text – the caption. Although photography cannot be considered a totally isomorphic system of representing reality, it is a more immediate system than verbal language (nowadays oral as well as written language), which is radically a non-isomorphic (i.e., mediated) system of reference. The text of a caption establishes various types of relationship with the image, offering the reader not simply its informative content, but rather the compromise it establishes with the picture to which it refers. The relationships from which that compromise results can be defined, in rather basic terms, as relationships of coherence12 that enable perceptional sequences or alternations. The caption does not have a global meaning without the visual object that it refers to, even if in certain particular cases, of a more literary nature, it possesses semantic autonomy and is therefore able to construct meanings per se. We can therefore state that the texts of captions are produced as a function of images, and that their basic purpose is to render the goals of the image’s reproduction explicit; in this respect, they are different from texts of other types, that may also be accompanied (illustrated) by images. However, this also entails that pictures exclusively surrounded by caption texts cannot be considered illustrations. When no other text, apart from the caption, is present, the image becomes the dominant informative element, and the question that arises is how is the caption text will be able to manipulate the polysemous information inevitably conveyed by every picture. Since we do not consider the caption an autonomous entity, i.e., we do not consider that it possesses textual identity when separated from the image, one must surely define the type of text it produces when combined with the image.13 Our point of departure will be a cognitive understanding of the text as an open door and a hoard of data, able to construct Cf. M.A.K. Halliday and Ruqaiya Hasan, Language, context and text: aspects of language in a social-semiotic perspective (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), passim. These authors argue that all texts are contextual to themselves and that coherence is what allows them to stand as a self-supporting whole. 13 Studies of textual typology rarely refer to the caption, although Jean-Michel Adam classifies it within what he considers to be the journalistic peritext, namely within the iconographic peritext (Linguistique textuelle. Des genres de discours aux textes [Paris: Natham, 1999], pp.64-5; ‘Unités redactionnelles et genres discoursifs: cadre général pour une approche de la presse écrite’, Pratiques, 94 [1997], 3-18 [pp.5ff.]). However, Adam places the caption within the category of peritexts because he takes it with regard to the article. The truth is that, outside a journalistic framework, and beyond that of the picture illustration, the direct context of the caption is usually, as we will see, the image itself, eventually summoning background knowledge or even memory, but not necessarily another verbal text. 12

260 Adriana Baptista mental structures in each of its receptors.14 Further support will be sought in dynamic conceptions of text, which foreground the interaction between the material texts of a certain producer and the activities of the receptor, and which also highlight the confluence of textual information with received knowledge towards the process of understanding.15 We will accept the definition of text proposed by Steffen-Peter Ballstaedt (and others), connecting the material dimension (in sound or print) of the representation of a structure of knowledge with the complex cognitive dimension mentally processed by each receptor.16 Hence, we will propose that captioned images (without other surrounding texts) produce a particular type of dynamic text; but we will totally reject the designation of “mixed text” proposed by Hausenblas (1977) for texts composed of linguistic and extra-linguistic elements.17 Indeed, Hausenblas’s notion of mixed text may rest on the assumption that this type of bimedial reality is the result of a simple addition of two or more parts, of texts with different semiotic characteristics, and not, as we believe, the result of two or more factors that are able to produce a new textual entity. The study of the relation between text and image rarely contemplates the captioned picture. The minority status which has long marked the caption has made it almost invisible, especially if we compare it with other types of text. Whenever there is any reference to that relation, the two elements are usually considered to be contiguous.18 Sometimes this contiguity is roughly defined as a simple proximity, other times as a succession, as if distance (and we all know how physically and psychologically relative this concept is) were objective enough to control such a notion. We believe that within a bimedial message, none of these elements can be the straightforward translation of the other, especially because the particularities of both systems do not allow them to become correlates. This assumption leads us to consider the co-presence of images and captions a product rather than an addition; their interdependence is so significant that we can consider them factorial elements of a whole visually perceptible as a unit, and not as two contiguous units subject to independent perception and interpretation. Data on the visual processing of that co-presence, and on how it conforms to non-sequential rhythms,19 have contributed to our reservations regarding the notion of a simple contiguity. Arguably, one should speak of contiguity only with regard to production, since the reception – as vital as our chosen dynamic understanding of the text inevitably makes it – will be the reception of a product.

14

15 16 17 18 19

Cf. Maximilian Scherner, ‘Texto. Subsídios para a história do conceito’ (Text: towards a history of the concept), trans. By Helder Lourenço, in Texto Leitura e Escrita, Antologia, ed. by Irene Borges Duarte, Fernanda Henriques and Isabel Matos Dias (Porto: Porto Editora, 2000), p.175. Wolfang Heinemann and Dieter Viehweger, Textlinguistik. Eine Einführung (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1991), passim. Steffen-Peter Ballstaedt et al, Texte verstehen, Texte gestalten (München: Urban & Schwarzenberg, 1981), p.17. Karel Hausenblas, ‘Zu einigen Grundfragen der Texttheorie’, in Probleme der Textgrammatik, II, ed. by Frantisek Danes and Dieter Viehweger, Studia Grammatica (1977), X-VIII. Cf. Moles, passim; Bernard Bosredon, Les titres de tableaux. Une pragmatique de l’identification. (Paris: P.U.F., 1997), passim. See Herman F. Brandt, The Psychology of Seeing (New York: The Philosophical Library, 1945) – not for the particular case of pictures and captions, but rather for its remarks on iconic and verbal advertising.

Karen Knorr and Tracey Moffat 261 At the centre of this debate about perceptive and cognitive interdependence is the form taken by relationships of cohesion and reference between the two elements: which type of text refers to which? Which is the index, which the referent? Flusser, who gives the photographic image the power of magical automatism, advocates the need for it to come attached to texts that will allow it to be a map of the world, rather than a screen in front of the world.20 Is it possible to argue that particular indexical relations develop between image and caption? Is it possible to cross visual perception data with verbal deixis? Which of these two elements (text and image) will function as a theme, namely for perception? This debate is compounded by the fact that the absence of a systematic learning of how to read images gives them what is commonly called a manipulative power over us. It all happens as if we felt more comfortable discovering and dismantling manipulative strategies in verbal texts (since a recent verbal cultural past has accustomed us to them), while we almost always expect pictures to be accompanied by them – either to make us feel more secure about our reading of those images, or simply to provide us with readings we have been unable to produce.21 What seems obvious is that we read pictures as if their caption were somehow to function as the picture’s “veridiction” strategy,22 i.e., as if it could lead our reading and tell us, not only what type of text it is, but also, unambiguously, what the picture says and where we should look in order to know what it says. The caption would have us believe that when we see in the picture what the caption says is there, we are seeing whatever is important that the picture should show; further, we will also know that what the image shows is real, because that is what the caption says it shows. This tautological reasoning would have a soothing effect on the observer and would make one waste much less time reading the caption. Therefore, veridiction and verivision would definitely be wrapped up in the caption’s function.

Flusser, pp.75-6. The concept of “reading images,” as employed here, is certainly controversial. Our point is that there are pictures that are not immediate, and whose comprehension always involves a command of structured strategies for coding and decoding. We will not be discussing whether the image can or cannot constitute itself as language – we know that it is also arbitrary and discontinuous, in spite of being massive, as Bauret puts it (Gabriel Bauret, ‘De l’esquisse d’une théorie à la dernière aventure d’une pensée’, in Roland Barthes et la Photo: le pire des signes [Paris: Les cahiers de la photographie, Contrejour, 1990], pp.7-13 [p. 9]); and yet it enjoys a very particular system of double articulation which is not comparable to that of verbal language. We will rather follow Thibault-Laulan, Saint-Martin, Dondis and Goldsmith, among others, and claim that the image can be seen from three angles: the syntactic, the semantic and the pragmatic; and that the interdependence of these three levels entails, for reading images, a command of them all – Anne-Marie Thibault-Laulan, ‘Image et Langage’, Le Langage, ed. by B. Poitier (Paris: Centre d’Étude et de Promotion de la Lecture, 1973), pp.188-215; Fernande Saint-Martin, Semiologie du langage visuel (Quebec: Presses de l’Université du Quebec, 1987); Donis A. Dondis, La sintaxis de la imagen (Barcelona: Gustavo Gilli, 1976); Evelyn Goldsmith, Research into Illustration: an approach and a review (London: Cambridge U. P., 1984), p.124ff. 22 This concept is referred by Greimas and José Augusto Mourão. The latter pursues the concept, though in a rather different context from the one we want to put in evidence here: A. J. Greimas et al, Semiotics and Language: An Analytical Dictionary (Bloomington, In: Indiana U.P., 1983); and José António Mourão, ‘As estratégias de Veridicção no Discurso’ (Veridiction Strategies in Discourse), Comunicação e Linguagens – As Máquinas Censurantes, 1 (1985, Março), 65-78. 20 21

262 Adriana Baptista If it is true that I read/see better whatever falls within my expectations, then the caption can constitute a strong expectation about the decoding of the elements present in the picture (and of the degree of truth that each one encloses), and therefore help clarify, potentiate, erase or even transform the information included in the picture. Far from the rhetoric of resistance that W.J.T.Mitchell finds in the relationship between text and image (the only strategy he acknowledges as capable of setting up a blockade that will make both elements work as spies or counter-spies on the information each transmits),23 we would like to propose a rhetoric of attraction for the definition of what happens between pictures and captions. Only that attraction will be able to explain how it is possible for the caption to develop, with regard to the image, rhetorical and/or logical operations of enlargement, reduction, substitution, exchange and mutation. These operations would allow the caption to go considerably beyond its hypothetical function as ancrage (anchorage), as proposed by Barthes24 – a notion that would reduce the caption to decreasing the image’s polysemous flux, fulfilling a function of repression and control of the information perceived. Neil Rowe claims that there is a linguistic focus to the caption (as against the image’s visual focus). Through this linguistic focus, the caption takes on its ability to show. By “showing” we mean, in this case, making visible, but also rendering visible whatever is real, in an attitude that lies clearly beyond what is usually meant by “describing.”25 To describe inevitably presupposes the construction of mental images and, therefore, to make something present, to make something visible. What the caption does next to the already visible picture is basically to show, to indicate. In this sense, this function of “showing” is usually distinctive of visual language, but it can also be activated in writing, especially in the cases where the latter associates with the visual. More than describing, “showing” means in this case to name and designate what one sees, or what one wants others to see. Showing is to indicate that the punctum of the picture26 is the one that is named, and no other (that the organization of the picture may permit, or the observer select). This amounts to saying that the caption can erase the possible existence of elements other than those that are named; and that conversely, by naming them, it can create the existence of elements that are not present in the picture, thus manipulating the importance of those that are, and serving purposes that are not strictly descriptive. This function of “showing” can be expected to operate by directing one’s attention to pictorial contents that are found relevant; and we would like to inquire into the linguistic processes that intervene in that operation. André Petitjean, while making allowance for the current interpenetration of various text types, seeks the support of a conceptual framework related to cognitive procedures and elaborates on the five types of texts first proposed by Egon Werlich in 1975: the descriptive type, which he connects with perception in space; the narrative type, that he links to

Mitchell, p.295. Barthes, p.44. The four procedures defined by Jean-Michel Adam for description are anchorage, aspectualization, relationship, and concatenation through subthematization. These can easily be found in caption texts. Cf. JeanMichel Adam, Les Textes: Types et prototypes (Paris: Natham, 2001), pp. 85 ff. 26 Cf Roland Barthes, La Chambre Claire (Paris: Gallimard, 1980), p.47 and passim. 23 24 25

Karen Knorr and Tracey Moffat 263 perception in time; the expository type, associated with the analysis and synthesis of conceptual representations; the argumentative type, centred on judgment and on the taking of position; and the instructive type, which he connects with the prediction of future behaviour.27 Although we do not want to be totally bound to this conceptual basis for a textual typology, and we take it for granted that any text is often at the intersection of several types of texts, we also acknowledge that we have detected all these text types in photographic captions, and that they set off the cognitive procedures presented by Petitjean. Perhaps the least frequent has been the narrative type, not because we have not found narrative texts associated with pictures, but rather because they are usually accorded textual identity and their authorship is distinct from that of the picture – hence, they tend not to be regarded as captions. Nevertheless, in her typology for captions, Nancy Newhall identifies a type she calls “narrative,” a type that she finds in photo-journalism for narrating events represented in the picture. It is commonly said that photographs choose a moment to petrify it, inevitably removing it from the course of time, from the movement that preceded and followed it. The camera shot is a deadly shot. Every still is a static picture, even when we say the photo captured the movement very well. Every picture can only capture movement by cancelling it forever, excluding the temporal dimension from its structure, and hence preventing itself from being, in absolute terms, a narrative. Barthes actually asserts that the noeme (or essence) of photography is the real in a past condition.28 Other relevant contributions that may be invoked in this respect include Claude Bremond and Jean-Michel Adam. The former argues that all narration includes three basic constituents: a subject (animate or inanimate), situated in a determinate time which unfolds in the direction t + n, and the enunciation of the predicates that were attributed to this subject both at the t moment and at t + n.29 Adam, on his part, isolates and proposes six constituents for the narrative: 1) the succession of events; 2) a thematic unity; 3) transformed predicates; 4) a process; 5) the narrative causality that derives from the construction of a plot; 6) an explicit or implicit final evaluation.30 We have already said that the gaze organizes times of observation of the image, made of advances and retreats. In the particular cases that will be considered next, the caption does not necessarily constitute a narrative hypergenre; but, by organising the time of perception into a before and an after that is alien to visual pregnancy, the caption derives narrative markers from its interaction with the image and returns to it what it lacks to become reality: time. We have picked for analysis two examples of captioned photographs, one by Tracey Moffat and another by Karen Knorr. What is so appealing to us about these pictures (apart from their aesthetic and semantic import), is that the picture and the caption are by the same author. This solves the problem of defining the authorship of the textual unit(y), and allows us to take each, together with its caption, as a single text. Besides, each of the (verbal) texts André Petitjean, ‘Les typologies textuelles’, Pratiques, 62 (Juin 1989), 86-125 (p.97); Egon Werlich, Typologie der Texte (Heidelberg: Quelle und Meyer, 1975, 1975). 28 Barthes, La Chambre Claire, p.106. 29 Claude Bremond, La Logique du Récit (Paris: Seuil, 1973), pp.99-100. 30 Adam, Les Textes, pp.46ff. 27

264 Adriana Baptista was considered a caption by its author, while in our view they both contain narrative markers that can situate a subject in a determinate time, attribute certain predicates to her at a past t moment and connect it to the visual narrative, where the predicates associated with the subject at a t + n moment allow a sequence to emerge. The most important detail here is that the narration of a succession of events would not be possible without the interconnection of caption and picture.

Tracey Moffat

© Tracey Moffatt, 1974 Courtesey L.A. Gallerie-Lothar Albrecht, Frankfurt, Germany

© Tracey Moffatt,1974 Courtesey L.A. Gallerie-Lothar Albrecht, Frankfurt, Germany

The picture we have chosen from the work of Tracey Moffat shows a certain action (a car wash) carried out by a certain subject: a young woman. The punctum seems to be the character’s gaze. Dismal. Distant. We easily realise that the task is unpleasant. The whole scene is probably part of American everyday life, and yet it is uncharacteristic. The picture captures our attention with enormous power. This girl is frozen in time, although she seems to move. Let us now look at the same picture with its caption. We will not at this point discuss whether this caption fits the category of the “additive caption,” as proposed by Newhall, nor which are its constitutive blocks. We will only say that the captions we have chosen only actualise what we consider to be the sixth block (the one that allows us to identify, describe, and explain the contents that are co-present in the pictorial instance, or others that relate to them, even if in absentia).31 As for the structure of Tracey Moffat’s caption, it is graphically organised so as to highlight what the author apparently wants to work as a title: “Useless.” Not meaning to discuss at any length a typology of the titles of works of art, we will merely refer to Bernard Bosredon’s – who claims that the main function of titles is a naming function – and classify this particular instance as an ideal title, since it Useless Her father’s nickname for her was useless. names an abstract referent.32 Associated with a young woman who performs a task, this designation emerges as ambiguous. I expand on this notion of the “sixth block” in my dissertation in psycholinguistics: Adriana Baptista, Para uma Análise das Interacções entre a Legenda e a Imagem, unpublished diss (Lisbon: Faculdade de Letras, 2005). 32 Bernard Bosredon, Les titres de tableaux. Une pragmatique de l’identification (Paris: P.U.F., 1997), passim. 31

Karen Knorr and Tracey Moffat 265 The caption itself follows the title and it looks more like its caption than the picture’s. As brief as it is, it comes implacable like a story – and finally the character in the photo has a father, a life, and a past. Her father has a profile, we see his sarcastic smile, we hear the callousnesss of his remarks on his daughter. The girl’s sombre gaze becomes suffering. Silence and immobility now seem like a habit in her life. We cannot get out of this story any longer.

Karen Knorr

© Karen Knorr 1991

Courtesey Karen Knorr

We are particularly interested in Karen Knorr’s work for the importance she gives to captions in her photographs. In an interview with António Guzman in 1989, she says that she prefers the French term “légende”, with all its mythological connotations, to its English equivalent, and she explains that she uses both picture and text “to slow down the spectator’s pace of consumption, creating a ‘slow-motion reading’ which leaves room for reflection. Viewers tend to devour images without digesting them. […] neither image nor text comes first. Neither explains or completes the other. Both add to each other.”33 The picture we have chosen shows a middle-aged lady posing inside an apartment. She is wearing a fur coat and she is surrounded by objects that mark the setting with all the social signs of affluence. This is what justifies the title of Karen Knorr’s album: Marks of Distinction. She is barefoot, with her feet on the carpet, but standing on the tips of her toes, keeping the same arrogant pose as if she were on high heels. She is completely still, frozen in that otherwise uninhabited environment, almost aseptic if it were not for the weirdness of those shoes off her feet, to which our gaze is inevitably directed. She is a perfect portrait. She is at the centre of the picture, in profile. Behind her and in front of her the space is uncharacteristic. It looks as if she has neither come from anywhere, nor will be going anywhere. Perhaps that is the reason why she is barefoot. 33

Karen Knorr, Marks of Distinction (London: Thames and Hudson, 1991), p.127.

266 Adriana Baptista

© Karen Knorr

1991 Courtesey Karen Knorr

However, the caption makes her walk. While at the house of a friend, she went to the kitchen. She saw the servants squeezing some oranges, mixing juice and sweat. She saw what would always seem to be off limits to a character like her: a kitchen, the lack of hygiene. She was shocked and forbade her son to drink orange juice. After all, she has a friend and a son and notions of hygiene. Although the caption opens with a statement, it is its narrative markers that, relating to the picture, bestow time and life on this character otherwise with no past nor future. It is through the caption that the portrait adds action and, hence, a sociological dimension to the character. Our reading of the two images above will have shown how, in scripto-visual texts of their kind, the caption, by endowing a still picture with temporal sequentiality, can go beyond the descriptive and attain a narrative dimension. This is accomplished through strategies of perceptional interdependence organized in what one might describe as a “rhetoric of attraction,” and through a permanent cognitive transfer between visual and verbal. We have argued that a visually presented thematic unit can be, and usually is, processed with transformed predicates because it is associated to a process. Through a succession of verbally construed events, this process traces a narrative causality, or rather sketches a plot, ultimately to be judged by the observer. The word in a caption is the word that aims to lead the gaze, to manage time, to elicit from images real maps of the world, in Flusser’s saying,34 or even to browse through the maps of different worlds – and, even while integrating in the picture reports from distant times and spaces, to maximise the emotions it encloses.

34

Flusser, pp.75-6.

Peter ED Muir

An Act of Erasure: October and the Index

This essay discusses two related issues central to October’s reconstruction of the “object” of criticism. The first being to provide the photographic with an art-theoretical rationale that could be used to dissemble the high modernist aesthetic and its modes of representation, its symbolic unities of thought. The second is associated with the American art journal’s critique on the nature of the sign, a mediation that would include the frameworks that establish the social and aesthetic codes of perception that determine its pictorial nature. In particular, the editors highlight the semiotic order of the index, which they describe variously as being a useful tool, as being mute, as a trace or imprint rather than an (universalising) ordering principle. Thus its structural logic, its parergonic function, here revealed in a perceived new specificity of the photographic, is set up in figurative opposition to modernist notions of medium and style. This can be seen as part of the journal’s radical separation of semiotic criticism from the preexisting perceptualist (stylistic analysis), social art historic and phenomenological alternatives.

Postmodernism may be said to be founded upon this paradox, that it is photography’s reevaluation as a modernist medium that signals the end of modernism. Postmodernism begins when photography comes to pervert modernism.1 The parergon inscribes something which comes as an extra, exterior to the proper field…but whose transcendent exteriority comes to play, abut onto, brush against, rub, press against the limit itself and intervene in the inside only to the extent that the inside is lacking. It is lacking in something and it is lacking from itself.2

In 1953 Robert Rauschenberg obtained a drawing from the artist Willem de Kooning, and after informing him of his intention to make it the subject of a work of his own, erased the image. This act of erasure left vestiges of ink and crayon as well as the physical impress of the drawn lines to act as traces of memory. The “drawing” was then enclosed within a gold leaf frame and a hand-lettered ink label attached identifying the drawing as an artwork by Rauschenberg entitled Erased de Kooning Drawing and dated 1953. Speaking in his essay “Allegorical Procedures, Appropriation and Montage in Contemporary Art” (1982), Benjamin H. D. Buchloh informs us that, “Rauschenberg’s appropriation confronts two paradigms of drawing, that of de Kooning’s denotative lines, and that of the indexical functions of the erasure.”3 Further to this confrontation, this de-disciplinary act, one might suggest that when the preexisting perceptual data is removed from its original surface of display the connotative gesture of that erasure can be interpreted as shifting the focus of the beholder’s attention towards the conditions under which an artwork is understood, towards the devices of its “framing,” towards the wider aesthetic forms and their interaction within

1 2 3

Douglas Crimp, ‘The Museum’s Old/The Library’s New Subject’, Parachute, no. 22 (Spring 1981), 36-38 (p.37). Jacques Derrida, The Truth in Painting (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), p.56. Benjamin H.D.Buchloh, ‘Allegorical Procedures, Appropriation and Montage in Contemporary Art’, Artforum (September 1982) 46-48 (p.46).

268 Peter ED Muir disciplinary fields, to the relationship with narrative, towards institutional discourse and the spectator. According to Rosalind Krauss, [during the] late ‘60s/early ‘70s moment, deconstruction began famously attacking what it derisively referred to as the “law of genre,” or the aesthetic autonomy supposedly ensured by the pictorial frame. From the theory of grammatology to that of the parergon, Jacques Derrida built demonstration after demonstration to show that the idea of an interior set apart from, or uncontaminated by, and exterior of the work of art was a chimera, a metaphysical fiction.4

The literary theorists Mieke Bal and Norman Bryson isolate the index as a principle that might expose such framing: “the notion of the index suggests that we do not only account for images in terms of their provenance and making, but also of their functioning in relation to the viewer, their structure of address.”5 Krauss summarises the position in her essay “Sincerely Yours”: “The notion of the painting as a function of the frame (and not the reverse) tends to shift our focus from being exclusively, singularly, riveted in the interior field. Our focus must begin to dilate, to spread.”6 Thus, one might say that the ambition of the Rauschenberg is, through the application of erasure, to force the presence of that shifting artistic sign to the surface. Further, as noted by Buchloh, under these new conditions the original sign can be considered to be reduced to a trace or index of meaning. In order to reestablish artistic intelligibility this new category of sign needs to be reconstituted, to be given a new object or referent; this is an imperative noted by Krauss in her two-part essay “Notes on the Index: Seventies Art in America” (1977): “This logic involves the reduction of the conventional sign to a trace, which then produces the need for a supplementary discourse.”7 In this way, by reduction and addition (of a narrative, actual or implied), Rosalind Krauss sought to solve a fundamental problem: could visual images be dealt with as texts? She asserts the viability of this proposition, “the successive parts of the work[s] […] articulate into a kind of cinematic narrative, and that narrative in turn becomes an explanatory supplement of the work[s]. Thus the visual is linked with the verbal and the verbal with the visual, in short, the image becomes a form of text, and that text can be analysed in semiotic and social terms.”8 Referring to Derrida’s “The Parergon,” Craig Owens describes this “narrativisation” process as “the occupation of a nonverbal field by a conceptual force.”9 Krauss asserts that the semiotic order of the index is something that has shaped the sensibilities of many contemporary artists, “whether they were conscious of it or not.” This 4 5 6 7 8 9

Rosalind Krauss, A Voyage on the North Sea, Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition (London: Thames & Hudson, 1999), p.32. Mieke Bal & Norman Bryson, ‘Semiotics and Art History’, The Art Bulletin, LXX111: 2 (1991), 174-208 (pp.190-91). Rosalind Krauss, ‘Sincerely Yours’, in The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1985) pp.175-194 (p.191). Rosalind Krauss, ‘Notes on the Index, Seventies Art in America Part 2’, in The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1985) pp.210-219 (p.211). Krauss, ‘Sincerely Yours’, p.219. Craig Owens, Beyond Recognition, Representation, Power, and Culture, (Los Angles: University of California Press, 1992), p.32.

An Act of Erasure 269

characterises what she sees as an epistemological malaise, a generalised “flight from the terms of aesthetic convention.”10 The following essay considers some of the implications of the index in terms of this “crisis in representation” and in relation to October’s reconstruction of the object of criticism. The editors considered the notion of the index, and Krauss’ article so important, that they reprinted the first part in an anthology of essays that marked the journal’s first decade of criticism, October the First Decade, 1976-1986.11 The editors write in the introduction, Almost from the outset the index, for example, appeared to us a particularly useful tool. Its implications within the process of marking, its specific axis of relation between sign and referent, made of the index a concept that could work against the grain of familiar unities of thought, critical categories such as medium, historical categories such as style, categories that contemporary practices had rendered suspect, useless, irrelevant. In its status as trace or imprint, the index cut across the rigidly separate artistic disciplines, linking painting with photography, sculpture and performance and cinematography. From the scrutiny of this process in its mute obduracy, its striking independence from categories of form, there seemed to emerge a critical language flexible enough to address the photographic, not photography as a specific medium but a particular mode of signifying that had come to affect all the arts during this historical juncture.12

Thus the Peircean index13 directs one’s gaze both visually and critically, it marks, it points like an arrow, or a finger or a flood of light towards other possibilities. Within this editorial statement one can detect two related issues central to the journal’s project. The first being to provide the photograph, or rather the “photographic,” with an art-theoretical rationale that could be used to dissemble the high modernist aesthetic and its modes of representation, its “familiar unities of thought.” The photographic signifying for October a moment upon which representation might turn, being seen (by Walter Benjamin) as “neither art nor nonart [but technology], it is a new form of production that transforms the whole nature of art.”14 The second issue brought forward by the editorial statement is associated with a critique on the nature of the sign, representing part of October’s “active mediation of the post-structuralist debate,”15 a mediation that would include the frameworks that establish the social and aesthetic codes of perception that determine its pictorial nature: the sign being

10 11

12 13

14 15

Krauss, ‘Sincerely Yours’, p.219. October’s editorial personnel (2004): Rosalind Krauss (Founding Editor), Annette Michelson (Founding Editor), Yve-Alain Bois, Benjamin H.D.Buchloh, Hal Foster, Denis Hollier and Mignon Nixon. Managing Editor, Lisa Pasquariello. October The First Decade, 1976-1986, eds. Annette Michelson, Rosalind Krauss, Douglas Crimp and Joan Copjec (Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1987), p.xi. C. S. Peirce’s theory of signs is based on a triadic typology formed between the icon, the index and the symbol. Pierce’s icon signifies by virtue of a similarity in qualities or a resemblance to its object. For example, a portrait iconically represents the sitter. The index signifies by virtue of what might be considered an existential bond, in this aspect of the sign an actual causal connection is established between itself and the object. The often-quoted examples are a weathervane indexically signaling the direction of the wind, a footprint indexically pointing to someone’s presence on a beach, or more pertinently the vestiges of Rauschenberg’s erasure indexically pointing to the art historical paradigms of drawing. Peirce’s symbol signifies by virtue of a contract or rule – it is the equivalent of Saussure’s arbitrary linguistic sign. W.J.T. Mitchell, Iconology, Image, Text, Ideology (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1986), p. 183. October the First Decade, p, x.

270 Peter ED Muir understood here not as a thing but an “event.” more like a radical differentiation acting in historical and socially specific locations. The editors present the index as a neutral methodological tool (“the index cuts across the rigidly separate artistic disciplines”), as being mute, as a trace or imprint rather than an (universalising) ordering principle: it “intervene[s] in the inside only to the extent that the inside is lacking. It is lacking in something and it is lacking from itself.”16 Thus its structural logic – “[as] a particular mode of signifying” – is set up in figurative opposition to ideas associated with modernist notions of medium and style. According to Bal and Bryson, “One category of indexical signs […] refer[s] to the maker of the image, ranging from the recognizable “hand” of the artist, the will to be expressive as in expressionist painting, to the signature.”17 High modernism in the aspect of Abstract Expressionism can be considered the very apotheosis of the indexical sign (the all-over signature, the recognizable hand). It uses the semiotic order of the index to point back to the presence of the artist, thus tracing his or her physical and emotional presence in the production of the work. However, there is another use of the index, a use that reduces the humanist gesture to an absolute minimum; this use inaugurates another very different set of values and relationships, for example, the act of releasing the shutter of a camera, or positioning a ready-made art object within an institutional context. This second and Duchampian use of the index reflects the failure of contemporary art “to signify directly, to picture anything like an identifiable set of contents,”18 and emerged in the mid-fifties (with the practices of the neo-avant-garde) as part of the critique of expressionism. Artworks by Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg acted as a critical and art-historical site for this exploration. It is generally agreed that their work formed a bridge between the gestural attitudes of the abstract expressionists and the beginnings of Pop Art, signifying a “new kind of textuality in all the arts.”19 For the critical champions who defended formalist premises, such as Clement Greenberg, Michael Fried and Harold Rosenberg, Pop Art was not considered to be, in any sense, an evolutionary development; these critics generally saw it as a trivial response based in “kitsch” and supported by the contemporary media theories of Marshall McLuhan. For others, Pop Art was the arousal of a new kind of societal consciousness, one in which the social formation of the image had come to replace metaphysics. As Rosalind Krauss writes, “The significance of the art that emerged in this country [the United States] in the early 1960s is that it staked everything on the accuracy of a model of meaning severed from the legitimising claims of a private self.”20 By 1966, a new model of representation based on the so-called “dematerialisation of the art object” began to emerge and become operative in the United States. Artists associated with this development included Robert Morris, Mel Bochner, Bruce Nauman, Sol LeWitt,

Derrida, p.56. Bal & Bryson, p.190. Krauss, ‘Sincerely Yours’, p.202. Fredric Jameson, ‘Periodizing the ’60s’, in The 60s Without Apology, ed. Sohnya Sayres (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), p.200. 20 Rosalind Krauss, Passages in Modern Sculpture (Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1977), p.266. 16 17 18 19

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Robert Barry, Lawrence Weiner and Joseph Kosuth. These artists were concerned primarily with the language of art as opposed to its visual form, thus de-centring one of the fundamental tenets of modernism, that is, that the visual has precedence over the verbal; these artists considered the “concept” as the primary material upon which the physical or documentary aspect of the work depended. According to Krauss, It was Kosuth’s […] contention that the definition of art, which works would now make, might merely take the form of statements and thus rarefy the physical object into the conceptual conditions of language. But these statements, though he saw them resonating with the logical finality of an analytical proposition, would nevertheless be art and not, say, philosophy. Their linguistic form would merely signal the transcendence of the particular, sensuous content of art, like painting or photography, and the subsumption of each by that higher aesthetic unity – Art itself – of which any one is only a partial embodiment.21

Thus, the art practices of the ‘60s and ‘70s offered suitable material for analysis using linguistic tropes; for example, C. S. Peirce’s typology of the sign. In “Notes on the Index: Seventies Art in America,” Rosalind Krauss focuses on the “logic” of the indexical art of the 1970s; this is a limitation that allows her to define this logic within strict historical conditions – reflecting the imperative of critical theory which seeks to make knowledge relevant and transparent to the cultural and political circumstances in which it is formulated. In this notion of the index one can observe one of the many critical means by which the editors of October began the deconstruction of modernist form, perhaps the primary signifier of modernism in America. And according to Peter Bürger, “The category of artistic modernism par excellence is form, sub–categories such as artistic means, procedures and techniques converge in that category.”22 In place of internalised self-referential analysis the October writers installed an alternative set of operations, operations that are observable as functioning within the artwork, and yet, external to it (the catalytic operations of parerga). Such mechanisms are represented by terms like “indices and shifters, empty signs (like the word this) that are filled with meaning only when physically juxtaposed with an external referent or object.”23 Further, one can point to October’s use of Derridian concepts like supplément, différance, the parergon, and dissemination, which can be seen as tools to undo/deconstruct the stable meanings actualised by “classical” Saussurian semiotic oppositions. Craig Owens writes that such operations are responsible for “transforming the object, the work of art, beyond recognition”; further, that “such a transformation has no better point of departure than that which has always been excluded from the aesthetic field: the parergon.”24 Owens outlines the implications of Derrida’s text: The permanent complicity of Western aesthetic with a certain theory of the sign is the major theme of Jacques Derrida’s “The Parergon,” written primarily on Kant’s Critique of Judgement. “The Parergon” is not, however, a text about art; nor is it simply about aesthetics. Rather, it represents an attempt to unmask what Derrida calls “discursivity within the structure of the beautiful,” the occupation of a nonverbal field by a 21 22 23 24

Krauss, A Voyage on the North Sea, p.10. Peter Bürger, The Decline of Modernism, trans. Nicholas Walker (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992), p.45. Krauss, ‘Sincerely Yours’, p.197. Owens, p.38.

272 Peter ED Muir conceptual force. “The Parergon” thus extends to the aesthetic domain Derrida’s observations concerning the permanent authority invested by Western metaphysics in speech.25

In this way the alternative mechanism, the “parergon, this supplement outside the work”26 offered by October is initiated through the intervention of language, by a text (actual or implied), the “literary commonplace,” revealing the necessity to “add a surfeit of written information to the depleted power of the painted sign.”27 Citing Walter Benjamin, Rosalind Krauss explains the functioning of this rationale in relation to the photograph: There are, however, other kinds of texts for photographs besides written ones, as Walter Benjamin points out when he speaks of the history of the relation of caption to photographic image. “The directive which the captions give to those looking at pictures in illustrated magazines,” he writes, “soon become even more explicit and more imperative in the film where the meaning of each single picture appears to be prescribed by the sequence of all preceding ones.” In film each image appears from within a succession that operates to internalize the caption, as narrative.28

In light of this analysis the photographic can be seen as part of a complex of discursive practices, practices that are embedded in the parergonic function, its exclusion, its detachment from the work: “the parergon stands out […] the dagger […] the necklace she wears […] the exceptional, the strange, the outstanding [quality] of the index.”29 Here the index, like the parergon, can be seen as representing the spaces and procedures by which the visual and the linguistic communicate. Walter Benjamin also seeks a photographic practice that would not “paralyse the associative mechanisms of the beholder,”30 moving it out of “the realm of aesthetic distinctions to social function,” a practice that might transfigure photography into a form of literature. As Foucault writes, words and images are like two hunters, “pursuing its quarry on two paths […] By its double function, it guarantees capture, as neither discourse alone nor a pure drawing could do.”31 In the first section of “The Parergon,” Derrida translates its meaning as the “abyss” mirroring “this curious transitional region between the word and the image,” the region of the “in between,” a region at once described by Foucault as a “colourless neutral strip,” or a form of sublime landscape, “an uncertain foggy region,” or indeed a “lacuna,”32 the very “absence of space.”33 For Krauss, these operations of the index, “the discursivity that occupies a non verbal field,” govern the Duchampian oeuvre in its photographic 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33

Owens, p.32. Derrida, p.55. Krauss, ‘Sincerely Yours’, p.219. Krauss, ‘Sincerely Yours’, p.218. Walter Benjamin is quoted from ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), pp.211-44 (p.226). Derrida, pp. 55-58. Walter Benjamin, ‘A Short History of Photography’, in Germany: The New Photography, ed. David Mellor (London: The Arts Council of Great Britain, 1978), p.17. Michel Foucault, ‘Ceci n’est pas une pipe’, October 1 (1976), p.22. (The essay was originally published in Les Cahiers du Chemin, no. 2, January 1968). From phenomenology, lacunae are the missing parts of the text that require the participation of the spectator/reader. Foucault, p.21

An Act of Erasure 273

manifestations as well as in its readymade manifestation, since, according to Krauss, the photograph as a “sub- or pre-symbolic” trace is inherently indexical and the readymade is “a sign which is inherently empty, its signification a function of only this one instance, guaranteed by the existential presence of just this object.”34 Further, she isolates the index as a principle that might account for the pluralistic art of the decade. Immediately this “mode of signifying” began to refocus practices such as body art and installation work, providing an “indexical grounding” for art (shifting its sign, as in the Rauschenberg erasure) in a physical presence, on a body, rather than in the virtuality of the modernist gestalt. Because of the ephemeral or inaccessible nature of much of the art practice of the 1970s, photodocumentation came to be thought of as a way to preserve its memory. In this way the photograph can be interpreted as a “trace,” or an “index” of the real object or event, “it shares, by virtue of the very process of its becoming, the being of the model of which it is the reproduction; it is the model.”35 However, according to Krauss, “it is not just the heightened presence [within the art of the ‘60s and ‘70s] of the photograph itself that is significant. Rather it is the photograph combined with the explicit terms of the index. For, everywhere one looks in ‘80s art, one finds instances of this connection.”36 Yet, as Krauss notes, the shift in the indexical grounding of art was initiated by the work of Marcel Duchamp who confronted ascendant cubism with the arbitrariness of the sign: “It was as if cubism forced for Duchamp the issue of whether pictorial language could continue to signify directly, could picture anything like an identifiable set of contents.”37 In response to such depletions of meaning, the inability of art to signify directly, she tells us that indexes are “marks or traces [of that] to which they refer, the object they signify […] [into the category of the index] We would place physical traces (like footprints), medical symptoms […] Cast shadows could also serve as indexical signs of objects − and above all photographs.”38 Krauss quotes C. S. Peirce in relation to establishing the ontology of the photograph: “Photographs,” Peirce says, “especially instantaneous photographs, are very instructional, because we know that they are in certain respects exactly like the objects they represent. But this resemblance is due to the photographs having been produced under such circumstances that they were physically forced to correspond point by point to nature. In that aspect, then, they belong to the second class of signs [indices], those by physical connection.”39

Krauss continued to say that to be understood, the photograph required a caption:

34 35 36 37 38 39

Krauss, ‘Sincerely Yours’, p.206. André Bazin, What Is Cinema, trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley, Cal: University of California Press 1967), p.14. (Cited in Krauss, ‘Sincerely Yours’, p.203). Krauss, ‘Sincerely Yours’, p.216. Krauss, ‘Sincerely Yours’, p.202. Krauss, ‘Sincerely Yours’, p.215. C. S. Peirce, ‘Logic as Semiotic, The Theory of Signs’, in Philosophic Writings of Peirce (New York: Dover Publications, 1955), p.106. (Reproduced in Krauss, ‘Sincerely Yours’, p.215).

274 Peter ED Muir A meaninglessness surrounds [the photograph] which can only be filled by the addition of a text […] The supplemental caption related to the index to the conceptual field of art. Not only did the captioned photograph incorporate verbal texts into visual art more than ever before, but captioning so linked the visual with the verbal that the visual was turned into a text.40

In regard to this logic, it has been suggested that the relationship between the photographic and the linguistic is formed by two opposing propositions. The first places the emphasis on how the photograph differs from language; here it is characterised as a “message without a code,” that is, in its aspect as a purely objective transcription of reality. The second position either transforms the photographic into a language, or stresses its incorporation into language.41 The proposition is outlined by Victor Burgin when he tells us that the photographic is “invaded by language in the very moment it is looked at, in memory, in association, snatches of words and images continually intermingle and exchange one for the other.”42 In his essay “The Photographic Message” Roland Barthes notes the uneasy and paradoxical relationship between language and photography, which he describes as “the coexistence of two messages, the one without a code (the photographic analogue), the other with a code (the ‘writing’ or the rhetoric of the photograph).”43 The most familiar opposition he applies to the photographic message is that of denotation and connotation, the former being associated with the nonverbal status of the photograph, and the latter with the readability of the photograph, but, as noted, the relationship is coexistent, fluid and reciprocal. W.J.T.Mitchell puts it this way: Connotation goes all the way down to the roots of the photograph, to the motives for its production, to the selection of its subject matter, to the choice of angles and lighting. Similarly, “pure denotation” reaches all the way up to the most textually “readable” features of the photograph, the photograph is “read” as if it were the trace of an event, a “relic” of an occasion laden [with] aura and mystery.44

Although the text-image debate has never adequately been resolved, the art theoreticians aligned with October proceeded to treat visual imagery as if it was verbal (language), and thus an appropriate subject for the methodologies of post-structuralism and deconstruction. At one and the same time embracing the literal or implied text (language) and the photograph (image). According to Craig Owens, Rosalind Krauss considered photography to be the medium of postmodernism, she “unifies postmodern art according to the signifying conditions of a single medium, photography.”45 Further to this ascendancy (in a special issue on photography, October 5, 1978), Krauss and Annette Michelson write, “only now […] is photography truly ‘discovered’, and now it is that we must set to work, establishing an archaeology, uncovering a tradition, constituting an aesthetic.”46 The editors

40 41 42 43 44 45 46

Krauss, ‘Sincerely Yours’, p.205. W.J.T. Mitchell, Picture Theory (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1994), pp.281-2. Victor Burgin, ‘Seeing Sense’, in The End of Art Theory, Criticism and Post-Modernity (London: Humanities Press, 1996), p.51. Roland Barthes, ‘The Photographic Message’, in Image/Music/Text (Glasgow: Fontana Books, 1997), p.19. Mitchell, 1994, pp.284-5. Owens, p.299. Editorial, ‘Photography, A Special Issue’, October, 5 (Summer 1978), p.3.

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considered the rehabilitation of photography part of a “return of the repressed” signified by “the eruption of language into the aesthetic field.”47 Tracing origins to Lessing (in Germany) and Diderot (in France) and invoking Roman Jakobson, Owens notes that poetry and all the discursive arts [were placed] along a dynamic axis of spatial simultaneity. Consequently the visual arts were denied access to discourse, which unfolds in time, except in the form of a literary text which, both exterior and anterior to the work, might supplement it. [Further] the linguistic origin of the principle which made distinctions between the arts, and thus modernism, possible had to remain unconscious; were the subordination of all the arts to language exposed, the visual arts would effectively be denied a proper territory, and the thesis that the arts are rigorously isolable and definable would be challenged.48

In their thinking about photography and film the contributors to October were greatly influenced by the implications of the 1936 essay “Photography in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” by Walter Benjamin. What made Benjamin so crucial to October was that he had focused on photography because it was an art of mechanical reproduction (representing technology), being the “first image of the encounter between the person and the machine,”49 and hence, for Crimp and others, a fitting medium of postmodern culture. Benjamin’s contribution was considered to be of such significance as to deserve a special issue of October (1985), comprising an English translation of his “Moscow Diary.” His influence (here in terms of the decentering of originality and expressionism) is made clear in a 1984 (October 31) article by Rosalind Krauss, where she notes that the photograph had made a travesty of the idea of originality, or subjective expressiveness, or formal singularity […] By exposing the multiplicity, the facticity, the repetition and stereotypes at the heart of every aesthetic gesture, photography deconstructs the possibility of differentiating between the original and the copy, the first idea and its slavish imitators. [It] calls into question the whole concept of the uniqueness of the art object, the originality of its author, the coherence of the æuvre within which it was made, and the individuality of so-called self expression.50

As noted, Krauss characterises the photograph as an “index,” an actual imprint of something tangible in the real world, as it were, a trace deposit of the “real.” But to be understood the photograph required a caption, a positioning, literal or implied. In its literal aspect, “an overt use of captioning is nearly always to be found in that portion of contemporary art which employs photography directly. Story art, body art, some of conceptual art, certain types of earthworks, mount photographs as a type of evidence and join to this assembly a written text or caption.” However, “[in] the abstract wing of this art of the index — we do not find a written text appended to the object-trace.”51 Nevertheless, the text is present, and that text is invoked by narrative succession, Krauss explains: “In

Owens, p.45. Owens, p.45. Walter Benjamin, Walter Benjamin: Overpowering Conformism, ed. by Esther Leslie (London: Pluto Press, 2000), p.48. 50 Rosalind Krauss, ‘A Note on Photography and the Simulacral’, October, 31 (Winter 1984), pp.59-63 (p.59). 51 Krauss, ‘A Note’, p.59. 47 48 49

276 Peter ED Muir film each image appears from within a succession that operates to internalise the caption, as narrative.”52 She supports this proposition in relation to the 1976 exhibition “Rooms” presented at P.S. 153: the works I have been describing all utilize succession. Pozzi’s panels occur at various points along corridors and stairwells of the building. Stuart’s rubbings are relocated across the facing planes of a hallway. The MattaClark cut involves the viewer in a sequence of floors. The “text” that accompanies the work is, then, the unfolding of the building’s space which the successive parts of the works in question articulate into a kind of cinematic narrative, and that narrative in turn becomes an explanatory supplement of the works. Thus the visual is linked with the verbal and the verbal with the visual, in short, the image becomes a form of text, and that text can be analysed in semiotic and social terms.54

Here Krauss is describing a concern not so much with any manifest content present in such works, but with structural relationships of representation within a text; thus, it is not the actual content that determines meaning, but the relations between elements in some kind of system (after Saussure and Pierce), in this case a linguistic system represented by a narrative unfolding through time. Further, she states that the 1970s faced a “tremendous arbitrariness with regard to meaning,” and that its response to that arbitrariness was to turn to “the mute presence of an uncoded event.”55 Such responses, based as they are on Roland Barthes’s notion of the photograph as a “message without a code,”56 and representing what can be seen as a progressive erosion of specific artistic mediums (the emptying out of the modernist sign) can be seen, for example, in the “reductive” cuts into derelict buildings undertaken by the artist Gordon Matta-Clark. Rosalind Krauss explains the genealogy and nature of the uncoded message: The phrase “message sans code” is drawn from an essay in which Roland Barthes points to the fundamentally uncoded nature of the photographic image. “What this [photographic] message specifies,” he writes, “is, in effect, that the relation of the signified and signifier is quasi-tautological. Undoubtedly the photograph implies a certain displacement of the scene (cropping, reduction, flattening), but this passage is not a transformation (as an encoding must be). Here there is a loss of equivalency (proper to true sign systems) and the imposition of a quasi-identity. Put another way, the sign of this message is no longer drawn from the institutional reserve; it is not coded. And one is dealing here with the paradox of a message without a code.”57

Such works as those above deal with “the jettisoning of convention, or more precisely the conversion of the pictorial and sculptural codes into that of the photographic message without a code.”58 In “Notes on the Index (Part 2),” Krauss focuses on the work of Gordon Matta-Clark, Michelle Stuart, Marcia Hafif and Lucio Pozzi in relation to “Rooms.” This 52 53

54 55 56 57 58

Krauss, ‘Sincerely Yours’, p.218. P. S. 1. was a public school building in Long Island City, which was leased to the Institute for Art and Urban Resources for use as artist’s studios and exhibition spaces. The exhibition in question was called ‘Rooms’, being mounted in May 1976 as the inaugural show of the building. Krauss, ‘Sincerely Yours’, pp.218-219. Krauss, ‘Sincerely Yours’, p.212. Barthes, p.32. Krauss, ‘Sincerely Yours’, p.211. Krauss, ‘Sincerely Yours’, p.211.

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exhibition not only represented the narrative functions of the index but also her proposition that “in the ‘70s, over large stretches of abstract art that is being produced, the conditions of photography have an implacable hold.”59 This kind of theorising claimed the ascendance of the verbal in the visual arts, and thus provided a rationale for conceptual art. It also asserted the primacy of the temporal over the spatial, establishing a basis for “theatricality”; art was thus linked with the temporal unfolding of a literary/poetic text – the return of linguistic consciousness. Making a metaphorical link with the Erased de Kooning Drawing, what this kind of criticism does is detach the purity of the visual – with its sublime connotations – from the alleged continuity of time and history; thus decontextualising (shifting the focus of the beholder to the “frame,” to the “context”) and recontextualising the visual image as a “text”; the aim being the subversion, inversion or decentring of the initial privileged term. The purpose was to prove that the binary or marginal form (for example, semiotic critical analysis) is either more or equally significant (than say stylistic analysis), or at least to establish an unstable relationship between one term and the other: “A parergon comes against, beside, and in addition to the ergon, the work done [fait], the fact [le fait], the work, but it does not fall to one side, it touches and cooperates within the operation from a certain outside.”60 One can see this process at work for example, in Craig Owens’ essay “Earthwords” (1979), a review of The Writings of Robert Smithson in which he links a postmodern impulse in Smithson’s work with poststructuralism in Derrida by means of the decentering at work in both practices.61 Another example would be originality versus copying, here one can cite Krauss’ highly influential essay The Originality of the AvantGarde and Other Modernist Myths (an associated text published primarily in October between 1976 and 1984 as representing part of this continuing project initiated in the mid 1970’s.) Thus, if originality, for example, was deemed central to modernist art, then a deconstruction of originality would claim that the copy was at least equal or perhaps more important, hence the aforementioned concerns with photography as a premiere deconstructive art form. In this de-disciplinary methodology all precedent and traditionally established presumptions could be radically inverted, for example, that in the visual arts the visual took precedence over the verbal or the spatial over the temporal, leading to a position where “the sign of this message is no longer drawn from the institutional reserve.”62 In this way “the linguistic signs which seemed excluded, which prowled at a distance around the image [have] reappeared; [introducing] into the plenitude of the image, a certain disorder.”63

59 60 61 62 63

Krauss, ‘Sincerely Yours’, p.210. Derrida, p.54. Owens, p.124. Krauss, 1985, p.211. Foucault, 1976, p.16.

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6. STAGE AND SCREEN, EAST AND WEST

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Rosa Branca Figueiredo

The Semiotics of the Body: Ritual and Dance in Soyinka’s Drama

Drama is the most primal mode of artistic expression; it communicates directly through the raw material of the pulsating human body, its rhythmic movement, sounds and presence. Soyinka’s Yoruba world has always been rich in these elements. And in his plays he presents ceremonial masques where personality transformations are conjured by costume, and vocal projections and distortions by masks; then the effect is a powerful combination of the consecrated and the comic, involving both ecstatic possession and satiric entertainment, solemn and acrobatic dance. Dance has, in fact, a number of important functions in drama: not only does it concentrate the audience’s gaze on the performing body/bodies, but it also draws attention to proxemic relations between characters, spectators, and features of the set. Splitting the focus from other sorts of proxemic and kinesic – and potentially, linguistic – codes, dance renegotiates dramatic action and dramatic activity, reinforcing the actor’s corporeality, particularly when it is culturally charged.

Q: Should a young playwright try to incorporate music and dance into his play? S: (…) There is no question at all that any play which succeeds in integrating music, dance, masks, and so on is at least one dimension richer than the purely literary form of theatre. […] Q: Would you comment on the use of rites in drama? S: […] rites, rituals, ceremonials, festivals are such a rich source of material for drama. They are intrinsically dramatic in themselves, because they are formalized. Apart from being visually clarifying, their representation is so precise that even when the meaning is obscure you are left with a form which is so clear that it reifies itself into a very concrete meaning for the viewer.1

To the Yoruba people, located largely in southwest Nigeria,2 dance is an important and versatile art form and an integral part of their culture. The communicative and expressive properties of dance are maximally employed and deployed in diverse social and aesthetic activities of the people. At significant events, such as end-of-year rituals and festivities, religious observances, rites of passage, political ceremonies, and professional activities, dance not only serves as a popular convivial accompaniment but also illustrates the meaning and underlines the symbolism of those occasions. Enjoyed both for its recreational and aesthetic pleasures, dance visually and kinaesthetically enhances and complements the aesthetic and symbolic impact of other art forms, whether verbal or non-verbal, bringing out their full significance and meaning. The channel of communication most commonly acknowledged in dance is the “visual,” which in fact, until quite recently, was the only channel through which dance was believed to communicate. True enough, the first impact of the dancer on an audience is the physical image of the body in continuous motion creating patterns in space. But also contributing in 1 2

James Gibbs, ‘Soyinka in Zimbabwe: A Question and Answer Session’, in Conversations with Wole Soyinka, ed. Biodun Jeyifo (Jackson, Miss: University of Mississippi, 2001), pp.68-115 (pp.90, 108). People of Yoruba descent are also found in the Republics of Togo and Benin, and in the African Diaspora, especially Brazil. Before the creation of Nigeria in 1914, Yorubaland stretched along the West African coast into Benin and Togo. While Nigeria was colonised by the English, Togo and Benin were colonised by the French.

282 Rosa Branca Figueiredo no small measure to the dancer’s image is the perceived total presence enhanced by other visual symbols such as costume, mask, make-up, and hand props: symbols in their own right, they lend added significance to the dancer’s physical appearance. In an article entitled “Nietzsche, genealogy, history,” Foucault wrote: “The body is the inscribed surface of events (traced by language and dissolved by ideas), the locus of a dissociated self (adopting the illusion of substantial unity), and a volume of disintegration.”3 Foucault’s definition, however, omits a crucial performative fact: the body also moves. In the theatre, the actor’s body is the most important physical symbol; it is distinguished from other such symbols by its capacity to offer a multifarious complex of meanings. The body signifies through both its appearance and its actions. As well as indicating categories like race and gender, the performing body can also express place and narrative through skilful mime and/or movement. Moreover, it interacts with all other stage signifiers – notably costume, set, and dialogue – and, crucially, with the audience. It is not surprising, then, that the body functions as one of the most charged sites of theatrical representation. Dance is also an integral part of African ritual. Addressing metaphysical beings or powers, it is a poetic, non-verbal form of expression continually created and re-created by countless performer/interpreters over generations. In its formulations of time, space and dynamics, dance transmits a people’s philosophy and values. A primary vehicle for connecting with the spirit realm, it is at the same time perceived to be an instrument of the gods through which they communicate with the phenomenal world. As such, ritual dance is an unspoken essay on the nature and quality of metaphysical power. Indeed, for the Yoruba, dance – in certain contexts – is metaphysical force actualised in the phenomenal world.4 Wole Soyinka intends the corpus of modern African literature to be read in the light of his elaboration of specific cultural sensibilities, the specific modes of thought and feeling which in his view, characterise the “African World.” These are best apprehended in the vast storehouse of paradigms and figurations of creativity, reality and social responsibility discoverable in the mythology, visual arts, dance, music and idioms of ritual performance of African peoples.5 Several of these presuppositions are relevant to the framework of his most famous play, Death and the King’s Horseman, especially those concerning the nature of the abyss and the efficacy of bridging rituals.

3

4

5

Michel Foucault, ‘Nietzsche, genealogy, history’, in Language, Counter-memory, Practice, ed. by D. Bouchard, trans. By D. Bouchard and S. Simon (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997), pp.139-64 (p.148). In Yoruba thought, the phenomenal world is ayé, usually translated simply as world. Ayé is a domain where people reside temporarily. In addition, it includes a number of spirits who can become manifest in human or animal form. The realm of the gods and ancestors is known as òrun, a permanent otherworldly reality. The relationship of ayé to òrun is expressed in the proverb ‘The world is a market, the otherworld is home.’ (Ayé l’ojà, òrun n’ilé). For more details see Sandra T. Barnes, Africa’s Ogun (Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1997), passim. Cf Wole Soyinka, Art, Dialogue and Outrage: Essays on Literature and Culture (Ibandan, Nigeria: New Horn Press,1988), passim; and Myth, Literature and the African World (Cambridge: CUP, 1976), passim.

The Semiotics of the Body 283 The first scene opens with a praise-singer and drummers pursuing Elesin Oba as he marches through the marketplace, an open-air space with quite specific connotations. It is an important place of communication, perhaps the quintessential public arena in Yoruba and African culture, not just a place for commerce. We gradually discover that he is the “King’s horseman” – whose pride and duty is to follow the dead king to ride with him to the “abode of the gods.”6 In the words of Joseph, the “houseboy” of the British district officer, “It is native law and custom. The King die last month. Tonight is his burial. But before they can bury him, the Elesin must die so as to accompany him to heaven” (DKH 28). The purpose of the ritual suicide, imposed upon the keeper of the King’s stables forty days after the King’s death, is not only to give the King a companion into the other world, but also to affirm a sense of cosmos for the culture in general. When the Praise-Singer tells Elesin that their world “was never wrenched from its true course” (DKH 10), he is revealing his confidence that stability may be secured by attending to the rituals of one’s ancestors. This remark is addressed to Elesin to make him constantly aware of how important it is not to fail in his ritual suicide. Preparations for the ritual are psychological as well as physical, and the music and the drumming that follow Elesin on his every appearance are meant to groom him psychologically for the ritual of transition. The stage directions say: “He is a man of enormous vitality, speaks, dances and sings with that infectious enjoyment of life which accompanies all his actions” (DKH 9). His entrance is, in fact, marked by music and dance: a man of very high station presents himself dancing, and this alone signals the paramount importance of kinesic signs in which rhythmic movement has a very high status, not only for the young but also for mature and high-ranking personages. In the light of his impending demise, “that infectious enjoyment of life” may seem a peculiar state of mind. Dance and music are also in this context synonymous with death. Dancing is the vehicle by which one joins the ancestors. A trancelike dance is the culminating expression of Elesin’s final readiness to step into the abyss. On a review of Soyinka’s premiere production of the play in Chicago (1979), Gerald Moore wrote: On a wide, bare stage a lone figure dances to the antiphonal singing of male and female choruses. He dances from the condition of life towards the condition of death. He has moved beyond words and is now “darkening homeward” to the urgent music of other voices.7

It is significant that in this scene the drumming provides a completely coherent text which Elesin reads and which guides him in his actions. Here we see then the importance of complex semiotic communication within a unified semiosphere where all codes and signs cohere and make sense. The trance-dance itself is a well-known performance form associated with Yoruba religion. The trance-dancer, or in Soyinka’s formulation in ‘The

6 7

Wole Soyinka, Death and the King’s Horseman (London: Methuen Drama, 1975), p.62. Henceforth referred to in the text as DKH followed by page numbers. Quoted by James Gibbs, Critical Perspectives on Wole Soyinka (Washington D.C., Three Continents Press, Inc., 1980), pp.126-7.

284 Rosa Branca Figueiredo Fourth Stage,’ “the possessed lyricist” is the mouthpiece of Yoruba tragic drama and the medium between the worlds of the living and the ancestors: his [the possessed singer’s] somnambulist “improvisations” – a simultaneity of musical and poetic forms – are not representations of the ancestor, recognitions of the living or unborn, but of the no man’s land of transition between and around these temporal definitions of experience.8

Transition is therefore the major preoccupation of the play and it is embodied in the tragedy of Elesin. Harmony can only be achieved in this spiritually wholesome universe through a well ordered and well executed ritual observance, accepted as such by the people. Transition has a series of planes: death is one, continuity in communal growth is another. A break in the link between the dead and the living is a disruption of transition. Elesin is thus expected to perform the duty of bridging the gulf between the dead, the living and the unborn.9 He is mentally prepared for the final rite. He will be sung into a trancelike state when he will cross the abysm. This final night is his most honoured and he is given lavish treatment so that in the most vivacious moment of life he dies. In his dance-dialogue with his Praise-Singer, he discloses his preparedness to embrace the phenomenon of death using the riddle of the “Not-I bird.” Through this riddle he images the traditional act by warding off evil, specifically death, by snapping the fingers round the head, as performed consecutively by the farmer, the hunter, the courtesan, the Mallam, his good kinsman, Ifawomi, and the palm-wine tapper in his story. He assures the Praise-Singer and his community that his own reaction to the “Not-I bird” was completely different:

8

9

ELESIN:

[…]. Not-I Has long abandoned home. This same dawn I heard him twitter in the gods’ abode. Ah, companions of this living world What a thing this is, that even those We call immortal Should fear to die.

IYALOJA: ELESIN:

But you, husband of multitudes? I, when that Not-I bird perched Upon my roof, bade him seek his rest again Safe, without care or fear, I unrolled My welcome mat for him to see. Not-I Flew happily away, you’ll hear his voice

Wole Soyinka, Myth, Literature and the African World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), p.148. ‘The Fourth Stage’ was published as an appendix to this compilation of a lecture course Soyinka gave while in Cambridge in 1974-75. The essay was written in honour of G. Wilson Knight, who taught Soyinka at Leeds. ‘The Fourth Stage’ is Soyinka’s first pronouncement on what he later calls ‘morality and aesthetics in the ritual archetypes’ and on the role of drama in the African worldview. The Yoruba believe that life is much more inclusive than it is commonly seen to be in the West. Man himself has three states of being, all of which are linked and can influence each other. These three states are the unborn, the living and the dead (ancestors), and are all linked by what Soyinka has called variously a passage, an abyss or a transitional gulf. For more details see Olufemi Obafemi, Contemporary Nigerian Theatre: Cultural Heritage and Social Vision (Bayreuth: Bayreuth African Studies, 1996), passim.

The Semiotics of the Body 285 No more in this lifetime – you all know What I am. (DKH 13-14)

The tale of the Not-I bird, into which Elesin launches, is a performative tour-de-force that communicates equally on a physical and musical level. The following stage direction must be kept in mind throughout Elesin’s narration of the story: ELESIN executes a brief, half-taunting dance. The drummer moves in and draws a rhythm out of his steps. ELESIN dances towards the market-place as he chants the story of the Not-I bird, his voice changing dexterously to mimic his characters. He performs like a born raconteur, infecting his retinue with his humour and energy. (DKH 11)

The opening line, “a brief, half-taunting dance” indicates to what extent and with what subtlety kinesic signs can communicate in African movement aesthetics. It is a physical reply to the admonitions of the Praise-Singer. Particularly the participle adjective “halftaunting” suggests a subjunctive mood which normally one associates only with verbal messages. A visual equivalent to this mood is provided in the next sequence, when Elesin feigns “insult” yet only wishes to be garbed in rich clothing, which the women hasten to adorn him with: “Elesin stands resplendent in rich clothes, cap, shawl, etc. His sash is of a bright red alari cloth. The women dance around him” (DKH 17). The scene serves to underline Elesin’s vanity and his universally understandable desire to delay his own death somewhat. Elesin’s weakness for profane pleasures, expressed most clearly in his demand for a young bride, is communicated here with visual signs which also set up the connotative field of death and burial. Especially for a Western audience, which associates death with somewhat darker hues, the image of bright red is unusual, if not positively disconcerting. The overall impact of Scene 1 involves a complete shift in the normal organisation of Western theatre. The scene is verbally, musically, gesturally and philosophically an encounter with the Yoruba world communicated through its performance aesthetics. For all the colourful evocation of a bygone age, there is no trace of idealisation, nor of a folkloristic transposition of cultural texts; the integrated performance forms have been refashioned into a fictional ensemble which gives expression to the impending conflict and tragedy. The transition to Scene 2, the verandah of District Officer Pilkings’s bungalow, is constructed around a contrapuntal strategy. It is important to remember that Soyinka demands “rapid scene changes” (DKH 8) so that the drumming of Scene 1 is almost abruptly interrupted by tango music “playing from an old hand-cranked gramophone” (DKH 23). The juxtaposition of two culturally different musical codes carries a variety of connotative associations. The spatial signs provide an equally harsh contrast. The performance space of the market in the previous scene is characterised by circularity, fluidity and constantly changing arrangements created by Elesin, his retinue and the market women. In Scene 2, however, the perspective alters significantly. The audience is confronted with a frontal, linear perspective. This contrast of two types of theatre space has almost a programmatic function: the circularity and multifunctionality of African theatre is contrasted with the fixed structures of Western proscenium staging, which places the spectators in almost the position

286 Rosa Branca Figueiredo of voyeur, looking in on the “Space of Guilt,” as Roland Barthes termed the proscenium stage.10 Structurally, the scene revolves around three different types of texts – verbal, visual and acoustic – and the difficulties of intercultural communication they can involve. The first text is visual: the appearance of the Pilkings in egungun costumes.11 Throughout the scene it becomes clear, even to a spectator with no knowledge of Yoruba culture, that, for Sergeant Amusa and the house-boy Joseph, the Pilkings’ “fancy-dress costume” is a cultural text; it is an ensemble of signs which changes according to the wearer and the context in which it is worn. The messages conveyed can thus have radically different, even existentially important meanings. The functionalisation of the potentially very dangerous egungun dress (traditionally it is thought to be dangerous, even fatal, to touch an egungun) as fancy-dress is not only an expression of ignorance on the part of the Pilkings, but also a visual concretisation of the colonial policy of breaking up and destroying the egungun cults. In Death and the King’s Horseman, Soyinka turns away from the Western tradition; the play does not merely hang upon the framework of ritual, it is the ritual. Technique and theme weld fluidly to yield a theatrical experience in which both actors and audience are meant to participate, and this participation extends beyond the province of the emotional to the psychic, beyond mere physical exhilaration to a deeper spiritual fulfilment. Hence, the dramatic elements alter accordingly. Dialogue, for instance, deepens beyond the level of dramatic wit and becomes a celebration of the primal word; language reverts to its pristine existence as incantation, and “the movement of words is the very passage of music and the dance of images.”12 Rarely, in all of Soyinka’s repertory, does language or spectacle approach the tragic splendour of that moment when Elesin at the end of the third act dances slowly to a gradual death, the words beating against a background of keening female voices: ELESIN:

PRAISE-SINGER:

[ His voice is drowsy] I have freed myself of earth and now It’s getting dark. Strange voices guide my feet. The river is never so high that the eyes Of a fish are covered. The night is not so dark That the albino fails to find his way. A child Returning homewards craves no leading By the hand Gracefully does the mask regain his grove at The end of day (DKH 43)

Cf. for example Roland Barthes on the semiotics of the Western stage as a place of artifice and deception: ‘The Italian-style stage is the space of this lie: everything takes place in an interior which is surreptitiously opened, surprised, spied upon, savoured by a spectator hidden in the shadow. This space is theologically, a ‘Space of Guilt’ – Roland Barthes, ‘On Bunraku/The Written Face’, The Drama Review 15.3 (T50) (1971), pp.76-82 (p.79). 11 Cf. Henry John Drewal: ‘The Arts of Egungun among Yoruba Peoples’, African Arts 11:3 (1978), 18-19 (p.18). 12 Soyinka, Myth, Literature and the African World, p.147. 10

The Semiotics of the Body 287 But Elesin fails in his duty, and the cause, in Soyinka’s interpretation, is to be discovered not only in the sacrilege of the District Officer’s intervention, but also in Elesin’s concupiscence, his tenacious love of earth and flesh, as he himself later confesses: “my weakness came not merely from the abomination of the white man who came violently into my fading presence, there was also a weight of longing on my earth-held limb” (DKH 65). At the point when Elesin fails in his ritual suicide, an overwhelming sense of doom washes over the community. His failure is a mark of the disruption of cosmos for them, and part of this disruption is captured in the filial inversions that attend the meeting between Olunde, Elesin´s son, newly returned from England for the King’s funeral, and his father. The moment is a charged one. Elesin storms onto the stage pursued by the district officer and his guards. Olunde is already on stage with Jane Pilkings, and Elesin nearly runs into the statuesque figure of his shocked son. He stops dead. This is what transpires between them: (For several moments they hold the same position. ELESIN moves a few steps forward, almost as if he is still in doubt.) ELESIN: (He moves his head, inspecting him from side to side.) Olunde! (He collapses slowly at OLUNDE’S feet.) Oh son, don’t let the sight of your father turn you blind! OLUNDE: (He moves for the first time since he heard his voice, brings his head slowly down to look on him): I have no father, eater of leftovers. (He walks slowly down the way his father had run. Light fades out on ELESIN, sobbing into the ground). (DKH 61)

The father’s bewilderment and the son’s frozen shock are captured in their different reactions. The most important part of the scene is Elesin’s collapse at the feet of his son, gesturing to an involuntary prostration. In Yoruba culture it is young people who prostrate before their elders and sons before fathers, not vice-versa. For a father to fall before his son is a mark of role inversion and deeply shocking. In the last scene Iyaloja, the market woman, hurls back at the horseman his earlier proverbs of strength and daring and presents to him in the white man’s prison the body of his son, who committed ritual suicide in his place, whereupon Elesin, unable to bear his shame and look upon the bitter fruit of his indecision, strangles himself with his chains. And that is the signal for tragedy, for this death is now merely gratuitous, void of meaning; it has therefore no sacrificial or restitutive value, and in any case comes too late, after his son has charted the transitional passage for him: IYALOJA: […] He is gone at last into the passage but oh, how late it all is. His son will feast on the meat and throw him bones. The passage is clogged with droppings from the King’s stallion; he will arrive all stained in dung. (DKH 76)

Soyinka is not writing a polemic aimed at securing the practical reintroduction of ritual suicide; he is merely using the historical incident as a particularly vivid imaginative symbol of sacrifice in general and of traditional Yoruba communalism in particular.13 It is this 13

Death and the King’s Horseman is based upon a real event that happened in Nigeria in 1945. The Alafin (king) of Oyo, Oba Siyenbola Oladigbolu I, died after a thirty-three-year reign. His ‘Horseman’, Olokun Esin

288 Rosa Branca Figueiredo metaphorical level of the play which is stressed by most critics and on which Soyinka insists in his prefatory note. This argument carries a great deal of force. The audience is not required to approve the religious motive of Olunde’s sacrifice at a literal level. Very few will be inclined to accept that the gods or “cosmic totality” really require self-immolation of the kind prescribed by Yoruba tradition. Olunde’s sacrifice is to be seen as the metaphorical vehicle for a more universal tenor. It symbolises the determination to be true to one’s roots and to assert the value of higher duty against both the internal threat of materialistic selfinterest (Elesin’s tragic flaw) and the external threat of an imposed alien culture. Viewed as the freely willed sacrifice of individual self on behalf of a religious principle, Olunde’s decision achieves metaphorical universality and can command the respect of spectators with widely different views on religion and philosophy. Death and the King’s Horseman has proved popular with western playgoers and readers, being regularly produced and featuring on many syllabi. This is probably because it is one of the dramatist’s more accessible plays, with its dramatisation of British colonialism in Nigeria, its British characters (even if they are stereotypes) and its theatrically exciting use of music, dance and trance ritual in the marketplace scenes. In fact, the mainstay of Soyinka’s play is dance and music employed alongside enactments and re-presentations of events and actions in the past and present lives of the protagonists. So even though his dialogues take place in a foreign language and he employs the theatrical models of the West, he retains the traditional African concept of theatre as a comprehensive, total and celebratory experience in which all the arts are integrated. By serving as the receptacle for other art forms, dance heightens their (and its own) communicative and aesthetic value and significance. This quality is most vividly demonstrated in a Yoruba religious context where dance functions effectively as the language that bridges the chasm between transcendental cosmic powers and human beings. Clearly, with the ancient Yoruba, the art of dance becomes the language of cohesion, displaying different works and fusing all other communication symbols together in a compact aesthetic experience. This composite aesthetic manifestation constitutes an important poetics of and in Yoruba culture. It is a crucial vehicle for conveying, experiencing and reinforcing ideals that give a strong and enduring sense of identity to a people. While the dancing body is by no means confined to the specific functions outlined in this paper, the examples of Soyinka’s play illustrate its importance for post-colonial theatre. Interpreting dance as a text in itself – and as part of a play’s overall semiotics – provides an Jinadu, had led a traditionally privileged life and the people of Oyo expected that he would carry out his duty and ‘follow his master’ by a ritual suicide. When the Alafin died the horseman was delivering a message in the village of Okoyi. About three weeks later he returned to Oyo, dressed himself in white and, in a traditional build-up to committing suicide, began dancing through the streets. The British colonial officer in charge at Oyo heard of Olokun Esin’s intention and ordered that the Horseman should be prevented from killing himself. When word of his father’s arrest reached the Horseman’s youngest son, Murana, he killed himself in place of Olokun Esin in order to fulfil the needs of the ritual. The rewriting of African myth and history in dramatic form has been practised by many modern African writers as they seek to find ‘truths’ often suppressed or ignored in colonial or post-independence versions of African history. Soyinka has freely reinterpreted the story, while keeping close to its major events, in order to explore his ideas on leadership, tradition and the gulf between peoples.

The Semiotics of the Body 289 approach to drama that denaturalises notions of subjectivity as grounded primarily in dialogue. Dance thus emerges as a locus of struggle in producing and representing individual and cultural identity. As a site of competing ideologies, dance also offers potential liberation from imperialist representation through the construction of an active, moving body that “speaks” its own forms of corporeality. The main thrust of this study has been to examine the meaning of the verbal and the visual in Soyinka’s theatre and its significance as an art form communicating cognitively and effectively the aesthetics of Yoruba culture. Semiotics, the study of the production and exchange of meaning in society has been instructive in this process, especially in the analysis of the body.14 Dance makes and becomes art in the way it unifies external intangible elements such as movement, rhythm, and space in the body to create a new cohesive form. This new form becomes a powerful non-verbal communication symbol. This is because the body, in its dual role as the primary tool of dance and as a cultural indicator, is the tangible element able to turn cultural concepts into perceptible forms and narrated rhythmic movement, as it becomes contextualised in space. Analysing the Yoruba corporeal attitude in communication has thus allowed us to focus on and briefly discuss the visual and dynamic form, the narrated content, and the conceptual meaning of dance.

14

See more about the semiotics of the body in Omofolabo S. Ajayi, Yoruba Dance: the semiotics of movement and body attitude in a Nigerian Culture (Trenton: Africa World Press, Inc., 1998), passim.

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Maria Sofia Pimentel Biscaia

An Inheritance of Horror: the shadow of Das Kabinett des Doktor Caligari in Salman Rushdie’s Shame Setting off from the oft-recognised influence of film and the film industry upon Salman Rushdie’s work, this article proposes to disclose a specific relationship between Shame, Rushdie’s 1983 satirical novel, and Robert Wiene’s 1920 German classic Das Kabinett des Doktor Caligari. Both works evolve from the same main subject, insanity, which is suggested in the film by the extraordinary effects of twisted streets, over-hanging buildings and contorted spaces, and in the book by the vivid description of Sufiya’s violent attacks. There can also be found an identical set of characters: a murderous somnambulist, a mad doctor, and a Beauty-like character roaming through a text pervaded by mystery, horror and fantasy. In reality, both works draw heavily on the workings of fairy tales and particularly on Beauty and the Beast and Sleeping Beauty. If Das Kabinett was able to make an impressive statement on post-war Germany, the horror conventions that it established are effectively still at work in a novel which revisits the context of a politically repressed Pakistan where mindless tyranny was the norm.

Salman Rushdie’s relation with cinema began at an early age. He has said that he grew “with the feeling of being in a film capital,” which is no exaggeration, coming from someone born in Bombay.1 Some of his relatives even worked in the film industry. Before he left for England to attend Rugby School at the age of fourteen, he had already done some acting at his school in Bombay. He continued to act at Rugby and later at Cambridge where he read History. After a brief period in Pakistan, where his parents had in the meantime moved to, he joined a group theatre that performed at the Oval House in Kennington. Though he enjoyed it immensely, in 1970 it became financially unsustainable and this, along with the idea that he probably did not excel in the performative arts, led to his decision to give up a career in acting.2 He said dryly that he waved his arms too much.3 His close connection with cinema was never abandoned though, and it became a complementary form of art to his writing. In 1995, while still hiding due to the fatwa proclaimed on his life, he gave an interview to Canadian film-maker David Cronenberg, who incidentally as a young artist wanted to be a writer and not a director. Rushdie confessed to Cronenberg that “I’m completely obsessed with movies. I’ve always said that movies had more impact on me than novels in a formative way.”4 Rushdie openly disagreed with Ingmar Bergman, who is mentioned in the interview and for whom the novel is a higher form of art than film. Sometimes the link with movies assumes a most surprising and even comical quality. Following the fatwa hysteria, a film was produced in Pakistan called International

1

2

3 4

Jean W. Ross, ‘Contemporary Authors Interview: Salman Rushdie’, in Conversations with Salman Rushdie, ed. by Michael R. Reder (Jackson, Miss: University of Mississippi Press, 2000), pp.1-7 (p.6). The interview took place in 1982. Jean W. Ross, p.7; John Haffenden, ‘Salman Rushdie’, in Conversations with Salman Rushdie, pp.30-56 (p.34); David Cronenberg, ‘David Cronenberg meets Salman Rushdie’, in Shift 3.4 (June-July, 1995). 25 Sep. 1997 <www.davidcronenberg.de/cr_rushd.htm> Cronenberg, no page. Cronenberg, no page.

292 Maria Sofia Pimentel Biscaia Guerrillas (Jan Mohammad, 1990) where Salman Rushdie was made a heretic villain whom freedom fighters of Islam dutifully persecuted in order to murder him. He lived in a paradisiacal island in the South Pacific where he was protected by armed forces suspiciously similar to the Israeli army. Attired throughout the film in safari suits, Rushdie helped the “Israeli” militaries to torture and murder the Islamic soldiers who had been made prisoners. At the end of the film, Rushdie was “justly” punished when the Qu’ran appeared in the sky and struck him dead with a lightning bolt. But Rushdie participated in a serious project involving writing and the screen through Midnight’s Children. In 1987 he worked with Channel Four to make a documentary on Midnight’s Children; and in 1995 a production for BBC was put in motion to make a series of the novel which in the meantime, in 1993, had been chosen as the Booker of Bookers. During what became a bumpy ride in 1995 and 1996, the project was successively taken over by three directors, four producers and two writers, the last of whom was Rushdie himself. The dream finally came to an end after problems with financial support from the BBC, a refusal by the Indian government to authorise shooting the film in the country, and another from the Sri Lankan government whose Muslim Members of Parliament were sympathetic to Iran and its hostility towards Rushdie. The making of the film was almost an epic itself and sadly, in the end, it never came to light, although in 1999, through Vintage Publishers, Rushdie published the screenplay for the five episodes planned for the film.5 In the field of film criticism he has published on the work of Satyajit Ray in Imaginary Homelands and on The Wizard of Oz for the British Film Institute – a piece which included a tale inspired by the film, “At the Auction of the Ruby Sleepers,” later included in the collection of short stories East, West.6 But it is in relation to Midnight’s Children that the issue of cinema is most commonly raised. When reading Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children one cannot fail to notice the influence of cinema as a material element in the overall structure of the novel. Rushdie’s writing is in fact able to create multiple visual effects, a technique inspired by a cultural means that has many affinities with his own art. The influence of film has been frequently noted, both in articles and in dissertations.7 This affinity is therefore documented by himself and widely acknowledged by his readers. To a lesser extent than Midnight’s Children, Shame discloses Rushdie’s filmic interests. Alexander, The Great (Robert Rossen, 1956) is a key intertext which enables the comparison of Richard Burton’s epic interpretation with Iskander Harappa’s shocking arrogance in staging his innocence with relation to money-making in the war business. Iskander Harappa takes off his shirt in a dramatic and effective gesture to convince people of his sincerity and commitment to their welfare. The other despot in the novel, Raza Hyder, is in his turn related with Excelsior, creating an idealised image of the honourable 5 6 7

Salman Rushdie, The Screenplay of Midnight's Children (London: Vintage, 1999). Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-1991 (London: Granta / Penguin, 1991); The Wizard of Oz (London: BFI Publishing, 1992); East, West (London: Vintage, 1995). Cf Nicholas D. Rombes Jr., ‘The Satanic Verses as a Cinematic Narrative’ Literature-Film-Quarterly, 11:1 (1993), 47-53; Nimisha Ladva, Where Are You From? Migrancy and Representation in Postcolonial Fiction and Film, unpublished diss. (U of California, Irvine, 1999); Moumin Manzoor Quazi, The Blurred Boundaries between Film and Fiction in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children’, ‘The Satanic Verses’, and Other Selected Works, unpublished diss. (U of North Texas, 1999).

An Inheritance of Horror 293 knight saving damsels in distress. The romanticised construction proves to be fragile and superficial, eventually not at all consistent with what later proves to be his cruel and unstable inner self. Bilquìs’s lunacy is derived from that moment when Hyder saves her from her father’s burning cinema, which had been blown up by a religious radical group. Another example of how film intertwines with Rushdie’s writing is put forward in the interview with Cronenberg, where he describes how the episode of the honour-killing of the girl who consorted with a white boy began by being a draft for a screenplay. In this paper I would like to suggest another link of Shame with film, specifically with Robert Wiene’s 1920 classic Das Kabinett des Doktor Caligari which established the grounds for the genre of the horror film. Das Kabinett des Doktor Caligari has survived well to the present day and it has even overflowed to the literary universe where Shame can be listed as one of its offspring. The theme that pervades both the novel and the film is insanity, which in the latter is suggested by the extraordinary effects of twisted streets, over-hanging buildings and contorted spaces. In the book, insanity is shaped as the madness of blood-thirsty regimes which have human rights downtrodden. My argument is not that Das Kabinett des Doktor Caligari is a direct intertext in Shame, but rather that the film’s brilliancy in making a comment on the political situation of its time resulted in its continued presence in our collective imagination and therefore in artistic manifestations dealing with themes such as oppression, tyranny, social injustice, and national identity crises. Taking a cue from German expressionism, the film is filled with stark, angular shapes, and grotesquely shaped fixtures so as to construct a more terrifying world. The distortion of the sets is correlative with the insanity of Francis, the narrator. The visual effect of light and darkness, which was later recovered by film noir, allied to architectural distortion, thus insinuates the socio-psychological instability of the characters. The impact of the film cannot be overstated for it initiated the expressionist style in cinema eventually known as Caligarism. No other film was able to achieve the Expressionist principle so brilliantly: to depict the turmoil of interior realities so well through the construction of exterior spaces. In the years that followed, a whole body of Schauerfilme came to light and they all resorted to the horror plot and Expressionist mood to convey the dominant cinematic theme of the time: the torments of the soul.8 In Shame, irrationality is represented in Sufiya’s murderous violence directed at her family, husband and eventually strangers. Sufiya was the repository of an inheritance of shame for being a girl, and this, following the death of Raza and Bilquìs, Hyder’s first son, was invested with a supplementary dose of shame.9 A terrible fever comes upon her and her 8

9

For an expanded discussion of the Faustian theme and nationalism in early German cinema see Paul Coates’s The Gorgon’s Gaze: German Cinema, Expressionism, and the Image of Horror (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1991). The best-known examples of Schauerfilme, films of fantasy and terror, include Fritz Lang’s Der Müde Tod (1921), F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922), and Robert Wiene’s Raskolnikov (1923), an adaptation of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. Interestingly, it is her mother who is especially hurt and who therefore devises constant ways of punishing the girl. Bilquìs is, from the most conventional point of view, the lunatic character of the novel, as she suffers from an insane fear of the wind. She is clearly related with Jane in the insane asylum declining Francis’s wooing because queens are not free to give their hearts away. In the same manner, Bilquìs “grew up with an unspoken fantasy of queenhood” only to make herself the focus of the mockery of neighbours and street

294 Maria Sofia Pimentel Biscaia mental abilities suffer severe and irretrievable damage. The first attack she carries out victimises over a hundred turkeys. She “had torn off their heads and then reached down into the bodies to draw their guts up through their necks with her tiny and weaponless hands […] and soon everybody […] was standing and gaping at the spectacle of the bloodied girl and the decapitated creatures with intestines instead of heads.”10 The association of spectacle with violence establishes the first common trait between Sufiya and Cesare (Conrad Veidt) in Das Kabinett des Doktor Caligari. In the same manner that Sufiya provides a spectacle of horror to sister, parents, servants and neighbours who approach the site with the sadistic impulse of observing the mutilated bodies of the animals, Cesare is also constructed as a freak, but a traditional one, a wonder in a freak show with foretelling abilities. She, on the other hand, is a socio-cultural freak: a woman with a taste for killing. Sufiya’s condition worsens and she moves on to human victims. She attacks her sister’s husband-to-be during the wedding ceremony, adding another shameful stain to the family’s honour. Then rumours begin about a white panther ravaging the countryside and attacking people. Her father and her husband, Omar Shakil, realise that the beast is none other than Sufiya whose self has parted in two. Whenever she suffers an attack the half of Sufiya which the effort of socialisation manages to repress under the cloak of a cultural masquerade succumbs to the uncontrolled half. Omar, a doctor, is thus forced to put his wife to sleep to keep her rage under control: Hyder and Shakil agreed that Sufiya Zinobia was to be kept unconscious until further notice. She was to enter a state of suspended animation; Hyder brought long chains and they padlocked her to the attic beams; in the nights that followed they bricked up the attic window and fastened huge bolts to the door; and twice in every twenty-four hours, Omar Khayyam would go unobserved into that darkened room, that echo of other deathcells, to inject into the tiny body lying on its thin carpet the fluids of nourishment and of unconsciousness, to administer the drugs that turned her from one fairy-tale into another, into sleeping-beauty instead of beautyand-beast.11

The story of Das Kabinett des Doktor Caligari begins with the arrival of Dr Caligari (Werner Krauss) in the town of Holstenwall where he seeks the local authority’s permission to exhibit his freak at the local carnival fair. Cesare, the freak, was reported to be asleep at all times but later we learn that it is the Doctor who, through hypnosis, puts him in that state of unconsciousness. The similarity with Sufiya’s case is striking: both sleep because their doctor creates a continuous and unnatural sleep. Dr Omar is Rushdie’s modern version of that first mad doctor, Caligari, though Omar’s madness, previously presented in the form of hallucination and vertigo, was essentially a misjudgement: to assume he could manipulate the beast stirring inside Sufiya. The doctors also resemble each other in the attention they pay to their sleeping partners: Caligari feeds and cleans up Cesare while he is asleep and Omar goes up to that room, an attic room where once again a woman finds herself in confinement, to provide for her needs. Despite his supposed affection for her, Sufiya is urchins – Salman Rushdie, Shame (London: Vintage, 1983), p.60. However, in this paper I want to read irrationality beyond the mere context of psychosis. 10 Rushdie, p.138. 11 Rushdie, pp.236-7.

An Inheritance of Horror 295 Omar’s prisoner, a chained slave as much as Cesare is, though Caligari demonstrates an almost motherly care. But whereas Sufiya set herself free from her artificial sleep through a murderous frenzy, Cesare was woken up by Caligari who then instigated him to commit the homicides. Another convergence refers to the setting. Sufiya is in a chamber of horrors which, as the text indicates, echoes another, that of Iskander Harappa, her father’s political rival who was tortured and put to death in a prison cell. Cesare’s prison is, as the name of the film indicates, the cabinet of Dr Caligari. The word cabinet, in fact, can suggest either the small room where the scientist performs his mysterious experiments safely hidden from the curiosity of others or a sort of closet. Both interpretations convey a sense of claustrophobic confinement which visually is achieved with the scenes where Cesare is shown sleeping in a cabinet-like container. Assuming a rigid position inside the box, Cesare’s sleep recalls the sleep of the dead in their coffins. It is a fitting metaphor because Cesare is not only maintained in a state that is coterminous with death; he is also the bringer of death to the world of the living. As the monster that comes back to life to spread death, in the following years Das Kabinett des Doktor Caligari spawned a brood of its own. The scene is re-enacted in Nosferatu by F. W. Murnau in 1921, where Max Schreck brilliantly interprets the first of a whole line of vampires in cinema; by Imhotep in The Mummy (1932, directed by Karl Freund), with Boris Karloff playing the role of the dreadful villain; and by a number of Dracula figures, namely Tod Browning’s Dracula (1931), where Bela Lugosi established the parameters for all vampiric creatures to come (with Karl Freund’s photography). The vampire sleeping in his coffin has since been a foreseeable scene in all the remakes and refashionings of the figure. Both Sufiya and Cesare are therefore part of a tradition of monstrous creatures, but the one reference that is perhaps closer to them is Frankenstein’s monster, due to the dichotomic mechanisms that Mary Shelley worked out in 1818 and that can still be seen operating in the texts under consideration. Like Frankenstein’s monster, Cesare is but the product of a doctor whose only purpose was to prove a scientific point with no concern for the ethical issues involved or consideration in dealing with human lives. Caligari is not interested in the harm he causes Cesare, and the attention he pays to him is that of a scientist towards his guinea pig. Moreover, because he is obsessed with the manipulative possibilities that the study of the unconscious might make available,12 Caligari gives no importance to the issue of murder, to the fact that Cesare, as his creature, kills in accordance with his creator’s orders. Caligari is Cesare’s master and the latter is but a slave fulfilling the doctor’s evil wishes. Sufiya, on the other hand, is made a captive precisely to prevent her from committing homicide. Once free, she sets in motion a succession of homicides that finally lead her to Omar. However, it cannot be said that Sufiya was a natural born killer. She was also made into one because all the sins, lies, betrayals and even murders committed by members of her family were transferred to her. The shame that should have been felt by others is deposited 12

It is no coincidence that Freudian theories had been developed during the twenty years prior to the making of the film.

296 Maria Sofia Pimentel Biscaia on her body: “Swelling slowly, feeding on inadequacy, guilt, shame, bloating towards the surface. The Beast has eyes like beacons, it can seize insomniacs and turn them into sleepwalkers. Sleeplessness into somnambulism, girl into fiend.”13 In his youth Omar had also hypnotised people into obeying his commands or complying with his suggestions. The use Omar makes of his hypnotic powers is as dishonourable as that which Caligari makes of his. Among the outcomes of Omar’s svengalian activities are the suicide of Hashmat Bibi, the servant, who, having been given glimpses of non-being, decided it was not worth living; and also his desire to take sexual advantage of Farah Zoroaster. Sufiya, once also under the effects of Omar’s immobilising powers, reverses the situation and now it is she who hypnotises her victims and paralyses them with her flaming eyes. She becomes “the most powerful mesmerist on earth.”14 At the end of the novel, the creature rebels against her maker and, after accepting her beastly self to the point of looking like a wild animal, she goes back to Nishapur to take his life: She saw him and shuddered; then she rose up on her hind legs with her forepaws outstretched and he had only enough time to say, “Well, wife, so here you are at last,” before her eyes forced him to look. He struggled against their hypnotic power, their gravitational pull, but it was no use, his eyes lifted, until he was staring into the fiery yellow heart of her, […]; and as he stood before her, unable to move, her hands, his wife’s hands, reached out to him and closed. His body was falling away from her, a headless trunk, and after that the Beast faded in her once again, she stood there blinking stupidly.15

It is not only the Sleeping Beauty story that pervades the two pieces. As a previous quotation put forward, Beauty and the Beast motifs are also paramount. In Shame, the Beast emerges from within Beauty because the Beast is the materialisation of the shame which Sufiya is unable to repress: She appeared to be spellbound by the sorceries of the drug, but the monster inside her never slept, the violence which had been born of shame, but which by now lived her own life beneath her skin; it fought the narcoleptic fluids, it took its time, spreading slowly through her body until it occupied every cell, until she had become violence, which no longer needed anything to set it off, because once a carnivore has tasted blood you can’t fool it with vegetables anymore.16

Both Cesare and Sufiya represent therefore the convergence in a single body of the antagonistic impulses already personified by Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, an embodiment of goodness and wickedness as they characteristically exist in human nature. It is worth noting that in this tale the two parameters are represented by a doctor and a monster. Beyond mere dichotomies, film and novel are imbued with a sense of duality that applies both to the creatures and the creators. Referring to Sufiya the narrator asks the question: “whatif, whatif a Beastji somehow lurked inside Beauty Bibi?”17 Cesare performs

13 14 15 16 17

Rushdie, p.218. Rushdie, p.236. Rushdie, p.286. Rushdie, pp.242-3. Rushdie, p.159. Italics in the text.

An Inheritance of Horror 297 the role of a woman who can either be identified with Sleeping Beauty or with Beauty, from the Beauty and the Beast tale. To this transition much contributed the magnificent work done with the make-up. Like them, Cesare lies down passively, pinned down by the male gaze. But when he wakes up, he puts on the cloak of manhood, falls in love with Jane (Lil Dagover), and undergoes the experience of other creatures such as Frankenstein’s nameless monster (Frankenstein, 1931, James Whale)18 and King Kong (King Kong, 1933, Merian C. Cooper): he is rejected, kidnaps the woman, and is subsequently persecuted by an enraged mob.19 Less specifically, it could be said that Sufiya and Cesare inhabit the middle ground between non-human and human, death and life, and innocence and corruption. With respect to the creators, in Caligari’s case the shots make his shadows a visible reality so that it is impossible not to notice them, in order that the viewer can actually see the dark side of the character. In the final part of this paper I would like to address briefly the reason why in my view the elements of Das Kabinett des Doktor Caligari which lingered on in our imagination served Rushdie’s purposes in Shame. I must begin with Das Kabinett des Doktor Caligari and the readings that are made of the film within the social and political context of its production. When the film was exhibited the traumas of World War I were still very much alive in German minds, traumas that were closely related with loss, defeat, and alienation. There was a genuine sense of severance, perceived both as physical mutilation and as the collapse of the collective psyche of a people, a feeling which ultimately opened the breach for Nazism to penetrate and infect the national body. Dennis Schwartz comments that it is an allegory for an evil government (Dr. Caligari) that brainwashes its people (Cesare) to commit crimes it wants carried out. By its odd style, accented mannerisms, all the actors wearing grotesque makeup and acting in a formal stagy manner, it becomes a very unsettling film. Through its amazing sets the film best expresses the insanity of its theme and the story only enhances this as the authorities are shown to be either incompetent or uncaring, and madness proves to be the staple psyche of the Germans at that time.20

Cesare is therefore what Richard Murphy calls an “external embodiment of the desires of others.”21 Spiro Gangas’s remarks are in the same line of thought: It is interesting to notice that Karloff’s interpretation in Frankenstein bears resemblance to Cesare’s peculiar walk, which our collective imagination has ascribed to somnambulists. 19 David Cook posits that Hollywood’s monster movies of the thirties were “Caligari’s American children.” See David Cook, A History of Narrative Film, 3rd edn (London and New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1996) p.123. I would also like to draw attention to the fact that the motif that I have outlined appeared in several films made before Das Kabinett des Doktor Caligari. Der Golem, 1915, also a precursor of Expressionist cinema, was based on the Jewish legend of the giant infused with life. The rabbi who performed the miracle had a daughter who, on rejecting the golem’s affection, triggered the monster’s violence. Another film was made in 1916 which dealt with the theme of soullessness. Homunculus tells the story of an artificially created being who, learning of his origins, turns his rage against humans. The homunculus figure also appears in the Bride of Frankenstein (1935, James Whale), where another mad doctor, Dr Praetorius, is introduced. 20 Dennis Schwartz, Ozus’ World Movie Reviews, 1999. 21 Richard Murphy, Theorizing the Avant-Garde: Modernism, Expressionism and the Problem of Postmodernity (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998), p.221. The politics of power is frequently associated with the politics of sex and that is confirmed in the film. Desire thus finds its expression at the level of authority and sexuality. Murphy argues the subject at length, revealing the connection between the two. He states that Cesare not only 18

298 Maria Sofia Pimentel Biscaia The film conveys through its story and aesthetics a world of chaos and disorder where the individual existence is overshadowed by fear of its own past experiences and the hostile powers embodied within the establishment. To achieve this portrayal of a nightmarish world of guilt Wiene and his photographer Hameister placed the story within the context of angular structures and decors – most notably, the town, the forest and the asylum – rendering the “paranoid” individual captive of a claustrophobic society.22

Robert Wiene wanted to condemn Kaiser Wilhelm, whom he considered responsible for Germany’s humiliating defeat in the war, and, in addition, to alert the population to the dangers of not being attentive to the actions of institutional power. Wiene was thus making an uncanny prophecy of terrible events to come, and was correct in asserting that when a nation sheepishly follows a leader, it might be led into disaster. The metaphor of sleep refers therefore to Germany, sleeping away while heading towards its doom. The madness in Shame is symbolised in an imagined country, Peccavistan, which is but a frail disguise for a real country, Pakistan, where political affairs would have been comical if they did not cost human lives. Raza Hyder, a parody of General Zia ul-Haq, is also the ruler of a regime of terror where political opponents, such as Iskander Harappa, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s fictional counterpart, are simply eliminated. Hyder/Zia’s American-friendly government imposed a new era of Islamism sympathetic with the fundamentalist views: Islamic-inspired education, censorship in the arts, veiled women, and promotion of mutilation as criminal punishment for those disrespecting religious regulations. Iskander Harappa’s rule proves to be no better than Hyder’s theocracy; his regime is characterised by torture, spying, corruption, repression of freedom of the press, conspiracy with foreign politicians,23 and murder of rivals and relatives. He is described as a patrician, autocratic, intolerant and repressive man.24 His crimes are recorded in the shawls, collectively known as “The Shamelessness of Iskander the Great,” that his wife embroiders and which display them as in a reel. In the shawls are pictured, among other offences, his multiple adulteries and orgies, his pornographic voyeurism of foreign films censored by his own regime, the drinking, the drug-consumption, the gambling, the police pay-offs, and the breaking of the voting ballots; the goriest ones describe the repression of the separatist movement in the west, the assassination of Little Mir, his cousin, and the torture of prisoners in his jails. The first of these is appropriately referred to as the shawl of hell: [I]n the name of never-another-East-Wing, the bodies sprawled across the shawl, the men without genitals, the sundered legs, the intestines in place of faces, the alien legion of the dead blotting out the memory of Raza

plays out Caligari’s murderous desires but also his erotic ones. By alluring Jane to his tent to show her his secret, Caligari makes Cesare a representation of his phallus. Furthermore, Cesare can also be seen to embody Jane’s desires, or at least female desire as male imagination conceived it, through passivity, which is wholly concurrent with the abduction scene. Paul Coates argues in relation to the well-known publicity image showing Caligari and his gigantic shadow that its size is symptomatic of the dimension of the hidden power / phallus. On the topics of sex, exhibition and im/potence, see Thomas Elsaesser’s interesting, though rather brief comments in his ‘Social Mobility and the Fantastic: German Silent Cinema’, in Fantasy and the Cinema, ed. by James Donald (London: British Film Institute, 1989), pp.23-38. 22 Edinburgh Film Society Page. University of Edinburgh. 18 Oct. 2003. 23 There are allusions to Chinese diplomats, and to the dictators Shah Pahlevi and Amin Dada. 24 See Rushdie, p.183.

An Inheritance of Horror 299 Hyder’s governorship […], the people grinning lifelessly with bullet holes for second mouths, the people united in the worm-feast of the shawl of flesh and death.25

The Death of Democracy shawl becomes a symbol for the death of a nation once it is dominated by any form of tyrannical force. It is therefore equally suitable to describe the insanity of chaos and cruelty of Raza Hyder,26 Iskander Harappa and of all Caligari types. It is not a coincidence therefore that the democratic principle is allegorically represented by Sufiya in the shawl: “[Iskander Harappa’s] hands [are] around her throat, squeezing Democracy’s gullet, while her eyes bulged, her face turned blue, her tongue protruded, she shat in her pajamas, her hands became hooks trying to grab the wind, and Iskander with his eyes closed squeezed and squeezed.”27 Sufiya embodies an ambiguity that distinguishes her in the end from Cesare; she incarnates democratic hope while replicating the horror of the political systems she experienced. In her one sees conveyed a dilemma that many countries striving to grow out of a repressive command have to resolve. Cesare, on the other hand, is but the instrument reinforcing authority and an emblem of general submissiveness. In Shame, as in Das Kabinett des Doktor Caligari, expressionism’s oppositional discourses convey therefore a sense of irrationality by “deconstruct[ing] the ideological dimension of the conventional system of representation itself, namely its central principle of rationalism and the unshakable positivism of its belief in empirical, knowable forms of truth,” by presenting forms of duplicity and splitting that create what Richard Murphy denominates representational instability.28 But one also sees the expressionist ideal dramatising its own failure. With the advent of World War I, Germany and the expressionists in particular were overcome with nationalistic fervour and with the dawn of a new order rising from the ashes of the one they felt to be oppressive. The communal experience of war would be useful to tear down class division. Inebriated with the thought, Beckmann, Kirchner, Macke, Marc, Heckel, Kokoschka and Dix volunteered to fight. “The sham of European propriety is no longer tolerable. Better blood than eternal deception; the war is just as much atonement as voluntary sacrifice to which Europe subjected itself in

Rushdie, pp.194-5. Hyder’s chaotic state of mind is put forward in his hearing voices, which as in cartoons, represent good and evil. Hyder imagines the advice Harappa and Maulana, his religious advisors, give to him. At the time they were both dead. 27 Rushdie, p.194. 28 Murphy, p.203. 25 26

300 Maria Sofia Pimentel Biscaia order to ‘come clean’ with itself”, wrote Marc.29 In the end, the events themselves proved stronger than ideals; Kirchner, Beckmann and Kokoschka were unable to deal with the horror and were sent home. Some died and the phoenix that rose from the ashes was a deadlier one.30 In Das Kabinett des Doktor Caligari irrationality is also set loose and, in the end, the viewer is left with the sense of a precarious reality, since no definitive answer is available as to how events really took place. Is Francis the insane one and does Caligari still occupy the seat of authority? Is there actually a glimpse of a brighter order after Sufiya has her country, family and herself destroyed?

29 30

Shulamith Behr, Expressionism (London: Tate Gallery Publishing, 1999), p.59. See Dietmar Elger, Expressionism: A Revolution in German Art, trans. by Hugh Beyer (Köln: Taschen, 1991).

Michaela Schäuble

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

In the social sciences the articulation and transmission of scientific thought has traditionally been restricted to the printed and spoken word, but anthropology constitutes a rare exception. The discussion about the relation between the verbal and the visual as media and modes of communication is current in the field, and anthropologists have been involved in the production of still photography and motion pictures ever since these technologies became available. In his article The ethnographer’s eye (1930), Michel Leiris designates seeing as the essential experience for relating to one’s surroundings. He compares the eye of the anthropological observer to the skin and ascribes it the function of a layer between the self and the other through which one’s vision of the world can be mediated both ways. In my paper I use this concept of the ethnographer’s eye as an outset 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. Each style of interrelating text and image results in a unique ethnopoetic manner of creating and communicating ethnographic knowledge. The films are based on the assumption that images can reveal a content beyond their appearance, and that visual meaning remains elusive in the sense that it is never to be captured fully. Exploring ways of understanding that are accessible only by non-verbal means, the three filmmakers conceive of a new configuration for the relationship between images and words in anthropological representation.

The Word and the Eye in Anthropology This volume’s title, Writing and Seeing, outlines the classical procedure of anthropological work, yet in reverse chronological order. By closely looking at the world, being looked back at, and by then textually reconstructing what one has seen, an anthropologist’s or ethnographer’s principal task is to describe the formerly unknown in as detailed and as objective a way as possible. The etymological equivalence between theorising and gazing already points towards the prevalent conceptual transcription of the visual. The Greek word theorein, to gaze upon, originally indicates a foreigner who gazes upon a feast or a spectacle; and thea signifies the gaze upon a god (theos). Within anthropology vision has always enjoyed a privileged status as the principal source of knowledge about the world. Johannes Fabian referred to the equation of “seeing” and “understanding” – on which the crucial role of observation in anthropology is based – as visualism, and has criticised the discipline’s “visualist bias.”1 While in the social sciences the articulation and transmission of scientific thought has traditionally been restricted to the printed and spoken word, anthropology constitutes a rare exception. The discussion about the relation between the verbal and the visual as media and modes of communication is one of the core constituents of this comparatively young scientific branch, and anthropologists have been involved in the production of still photography and motion pictures ever since these technologies became available. As early as 1895, the year in which the Lumière brothers promoted the first public screening of a motion picture, Félix-Louis Regnault, who 1

Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), p.106

302 Michaela Schäuble

is today considered the first ethnographic filmmaker, went to the West Africa exhibition in Paris to film a Wolof woman making a ceramic pot. Three years later, a fieldwork expedition to the Torres Straits Islands north of Australia marked the birth of modern anthropology. Amongst a variety of technical instruments that the scientists brought with them was one of the first kinematographs to record the islanders’ customs and physical behaviour.2 The early synthesis between modern anthropology and documentary filmmaking is utterly striking and points towards the use of the camera as a technological extension and perfected version of the ethnographer’s eye.3 Despite these explorations regarding the role of vision within anthropology, imagebased media (such as drawings, engravings, photography, painting, film, or television) have traditionally been used as merely descriptive or illustrative materials, whereas analytic or explanatory media continued to refer to spoken/written codes. Anthropology’s “iconophobia” lasted until the definite vindication of pictorial media during the so-called crisis of representation.4 Since this epistemological turn, ethnographic picture-taking and filmmaking have obtained the status of an independent, yet nevertheless controversial scientific branch within the logocentric anthropological academy, called “Visual Anthropology.” In the following I will be treating vision, or rather – as the citation of Michel Leiris in my title indicates – the eye of the ethnographer as the core of every anthropological endeavour. Our knowledge of the world, including scientific inquiry, is largely gained through the eye, in the sense that it shapes our ways of seeing and is therefore instrumental in constituting our points of view. However, according to Luce Irigaray, “more than the other senses, the eye objectifies and masters. It sets at a distance, maintains the distance. In our culture, the predominance of the look over smell, taste, touch, hearing, has brought about an impoverishment of bodily relations […] The moment the look dominates, the body

2 3

4

See Anna Grimshaw, The Ethnographer's Eye: Ways of Seeing in Modern Anthropology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp.19-24. The expression refers to Michel Leiris' article L’oeil de l’ethnographe (1930) in which he designates seeing as the essential experience for relating to one's surroundings. Leiris compares the eye of the anthropological observer to the skin and ascribes it the function of a layer between the self and the other through which one’s vision of the world can be mediated both ways. In Michel Leiris, 'L’oeil de l’ethnographe (à propos de la Mission Dakar-Djibouti)', Documents, 7 (1930), 404-14. In the following I use the concepts of the subjective mind's eye and the objective bodily, physical eye not as contrasting, but as complementary notions. Starting from the 1980s, the debates on the subject matter of cultural anthropology have undergone a shift in emphasis regarding the modes and modalities of representation. In the description of cultural difference, the exercise of ethnographic authority through a “textualisation of the Other” is viewed with as much critical distance as the claim of objectively depicting an “other reality.” As this puts its empirical domain and its methodology into question, ethnography is experiencing a political as well as an epistemological crisis. The anthology Writing Culture is widely considered as the basis for this discussion about the “transparency” of scientific data-gathering. The controversy, accordingly known as Writing Culture Debate, addresses not only the subjectivity of one's own perception, calling for a reflection on the author's locatedness even beyond the written text, but fundamentally takes issue with the collection and translation of anthropological knowledge. Cf. James L.Clifford and George E.Marcus (eds.), Writing Culture:The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (Berkeley, Cal: Univ. of California Press, 1986).

The Ethnographer’s Eye 303 loses its materiality.”5 Irigaray’s hypothesis contradicts the more conventional assumptions that attribute a strong synaesthetic immediacy to photographic or filmic material. Such viewpoints imply that visual descriptions are capable of mediating a more sensuous knowledge about the world, whereas written accounts would solely apply to the intellect. One of the most influential anthropological filmmakers of today, David MacDougall, states that “images begin to become signs of the objects they represent; yet unlike words or even pictographs, they share in the physical identity of the objects, having been produced as a kind of photochemical imprint of them.”6 He furthermore pleads for an anthropology that allows for forms of understanding that are capable of eventually replacing those of the written word.7 With these premises in mind, I will look at the work of three contemporary anthropological filmmakers whose central theme is the unsettling experience that the relation between what we see and what we know is never fully determined. Robert Gardner, Trinh T. Minh-ha, and Peter Brosens have developed three very different ethno-poetological concepts in which visual media are used not merely as scientific tools for documentation, but rather considered to be an imaginative and alternative way of exploring and representing the world.

Robert Gardner: Fusion of Sense and the Senses Robert Gardner’s film Forest of Bliss (1987), set in the holy city of Benares in India, is a visual exploration of time as a poetic, sensual experience. The 90-minute film portrays one single day and is built around the juxtapositions of life and death, creation and destruction. Trying to draw close to areas of human life in regard to which scientific methodology proves inadequate, Gardner eliminates all traces of narration or verbal explanations from his filmic account. Forest of Bliss relies exclusively on vision to convey information; not even the dialogue is subtitled. Without focusing on protagonists in the original sense, Gardner’s camera is following three men, two old temple priests and a man who lives near the burning ghats, the cremation grounds, as master of the mortuary rites. The characters as well as the narration stay fragmentary, and their actions remain small segments of consecutive movements. The viewer is exposed to countless – for the most part very confusing – impressions, and continually has to draw his/her own conclusions. Up until today, Forest of

5

6 7

Luce Irigaray, ‘Un art différent de sentir’ [Interview], in Les Femmes, la Pornographie et l´Érotisme, ed. Marie-Francoise Hans and Gilles Lapouge (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1978), pp.42-59 (p.45). See also Sartre's analysis of the gaze in L´être et le néant, which suggests that the constitution of one's own self through the other's gaze (through “being looked back at”) is prior to – or at least co-original with – one's objectifying gaze upon the other (Jean-Paul Sartre, L´être et le néant [Paris: Gallimard, 1943], passim). This concept is of particular importance regarding Trinh T. Minh-ha's filmic approach that I will be referring to in the second section of this paper. I am grateful to Robin Celikates for bringing Sartre's reflections on the gaze to my notice. David MacDougall, 'Beyond Observational Cinema', in Principles of Visual Anthropology, ed. by Paul Hockings (The Hague and Paris: Mouton Publishers, 1975), pp.109-124 (p.117). MacDougall, p.122.

304 Michaela Schäuble

Bliss is considered to be the most controversial and maybe the most widely loathed film of the genre. Starting with a quote by William Butler Yeats from the Upanishads, “Everything in this world is eater or eaten. The seed is food and the fire is eater,” Gardner prepares the ground for the mystic/mythological symbolist poetry of his filmic account. The viewer is given this brief written instruction to decipher the film’s symbolism in view of the fact that all things are transitory and yet endlessly repeated. The central image Gardner employs for the transition between this world and the next are the boats that carry the corpses of the recently deceased to the other side of the river Ganges.8 The shots of the boatmen crossing the river are intercut with pictures of daily life in Benares: street scenes, sacrifices to the gods in the numerous tiny temples, purifying rites, images of the cremation sites at the burning ghats, or children playing hopscotch and flying kites – all of them arranged in such a manner that they can be read as transcendental metaphors. Another striking device is the image-and-sound-montage in the film. The leading sound theme throughout is the roaring and pounding of the wooden boats. At first, the disturbing sound that reminds one of a quiet crying or moaning cannot be assigned to a particular source and it is only much later in the film that its origin is detected. Combined with images of dogs eating the leftovers of human corpses, for instance, the sound motif resembles the suffering and moaning of the living. The last sequence of the film is an empty screen, a filmic device that could point towards a visualisation of nothingness. By constantly picturing death, creation and cosmic renewal, Gardner fabricates his own cosmology that cannot be fully deciphered, yet he manages to “transform the linear time of the unrepeatable into the cyclical time of the endlessly repeated.”9 A further indication for this reading might be that at the beginning of the film the boats move from left to right, whereas towards the end of the film their direction is reversed, and they disappear in the void – just to reappear again out of the fog from the left at the beginning of a repeated screening of the film. Eliot Weinberger has pointed out that in Hinduism the primary form of worship is darshana, the act of seeing, in which the eyes literally go out to touch the gods – and one might go as far as to read Forest of Bliss as a filmic rendering of this religious concept.10 Due to Gardner’s filmic style of direct, open shots, without restricting himself to specific topics and themes, he succeeds in gradually transforming the viewers’ perception. By making the audience look at things with “new eyes,” he is inventing a reality rather than depicting an already existing one. The main criticism, however, is that the film is eurocentric, since it puts much more emphasis on the viewer than on the people depicted – which, from an ethnographic point of view, goes against the dominant anthropological principle of having to grasp the native’s point of view. Some critics even call Gardner’s films imperialistic or neo-colonial, in the sense that he rouses apparent mystifications about the countries and peoples depicted. In his See Robert Gardner and Ákos Östör, Making Forest of Bliss: Intention, Circumstance, and Chance in Nonfiction Film (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), passim. Eliot Weinberger, 'The Camera People', in Visualizing Theory. Selected Essays from V.A.R. 1990-1994, ed. by 9 Lucien Taylor (New York and London: Routledge, 1994), pp.3-26 (p.21) 10 Weinberger, p.24. 8

The Ethnographer’s Eye 305 review of Forest of Bliss, Alexander Moore writes in the Society of Visual Anthropology Newsletter: [The film] is, for pure imaginary, for sheer cinematographic beauty, an aesthetic masterpiece. As art, we could make a case that this is a visually absorbing film. Yet the film is labelled an anthropological documentary. As such, it is deficient, because it relies on only one perceptual mode, vision, to convey information.11

Gardner clearly sets the aesthetic potential of a film against the descriptive-analytical potential of a written scientific text. Forest of Bliss does not respond to the demands for explanatory comments by readers who were trained to interpret the written word and who find it difficult to trust the perceptive faculties of the observant eye. In Gardner’s film, the eye of the ethnographer is the eye of a flâneur: the momentary, associative, and impressionistic glimpses that the viewer is allowed to take almost subvert the idea of meaning, and sustain the conception that everything we see is just a transient appearance. As Michael Oppitz puts it, “In its silent eloquence Gardner’s film [...] points towards an open door beyond which the conventional divisions between document and fiction, sense and the senses do not exist.”12

Trinh T. Minh-ha: Disruption and Dislocation Like Robert Gardner’s filmic documents, the works of the Vietnamese filmmaker and writer Trinh T. Minh-ha are commonly labelled art, in order to stress the fact that they strongly discard conventional forms of scientific documentation. Working as an ethnomusicologist in Senegal, Trinh T. Minh-ha shot her first film, Reassemblage in 1982. Her critique of traditional ethnographic documentaries is expressed in one of her voice-over commentaries early in this film: “I do not intend to speak about / Just speak nearby.” This concept of “speaking nearby” is a visual, musical, and verbal technique she uses to make the invisible visible, by commenting on the filmic images in a way that does not point to an object as if it were distant from the speaking subject.13 Trinh T. Minh-ha presents her images with a maximum of manipulation and distortion: she uses the stereotypical images one would expect of a film about Africa, such as colourful markets, bare-breasted women, exotic dances and fearful rites, and orchestrates them with sounds of wild drumming, unexplained dialogue and a number of self-reflexive statements. The most striking feature, however, is her assertion of the non-linearity of time, constructed by constant disruptions and juxtapositions of image and commentary. In an interview she states that she wants the viewer to “perceive the plural, sliding relationship between ear and

Alexander Moore, 'The Limitations of Imagist Documentary: A Review of Robert Gardner's “Forest of Bliss”', Society For Visual Anthropology Newsletter, Volume 4, 2 (Fall 1988), 1-3 (p.3). 12 Oppitz, Michael, 'A Day in the City of Death', Anthropos, 83 (1988), 210-212 (p.212). 13 See Trinh T. Minh-ha and Nancy N. Chen, 'Speaking Nearby', in Visualizing Theory. Selected Essays from V.A.R. 1990-1994, ed. by Lucien Taylor (New York and London: Routledge, 1994) pp.433-51. 11

306 Michaela Schäuble eye, image and word.”14 Trinh T. Minh-ha’s filmic and written projects are mainly concerned with the question of authorship, and she aims at subverting the power of naming and the power of language in general. She perceives filmmaking as a poetic practice, a performance that engages as well as questions its own language. In Reassemblage, the space of language and meaning is constantly interrupted by gaps of “absences, non-senses, and silences”15 – and one recognises that she never takes the working of language for granted. The film is a collage of “jump-cuts, close-ups of human body parts, changes in the mode and register of commentary, and the frequent repetition of key phrases.”16 By using language like a musical instrument, Trinh T. Minh-ha composes a cacophony of different yet highly subjective statements that can be read as an attempt to subvert the hegemonic authority of the single voice. Her discourses on the construction and depiction of the Other are mimicry of scientific anthropological discourse in which she uses and defamiliarises bits and pieces of theoretical terminology. The result is the following voice-over commentary: A film about what? My friends ask. A film about Senegal, but what in Senegal? [...] Ethnologists handle the camera the way they handle words recuperated collected preserved [...] Documentary because reality is organised into an explanation of itself Every single detail is to be recorded The man on the screen smiles at us while the necklace he wears, the design of cloth he puts on, the stool he sits on are objectively commented upon It has no eye, it records

Her ethno-poetological concept consists of various playful performances, in which she nonchalantly moves within the tension between political discourse and poetical speech, as well as between literal and non-literal language. Commenting on her film she questions “the habit of imposing a meaning to every single sign” and calls the production of meaning a

Constance Penley and Andrew Ross, 'Interview with Trinh T. Minh-ha', in Camera Obscura, 13/14 (1985), 86-111 (p.92). 15 Henrietta L. Moore, 'Trinh T. Minh-ha Observed: Anthropology and Others', in Visualizing Theory. Selected Essays from V.A.R. 1990-1994, ed. by Lucien Taylor (New York and London: Routledge, 1994) pp.115-125 (p.117). 16 Moore, Trinh T. Minh-ha Observed, p.117. 14

The Ethnographer’s Eye 307 “totalizing quest.”17 The emphasis of her films, however, lies on revealing the intricacies of the ethnographic production of knowledge. In an interview she states: When one is not just trying to capture an object, to explain a cultural event, or to inform for the sake of information; when one refuses to commodify knowledge, one necessarily disengages oneself from the mainstream ideology of communication, whose linear and transparent use of language and the media reduces them to mere vehicles of ideas.18

Referring to Roland Barthes’ statement that the real antonym of the “poetic” is not the prosaic, but the stereotyped, Trinh T. Minh-ha claims that she seeks to set fluidity and multilayered meanings against the stereotypical, which always tends towards the static.19 In her films, the ethnographer’s eye resembles a scalpel that cuts the surface to unearth layer after layer of sedimented meaning. Instead of talking about the unknown Other, Trinh T. Minh-ha confronts the viewer with her own situation as an outsider in a foreign setting. Her focus is upon the complexities of her involvement as a person, and she critically depicts her own act of watching. In Reassemblage she comments that “life is looking at me [...] I am looking through a circle in a circle of looks.” By making herself an object of the inverted gaze and combining it with extended verbal and pictorial reflections on looking at each other, she performs a degree of reflexivity that attempts to deconstruct the dualistic relationship between subject and object, and eventually ethnographic authority in general. The viewer is left with a sense of disorientation, and Trinh T. Minh-ha’s instructive and at times patronising style, in which she discourages the audience from assuming any statement to be “true,” is effectively unsettling. However, her intended multivocality often leads to a decontextualisation and generalisation of her comments. By not putting her voiceover in a historical context, she herself runs the danger of stereotyping the people about whom she claims to “speak nearby.” The anthropological discourse, that Trinh T. Minh-ha claims to constitute, rather often works towards its contrary: by stressing the wholeness of cultures, their distinctiveness and the coherence of their values, she draws an ahistorical – and therefore static – picture that counteracts the processual, dynamic structure of her deconstructivist image-sound-montage.20

Peter Brosens: Hybrid States of Mind In my last example of poetic imagery in documentary film, I refer to the work of Peter Brosens, a young Belgian filmmaker, who, like Robert Gardner and Trinh T. Minh-ha, has an academic background in Social Anthropology. Yet quite contrary to Trinh T. Minh-ha’s unsettling and disturbing narrative approach, and to Gardner’s exclusive reliance on the visual, Brosens’s cinematic form of storytelling literally drags the viewer into the Trinh T. Minh-ha, When the Moon Waxes Red: Representation, Gender, and Cultural Politics (New York: Routledge, 1991), pp.29-50. 18 Trinh, ‘Speaking Nearby’, p.441. 19 Trinh, ‘Speaking Nearby’, p.441. 20 See Moore, Trinh T. Minh-ha Observed, pp.124ff. 17

308 Michaela Schäuble

astoundingly melodious tale of Basaar, a stray dog. Set in Mongolia against the background of the upcoming total solar eclipse of 1997, the film State of Dogs (1998) starts with a poem written and recited by the Mongolian poet Baatar Galsansukh. It is an ode to life in which the lyrical I announces seven reasons to die for, which are equally mirrored by seven reasons to live for. The poem ends with the words: “I am here now. I am nowhere.” After a sad lute melody sets the intangible tone of the film, we are told the mythological story of the dragon Rah: “A long time ago, people were offered the water of eternal life. But the giant dragon Rah stole and drank it. The sun and the moon denounced Rah and God sent his messenger to kill the evil dragon. But because Rah had eternal life, he did not die. Instead he swallowed the sun and the moon and it was darkness. The people protested fiercely and Rah spat the sun and the moon back out. But Rah hates the sun and the moon and he keeps returning to swallow them.” By combining the poem about the beauties and cruelties of life with the mythological explanation of the anticipated solar eclipse, the symbolism in State of Dogs – as in Forest of Bliss – points towards the perpetual recurrence of all visible things, but also towards their illusory character. Following this artfully staged opening scene, the film introduces us to Basaar, the dog whose perspective we are about to enter. Using actual footage of recent governmentauthorised dog-hunts, Brosens recounts how Basaar is shot along with other strays in the streets of Ulan Bator. Left without the main protagonist at the very beginning of the film, we are told that it is common belief in Mongolia that when a dog dies, he will be reborn as a human being. Then the narrator’s sonorous Mongolian voice begins to speak from Basaar’s perspective: set in the transitory realm between death and rebirth, Basaar wanders across his own memory as a disembodied spirit. The viewer embarks on a journey along the phantom images of the dog’s recollections: his cheerful times as a shepherd’s dog, his suffering at being abandoned by his master, his striving for survival as a stray in the city, and finally his reluctance to be reborn as a human being. The film lacks a conventional plot as well as a dramatic structure, and consists of a collage of seemingly random images, sounds, and every day scenes of Mongolian life – in the capital, on the steppe, and throughout the whole year. The camera seems to float in the air, and many times the shots are taken from a low angle in order to match the dog’s perspective. As Basaar’s spirit wanders the country, the eclipse myth of the dragon Rah is skilfully taken up and intertwined throughout the film. Step by step the viewer comes to understand that Basaar’s rebirth is scheduled for the actual day of the solar eclipse, and that according to the myth, his fate depends on man’s power to scare away Rha. The film employs different time schemes that run parallel and finally merge. The recurrent appearance of a pregnant young woman, for example, foreshadows the birth of the child in which Basaar’s reincarnated spirit will dwell. And whilst Basaar is still remembering his past as a dog and is still trying to object to his future as a human, the present is catching up with him. Towards the end of the film, beautiful shots of the eclipsed landscape are linked to documentary footage of Mongolians who beat metal objects in an attempt to defeat the mythological dragon. Even though the sun is rescued from being swallowed permanently and Basaar’s spirit is eventually reborn, State of Dogs is far from being a redemption myth.

The Ethnographer’s Eye 309 The notion that reincarnation as a human being is not considered salvation makes Basaar’s story also a social parable about the loss of mankind’s origins and the alienation of life in an urban environment. However, the entwining of Basaar’s story with Mongolian folklore, songs, traditional throat singing, myth, and contemporary verse makes for a highly contemplative film that takes on the texture of a poetic fairy tale. The images are dominated by the narrator’s voice whose repetition of Basaar’s assumed recollections and philosophical contemplations develops the hypnotic effect of a mantra. One critic writes, “State of Dogs is a peculiar hybrid, a patchwork of documentary and fiction, travelogue and animal fable, mysticism and social realism. It has a story, but is not overly concerned with telling it. It unfolds in fragments and impressions, like a dream, and, like a dream, some of it is memorable, some of it is not.”21 While Brosens returns to a rather conventional type of verbal narration by employing straight, monologic storytelling, he deploys an unusually poetic form “of emotional speech that operates through the imagistic value of words.”22 State of Dogs is based on the assumption that the “deeper meanings” of visible things leave their trace on the image, and Brosens aims at cinematically discerning the mysteries of life and the complexities of reality. In State of Dogs, the ethnographer’s eye takes a stand for the memory of a stray dog. Visual metaphors and imagination are the vehicles which transport him beyond representational conventions, and subsequently also beyond reality as known in ethnographic film. Underneath the intuitively experienced aesthetic depth lies the assumption of a modern world in which a certain mythological or imaginary knowledge about being in this very world has been repressed – a situation which already threatens to become real in the urbanised parts of Mongolia. The object of the poetic in Peter Brosens’ enchanted narrative technique is seemingly to bring these lost perceptions back into experience.

Conclusion I have presented three very different approaches to the use of text-image relations in contemporary ethnographic film, in which the eye of the ethnographer has taken the shape of a submissive flâneur, of a scalpel in the service of disillusionment, and of the associative memory of a stray dog. While Robert Gardner entirely relies on the imaginative power of images and believes in the unrestricted visual transportability of meaning, Trinh T. Minh-ha uses stereotyped images to illustrate her critique of the production of scientific meaning. By making the physical eye of the ethnographer visible, she challenges accustomed ways of seeing in modern anthropology. In Peter Brosens’ film State of Dog the image-word relationship is a seemingly harmonious one in which verbal narration appears to be inspired

David Dalgleish, 'Review of Nohoi Oron / State of Dogs', Full Alert Film Review, http://wlt4.home.mindspring.com/fafr/reviews/state.htm (Feb. 27, 1999). 22 George E. Marcus, 'The Modernist Sensibility in Recent Ethnographic Writing and the Cinematic Metaphor of Montage', in Visualizing Theory. Selected Essays from V.A.R. 1990-1994, ed. by Lucien Taylor (New York and London: Routledge, 1994), pp.37-53 (p.48). 21

310 Michaela Schäuble

by the images, but in fact utterly implements the unfolding of the story line. His film is a cinematic poem rather than a poetic movie. Yet however different in style, all three filmmakers consequently challenge the objectivist pretensions of a scientific anthropological language: they ignore questions about the “truth” or “reality” of their filmic images, and point rather towards the constructedness of their films. They refuse to accept the primarily supplemental function that film is given in anthropology, and aim at overthrowing the discourse of realism and sobriety in documentary by inventing themselves the images they portray, or by lending them new meaning. They all abandon realist dogma and play with the assumed and expected ideological neutrality of the image, operating in the space between imagination and reality – judging from these examples, “objectively representing reality” seems a hopelessly obsolete quest for contemporary anthropology. Gardner’s and Brosens’ films aim at conveying a revelatory content that is supposed to be directly transmitted to the viewer’s senses, even before s/he has come to a rational understanding. Trinh T. Min-ha’s self-referential approach, on the other hand, which claims by its stylistic devices to be a non-representation, challenges the viewer’s judgement at all times by interfering with the process of observation and imagination. However, what is most striking is the fact that all the three films I have discussed here are labelled as “art” within academic discourse, and I think that they are named artistic because they do not simply produce images on the margins of the text. Poetic imagery and what Merleau-Ponty calls “the indirect language” still seem to pose a threat to science that might be grounded in art’s determined rejection of literality.23 In conclusion, I argue that the assumption that all three films share, namely that images can reveal a content beyond their appearance and that visual meaning remains elusive in the sense that it is never to be captured fully, rests on the modernist dialectics of rationality and irrationality, of the conscious and the unconscious.24 Gaston Bachelard, the French phenomenologist, situates imagination in the construction of meaning by ascribing a productive power to images and metaphorical language, without which insights would not be possible at all. He argues that science develops much more on the basis of reverie than on the basis of experiments, as we inevitably have to imagine more than we know.25 Reveries and artistic representations are essential devices to open up the space for possible (new) meanings, and it is one of film’s unique features that it cannot be ascribed a mere illustrative function: the visual material speaks a language of its own, or can be made to speak in very different manners. “To demonstrate the identity of the artistic Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Prose of the World, (Evanston: Northwestern 1973 [1969]) (cf. Ch. 3). See Henning Engelke, Drippings, Recordings and Revelations: Jackson Pollock, Maya Deren, and the Realist Aesthetics of Ethnographic Film (unpublished paper). 25 See Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), passim. 23 24

The Ethnographer’s Eye 311 and scientific uses of photography which heretofore usually were separated will be one of the revolutionary functions of the film.”26 Written in 1936, Walter Benjamin’s prediction has yet to be fully seized in visual anthropology and in documentary filmmaking in general, by acknowledging that film’s photographic realism is underscored by the imperative to reshape the recorded material.

26

Walter Benjamin, 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction', Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, (London: Fontana Books, 1973 [1936]), pp.217-251 (p.236).

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7. HIGH AND LOW, LEARNED AND POPULAR: STRAYING NARRATIVES

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Laura Fernanda Bulger

Looking at the Written Text on Television This paper deals with the relationship between literature and television. Some believe that literature, once considered a privilege of the educated idle elites, has lost its “aura” owing to the power of the electronic media such as television and the internet. The truth is that literature has been losing ground since the last century, due to a variety of social changes, and particularly of mass education and new patterns of (il)literacy. Television is a complex medium that transcends the technological sphere, as it involves several layers of codification and decodification. To transpose a literary work to the small screen it is necessary to know both the grammar of the literary text and the techniques used in television. Unlike cinema, television is conditioned by space as well as by a much wider range of viewers who seek popular entertainment; in addition, one should not forget its commercial side, its dependence on sponsors whose main interest is to advertise their products on a wide scale and for whom a literary transposition may not be the ideal programme to attract as many viewers as possible. Our purpose is to explore the difficulties of bringing a literary transposition to the small screen and show how some of them can be resolved in practice by competent committed production. May the effort on the part of those who are courageous enough to carry out this type of enterprise be compensated by reaching viewers who, if it were not for the small screen, would never become acquainted with great literary works as Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, the BBC transposition here analysed. One is also hopeful that at least some of the viewers feel compelled “to peer behind the small screen” and get to know the literary text itself.

There is a generalised tendency to emphasise the utilitarian function of the new technologies and to devalue their role in the promotion of art, particularly of an art like literature that is itself a system of verbal communication with relevance in the diffusion of a language and of aesthetic, ethical and ideological values. Therefore, it is not unusual for the illusory world of fiction and the virtual world of the audiovisual to interrelate and blend with more or less success, as is now possible to evaluate. Television has begun to understand that the literary text can be a lucrative investment, while the cinema has of course long reaped the rewards of its felicitous association with that other medium. There are those who fear that literature may lose its autonomy and potential – mimetic or suggestive – if it collaborates with an electronic medium like television, considered still by certain intellectual elites as the “villain” of the popular arts,1 or as a simple product of high technology and capitalistic economics. However, it is consensual nowadays that many series and telefilms produced directly for the screen have the same aesthetic dimension as great literary works. Charles McGrath, editor of the New York Times Book Review, praises the literary quality of the dialogues in current television fiction and says that, unlike what used to happen when the television studio was an extension of Hollywood, television is now the ideal medium for a writer to express himself.2 Regarding the literary transposition, a generic term by which we designate a televised recreation of a former text, McGrath’s opinion is that works identified as great literature should not be submitted to the television serial format that presents them in “canned” episodes during a few hours of projection, interrupted at times by advertising slots. In spite of the reservations put forward by this critic, no one could deny that many 1 2

David Bianculli, Teleliteracy: Taking Television Seriously (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2000), p.40. Charles McGrath, ‘The Triumph of the Prime-Time Novel’, in Television: the Critical View, ed. by Horace Newcomb (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp.242-252 (p. 243).

316 Laura Fernanda Bulger authors – canonical and otherwise – would not have reached such a vast and heterogeneous audience if it were not for the electronic mediation of the small screen. The complexity of television transcends the technological sphere by involving several levels of codification and decodification – linguistic, visual, sonorous, social, cultural, literary, political, ideological and economic. To transpose a literary text to the screen implies a knowledge of the relationship between the written word and the sound image, or between a verbal/conceptual sign system and another that is simultaneously visual, sonorous, verbal, iconic and which, by means of technological representation, surpasses the anthropological mimetic reproduction that Aristotle conceived to explain the genesis of the literary phenomenon. These questions have been little studied or systematised with relation to television. Brian McFarlane reminds us of the interest shown by Joseph Conrad in exploring the potential of the written word to evoke, through a verbal stimulus, images comparable to those evoked by non-verbal stimuli, allowing him to show instead of tell.3 Like other writers in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, the author of The Nigger of the Narcissus (1887) cultivated a type of writing that anticipated the techniques used in the audiovisual, although of course he could not possibly have guessed that Marlow, Kurtz, Nostromo or Lord Jim would become stars of both the big and the small screen. Yet, the difficulties that arise in transposing a literary text to the audiovisual are not easy to solve, particularly those related to temporal and spatial summaries, narratorial intrusions, or the mental states of the characters, as described by Seymour Chatman.4 Ben Brady, for his part, alludes to the limitations of the television medium with respect to the interior life of a character, shown by the camera only in dialogue or action.5 The strategies used to control the space of the small screen make possible a direct transference of certain components of the literary narrative, such as events represented in chronological sequence of cause and effect and objective portraits of character. Others, though, resist being transferred owing to inter-systemic incompatibilities that are aggravated by the complexity of the deformations in the fabula or story; they are visible in the aesthetic organisation of the intrigue, the sujet or plot, to use either the dichotomous conceit of the Formalists or the equivalent distinction made by E.M.Forster.6 Whenever the elements of the literary narrative are not transferable to the screen, it is necessary to adapt those that are considered to be essential so that the original text may not be violated, a question that is much debated among the critics that defend the principle of fidelity. In a field such as this of literary, cultural, technological transtextuality (which is fertile in interpretative perspectives, ranging from adaptation itself to the version, the commentary, the analogy), it is likely that no consensus exists concerning norms, 3

4 5 6

McFarlane quotes Joseph Conrad, who in the preface of The Nigger of the Narcissus, writes the following comments: “My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the powers of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel – it is, before all, to make you see.” – Brian McFarlane, Novel to Film, An Introduction to the Theory of Adaptation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), p.3. Seymour Chatman, Coming to Terms: The Rhetoric of Narrative in Fiction and Film (Ithaca, NY / London: Cornell University Press, 1990), p.162. Ben Brady, Adaptation for Film and Television (Austin, Tx: University of Texas Press, 1994), p.3-4. E.M.Forster, Aspects of the Novel (1927), ed. by Oliver Stallybrass (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974), passim.

Looking at the Written Text on Television 317 methodologies or typological classifications. On a theoretical plane, McFarlane says, “subjective” discussions are “endemic” and “impressionist.”7 In practice, the creativity of the professionals, which often includes a great deal of experimentalism, tends to be oblivious to these polemic discussions. Linda Seger states that it is not possible to make adaptations without having some knowledge of the mechanisms that function in each of the media (she is concerned with literature and cinema), since it deals with a “transition or conversion” from a medium in which the narrative mode prevails to another in which the dramatic mode is dominant.8 For his part, McFarlane, whose theory is supported by the functional Barthesian model,9 distinguishes transference from adaptation. He separates the “distributional” functions (those that relate in the text in a linear manner, like actions and events) from the “integrational” functions (those that manifest themselves in the enunciation). McFarlane defines enunciation as the “expressive apparatus” that governs the presentation and the reception of the narrative. During adaptation, one looks for “functional equivalents,” taking into account the “effects” of each narrative system. Adaptation uses the techniques of the electronic medium but the cultural model of the literary text.10 Adapting consists, then, of an “appropriation” of the literary narrativity, which presupposes a judgment “at the level of a productive imagination,” or an emplotment, that is, a configuration of the narrative sequences of the literary text.11 We use the concept learned from Paul Ricoeur to underline the dynamics involved in the process of mediatiation, reorganisation and synthesisation, as elements from the literary narrative are turned into images and sounds. Adaptation may also imply the defamiliarisation of spatial-temporal structures; the introduction, omission or combination of scenes and characters; the use of indices and information in the psychological characterisation, or the use of the elements of the mise-en-scène in the construction of atmospheres. Both transference and adaptation depend on the interpretative and creative capabilities of a network of collaborators. A transposition is, thus, a collective operation. If we were to confront different teams for a television production with the questions we are going to ask next, it is likely that each would come up with different solutions. For instance, how would one transpose to the screen a psychic narration or a narration in the first person, each one rendering the thoughts, perceptions and emotions of a character?12 There is always the possibility of utilising oral narration or voice-over. However, this type of strategy could make the narrative monotonous, while also depriving the viewer of the character’s physical presence. We might say that it would be a visually undesirable option in a medium like McFarlane, p.viii. Linda Seger, The Art of Adaptation: Turning Fact and Fiction into Film (New York: Henry Holt & Co, 1992), p.2. Cf Roland Barthes, ‘Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narrative’ (1966), in Image-Music-Text, trans. 9 Stephen Heath (Glasgow: Fontana/Collins, 1977), pp.79-124 (p.89). 10 McFarlane, pp.21-26. 11 See Paul Ricoeur, ‘The Text as Dynamic Identity’, in Identity of the Literary Text, ed. by Mario Valdés and Owen Miller (Toronto, Buffalo, London: University of Toronto Press, 1991), pp.175-186. 12 Cf Dorrit Cohn, Transparent Minds, Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978), pp.21-57. 7 8

318 Laura Fernanda Bulger television where the effect of the real is simulated through the immediacy of the perceptions and of the “representation of the present,” the instantaneous and precarious tense most used in television. But there are other cases to consider. How would one deal with the digressions and commentaries of an intrusive narrator like the sententious voice in the novels written by the Portuguese novelist Agustina Bessa-Luís?13 How would one deal with Gérard Genette’s anachronies without either resorting to the “twenty years before” or “twenty years later” device, or recounting/enacting the scenes, which of course would involve long evocative dialogues by a character or constant recreations of the past or future? The anachronies, which establish interrelationships between past and present, or between future and present, might give rise to secondary intrigues and compromise the sequential fluidity and inherent presentification of the television medium.14 The solutions presented by the different teams would demonstrate the sensitivity and creativity of their members, including those of the actor (a signifier with multiple signifieds), who is largely responsible for the artistic success or failure of the transposition. Equally important is the interaction with the public, upon whom the commercial success of the production depends. A successful televised production will certainly take into account the convergences or divergences between the narrative grammar of the camera and that of the narrative text. Although the camera, whether fixed or mobile, tends to be anthropomorphised, it is in the last analysis simply an instrument at the service of various agents, whose activities are interrelated during the narrative process (from the instructions given by the director in collaboration with the text of the script writer to the montage of the editor, the performance of the actors, the photography, the lighting, the wardrobe, the set, the make-up to the work of the various cameramen). The visual narrative provided by the television cameras is the result of that interactivity, which is also extended to the non-visual and non-verbal cues, such as the music and sound effects used to create ambiances, accompany framings, underline leitmotifs or identify characters. The viewer’s visual perception is altered as the cameras move towards or away from the subject or object. In approaching the subject, the close-ups and extreme close-ups establish a relationship of intimacy or of complicity between the viewer and the character. The closeup can be used with or without simultaneous discursive intervention, either with voice-off or voice-over. Coinciding with the point of view or, in the terminology of David Bordwell, with the “optic subjectivity” of the character,15 the close-up creates the illusion that the lens is showing that character’s thoughts, perceptions and emotions. The illusion may be similar to that obtained in the literary text by using the narrated monologue, whenever the internal Agustina Bessa-Luís was born in 1922 in northern Portugal. Like Eudora Welty’s Mississippi, the Douro region is the setting for most of Agustina’s fictional work. After the publication of The Sybil, in 1954, which is considered to be a masterpiece of Portuguese literature, she acquired instant fame in her country. She has written over forty novels as well as plays, biographies and chronicles. Her novels are translated into several languages. In 2004, Agustina was awarded the prestigious Camoens Prize, given to writers from the Portuguese-speaking world. 14 Cf Gérard Genette, ‘Time and Narrative in A la recherche du temps perdu’, in Aspects of Narrative, ed. J. Hillis Miller (New York: Columbia University Press, 1971), pp. 93-118. 15 David Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film (London: Routledge, 1997), p.60. 13

Looking at the Written Text on Television 319 focalisation of the omniscient narration reveals to the reader the mental state of the protagonist. The effectiveness of this technique depends on the actor. It can be seen in the television series, The Sopranos,16 where close-ups of the central figure, Tony Soprano (James Gandolfini), allow the viewer to observe the dilemma of the mafia boss between killing or being killed, as well as his Oedipus complexes that are dramatised in his dialogues with the psychiatrist, Dr. Jennifer Melfi (Lorraine Bracco); they are admirable representations of Bakhtinian dialogic inter-subjectivity.17 In Once and Again,18 the close-up, together with a switch from colour into black-and-white, is used for brief instants when the character engages in a kind of self-analysis or remembers past experiences in order to explain what is happening in the present. In In a Land of Plenty19 (a transposition of a novel with the same title, written by Tim Pears20), a close-up of the protagonist, James Freeman (Shaun Dingwall), is often followed by a flashback in black-and-white. This functions simultaneously as an evocation of an unhappy childhood and as a premonition of the tragic unfolding of the series. Jane Eyre, the mini-series produced by the BBC in 1983,21 has as its literary progenitor the novel by Charlotte Brontë, written in 1847.22 As in Brontë’s text, the transposition centres on the actions of the protagonist, Jane (Zelah Clarke), the plain orphan who, against the greatest adversity, finally manages to achieve what she has sought all her life: her independence and a man, Mr.Rochester (Timothy Dalton), who ironically becomes her dependent after having been her patron.23 The viewer who has read the novel will not be disillusioned with the fidelity of the televised version to the written text. The version is in fact very close to the book, both in respect of the representation of the characters created by the author, and in the adaptation of the first-person narrative to a form of dialogue. Alexander Baron, responsible for the script, tried to be faithful to the discursive register and to the vocabulary in the novel. The dialogues are long, hardly natural, too “literary” and, at times, quaint for a viewer who is not familiar with Brontë’s language, which, in spite of being clear and accessible, is identified with the speech used by the upper bourgeoisie of the period. Nevertheless, none of this weighs negatively, owing mainly to the excellent interpretation of the actors. The traits shown by the secondary figures – stereotypes as much in the novel as in the television recreation – are transferred directly to the screen through the characters’ oral, facial and gestural expressiveness. The reader-viewer will have no difficulty in recognising the cruel Mrs.Reed, the hypocritical Mr.Brocklehurst, the discreet Mrs.Fairfax, the ascetic St John Rivers or the superficial and arrogant Blanche Ingram, the 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23

David Chase is the creator of the Sopranos; the TV series started in 1999 and are still in production. See Mikhaïl Bakhtine, La poétique de Dostoïevski (Paris: Seuil, 1970), pp.340-42. 1999-2002. Directors: Robert Berlinger and Robert Black; scriptwriters: Joseph Doughherty and Maggie Friedman. 2001. Directors: Hettie MacDonald and Dave Moore; scriptwriters: Neil Biswas and Kevin Hood. Tim Pears, In a Land of Plenty (New York: Doubleday, 1997). It was produced by Berry Letts and directed by Julian Amyes. Charlotte and Emily Brontë, Complete Novels (Glasgow: Harper Collins Publishers, 1993). More than once the protagonist repeats sentences such as these: “I am a free woman being”; “I am an independent woman now!”

320 Laura Fernanda Bulger imagined fiancée of Edward Rochester. The homme fatal uses his engagement to Blanche as a strategy to put Jane’s sentiments to the test. The televised version explores the visual potential of the literary text through the various elements of the mise-en-scène, among them the interior and exterior scenes, with special prominence given to the repeated images of a frozen landscape, which, as in the written text, coincide with the mental state of the protagonist. As to the wardrobe, the modest clothes worn by the virtuous Jane make not only the Puritanism of her society stand out, but also her precarious and subaltern condition, first as an orphan at Lowood Hall and then as governess at Thornfield Hall. The dim lighting of the scenes accords with the gloomy atmosphere of the novel, while the crazy woman’s cackling in the background helps maintain the suspense of the televised narrative. The Gothic or even gory traits are accentuated by means of several indices, as in the scene where Mason is seen bleeding after having been attacked by his mad sister. The dialogues, theatrical mood of the characters and scenery represent a society marked by puritanical morality, snobbery and xenophobia, as can be inferred from the attitudes of the guests during the festive sequences at Thornfield Hall, or from the criticism the characters make of French women’s loose conduct. For this reason, it is necessary to regenerate frivolous Adèle, protégée, or daughter, of Rochester, whom Jane is going to turn into a respectable young woman with English speech and manners. Like Conrad and Hardy, Brontë appears to have used narrative strategies that anticipate those of the audiovisual. The novel, divided into thirty-eight chapters that follow a chronological order of narration, does not raise any problems regarding flashbacks or flashforwards and the descriptive scenes are easily transferred to the screen. The literary text lends itself to the techniques used in the television medium, such as zoom-ins, closeups, long shots and wide-angles. They show, for instance, a demure but determined Jane, either by herself or in interaction with other characters; they also focus on a cunning Edward Rochester when he lies and uses self-victimisation to capture the sympathy of the governess. The physical and moral resistance of the protagonist transforms her into a heroine even in the eyes of the modern reader and viewer. It enhances the female capacity for survival in a hostile world, shortly before Darwinian evolutionism shook up Victorian society, and long before most literary representations of women stopped confining them to their genteel surroundings. We have mentioned only the most significant narrative techniques used in this remarkable televised conversion carried out by the BBC. It would not be possible to explore here the multiplicity of optical and sound strategies that, together with the mise-en-scène, have brought the works of so many celebrated authors, from Austen, Dickens, Galsworthy, Dostoevsky, Pasternak, Hugo, Balzac, Amado, Castelo Branco, Eça de Queiroz, etc, to the small screen This brief look at the written text on the small screen attempts to elucidate the happy cohabitation between literature and the most popular and manipulative of media – television. Through the medium of that luminous box we all have in our homes, a book that has been gathering dust on a shelf may be transformed into a true reality show. At the same time, it will hopefully awaken the curiosity of the viewer who may feel compelled to peer behind the small screen and thus read the actual written text. That will be the moment when

Looking at the Written Text on Television 321 the imagination will feel free to trigger the appearance of new faces and the sound of new voices.

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Yoko Ono

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

This article discusses the correlation between contemporary Japanese literature and manga (Japanese graphic novels or comics), particularly from the point of view of gender studies. Manga has long been popular in Japan and, unlike European or American graphic novels/comics, it has a variety of types/genres, targeted at diverse age groups, of both sexes. Among them is a unique genre called shojo manga (comics for girls). Until recently, scholars have considered manga merely a popular and low culture genre, and very little study has been attempted. However, the strong influence of shojo manga on contemporary Japanese literature, particularly on women’s writing, highlights significant aspects of gender in Japanese society, and is worth our serious consideration. The author begins by comparing the techniques of literal/verbal expressions in shojo manga with the writing techniques of contemporary female writers such as Banana Yoshimoto and Amy Yamada, as well as other writers of the Cobalt series, or “teenage girls’ novels,” to show their respective development. She then demonstrates their similarities, not only in form but also in substance, and discusses their impact on the readers’ consciousness. Finally, the author clarifies the correlation between these two media, and why both media are (generally) created by women and for women, as well as the reasons why they are widely supported by women today.

1. Introduction Japanese manga, which means popular comics, or graphic novels in Japan, takes a variety of genres, unlike American or European comics. They are targeted at diverse age groups from small children to middle-aged adults, of both sexes. Among them is a genre called Shojo Manga or comics for girls, which exists only in Japan, and enjoys a considerable market there. Generally speaking, shojo manga are romantic stories for girls and young adult women. They have developed a distinctive narrative style and expressive techniques to create a world different from boys’/men’s manga. This may be due to gender segregation within Japanese society, and I argue that this genre (with a fifty-year history behind it) has exerted a considerable influence on contemporary women writers, both in terms of themes and of techniques. To prove my point, I will begin with a quick survey of the history of shojo manga to explore its correlation with contemporary women’s writing from a technical point of view. Then, a brief comparison of women writers’ work with male writers of the same generation will help clarify the influence of shojo manga. Finally, specific examples from the work of Banana Yoshimoto and Amy Yamada will be examined to see their themes in contrast to manga.

2. Shojo manga; a historical survey Shojo manga is regarded as a very feminine genre because it is written / drawn by women cartoonists for a female audience. No other Japanese media could provide women writers with as big a market as shojo manga. However, shojo manga was originally designed by a

324 Yoko Ono male cartoonist in 1954, when “Ribon no Kishi” (Princess Knight), a romantic adventure story of a princess in a European setting, appeared in a girls’ magazine. It was written by Osamu Tezuka, the “Master” of Japanese manga. This work appealed to many girls and shojo manga became a popular genre, but it was dominated by male cartoonists until the early 1970s. In the late 1960s, writing private memoirs (Shuki) became very popular among nonprofessional women writers in Japan, concurrently with the arrival of feminism. These women, ranging from the ideologically motivated to the apolitical, expressed themselves in their own words, published their writing and were well received.1 This phenomenon was culturally significant in two ways: firstly, by writing memoirs, women writers stood up against male-dominated “literature”; secondly, by virtue of the fact that amateurs opposed professionals. The typical shojo manga narrative derives from the style of these memoirs: a female protagonist speaking in the first person. Shortly after this, women cartoonists started writing manga for female readers. The golden Age of Shojo manga was the 1970s when new women cartoonists such as Yumiko Ohshima, Keiko Takenaka, Moto Hagio, Ryoko Yamagishi began their careers. They established a new style of narrative; the constant use of the first person is a distinctive feature, as it represents only the narrator’s point of view and gives insight into the characters’ emotion. (Note that the majority of contemporary women writers also use first person narration in their novels.) There was also polyphony, a plurality of voices represented in speech bubbles, as well as unuttered thoughts represented by unframed text. By contriving more complex and decorative (c) Yumiko Ohshima 1994 ways of frame cutting (including the

1

Eiji Ohtsuka, Kyouyou to shiteno manga anime (Introduction to academic studies on manga) (Tokyo: Kodansha, 2001), p.74. For other studies of manga published over the past decade, see: Ayako Sugimoto, ‘Shojo manga to shojo shosetsu no hyougen’ (Expressions in shojo manga and teenage girls’ novel) in Manga no Yomikata (How to read manga), ed. Bessatsu Takarajima (Tokyo: Takarajimasha, 1995); Fusanosuke Natsume, Manga wa naze omoshiroi noka (Why manga is interesting) (Tokyo: NHK Shuppan, 1997); Yukari Fujimoto, Watashi no ibasho wa dokoni aruno? (Where is my place?) (Tokyo: Gakuyo Shobo, 1998).

Listen to Me 325 creation of blank frames which function as “intervals”), the cartoonists tried to express the characters’ inner worlds and gave depth to the manga narrative.2 Ryumei Yoshimoto, an eminent Japanese critic, has compared shojo manga to literature,3 contributing to an acceptance of the notion that manga narratives are essentially literary. Shojo manga has widened its readership to adult males, and it has proved attractive for intellectuals (but not for academics, at least until very recently). Now shojo manga is categorised as a genre that depicts the inner world of girls in a narrative style which has influenced not only writers within the same genre, but also women novelists.

3. Influence on the style of contemporary women’s writing Early influence of shojo manga-style narrative appeared in the so-called “Cobalt series,” a series of novels comparable to the harlequin romance, except they were for teenage girls (the main characters were teenagers also). Starting in the middle of the 1970s under the name of “Junior shosetsu” (novels for teenagers), by a majority of male writers, the stories always had a moral lesson for girls, such as avoiding teenage pregnancy4 (Yonemitsu 2002:26). In 1980, however, young women writers entered the series; Kurara White Paper, by Saeko Himuro, and Itsuka neko ni naruhimade (Until the day I become a cat), by Motoko Arai, were milestones of contemporary women’s writing. In their twenties at that time, with little generation gap between them and their readers, these writers were aware of their teenage girl readers’ fantasies, and introduced an unprecedented idea into their novels: shojo manga-style writing. These novels had a common style. They told love stories of ordinary teenage girls in their everyday life, employing first person speech and often beginning the story with the protagonist introducing herself with lines such as, “I’m Momoko, and I’m sixteen years old.” Colloquial expressions were used, rather than a more “literary” style, creating a tone of girls’ chitchat. Fewer kanji (Chinese characters used in Japanese writing) and short paragraphs (1 to 3 lines each!) made fast and easy reading possible, as with manga. They also favoured direct speech to produce lifelike verbal communication, and hardly used indirect speech, apart from expressions like “she said hi to me.” An equivalent to the blank frames of shojo manga appeared in the Cobalt series novels in the form of wider space between the paragraphs, to allow the readers to read between the lines. Considerable use was made of onomatopoeia. Japanese onomatopoeia play an important role in daily conversation, even for adults. They are not simply direct phonetic representations of actual sounds, but also of phenomena and emotions, serving as phonetic

2

3 4

According to Takemiya, one of the shojo manga writers of the 70’s, Ohshima was the first to introduce intricate frame cutting in her manga. Cf Yumiko Ohshima, Wata no Kuniboshi (Cotton Star) (Tokyo: Hakusensha, 1994). Cf Ohtsuka, p.64. Kazunari Yonemitsu, ‘Cobalt wa kawaru, onnanoko wa kawaru’ (Cobalt series change, so do the girls), in Lbungaku kanzen dokuhon (L-literature Guidebook) (Tokyo: Magazine House, 2002), p.26.

326 Yoko Ono metaphors of emotions that permit a sharp and vivid depiction. In manga, onomatopoetic phrases are used frequently and effectively outside of speech bubbles to explain the characters’ emotional state. The writers of the Cobalt series exploited onomatopoeia to demonstrate characters’ feelings clearly in a single word. The fruit of these techniques was to draw the readers into the world of the novel, and to make it easier for them to sympathise with the characters. This new writing style in the Cobalt series in turn appealed to readers of shojo manga, giving them the sensation of reading a friend’s diary. The popularity of the Cobalt series triggered the publication of similar series, and some manga writers even ventured to write such novels. Interestingly enough, this new style of writing had never appeared in “genuine” literature. Therefore, there was a great impact when Banana Yoshimoto, a very popular writer who had once wanted to become a manga cartoonist, appeared as a debutante in a male-dominated literary world with her 1987 Kitchen.5 Her novels were praised as fresh and innovative, while female readers of manga and of the Cobalt series saw nothing new. In novels by Banana Yoshimoto, one can easily find elements of Cobalt-style writing. Firstly, she always employs first person speech and uses a sentence like “my name is Ningyo Toriumi” at an early stage of the story. Secondly, she prefers direct speech: in the first chapter of her first novel Kitchen, her use of direct speech marks 229 out of 236 dialogues (and an average of 1.4 lines per speech); this allows her to capture lifelike conversation, as in manga and in the Cobalt series. These speeches are combined with expressions describing a tone of voice (ex. “in a shrill excited voice”) or a demeanour (ex. “with her head a little to one side”) to render a vivid picture. Thirdly, her paragraphs are relatively short, with an average of 1.8 lines, and contain few kanji, therefore making them seem easy reading, as in the Cobalt series. Finally, she employs many onomatopoeic phrases (116 times in one chapter). Hence, her work is often compared with the works of Ohshima, the already mentioned shojo manga cartoonist, and in fact manga-style writing suits the fantastic world Yoshimoto depicts in her novels. Just as shojo manga had adopted the literary element into their narrative, Yoshimoto has naturalised manga/Cobalt style into literary writing, and her style has opened up a new dimension in literature by women writers and widened the readership of literature to young females. Finally, manga/Cobalt-style writing has gained acceptance in the literary world, by proving that it can depict young women’s delicate feelings sensitively and profoundly. Yoshimoto’s style becomes apparent when we compare her with male writers, such as Haruki Murakami and Ryu Murakami, popular literary writers who started their career in the mid-70s. Haruki uses first person speech, but it comes from a literary tradition of the autobiographical novel, rather than from shojo manga style. Haruki’s paragraphs in the first chapter of his early work, Listen to the Song of Wind (1979), have an average of 3.1 lines;6 by the mid-80s (the time Yoshimoto and female writers who were influenced by shojo manga launched their literary careers) he uses an average of 5 lines per paragraph. Haruki employs only direct speech, and each speech has an average of 1.1 lines (slightly shorter than Yoshimoto’s, as his characters are not as expressive), but frequent use of direct speech 5 6

Banana Yoshimoto, Kitchen (Tokyo: Fukutake Shoten, 1988). Haruki Murakami, Kaze no Uta wo Kike (Hear the Wind’s Song) (Tokyo: Kodansha, 1982).

Listen to Me 327 is the only similarity between him and the female writers under discussion. Much more kanji is used and less onomatopoeia appear in his first novel: only 27 times in one chapter of his work from the 1980s, as opposed to Yoshimoto’s 116 times. On the other hand, Ryu’s work in the 1980s (Coin Locker Babies) is even more aggressively “literary” than Haruki’s.7 There is an average of 9.4 lines per paragraph (much longer than Yoshimoto’s work), much more use of kanji (more even than Haruki) and of third-person and indirect speech (only four instances of direct speech, while indirect speech appears 23 times in one chapter), less use of onomatopoeia (only five times), and no “easy to read” appearance on the page. Obviously these male writers were not affected by shojo manga or the Cobalt series. It seems that their writing is not aimed at drawing the readers in quite the same way as the women novelists’, who write as if they are talking to their readers.

4. What girls want. Banana and Amy Although not all women writers share the style carried over from shojo manga, they have other things in common: themes of love and family. A comparison between Amy Yamada and Yoshimoto will prove this point. Their depictions of love relationships, for example, appear to be quite different. Yoshimoto hardly represents sexual intercourse, while Yamada is famous for her physical descriptions of sex. Her early novels, such as Bed Time Eyes (1987), which focuses on a sexual relationship between an African American and a Japanese woman (based on her real life experience), caused scandal, particularly among male readers and critics who were shocked by the depiction of the female character’s enthusiasm for sex.8 (However, Yamada insists that sex comes in the process of love, and that sexual love is ultimately pure and romantic.) On the other hand, Yoshimoto, who represents girls’ “romantic-love” fantasy, alludes to her characters’ sex life, but never describes it as realistically as Yamada does. Carrying over the repeated theme of sexuality from the shojo manga cartoonists of the 1970s, where girls’ fear of their sexuality and indeed of sexual relationships were a main focus, they seem to regard sex as either proof of love or physical pleasure, but never as a process of reproduction; for neither of them refers to pregnancy or motherhood in connection with the young female protagonists. To be aware of female sexuality is to become an adult woman, but girls do not want to grow up as female and be involved in reproduction. It is seen, in a way, as girls’ resistance to the patriarchy of Japanese society. Even Yamada’s preoccupation with positive female sexuality is confined to the relationships between men and women, and reproduction and motherhood are avoided in her early love stories. In contrast, there is another theme these two writers share; the concern with the family. In her early love stories, Yamada hardly mentioned the family of female protagonists. In her later works, she stresses the importance of family support for teenage characters in novels such as Boku wa benkyo ga dekinai (I am not good at studying) (1993), that have 7 8

Ryu Murakami, Coin Locker Babies (Tokyo: Kodansha, 1984). Eimi Yamada, Bed Time Eyes (Tokyo: Kawaide Shobo, 1987).

328 Yoko Ono gained a wider female audience than her early love stories.9 These teenage characters always have a family that accepts them and helps them to be themselves, when they have problems at school or with their friends. For Yoshimoto, on the other hand, the family has been lost from the outset. The only exception is Tsugumi (1992), but it is suggested from the beginning that the central character will die soon from an illness. Yoshimoto’s stories are always about the reconstruction of a family. In her first novel, Kitchen, the protagonist Mikage loses her only relation, her grandmother, at the beginning of the story. She then meets her boyfriend-to-be, Yuichi. At the end, Yuichi and Mikage express their feelings for each other, and they come to the conclusion that they are meant to be a family. One could certainly see the romantic love ideology there, but Yoshimoto’s insistence on the theme of loss and the emotional journey of finding a new family through romance suggests more than that. For both Yamada and Yoshimoto, a family is not a blood relationship (therefore, reproduction need not be included) and “home” is where you can be yourself and feel accepted, which is a popular theme also in shojo manga since the mid-80s. The cartoonists queried the concepts of family and home, and what they call home generally does not consist of a blood relation but a group of friends who live together, considering each other as a “family.” Interestingly enough, even when they are truly related, neither in shojo manga nor in works by Yoshimoto and Yamada do they constitute an ordinary family. This is because they never have both father and mother at the same time, nor are they conventional people, but rather drag queens (for example), or highly promiscuous characters. Nonetheless, they show their affection and care for one another, like a true family. Regardless of blood relationships, they live together because they love and accept each other, and that is how “family” or “home” are supposed to be, these writers seem to say. In a patriarchal society, girls/women need to find a place they belong to, otherwise they have no raison d’etre.10 Romantic ideology suggests that marriage is the best solution, but Japanese girls have realised that this is not always the case. They would like to find a place where they can be accepted and loved as they are. The women cartoonists and writers have provided an alternative concept of family and home, and still continue their search for further answers.

5. Conclusion The women writers’ approach, with a light touch, to the serious themes of love and family has been appreciated not only by young female readers, but also by literary critics in Japan.

9 10

Eimi Yamada, Boku wa Benkyo ga Dekinai (I am not good at studying) (Tokyo: Shinchosha, 1993). The story line of shojo manga is about self-development through romance in most cases. Hashimoto suggests that the motif of shojo manga is self-affirmation by being loved (Osamu Hashimoto, Hanasaku otometachino kinpiragobo [Fried lotus roots for blooming maidens] [Tokyo: Kawaidebunko, 1984], passim). The female protagonist’s being told by a boy that he loves and needs her indicates that love is the only reason to exist, and the only way to secure one’s place in society.

Listen to Me 329 More and more women writers receive literary awards these days.11 New writers who have experienced the style of shojo manga, or of Cobalt or Yoshimoto, are exploiting its narrative appeal. They invariably use friendly “talking to you” style in their writing to express themselves on themes of family and love. They may not deal with these themes from a feminist point of view, but nonetheless ask their readers to reflect upon their words. Their stories remain personal, rather than ideological or political. However, since “personal is political,” the personal matters, which these writers treat in contemporary terms for the sake of a multitude of female readers, may contribute to a fundamental cultural shift in Japanese society, by allowing for the voices of Japanese women to be heard. The correlations between manga and literature will persist, as long as women maintain the will to express themselves.

(c) Hideko Tachigake 1997

11

Kei Yuikawa, a former Cobalt writer, now a novelist, received an important literary award in 2002 for her novel Lovers over the shoulder, on a female friendship and their new “family” lifestyle. Although it was a familiar theme for readers of shojo manga, it was finally recognised in the world of high literature (Kei Yuikawa, Katagoshi no koibito [Lovers over the shoulder] [Yokyo: Magazine House, 2001]).

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Marie-Manuelle Silva

The Link Between Text and Image in Voyage au bout de la nuit de Céline by Tardi Voyage au bout de la nuit by Tardi is a reworking of the theme of the novel by Céline. It consists in an adaptation which implies a transformation into another language and another medium. The novel will thus be partly “rewritten” into image, which will itself be read in relation to the text. This will create another text that will reveal Tardi’s perspective on Voyage by Céline.

Le Voyage au bout de la nuit de L. F.Céline by Tardi created a stir when it was published in 1988.1 Following its enormous success in sales – no less than 120 000 copies – Jacques Tardi adapted two other books by Céline: Casse-pipe came out in 1989 and Mort à credit in 1991.2 Despite this achievement, what seems to be better remembered of a critical reception divided between admiration and dismay is an article published in Libération on 24th November 1988, entitled “Céline abâtardi” (“Céline bastardised”). Tardi frequently refers to that article in his interviews: “ça m’a quand même valu d’être montré du doigt pour avoir salopé le chef-d’œuvre avec mes vilains graffitis, d’avoir ‘abâtardi’ l’immense livre. C’était déchirant de voir comme ils prenaient ça…Un blasphème!” (still I was pointed at for mucking up the masterpiece with my dirty graffiti, for “bastardising” the great book. It was depressing to see how they were taking it… Blasphemy!). Jacques Tardi is nonetheless a myth; he appears as an intellectual within the cartoon strip world. Tardi began very young in the magazine Pilote and his characteristic black and white line quickly attracted followers. He is known for remaining true to ideas such as denouncing the barbarism of wars, particularly the First World War, condemning the death penalty, the abuses of political power and urban violence. Besides his activity as a cartoonist, Tardi also became known for his work in media such as publicity, film posters, book covers and caricatures. He has published Chiures de gommes and Mine de plomb, which collect most of his graphic work.3 He has also interacted with literature through what we will call for now “adaptations” of literary works. To refer to Tardi as a cartoon strip author would thus prove limiting. A myth, certainly, but with qualifications: first, he is a living myth, which raises suspicion; secondly, his privileged medium, the cartoon strip, was considered a sub-genre for a long time. It is not surprising that Tardi’s work was criticised since it is difficult to touch literary masterpieces with impunity. It is even harder to do so through the ninth art, a bastard art par excellence which intersects the verbal and visual realms, and seeks to assert its independence from other artistic codes. 1 2 3

Jacques Tardi, Voyage au bout de la nuit de Céline (Paris, Gallimard, 1988). Henceforward referred to by page numbers in the text. Jacques Tardi, Casse pipe suivi des carnets du cuirassier Destouches (Paris: Futuropolis Gallimard, 1989); Mort à crédit (Paris: Futuropolis Gallimard, 1991). Jacques Tardi, Mine de Plomb, Chiures de Gommes (Paris: Futuropolis Gallimard, 1985).

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We shall first consider Tardi’s Voyage au bout de la nuit de Céline by Tardi within the author’s “adaptations.” We will then consider the text itself, i.e., as a text constructed after Céline’s text, in which the visual and the iconic coexist. Finally we will show that Tardi’s Voyage is a narrative of a narrative, but also a discourse that springs from that narrative.

1. Adaptation in images Tardi has employed the materials of narrative fiction several times but in different ways. We may thus distinguish various types of relationship to the narrative material:

– What one might call collaborations with writers / scriptwriters. In this case the writer constructs the text himself the way a cartoon strip writer would. Though opinions are of course exchanged, the roles are overall well-defined. This was the case in Tardi’s collaborations with Cristin (Rumeurs sur la Rouergue, 1976), Manchette (Griffu, 1978), JC Forest (Ici même, 1979) and more recently with Vautrin in Le cri du peuple which the novelist adapted to cartoon strip; finally with Pennac in La débauche (2000), meant to be an essay but which eventually became a 70-plate detective story of thorough collaboration with Tardi.4 – Transformation of the novel into a cartoon strip. This was the case in a series of four cartoons based on detective novels by Léo Mallet (Brouillard au pont de Tolbiac; 120 rue de la Gare; Casse-pipe à la nation; M’as-tu vu en cadavre). Tardi did the transformation. Yet the detective novel has a structure which reveals the cutting/division of the book, according to Tardi. The remaining tasks consist in doing the research, the staging and the rewriting of the dialogues. Though the writer was interested in the outcome, he did not interfere in the process and let Tardi work without showing much enthusiasm for his activity.5 – The last type of link with the novel, called “adaptation in images,” can be found in Voyage au bout de la nuit and Casse-pipe by L.F. Céline. This is obviously neither a collaborative act nor an adaptation into cartoon strip; we shall be returning to this point.

4

5

Jacques Tardi et Pierre Cristin, Rumeurs sur le Rouergue (Paris: Futuropolis Gallimard, 1976); Jacques Tardi et Patrick Manchette, Griffu (Tournai: Casterman, 1978); Jacques Tardi et Jean Claude Forest,Ici Même (Tournai: Casterman,1979); Jacques Tardi et Jean Vautrin, Le cri du peuple – Les canons de 18 mars (Pantin: Casterman, 2001); Le cri du peuple – L‘espoir assassiné (Tournai: Casterman, 2002); Le cri du peuple – Les heures sanglantes (Pantin: Casterman, 2003); Jacques Tardi et Daniel Pennac, La débauche (Pantin: Futuropolis Gallimard, 2000). Jacques Tardi, Brouillard au pont de Tolbiac (Paris: Casterman, 1982); M’as-tu vu en cadavre (Paris: Casterman, 1984); 120 rue de la gare (Paris: Casterman, 1988); Casse pipe à la nation (Paris: Casterman, 1996).

The Link Between Text and Image 333 Tardi’s Voyage is a large-format album (210 x 290) in black and white involving text and image (600 sketches); the text is the complete reproduction of the 1952 edition of the novel by L.F. Céline, Voyage au bout de la nuit, published by Gallimard. The famous cream cover of the NRF series, with its black and white grids, reappears as the cover of Tardi’s book in the collection “Futuropolis,” a new subsidiary of Gallimard. Against all odds (the expectation created by its appearance under the Futuropolis label, a series dedicated to cartoon strips), it does not consist of cartoons, as there are neither speech bubbles nor rectangular frames for external narratio. There are silent images which seem to draw a text that is itself a drawing.

2. Verbal and iconic material Although the images work as a coherent whole, depending on the text without submitting to it, this is not a cartoon strip. But neither are these images meant to illustrate a book, without obeying a logical sequence, merely to show a character or a specific situation. They are rather closely connected with the text and form a new whole, aiming at a unified reading. The object of our study is not located at the level of the debate between the bias of the word and that of the image. Our approach has this in common with the cartoon strip: that we must find a specific field of analysis, founded on the reading models inherited from writing and painting, while inviting “the two instances to dissolve into a new state of the matter.”6 Despite the indissoluble connection between text and image within comics, our approach is of a different order. Céline is not Tardi’s scriptwriter; his Voyage does not need Tardi to exist. The visual expression establishes here a necessary dependence: it is the interpretation of a pre-existing and autonomous text, which calls for a transformation involving the image as a partial and biased representation of Céline’s novel, and which operates as a co-text and as context. The study of the image layout would thus make no sense if we did not take into account the text as part of Tardi’s narrative scheme. Tardi adapts the text to his graphic intentions following a course upon which the narration partly depends. The text is like an image – however little the image may be like a text – but the connection between the two is not the same as in a cartoon strip. Unlike the cartoon, the image is separate from the text (there are no speech bubbles) and is meant to reproduce the substance of the text in a condensed or partial way, involving a kind of dramatisation. We are thus at the level of external narration, where the text appears above or below the image, rather than as a hero’s utterance. The order of the story follows the order of Céline’s text, hence there is no need to manage a plot or a narrative internally. The continuum of the text becomes fragmented, and yet it ensures the image some continuity by becoming a “backdrop” which creates a sort of unity of place. It is impossible to find narrative in the image: the plot is continuous whereas the image is fragmented, a difference brought about by the very nature of the two codes. We are left to visualise the 6

F. De la croix and A. Andriat, Pour lire la bande dessinée (Gembloux: Deboek-Duculot, 1991), p.46.

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narrative within the image. We thus become narrators who “give voice to the white space” between the images, a cognitive operation which allows the illusion of the story to take place. In this case, that space is not totally white, as Céline’s text is interspersed among the images. We shall now analyse some examples that illustrate Tardi’s graphic options.

2.1 Tardi’s graphic options Our corpus is located at the beginning of Voyage au bout de la nuit de Céline by Tardi (pp.16-25). It includes eleven images. In this earlier part of the narrative, Bardamu, the narrator of Voyage, has a lively discussion about homeland with his friend Ganate. Bardamu decides to enlist: he will soon be going into action; but, after a brief contact with war, he realises its absurdity and decides to desert. Indeed, a brief glance at pages 16 and 17 reveals that Bardamu, whom we recognise as a soldier in the drawing on page 17, has already enlisted: the setting is no longer Place de Clichy and the episode is no longer the argument with Ganate that opens the novel. We notice an analogy with the parade featured on pages 12 and 13, which is coherently linked with the pages under present analysis. That parade occurred simultaneously with the argument (“Justement la guerre approchait” [War was imminent]), but through external focalisation – the characters were not aware of it, since they were absorbed in the dispute. This intrusion in the plot is visually marked by a break between the two top frames, opening a gap through which the war (advancing in the only parallel frame down below) is temporally set within the argument. Ganate announces he would enlist willingly, but not only is it Bardamu who enlists instead – he does so without realising it. Night seems to have fallen on the soldiers’ parade in the image at the top of page 16 and 17; it thus inscribes the action in a time span that will be interrupted by the image at the bottom of page 17. The beginning of the text is set at the turning point between the two sequences: once we turn the page, it is irreversible. This was already prefigured by the mass of civilians on page 14: “ils avaient fermé la porte derrière nous les civils. On étaient faits comme des rats” (the civilians had closed the door behind us. We were trapped like rats). Similarly the decrease of the civilian crowd as the regiment advances foreshadows Bardamu’s solitude. The image of the stretched frame at the top of the page leads to a horizontal reading that pursues the line of flight of the previous image and also anticipates the vertical reading of the text. The image seems to pass, like time, and becomes another universe: the parade stretches out gloomily as if to give birth to a Bardamu become soldier, newborn into the war. The helmet in the isolated image on page 16 (a vignette in jargon) reinforces this passage to war symbolically: the verdict, “on était fait comme des rats” (we were trapped like rats), is thus confirmed. Besides, the location of this vignette wavers between the words and the images and its status is vague. It precisely articulates two passages of the text: “ils avaient fermé la porte derrière nous les civils” (the civilians had closed the door behind us) and “Une fois qu’on y est, on y est bien” (once we’re in it, we’re in it for good).

The Link Between Text and Image 335 While the soldiers march, the text shows us Bardamu’s thoughts, which causes a loosening of the plot. Among the temporal references in the text, some situate us in the white space between the two images of pages 15 and 16: “on a marché longtemps […] il y en avait encore des rues, des patriotes, puis il s’est mis à y en voir de moins en moins puis plus du tout d’encouragements plus un seul sur la route” (we walked for a long time […] there were still streets, patriots, then there were less and less expressions of support until there was none at all on the road). The image then “catches up with” the text and only shows some snatches, such as, “ils nous firent monter à cheval, puis au bout de deux mois qu’on était là-dessus, remis à pied” (they made us ride, then after two months riding, we got back on our feet). The image at the top of page 16 seems to show only what it is trying to signify: “longtemps,” “les uns derrière les autres.” Tardi seems to be grappling with one of the great limits of the fixed image: how to represent time through images? The return to the plot is done in the text through the evocation of the colonel and of the “deux points noirs” (two black dots – the Germans): aussi loin qu’on pouvait voir il y avait deux points noirs, au milieu, comme nous, c’était deux Allemands occupés à tirer depuis un bon quart d’heure (as far as our eyes could reach there were two black dots, in the middle, like us, they were two Germans who had been firing for some fifteen minutes).

The backdrop is made of elements of the landscape (the farms, churches, deserted hamlets, countryside, road, trees; cows, a dog), while the feeling of the absurdity of war and Bardamu’s wish to desert grow. Tardi manages these elements progressively as he resumes the plot with, “je me pensais aussi (derrière un arbre) que j’aurais bien voulu le voir ici, moi […] m’expliquer comment il faisait, lui, quand il prenait une balle en plein bidon” (I also thought [behind a tree] I would have liked to see him here, […] to understand how he reacted when he got a bullet in the stomach). For the spectator, the character is not behind the tree but rather in front of it, exposed to the spectator’s gaze: Bardamu’s psychological condition and its suggestion of fear, cowardice, of the “immense universal mockery” (“immense universelle moquerie”) are thus reinforced. Only the trees and the colonel remain in the image at the bottom of page 17. The colonel will epitomise the universal mockery before dying in an explosion a few pages further on. The hamlet and the cart will only appear at the end of the sequence. The two dots, a metonymy of the German enemies, will only appear on the following page (p.18). It is the second occurrence of this type, which seems to signal that the action is about to stagnate, giving way to a more psychological dimension. Still, nothing is going on. The tree remains Bardamu’s reference and illustrates his immobility: “je n’osais plus remuer” (p.18 – I did not dare move). Bardamus is still on the fringe of a hostile landscape which crushes him, as if his growing disillusionment has pushed him out of the field. The psychological inflates the text and Bardamu’s physical image disappears, as if to take on a universal value and to vanish into the war which is also outside the field of view for the moment. We notice that everything indicating movement is excluded from the image: the bursts of gunfire, the

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colonel pacing up and down the road, a brutal gust of wind… Tardi only relates Bardamu’s immobility, solitude, and wondering: “serais-je le seul lâche sur la terre?” (am I the only coward on earth?). Tardi’s story has to use other means to achieve a similar result to that of writing. Indeed, it has to describe “deux millions de fous héroïques” (p.18 – two million heroes in ecstasy) among whom Bardamu feels isolated. What the text renders through excess, the image does through lack. The return to the plot is marked by Bardamu’s absence from the image on page 19, which reinforces the image’s value as illustration. It is worth pointing out that there are few distinguishing features between the colonel and the liaison officer, as if to remind us of Bardamu’s remark, “sa carne ne ferait pas plus de rôti que la mienne quand le courant d’en face lui passerait entre les deux épaules” (p.19 – his flesh would roast as much as mine when the current in front of him passed between his shoulders). The text establishes the transition: Bardamu describes himself as “puceau de l’Horreur” (virgin of Horror; capital horror permeates Tardi’s universe), then as “dépucelé” (deflowered) after the isolated image (p.19) representing a helmet differently from the one on page 16, but within the same design of hyponymy. “Donc pas d’erreur?” (no mistake then?): Bardamu’s conclusion closes the psychological parenthesis and brings us back to the plot. Bardamu connects the sequence of events as he decides to stop the war by himself. The image on page 20 gains strength and its size sets us back on the side of action. But the image only presents one stage of the action. Bardamu decides to stop the war: je me décidais à tenter la dernière démarche, la suprême, essayer, moi tout seul, d’arrêter la guerre du moins dans le coin où j’étais (I was making up my mind to take the last step, the supreme one, to try to stop the war by myself, at least in the spot where I was);

then he imagines the colonel’s reaction to this statement, hesitates, and when he finally decides to declare his decision a horseman arrives on foot to announce the Marshal is dead. We do not see Bardamu hesitating or thinking of what he would tell the colonel (that would be harder to render into images). Nor do we see the horse rider arriving on foot. The spatial arrangement of the text is significant as it appears before the image and is set on the path where the action is taking place. The distribution of the information outside the text is complex mainly because it is difficult to represent what Bardamu wants to do but does not do in the end. The retreating position of the character suggests his failed act as the rider’s expression shows dismay. Tardi completely omits certain details such as the colonel’s steely glare (“le regard en acier”), though he appears in the foreground, as if the colonel’s brutality stood to reason and the redundancy between image and text (which is much more intense) could thus be prevented. The image on page 21 resumes the rider’s account which has already been revealed in the text. The image seems to treat the event differently for temporal reasons: the explosion involving the Marshal of the Barousse quarters happens before the time of utterance, and before the present moment when Bardamu protects himself from another blast echoing the

The Link Between Text and Image 337 first. We can see two bodies, right and left, portending death. The visual representation corresponds to the rider’s account, replying to the colonel’s questions, whereas the noise is suggested by Bardamu’s gesture. As we turn the page, the position of the image on page 22 aims at presenting the end of the sequence first. The image and Tardi the narrator seem to be guiding the plot: Bardamu’s doubts on the war and the narrative events converge on the first image of the war which becomes ordinary, that can therefore be represented. As everything else, war is now part of the landscape. The visual climax of the action is followed by the pacification of the text: “le feu est parti” (the fire is gone), Bardamu gradually becomes calm again. This reading encourages a rereading of the image which Tardi’s narrative sequence had almost “detached” from the text. We notice that the bodies bleed less, that the blood does not “simmer” or “gurgle.” The image is almost a euphemism of Céline’s story: le cavalier n’avait plus sa tête, rien qu’une ouverture au-dessus du cou, avec du sang dedans qui mijotait en glouglou comme de la confiture dans la marmite (the rider had no head any longer, only an opening above his neck, with blood gurgling like jam boiling in the pot)

From a different perspective, the image renders the climax of an action diluted in the text. At this stage of our reading, this image materialising war seems to be a culmination of Tardi’s narrative. Through a linear analysis of this short extract, we have tried to demonstrate that the sequence of Tardi’s story requires strategies that are proper to the visual, but that will not discard a close connection with the text. To conclude this section, we will refer to Jean Marc Caré’s description of Tardi, whom he considers the “leader of a New Realism” (“chef de file du Nouveau Réalisme”): Son premier principe est l’itinéraire du regard presque programmé. En effet, Tardi accorde une grande importance au parcours de lecture. La place de chaque élément graphique est toujours motivée. Vient ensuite le statut de l’espace qui fait sens, le décor agit parfois jusqu’à l’obsession. Enfin, ce n’est pas la recherche d’une réalité conforme mais le besoin d’authenticité dans les ambiances qui intéresse Tardi. Comme les dessinateurs de la ligne claire, Tardi se sert d’une importante documentation mais s’imprègne aussi des lieux qu’il dessine.7 (His first principle is the nearly programmed itinerary of the gaze. Tardi gives great importance to the course of reading. There is always a reason for the location of each graphic element. Then the status of the signifying space and the scenery are developed almost obsessively. It is not so much the search for reality but the need for authenticity of atmosphere that interests Tardi. Like the cartoonists of the clear line, Tardi employs a certain amount of documentation, while also impregnating the places he draws with mood)

However, the questions that arise from the graphic choices made by the narrator, Tardi, do not derive only from the different natures of the two codes in use. As in the theatre, the text is revealed through images, which are put together according to the options of the mise en scène.

7

Jean Marc Caré in Le français dans le monde, n°224 (n.d.), pp.69-71.

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3. Tardi’s text as a discourse By mise en scène, we mean a particular perspective on the text, and hence a critical reading of it. The text generates images in the mind of an author, who has a specific history that he brings to his interpretation; moreover, it does so at a different moment in time to that when the text was originally produced. Le Voyage by Tardi is therefore also a discourse after Céline’s narrative. Voyage au bout de la nuit of course belongs to a communication network where it circulates from reader to reader, with each reader naturally producing a particular reading. However, the fact that Tardi is one of those readers inflects the path of communication, since he in turn becomes a “producer” of the work, materialising his particular reading and transforming it into his own discourse. This new addresser is therefore directing his discourse to other addressees. But what does he have new to tell? Tardi’s communicative purpose cannot be superimposed on Céline’s, nor can we confuse the means used in each case. As we have already mentioned, Céline uses verbal material exclusively, whereas Tardi uses iconic material together with verbal. The field of the means of expression thus seems delimited; what remains to be defined is that of the message and the intention, which is less evident since the complete narrative text is to be found in the iconic material… The issue of the literary text as a constituting element of a communication network is apparent in Tardi’s text. It is all the more complex since it implies several different instances of communication; there is the dialogical link between Tardi and the text by Céline, and also that between Tardi and his readers. In order for communication to take place, this network of dialogisms must be located on common ground where the position of the image and the universe of pictorial reference agree with the position of the text and with the text as a source reference. The reading suggested by Tardi will be legitimised by the addressee who will somehow give it verisimilitude. This introduces a rhetorical element: Tardi needs to convince us… We will try to demonstrate by means of some examples that the range of topics employed by Céline and Tardi are similar, first, because Tardi integrates Céline’s text into his own, and second, less obviously, because of what it evokes in Tardi’s imaginary and imagery. The image-making activity in Tardi’s work draws on pictures he holds in his memory, engendered by another “text”: the account of the war as experienced by his grandfather. Tardi’s grandfather and father both went through the two world wars and indeed Tardi himself lived in bombarded Germany while his father was in the army there. The First World War had a particular fascination for him, as we can see in his work (the cartoon series Brindavoine and Adèle Blanc-sec take place during that period). This war was actually related to him “second-hand” by his grandmother, which reminds us of his approach in Voyage.

The Link Between Text and Image 339 Je passe sur les 5 ans de captivité, sur les tentatives d'évasions, sur tout ce bazar-là. Mais l'intérêt, si tu veux, c'est que cet homme est aigri et qu'à partir de là, il va jeter un regard d'un grand pessimisme total sur pratiquement tout ce qui l'entoure8 (I skip 5 years of captivity, attempts to escape, all that mess. But what matters, if you will, is that that man becomes bitter and starts looking at almost everything that surrounds him with utter pessimism)

Tardi defines his own vision of the world as pessimistic: “Derrière toute tentative humaine, derrière cette énorme dépense d’énergie, je ne vois qu’une chose : l’échec” (Behind every human endeavour, behind that huge waste of energy, I can only see one thing: failure).9 He is haunted by the implications of war for individuals, more than by war itself: Davantage que la guerre elle-même, l'idée directrice est la manipulation des individus: comment les gens ont perdu complètement le contrôle de leur existence, comment ils se sont trouvés embarqués dans des trucs qu'ils n'avaient pas choisis et qui vont, à partir de ce moment-là décider à leur place.10 (the main idea is the manipulation of individuals, even more than war itself: how people have lost control over their existence, how they found themselves engaged in things they had not chosen and that are going to take decisions instead of them)

This is the idea that Tardi’s story will reinforce above all. His characters do not benefit from the kind of accuracy one finds in his scenery (Tardi is said to own archives made of thousands of photographs which inspire him in his drawings). His stroke is thick and simple and shows his lack of knowledge and interest in anatomy: Mes personnages […] ont des mouvements qui ne sont pas toujours très naturels, et ce n'est d'ailleurs pas ce que je recherche. […] ce qui doit primer c'est l'efficacité et le contenu.11 my characters […] have movements which are not always natural, and besides, it is not what I seek. […] what must prevail is efficacy and content

The author attaches little importance to the characters. They are anti-heroes who feel “awkward, not in their environment” (“mal à l'aise, pas à leur place”) rather than “where they’ve chosen to be, which is not the case of most people” (“Là où ils ont choisi d'être, ce qui n'est quand même pas le cas de la majorité des gens”). He focuses upon the way they evolve within a social group which they have not chosen and which they hate, stating “this is what I felt when in the army and what I try to reproduce” (“c'est ce que j'ai ressenti à l'armée et que j'essaie de restituer”).12 These characters could be interchangeable, especially regarding war: in La guerre des tranchées, the “main” character dies in the opening pages and is replaced by “faces and names of men in interchangeable uniforms” (“des visages et

8 9 10 11 12

Numa Sadoul, Tardi, entretiens avec Numa Sadoul (Bruxelles: Editions Nifle-Cohen, 2000), p.22. Jean Luc Cochet, À suivre, 97 (Février 1986), 38-9. Sadoul, p.23. Sadoul, p.136. Sadoul, p.148.

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des noms d'hommes en uniformes interchangeables”).13 War and its absurdity, those who benefit from it, excessive patriotism, the sufferings of the wretched, death, the collapse of existence – these recur almost obsessively in the work of Tardi, who is known for his strong antimilitarism and his satirical and disillusioned vision of the world. Critical opinion has often represented Tardi as a self-appointed prophet whose mission would be to remind the readers of the horrors of war. This thematic unity, like his graphic style, are bound to persist in his cartoons as well as in his work based upon novels.

Conclusions – From text to image: transmutation of the real, aesthetic invention: We have attempted to demonstrate that Voyage by Tardi is profoundly related to a form and that it follows a particular structure. As in every artistic structure, this determines all the aspects of what it engenders, namely a plot and a discourse being transmitted to a reader. On the other hand, writing and drawing are two strategies which aim to “trap” images (“prendre au piège,” in Foucault’s well-known saying14), two representational frames, two ways of representing the world. The question is, whose world is it: Céline’s or Tardi’s? – The text as co-text: Though every text produces images, evoking or describing a visual universe, or leading us to infer one, we do not really see what the text describes. It is thus its referential capacity, not its visual nature, which is at stake. Cartoons are signs whose sense depends on the referential, i.e., the contextualisation of Céline’s text. However they also refer to another reality, namely Tardi’s “archive of personal images.” The cartoons do not have any referential value per se: they only make sense if we accept that Tardi’s account is a story that quotes Céline’s. In this respect, Tardi’s cartoons may be considered indexical, in Pierce’s sense; there is a sharing of common values between the two universes, which is only valid if we know them both.15 We have seen that there are aspects of the text that Tardi has chosen out of a formal constraint. There are others he has selected voluntarily, as demonstrated in his discourse on Voyage, which he reads and interprets critically according to his own experience, “that which concerns him” (“ce qui le regarde”), those aspects of the text that touch him and open up something in him.16 – Ultimately, we could say that the information which the text conveys to the image is semiotic in nature, whereas the information which the image conveys to the text is rhetorical.

13 14 15 16

IgnacioVidal-Floch and Ramón De España, El canon de los comics (Barcelona: Glénat, 1996), p.25. Michel Foucault, Les Mots et les Choses (Paris: Gallimard, 1990), passim. Cf Joly Martine, Introduction à l’analyse de l’image (Paris: Nathan Université, 2001), p.27. Cf G. Didi-Huberman, Ce que nous voyons, ce qui nous regarde (Paris : Editions de Minuit, 1992), passim.

The Link Between Text and Image 341 1. The information which the text conveys to the image: Tardi’s image-making activity operates on the basis of a reading of the text, i.e. there is a movement from the text to the image, which takes place over various stages: 1.1. Prior to Tardi’s Voyage: there are images that precede it and provide a scaffolding, though they do not necessarily leave any trace. With regard to locations, the Place de Clichy exists as a real place, which would have been represented in photographs from the era. Apart from having an archive of thousands of images, Tardi probably also drew inspiration from what Céline saw: as we know, that was his favourite period in history; 1.2. Some images arise from his reading of the text: as we have seen, Tardi “draws” Céline’s text as a sort of inverted ekphrasis; 1.3. There are also images after the text: all those that derive from perception, since images prompted by the literary text generate aesthetic transformations based on an emotion (all that emanates from description, from environments, and which concerns interpretation and inference, etc). 2. The information that the image conveys to the text is rhetorical: there is no authentication of the text through the image, since the aim is neither to represent reality nor to give a personal view on the world. The world of reference is a world of fiction which is impossible to demonstrate as true and concrete. It is crucial to believe in the existence of the represented object, but we must acknowledge that what we see corresponds to a site of memory. It is easier to approach the formal composition of the novel with rigour in order to compare it with the formal structure of the plot in images, and to observe what is transmitted or not from the text to the image and why. It is more difficult to analyse Voyage as a vision of / discourse on the world, due to the phenomena of historicisation and the acknowledgment of a referent. Céline’s referent is “first-hand” reality, which he represents through an aesthetic material, literature, with all the potentialities of language. Tardi’s referent is that same reality “second-hand”; what we have is then the representation of a representation, and that through another means: image. Representing something that we have not seen is closer to demonstration (hence, rhetorical) than to representation. Tardi resorts to a personal culture that produces an effect and not a reality. His figurative images are able to reconstitute the perceptional conditions through which “reality” presents itself to us. Governed by the principle of analogy, the figurative image is immediate and evident: what the image shows creates the illusion of a material reality. In this sense, representation has a value of presentation, though only for Tardi’s reality. Though the image is subordinated to the text, it is not limited to (or coterminous with) it; and it does not cover its entire signification. We should use the term “transécriture”17 (“transwriting”) to describe this process (which is, after all, the process proper to all writing, literary or non-literary), rather than

17

Cf André Gaudreault and Philippe Marion, La transécriture, pour une théorie de l’adaptation (Colloque de Cerisy, Québec: Editions Nota Bene, 1998), passim.

342 Marie-Manuelle Silva

adaptation, which inevitably suggests the idea of comparison and equivalence between an original work and the creation of another piece inspired by it. In fact, faithfulness to the literary text seems here compromised by an aesthetic aspect: there is a dialogue between arts, i.e. literature vis-á-vis visual narrative through the medium of the fixed image. The transcodifying is “naturally” partial: the fixed image establishes a discontinuity, but at the same time it carries over the continuum of the text it recreates. The text increases and becomes a text with other features, a text which can be confronted with the original, but which is autonomous due to its outgrowth and distance from the original. The reading that Tardi made of Voyage forms an “icon” of the text in his mind. This icon is registered diachronically, and it generates feedback on the original work. Regardless of the attempt to keep close to the source text, the unstable and dynamic nature of the signification of the literary work creates an inter-semiotic connection that is impossible to define in terms of identity or exclusion. We could apply to our analysis Masson’s comment on cartoon: La mise en image passe de la description anecdotique à la représentation historique, qui tend à interpréter une fois pour toute le vécu. On cesse de mimer la réalité (Le Voyage de Céline) pour tenter de le cerner dans des instantanés figés, à valence historique et qui jouissent ainsi d'une plus solide force de persuasion: fixité plus grande et vérisme amoindri, la mort du héros et la contestation du réel caractéristiques du roman moderne18 (The image rendering goes from anecdotal description to historic representation which tends to interpret once and for all what has been experienced. We cease to imitate reality (Céline’s Voyage) and try to define it in frozen snapshots with historical validity, which will have a stronger persuasive power: more fixed moments and fewer truisms, the death of the hero and the questioning of reality which characterise the modern novel.)

Tardi’s choices seem to find a balance in the interpretation of “what has been experienced” and multi-vocality, between the cartoon strip as the language of a group and its confrontation with literature (Céline also used popular language, the language of a group, within literature). He does not reduce the narrative text to the plot (to what Labov and Waleszky have called “unremovable passages”19) in order to seduce cartoon readers. However, he does not weaken the link between these two elements and sink into a contemplative account.

18 19

Pierre Masson, Lire la bande dessinée (Limonest: Presses Universitaires de Lyon, 1994), p.73. “Passages inamovibles” – William Labov & Joshua Waletzky, ‘Narrative Analysis: Oral Versions of Personal Experience’, in Essays on the Verbal and Visual Arts, ed. June Helm (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1967), pp.12-44.

8. ARTS AND CRAFTS: COMPOSITE SKILLS

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Anabela Mendes

Pulsating Visions – Idioms Incarnate: Wassily Kandinsky Amidst Stage, Pen and Brush Research on the work of Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944) allows us to realise that his gradually consolidated tendency to claim for an art that represents the “spiritual,” together with his formal option for a growingly abstract type of painting, is grounded on a formative experience that combines a variety of references, discourses and forms of knowledge. This is tantamount to acknowledging that Kandinsky’s work as a painter is duly balanced and complemented by his theoretical reflections on art. This article aims to compare a few instances of Kandinsky’s pictorial art (sketches and paintings from 1907 to 1912), prose poems (1912), and compositions for the stage (1908-1909, 1914) – all produced during the Munich and Murnau period. His artistic development was then especially stimulating, informed as it was 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.

It has been said countless times that it is impossible to define the aim of a work of art by way of words. And despite a certain superficiality with which this affirmation is often made, it is generally correct and will remain so even in an age of specialised training and knowledge of language and its properties. This affirmation – I take leave now of all objective criteria of evaluation – is correct precisely because the artist himself never succeeds in apprehending or recognising fully his own goals. And to conclude: the best words possible miserably fail when faced with what is kept in an embryonic state. (…) I do not wish to paint music. I do not wish to paint various states of soul. I do not wish to paint either with colour or without colour. I do not wish to alter, decry or demolish a single aspect of what constitutes harmony in the masterpieces of the past. I do not wish to reveal to the future its true paths.1

1. In January 1914 the Cologne Art Circle (Kreis für Kunst Köln), a privately run organisation with no rigidly set cultural agenda (and modelled on turn-of-the-century Parisian Salons), chose to present a solo exhibition of the artist Kandinsky in the foyer of the Deutsches Theater in Cologne. The promoters of this initiative requested the painter’s presence at the opening in order to speak about himself and his work. The first artist to be invited by the Circle was in fact already a key figure in Germany’s most avant-garde artistic milieus. Furthermore, he, along with Franz Marc, had previously appeared as co-author of an almanac entitled Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider) in 1912, which would see a second edition as early as 1914. In this work, a trans-disciplinary and trans-historical conception of

1

From Wassily Kandinsky’s Cologne Lecture, 1914. This text, first published in 1957, can be found in its complete form in Wassily Kandinsky, Mein Werdegang (My Future Path), in Kandinsky – Die Gesammelten Schriften, vol. 1, ed. by Hans K. Roethel and Jelena Hahl-Koch (Bern: Bentelli, 1980), p.58.

346 Anabela Mendes art is defended, a conception which Kandinsky supported enthusiastically and to which he would devote himself thoroughly in his artistic practice, theorising and teaching for many years to come. The extraordinary success that Kandinsky knew as a writer during this period is further seen in his first theoretical work, Über das Geistige in der Kunst, insbesondere in der Malerei (On the Spiritual in Art), published in 1912.2 In fact, this publication would be the object of two new editions later that same year. Also in 1912 the Munich-based editor F. Bruckmann would publish an impressive album of thirty-eight prose poems, twelve colour and forty-three black and white wood-carvings, all by Kandinsky, entitled Klänge (Sounds), and dedicated by this multi-faceted artist (painter, wood-carver and poet) to his parents.3 Despite his having felt honoured by the Cologne Art Circle’s invitation, Kandinsky declined to appear publicly at the inauguration of the exhibit of his work on 30 January 1914. Instead, he sent an explanatory outline of his paintings as well as a typescript entitled Mein Werdegang (My Development) to the event organisers, Mr. Kames and Mr. Livingstone Hahn, which the artist wished to be presented publicly in his name. According to the exhibit promoters, the account of the evening’s event sent to Kandinsky on the day following the inauguration reported that the public’s response to his artwork had been unexpectedly enthusiastic although the painter’s high prices had driven away potential purchasers of his work. The public’s general response to the reading of several of the poems comprising the Sounds album was, however, less than favourable while the response by the more specialised critics was divided between extreme praise and vitriolic disdain.4 The typescript prepared by Kandinsky expressly for the exhibit had in fact not been read to the public and has been subsequently lost. Mr. Livingstone Hahn had decided to disregard altogether Kandinsky’s text, providing instead a brief historical account of realist and spiritual painting in general, believing such an account to be more to the public’s taste. Mr. Kames would later seek in vain the painter’s permission to publish the Cologne Lecture. The original document would not be printed until 1957,5 and is today considered to

2

3

4 5

Although the first edition of On the Spiritual in Art, dedicated to the theoretician and painter’s aunt and first teacher, Elizabeth Tichejeff, is dated 1912, this work was in fact first published by R. Piper & Co. of Munich in December 1911. Of interest is the editor’s introduction to the republished volume. Max Bill (ed.), Wassily Kandinsky, Über das Geistige in der Kunst (Bern: Bentelli, n/d), p.7. Subsequent references to this work will be designated by the abbreviation ÜGK. The poetic work entitled Sounds was not published again according to its original conception. For further discussion on this matter, see Hans Konrad Roethel’s Kandinsky. Das graphische Werk (Köln: DuMont Schauberg, 1970), pp.445-447. See also Anabela Mendes, Volumetrie, Klangbild und Farbe im poetischen Werk ‘Klänge’ von Wassily Kandinsky. Paper given at the 2nd International Congress of the APEG, School of Letters, University of Oporto, 2001, p.1. (in press) Kandinsky was informed in writing by the directors of the exhibit of the impact caused by the event in two letters dated 31 January 1913 and 5 February 1914. Roethel/Hahl-Koch, pp.173-174. The 22-page manuscript can be found in archives located in Munich. The first page is, however, missing from this manuscript. The surviving text was published for the first time in: Johannes Eichner, Kandinsky und Gabriele Münter.Von Ursprüngen moderner Kunst (München: Bruckmann, 1957), pp.106-109, 124-125. See also Roethel and Hahl-Koch, p.172.

Pulsating Visions – Idioms Incarnate 347 provide fundamental insights into the artist’s development from representational to abstract painting. This summary recounting of cultural and artistic misadventures during Kandinsky’s career would not be of great significance were it not for the fact that such occurrences lead us to reflect upon the possible motivations which subsequently led the artist to produce an ongoing and systematic theoretical and aesthetic account of his work.

2. Despite his surprising and unexpected success as published author in the years between 1911 and 1914, Kandinsky felt he was sorely misunderstood and considered himself to be both profoundly isolated and a beacon for enemies. In a letter dated 22 December 1911 addressed to Franz Marc (an artist with whom he would have innumerable differences of opinion), Kandinsky expresses his discouragement caused by the critics’ reaction to The Blue Rider’s most recent exhibit: “If you could only imagine how difficult it is for me at times to endure the hate that continually befalls me.”6 Years later, while reminiscing about his experiences in the artistic milieu in general, Kandinsky would reiterate his belief that he had confronted the concept of abstraction in art as well as the underlying spiritual transformation it entails in a solitude of the most absolute sort.7 It is safe to infer that his path as artist and theorist was in part stimulated by the disparaging and less-than-perceptive reactions published by the specialised critics; reactions which, in turn, led to his exclusion from institutional legitimacy during the period preceding the First World War.8 Moreover, if the artistic activities by the group forming The Blue Rider were of the meteoric kind, albeit possessed of an undeniable incandescence,9 Kandinsky’s own artistic evolution towards abstractionism represents unquestionably a painstaking and highly demanding apprenticeship during which reflection and experimentation daily intermingled. Besides being a form of legitimate response to the chorus of his denigrators, the artist’s theoretical and essay writings express his strong convictions concerning the ontological basis of art. The reciprocity between theory and practice, between logical thinking and intuition-based thought processes, between reason and feeling was, according to Kandinsky, intrinsic to the very genesis of the work of art and to its essentially cosmic character.

6 7 8

9

Klaus Lankheit (ed.), Wassily Kandinsky/Franz Marc: Briefwechsel. Mit Briefen von und an Gabriele Münter und Maria Marc (München, Zürich: R.Piper, 1983), p.84. See Kandinsky’s letters to Thiemann (17.12.1934) and to Hilla Rebay (16.12.1936) in: Reinhard Zimmermann, Die Kunsttheorie von Kandinsky, vol. 1 (Berlin: Gebr. Mann Verlag, 2002), pp.66-67. For further discussion of this matter, see Luzius Eggenschwyler, Der wissenschaftliche Prophet. Untersuchungen zu Kandinskys Kunsttheorie unter besonderer Berücksichtigung seiner zweiten theoretischen Hauptschrift “Punkt und Linie zu Fläche” (Zürich: unpublished B.A. dissertation, 1991), p.42. The socially non-engagé, provocative and radical way in which the two exhibits were organised by The Blue Rider group in Munich in January 1909 and September 1910 should not be forgotten. These exhibits were connected to the Neue Künstlervereinigung München – NKVM (New Association of Artists) and represent a major break with the predominant academicism of that period.

348 Anabela Mendes In the aforementioned Cologne Lecture, which, as has been stated, the public present at his inaugural exhibit of 1914 did not hear, the following thoughts would have been heard: The essence of soul is of divine and spiritual origin. In the human being soul is enveloped by flesh, by flesh made of soul and subject to a myriad of external influences and coloured by them. Thus, works of art can also be subject to such “dispositions” and coloured by them as well. It is by this colouration that we recognise the immutable reverberation of the immutable diapason. The universal force of this reverberation, which emanates in resplendent fashion throughout the artist’s output, legitimates both the artist and his work.10

From Kandinsky’s neo-platonic perspective, the work of art exists first in abstracto before becoming material object. Such a perspective makes the utterly plausible claim that any sequence of events that brings the particular work of art to actual concrete reality is valid, regardless of whether its emergence into concrete form is of a rationally cognitive or a more intuitive nature. The creator of a work of art is, according to Kandinsky, indebted to a supreme creative spirit and therefore dependent on “Spirit” (der Geist) alone, i.e., on an abstract quality, “the spiritual” (das Geistige). This is what characterises the artistic experience in general and manifests itself by way of an “inner vibration” (innerer Klang). It is to the creator of art and to him/her alone to decide in what way s/he will make use (or not) of the cognitive and intuitive faculties at his/her disposal provided that s/he is able to distinguish what is false in each one of these faculties, i.e., all that is inadequate or prejudicial in regard to his/her artistic intention at any given moment.11

3. The years between 1908 and 1914 were particularly fertile ones for Kandinsky, who during this period produced poetry, paintings, wood-carvings, aesthetic theory, a new conception of theatre and short musical compositions as well as devoted himself to gardening, bicycling and long nature walks. In fine health despite persistent bouts of hypochondria, Kandinsky grew both artistically and intellectually during this

10 11

Roethel and Hahl-Koch, p.51. Roethel and Hahl-Koch, p.58.

Kandinsky and Münter going on a life journey, 15 May 1904, Düsseldorf (Gabriele Münter and Johannes Eichner Foundation, Munich)

Pulsating Visions – Idioms Incarnate 349 period in the loving company of Gabriele Münter, his companion and fellow painter of more than a decade. The artist’s Munich and Murnau phase is considered to be one of his most productive and artistically most eclectic periods. During these ten years his activities in the area of design, painting and wood-carving succeed in placing the representational and the progressively more abstract on friendly terms.12 The artistic consequences of this development can be observed, for example, in the painter’s preference for experimentation with the effects of brush strokes of colour as the predominant organisational principle of the pictorial space rather than the use of the objects depicted or their specific location on the canvas as the latter’s organisational focus. In the Cologne Lecture Kandinsky also addresses this issue: I felt simultaneously an incomprehensible agitation and the impulse to paint a picture. And the thought that this picture could be a beautiful landscape, or an interesting pictorial scene, or the representation of a human figure did not at all satisfy me. Since I loved colour the most, I began to conceive vaguely of a colour composition in which the representational element would be seen through the filter of the colours themselves.13

Kandinsky is driven by a veritable furor divinus although this furor differs markedly from Plato’s understanding of poetic inspiration, i.e., the latter’s belief in the transcendent nature of divine inspiration manifesting itself in the artist as a totally untutored gift.14 On the contrary, for Kandinsky artistic creativity signifies a careful process of distilling several languages (i.e., pictorial, graphic, poetic and scenic, the latter considered both in its instrumental and vocal aspects). Moreover, his desire to produce trans-disciplinary works both of an aesthetic and ethical nature is inseparable from his ongoing philosophical speculations. Kandinsky considers his multi-artistic and multi-modal experimentation to be reflective first of a purely exterior principle which states that the fusion of the arts should grow out of “a work in space that involves a process of construction”.15 His stage compositions exemplify this principle in the sense that in them can be found music, song, spoken word, dance, light and colour. This first principle is quite naturally and organically applied to the process of creation for the stage although it can easily be extended to include the creation of poetic texts and pictorial imagery as well. A second principle addresses, according to Kandinsky, the artist’s inner experiences; it depends directly upon the abstract categories defined by the artist as “inner vibration” and “spirituality.” The confluence of the exterior and inner principles suggests the existence of a synthetic principle bridging external and See also: Gisela Kleine, Gabriele Münter und Wassily Kandinsky – Biographie eines Paares (Frankfurt am Main, Leipzig: Insel Verlag, 1994), pp.319-452; Armin Zweite, ‘Die Linie zum inneren Klang befreien – Kandinskys Kunsterneuung vor dem Horizont der Zeit’, in Kandinsky. Kleine Freude. Aquarelle und Zeichnungen [Catalog of the Düsseldorf/Stuttgart Exhibit], ed. by Vivian Endicott Barnett and Armin Zweite (München: Prestel-Verlag, 1992), pp.9-32. 13 Roethel and Hahl-Koch, p.54. 14 Plato, ‘Apology’, in The Trial and Death of Socrates, trans. by F.J. Church (London: Macmillan, 1928), pp.43-4 (22 b-c). 15 See Kandinsky’s letter to Grohmann, dated 5.10.1924 in Zimmermann, p.346. 12

350 Anabela Mendes inner reality, nature and art. This synthesis gives rise to an aesthetic principle founded on the simultaneous stimulation of all of the “receptor’s” senses, the experience of which also includes the integration of synaesthetic processes. Once the external and inner principles are correctly identified, the fundamental idea underlying Kandinsky’s aesthetic theory can be elucidated, which states in essence that by way of works based on the aforementioned fusion of the arts a modus operandi of sensorial stimulation leading to the human being’s spiritual liberation can ultimately be divined.

4. In his activities devoted to painting in his Munich and Murnau period Kandinsky became mainly concerned with the study of colour and its multiple effects. He also explores form in its infinite possibilities, at times, however, neglecting content, and studies the changes of perspective caused by the deliberate decentring and displacement of elements or sections of the pictorial composition. In many of the paintings of this period, objects or references to objects are all but absent with the exception of an assortment of recurrent yet evolving motifs made up of towers, cupolas, boats with their oars, birds, mountains and the unmistakable medieval knight. These motifs recall the artist’s abiding passion for the Russia of his childhood and youth. In subsequent phases of the artist’s work, he would also make use of shamanic motifs, reshaping artistically his ethnographic experiences in the Vologda region of northern Russia in 1889.16 If we observe Kandinsky’s paintings as a process of mise-en-scène, we readily become aware of the role played by concealment and disguise, but also of how the heavy emphasis given to the work’s constitutive elements (i.e., colour choice, a ludic approach to form, rhythms and movement) creates, by way of the expressive devices at his disposal, a language of absolute exceptionality operating outside the descriptive norms of general linguistic capability. In addition, for Kandinsky this exceptional language is motivated by a sense of the “pure” (Reinheit) and closely linked with a profound artistic sensibility: it is the very echo resonating from the great divine and spiritual Opus.17 It is this sense of the “pure” underlying his pictorial theory and practice that can equally be found in his poetic writings, for instance the Klänge (Sounds) album of 1912 as well as in his theatre project which would come to fruition in 1928, when he staged, prepared the stage sets and designed the lighting and models for a production of Modest Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition given at the Friedrich Theatre in Dessau. Between 1906 and 1923 the painter created fourteen compositions for the stage in addition to writing three essays on

The daily contact Kandinsky maintained with several autochthonous populations (Finno-Ugrian, Lap and Siberian) at this time led him to discover an ancient religious, folkloric and iconographic heritage which the painter would subsequently incorporate into some of his paintings from the Munich and Murnau period up to his late Parisian period. These paintings display small, gaily coloured, organic figures that are known as representatives of “biomorphic abstraction.” For further discussion, see: Peg Weiss, Kandinsky and the Old Russia – The Artist as Ethnographer and Shaman (New Haven, London: Yale University Press, 1995). 17 See also Bill, ÜGK, pp.132-143. 16

Pulsating Visions – Idioms Incarnate 351 the art of stagecraft, defining the latter as the embodiment of total art, the abstract synthesis of art itself. If for Kandinsky the act of painting was an act of violence, acknowledged by him in an autobiographical text,18 his stage compositions reveal an artist who approaches the blank page in an unhurried, painstaking and meticulous manner; the artist develops a rigorous process of textual notation for an essentially instructive or expository score accompanied by small preparatory sketches and designs. These preparatory designs appear to be the source of his idea for an almost minimalist writing for the theatre; they can also be considered to be the point of departure or arrival for a painting or poem. In Grüner Klang (Green Sound), a work written between 1908 and 1909, we discover a composition divided into two scenes, both enacted by a vast assortment of human figures (women, men, children, a beggar and a cripple), whose spatial organisation and movement not only reveal a structure of audible, pictorial and rhythmic contrasts but also require the reader’s or spectator’s participation in a momentary process of ontological, mystical and transcendental reflection on the cosmic dimension of human destiny. The title of this short composition accentuates the figure of the beggar dressed in green (a serene, quiescent and discreet colour in this work),19 who plays an ambivalent role here: is he simply a wretched beggar or rather the saviour of humankind? The title also conveys the symbolic importance of voice, for it is through song that the figure of the beggar becomes an object of inquiry, first in a female figure’s love song (in which she also appears dressed in green) then by the reedy lamentation uttered by the cripple. This brief composition for the stage shares certain affinities with the poem “Lied” (Song)20 from the Sounds album, as well as with the painting Das bunte Leben (The Coloured Life) of 1907. In his autobiographical work Rückblicke (Reminiscences), Kandinsky states that learning to paint implied a combat with the canvas and a subsequent victory over the latter; he thus justifies, both literally and figuratively, his aggressive libidinous nature. The process of understanding his obstinate nature in the face of difficulties related to the control of creative stimuli during the materialisation of the desired work of art would appear to be at issue here. Roethel and Hahl-Koch, p.41. 19 Bill, ÜGK, p.94. 20 We provide below a published translation of this poem originally entitled “Lied”: 18

SONG A man sits in A narrow ring, A narrow ring Of thinness. He is content. He has no ear. And doesn’t have his eyeballs. He cannot find What’s left behind Of red sounds of the sun ball. Whatever falls Stands up again. And what was dumb,

352 Anabela Mendes Toward the end of 1908 Kandinsky wrote a new stage composition entitled Schwarz und Weiss (Black and White). The text for this piece is organised into four orchestrated scenes and reveals an ascendent progression of dynamic moments around a small male figure dressed in black as well as an indistinguishable white form of disproportionately gigantic dimensions depicting the artist’s embryonic conception of a woman. During the first three scenes of the piece, the composer builds his abstract universe by way of these two figures (symbolic representations of life and death, of the positive and negative, viewed in their essential complementarities). He simultaneously fills the space with a series of miniaturelike human figures, cloaked in heterogeneous colours and given to explosive movement, who contrast in size, rhythm and directionality with the heavy props which invoke the natural world, depicted here in uncommon dimensions. In the fourth scene a change of scenery and of the organisation and behaviour of the scene’s participants occurs, a change announced by a strident overture. The space is now dominated by a black knight mounted on a white horse that slowly crosses the stage diagonally. In contrast with the voluminous horse and knight couple and their ponderous traversal of the stage, much smaller figures dressed in shades of green once again appear; they form a mountain of squatting figures and appear to be located at the centre of the earth. The entire scene comes alive through the successive light changes, the sounds made by the horse’s hooves and the appearance of a bird. The composition aims to instil in the spectator a process of inner polarisation as a result of the interaction of contrasting aesthetic stimuli built on the now opposed, now complementary pair of black and white figures. The composition as a whole, particularly its last scene, can be objectively compared to Kandinsky’s pictorial universe and colour schemes of the same period. Moreover, there exist several studies by the painter as well as copies made by Olga von Hartmann for this stage composition that likewise push the boundaries of stage and pictorial languages. Kandinsky gave the title Violett (Violet) to his last stage composition. Originally entitled Violetter Vorhang (Violet Curtain), the artist worked on it between 1908 and 1926. Although this piece heeds the same principles as the earlier ones, Violet possesses a much greater inner and external complexity. We discover here for the first time a text that is unabashedly absurd, derisive and disconcerting in its humour. In fact, some contemporaries believed it to be an example of dada writing.21 It sings a song. Until the man, Who has no ear, And doesn’t have his eyeballs, Will start to find Signs left behind Of red sounds of the sun ball. (Wassily Kandinsky [1912], Sounds, trans and intro by Elizabeth R. Napier [New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1981], p.128.) 21 Ulrika-Maria Eller-Rüter, Kandinsky – Bühnenkomposition und Dichtung als Realization seines SyntheseKonzepts (Hildesheim, Zürich, New York: Georg Olms Verlag, 1990), p.94. See also Jessica Boissel (ed.), Wassily Kandinsky – Über das Theater Du Théâtre O Teatpe (Köln: DuMont, 1998), p.213.

Pulsating Visions – Idioms Incarnate 353 This stage composition is made up of seven scenes, two interludes and an apotheosis. The scenes include various caricatured figures, some recognizable as characters from earlier compositions and voicing similar themes: the metaphysical dimension of life, a deep inquiry into the nature of the world, and the fate of the individual versus the undifferentiated masses. Despite their anonymous condition, these beings devoid of psychological definition are nonetheless quite finely and incisively hewn. The middle and final structures of this composition are in our opinion of particular interest. They form together an intensely unique logic underpinned by a rigorous light design revelatory of a truly professionallevel lighting technique. In the first of the two interludes, occurring just before the third scene, the main character, so to speak, is in fact a red dot that traverses the stage before widening into a large circle. Immediately afterwards, the surface of the Wassily Kandinsky, Glass Painting with Red Spot, newly formed red circle envelops a diffuse c.1913 yellow spot that moves in a vertical upward (Municipal Gallery, Lenbachhaus) and downward motion. This dynamic pair then interacts with a blue ellipse that flickers in the right-hand corner of the stage. The interlude closes as the different colours fade into the dominant red accompanied by the sound of trumpets. In the final interlude, which occurs just before the fifth scene, the main characters are a black spot and diagonal lines that move in all directions, sometimes from opposite ends, while traversing a white screen in now curved, now rectilinear, now vibratory motion. The ecstatic mood generated by this scene is the result of the rapid interplay of these elements and their presentation in the form of a kaleidoscopic vision amidst a tremendous raucous explosion. Violet‘s finale is both extensive and possessed of a compositional unity giving to it a virtual autonomy vis-à-vis the rest of the piece. Whether it is perceived as an autonomous piece or as the final act of this stage composition, however, Apotheosis is a frenzied event of euphoric colour, a riot of free forms colliding and clashing together; in short, it is a tableau that inspires a truly uncommon perspective. Why does Kandinsky give the name Apotheosis to this finale? Why does Kandinsky wish to show his readers – museum goers and potential spectators of his compositions for the stage – this veritable atelier in action? Let us listen to this picture-writing, ready for the stage, as if the now wished to free itself from the ever eternal, ever spiritual plane:

354 Anabela Mendes A series of coloured brush strokes appear in different combinations and in different places. The red is exhausted. To the right, quite low, near the margin, a great green circle emerges suddenly from a single point. The entire scene begins to turn: it veers on its left side which then occupies an inferior position; the higher part is now the lower part. Another quick spin follows. And another. And yet another and another. Each time more quickly. The entire scene spins like a wheel – with ever increasing speed. The sounds of a whip are heard. Ever louder and quicker. The colours and sounds then run off wildly.22

In Kandinsky the interplay of the material and the spiritual, which underpins his concept of the “abstract” (even when he considers it to be “concrete”),23 emerges fundamentally from his idea of construction, his principle of organisation of every intervening expressive element or device, i.e., light, colour, form, texture, rhythm, resonance, vibration, movement, voice, body, musicality, etc. This interplay encompasses the specific artistic medium which holds them together as well as the forces involved in their interaction. These elements, which interact either in a convergent fashion or in a multiplicity of heterogeneous expansions, produce now isolated, now large or discrete packets of meaning possessed of an autonomy of expression. These elements or devices, however, never abandon an active sense of totality or wholeness governed by principles which are exclusive of the work of art in question: the nature of these principles is dictated by the work of art itself. This fundamental idea of the non-appropriation of principles, which creates the specific viability of each individual work, allows us to live the intentionalities and energies which together drive the idea of composition inherent in Kandinsky’s scenic, poetic and pictorial work.

22 23

Wassily Kandinsky, ‘Apotheosis’ (1914), in Boissel, p.272; my translation. Cf. Max Bill (ed.), Konkrete Kunst (1938) and abstrakt oder konkret (1938), in Kandinsky, Essays über Kunst und Künstler (Bern: Benteli-Verlag, (2) 1963), pp.217-221, 223-225.

Anne Price-Owen

From Medieval Manuscripts to Postmodern Hypertexts in the Art of David Jones This investigation argues that the visual and literary work of the poet-painter David Jones (1895-1974), together with the “painted inscriptions” he pioneered, are reminiscent of ancient manuscripts, while simultaneously anticipating postmodern hypertexts. Jones’s “painted inscriptions” are the apotheosis of the unity of the two disciplines he practised: painting and poetry. His inscriptions consist of painted poetic texts, often quotations, composed of his own unique lettering where each alphabetical form is designed to accommodate its neighbours. The style of the letter forms evokes the language(s) of the poetic texts, and the layout contributes to the meaning. As a child gifted in drawing, Jones’s familial environment also encouraged his interest in the written word. By 1927, he was an adept illustrator, and he pictured himself as a medieval monk in a scriptorium. This quasi selfportrait precedes his determination to “make a shape in words,” with illustrations, based on his experiences as a foot soldier during the Great War. Just two illustrations accompany this epic poem, but in 1952 he realized his ambition with the publication of his next long poem, The Anathèmata. His illustrations expand on and illuminate the text, ranging as they do from sophisticated wood- and copper-engravings through highly complex figurative paintings in mixed media to his abstract painted inscriptions. As such, the illustrations reflect the verbal expression in a number of ways. The pattern of the poetry on the page, the use of varied fonts: capitals, italics, and the use of different languages together with allusions to literary and biblical texts, are of utmost significance to the meaning. Had Jones not died before the digital age, which he would most certainly have embraced owing to the combinations and manipulations afforded by this technology, it is likely that he would have employed hypertext, and perhaps would have extended its boundaries by including text as image, and vice versa. In addition, his poetry and visual art are shot through with references, resonances and connotations of other literary and visual artists’ works and genres, as well as his personal experiences. Accordingly, Jones might be accused of eclecticism and even pastiche. Both are symptomatic of the postmodern condition. However, this discussion demonstrates that Jones’s approach to the visual, verbal and the synergetic combination of the two, place him in the canon of poets and visual artists whose works are informative, innovative and original, being rooted in tradition but having prescient overtones.

Towards the end of his life, the poet-painter David Jones reflected: My father was […] a printer’s overseer and that meant that I was brought up in a home that took the printed page and its illustration for granted. It is conceivable that this may have had some influence on my early preoccupation with drawing. My mother had drawn well as a young woman1

Jones was convinced of the influence that not only our parents, but also our ancestors have on us. Moreover, he believed in the evolutionary processes of the planet together with that of the collective unconscious implanted in the minds of mankind. In 1952 he published his most comprehensive poem, The Anathemata2 (which he also illustrated). In the Preface, which occupies some thirty-six pages, he commences by quoting “Nennius, or whoever composed the introductory matter to the Historia Brittonum,” declaring “I have made a 1 2

David Jones, The Dying Gaul and other writings (London: Faber & Faber, 1978), p.23. David Jones, The Anathemata: fragments of an attempted writing (London: Faber & Faber, 1952). From hereon referred to in the text as A, followed by page number.

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heap of all that I could find” (A 9), before acknowledging his debt to his parents, their forebears and, in its English translation, “to all the inhabitants of the whole of the White Island [Great Britain] of the race of the Britons.”3 The latter, entitled Parentibus Meis (1952), appears as an illustration on the dedication page accompanying the start of the poem (A 48-9), and takes the form of a “painted inscription,” as opposed to one that is carved in stone. Like its inscribed counterpart, Jones’s painting is composed of lettering rather than the painter’s customary iconic motifs and symbols, and is an art form he developed in the 1940s. In this, he relies solely on lettering in order to communicate his ideas. The language of the inscription is Latin, because Jones opined that it was under the Romans that Europe was united and strengthened by a common language, which endured throughout the world until the latter part of the twentieth century in the Roman Catholic Mass. His recalling of all the past generations back to the Roman Britons is emphasised by his choice of colour: the text is in black, but “indigenis,” “gentis” and the “p” of “prior” are emphasised, being highlighted in red. The layout of the letter-forms are also significant. In order to evoke the spirit of the Roman era, Jones uses a typographical arrangement which corresponds to carving on ancient Roman tombstones where the separation of words was indicated by a vertically centred dot instead of a space.4 The correlation between the Romans’ carved inscriptions and Jones’s lettered panels is a characteristic the latter sustained through to his final inscriptions. The central dot supplied an irregular continuity to the whole, and this is congruent with his non-regularised letter forms. The accumulation of knowledge in the mind is complemented by Jones’s references to the notion of the cosmic cycles of climatic change which impacted on the Earth and its distribution of land masses including geological changes, and their subsequent influence on mankind. In a long parenthetical passage beginning on page 55, he intimates the impermanence of the created world, while insisting on the imposition of the permanent on the impermanent, of the timeless upon time. The permanent and timeless are how Jones suggests the controlling influence of God who created this world, and to whom mankind is ultimately responsible. This is implied in Jones’s reference to the Old Testament, specifically Ecclesiasticus5 in: For one Great Summer lifted up by next Great Winter down among the altitudes with all help-heights down (A 55)

In this brief sequence it is clear that Jones deemed as significant the layout of the text, where he appears to show the layering on the sequential stratas that form the Earth’s crust. 3

4 5

The inscription in Latin reads: “Parentibus Meis et Prioribvs Eorvm et Omnibvs Indegenis Omnis Candidae Insvlae Btirronvm Gentis.” All English translations of the inscriptions are taken from Nicolete Gray, The Painted Inscriptions of David Jones (London: Gordon Fraser, 1981). Nicolete Gray, ‘David Jones’, Signature: a quadrimestrial of typography and graphic arts, no.8 (1949), pp.46-56 (p.51). Cf. René Hague, A Commentary on The Anathemata of David Jones (Wellingborough: Christopher Skelton, 1977), p.34.

From Medieval Manuscripts to Postmodern Hypertexts 357 The variability of the folds and stratification are expressed throughout this series of rhythmical allusions to the past: All montes with each dear made-height et omnes colles down? hautes eagle-heights under (A 57),

where he quotes from the Book of Psalms.6 This is followed by “As solitary tump, so massif”(A57), where Jones recalls an actual place where he had lived in the 1920s, demonstrating his capacity for contextualising the universal in the particular, and in doing so concretises his meaning. The tump he evokes is the great mass of hill which closes the Honddu valley above Capel-y-ffin, in Wales. It was when he moved to Wales in 1924, his father’s native land and one with which Jones identified strongly, that he developed his initial style as a painter. Looking back on his work prior to 1925, he declared that his art was “stylized, conventionalised, and heavily influenced by theory, and imitative of primitive Christian art.”7 These are conventions associated with Medieval art and appear in his oil painting Madonna & Child (1922). The painting displays the upper part of a woman cradling her infant son, against a rural background. The colour is modelled in planes, creating a somewhat angular portrait, instead of the tonal, yet subtle gradations which characterise his later works. Jones had been received into the Roman Catholic Church in 1921, having met the stone carver and letterer, Eric Gill in Ditchling, Sussex. Gill (who had converted to Catholicism in 1913), had established an arts and crafts community at Ditchling, and Jones joined the group. Encouraged by Gill, he learned wood-engraving, and his prints were used to illustrate magazines, such as The Game (1922-3),8 and other texts published by the Ditchling Press. These simple, black-and-white illustrations, where Jones eschews any kind of interpretation other than adhering to the text, are descriptive, denotative images, that have an unselfconscious charm. In one of his first attempts at presenting an illustration with its complimentary text, Jones isolates the image of the Nativity from the lettering by placing the scene of Christ’s birth from the accompanying lettering underneath the image. Nevertheless, this 1924 wood engraving, although somewhat crude, anticipates the style and layout Jones adopted for his later lettered panels. Following the tradition of early mss. illuminators (and the Romans before them), Jones uses the customary central dot to point up their separation. Moreover, the words are divided in order to fit the spaces:

6 7 8

Cf Hague, p.44. Jones also gave the title Montes et Omnes Colles to a watercolour landscape he painted on a visit to France in 1928. David Jones in H.S.Ede, David Jones 1895-1974: a memorial exhibition (Cambridge: Kettle’s Yard, 1975), unpaginated. The Game was a monthly magazine concerning texts from the Scriptures, and was published by The St Dominic and St Joseph Press at Ditchling. For brevity’s sake, I refer to the Ditchling Press in the text.

358

Anne Price-Owen [David Jones’s Image of the Nativity] ----------------------------BY.THE.MYSTERY OF.THYHOLY.INCAR NATION.DELIVER.VS -----------------------------OVIRGIN.MOTHER! HEWHOM.THE.WH OLEWORLDCANNOT.HOLD.WAS.EN CLOSEDIN.THY.WOMB

Despite the deliberate separation of image and text, the former is remarkably illustrative of the meaning: the shelter enclosing the mother and child is womb-shaped, while the ox and ass are icons of the Nativity.

David Jones, “Ongyrede”, text and illustration from The Anathemata: fragments of an attempted writing (London: Faber & Faber, 1952), p.240

From Medieval Manuscripts to Postmodern Hypertexts 359 Just as the illustrators of early printed books often used one engraving to illustrate more than one text, so too, Jones maximises on his engravings. A small carving of 1924 commenced as an engraving of the torso of the Madonna cradling her child, before Jones continued to carve it into a sculpture. Finally, he engraved the title on the back, ensuring that the arrangement of the letters was commensurate with the space: B E PN NRE O ODI S L CA CET M V I V AR M IR IA IA GO In this computer-typed approximation an exact replica of Jones’s carved lettering cannot be made, but it is clear that the text can be read downwards, and also in some instances, from left to right. Alternative software is required to reproduce a faithful rendition of Jones’s text, which perhaps advances the hypothesis that this artist is a forerunner of postmodern hypertext. Indeed, twelve years after Jones finished this work, Walter Benjamin predicted that The history of every art form shows critical epochs in which a certain art form aspires to effects which could be fully obtained only with a changed technical standard, that is to say, in a new art form. The extravagances and crudities of art which thus appear […] actually arise from the nucleus of its richest historical energies.9

Also in 1924, Jones made his first painting incorporating lettering. Sanctus Christus de Capel-y-ffin depicts the Crucifixion at his village home in the Eglwys Valley, near Abergavenny, where Jones joined Eric Gill and his family who had left Sussex for Wales. The elongation of the figure, together with the symmetrical composition and the insertion of the letters in the negative spaces, are reminiscent of medieval designs. In keeping with religious icons and images, this picture connotes both matter and spirit. This, as Gill observed, is typical of Jones’s work where “the spiritual world […] [is] at the same time as much enamoured of the material body in which he must clothe his vision.”10 Gill, a foremost 20th century pioneer of typography, influenced Jones’s thinking as well as his approach to his work, so it is unsurprising that Jones’s interest in the word was reinforced. He continued to illustrate a considerable number of books, for example, The Chester Play

Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, trans. by Harry Zohn (London: Jonathan Cape, 1970), pp.219-253 (p.239). 10 Eric Gill, Last Essays (London: Jonathan Cape, 1942), p.303. 9

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of the Deluge (1927),11 and with copperengravings, Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1929);12 both fuelled Jones’s curiosity concerning poetic literary forms. He subsequently investigated the early bardic tradition in Wales, referring to the bards as the “‘carpenters of song’ [...] [because] Carpentry suggests a sort of fitting together and [...] the English word ‘artist’ means, at root, someone concerned with a fitting of some sort.”13 Jones demonstrates the same “fitting together” visually, where he accommodates the content of his pictures in a harmonious relationship. This is evident in his wood engraving The Artist (1927), where he likens himself to a medieval monk in his scriptorium, surrounded by zoomorphic motifs. In the late 1920s Jones made a number of visits to the Benedictine monastery on Caldy Island, off the coast of Wales, where the monks offered him the scriptorium as a studio. Jones depicts himself as the illuminator in The Artist, but also anticipates his own career as a David Jones, The Artist, 1927 scribe – everything he wrote was written in long-hand, before it was sent to typists.14 Apart from signifying his devotion to the Catholic Church, this engraving heralds his distinctive mature style where the content is accommodated within the spatial structure of the composition. In his watercolours he developed this style further, creating a sense of unity by the dexterous handling of the fluid paint exemplifying the interrelationship between form and content, and aptly manifesting his belief in “the unity of all made The Chester Play of the Deluge with ten wood-engravings by David Jones (Waltham St Lawrence: The Golden Cockerel Press, 1927), reprinted by Clover Hill Editions, 1977. 12 The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (Bristol: Douglas Cleverdon, 1929), reprinted by Clover Hill Editions, 1964. 13 David Jones, Epoch and Artist (London: Faber & Faber, 1959), p.29. 14 Nest Cleverdon, the wife of the publisher and broadcaster, Douglas Cleverdon, helped to type the manuscript of The Anathemata, remembering that “I didn’t realise at first that I was supposed to copy exactly his very unusual spacing and layout, but after it [the ms.] had been returned to me three times, each time for the smallest inaccuracy, […] the job was finally finished by Louis MacNeice’s secretary,” in ‘A Handshake with the Past’, The David Jones Journal, Vol.1, no.2 (1997), pp.30-2 (p.31). The manuscripts of The Anathemata are in the National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth. 11

From Medieval Manuscripts to Postmodern Hypertexts 361 things.”15 For this reason, much of his visual work is shot through with a sense of fusion, where nothing dwells in isolation. In his watercolour, Curtained Outlook (1932), even the interior and exterior are confused: everything exists in a state of flux: the building which is viewed in the distance beyond the window is as clearly defined as the vase of flowers on the window-sill, which are portrayed with the same strength of line and colour as the artist’s worktable situated in front of the window with its assortment of artistic utensils and tools. The cracks on the interior plastered wall are distinctly visible, whereas the eponymous curtains are transparent; their outlines and patterns create a further sense of movement as they are blown by the wind entering the open window. The beginnings of this style are sourced in the less flexible engraver’s technique of The Artist. The title of this indicates that it is a self-portrait, although the image is generic and not a physiognomic portrait, unlike the miniature of Marcia painting her own portrait in the pre-Renaissance age. Although Jones’s engraving is comparable to our concept of medieval portraiture, Boccaccio’s encyclopaedia On Famous Women16 shows Marcia and Iaia of Cyzicus painting self-portraits which we assume are likenesses owing to their use of hand mirrors, the latter also being a sculptor, as depicted in the tools nearby.17 Jones’s growing confidence as a visual artist, strengthened by a visit with Eric Gill to France – the land of the medieval epic, La Chanson de Roland, and where Jones had been engaged in armed combat – perhaps stimulated his next project: an attempt “to make a shape in words.”18 The theme was the Great War in which he had served as a foot soldier on the Western Front between 1915 and 18. His title for this prose-poem was In Parenthesis because it dealt with the period from December 1915 to July 1916, when Jones sustained a leg wound at the battle of the Somme. The poem was not completed until 1937 although it commenced in 1928. This suggests a long gestation period of revisiting the manuscript, and of copious alterations. However, this was not entirely the case, as Jones explained in a letter to the poet W.H. Auden in 1954: “In Parenthesis was nearing completion in 1932 (it was begun in 1927 or ’28); for a number of reasons the Preface and notes were not written till 1936 but the text was virtually finished by 1933.”19 The “number of other reasons” relate to several factors. Primarily, Jones’s principal concern was drawing, and the years 1928 to 1932 saw a flowering of his visual art which he often exhibited in the London galleries. The influential painter Ben Nicholson invited him to join the prestigious Seven and Five Society, a group of avant-garde British painters of

David Jones in Ede, unpaginated. Giovanni Boccaccio, De Claris Mulieribus (Florence, c.1361-64), translated as Concerning Famous Women, see n.17, below. 17 See http://www.heritage-images.com (The British Library). The caption beneath the illustration of “Iaia of Cyzicus with mirror and sculptor’s tools” (c.1400-c.1425), reads: “Iaia was an artist who painted her selfportrait with a mirror. She is pictured seated, combing her hair whilst looking into the mirror. From De Claris Mulieribus (Concerning Famous Women) by Giovanni Boccaccio. This work contained 104 brief biographies of famous women.” 18 David Jones, In Parenthesis (London, Faber & Faber, 1937), p.x. From here on referenced in the text as IP, followed by page numbers. 19 David Jones, Dai Greatcoat: a self-portrait of David Jones in his letters (London: Faber & Faber, 1980), p.161. From here on referenced as Dai Greatcoat. 15 16

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whom Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth were members. During these years Jones was at his most prolific, and created some of his most enduring and innovative paintings which established his reputation as an original and talented artist. This energetic period was over by 1933, when Jones suffered a mental breakdown, which may be accounted for in several ways. In 1931 his erstwhile fiancée, Petra Gill, married another artist. Jones knew that marriage for him was not a practical option,20 for as his publisher friend, René Hague observed, he was an “‘unemployed steady’”21 and not financially independent; even so, Petra’s decision “was a shattering and permanent blow.”22 In 1934, at the advice of friends, he visited Cairo and Jerusalem for his health’s sake, and on his return to Britain consulted a doctor who advised him to give up painting. Although speculative, it is likely that during the ten years between starting and finishing his war epic, Jones must have been considering his time on the battlefield in order to write, edit and also append the copious notes and references which explain many of its allusions and sources. The hypothesis is supported by the factual accuracies of situations, times, events and personalities which permeate the work.23 It is possible that the remembrance of the war and the horrors which the soldiers endured, had a bearing on the state of Jones’s mind, and may even have contributed to the startling reality of this particular passage: He found him all gone to pieces and not pulling Himself together not making the best of things. When they found him his friends came on him in the secluded fire-bay who miserably wept for the pity of it all and for the things shortly to come to pass and no hills to cover us. (IP 153)

Thus it was, that Jones continued to work intermittently on his poem hoping that it is something – I terribly want ouside judgement. Sometimes when I read it it seems to have a shape, at other times it sounds awful balls and full of bad jokes and strained meanings. The real thing I’m afraid of is this business of Cockney speech. It’s the very devil to try and make a real enduring shape that won’t be embarrassing with the stuff – dropped h’s and “yers” and “bloody” and all that are so difficult.24

He was also fastidious about the layout of his text, and confides to Hague his desire for the poem to be published in double columns: 11.2.35. I do hope we can print my book in double columns – I want it to be printed just as you want it so that you can at least print one book exactly according to your ideas of typography […] I’m re-writing my Preface for the third time – what a fucking sweat.25

20 21 22 23 24 25

Dai Greatcoat, p.42. Dai Greatcoat, p.41. Dai Greatcoat, p.41. Dai Greatcoat, pp.248ff. Dai Greatcoat, p. 80. Dai Greatcoat, p.81.

From Medieval Manuscripts to Postmodern Hypertexts 363 In the event, it proved too problematic for Hague, the typographer, to publish the poem in the format with which Jones most empathised. In this era of advanced computer technology, however, it is likely that a software programme could be devised that would enable a costeffective printing of this entire text to be published exactly as Jones wished. His intention was to illustrate the work, but in the end he settled for just two illustrations: a frontispiece and a tailpiece. The former is a densely packed image of a young naked soldier donning his army jacket which suggests the vulnerability of the soldier in “no-man’s-land.” As the poem reveals, the soldier is a universal emblem of survival in adversity, and doubles as a figure for Christ the Saviour. In other words, the warrior is Everyman, and in his 1929 engraving of the same title, Jones packs this figurative work with movement, life and death. The female figure on the right is a twentieth-century rendition of Botticelli’s Flora from his masterpiece Primavera, c.1440. Interestingly, Botticelli was the artist beloved of the PrePaphaelite Brotherhood, a group of nineteenth-century English painters who also looked back to the Medievalists for their inspiration: both for their purity of expression, as well as the themes they tackled. Lancelot and Guenevere (1916), is a pastel that most resembles the PRB style, in both colour and composition. Jones drew it when he was home on leave from the trenches to illustrate himself and his girlfriend at that time, signifying his predilection for heroic themes. The interdependence of literary allusion and pictorial content is a hallmark of much of Jones’s visual art. This is best seen in his painted inscriptions, the visual text form he pioneered in the 1940s which he described as “a private art.”26 It is through these works that Jones pre-empts postmodernism most obviously. Not only does he use text as visual art in the manner that visual artists of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries appropriate language as their best means of communication, but like so many of these artists, he quotes from former sources mainly – in the case of his inscriptions, from the Bible and the Christian missal. He made a watercolour on cheap paper as a birthday present for the daughter of a close friend with whom he had studied at Westminster Art School from 1919 to 21. The daughter’s name is Beatrix, and Jones’s tribute quotes the sequence in the Mass for Whit Sunday: “O Lux Beatissima Reple Cordis Intima Tuorum Fidelium Alleluia [O most blessed light fill the hearts of your faithful/Alleluia]” (1946).27 Because the text is in Latin, Jones uses the Roman alphabet in order to emphasise the context, while the colours reflect the light, purity and fidelity implicit in the text. A sprinkling of stars celebrates the theme, while the last line creates a satisfactory terminal. By this date, Jones had resolved the inconsistencies which occur in some of the earlier lettered panels, such as Vexilla Regis (1944), where the Roman lettering is commensurate with the Latin quotation meaning: “They bring forth the standard of the King on the 18th day of the calends of May in the year 782 after the foundation of the city [Rome].” The text is from the hymn sung in the Tridentine liturgy for Good Friday, with the date of the Crucifixion, according to Roman calculation.28 The use of both upper- and lower-case letter forms creates awkward negative spaces, indicating the experimental nature of this work. 26 27 28

Gray, The Painted Inscriptions, p.103. The English translation is from Gray, The Painted Inscriptions, p. 28. Gray, The Painted Inscriptions, p. 27.

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This sparse inscription contrasts with Jones’s 1947 painting of the same title, with the three trees “left standing on Calvary,”29 as Jones saw them outside the window of his studio. But he crams in all sorts of other connotations also, for in his mind was “the collapse of the Roman world.”30 In the background is a druidic stone circle, various bits and pieces of classical ruins in the Welsh hills, while the ponies were those of the Roman cavalry turned to grass. They also refer to “Malory’s Morte D’Arthur when […] after the death of Guenevere and the break-up of the Round Table, Launcelot and other knights let their armed horses free.”31 Anticipating artists working in the postmodern epoch of reflexivity, Jones juxtaposes visual quotations from an assortment of contexts to create an image which is personal to him, yet universal in its application. The Arthurian theme was important to Jones. Arthur, the ancient king of Britain, known as the once and future king, was a vicarious Christ-type and, like Christ, he will come again. Jones had intended to do a sequence of illustrations for Malory’s text, but in fact created just two. In 1940, he finished Guenever,32 in Sir Megliagruance’s castle. Lancelot, on the extreme right, enters the chamber from the window in order to gain access to the queen, the wounded knights around her oblivious to the drama. Guenevere is naked (for Jones was not averse to introducing a sexy note to his works, and her nude body emphasises the queen’s appeal). Despite the carnal suggestions in the foreground, Jones introduces a priest celebrating Mass in the background, for he sees Lancelot’s love for Guenevere as an allegory for Christ’s love for the Blessed Virgin Mary. The knights represent mankind through the ages, with the cross-kneed Crusading knights, the long-barrow sleepers of prehistory, the soldiers of World War I in their dugout as well as those who sheltered in the underground during World War II. This gathering in of all nations and creeds is typical of Jones’s mind set: he saw the universal shining through the particular. Jones’s second visual response to Malory, The Four Queens (1941), shows the recumbant Lancelot being tempted by the queens who find him sleeping. Melissa Douglas offers some interesting speculations on this work in a postmodern context,33 maintaining that Lancelot assumes the traditional position of the female subjected to the male gaze. The erect stance of the four queens implies this subjugation, indicating that they have usurped the masculine position. Moreover, the apparent lack of the knight’s penis infers a castrated body, so that the hero is “physically […] ambiguous; Lancelot’s composed genital state implies otherness, lack and deformity as prescribed by Aristotelian and Freudian notions of femininity.”34 Dai Greatcoat, p. 149. Dai Greatcoat, p. 150. Dai Greatcoat, p. 150. David Jones’s spelling of characters’ names sometimes varies from that which is normally used because he adapts proper names in English to what he believes is the Welsh equivalent, eg., Lancelot becomes Launcelot; Guinever becomes Guenevere/Guenever. The spelling I have used concurs with the norm except when quoting Jones. 33 Melissa Douglas, ‘“The Four Queens”: a deconstruction of sexuality and convention: a psychoanalytical reading of David Jones’s painting of 1941 with reference to Freudian criticism’, The David Jones Journal, vol.3 (2001), pp.5- 8. 34 Douglas, ‘“The Four Queens”’, p. 5. 29 30 31 32

From Medieval Manuscripts to Postmodern Hypertexts 365 In their comprehensive analysis of Jones’s visual art, Miles and Shiel respond to the knight’s diminished sexual condition by asking “What is that strange vulval shape that rests between his legs and why do the spikes of his spurs point towards it?”35 Douglas has the answer, declaring that “Lancelot bears the wounds of an emasculated subject and hence occupies a space beyond the margins of what Jones scholars would characterise as the system of masculine and feminine 'principles.’”36 Accordingly the knight, being outside of the norm for both sexes, further advances the proposition of his ambiguity, perhaps even alluding to hermaphrodite tendencies.37 To compound this assessment, Jones gives more weight to his outline of the knight than to any other part of the drawing, containing him within his own physical frame. Hence, he appears to support Lynda Nead’s claim that the female body is contained and therefore perceived within outlines, margins and frames.38 Despite this evaluation of Lancelot, the queens are incontestably female, as Douglas concludes: Jones’s narrative and his literary source, […] debase the female and ultimately privilege male elements within the composition. In the original Malorian text, Lancelot belies Jones’s seemingly defenceless portrayal by going on to resist his captor’s advances […] The hero’s identification of The Four Queens as “false enchantresses” ironically underlines the predominance of the patriarchal structure within both the historical and pictorial narratives. It implies that the Queens’ imported masculinity is both transparent like their pictorial form, and superficial, evoking their status as passive agents of the subjective construct of desire.39

Where “The Four Queens” may be deconstructed from a postmodern perspective, Jones’s most comprehensive literary work, The Anathemata (1952), is a precursor of postmodern writing in two ways. Firstly, by the density of its interrelated themes and the allusions to other authors, which results in copious footnotes accompanying the text, and sometimes interrupting the sequence; for example, pages 54, 76, 126, 184, 212, 218 and 234, contain only notes relating to the proceeding pages of the poem, in each case. Ingeniously, these pages also precede full page illustrations, so that the reader naturally pauses to look at the apposite image.40 Secondly, the text format, the use of alternative languages, fonts and particularly the layout are, by their nature, hypertextual. All contribute to the poem’s meaning. The overriding theme is the voyage of the Redeemer, yet by its nature Jones evokes Homer’s Odyssey, and also draws on many Classical myths to articulate his sub-themes. 35 36 37

38 39 40

Jonathan Miles and Derek Shiel, David Jones: The Maker Unmade (Bridgend: Seren, 1995), p.254, cited in Douglas, ‘“The Four Queens”’, p. 5. Douglas, ‘“The Four Queens”’, p. 5. Cf Paul Hills, ‘“The Pierced Hermaphrodite”: David Jones’s imagery of the Crucifixion’, in David Jones: Man and Poet, ed. John Matthias (Orono, Maine: National Poetry Foundation, 1989), pp.425-40. Hills argues a convincing case for the dual gender of Christ, and, because Jones equates Lancelot with Christ, the inference would seem appropriate in the context of Douglas’s article. Lynda Nead, The Female Nude: Art, Obscenity and Sexuality (London: Routledge, 1992), p.8. Douglas, ‘“The Four Queens”’, p. 7. The pages with the notes are always on the verso, and these are accordingly accompanied by a blank recto page. The reader is required to turn the (blank) page to view the succeeding double page spread bearing the illustration and its companion text page to which the preceding notes refer.

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These topics variously relate to particular cities, such as Troy, Rome, Jerusalem and London as well as natural formations – hills and rivers – throughout Europe. The latter allow Jones to introduce characters from Welsh mythology, and also Malory’s Morte d’Arthur. He skilfully weaves these threads together by underpinning the entire poem with a subtext which recalls the Christian liturgy. Ultimately, this endues the poem with an overall coherence. In today’s secular multicultural world, Christianity is hardly a postmodern concept, but because of the breadth of allusion together with his deft juxtapositioning of characters from alternative eras – whether fictional or actual – Jones avoids pastiche: the situations he evokes are novel and original. He introduces risqué subjects which often characterise postmodern literature, for example prostitution, blasphemy, homosexuality and incest. The central character of the poem is a woman of easy virtue who discusses her relationships with successive lovers (A 124-68). As if to expand on the wantonness of women, two Greek courtesans are mentioned by name, Phryne and Lais, when they pop into church to say “a quick decade” (A 180). In a further shocking passage, Jones creates an analogy between the rape of Leda by the swan from Greek mythology and that of the Vigin Mary’s incarnation by the Holy Spirit (A 189). Is there also an implication that priests are bisexual, when he refers to “the dedicated men in skirts” (A 179)?41 But perhaps Jones’s most startling insinuation is incest between Christ and Mary: He that was her son is now her lover signed with the quest-sign at the down-rusher’s ford. Bough-bearer, harrower torrent-drinker, restitutor. He by way of her of her his gristle and his mother wit. White and ruddy her beautiful in his shirt errant for her now his limbs like pillars. (A 224)

Aside from these implications, Jones’s fragments of an attempted writing, as he subtitles The Anathemata are exactly that, being sections which were siphoned off from “experiments made from time to time between 1938 and 1945” (A15). The fragments which were omitted from his 1952 publication were subsequently published as two other books: The Sleeping Lord and other fragments (1974)42 and The Roman Quarry and other sequences (1981)43 Through his persistent investigations of the manuscripts relating to all three of these books, Tom Goldpaugh discovered that Jones was attempting

41 42 43

See note 37 above. David Jones, The Sleeping Lord and other fragments (London: Faber & Faber, 1974). David Jones, The Roman Quarry and other sequences (London: Agenda Editions, 1981).

From Medieval Manuscripts to Postmodern Hypertexts 367 to create verbal depth perspective, to form the equivalent of the delicate layering of his paintings. But print, bound by flat text, could not offer perceptual depth. The difficulty, finally, was not with his vision, so much as with the technical means available at that time […] [This] highly experimental text might […] find form in a new medium, hypertext, rather than traditional print.44

But for The Anathemata’s publication, Jones had to accept traditional print, which provided an exacting task for the typographer. The first page of text focuses on the priest celebrating Mass, and the priest, being a substitute for Christ, is an eternal figure for time and subsequent eras. This impact of the past on the present is represented in an inscription opposite page 55, in which Jones quotes James Joyce: “Northmen’s Thing is Southfolks Place” (1948), the only inscription entirely in English. The medium is wax crayon, subsequently burnished, confirming its experimental nature and relatively early date. The inscription is landscape formatted, therefore it is necessary to turn the book sideways in order to read the Joycean quotation. As his inscriptions became known, and therefore in demand, Jones improved his techniques, creating a chalk and Chinese white painted surface which gave him a rugged surface to work on, and one which was patient of making corrections, should he make a mistake. He superimposed his lettering on this ground, and his later pieces are highly sophisticated, as his great invocation to the Tree of the Cross confirms: Arbor Decora (1956), “Tree beautiful and shining, adorned with royal purple elected tree worthy to touch such holy limbs stripped himself then the young man who was God Almighty, holy strong one.”45 The letters in green, yellow, purple and reddish brown are those associated with the meaning. The work is a complex mix of different languages: the Latin is from the hymn Vexilla Regis, the Anglo-Saxon references from the poem The Dream of the Rood, and the Greek is the liturgy for Good Friday. The entire composition is constructed so that the Latin text, which is larger in scale than the others and reads from left to right, is analogous to the solid trunk and limbs of the tree. The decorative Anglo-Saxon, which looks like lower-case lettering owing to the archaic alphabetical forms which create an irregular frame around the sides and top of the Latin inscription, and are thus written at right angles to the main text’s sides, corresponds to a dressing of leaves around the central trunk. The Greek lettering, again smaller than the Latin, appears to support the entire design, suggesting that the whole concept is rooted in Good Friday. The Anglo-Saxon text from The Dream of the Rood (1952), illustrates another section of The Anathemata, where the text is in black and red being made specifically for the poem. The pattern of the lettering demonstrates Jones’s regard for the layout of his text. He was concerned with the impact that the words and their spaces, the pauses and the inferences which the visual layout on the page would have on his reader. Such means of conveying the sense of the text is not new: in 1628 the metaphysical poet George Herbert published Easter

Tom Goldpaugh, ‘To Make a Shape in Words: the Labyrinthine Text of David Jones’, in David Jones: Diversity in Unity, ed. Belinda Humfrey and Anne Price-Owen (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2000), pp.135-52 (p.150). 45 Owing to the unorthodox letter forms of the Anglo-Saxon and Ancient Greek alphabets, I am unable to reproduce the original text of David Jones’s inscription Arbor Decora (1956) on my computer. 44

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Wings, in a format that forced the reader to turn the book sideways in order to read the poem.46 It is conceivable that had Jones lived through to the twenty-first century, he would have embraced current computer technology where we can manipulate typefaces, sizes, characteristics of different languages and also layout, as is common in today’s trendy magazines, such as Beach Culture.47 Nevertheless, Jones’s legacy lives on in contemporary Welsh artists who combine image and texts, such as Mary Lloyd Jones and Tim Davies. The former introduces pieces of text to her landscape paintings in both English and Welsh in order to reinforce the political undercurrent which many of her works address, for example “foot and mouth,” a disease that attacked many cattle and sheep in rural Wales in 2001 and which bankrupted Welsh hill farmers. Tim Davies investigated the Welsh vowel sounds in a series of works called Wild & Scattered (2002), articulating his protest at the demise of the Welsh language. But in the dual contexts of medievalism and postmodernism, Jones has the last word. As if to prove that he is the sum of all his parts, his personal letters to friends support his predilection for illuminated manuscripts as well as his visionary capacity for intriguing and innovative material. “Letter to Tony” (1971)48 exhibits his ability to intertwine the past with the present by colour coding, layout and pictorial application. In his own distinctive method of writing, the writing slopes to the right side as the letter progresses down the page, leaving a large triangular blank area of paper on the left. His address and the main body of the letter are written in black ball pen, but the date is in green. Corrections, together with additional information which Jones includes on re-reading his text, are added in the remaining spaces on the page, and arrows followed by curving lines, and asterisks, guide the attention to the red, or alternatively green, areas of additional text. Perhaps this letter sums up Jones’s capacity for recalling the past approaches of early scribes who deliberately included spaces in their manuscripts to permit the illuminator to add the rubrics and images. At the other end of the equation, Jones’s letter also exhibits qualities associated with hypertext. Considering that hypertext is when text does not form a single sequence, but may be read in various orders, especially when material is interconnected in such a way that the reader can discontinue reading one document at certain points in order to consult other related material, then Jones’s letter is commensurate with this definition also, and is hypertextual in nature. Truly, Jones was a man after his time, in tune with his own time, while simultaneously anticipating the future in both his literary and visual art. Reproduced in Palmer, George Herbert (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1895), 2 vols., vol. 2, pp. 335, 337. Cf Rick Poyner & E.Booth-Clibborn, Typography Now: the next wave (Ohio: F&W Publications, 1991), p.21, cited in Beach Culture (USA: 1991 & 1990), p.37. 48 David Jones’s letter to his nephew Anthony Hyne is reproduced in full in ‘David Jones – a Man of Letters’, The David Jones Journal, vol.1, no.3 (1999), pp.10-14. 46 47

Dominique Costa

Visual and Verbal Representations in the Scottish Novel: The Artistry of Alasdair Gray Alasdair Gray’s career as a full-time artist and writer began in Glasgow in the early 1960s but it was in 1981 with the publication of his first novel, Lanark: A Life in Four Books, that his literary career was successfully launched. In the following decades Gray’s experimental writing flourished and his published work presently amounts to six novels, two novellas, four collections of short stories, two volumes of poems, several plays, and numerous nonfictional pieces, all of which are illustrated with his remarkable drawings. As Gray is a visual artist as well as an innovative novelist, his writing goes hand in hand with his art: “his work as an artist is complementary to, and inseparable from, his work as a writer and novelist.”1 In this paper, following an introduction to Gray’s work, my purpose is to present and discuss some of the striking visual and verbal representations the reader encounters in the author’s major novel – Lanark (1981) – which undoubtedly create the fascinating characteristics that place Gray’s writing in a category of its own.

Alasdair Gray, who was born in Glasgow in 1934, is a Scottish visual artist and innovative writer who describes himself as a self-employed verbal and pictorial artist. He grew up in a working-class family mostly in that city and from very early on he showed a keen interest in reading, writing, drawing and painting. In 1957 he graduated in Design and Mural Painting from the Glasgow School of Art. It was during his School of Art days in the 1950s that his artistic and literary work truly began. Short stories, prose pieces and poems, which saw publication during the 1980s, were mostly written in those days. In 1962 Gray decided to give up art teaching to take up a career as a full-time artist and writer. In the following years he lived on mainly as a painter, as a mural painter executing murals in churches and other buildings in Glasgow, and as a theatrical scene painter. “The art of Alasdair Gray,” one critic remarks, “is as original and as creative in its conception and execution as his novels, short stories, plays and poems.”2 Nowadays, a selection of his paintings and murals can be seen at the People’s Palace local history museum and at the Collins Gallery at Strathclyde University. While he painted Gray went on writing, sporadically publishing short stories in small literary magazines. Occasionally, he lectured on Art Appreciation for Glasgow University Extra-Mural Department. In the early 1970s Gray was writing plays for radio, television and theatre and was a member of the Glasgow Group writers’ circle where he became friendly with other Scottish authors such as Tom Leonard, James Kelman, and Angela Mullane. He produced a lot of work in broadcast media – film, television, radio – and between 1965 and 1976 he had seventeen TV and radio plays broadcast by English and Scottish radio and TV stations. Four plays were produced as well for the theatre. In 1977, he was appointed Glasgow's official Artist Recorder, painting portraits of contemporaries and streetscapes for the

1 2

Elspeth King, ‘Art for the Early Days of a Better Nation’, in Alasdair Gray: Critical Appreciations and a Bibliography, ed. by Phil Moores (London: British Library Publishing, 2002), pp.93-121 (p.95). King, p.93.

370 Dominique Costa People’s Palace local history museum, and from 1977 to 1979 he held the position of Writer in Residence at the University of Glasgow. After some difficult periods in his life, as when he was drawing social security benefit as an unemployed scene painter, in 1981 Gray finally managed to publish Lanark: A Life in Four Books; a long and complex novel, written on and off during a period of twenty-five years. This highly-acclaimed experimental narrative is partly surrealistic, partly realistic and semi-autobiographical, and has been described as “one of the greatest of Scottish novels.”3 It launched Gray’s literary career and at last enabled him, as the author remarks, to live “almost wholly by writing, designing and illustrating books, mainly my own.”4 Since Lanark, Gray has proved a prolific writer. In the intervening decades he has published a whole variety of texts with different degrees of experimentation – novels, novellas, short stories, plays, poems, political pamphlets, essays, reviews. In 2000 the author’s much anticipated anthology, The Book of Prefaces, met with broad critical approval and the following year, with Tom Leonard and James Kelman, Gray became Joint Professor of Creative Writing at Glasgow and Strathclyde Universities. 2003 saw the publication of his latest work, a collection of short stories, revealingly entitled The Ends of Our Tethers, 13 Sorry Stories. Currently, Gray’s published oeuvre consists of six novels, two novellas, four collections of short stories, two volumes of poems, various plays, and numerous non-fictional works, all of which are illustrated with his remarkable drawings. Due to the challenges he poses to existing forms, and to his overt verbal and visual experimentation, Gray has been recognised not only as a key figure in Scottish contemporary writing but also as one of the most original figures writing in English. Generally considered in the context of postmodernism, because of the themes explored and the playful, experimental narrative techniques he employs, Gray’s work has been a major influence on the literary output of Scottish authors such as James Kelman, Irvine Welsh, and Jeff Torrington, to name but a few. As both a visual artist and an innovative writer, Gray likes to get involved in all aspects of the making of his books. He has complete control of their design, not only creating striking cover designs and impressive illustrations but also selecting typefaces and page layouts. He also frequently produces his own reviews, writes the blurb and likewise introduces informative flyleaves. As Elspeth King states, The reading of a book by Alasdair Gray provides an aesthetic sensory pleasure, from the dust jacket to the valediction on the last page. Every part of his own books has been designed by him. No other Scottish writer has sought and obtained involvement in the design and production in this way [...] Each publication by Gray is as much a work of art as it is a work of literature.5

Gray’s début novel, Lanark: A Life in Four Books, has been hailed as a ground-breaking work in Scottish literature, and it marks the beginning of a renaissance in the Scottish 3 4 5

Douglas Gifford, ‘Scottish Fiction 1980-81: The Importance of Alasdair Gray’s Lanark’, Studies in Scottish Literature, 18 (1983), 210-52 (p.229). Alasdair Gray, ‘Alasdair Gray’s Personal Curriculum Vitae’, in Alasdair Gray: Critical Appreciations and a Bibliography, ed. by Phil Moores (London: British Library Publishing, 2002), pp.31-44 (p.40). King, pp.117-18.

Visual and Verbal Representations in the Scottish Novel 371 Novel. As its subtitle indicates, it presents “A Life in Four Books,” but what the reader is offered is not the life of just one hero, Lanark’s, but the lives of two peculiarly interconnected ones, his own and Thaw’s, each echoing the other in various ways. In this epic novel the accounts of the existence of the twin protagonists or of the two halves of the one protagonist, Lanark being Thaw in an afterlife, are unfolded in two very different tales, two interwoven narratives written in contrastive styles: one, an apocalyptic fantasy tale set in the surrealistic, nightmarish city of Unthank (Lanark’s story); the other, a realistic account of the life of young Duncan Thaw set in Glasgow in the 1940s and 1950s. These two plots are highly interrelated, “with Gray creating in Lanark a complex network of cross-references, be they thematic, structural or formal.”6 Amongst the many surprises that await the readers of this inventive work of fiction, there is, for a start, Gray’s teasing opening, where we are confronted not with Book One, as we might expect, but rather with Book Three, which introduces Lanark’s futuristic tale. This unexpected ordering, which makes Books One and Two follow Book Three, has the strange effect of placing the account of Thaw’s afterlife as Lanark prior to the story of Thaw’s “real” life as a child and as an art student in Glasgow. After Thaw’s story, Lanark’s tale is finally resumed in Book Four. Such an unconventional sequencing is clearly foregrounded in the Table of Contents, which introduces Book Three, followed by the Prologue, Book One, an Interlude, Book Two, Book Four and the Epilogue, which is inserted four chapters before the end of the novel. As Lanark, the character, learns from Nastler, the author-figure whom he actually meets in the Epilogue, the narrative is presented out of the usual order, because he wants “Lanark to be read in one order but eventually thought of in another.”7 In Book Three, at the opening of the novel, the reader is plunged in medias res into the bizarre, fantastic world of Unthank where he/she is going to accompany Lanark, the hero who cannot remember his past, in his hazardous journeys and quest. Unthank appears as a vision of Glasgow as Hell – a nightmarish city of darkness, governed by a merciless corporate conglomeration known as “The Creature,” and whose inhabitants are afflicted with peculiar diseases, for instance “dragonhide” and “softs,” which transform them into monstrous creatures that disappear mysteriously. At the end of Book Three, in the Prologue, Lanark learns from the oracle the narrative of what appears to have been his past life as Duncan Thaw. Thus the reader is taken to Thaw’s life story, following the initial part of Lanark’s surrealistic tale. In Books One and Two Thaw’s life story, inserted in Lanark’s after-death fantasy world, is that of a young Glasgow artist in the 1940s and 1950s. His story is written in a realistic vein and the recounting of his life, from his working-class boyhood through his uneasy years at the Art College, is told mostly from his own perspective and in a chronological sequence. As Gray acknowledged, Thaw’s account, which offers a vivid picture of Scottish working-class life, is densely autobiographical, drawing indeed on numerous events in the 6 7

Marie Odile Pittin, ‘Alasdair Gray: A Strategy of Ambiguity’, in Studies in Scottish Fiction: 1945 to the Present, ed. by Susanne Hagemann (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1996), pp.199-215 (p.199). Alasdair Gray, Lanark: A Life in Four Books (Edinburgh: Canongate, 1981), p.483. Henceforward referred to in the text as L, followed by page numbers.

372 Dominique Costa writer’s life.8 The quest of this asthmatic, introverted, insecure young man for a decent life, for fulfilment in love and in art is doomed to fail, and, after possibly committing a murder, he is driven into suicide by drowning. In Book Four the reader accompanies Lanark’s travels through the mysterious Intercalendrical Time Zone which will bring him back to the “Kafkaesque” city of Unthank. At the close of the novel, having failed to save the metropolis and its inhabitants from total destruction by the merciless centralised authority of this nightmarish universe, Lanark, now an old, disillusioned man, is left on his own to face death. In the Epilogue, Lanark explicitly learns from the author-figure: “The Thaw narrative shows a man dying because he was bad at loving. It is enclosed by your narrative which shows civilisation collapsing for the same reason” (L, 484). Each of Lanark’s four books is introduced by beautifully illustrated allegorical title pages (L, 1, 119, 221, and 355). The reader who observes the title pages will recognise, for instance on the title page for Book One, a microcosm of Glasgow being engulfed by the sea, with a whale waiting with open mouth to devour an approaching ship (L, 119). Half of Thomas Hobbes’ famous representation of the state as The Leviathan, standing for ruling force, appears in the background with his sword drawn. On each side, there are pillars engraved with the epigraph: “Let Glasgow Flourish by Telling the Truth.” On the title page for Book Four (L, 355), Hobbes’ allegorical Leviathan state rules over a city and its outskirts with both “Force” and “Persuasion.” In the reader’s mind this image is associated to “The Creature”, the ruthless corporate conglomeration that runs and ultimately destroys Unthank and its citizens. At the bottom of Gray’s illustration, around the words, “Or the Matter, Form and Power of a Commonwealth,” we are offered the ways a state controls its people: the army, war, the law, education, and an assembly line. As Alison Lee remarks in her work Realism and Power: Postmodern British Fiction, these drawings have two prose equivalents: the paintings created by Duncan Thaw and described in prose, and the Epilogue which, because of its complex typography, imitates in prose images what the title pages do in visual ones. The illustrated title pages [...] exert tremendous control in shaping the way the reader reads the text. Like the prose, they are structured with minute detail, and they point to many significant features of the novel.9

Due to the fragmented narrative structure and the ambiguities created by the shifting viewpoints on events and characters, Lanark has been given different overall readings.10 It 8 9 10

See Gray, ‘Alasdair Gray’s Personal Curriculum Vitae’, p.41. Alison Lee, Realism and Power: Postmodern British Fiction (London: Routledge, 1990), pp.103-4. For some instances of this variety of readings, see Beat Witschi, Glasgow Urban Writing and Postmodernism: A Study of Alasdair Gray's Fiction (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1991); Edwin Morgan, ‘Tradition and Experiment in the Glasgow Novel’, in The Scottish Novel Since the Seventies, eds Gavin Wallace and Randall Stevenson (Edinburgh: Edinburgh U. P., 1993), pp.85-98; Alison Lumsen, ‘Innovation and Reaction in the Fiction of Alasdair Gray’, in The Scottish Novel Since the Seventies, eds Gavin Wallace and Randall Stevenson (Edinburgh: Edinburgh U. P., 1993), pp.115-126; Randall Stevenson, ‘Alasdair Gray and the Postmodern’, in The Arts of Alasdair Gray (Edinburgh: Edinburgh U. P., 1991), pp.48-63; Cairns Craig, ‘Going Down to Hell is Easy: Lanark, Realism and the Limits of the Imagination’, in The Arts of Alasdair Gray (Edinburgh: Edinburgh U. P., 1991), pp.90-107.

Visual and Verbal Representations in the Scottish Novel 373 can be considered an essentially semi-autobiographical or fictional biographical novel set within – and here the opinions diverge – fantasy, satire, allegory, vision of the future, science-fiction. In the end, the reader is let free to choose between different possible interpretations. Apart from the foregrounding of its unusual structural order, the novel offers many other experimental elements, usually regarded as postmodernist narrative devices. It is particularly in the Epilogue that they can be found. In this section the hero Lanark meets the author-figure Nastler, an obvious distortion of “Alasdair,” who engages in a metafictional conversation and promptly reveals that he is Lanark’s creator: “I am your author” (L, 481). In Postmodernist Fiction, Brian McHale rightly claims that such an interview constitutes “a topos of postmodernist writing.”11 The device of the intrusive author is used on this occasion for “an exploitation of the self-referent and the selfreflexive.”12 Hence, in this overtly self-conscious chapter, the reader learns in a footnote that the Epilogue serves “the office of an introduction to the work as a whole,” and that “it contains critical notes which will save research scholars years of toil” (L, 499). Besides the long debate between the character and the author-figure and valuable information about the novel itself, the Epilogue discloses as well a variety of other inventive features. Amongst these, one finds in this typographically complex chapter footnotes, descriptive running headers and, most interestingly, the inclusion of intertextual elements as marginal notes that Gray calls an “Index of Plagiarisms.” The presence of these features outside the narrative produces a fracturing of the text and compels the reader to play an active part since he/she is asked “to make a conscious decision about how his or her reading will proceed. In the very appearance of the pages, the Epilogue simulates in print what the title pages do in images.”13

Alasdair Gray, “The Conjuror Scratches, Reminisces / Faces Facts, Yawns, Regrets”

Brian McHale, Postmodernist Fiction (London: Routledge, 1987), p.213. Richard Todd, ‘The Intrusive Author in British Postmodernist Fiction: The Cases of Alasdair Gray and Martin Amis’, in Exploring Postmodernism, ed. by Matei Calinescu and Douwe Fokkema (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1987), pp.123-37 (p.124). 13 Lee, p.112. 11 12

374 Dominique Costa While the footnotes, thirteen of them, often introduce funny comments – e.g. footnote 7: “This remark is too ludicrous to require comment here” (L, 492) – the running headers offer a brief summary of the narrative on the page, such as “The Conjuror Scratches, Reminisces / Faces Facts, Yawns, Regrets” (L, 492-3). In the margin of Lanark and Nastler’s conversation, the “Index of Plagiarisms” explicitly tells the reader the different types and degrees of plagiarism that can be found in the work: INDEX OF PLAGIARISMS There are three kinds of literary theft in this book: BLOCK PLAGIARISM, where someone else's work is printed as a distinct typographical unit, IMBEDDED PLAGIARISM, where stolen words are concealed within the body of the narrative, and DIFFUSE PLAGIARISM, where scenery, characters, actions or novel ideas have been stolen without the original words describing them. To save space these will be referred to hereafter as Blockplag, Implag, and Difplag (L, 485).

The index, rather “capricious in nature” and very often not at all helpful, reminds us, Richard Todd remarks, of “some of the comprehensive unhelpfulness of the notes to T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land.”14 Considering Gray’s use of plagiarism, Lee is quite right when she notes that, Despite the obvious play here, the plags initially promote the same kind of reading as do the title pages. However, while they invite reading for correspondence, it is clear that the purpose of these plags is sheer delight in the structure created by retrospective reading, especially since the application of the plags is often specious.15

To conclude, a few years after the publication of Lanark, in 1984, Gray donated to the Glasgow Library a collection of work made up of numerous papers related to the writing of the novel. Such papers range from manuscript notebooks and fragments, written as early as 1952, to typescript drafts. In the draft manuscript pages from Lanark text and images appear to emerge simultaneously, as the text on the page is interspersed throughout with original sketches and line drawings. What these draft manuscript pages, in my opinion,

14 15

Todd, p.128. Lee, p.113.

Alasdair Gray, manuscript pages for Lanark

Visual and Verbal Representations in the Scottish Novel 375 clearly demonstrate is that Gray’s unique association of the visual with the verbal is already there at the genesis of the narrative. As I hope this article will have shown, Gray is an original Scottish writer-artist / artist-writer whose striking visual and verbal representations undoubtedly create a fascinating characteristic that places his writing in a category of its own.

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Gil Maia

When what you see is what you read The visual dimension of writing is an unquestionable fact, made especially obvious by manuscripts. Awareness of this visuality has perhaps decreased with the development of systematic writing and with the evolution of printing. With the exception of the various movements of concrete poetry, with their definite aesthetic and social agendas, we are often confronted with the argument that the printed text should be practically invisible, as if it were transparent glass (as was stated by Lindekens in 1971), so as not to interfere negatively in the reading process. Nevertheless, communication design and, more specifically, typographic design have increasingly emphasised the importance of the visual word: posters, postcards, book-covers, records and CDs, and printed publicity material have provided examples of this for decades. Indeed, they continue to do so, with varying degrees of impact, with varying disruptive force. They foreground a logic that makes form depend on intention; or conversely, they bring out an ignorance of that very logic by subordinating intention to form, in subservience to vogues or in the individualism of one’s likes or dislikes. The Cranbrook school has made a break with the systematic, in the printed word, by definitively establishing the text block as an object of non-linear visual perception. What we are suggesting is that the printed page (which includes the text in partnership with the image), in the particular case of literature for children, is built not only to be read, but also to be seen (often in ignorance of the reading process). The text thus takes on the condition of an image as well – an image that evades the systematic constraints of graphemes and creatively converts semantic contents into images capable of telling stories. This text-image, which mingles illustration and written word, has the extra advantage of walking hand in hand with icons and symbols whose role has always been that of (con)verting a printed text into a visual narrative. We will explore some of the strategies used by graphic designers that work on the text block, line and isolated characters, paragraph capitals or the interior of the text to make our reading of children’s stories unsystematic and exquisite.

As I have argued elsewhere,1 a reproduced text is different from the original text. And I would like to add that a printed text, reproduced mechanically or electronically, creates another work, beyond the one embodied in the author’s original. Gone are the medieval copyists, who were intermediaries between the writer and the reader in the (re)production of texts; the actions leading up to the presentation and consequently the reception of the text seem today to be more controlled than back then: they are now the responsibility of what we call graphic design. This entails a global conception of the work, in its graphic options and legibility, and in the manifold aspects of its production and execution. The latter comprise the technical resources, publication goals, and the personal options that lead to the choice of certain formats and materials, rather than others. Hence, graphic design is also responsible for the distance between the reproduced text, and the text produced by the author. However, as systematic users of printed texts, we are perhaps less sensitive to that graphic intervention today, and we constantly mistake the reproduced work for the originally produced work, as if the graphic designer’s intervention were null and its effect 1

Gil Maia, ‘Entrelinhas’, Leitura, Literatura Infantil e Ilustração (Reading, Children’s Literature, and Illustration), ed. by Fernanda Viana et al. (Braga: IEC, 2002), pp.145-55; Gil Maia, ‘As Capitais da Ilustração’, in No Branco do Sul as Cores dos Livros: Actas do Encontro (The Colours of Books Against a Southern White: Conference Proceedings), (Beja: Escola Superior de Educação de Beja, forthcoming).

378 Gil Maia transparent. But, in fact, the designer’s action is not neutral, and much research has been done that indicates the significant impact of graphic design on the reception of written texts, both in linguistic and cognitive terms (reading, semantic comprehension, memorisation, etc.).2 In some cases, the action of type design, guided by pragmatic principles of reading speed optimisation, is almost imperceptible to the public in general, and the reader experiences its action unconsciously. However, in other cases, as we will see, that action is as deliberate as it is significantly visible. Children’s books have become a meeting point for generations that share common interests and ways of living. To some extent, illustrated books for children afford an experience analogous to readings of the Bible by Protestant families in the past (even if they lack religious attributes, or the side effects of submission and veneration proper to every sacred text): they bring together friends and family members of different ages and concerns for shared moments of pleasure. Indeed, as a result of the graphic revolution brought about largely by innovative attitudes towards illustration, the illustrated book for children has become a very particular typographic case. Rather than a succession of plain pages – some taken up by text, some by intertwined text and image – it has become a succession of springboards, i.e., pages which are folded in half. The unit of perception is thus no longer the page but the “double page” held in our hands, odd and even pages connected through colour, dashes, blotches of image and text. It is as if the illustration had grown tired of occupying the margins and had decided to take the very centre of the work, the focus of our gaze, somehow forcing the written text to present itself as an image in order to be seen. According to Garrett-Petts, with illustrated children literature we are not in the presence of a simplified narrative – a text set side by side with images – but rather in the presence of three potential stories: the one told by the written text, the visual narrative, and the story which is told by the interrelation of image and text.3 The “third text,” or rather, the new illustrated book for children, would certainly deserve to have a triangular authorship. Besides the writer and the illustrator, the designer’s work seems fundamental to highlight new paths for research and creation; to allow for a refashioning of options and procedures as regards the choice of materials, formats, lettering and techniques; and to enable a more fully integrated sensory apprehension of the composite work. What we want to emphasise with the existence of this third author, is that through a new project methodology there is an enhanced possibility of bringing out more new works, characterised by new relationships between authors, and integrated by ecologically correct and artistically daring solutions. In this context we need to know whether, in graphic terms, the written text should or should not be understood as a transparent text. This seems to be a point that we urgently need to think about.

2

3

E.g. Sue Walker, Typography and Language in everyday life (Harlow: Longman, 2001); Robert Waller, The Typographic contribution to language. Towards a model of typographic genres and their underlying structures (unpublished dissertation), (Reading: The University of Reading, 1988). W.F. Garrett-Petts, ‘Garry Disher, Michael Ondaatje, and the Haptic Eye: Taking a Second Look at Print Literacy’, Children Literature in Education, vol. 31,1, (2000), 39-52 (p.47).

When what you see is what you read 379

Research into the psycholinguistic processes involved in the act of reading has been, undoubtedly, an interdisciplinary enterprise. It has not always been accompanied by insights from typography, but it is known that substantial research has long taken place in this area. Pioneering contributions to the field included those by Charles Babbage, Émile Javal, De Vinne, and Eric Gill;4 these were followed by many other researchers that have contributed significantly with scientifically based studies or more empirically grounded insights to what has become known as reading hygiene. In this domain, various authors commonly distinguish between visibility, legibility and readability. The latter concept is usually acknowledged as broader in scope, since, as Keith Johnson defines it, “[readability] refers to all the factors that affect success in reading and understanding a text.”5 In fact, Johnson presents the results, for the English Language, of research into the conditions necessary for success in reading, carried out with regard to science textbooks used in schools. He organises those conditions into three factors: 1. The interest and motivation of the reader. 2. The legibility of the print (and of any illustrations). 3. The complexity of words and sentences in relation to the reading ability of the reader.6

With regard to the second of these aspects, this author indicates actual values (for size of type, spacing, etc) that determine the relative “legibility of print,” and that can help in understanding some widely accepted basic typographic rules. Rather than registering those values as standardised and universal values, we will merely acknowledge their relevance as indications – but even this is hardly consensual. Various studies of this sort have arrived at contradictory results, and the quantity of variables involved is so large that the majority of researchers complain about the difficulties in their effective control, and the ambiguities that this generates. Robert Waller even suggests that for research into reading in such fields as applied psychology and linguistics, researchers should always be advised by designers when formulating their hypotheses, in order to prevent contradictory results due to lack of control of typographic variables.7 Here are some of those reference values presented by Johnson, who bases his estimates on studies by John Gilliland, and by Lynne Watts and John Nisbet, among others.8 Johnson claims that, – A fluent reader is able to read at a rate of 250-300 words per minute, and the length of a typical line should be of 7-12 average words at 10-12 point type;

4

5 6 7 8

Cf Émile Javal, ‘Hygiène de la lecture’, Bulletin de la Société de Médecine Publique (1878), 569; T.L De Vinne, Correct Composition (New York: Century, 1901); T.L. De Vinne, Modern methods of book composition (New York: Century, 1904); RL Pyke, The legibility of print (London: HMSO, 1926); Eric Gill, An essay on typography (London: Lund Humphries, ‘photo lithographic copy ed. 1936’, 2001). Johnson, Keith, Readability (1998) (www.timetabler.com, 2002, 10:04), p.1. Johnson, p.1. Waller, p.31. J. Gilliland, Readability (London: University of London Press, 1972); L. Watts and J. Nisbet, Legibility in children´s books: a review of research (Slough: NFER Publishing Company Limited, 1974).

380 Gil Maia – At the normal reading distance of 35 cm 10 point type brings 4 letters within the foveal area and 20 letters within a 5-degree field of view; – Lower case print is preferred by most readers, and is read about 10 per cent faster than words in CAPITAL letters. However, for single letters CAPITALS are more easily differentiated; – There seems to be no significant difference in legibility between serif and sans serif type faces. Some designers prefer sans serif for sub-heads and serif for the body text; – Where emphasis is required, bold type is read more quickly than italics or CAPITALS; – If the size of the type or length of line is changed, then the leading (spacing between the lines of text) should be altered to maintain efficient eye movements; – Lines that are too short or too long cause inefficient eye movements; – The style of text alignment known as ranged left (ragged right or flush left in the USA) is better, because it helps the reader’s eye to scan the lines more accurately.9 These examples, gleaned from Keith Johnson’s study, enable us to understand that in situations in which there are more variables than rules, the establishment of principles is always heavily conditioned by one’s objectives and contexts. Nevertheless, this has not prevented some authors from stating that failure to observe these values is a typographic mistake, and their observance an example of good design and consequently of more legible texts. It is true that a long-standing tradition of “good” typography has rested on the observance of rules – rules that one would hardly call sacred, but that result rather from the accumulation of knowledge in all the various aspects that have to do with supposedly intrinsic features of graphic language.10 They involve respecting principles of legibility and harmony in such a way that the reader will not realise why he reads that text with pleasure, ease, and speed. From their position in front of a text where all negative interferences have been abolished, and where all the relations between the black ink of the characters and the white of the sheet have been meticulously and harmoniously balanced, readers should not be aware of all that was done behind the scenes to make that possible. One is then faced with a transparent text, in the sense that it retains no trace of any of those intrinsic characteristics. At this stage, however, it is important to acknowledge the important role played by several postmodern graphic designers, influenced by poststructuralism and deconstruction: it would be tedious to list them here, but their work has been gathered and made better known by the collection Typography Now – the Next Wave.11 A mandatory reference in this context is an American school, the Cranbrook Academy of Art, and the director of its graphic department, Katherine McCoy. Especially between 1982 and 1995, McCoy brought Johnson, pp.2ff. Cf Michael Twyman, ‘Articulating Graphic Language: A Historical Perspective’, in Toward a New Understanding of Literacy, ed. by Merald E. Wrolstad and Dennis F. Fischer (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1986), pp.188-251 (pp.191-211). 11 Rick Poynor et al (eds), Typography Now—the Next Wave (London: Internos Books, 1991). 9 10

When what you see is what you read 381

into the field of communication design a stringent and structured discourse, which has proved highly stimulating and productive, as regards theoretical awareness of issues involved and the formative training of students, as much as the development of the profession of designer. In 1978 the Cranbrook Academy of Art’s scholarly journal Visible Language began publishing articles on linguistics and literary theory, ranging from Saussure to Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction. “The Visible World,” as the ensuing movement was called, soon became, together with deconstruction, a starting point for concepts that are presently used in all the new multimedia disciplines, although not without some controversy. Steven Heller and Karen Pomeroy have drawn our attention to the fact that the traditional notion that text was to be read (a linear, encoded, left-brained activity) and images were to be seen (a holistic, experimental, right-brained activity) was questioned. Text became cross-functional and took on an expanded capacity to communicate beyond its functionality, moving into the realm of the illustrative (type as image), atmospheric, or expressive. Similarly, images could be “read”, sequenced, and combined to form more complex information patterns.12

These remarks may prove directly relevant for the description of the current situation as regards children’s books, where typography seems to be following principles and purposes that agree with the above. Reflecting the activity of the illustrator as much as of the graphic designer – Heller and Pomeroy claim that “the designer [is] no longer just a translator, but a commentator, partner, and participant in the delivery of the message”13 – the double-page spread in most illustrated children’s literature becomes a particular object of perception where verbal and visual texts literally interact, or rather where every text (constructed of images and/or words) is always a visual text. The visual dimension has always been one of the conditions of writing, of any type of writing. The thesis argued in a book like L’image écrite ou la déraison graphique (The Written Image, or, The Graphic Unreason), by Anne-Marie Christin, is that “writing was born from the image, and whatever the system of writing, whether ideographic or alphabetic, its effectiveness comes from the fact that it is an image.”14 It is therefore interesting that this author should look at writing as a “graphic vehicle for the word,” considering that the word gains a new wealth and ambiguity once it is printed. The spoken word, being above all sound and intonation, rhythm and tone, is also breath and gesture, facial and bodily expression. But, determined as the spoken word is by temporal continuity, when it is translated into the spatial domain proper to the written word, whether printed or handwritten, it irreversibly acquires the status of an object.

Steven Heller and Karen Pomeroy, Design Literacy – Understanding Graphic Design (New York: Allworth Press, 1997), p.150. 13 Heller and Pomeroy, p.149. 14 Anne-Marie Christin, L’image écrite ou la déraison graphique (Paris: Flammarion, 1995), p.5; my translation. 12

382 Gil Maia

The visual text: a graphic cartography Reading is always a complex process, but in the case of children’s books it is a particular kind of activity. The child who browses through the book either cannot read and therefore only sees images and text; or can already read, but not fluently, and will consequently stumble over the mental connections, syllabic combinations and corresponding articulation (rather than over the graphic features). Hence, the issue of graphic rules that optimise the reading experience cannot be taken in the same manner as when we are dealing exclusively with an adult readership. The graphic attitude resulting from the Visible Word movement foregrounds the line, the word, or the letter, deconstructs the regular text block, and highlights specific mechanisms of visual awareness and perception. The word does not remain invisible in the middle of the text block, and the letter does not remain invisible in the middle of the word. Frequently, the letter switches off the light on the word, forcing the reader to stray from the meaning (and find other meanings), to linger on the isolated letter in its aesthetic dimension, freed from verbal linearity to explore mental relationships which the design of the letter permits with regard to the meaning or the sound of the word, through analogy or contrast.

1. The text at the “tip of the line” In printed and illustrated books for children – and we argue that the so-called children’s book is increasingly becoming a work for adults, children and youngsters alike – the line, as a graphic structure, is not an object of unitary perception, but rather the product of an interaction of multiple graphic features drawn from the alphabet. According to Twyman, “extrinsic features include the configurations of graphic language. Four of these have conventionally been used when organising words and numbers graphically: the linear interrupted (continuous prose), list, matrix, and branching configurations.”15 Hence, the interrupted line, which in prose, organises information within the graphic block, is in Twyman’s set of extrinsic graphic features the one that is the closest equivalent to discursive linearity, in spite of suffering frequent and arbitrary interruptions (since frequently the trans-linear point has neither a connection with the syntax, nor with the semantics, nor even with the pauses that occur in spontaneous utterances). Any graphic arrangement of information that forgoes the linear sequence will inevitably generate a text layout that will be closer to a drawing than to that which we understand as text. Such is the case of graphics or diagrams, where a non-arbitrary structure tries to translate meanings into dividing and/or converging lines, into arrows and boxes that distribute content and mould and structure the given information. However, technically speaking, the line where characters are placed – characters that will themselves constitute, in common parlance, a line – is called baseline. This is always a reference line determined by the type-designers who, when creating a font, will also establish the parameters that allow the disposition of all letters to be perfectly horizontal. 15

Twyman, p.191.

When what you see is what you read 383

This is an imaginary line whose visibility is the result of what, in Gestalt theory, is known as “the law of continuity.” It presupposes that our brain, though working in abstract terms, is able to lend concrete form to something that does not in fact exist. In strictly technical terms, this line is virtually infinite. It is normally only interrupted because of the width of the text block (which small graphic strategies can also subvert, for aesthetic or pragmatic purposes). The line makes the block or, in other words, the block pre-determines the maximum length of the line, and the lines create a (metaphorically woven) texture, that which we call a text. By definition, lines should be continuous, but we know they end when their previously defined extension is reached. At that abrupt tyrannical end, it is permissible to separate words, and even double consonants (with hyphens) and expressions within which no graphic punctuation sign would be acceptable. We know that not all writing systems use the same type of linear interruption. The beginning of all lines in a text is not always on the left of the text block, as is the case nowadays with books printed in the West. Boustrophedon writing, for example, was defined by a kind of continuous course that minimised interruption, when it was necessary to change lines: the line that had begun on the left and reached its limit on the right would continue on the next line inversely, that is, from right to left, and so consecutively, like a plough tilling the land. But, besides this harshness, which would seem to be alien to the text, line interruptions can also result from non-arbitrariness, from some motivation. When a line does not use up all the width of the text block (because a colon is used, when we can change line for the sake of enumeration; or in direct speech; because we begin a new paragraph, or for any other reasons determined by the rules of writing or by the designer’s choices), text breaks may correspond to temporal and semantic breaks. It is not, however, these more or less typified determinants of the line that interest us here, but rather all the others that we find in books for children. Contrary to what might be expected, the line is established as a stage for endless manoeuvres that capture the eye and interfere with reading rhythms, transforming those runs of graphemes that make up texts into images. In the early twentieth century Legros categorised the spectrum of research on legibility and listed nineteen typographic variables capable of significantly interfering with the reading process.16 Among them we can find: size of character; thickness of strokes; white spaces between strokes; dissimilarity of characters; leading; line length; frequency of kerns; similarity of figures; width of figures; separation of lines from adjacent matter; unnecessary markings in or near characters; vulgar fractions; variations in type height; quality of paper; colour of paper; reflectance on paper; colour of ink; lighting; irradiation. Many of these nineteen variables have a strong effect on the line, especially when the designer’s option for one of these variables produces a break with the characteristics of the other lines. I have elsewhere presented and defined eight types of lines: disorderly lines (out of line); rainbow lines; lines of oscillating extension; mixed lines (image and word); iconic

16

L.A.Legros, A note on the legibility of printed matter (London: HMSO, 1922).

384 Gil Maia lines; lines in perspective (crescendo / diminuendo); lines in a show-case (catalogue of letters), and inverted lines.17 Every single one of these not only facilitates the text’s legibility but also makes it into a kind of illustration.

2. The text at the “foot of the letter” Besides such interventions on the line, elaborations on the letter have become increasingly frequent. The character frequently appears as a graphic element of a visual alphabet with no clear dependence on the verbal context; but can the letters of a text function as the stage for an illustration, in a clear return to the kind of procedure used in medieval manuscripts? A very specific case is that of the capital letter. The capital letter is a kind of initial virus of illustration. In medieval manuscripts it was the beginning of the written text, as if anticipating the inevitability of reading a text through an image. It proliferated and reproduced incessantly, becoming a visually pregnant element, until the image departed from it and moved onto another page. This separation did not last long, and the capital letter and the illustrations seem to join up again, as if the illustration wished to retain the text closer to it. In the light of this, the capital letter, illuminated indeed by the chance fact that it is the first letter in a sentence, becomes self-sufficient and, as Barthes put it, pushes the word aside.18 The capital letter is not only a majuscule, the letter with the biggest body: it is definitely the image that is most visible in the whole texture of writing. The illuminated capital letter is also illuminating. It is the doorway from the word-image into the textimage. Nowadays, at the core of type design, the letter seems to some extent to have recovered the power of its visual dimension. This involves a significant break with the linear and anonymous structures of the printed text, at the risk of transforming the regularity and speediness of the reading process back into an individual movement, subject to irregular rhythms. I have shown elsewhere how the alphanumeric isolated graphemes that appear in titles, in the capitals that open chapters, at the beginning of paragraphs, verses and stanzas (evidence of a clear complicity between letter and illustration) allow the letters that are part of a systematic alphabet to become unique, to capture the eye, to transmit complex meanings and to narrate stories in various ways.19 The illustration of those capital letters (the action of attaching a frequently isomorphic image to an arbitrary alphabetic element) produces a number of rhetorical figures. Although all these graphemes thrive on the attempt to mould form to meaning, and in the process generate rhetorical relations proper to synecdoche and metonymy, it is nevertheless possible to identify a range of other figures – irony, hyperbole, antithesis, gradation, etc. Two examples of letter-illustration in the text body (initial letters of a title, chapter, stanza, paragraph, word, index, etc) are: decoration of pre-existing graphemes, and the Cf Maia, ‘Entrelinhas’, passim. Cf Roland Barthes, The Responsibility of Forms: critical essays on music, art, and representation, trans by Richard Howard (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), pp.98ff. 19 Cf Maia, ‘As Capitais da Ilustração’, passim. 17 18

When what you see is what you read 385

creation of grapheme-icons (directly or indirectly motivated by the story theme that they illustrate, or by the meaning of the word they initiate).

3. The text block-blotch or the blotched-block text This type of intervention, either upon the line or upon the letter inevitably de-structures the regularity of the text block-blotch: rather than establishing from the outset the conditions that remain valid for the whole text, it turns its space into a working field at the level of the page; it becomes a magnifying-glass that focuses on its words, or a mirror that reflects its word-images. The compact blocks of text, recurrent in medieval manuscripts and in the first printed works, led to complex studies on the proportion of the text so as to obtain text areas and margins that were equally balanced with the format of the work. The compact text block has given way to the present text blotch: a term that curiously seems to anticipate a spreading that is more the attribute of liquid and volatile, than of solid materials. I quote, in this respect, João Cotrim: “letters are special beings, volatile like feathers and heavy like lead.”20 The layout of the text generally implies a graphic structure conceived by means of grids that support text and image. These invisible grids allow us to visualise textual blotches that are no more than a web of fibrous lines, capriciously curled by the regularity and the proportion of the characters, their placement [baseline] and their vertical equidistance [leading]. The text block that print culture has accustomed us to is regular and uniform, at times almost aseptic (most word processors, by default, justify it left and right), providing reading movements which are formally regular. We are used to seeing the text cramped between two margins, and we have grown used to that girdle in such a way that we associate the speed at which we read to this graphic regularity. In perceptional terms, this regularity leads to a huge predictability, and therefore the reader is not confronted with surprising movements. The gaze follows a path, a pattern like that of tilled land, in a highly regular movement. Regularity surely saves time, but it also hinders more creative (and possibly more reflexive) dynamics of reading. As this article has shown, in many contemporary works the typographic characteristics of the text are enhanced to create areas of visual interest, and to motivate irregular reading rhythms, which do not always coincide with the narrative blocks. Through actions of typographic visibility, the text is presently a blotched-block – rather than an amorphous whole, the cradle of every image. Indeed, the text blotch is striving fully to come to life, and to be seen.

20

João Paulo Cotrim, ‘A vida das Letras’ (The Life of Letters), Ler (Reading), 49, (2000), pp.64-69 (p.64).

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9. POSTSCRIPT: THE LONG P ERSPECTIVE, OR, THE CHALLENGES OF REPRESENTATION II

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José Jiménez

The Root of Forms This article takes the long perspective on the forms adopted by scriptural and artistic foregrounding of the materiality of writing, and on the philosophical constructs that have supported that process. It thus provides an overview of a broad range of manifestations of that materiality at various moments in the history of verbal and artistic production, as much as of their underlying conceptual elaborations. An exploration of the deeper “roots,” in the traditions of western thought, for the conceptual determination of how we see and read verbal inscriptions is balanced throughout the article by reminders of how our perceptions were in that respect enhanced by the formal boldness of the twentieth-century avant-gardes.

The word slides or flies about in search of materiality. The various manifestations of visual poetry all erupt from a dream of expansion of form, from a desire for the extension of meaning. What is at the root of this? In the first instance, it is the corporeal character of the letters, a representative dimension contained in their abstract shapes, which has been transcended. Pictograms and hieroglyphs reveal forms that the alphabetic signs hide. The language of printing restores that dimension, however; for typewritten letters are “bodies.” These signs, spread over the most diverse media (be it paper, canvas, a wall or a computer screen) have a form, as well as moulding the meaning. The line, the trace, the graphic dimension of writing shares a common core with painting. We can see this clearly, for example, in the pictorial versions of Japanese calligraphy, so close in other ways to the free gestural forms of abstract American expressionism. In western culture, the formal asceticism of the alphabet of signs does not completely eliminate its formal dimension, and so painters and poets have sought in the neighbourhood of the sign the last frontier of all expression, the visualisation of meaning. This impulse animated the aesthetic horizon of the various twentieth century avantgardes in a particularly intense way. Paul Klee gave pictorial consistency to language, converting it into one of the axes of his work that he called “script pictures.” In a separate process, but one which arrived at a similar point, Guillaume Apollinaire, in Fumées, captured the form of a cascade of smoke coming from a pipe, ironically inverting its ascending fluidity:1

Et je fu

1

m

e du ta bac de ZoNE

Guillaume Apollinaire, ‘Fumées’, Calligrammes (Gallimard: Paris, 1966), p.71.

390 José Jiménez This spirit of visualisation of the word, of the transgressive approximation between poetry and the visual arts, can also be seen in Portuguese avant-garde movements. I refer here to two fragments, one a manifesto and the other a poem by José de Almada-Negreiros, both read at the Futurist Conference that took place in the Lisbon República Theatre (now the São Luis Theatre) on 14th May 1917, and published later the same year in Portugal Futurista.2 In the manifesto O Futurismo, in which Bettencourt Rebello makes an interesting montage of important texts from Italian Futurism, we can read: To give more character to the word, we need to bring about a typographic revolution. When necessary, three or four different coloured inks should be used and twenty different characters. To express a series of similar rapid sensations, then italics will be used, and larger type for violent onomatopeias. When the letters are conveniently arranged, we can reproduce a sensation of rêverie, such as in the word FUMAR (“to smoke”), which effectively transmits a note of dreaminess and abandon. Onomatopoeias are indispensable to give more fluidity to the style, as in the example of the onomatopoeia tatatatatata, which enacts the whipping noise of machine guns, dispensing with the need for longwinded descriptions, etc.3

The use of onomatopoeia and typographical variation is thus associated with a desire to transcend the physical limits of language by means of a synaesthetic leap, that takes us from the word to a state of dreaminess, to rêverie. From this text, let us recall at least a small fragment of MIMA-FATÁXA, a poem by José de Almada-Negreiros, which describes itself as a “COSMOPOLITAN SYMPHONY IN PRAISE OF THE FEMININE TRIANGLE.”4 With a torrent of images, at the same time poetic and typographical, the poet exalts the figure of the seductress (such as Salome), evoked as “supplier of mystery” and as “learned in the passions,” culminating in a letter A, which is visually identifiable as the pubic triangle to which Almada-Negreiros alludes, with the secret anagram of ELLE (she), the FEMINA (woman):

2 3

Reproduced in Portugal Futurista [facsimile edition] (Lisboa: Contexto Editora, 1981), p.35. Portugal Futurista, p.28; my translation.

The Root of Forms 391 In this desire to transcend genre and achieve a synthesis of writing and visualisation (one of the aesthetic strands of those avant-gardes which we today call historical), language is given body. In the act of viewing, the form at the core of the letters is reconstituted, a form that is normally invisible in merely communicative uses of the word. We have therefore taken a really important step: letters are bodies, like the forms of painting or sculpture. But we can go further: if letters and shapes are comparable in their materiality, could we speak of them as having a common root? By making this comparison, we are not suggesting that they are identical, but merely similar. The corporeal nature of linguistic signs differs from that of artistic forms because, in the first case, there is an objective normativity, a code or system upon which they are dependent, while in the second, the forms are conceived in a completely open way, independent of stylistic convention. What is important about visual poetry is that it signifies, transmits meanings, whilst respecting the structures of the natural language in which it is formulated. Not only this, its visual expansion, the forms that it gives rise to are indissociably united to the semantic and pragmatic fields of that language. There is, therefore, an impassable boundary that distinguishes the formal corporeality of writing from that we can find in art. Nevertheless, despite this difference, I believe that we can still speak of a common root for both. This common root is constituted by the human body, a biological structure that is identical across the whole species and which is ultimately the last repository of all formal and symbolic projections that human beings deploy in their cultural dynamics. Visual poetry is the formal expansion of the word; it is body and matter, like artistic form. It is image, in the dual sense, of a doubling, inscribed simultaneously into the linguistic signs and its formal expansion. It is this common root that explains the aesthetic convergence of these distinct arts, despite their expressive or semiotic differences. And it is this that also makes translation possible, the communication of meanings, between different art forms as well as between different human cultures. Modern thought, as it is manifested in philosophy (in Nietzsche, but also in the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty) or in psychoanalysis (after Sigmund Freud), has insisted upon this role of the body as a repository of forms. All expressive manifestations have their roots in the body. Even from a palaeontological perspective, as André Leroi-Gourhan has demonstrated, graphics and visual shapes share a common origin. The bipolar ability manifested by numerous vertebrates is manifested in anthropoids in the formation of their functional pairs (hand-tool and face-language), which meant that the movement of the hand and the face were of primary importance in the moulding of thought into instruments of material action and into sound symbols. With “homo sapiens,” although the hand is used to make tools, it is also used for graphic representations, for signs and forms, that emerge from the same route. According to Leroi-Gourhan, the evolution of the species eventually gave rise to an intellectual pairing of integrated functions: voicing-inscribing, the root from which all 4

Portugal Futurista, p.35.

392 José Jiménez languages developed the auditory and the visual. The expressive force of contemporary audiovisual culture is thus based upon its capacity to reunite through technology these two dimensions, which over time become separated, with writing used as a support for the abstract word, independent of sound.5 A phenomenon which is even more profound and enriching as regards the possibilities it offers for synaesthesia and for the amplification of the sensory and mental capacities is of course the cybernetic revolution in progress today (though this is naturally not without its problems and contradictions). Everything points to a cultural horizon in which the anthropological unity of shapes and means of expression is finally restored. The expansion of meaning starts with the body, but may take on a life of its own, may acquire a form. In attempting to explain what is “beneath” (i.e. this anthropological root common to all arts and aesthetic experiences, which nevertheless does not negate or eliminate their plurality), I have used in my writings the category of image, understood in a philosophical sense. I would like to delimit the scope of this term a little more precisely here, at least in a summarised form. I understand images as symbolic forms of knowledge and identity that are forged in different human cultures in order to structure spaces of meaning, and which circulate through distinct expressive ways, or “languages” (using the term now in its broadest sense). From degree zero, the very first stammerings of human expression to the most complex formally elaborate productions, the human world is a world of symbols, of images. Owing to their representative potential, these images have often been located somewhere beyond this world, in a realm above the sensory. But, given their rootedness in the corporeal from whence they emerged, images offer a bridge between the transience of our life and the desire to be everlasting. Images bind human experience, which by nature is fleeting and unrepeatable, through the mirror of recognition, of meaning, which intensifies and perpetuates it, projecting it into eternity. Images are configured as an experience of transcending limits, using as raw material exactly what is most limited – carnality, the body, shapes from that fleeting world of sensory realities. It is in this corporeal and material universe, in the almost always unapprehendable realm of the image that time is truly transcended, where we find the unity of life and death. If we wish to do a genealogical survey of the development of the philosophical concept of the image, we must inevitably go back to ancient Greek culture, when the notion of mímesis was emerging. It was this that first gave the whole positive charge to sensory representation in general and to art in particular, in our cultural tradition. What was accepted first of all in Greek cities as the appreciation of form in its own right, the cultural value of the simulacrum, ended up acquiring a much greater force due to the philosophical and theoretical weight that was attributed to it. But it was life, experience, that came first. The historiographical data bears witness to this. By the end of the sixth century BC, an important change took place in the nature of representation; an affinity was established between images of the gods and of men that was already based not upon evocation or similarity, but on form understood in a general way. 5

Cf André Leroi-Gourhan, Le Geste et la Parole (Paris: Albin Michel, 1975), passim.

The Root of Forms 393 The main consequence of this change was that the image stopped being valued for its evocative power, and began to be judged in terms of perfection. The image acquired a weight and validity in its own right, with all its characteristics of simulacrum, of pure appearance, intact. The very term “form” (eídos) is one of the most important concepts in Greek philosophy. Although it has been suggested that the term, like others, was borrowed by philosophers from the lexicon of artistic practice, it seems to me more precise to view this rather as a case of profound intercommunication between a developing theoretical language, impregnated with terms relating to visualisation, and the diverse processes of sensory representation that would ultimately play an important public role in the life of the Greek polis during the Classical era. The cultural consolidation of this perspective, in which the image is valued in its own right is, in my view, a correlative of the affirmation of a new social type – the specialist in mímesis, which included all those that possessed a téchne mimetiké. The terms used to indicate painting (grafiké) and music (mousiké) are in origin feminine adjectives that qualified the noun téchne, in the sense of a profession. Empedocles called painters “technitai trained in wisdom”; Pindar spoke of constructing his own hymns. Once more, the dates coincide. In around the sixth century, ceramicists, painters and sculptors began to sign some of their works, a revolutionary step in the history of art, in that the artist, like the lyrical poet, was now recognised as an individual. The fame and wealth that Greek painters and sculptors enjoyed, no less than poets, clearly shows that the autonomous aesthetic valuing of form, of images, was by now generalised into a cultural fact, in the anthropological sense of the term. Although it might be excessive to equate those the Greeks called technítes with our present-day “artists” (though this has often been done), it is clear that the Greeks of the Classical period saw a similarity, a common nexus, in the techne, so that the term could be used to refer to anyone involved in activities as apparently diverse as poetry, music, dance, drama, painting, sculpture and, up to a point, rhetoric and architecture. Although this did not take on the structural features of a “system,” which is something that has only appeared in modern times, it should be pointed out that, in Classical Greece, as well as valuing the image for its own sake, the idea emerged for the first time of the convergence or formal similarity of all sensuous representational practices, irrespective of their expressive or semiotic differences. The whole process ended up producing nothing more nor less than the cultural institutionalisation of the practice of representation, which eventually became part of the paideia, the education and training for citizenship. What gives unity to this collection of practices, so different as regards their media and expressive processes used, is that in all cases they involve the production of images, in the sense of a fiction, a simulacrum. That is to say, they all participate in the act of mímesis, in the sense that I have been explaining. It was in philosophy, with Plato and Aristotle, that a general theory of “the image” was first formulated. However, (and I insist on this point) this took place post factum, as a theoretical elaboration in the philosophical domain of something which would have been constituted much earlier and was practised in Greece at least since the sixth century BC.

394 José Jiménez Even before Plato and Aristotle, steps had been taken (albeit circumstantial) in that direction. Given the importance of those later developments, we have to mention first and foremost the poet Simonides of Ceos (556-468 BC), who wrote a comparison of philosophy and painting that became one of the central topics of the humanist tradition. Simonides, says Plutarch, (Ae. Glor. Athen., 346f; Quaest. Conviv. 748a), “calls painting a silent poetry and poetry a painting which speaks (zografian lalousan), because the actions that the painter wants to show at the moment he produced them are related and described in words once they have been produced.” Also attributed to Simonides is the following remark (Fr. 190b) : “Poetry is the image (eikón) of actions.” This formulation emphasises the mimetic nature that the Greeks attributed to the new literary genres. The term eikón, employed by Simonides, had already acquired a technical value by the fourth century (as we can see in Plato) and was used to refer to the representative image in its materiality (a statue, for example).6 We should also consider as stages in the development of the philosophical theory of mímesis the steps taken within the framework known as the allegorical conception of poetry to strip this of its traditional nature as “divine gift” and conceive it in rationalist terms. This is formulated at the end of the sixth century BC by its presumed founder, Theagenes of Reggio, as an intention to rationalise myth and explain its absurdities as the mere appearance (dokeín) of rational concrete reality. In Athens too (a development which was more influential as a precursor of Platonic theory), Anaxagoras interprets poetry as an exterior and symbolic appearance of concrete reality: “what appears is no more than a vision of the invisible.” Thus, for him, the goddess Iris is no more than the image of the rainbow. However, the most important precedent of all, in my opinion, and one which explains all the reactive aspects of Plato’s philosophy, such as the importance he gives to reflection on téchne mimetiké, came from the Sophists. It was really they, the Sophists, who transmitted in a more complete and coherent way the main points of view that would sustain the value and appreciation that the Greeks of the Classical era would give to the different types of mímesis. It was they who related mímesis not only to the senses and to appearance but also to pleasure, thus permitting us to understand the extent to which the image had achieved autonomy of meaning. For example, Isocrates (Panegyricus, 40) has been credited with making the distinction between types of téchnai into those that are useful for life and those that produce pleasure (hedoné). Another Sophist rhetorician, Alcidamas of Elaia (4th Century BC) develops the same idea: “These objects are representations (mimémata) of real bodies, and contemplation of them gives us pleasure; however, they do not aim to be useful in the world of men.” (Oratio de sophistis, 10). The Sophists did not just relate mímesis with pleasure, they claimed that it was a special type of pleasure, one that was sensual, though elevated and refined, and which emphasised the role of vision and hearing as noble senses. This was a central aspect of the value that was attached to representation by the Greeks of the Classical period, and the aesthetic 6

The reference texts for all classical sources cited throughout are the relevant volumes in the Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard U.P., 1912- ).

The Root of Forms 395 enjoyment provided by it. On this point, it is important to stress that it was within their theoretical framework, that the first abstract categorial definition of beauty (tò kalón) appeared, a sensual and hedonistic definition, attributed to Gorgias, and which appears again in one of Plato’s first dialogues (Hippias Major, 298a): “beauty is what produces pleasure through hearing and vision.” The formulations of Gorgias (5th-4th Century BC) on téchne mimetiké were undoubtedly the most influential, and the best theoretical conceptualisations of the Greeks’ motives for valuing the production of images. In his Encomium on Helen (Frag. B 11), Gorgias, in a brilliant rhetorical and literary exercise, shows just how fickle and ambivalent a word can be, how it may be used in the service of a particular purpose or for its opposite, to condemn or to praise. Above all, he emphasises the force of words: “The word (lógos) is a powerful sovereign which, with its tiny and totally invisible body, performs divine actions; it can effectively remove fear, suppress pain, instil joy and stimulate compassion.” That is to say, the word (lógos), as used in rhetoric and in different kinds of mimetic poetry, is capable of transporting the listener, taking over his judgement, and producing in him all kinds of illusion. Obviously there is here a point of connection with the ambiguous uses of the word in the archaic period, where this appeared as the legacy of poetry, divination and ritual. But the most important step is that now, in the transition from the 5th to the 4th century BC, Gorgias no longer considers these uses of the word as a gift from the godhead, but rather as the use of a téchne. He says of poetry in general: “I consider all poetry to be word with meter.” And while rhetoric and poetry excite the spirit through the word, then painting and sculpture produce pleasure for the sight through their formal perfection: “painters, when they use many colours and shapes to give perfect form to a single body and a single form, they delight the sight; the creation of human statues and the carving of divine sculptures aim to provide a pleasurable spectacle for the eyes.” In the same theoretical and conceptual context, we can see how a parallelism has been established between the uses of the word and the uses of form, in both cases placed at the service of a specific kind of pleasure, aesthetic pleasure. The Sophists’ reflections enable us to understand the deep cultural roots underlying the great expansion of representation in the Greek world, and to refer to it with precision as the invention of art. The expressive autonomy of word and form provides pleasure to the recipients, who through them, through those words and forms, receive in an aesthetically reelaborated version the ideals of their culture, the dreams and needs of that world that is so far away in time and yet so close to ours in the way it evaluates the universe of the image. There is, however, a final important aspect. In conceiving the autonomy of forms and words in these terms, the Sophists demonstrated the illusory and fictional nature of the whole universe of the image, formulating it coherently with the following logic: in the land of mímesis, perfection is achieved when the deceit, the illusion of reality, is most complete. This idea, of the “illusionist” nature of all representation, one of the central axes of all “artistic” practices in Greece, was also formulated conceptually by the Sophists. For example, in the long anonymous text that has come down to us with the title of Dialexeis or Dissoi lógoi (3, 10), it is said: “in tragedy and painting, he who can deceive the most, who creates things closest to the truth, is the best.”

396 José Jiménez These antecedents enable us to understand more clearly the rejection of mímesis, indeed of the whole process of sensory representation, that came with Plato and the emerging philosophy. In formulating the rationalist ideal of the precision of lógos (thought-language) upon which his philosophy is grounded, Plato rejects all ambiguous uses of the word and representation, including both the archaic, connected to mythical thought, and those that for him were contemporary, connected to the use of a téchne mimetiké. The profound reason for this is the deceit, the illusion of reality, that provides such ambiguity in both the archaic use of the word and the mimetic use of words and shapes, that the listener/spectator is appropriated and bewitched, and suffers a certain loss of rational control. This cultivation of deceit, of illusion, also provokes a distancing from the truth, which is now characterised with the rational precision of the new philosophical logos as something very far removed from the sinuous ever-changing nature of the archaic alézeia, and which, together with the good aims to constitute the ideal of the life of wisdom. Poets, sophists, painters and sculptors are also rejected, because with their production and use of images, they offer an alternative ideal of life that is out of tune with the rigorous and ascetic ideal of the philosopher. Before leaping to refute this platonic rigour that results in such an emphatic rejection of the image, we should extend this consideration to our own cultural context, this world overloaded with images, a degree of proliferation that Plato could never have imagined. The image is always, intrinsically ambivalent, dual. For this reason, only from critical thought and philosophy, or from artistic practice, in the forms that this has taken in our world, is it possible (and desirable) to show and analyse the different uses and modulations of the image. For it can be used not only as a device of alienation, a means of distancing from the truth or of masking injustice, but also in the quest for truth and justice; all of this is possible within the universe of the image. Plato denounced mímesis globally as representing the world of appearances, the illusion of reality, at odds with the philosophical domain of the truth. The same posture of denunciation is sustained with regards to the Sophists’ idea of a pragmatic téchne, also as being delusive or persuasive in discourse. The only viable téchne for Plato, that is to say, the only one that may be reconciled with the main orientation of his whole thought (i.e. the philosophical search for truth) is that which provides philosophical knowledge of the truth, the philosophical logos. Plato turns in Phaedrus, 260, to what appears to be a proverb to express his position: “There is not nor ever shall be [...] a genuine art of speaking which is divorced from the grasp of the truth.” We have to wait till Aristotle before, with the acceptance in principle of the same anthropological dignity of téchne and of theory, it is finally possible to reconcile (theoretically and philosophically) the two different types of truth: the theoretical truth of philosophy and the aesthetic “truth” of the image, expressed in the category of verisimilitude within the ontological space of the possible, alongside any other practical reasoning. In becoming a merely literary practice, poetry definitively lost its status as a means of gaining access to knowledge “unveiled” by the gods, a role which has been taken over by the theoretical and secular knowledge offered by philosophy. However, its nature as a language meant that it was included in that universe of images which philosophy, from

The Root of Forms 397 Aristotle onwards, eventually came to consider as important, in anthropological terms, as it was itself. The universe of the image had been born as a human way of becoming immersed in the possible, as a virtual space for the questioning and extension of reality. By means of a series of important historical steps and transformations, this universe of mímesis, of the cultural production and acceptance of images, of sensory representation, has ultimately given way in the modern world to the formation of a system of arts, with the notion of specificity and convergence that characterises that system, and behind which lies that common root of forms, whose development we have been tracing. That is to say, in that historical context that we call the Early Modern era (that is, from the 15th century to the 18th centuries in Europe), the arts appeared as a mimetic or representational product. They are linked, in their different media, by a mode of acting that makes it possible to consider actions or phenomena that are absent or unreal, in an effective sense, as “present,” giving them the “appearance” of the truth, with an internal necessity or verisimilitude. This mode of action, mimesis, requires the cultural acceptance of a kind of deceit or fiction, which produces in us a conditioned experience of pleasure, aesthetic pleasure. In conclusion, the unity of the arts is an institutional product of cultural tradition. Our “common aesthetic sense” tends to consider the unity of the arts as something that has always been there. However, data from our cultural history refutes this. There were, for example, numerous periods in cultural history in which the novel, instrumental music and painting on canvas either did not exist or had no real importance. Moreover, at particular moments in history, sonnets, epic poems, stained-glass windows, mosaics, frescos, illuminated manuscripts, vasepainting, tapestry, bas-relief and pottery were the most important arts, in a way that was very different from our own time. The art of the garden, for example, has lost its status as fine art since the 18th century. Consequently the idea that we can maintain forever our different genres and artistic practices as well as our traditional criteria for classifying them is entirely inconsistent.. Nowadays, with our whole cultural universe impregnated with technology; (indeed, we are living through a veritable digital revolution), we continue to talk about “art.” But it would now also be inappropriate to do so by referring to a system that no longer exists, or to any kind of academic linking of the activities and practices involved in such autonomous and differentiated forms of representation. The term “art,” which now has a new vitality, today involves some kind of fusion, synthesis, hybridisation – just as the world in which we live is becoming increasingly more hybrid. The arts live and die, their boundaries shift, as do their functions and the places they occupy in the specific culture. The constantly changing distinctions that are made between different art forms, between those considered major and minor, of which there are so many examples from our cultural history, show that they are, in the end, arbitrary, and subject to a process of constant change, similar to what is experienced in life and in human cultures generally. They are arbitrary in the sense of an arbitrariness that stems from the whole universe of representation, of the image, which forms its common root. This point, and I am approaching my conclusion, is fundamental. This is because it is precisely the arbitrariness of the image, its conventional character that constitutes the nexus of the different kinds of mimesis, of the different artistic disciplines, which allows us to conceive of the anthropological unity of the arts, without making this depend upon a

398 José Jiménez single expressive root or upon the idea of system, with the strong metaphysical charge that this carries. This makes more feasible the notion of our own insertion into a chain of cultural transmission, which, with nuances and variations, has accepted the universal validity of the mimetic process since ancient Greece, ensuring the institutional and cultural unity of the arts, on the basis of similarity of effect. The aesthetic effect is what generates the plausible fiction of one or multiple images of plenitude (or of counter-plenitude; think, for example, of the aesthetic universes of Samuel Beckett or Fernando Pessoa) with which we are sensorily and cognitively confronted.

Index Albers, Joseph 108 Alcidamas of Elaia 394 Almada-Negreiros, José de 390 Amado, Jorge 320 Anaxagoras 394 Apollinaire, Guillaume 131, 133–135, 139, 142, 253, 389 Arai, Motoko 325 Arasse, Daniel 252 Arcimboldo, Giuseppe 15, 61–78 Aretino, Pietro 60 Aristotle 176, 177, 207, 316, 393, 394, 396, 397 Arnheim, Rudolf 30, 176 Atget, Eugène 146, 149, 150, 152, 153 Auden, W. H. 361 Augustine 48, 160 Austen, Jane 207, 320 Auster, Paul 107, 112–116 Avice, Jean-Paul 147 Bachelard, Gaston 83, 84, 310 Bal, Mieke 229, 268, 270 Ballstaedt, Steffen-Peter 260 Balzac, Honoré de 157–159, 320 Banville, John 110 Barker, Elspeth 176 Barry, Robert 113, 271 Barthes, Roland 15, 61, 62, 64, 66, 67, 70, 71, 177, 213, 214, 257, 261, 262, 263, 274, 276, 286, 307, 317, 384 Baudelaire, Charles 8, 17, 135, 141, 145, 146–149, 151, 152, 253 Beard, George Miller 163 Beauduin, J. 159 Beckett, Samuel 138, 398 Beckmann, Max 299 Benjamin, Walter 102, 250, 253, 269, 272, 275, 311, 359 Bernhard, Thomas 107, 110, 112 Bessa-Luís, Agustina 318 Bochner, Mel 270 Bois, Jules 166, 167, 169, 269 Botticelli, Sandro 363

Braque, Georges 42 Breughel, Pieter, the Elder 111 Brontë, Charlotte 18, 21, 175, 176, 179, 181, 315, 319, 320 Brown, Ford Madox 97, 99, 101, 228 Bürger, Peter 271 Butor, Michel 7, 16, 30, 119, 120, 123, 124–127, 225 Byatt, A. S. 8, 18, 104, 199, 201–221, 223–225, 227–231 Cage, John 28 Calle, Sophie 112, 114 Campos, Álvaro de 175, 184, 185 Cansinos-Assens, Rafael 138 Carey, John 62, 68, 76, 78 Caron, Denis 162 Cartari, Vincenzo 49 Castelo Branco, Camilo 320 Castilho, António Feliciano de 90 Céline, Louis-Ferdinand 9, 21, 331–334, 337, 338, 340, 341, 342 Cendrars, Blaise 131, 133, 134, 135, 139 Cézanne, Paul 132 Chagas, Manuel Joaquim Pinheiro 7, 89, 90–95 Chomsky, Noam 61, 67, 250 Christin, Anne-Marie 257, 381 Cicero 47 Clair, René 131, 141–143 Clark, T. J. 147 Cocteau, Jean 131, 141 Condillac, Étienne Bonnot de 141 Conrad, Joseph 99, 316, 320 Conti, Natale 49 Cornell, Joseph 111, 157, 282, 316 Cowan, James 254 Cronenberg, David 291, 293 Crow, Thomas 31, 34, 36 Damásio, António 177 Darger, Henry 176 De Chirico, Giorgio 142 de Kooning, Willem 33, 267, 277

400 Index de Meistre, Xavier 253 De Vinne, T.L. 379 Delacroix, Eugène 204 Delaunay, Robert 131–134, 138, 139, 142 Derrida, Jacques 250, 267, 268, 270– 272, 277, 381 Descartes, René 141, 177 Desmarest, Henri 169 Destouches, Philippe Néricault 158, 331 Dickens, Charles 320 Diderot, Denis 275 Dix, Otto 134, 299 Donne, John 7, 15, 61–78 Dostoevski, Fyodor 293, 319, 320 Duchamp, Marcel 143, 273 Dürer, Albrecht 97, 99, 101, 228 Eliot, T. S. 304, 374 Empedocles 41, 393 Erasmus 100 Evans, Walker 237, 238, 240 Fantin-Latour, Henri 204 Fernandes, Constantino 204 Ficino, Marsilio 49 Flaubert, Gustave 211, 213 Flusser, Vilem 257, 258, 261, 266 Ford, Ford Madox 7, 16, 97, 98, 99, 101–104, 228 Forster, E. M. 27, 52, 316 Foucault, Michel 11, 12, 85, 87, 217, 218, 272, 278, 282, 340 Fournier, Édouard 147, 148 Frank, Robert 8, 19, 235, 236, 241, 243 Freud, Sigmund 30, 181, 182, 391 Fried, Michael 31–34, 36, 44, 270 Friedrich, Caspar David 7, 16, 79–87 Fulgentius 47–49 Fulton, Hamish 8, 19, 245–249, 254 Galsworthy, John 320 Gautier, Théophile 147–149 Genet, Jean 252 Genette, Gérard 202, 318 Gerbault, Henri 160, 162, 163, 165 Gill, Eric 357, 359, 361, 379

Ginsberg, Allen 236, 242, 244 Ginzburg, Carlo 108 Giorgione 60 Giraldus 49 Giraudoux, Jean 141, 142 Godwin, William 141 Gombrich, E. H. 15, 30, 52 Goodman, Nelson 25, 30, 38 Gorgias 395 Gray, Alasdair 9, 21, 369, 370–373 Greenberg, Clement 26, 29, 32, 108, 270 Guys, Constantin 146, 147 Guzman, Antonio 265 Hafif, Marcia 276 Hagio, Moto 324 Hague, René 356, 357, 362, 363 Handke, Peter 254 Harrison, Charles 28, 29 Hausenblas, Karel 260 Hazlitt, William 27 Heaney, Seamus 198 Heckel, Erich 299 Heffernan, James A. W. 7, 14, 22, 25, 53, 123, 178, 203, 229 Heidegger, Martin 11, 12, 252, 253 Heinemann, Wolfang 260 Heinse, Wilhelm 107 Hélder, Herberto 245 Hemingway, Ernest 99 Hepworth, Barbara 362 Herbert, George 64, 76, 367, 368 Herbert, Sir Edward 7, 61–64, 67–69, 72, 75–78 Hetzel, Pierre Jules 158 Hobbes, Thomas 372 Hogarth, William 7, 16, 35, 89–95, 123 Holbach, Paul-Henri Dietrich 141 Holbein, Hans, the Younger 7, 16, 97– 104, 228 Homer 31, 48, 53, 57, 123, 178, 365 Horace 66 Houssaye, Arsène 159 Huidobro, Vicente 131, 135, 137–142 Hunt, William Holman 225

Index 401 Husserl, Edmund 391 Hustvedt, Siri 109, 111 Huysmans, Joris-Karl 131 Jakobson, Roman 275 James, Henry 97, 102, 175, 211 Jameson, Fredric 11, 12, 270 Javal, Émile 379 Johns, Jasper 25, 37, 38, 44, 270 Jones, David 9, 21, 355–358, 360, 361, 364–368 Joyce, James 37, 367 Kandinsky, Wassily 9, 21, 33, 345–354 Kawara, On 113, 115, 116 Keats, John 28 Kelman, James 369, 370 Kerouac, Jack 8, 19, 235–244 Kiefer, Anselm 8, 19, 245, 250–253, 255 King, Elspeth 369, 370 King, Stephen 111 Kirchner, Ernst Ludwig 299 Kirstein, Lincoln 237–240 Klee, Paul 389 Klein, Yves 26, 85 Knorr, Karen 8, 257, 263, 265 Koerner, Joseph 84 Kokoschka, Oskar 299 Kosuth, Joseph 42, 113, 271 Krauss, Rosalind 26, 27, 32, 268–278, 294 Krieger, Murray 13, 229 Krysinska, Marie 170 Kupka, Frantisek 139 Larcher, Louis Julien 158, 162 Lavery, John 193–198 Lee, Alison 372 Léger, Fernand 140, 143 Leonard, Tom 369, 370 Leonardo da Vinci 12, 40, 108, 223, 226 Leroi-Gourhan, André 391, 392 LeSecq, Henri 148 Lessing, G. E. 12, 177, 275 Lewis, C. S. 49, 50, 53 LeWitt, Sol 270

Long, Richard 113, 116 Lopes, Adília 176, 181 Lorrain, Claude 126, 129 Louvel, Liliane 13, 119, 120 Lucretius 47 Macke, August 299 Magritte, René 25, 30, 31, 37 Malevich, Kazimir 26, 27, 40 Malory, Thomas 364, 366 Malraux, André 121, 122, 177, 178 Manet, Édouard 60, 145, 147, 151– 153, 227, 231 Mann, Thomas 110, 347 Marc, Franz 345, 347 Marinetti, F.T. 140 Marlow, Tim 177, 316 Martin, Agnes 26, 41 Marville, Charles 149, 150, 152 Matisse, Henri 8, 18, 42, 198, 201, 202–212, 219, 224 Matta-Clark, Gordon 276 Maupassant, Guy de 131, 175 McGuckian, Medbh 8, 18, 187–198 McHale, Brian 373 McLuhan, Marshall 270 Meliés, George 142, 143 Melville, Herman 25, 28 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 310, 391 Michelangelo 124, 127–129 Middeldorf, Ulrich 107 Millais, John Everett 225 Milton, John 37, 163 Mirabeau, Sibylle-Gabrielle Marie-Antoinette de Riquetti de 170 Mitchell, W. J. T. 13, 14, 37, 177, 184, 197, 225, 257, 258, 262, 269, 274 Moffat, Tracey 8, 257, 263, 264 Moles, Abraham 258, 260 Monet, Claude 29, 140, 214 Moore, Henry 362 More, Thomas 100 Morris, Robert 113, 270 Morrison, Blake 176, 183 Moura, Vasco Graça 175, 176

402 Index Muldoon, Paul 187, 198 Mullane, Angela 369 Münter, Gabriele 346, 347, 349 Murakami, Haruki 326, 327 Murakami, Ryu 326, 327 Murnau, F. W. 293, 295, 345, 349, 350 Musset, Alfred de 158 Mussorgsky, Modest 350 Nadar, Félix 146 Namuth, Hans 31 Nauman, Bruce 270 Nerlich, Michael 119 Newhall, Nancy 257, 263, 264 Newman, Robert D. 177, 184 Nietzsche, Friedrich 282, 391 Nora, Pierre 17, 145, 146 Oates, Joyce Carol 176 Ohshima, Yumiko 324–326 Oliver, Sir Isaac 61, 62 Ovid 48, 120 Panofsky, Erwin 59, 109 Pantazzi, Sybille 107 Paracelsus 64 Pasternak, Boris 320 Pater, Walter 97, 98, 226 Pears, Ian 110, 319 Peirce, Charles Sanders 269, 271, 273 Péladan, Joséphin 163, 164 Pessoa, Fernando 175, 184, 185, 398 Picabia, Marcel 143 Picasso, Pablo 33, 35, 42, 134, 153 Pichois, Claude 147 Plato 47, 55, 68–74, 77, 349, 393–396 Plutarch 394 Pollock, Jackson 25, 27, 31–34, 36, 40, 44, 310 Pompery, Edouard de 165 Pozzi, Lucio 276 Proudhon, Pierre Joseph 166 Queiroz, Eça de 320 Quignard, Pascal 251 Radcliffe, Ann 7, 16, 79–83, 85, 86 Rauschenberg, Robert 26, 28, 29, 31, 267–270, 273

Rebello, Bettencourt 390 Rego, Paula 8, 18, 175–185 Reinhardt, Ad 26 Rembrandt 104, 108, 219 Reynolds, Joshua 97 Reza, Yasmina 25, 26, 29, 30 Rhys, Jean 18, 175, 176, 178, 179 Richards, I. A. 61, 64, 67 Richter, Gerhard 25, 38–42, 44 Ricoeur, Paul 217, 317 Riffaterre, Michael 198 Ripa, Cesare 120 Robbe-Grillet, Alain 120 Rops, Félicien 163, 164 Rosenberg, Harold 26, 28, 31, 270 Rosenthal, T. G. 178–180, 182, 183 Rousseau, Henri 131, 132 Rushdie, Salman 9, 20, 291, 292, 294, 296–299 Ruskin, John 98, 225, 226 Saint-Merry, Pol de 165 Sarraute, Natalie 120 Saussure, Ferdinand de 27, 217, 269, 276, 381 Scherner, Maximilian 260 Schwartz, Dennis 297 Schwartz, Gary 108 Sebald, Winfried Georg 107, 109, 117, 118 Seurat, Georges 131, 132, 134, 142, 143 Shakespeare, William 7, 15, 47, 52, 58, 59, 192 Shelley, Mary 295 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 28, 36, 145 Silvestre, Armand 165 Simon, Claude 120 Simonides of Ceos 394 Sinnassamy, Evelyne 119 Smithson, Robert 245, 277 Socrates 68, 70, 71, 72, 74, 349 Sontag, Susan 26 Soyinka, Wole 9, 20, 281–289 Spenser, Edmund 7, 15, 47–55, 57– 60, 123

Index 403 Spitz, Ellen Handler 177 Steinberg, Leo 37, 38 Stevenson, Robert Louis 296, 372 Stuart, Michelle 276 Szarkowski, John 244 Takenaka, Keiko 324 Tardi, Jacques 9, 21, 331–342 Tertullian 161 Tezuka, Osamu 324 Theagenes of Reggio 394 Tinayre, Marcelle 171 Tintoretto 110, 226 Titian 7, 15, 47, 52, 59, 60, 110 Todd, Richard 201, 203, 373, 374 Torrington, Jeff 370 Turner, J. M. W. 27, 35, 36, 44, 85, 140, 214 Valette, Charles 158, 159 Van Gogh, Vincent 211, 212, 217, 219, 220, 221 Vaughan, Henry 64 Velázquez, Diego 104, 177, 212, 219 Vermeer, Jan 191, 192, 198, 219 Vernet, Horace 226

Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, Auguste de 167, 168 Virgil 47, 123, 195 Vitruvius 40 von Hartmann, Olga 352 Wagner, Peter 119, 120 Wasserstein, Wendy 108 Waugh, Evelyn 108 Weiner, Lawrence 8, 19, 113, 245, 248–250, 254, 271 Wheeler, Daniel 26, 28, 29, 32, 39 Whistler, James McNeill 103, 204 Whitman, Walt 240 Wiene, Robert 20, 291, 293, 298 Wilde, Oscar 111, 226, 227, 228 Williams, William Carlos 237 Woellert, Dee 160 Woolf, Virginia 196, 197, 198, 213 Yamada, Amy 323, 327, 328 Yamagishi, Ryoko 324 Yeats, W. B. 195, 198, 304 Yoshimoto, Banana 323, 326 Yoshimoto, Ryumei 325 Zanutto, James 236 Zola, Émile 142, 214, 231