Rui Carvalho Homem, Maria de FÃ¡tima Lambert (Editors) - Writing and Seeing - Essays On Word and Image-Editions Rodopi B.V. (2006)

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
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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 Te-
cnologia (POCTI\ELT\43425/2001).
The editors also wish to express their gratitude to the Institute for English Studies, Univer-
sidade 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

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
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 special-
isation 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 epistemol-
ogical paradigm. Such discourses foreground an urge to construe all processes of significa-
tion 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-contain-
ment 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, trans-
disciplinary 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 “juxta-
position,” 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 cross-
fertilisations 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 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 (Lon-
don: Verso, 1991), pp.16 and passim.
2 Cf Gerry Smyth, Space and the Irish Cultural Imagination (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2001), p.1.
3 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 Murray Krieger, Ekphrasis: The Illusion of the Natural Sign (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins U.P.,
1992), p.10.
5 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 confor-
mations; see especially pp.95-115.
6 Liliane Louvel, Texte/Image: Images à Lire, Textes à Voir (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2002),
p.223.
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 Illu-
sion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation [Washington, D.C.: Pantheon Books, 1960], p.87).
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 Anglo-
Portuguese 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, Schoell-
Glass 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 Schoell-
Glass’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
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 self-
representation 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
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
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
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 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.
2 Yasmina Reza, Art, trans. Christopher Hampton (London: Faber and Faber, 1996) – hereafter cited as Reza.
3 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 paint-
ing 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 Daniel Wheeler, Art Since Mid-Century: 1945 to the Present (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1992),
p.129 – hereafter cited as Wheeler.
5 Clement Greenberg, ‘Toward a Newer Laocoon’ [1940] in Collected Essays and Criticism, 3 vols. (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1986), I, p.35.
6 Susan Sontag, ‘Against Interpretation,’ in Minimalism, ed. James Meyer (London: Phaidon, 2000), pp.201-02.
7 Rosalind E. Krauss, ‘Grids’ [1978] in The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths
(Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1986), p. 9.
8 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 nineteenth-
century 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
9 Tom Wolfe, The Painted Word (New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 1975), passim.
10 Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. P.P. Howe, 21 vols. (London: Dent, 1930-34), IV: p.76n.
11 Rosalind E.Krauss, ‘Reading Jackson Pollock, Abstractly’ [1982] in Originality, p. 237.
12 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.
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 Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (New York: Signet, 1952), pp. 175-77.
15 Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, ed. Harrison Hayford and Hershel Parker (New York: Norton, 1967), pp. 163-64.
16 Melville, p.169.
17 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.
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 all-
white 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 Wheeler, p.129.
19 Greenberg, p.43.
20 Charles Harrison, ‘On the Surface of Painting,’ Critical Inquiry, 15 (1989), 292-36 (pp. 294-95).
21 Harrison, 303.
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 Reza, p.63.
23 Rudolph Arnheim, Visual Thinking (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: Univ. of California Press, 1969), p.141.
24 Michel Butor, Les Mots dans la Peinture (Geneva, Les Sentiers de la Création, 1967), p. 77
25 “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.”
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
26 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.’
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 Fried, ‘Optical’, p.97.

30 Clement Greenberg, ‘The Crisis of the Easel Picture’ (1948), qtd. Fried, ‘Optical’, p. 97.
31 Clement Greenberg, ‘Feeling is All’ (1952), qtd. Fried, ‘Optical’, p. 98.
32 Qtd. Krauss, ‘Reading’, p.237
33 Qtd. Krauss, ‘Reading’, p.226n.
34 Wheeler, p.42.
35 Krauss, ‘Reading’, p. 239
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 repre-
36 Michael 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.
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 Crow, ‘Moving’, p.94.

39 Fried, ‘Optical’, p.99.
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 self-
portrait 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, all-
seeing 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.
40 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.
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 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.
43 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).
44 Crow, ‘Moving’, p. 94.
45 Qtd. Crow, ‘Moving’, p.94.
46 ‘Defense of Poetry’ in Shelley, p.505.
47 ‘Mont Blanc,’ lines 25-27 in Shelley, p. 90.
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
48 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.
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 some-
thing 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 soft-
focus 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
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 cul-
tural 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,
50 Lucy Lippard, ‘The Silent Art,’ Art in America 55 (January 1967), pp. 58-63 (p. 60).
51 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.
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 stand-
ing straight with arms outstretched. The cross used to brace the rhombus is less ob-
viously 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
54 Storr, p.304.
55 Storr, p. 83.
56 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.
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.
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
58 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.
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.
* * *
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 so-
called “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
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 love-
making; 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 Metamor-
phoses. 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
Bollingen Series XXXVIII (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1953). There is an enormous
secondary literature, only quoted here when of immediate use.
2 Fulgentius, Fulgentius the Mythographer, transl. L.G.Whitbread (Columbus, Oh: Ohio State University Press,
1971), pp.66-7.
3 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 Cf. Fulgentius the Mythographer, p.91.

5 Fulgentius the Mythographer, p.92.
6 For a brief account see David Daniell, The Bible in English (New Haven and London: Yale U.P., 2003),
pp.376ff and passim.
7 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 C.S. Lewis, Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Literature, ed. W. Hooper (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1966), p.137.
9 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.
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
10 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
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 dis-
cussed. 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 im-
ages. 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
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,
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)

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 Shakes-
peare’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.
15 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.
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 self-
inflicted 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 Arcim-
boldo’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
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.
2 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.
3 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,
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, <http://www.luminarium.org/sevenlit/chirbury/stateprogress.htm>
[accessed 16 March 2003].
4 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, agri-
5 For the notion of algorithm, I follow Simon Singh, The Code Book. The Secret History of Codes and Code-
Breaking (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.
6 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.
7 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.
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
8 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.
9 Richards, pp. 98, 130.
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).
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
11 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.
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 Arcim-
boldesque paintings and their effects. The iconic element of Donne’s text must be fore-
grounded 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
15 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.
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
17 Carey, p. 460 n. 200.

18 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.
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 State-
Progress 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 con-
firming 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 Kaufmann, The Mastery of Nature, p. 181.

21 Keister, p. 430.
22 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 Barthes, p. 136.
24 Barthes, p. 139.
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
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 con-
ceits 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
different sources. As I said earlier, (Musée National du Louvre, Paris)
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.
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
29 John Carey, ‘Sex and Violence’, The New Statesman January 7 (1977), p. 22. Some articles on Literature
Collected on the Internet by Magda Amundsen. <http://www.geocities.com/magdamun/careysex.html>
[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.
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 wis-
dom, his readings have not made him
able to attain self-control and self-
knowledge. These last lines show, be-
cause of the personal application sub-
stantiated in the direct apostrophe to Sir
Edward Herbert and the analogy be-
tween his portrait and Arcimboldo’s
The Librarian, that the previous argu-
mentation on the evils that afflict man,
the reply to Herbert’s poem, is appli-
cable 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 pro-
vokes the revision of its real meaning.
The clear personal aim of the text
makes us realise that the whole Giuseppe Arcimboldo, The Librarian, ca. 1566
philosophical and religious consider- (Skoklosters Slott, Sweden)
ation 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
31 Carey, ‘Sex and Violence’, (para. 2, 3 & 5 of 6); John Butler, ‘Edward, Lord Herbert of Chirbury (1582/3-
1648)’, Luminarium by Anniina Jokinen. <http://www.luminarium.org/sevenlit/chirbury/chirbio.htm>
[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).
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 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).
2 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).
3 Caspar David Friedrich: His Life and Work (Berlin: German Library of Information, 1940), p.22.
4 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 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).
6 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).
7 On the definition of Schauender, see Hofmann, p.40.
Perspective and Framing 81
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 Radcliffe, p.13.
9 Van den Berg, p.62; Guillén, pp.67-8.
10 Radcliffe, p.27.
11 See Ayala, p.25.
12 See Charles Sala, Caspar David Friedrich: The Spirit of Romantic Painting (Paris: Éditions Pierre Terrail,
1994), p.190.
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
13 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
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
Caspar David Friedrich, Woman at a Window, Radcliffe’s work, the implicit geometric
1822 (Nationalgalerie, Berlin) opposition of inside and out goes beyond the
17 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.
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 Fried- Caspar David Friedrich, View from the Left
rich Painting in his Studio, 1811), we can see Window of the Studio, 1805
(Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna)
that there are only a few objects in the atelier
21 Cf Bachelard, pp.191ff.
22 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
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
24 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.
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 Radcliffe, pp.479, 482.

29 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.
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.
30 Michel Foucault, ‘Of Other Spaces’, in Diacritics, Spring, 16:1 (1986), 22-27 (p.24).
31 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.
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 From now on the periodical will be referred to only as O Panorama.

2 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.
3 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 sentimen-
talism 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 commen-
tary 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 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.
5 See her entry on Chagas in Dicionário do Romantismo português, ed. Helena Carvalhão Buescu (Lisboa:
Editorial Caminho, 1997), pp.88-89.
6 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-la-
mode – 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”:
7 On this question, see Joseph Burke and Colin Caldwell, Hogarth. The complete engravings (London: Thames
and Hudson, 1968), p.8.
8 Fielding considers that Hogarth was responsible for the creation of an art which is, at once, elevated, and
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.
9 Anonymous [Manuel Joaquim Pinheiro Chagas?], ‘O infeliz poeta’ (The Distressed Poet) in O Panorama, 5ª
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.
[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 nineteenth-
century 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 nineteenth-
century 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.
12 [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 “romance-
folhetim” (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).
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: eccen-
tricity. Examples of British eccentricity, which were frequently recounted in the nineteenth-
century 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-la-
mode,” 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.
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
16 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-la-
Mode. An engraving by Hogarth) in O Panorama 5ª série, XVII: 7, (1867), pp.52-53.
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.

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 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.
2 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)
Holbein does not describe his portrait characters

mimetically, so they appear almost as objective
images; nevertheless, in reality, subtle psycho-
logical 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), fol-
lowing the tradition of Walter Pater’s Imaginary
Portraits (1887), Ford himself engaged in
biography as a literary genre by portraying not
Hans Holbein the Younger, Erasmus, 1523
(Musée du Louvre, Paris)
only the great Victorians he had met at the
house of his grandfather, the painter Ford
3 Ford Madox Ford, ‘On Impressionism’, Poetry and Drama, II, (June 1914), pp.167-75; II, (December 1914),
pp.323-34.
4 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 paint-

ings 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 promi-
nent positions in the paintings of the great
humanists Erasmus of Rotterdam and Thomas
More, and it is no accident that Holbein him-
self 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 genera-
tions.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 Den-
mark, 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 Hans Holbein the Younger, Christina of Den-
mark, Duchess of Milan, 1538
and narration, and for a novelist such as Ford
(National Gallery, London)
the significance of the famous portrait of
6 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).
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 Pre-
Raphaelite 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 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.
9 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.
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 timeless-
ness.
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 post-
modernist 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
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 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.
2 Wilhelm Heinse, Ardinghello und die glückseligen Inseln. Eine italienische Geschichte aus dem sechzehnten
Jahrhundert (1787) (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1975).
3 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 The Getty Research Institute is to be found at http://www.getty.edu/research/institute/. The library catalogue is

accessible from there.
5 1996; first published in Dutch as Dutch Kills, 1994.
6 Carlo Ginzburg, Clues, Myths and the Historical Method (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press,
1989).
7 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).
8 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 Heidi Chronicles, pp.160ff.

10 Heidi Chronicles, p.161.
11 London: Hodder and Stoughton, 2003.
12 John Freeman, Review for the Star Tribune, (March 2, 2003).
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
13 Thomas Bernhard, Alte Meister. Komödie (Frankfurt / M.: Suhrkamp, 1985).

14 Alte Meister, p.35.
15 Alte Meister, p.190.
16 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.
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. Nineteenth-
century 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
18 Michael Frayn, Headlong (London: Faber and Faber, 1999).

19 Stephen King, Rose Madder (New York: Viking Penguin, 1995).
20 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.
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.
22 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).
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,
24 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) ; Jean-
Marc Huitorel, Les règles du jeu: le peintre et la contrainte = The rules of the game: the painter and his cons-
traint (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.
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 Leviathan, p.215.
29 Leviathan, p.60.
30 Leviathan, pp.60 and 61.
31 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.
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 cover-
stories 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 meaning-
less 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 Leviathan, p.217.
33 Leviathan, p.61.
34 Leviathan, p.160f.
35 Paul Auster, City of Glass, in: The New York Trilogy (London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1992), pp.1-132;
here: pp.65-72.
[Fragmentary message – walks inscribing urban space [Quinn walking the map and trying to make sense in
in Paul Auster’s City of Glass.] From Paul Auster’s Paul Auster’s City of Glass.] From Paul Auster’s City
City of Glass. Script Adaptation: Paul Karasik and David of Glass. Script Adaptation: Paul Karasik and David
Mazzucchelli (New York: Avon Books, 1994) p. 63. 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
“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
36 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).
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 Michel Butor, Curriculum Vitae. Entretiens avec André Clavel (Paris: Plon, 1996), p.22.
2 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 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).
4 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).
5 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).
6 Daniel S. Russell, The Emblem and Device in France (Lexington, Ky: French Forum, 1985).
7 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

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).
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 trans-
formation. 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
11 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
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.
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 Butor, La Modification, p.104.

16 Butor, La Modification, pp.56-58.
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.

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.
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.
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 Collection Mr and Mrs Germain Seligman, New York.

2 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.
The Making of the Eiffel Tower 133
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 Respectively at The Solomon Guggenheim Museum, New York; Folkwang Museum, Essen; and Kunstmu-
seum, Basel.
4 Private collection, France.
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.
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 post-
Christian 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.

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
Nous sommes en haut
Un oiseau chante C’est le vent

Dans les antennes De l’Europe
Télégraphiques 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.
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, Eiffel-
miel, 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).

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.
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 scientific-
technical reasoning, with no misgivings whatsoever from any authority, moral, political or
9 Fernand Léger, Funciones de la pintura, Trad. Antonio Alvárez (Barcelona: Paidós, 1965), p.26.
10 Cf De Costa, p.61.
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.
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.

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.
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 photo-

graphy 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 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 (Ses-
sion: "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.
2 See, for example, Shelley Rice, Parisian Views (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), and note 9 below
3 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).
4 ‘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 expec-
tations, 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 “self-
doubling” (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 comprehen-
sive 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. Hauss-
mann’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 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).
6 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.1887-
89) 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 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: Édi-
tions Paris-Musées, 1993), pp. 27-32. Clark also identifies “ambiguity” as a Parisian attitude towards moder-
nity in general and specifically towards Haussmann’s modernization of Paris, p. 21.
8 ‘The Painter of Modern Life’, p.400; emphasis added.
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
9 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 as-
semblage 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.
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 word-
and-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
12 Baudelaire, ‘The Modern Public and Photography,’ Salon of 1859, in Selected Writings on Art and Literature,
pp. 296-298.
13 Ibid., p. 297.
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.
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 Folies-
Bergère.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
15 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 compo-
nents 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”).
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.
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 avant-
garde – 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.
4. WOMEN AND THE INTERMEDIUM
4.1. Portraits and Causes

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 Jeanne-Hélène Roy discusses this issue in with reference to Rousseau in Rousseau’s Floral Daydreams: Cultivat-
ing an Aesthetics in the Rêveries, Ph.D. dissertation (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University, 1997), p.162, n.60.
2 Honoré de Balzac, Une fille d’Ève, trans. Clara Bell and R. S. Scott (Philadelphia: John D. Morris, 1897).
3 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
4 Balzac, p.27.
5 Balzac, p.42.
6 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 Bal-
zac 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.
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 re-
sonate with the late nineteenth-
century Parisian audience – later
editions or reprints were pub-
lished 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 act-
ress, 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).
12 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.
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 upper-
middle 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
14 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 Help-
mate: 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).
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 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.
18 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.
19 Phillips, p.41.
20 Phillips, p.62.
21 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).
22 Margaret Hallissy, Venomous Woman: Fear of the Female in Literature, (NY: Greenwood Press, c. 1987),
p.15.
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 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 autono-
mous 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.
24 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.
25 Reproduced in Larcher’s La Femme jugée par l’homme, p.301, where “curiosity” appears as part of an alpha-
betical list of uncomplimentary characteristics of women under the collective title of “Petite Mosaique.”
26 Maria Deraismes in Ève dans l’humanité (Paris: Côté-femmes, 1990 [1895]), pp.166-167.
27 “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 puer-
ile 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).
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 responsi-
bility. Péladan was a prolific symbolist writer, leader of the alternative religious society
28 La Vie Parisienne (Feb. 28, 1903), 118-119.

29 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, di-
rector 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 Medi-
cal 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.
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 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).
34 Maurice Exsteens, L’Oeuvre Gravé de Félicien Rops (Paris: Éditions Pellet, 1928), no.440.
35 Exsteens, no. 866.
36 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.
37 Exsteens, no. 863.
38 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.
role et sa valeur sociale, “La

femme, c’est le péché, c’est Satan,
c’est l’ennemi!”39 Here, as else-
where, 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 Saint-
Merry 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 Édouard de Pompery, La Femme dans l’humanité: sa nature, son role et sa valeur sociale (Paris: Hachette,
1864), p.14.
40 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.
41 Armand Silvestre, Le Péché d'Ève – Contes gaillards et nouvelles parisiennes (Paris: Rouveyre & G. Blond,
1882).
42 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.
43 Saint-Merry, Pécheresses, p.6.
44 Saint-Merry, Pécheresses, p.10.
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 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 Of-
fen 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.
46 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.
47 Bois, L’Ève Nouvelle, p.3. My translation.
48 Bois, L’Ève Nouvelle, p.4.
49 Much of the proceedings were published as Congrès français et internationale du droit des femmes (Paris:
Dentu, 1889).
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
51 Bois, L’Ève Nouvelle, pp.23 and 358n.

53 Bois, La Femme inquiète, p. v.
54 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.
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
58 ‘Les Livres — L’Ève future’, La Vogue, no. 10 (June 28-July 5, 1886), pp.357-360.
59 Émile Pierre, ‘L’Ève Future par Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’, Le Chat Noir (May 29, 1886), p.712.
60 Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, ‘Fragments inédits de “L’Ève Future”’, Mercure de France (January 1891), pp.1-16.
61 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. Lath-
ers 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 un-
comfortably) 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 (Cam-
bridge. 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 al-
ready 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.
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.
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
66 Marie Krysinska, ‘I. Eve II. Hélène III. Magdelaine’, Revue Indépendante (January 1890), pp.442-447.
67 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 reac-
tion against the grounding of a liberal and democratic bourgeois republic, lead to her defense of traditional in-
stitutions 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 op-
pressed 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.
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 Eugenie Potonié-Pierre, ‘L’Ève Future’, Journal des Femmes no. 33-34 (September-October 1894), p.1.
71 Marcelle Tinayre, ‘La Révolte d’Ève’, La Fronde (September 5, 1898), p.2; (September 6, 1898), p.2;
(September 7, 1898), p.2.
actively transformed her by making her a part of the feminist movement in nineteenth-
century 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 anti-
feminist. “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-Judeo-
Christian 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 Maria Martin, ‘Ève dans L’Humanité’, Journal des Femmes, no. 104 (November, 1900), p.3.
73 Claire Galichon, Ève Réhabilitée: plaidoyer “pro femina” (Paris: Librairie générales des sciences occultes,
1909), passim.
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.
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 Interview conducted by Rodrigues da Silva, ‘Inocências e travessuras’, Jornal de Letras (3 June 1998), 9-11
(p.9).
2 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.
3 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.
4 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).
5 Quoted in ‘Paula Rego: The sinister storyteller’ (http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/arts/highlights/010822-
rego.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
6 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).
7 For a discussion of these influences see Maria Aline Seabra Ferreira’s ‘Echoes of English Literature in the
Work of Paula Rego’, Portugal e o Outro: Uma Relação Assimétrica?, ed. Otília Martins (Aveiro:
Universidade de Aveiro, 2002), pp.45-55.
8 Adília Lopes, Obra. Com três gravuras originais de Paula Rego e posfácios de Elfriede Engelmeyer e de
Américo António Lindeza Diogo (Lisboa: Mariposa Azul, 2000).
9 Elspeth Barker, ‘The Dance’, in Writing on the Wall: Women Writers on Women Artists, ed. by Judith Collins
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).
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 poly-
semous.”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 “recon-
sideration 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 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.
12 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.
13 Robert D. Newman, Transgressions of Reading: Narrative Engagement of Exile and Return (Durham and
London: Duke University Press, 1993), p.31.
14 Roland Barthes, Image-Music-Text, essays selected and trans. by Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang,
1977), pp.38-39.
15 Ellen Handler Spitz, Image and Insight: Essays in Psychoanalysis and the Arts (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1991), p.109.
16 W.J.T.Mitchell, Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), p.164.
17 António Damásio, Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain (London and Basingstoke:
Papermac, 1996), p.106.
18 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.
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
19 André Malraux, Le musée imaginaire (Paris: Gallimard, 1947).

20 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.
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
24 Rosenthal, p.166.
25 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).
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 Ana Marques Gastão, ‘Jane Eyre, a bruxa’, Interview with Paula Rego, Diário de Notícias (19 July 2002), 40-
41 (p.40).
30 Gastão, p.41. My translation.
31 Gastão, p.41. My translation.
32 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.
33 Quoted in ‘Paula Rego: The sinister storyteller’, (http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/arts/highlights/010822-
rego.shtml, (5/6/2003), 1-2.
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
35 Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre, ed. by Q. D. Leavis (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983), pp.40-1.
36 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.
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
40 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).
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
43 See John McEwen’s Paula Rego, 2nd Edition (London: Phaidon Press, 1997), p.229.
44 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.
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
48 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).
— 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.
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 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).
2 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).
3 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 omni-
present 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 Cf Wills, passim; Edna Longley, Poetry & Posterity (Highgreen: Bloodaxe, 2000), p.311.
5 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.
6 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.
7 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)
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 “Self-
Portrait 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 represen-
tation 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
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.
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.
Rather than just a squabble over technique, the source of that refusal lies both in the painter-
poet’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 self-
representation 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 Allen, p.287.
11 Sinéad McCoole, Hazel: A Life of Lady Lavery 1880-1935 (Dublin: Lilliput, 1996), p.58.
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 Cf www.centralbank.ie/data/AnnRepFiles/2001AReport.pdf (last accessed 20 March 2005).

13 Cf McCoole, passim.
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 W.B.Yeats, Collected Poems (London: Picador, 1990), p.368.

15 Cf http://www.ljhammond.com/notebook/nap-right.htm (last accessed 20 March 2005).
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 Wills, p .6 9 .
17 Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own (1929) (London: Granada, 1981), p.41; my emphasis.
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
18 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.191-
210 (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.
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 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).
22 Seamus Heaney, The Government of the Tongue (London: Faber, 1988), p.xix.
23 Cf Longley, The Living Stream, p.52.
24 As suggested, for instance, by Docherty, passim.
25 Wills, p.191.
4. WOMEN AND THE INTERMEDIUM
4.2. Ambivalent Narratives A. S. Byatt

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 back-
ground 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 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 impor-
tance attributed by Matisse to “background” and “subject” would be his Harmonie en rouge (Harmony in Red)
(1908).
2 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).
3 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 achieve-
ment.
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 unequi-
vocally 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 According to Genette, the “peritext” includes titles, subtitles, prefaces, dedications, epigraphs, titles of chap-
ters, notes, etc. Cf. Gérard Genette, Seuils (Paris: Seuil, 1987), p.10.
5 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 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 defini-
tion see Maria Fernanda Conrado, Ekphrasis e Bildgedicht: Processos ekphrásticos nas Metamorfoses de
Jorge de Sena (unpubl. Diss. Universidade de Lisboa, 1996), pp.46-62.
7 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).
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
8 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).
9 According to rhetorical precepts, a speech can either be divided into two or into three parts, depending on the
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 Paint-
ings, trans. by Judith Hayward (Paris: Éditions Scala, 2000), p.54.
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
13 Women dominate both technically, by being chosen as focalisers, and thematically. Susannah’s story in “Me-
dusa’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.
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
15 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.
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 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, Ma-
tisse: The Man and His Art 1869-1918 (London: Thames and Hudson, 1986), p.111.
19 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 Lan-
guage/Literature, Inaugural Conference Proceedings – Hellenic Association for the Study of English, 1994,
ed. E. Douka-Kabitoglou (Thessaloniki: Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, 1994), p.313.
20 However, unlike Debbie, only during a time of particularly serious financial troubles did Mme. Matisse con-
tribute 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 ut-
ter discretion when imprisoned by the Gestapo in 1944, in order not to upset the painter (a fact that is omi-
nously evoked in the last story of the volume “The Chinese Lobster”). Cf. Schneider, p.739.
21 For a similar episode in Henri Matisse’s life see Gowing, p.9 and Frazier, p.430
22 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.
23 In 1898, Matisse decided to go south because of the light. Cf. Gowing, p.20 and Flam, The Man, pp.51 ff.
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 ‘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 self-
reflexive 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).
25 Others would include Lucian (in “Medusa’s Ankles”), Perry Diss and even Peggy Nollett (in “The Chinese
Lobster”).
26 According to Gowing, “Matisse, as he said later, did not paint by theory” (Gowing, p.22). For relevant pas-
sages on Matisse’s artistic independence see also Gowing, pp.59, 69, 108, 142, and 173.
27 The love of costumes and fabrics (as seen in screens, hangings, tapestries, rugs, etc that form such an impor-
tant 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.
28 Matisse’s use of different media – sculpture, woodcuts, and prints and, later in life, paper cuts (“papier dé-
coupé”) – illustrates his need for experiment till the very end.
29 Cf. Schneider, pp.715-16.
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 self-
indulgently 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
30 Note the self-reflexive (and self-conscious?) use of the word “travesty” at the end of this story (MS 90).
31 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 self-
reflexively 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.
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 Cf. Elderfield, p.51.

34 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 self-
sufficiency, 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 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).
2 A.S.Byatt (ed.), The Oxford Book of English Short Stories (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. xv-
xxx (p.xviii).
3 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.
4 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 A.S.Byatt, Passions of the Mind: Selected Writings (London: Vintage, 1993), p. 3.

6 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).
7 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
8 Boyd Tonkin, ‘Antonia S. Byatt in Interview with Boyd Tonkin’, Anglistik 10.2 (1999), 15-26 (p.17).
9 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).
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
13 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).
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 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.
18 Vide Byatt, Passions of the Mind, p. 3.
19 Byatt, Still Life, pp.153-4.
20 Byatt, Still Life, p.68.
21 Worton, p 19.
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 word-
play; 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
22 A.S.Byatt, The Biographer’s Tale (London: Vintage, 2001), p.250.

23 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).
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 Byatt, Passions of the Mind, p.9.

29 Byatt, Still Life, 2.
30 Byatt, Still Life, 2.
31 Passions of the Mind, pp.15-18.
32 Passions of the Mind, p.11.
33 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).
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 post-
Renaissance 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 Passions of the Mind, p 17.

35 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (London and New York:
Routledge, 1989), p.40.
36 Foucault, The Order of Things, p.49.
37 A.S.Byatt, Babel Tower (London: Vintage, 1997 [1996]), p.190.
38 Byatt, Babel Tower, p.190.
39 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 blue-
black-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 Worton, p.17.
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.

45 Byatt, ‘Why painted portraits?’, p. 16.
46 Van Gogh, The Complete Letters, quoted in Still Life, p. 375.
47 Passions of the Mind, p. 24.
48 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.”
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 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.
2 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 meta-
artistic 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 meta-
artistic 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 Michel Butor, Les mots dans la peinture (Géneve: Skira, 1969), pp.8, 9; my translation.
5 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 re-

presentational 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 por-
traits in fiction possess an epiphanic William Holman Hunt, The Awakening Conscience, 1853
(Tate Gallery, London)
quality which painterly portraits lack
altogether. Furthermore, the portrait is
6 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, 1903-
1912), pp.126-127.
7 Oscar Wilde, ‘The Critic as Artist’ (1891), Intentions (London: Methuen & Co., 1913), pp.93-217 (p.144).
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 wide-
ranging 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
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:
10 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.
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.
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.
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)
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 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).
2 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 anti-
establishment 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 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).
4 Robert Frank, The Americans, (New York: Grove Press, 1959), p.6.
5 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 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).
7 Williams, p.311.
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 self-
affirmation 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.
8 Lincoln Kirstein, ‘Photographs of America: Walker Evans’ in American Photographs, (New York: Museum
of Modern Art, 1938), pp.193-198.
9 The Americans, p.9.
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

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
13 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.
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-

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:

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

23 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.
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
25 Johnson, p.65.
26 Jane Livingstone, The New York School Photographs 1936-1963 (New York: Stewart, Tabori and Chang,
1992), p.304.
27 Livingstone, p.306.
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 Herberto Hélder, ‘(guião) ([script])’, Photomaton & Vox (Lisboa: Assírio & Alvim, 1995), p.140.
2 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 Charles Bernstein, ‘Preface’, in Poetry Plastique, ed. Jay Sanders and Charles Bernstein (New York:
Marianne Boestky Gallery, 2001), p.7.
4 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
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 com-
mitted 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. Lawrence Weiner. The Sky and the Sea (1986)
6 Francesco Careri, Walkscapes: El andar como practica estética / Walking as an aesthetic practice (Barcelona:
Gustavo Gili, 2002).
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 Lawrence Weiner interviewed by Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, Lawrence Weiner (London: Phaidon, 1998), p.12
8 Buchloh, p.19.
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.
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.

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.
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 Xavier de Meistre, A Journey Around My Room (London: Hesperus Classics, 2004), passim.
13 Walter Benjamin, One Way Street and Other Writings (New York: The Verso Classics Series, 1997).
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;
14 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.
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.
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 Vilém Flusser, Ensaio sobre a Fotografia. Para uma filosofia da técnica (Towards a Philosophy of
Photography) (Lisboa: Relógio d’Água, 1998), passim.
2 W. J. T. Mitchell, Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago: The University of
Chicago Press, 1994), passim.
3 Roland Barthes, ‘Rhétorique de l’image’, Communications, 4 (1964), 40-51.
4 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.
5 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
6 Mitchell, p.5.
7 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.
8 Flusser, p.29; my translation.
9 Flusser, p.28; my translation.
10 Flusser, pp.27-8; my translation.
11 Cf Abraham Moles, L’image, communication fonctionelle (Paris: Casterman, 1981), p.45.
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
12 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.
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 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.
15 Wolfang Heinemann and Dieter Viehweger, Textlinguistik. Eine Einführung (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1991),
passim.
16 Steffen-Peter Ballstaedt et al, Texte verstehen, Texte gestalten (München: Urban & Schwarzenberg, 1981),
p.17.
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.
18 Cf. Moles, passim; Bernard Bosredon, Les titres de tableaux. Une pragmatique de l’identification. (Paris:
P.U.F., 1997), passim.
19 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.
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.
20 Flusser, pp.75-6.
21 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.
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
23 Mitchell, p.295.
24 Barthes, p.44.
25 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. Jean-
Michel 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.
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
27 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.
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
The picture we have chosen from the work of Tracey
Moffat shows a certain action (a car wash) carried out
Courtesey L.A. Gallerie-Lothar
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
Albrecht, Frankfurt, Germany
attention with enormous power. This girl is frozen in

© Tracey Moffatt,1974
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 © Tracey Moffatt, 1974 Courtesey L.A. Gallerie-Lothar
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
Albrecht, Frankfurt, Germany
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
names an abstract referent.32 Associated with a Her father’s nickname for her was useless.
young woman who performs a task, this
designation emerges as ambiguous.
31 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.
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
We are particularly inter-

ested 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 connota-
tions, to its English equi-
Courtesey Karen Knorr
valent, and she explains

that she uses both picture
and text “to slow down the
spectator’s pace of con-
sumption, creating a
© Karen Knorr 1991
‘slow-motion reading’
which leaves room for re-
flection. 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.
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, mix-
ing 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
1991 Courtesey Karen Knorr

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
© Karen Knorr
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 Douglas Crimp, ‘The Museum’s Old/The Library’s New Subject’, Parachute, no. 22 (Spring 1981), 36-38
(p.37).
2 Jacques Derrida, The Truth in Painting (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), p.56.
3 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 Rosalind Krauss, A Voyage on the North Sea, Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition (London: Thames
& Hudson, 1999), p.32.
5 Mieke Bal & Norman Bryson, ‘Semiotics and Art History’, The Art Bulletin, LXX111: 2 (1991), 174-208
(pp.190-91).
6 Rosalind Krauss, ‘Sincerely Yours’, in The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Mas-
sachusetts: MIT Press, 1985) pp.175-194 (p.191).
7 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).
8 Krauss, ‘Sincerely Yours’, p.219.
9 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 re-
construction 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 non-
art [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

11 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.
12 October The First Decade, 1976-1986, eds. Annette Michelson, Rosalind Krauss, Douglas Crimp and Joan
Copjec (Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1987), p.xi.
13 C. S. Peirce’s theory of signs is based on a triadic typology formed between the icon, the index and the sym-
bol. 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 of-
ten-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 in-
dexically 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.
14 W.J.T. Mitchell, Iconology, Image, Text, Ideology (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1986), p. 183.
15 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,
16 Derrida, p.56.
17 Bal & Bryson, p.190.
19 Fredric Jameson, ‘Periodizing the ’60s’, in The 60s Without Apology, ed. Sohnya Sayres (Minneapolis: Uni-
versity of Minnesota Press, 1984), p.200.
20 Rosalind Krauss, Passages in Modern Sculpture (Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1977), p.266.
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 Krauss, A Voyage on the North Sea, p.10.

22 Peter Bürger, The Decline of Modernism, trans. Nicholas Walker (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992), p.45.
24 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 Owens, p.32.
26 Derrida, p.55.
28 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).
29 Derrida, pp. 55-58.
30 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.
31 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).
32 From phenomenology, lacunae are the missing parts of the text that require the participation of the specta-
tor/reader.
33 Foucault, p.21
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:

35 André Bazin, What Is Cinema, trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley, Cal: University of California Press 1967), p.14.
(Cited in Krauss, ‘Sincerely Yours’, p.203).
39 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 co-
existence 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

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

thing tangible in the real world, as it were, a trace deposit of the “real.” But to be under-
stood 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
47 Owens, p.45.
48 Owens, p.45.
49 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.
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 Matta-
Clark 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

53 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’, be-
ing mounted in May 1976 as the inaugural show of the building.
54 Krauss, ‘Sincerely Yours’, pp.218-219.
56 Barthes, p.32.
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 Avant-
Garde 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

60 Derrida, p.54.
61 Owens, p.124.
62 Krauss, 1985, p.211.
63 Foucault, 1976, p.16.
6. STAGE AND SCREEN, EAST AND WEST
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 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).
2 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 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).
4 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.
5 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 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.
7 Quoted by James Gibbs, Critical Perspectives on Wole Soyinka (Washington D.C., Three Continents Press,
Inc., 1980), pp.126-7.
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:
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: But you, husband of multitudes?

ELESIN: 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
8 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.
9 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.
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 “half-
taunting” 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
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: [ His voice is drowsy]

I have freed myself of earth and now
It’s getting dark. Strange voices guide my feet.
PRAISE-SINGER: 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)
10 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.
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
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 self-
interest (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.
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.
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 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.
2 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>
3 Cronenberg, no page.
4 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 Salman Rushdie, The Screenplay of Midnight's Children (London: Vintage, 1999).

6 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).
7 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 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.
9 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
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 death-
cells, 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 beauty-
and-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.
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 re-
fashionings 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.
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 Rushdie, p.218.
14 Rushdie, p.236.
15 Rushdie, p.286.
17 Rushdie, p.159. Italics in the text.
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:
18 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. <http://www.sover.net/~ozus[/url]>
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
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. <http://www.eufs.org.uk>
23 There are allusions to Chinese diplomats, and to the dictators Shah Pahlevi and Amin Dada.
24 See Rushdie, p.183.
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 ex-
perienced. 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 dis-
courses 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 ex-
pressionists 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
26 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.
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 Shulamith Behr, Expressionism (London: Tate Gallery Publishing, 1999), p.59.

30 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, image-
based 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 “icono-
phobia” lasted until the definite vindication of pictorial media during the so-called crisis of
representation.4 Since this epistemological turn, ethnographic picture-taking and film-
making 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 See Anna Grimshaw, The Ethnographer's Eye: Ways of Seeing in Modern Anthropology (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp.19-24.
3 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.
4 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 anthro-
pological 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 repre-
senting 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 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.
6 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).
7 MacDougall, p.122.
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
8 See Robert Gardner and Ákos Östör, Making Forest of Bliss: Intention, Circumstance, and Chance in
Nonfiction Film (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), passim.
9 Eliot Weinberger, 'The Camera People', in Visualizing Theory. Selected Essays from V.A.R. 1990-1994, ed. by
Lucien Taylor (New York and London: Routledge, 1994), pp.3-26 (p.21)
10 Weinberger, p.24.
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
11 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.
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
14 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.
“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 voice-
over 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
17 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.
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 government-
authorised 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 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 philo-
sophical 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 repre-
sentational 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
21 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).
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
23 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Prose of the World, (Evanston: Northwestern 1973 [1969]) (cf. Ch. 3).
24 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.
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).
7. HIGH AND LOW, LEARNED AND POPULAR:
STRAYING NARRATIVES
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 David Bianculli, Teleliteracy: Taking Television Seriously (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2000), p.40.
2 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 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.
4 Seymour Chatman, Coming to Terms: The Rhetoric of Narrative in Fiction and Film (Ithaca, NY / London:
Cornell University Press, 1990), p.162.
5 Ben Brady, Adaptation for Film and Television (Austin, Tx: University of Texas Press, 1994), p.3-4.
6 E.M.Forster, Aspects of the Novel (1927), ed. by Oliver Stallybrass (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974), passim.
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
7 McFarlane, p.viii.
8 Linda Seger, The Art of Adaptation: Turning Fact and Fiction into Film (New York: Henry Holt & Co, 1992),
p.2.
9 Cf Roland Barthes, ‘Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narrative’ (1966), in Image-Music-Text, trans.
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.
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 close-
up 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
13 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.
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 Ding-
wall), 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 David Chase is the creator of the Sopranos; the TV series started in 1999 and are still in production.
17 See Mikhaïl Bakhtine, La poétique de Dostoïevski (Paris: Seuil, 1970), pp.340-42.
18 1999-2002. Directors: Robert Berlinger and Robert Black; scriptwriters: Joseph Doughherty and Maggie
Friedman.
19 2001. Directors: Hettie MacDonald and Dave Moore; scriptwriters: Neil Biswas and Kevin Hood.
20 Tim Pears, In a Land of Plenty (New York: Doubleday, 1997).
21 It was produced by Berry Letts and directed by Julian Amyes.
22 Charlotte and Emily Brontë, Complete Novels (Glasgow: Harper Collins Publishers, 1993).
23 More than once the protagonist repeats sentences such as these: “I am a free woman being”; “I am an
independent woman now!”
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, close-
ups, 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
the imagination will feel free to trigger the appearance of new faces and the sound of new
voices.
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 Yama-
gishi 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 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).
3 Cf Ohtsuka, p.64.
4 Kazunari Yonemitsu, ‘Cobalt wa kawaru, onnanoko wa kawaru’ (Cobalt series change, so do the girls), in L-
bungaku 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 Banana Yoshimoto, Kitchen (Tokyo: Fukutake Shoten, 1988).

6 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 Ryu Murakami, Coin Locker Babies (Tokyo: Kodansha, 1984).

8 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 Eimi Yamada, Boku wa Benkyo ga Dekinai (I am not good at studying) (Tokyo: Shinchosha, 1993).
10 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]).
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 independ-
ence from other artistic codes.
1 Jacques Tardi, Voyage au bout de la nuit de Céline (Paris, Gallimard, 1988). Henceforward referred to by
page numbers in the text.
2 Jacques Tardi, Casse pipe suivi des carnets du cuirassier Destouches (Paris: Futuropolis Gallimard, 1989);
Mort à crédit (Paris: Futuropolis Gallimard, 1991).
3 Jacques Tardi, Mine de Plomb, Chiures de Gommes (Paris: Futuropolis Gallimard, 1985).
332 Marie-Manuelle Silva
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 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).
5 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 inter-
pretation 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.
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).
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
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
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.

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.
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 Numa Sadoul, Tardi, entretiens avec Numa Sadoul (Bruxelles: Editions Nifle-Cohen, 2000), p.22.
9 Jean Luc Cochet, À suivre, 97 (Février 1986), 38-9.
10 Sadoul, p.23.
11 Sadoul, p.136.
12 Sadoul, p.148.
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 IgnacioVidal-Floch and Ramón De España, El canon de los comics (Barcelona: Glénat, 1996), p.25.
14 Michel Foucault, Les Mots et les Choses (Paris: Gallimard, 1990), passim.
15 Cf Joly Martine, Introduction à l’analyse de l’image (Paris: Nathan Université, 2001), p.27.
16 Cf G. Didi-Huberman, Ce que nous voyons, ce qui nous regarde (Paris : Editions de Minuit, 1992), passim.
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.
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 con-
frontation 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. How-
ever, he does not weaken the link between these two elements and sink into a contemplative
account.
18 Pierre Masson, Lire la bande dessinée (Limonest: Presses Universitaires de Lyon, 1994), p.73.
19 “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
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 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.
3 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)
4 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.
5 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 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.
7 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.
8 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.
9 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 Kandinsky and Münter going on a life journey, 15
May 1904, Düsseldorf
hypochondria, Kandinsky grew both (Gabriele Münter and Johannes Eichner
artistically and intellectually during this Foundation, Munich)
10 Roethel and Hahl-Koch, p.51.

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
12 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.
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.
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
16 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.
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.
18 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”:
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 miniature-
like 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 Synthese-
Konzepts (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.
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 professional-
level 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,
c.1913 newly formed red circle envelops a diffuse
(Municipal Gallery, Lenbachhaus) yellow spot that moves in a vertical upward
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 Wassily Kandinsky, ‘Apotheosis’ (1914), in Boissel, p.272; my translation.

23 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 self-
portrait 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 David Jones, The Dying Gaul and other writings (London: Faber & Faber, 1978), p.23.
2 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.
356 Anne Price-Owen
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 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).
4 Nicolete Gray, ‘David Jones’, Signature: a quadrimestrial of typography and graphic arts, no.8 (1949),
pp.46-56 (p.51).
5 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 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.
7 David Jones in H.S.Ede, David Jones 1895-1974: a memorial exhibition (Cambridge: Kettle’s Yard, 1975),
unpaginated.
8 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
OLEWORLDCAN-
NOT.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 Anathe-

mata: fragments of an attempted writing (London: Faber &
Faber, 1952), p.240
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
9 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.
360 Anne Price-Owen
of the Deluge (1927),11 and with copper-

engravings, 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 accommo-
dates 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
11 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.
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
15 David Jones in Ede, unpaginated.

16 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 self-
portrait 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.
362 Anne Price-Owen
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 Dai Greatcoat, p.42.

23 Dai Greatcoat, pp.248ff.
24 Dai Greatcoat, p. 80.
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 cost-
effective 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 Pre-
Paphaelite 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 Gray, The Painted Inscriptions, p.103.

27 The English translation is from Gray, The Painted Inscriptions, p. 28.
28 Gray, The Painted Inscriptions, p. 27.
364 Anne Price-Owen
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 pre-
history, 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

32 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.
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 Jonathan Miles and Derek Shiel, David Jones: The Maker Unmade (Bridgend: Seren, 1995), p.254, cited in
Douglas, ‘“The Four Queens”’, p. 5.
37 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.
38 Lynda Nead, The Female Nude: Art, Obscenity and Sexuality (London: Routledge, 1992), p.8.
40 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.
366 Anne Price-Owen
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 See note 37 above.

42 David Jones, The Sleeping Lord and other fragments (London: Faber & Faber, 1974).
43 David Jones, The Roman Quarry and other sequences (London: Agenda Editions, 1981).
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
44 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.
368 Anne Price-Owen
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.
46 Reproduced in Palmer, George Herbert (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1895), 2 vols., vol. 2, pp. 335, 337.
47 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.
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 non-
fictional 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 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).
2 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 Douglas Gifford, ‘Scottish Fiction 1980-81: The Importance of Alasdair Gray’s Lanark’, Studies in Scottish
Literature, 18 (1983), 210-52 (p.229).
4 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).
5 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 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).
7 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 See Gray, ‘Alasdair Gray’s Personal Curriculum Vitae’, p.41.

9 Alison Lee, Realism and Power: Postmodern British Fiction (London: Routledge, 1990), pp.103-4.
10 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.
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 experi-
mental 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 conver-
sation 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 self-
reflexive.”12 Hence, in this overtly self-conscious chap-
ter, 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, de-
scriptive running headers and, most interestingly, the
inclusion of intertextual elements as marginal notes
that Gray calls an “Index of Plagiarisms.” The pres-
ence 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 Alasdair Gray, “The Conjuror Scratches,
simulates in print what the title pages do in images.”13 Reminisces / Faces Facts, Yawns, Regrets”
11 Brian McHale, Postmodernist Fiction (London: Routledge, 1987), p.213.

12 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.
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 re-
lated to the writing of the novel.
Such papers range from manu-
script 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
Alasdair Gray, manuscript pages for Lanark
drawings. What these draft manu-
script pages, in my opinion,
14 Todd, p.128.
15 Lee, p.113.
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.
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 trans-
parent 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 indi-
vidualism 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 de-
serve 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 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).
3 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).
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 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).
5 Johnson, Keith, Readability (1998) (www.timetabler.com, 2002, 10:04), p.1.
6 Johnson, p.1.
7 Waller, p.31.
8 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 pre-
vented 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
9 Johnson, pp.2ff.
10 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).
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.
12 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.
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 lan-
guage. 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.
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 text-
image.
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
17 Cf Maia, ‘Entrelinhas’, passim.

18 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.
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).
9. POSTSCRIPT: THE LONG P ERSPECTIVE, OR,
THE CHALLENGES OF REPRESENTATION II
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 tran-
scended. 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 paint-
ing. 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 avant-
gardes 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
m
e
du
ta
bac
de
ZoNE
1 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 Reproduced in Portugal Futurista [facsimile edition] (Lisboa: Contexto Editora, 1981), p.35.
3 Portugal Futurista, p.28; my translation.
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 some-
where 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 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- ).
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 re-
elaborated 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
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 Braque, Georges 42

Alcidamas of Elaia 394 Breughel, Pieter, the Elder 111
Almada-Negreiros, José de 390 Brontë, Charlotte 18, 21, 175, 176, 179,
Amado, Jorge 320 181, 315, 319, 320
Anaxagoras 394 Brown, Ford Madox 97, 99, 101, 228
Apollinaire, Guillaume 131, 133–135, Bürger, Peter 271
139, 142, 253, 389 Butor, Michel 7, 16, 30, 119, 120, 123,
Arai, Motoko 325 124–127, 225
Arasse, Daniel 252 Byatt, A. S. 8, 18, 104, 199, 201–221,
Arcimboldo, Giuseppe 15, 61–78 223–225, 227–231
Aretino, Pietro 60 Cage, John 28
Aristotle 176, 177, 207, 316, 393, 394, Calle, Sophie 112, 114
396, 397 Campos, Álvaro de 175, 184, 185
Arnheim, Rudolf 30, 176 Cansinos-Assens, Rafael 138
Atget, Eugène 146, 149, 150, 152, 153 Carey, John 62, 68, 76, 78
Auden, W. H. 361 Caron, Denis 162
Augustine 48, 160 Cartari, Vincenzo 49
Austen, Jane 207, 320 Castelo Branco, Camilo 320
Auster, Paul 107, 112–116 Castilho, António Feliciano de 90
Avice, Jean-Paul 147 Céline, Louis-Ferdinand 9, 21, 331–334,
Bachelard, Gaston 83, 84, 310 337, 338, 340, 341, 342
Bal, Mieke 229, 268, 270 Cendrars, Blaise 131, 133, 134, 135, 139
Ballstaedt, Steffen-Peter 260 Cézanne, Paul 132
Balzac, Honoré de 157–159, 320 Chagas, Manuel Joaquim Pinheiro 7, 89,
Banville, John 110 90–95
Barker, Elspeth 176 Chomsky, Noam 61, 67, 250
Barry, Robert 113, 271 Christin, Anne-Marie 257, 381
Barthes, Roland 15, 61, 62, 64, 66, 67, Cicero 47
70, 71, 177, 213, 214, 257, 261, 262, Clair, René 131, 141–143
263, 274, 276, 286, 307, 317, 384 Clark, T. J. 147
Baudelaire, Charles 8, 17, 135, 141, 145, Cocteau, Jean 131, 141
146–149, 151, 152, 253 Condillac, Étienne Bonnot de 141
Beard, George Miller 163 Conrad, Joseph 99, 316, 320
Beauduin, J. 159 Conti, Natale 49
Beckett, Samuel 138, 398 Cornell, Joseph 111, 157, 282, 316
Beckmann, Max 299 Cowan, James 254
Benjamin, Walter 102, 250, 253, 269, Cronenberg, David 291, 293
272, 275, 311, 359 Crow, Thomas 31, 34, 36
Bernhard, Thomas 107, 110, 112 Damásio, António 177
Bessa-Luís, Agustina 318 Darger, Henry 176
Bochner, Mel 270 De Chirico, Giorgio 142
Bois, Jules 166, 167, 169, 269 de Kooning, Willem 33, 267, 277
Botticelli, Sandro 363
400 Index
de Meistre, Xavier 253 Ginsberg, Allen 236, 242, 244

De Vinne, T.L. 379 Ginzburg, Carlo 108
Delacroix, Eugène 204 Giorgione 60
Delaunay, Robert 131–134, 138, 139, Giraldus 49
142 Giraudoux, Jean 141, 142
Derrida, Jacques 250, 267, 268, 270– Godwin, William 141
272, 277, 381 Gombrich, E. H. 15, 30, 52
Descartes, René 141, 177 Goodman, Nelson 25, 30, 38
Desmarest, Henri 169 Gorgias 395
Destouches, Philippe Néricault 158, 331 Gray, Alasdair 9, 21, 369, 370–373
Dickens, Charles 320 Greenberg, Clement 26, 29, 32, 108, 270
Diderot, Denis 275 Guys, Constantin 146, 147
Dix, Otto 134, 299 Guzman, Antonio 265
Donne, John 7, 15, 61–78 Hafif, Marcia 276
Dostoevski, Fyodor 293, 319, 320 Hagio, Moto 324
Duchamp, Marcel 143, 273 Hague, René 356, 357, 362, 363
Dürer, Albrecht 97, 99, 101, 228 Handke, Peter 254
Eliot, T. S. 304, 374 Harrison, Charles 28, 29
Empedocles 41, 393 Hausenblas, Karel 260
Erasmus 100 Hazlitt, William 27
Evans, Walker 237, 238, 240 Heaney, Seamus 198
Fantin-Latour, Henri 204 Heckel, Erich 299
Fernandes, Constantino 204 Heffernan, James A. W. 7, 14, 22, 25,
Ficino, Marsilio 49 53, 123, 178, 203, 229
Flaubert, Gustave 211, 213 Heidegger, Martin 11, 12, 252, 253
Flusser, Vilem 257, 258, 261, 266 Heinemann, Wolfang 260
Ford, Ford Madox 7, 16, 97, 98, 99, Heinse, Wilhelm 107
101–104, 228 Hélder, Herberto 245
Forster, E. M. 27, 52, 316 Hemingway, Ernest 99
Foucault, Michel 11, 12, 85, 87, 217, Hepworth, Barbara 362
218, 272, 278, 282, 340 Herbert, George 64, 76, 367, 368
Fournier, Édouard 147, 148 Herbert, Sir Edward 7, 61–64, 67–69,
Frank, Robert 8, 19, 235, 236, 241, 243 72, 75–78
Freud, Sigmund 30, 181, 182, 391 Hetzel, Pierre Jules 158
Fried, Michael 31–34, 36, 44, 270 Hobbes, Thomas 372
Friedrich, Caspar David 7, 16, 79–87 Hogarth, William 7, 16, 35, 89–95, 123
Fulgentius 47–49 Holbach, Paul-Henri Dietrich 141
Fulton, Hamish 8, 19, 245–249, 254 Holbein, Hans, the Younger 7, 16, 97–
Galsworthy, John 320 104, 228
Gautier, Théophile 147–149 Homer 31, 48, 53, 57, 123, 178, 365
Genet, Jean 252 Horace 66
Genette, Gérard 202, 318 Houssaye, Arsène 159
Gerbault, Henri 160, 162, 163, 165 Huidobro, Vicente 131, 135, 137–142
Gill, Eric 357, 359, 361, 379 Hunt, William Holman 225
Index 401
Husserl, Edmund 391 Long, Richard 113, 116

Hustvedt, Siri 109, 111 Lopes, Adília 176, 181
Huysmans, Joris-Karl 131 Lorrain, Claude 126, 129
Jakobson, Roman 275 Louvel, Liliane 13, 119, 120
James, Henry 97, 102, 175, 211 Lucretius 47
Jameson, Fredric 11, 12, 270 Macke, August 299
Javal, Émile 379 Magritte, René 25, 30, 31, 37
Johns, Jasper 25, 37, 38, 44, 270 Malevich, Kazimir 26, 27, 40
Jones, David 9, 21, 355–358, 360, 361, Malory, Thomas 364, 366
364–368 Malraux, André 121, 122, 177, 178
Joyce, James 37, 367 Manet, Édouard 60, 145, 147, 151–
Kandinsky, Wassily 9, 21, 33, 345–354 153, 227, 231
Kawara, On 113, 115, 116 Mann, Thomas 110, 347
Keats, John 28 Marc, Franz 345, 347
Kelman, James 369, 370 Marinetti, F.T. 140
Kerouac, Jack 8, 19, 235–244 Marlow, Tim 177, 316
Kiefer, Anselm 8, 19, 245, 250–253, Martin, Agnes 26, 41
255 Marville, Charles 149, 150, 152
King, Elspeth 369, 370 Matisse, Henri 8, 18, 42, 198, 201,
King, Stephen 111 202–212, 219, 224
Kirchner, Ernst Ludwig 299 Matta-Clark, Gordon 276
Kirstein, Lincoln 237–240 Maupassant, Guy de 131, 175
Klee, Paul 389 McGuckian, Medbh 8, 18, 187–198
Klein, Yves 26, 85 McHale, Brian 373
Knorr, Karen 8, 257, 263, 265 McLuhan, Marshall 270
Koerner, Joseph 84 Meliés, George 142, 143
Kokoschka, Oskar 299 Melville, Herman 25, 28
Kosuth, Joseph 42, 113, 271 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 310, 391
Krauss, Rosalind 26, 27, 32, 268–278, Michelangelo 124, 127–129
294 Middeldorf, Ulrich 107
Krieger, Murray 13, 229 Millais, John Everett 225
Krysinska, Marie 170 Milton, John 37, 163
Kupka, Frantisek 139 Mirabeau, Sibylle-Gabrielle
Larcher, Louis Julien 158, 162 Marie-Antoinette de Riquetti de 170
Lavery, John 193–198 Mitchell, W. J. T. 13, 14, 37, 177, 184,
Lee, Alison 372 197, 225, 257, 258, 262, 269, 274
Léger, Fernand 140, 143 Moffat, Tracey 8, 257, 263, 264
Leonard, Tom 369, 370 Moles, Abraham 258, 260
Leonardo da Vinci 12, 40, 108, 223, 226 Monet, Claude 29, 140, 214
Leroi-Gourhan, André 391, 392 Moore, Henry 362
LeSecq, Henri 148 More, Thomas 100
Lessing, G. E. 12, 177, 275 Morris, Robert 113, 270
Lewis, C. S. 49, 50, 53 Morrison, Blake 176, 183
LeWitt, Sol 270 Moura, Vasco Graça 175, 176
402 Index
Muldoon, Paul 187, 198 Rebello, Bettencourt 390

Mullane, Angela 369 Rego, Paula 8, 18, 175–185
Münter, Gabriele 346, 347, 349 Reinhardt, Ad 26
Murakami, Haruki 326, 327 Rembrandt 104, 108, 219
Murakami, Ryu 326, 327 Reynolds, Joshua 97
Murnau, F. W. 293, 295, 345, 349, 350 Reza, Yasmina 25, 26, 29, 30
Musset, Alfred de 158 Rhys, Jean 18, 175, 176, 178, 179
Mussorgsky, Modest 350 Richards, I. A. 61, 64, 67
Nadar, Félix 146 Richter, Gerhard 25, 38–42, 44
Namuth, Hans 31 Ricoeur, Paul 217, 317
Nauman, Bruce 270 Riffaterre, Michael 198
Nerlich, Michael 119 Ripa, Cesare 120
Newhall, Nancy 257, 263, 264 Robbe-Grillet, Alain 120
Newman, Robert D. 177, 184 Rops, Félicien 163, 164
Nietzsche, Friedrich 282, 391 Rosenberg, Harold 26, 28, 31, 270
Nora, Pierre 17, 145, 146 Rosenthal, T. G. 178–180, 182, 183
Oates, Joyce Carol 176 Rousseau, Henri 131, 132
Ohshima, Yumiko 324–326 Rushdie, Salman 9, 20, 291, 292, 294,
Oliver, Sir Isaac 61, 62 296–299
Ovid 48, 120 Ruskin, John 98, 225, 226
Panofsky, Erwin 59, 109 Saint-Merry, Pol de 165
Pantazzi, Sybille 107 Sarraute, Natalie 120
Paracelsus 64 Saussure, Ferdinand de 27, 217, 269,
Pasternak, Boris 320 276, 381
Pater, Walter 97, 98, 226 Scherner, Maximilian 260
Pears, Ian 110, 319 Schwartz, Dennis 297
Peirce, Charles Sanders 269, 271, 273 Schwartz, Gary 108
Péladan, Joséphin 163, 164 Sebald, Winfried Georg 107, 109, 117,
Pessoa, Fernando 175, 184, 185, 398 118
Picabia, Marcel 143 Seurat, Georges 131, 132, 134, 142, 143
Picasso, Pablo 33, 35, 42, 134, 153 Shakespeare, William 7, 15, 47, 52, 58,
Pichois, Claude 147 59, 192
Plato 47, 55, 68–74, 77, 349, 393–396 Shelley, Mary 295
Plutarch 394 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 28, 36, 145
Pollock, Jackson 25, 27, 31–34, 36, Silvestre, Armand 165
40, 44, 310 Simon, Claude 120
Pompery, Edouard de 165 Simonides of Ceos 394
Pozzi, Lucio 276 Sinnassamy, Evelyne 119
Proudhon, Pierre Joseph 166 Smithson, Robert 245, 277
Queiroz, Eça de 320 Socrates 68, 70, 71, 72, 74, 349
Quignard, Pascal 251 Sontag, Susan 26
Radcliffe, Ann 7, 16, 79–83, 85, 86 Soyinka, Wole 9, 20, 281–289
Rauschenberg, Robert 26, 28, 29, 31, Spenser, Edmund 7, 15, 47–55, 57–
267–270, 273 60, 123
Index 403
Spitz, Ellen Handler 177 Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, Auguste de 167,

Steinberg, Leo 37, 38 168
Stevenson, Robert Louis 296, 372 Virgil 47, 123, 195
Stuart, Michelle 276 Vitruvius 40
Szarkowski, John 244 von Hartmann, Olga 352
Takenaka, Keiko 324 Wagner, Peter 119, 120
Tardi, Jacques 9, 21, 331–342 Wasserstein, Wendy 108
Tertullian 161 Waugh, Evelyn 108
Tezuka, Osamu 324 Weiner, Lawrence 8, 19, 113, 245,
Theagenes of Reggio 394 248–250, 254, 271
Tinayre, Marcelle 171 Wheeler, Daniel 26, 28, 29, 32, 39
Tintoretto 110, 226 Whistler, James McNeill 103, 204
Titian 7, 15, 47, 52, 59, 60, 110 Whitman, Walt 240
Todd, Richard 201, 203, 373, 374 Wiene, Robert 20, 291, 293, 298
Torrington, Jeff 370 Wilde, Oscar 111, 226, 227, 228
Turner, J. M. W. 27, 35, 36, 44, 85, Williams, William Carlos 237
140, 214 Woellert, Dee 160
Valette, Charles 158, 159 Woolf, Virginia 196, 197, 198, 213
Van Gogh, Vincent 211, 212, 217, Yamada, Amy 323, 327, 328
219, 220, 221 Yamagishi, Ryoko 324
Vaughan, Henry 64 Yeats, W. B. 195, 198, 304
Velázquez, Diego 104, 177, 212, 219 Yoshimoto, Banana 323, 326
Vermeer, Jan 191, 192, 198, 219 Yoshimoto, Ryumei 325
Vernet, Horace 226 Zanutto, James 236
Zola, Émile 142, 214, 231

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Writing and Seeing

Norbert Bachleitner (Universität Wien), Dietrich Briesemeister (Friedrich Schiller-Universität

Redaktion: Ernst Grabovszki

Anschrift der Redaktion:

Amsterdam - New York, NY 2006

Die Reihe „Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden

From 2005 onward, the series „Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen

ISBN: 90-420-1698-1 (Bound)

1. Setting the Tone: The Challenges of Representation I:

2. Early Modern to Modern: representations, appropriations

Gabriela Gândara Terenas

3. Crossing Images, Changing Places

4. Women and the Intermedium

4.1. Portraits and Causes

Maria Aline Seabra Ferreira

Rui Carvalho Homem

4.2. Ambivalent Narratives: A.S. Byatt

Margarida Esteves Pereira

5. The Lens and the Print: text, photo, semiotics

Maria de Fátima Lambert

6. Stage and Screen, East and West

Maria Sofia Pimentel Biscaia

7. High and Low, Learned and Popular: straying narratives

8. Arts and Crafts: composite skills

9. Postscript: the Long Perspective, or, The Challenges of Representation II

categories as a characteristic of postmodernity.1 The convergence of such contributions

BULGER’s contribution, the focus is on televised versions of canonical works of literature.

Speaking for Pictures: Language and Abstract Art

29 Fried, ‘Optical’, p.97.

38 Crow, ‘Moving’, p.94.

Thine earthly rainbows stretched across the sweep

Seeing and Writing Venus in Spenser, Shakespeare, Titian

4 Cf. Fulgentius the Mythographer, p.91.

All suddenly out of the thickest brush,

And whilest he bath’d with her two crafty spyes

So did she steale his heedlesse hart away. (III, i, 37, 1)

Deadly engored of a great wild Bore

swimming deep in sensual desires

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)

He cam also stille

It sited was in fruitfull soyle of old,

He letteth in, he letteth out to wend,

After that they againe returned beene,

Some thousand yeares so doen they there remaine;

Yet pittie often did the gods relent,

But we must go further.

And in the thickest couert of that shade,

There wont faire Venus often to enjoy

And sooth it seems they say: for he may not

And by succession made perpetuall,

Dame Venus girdle by her steemed deare

There is no attempt at consistency or naturalistic characterisation, simply aspects of love, or

And both her feete and legs together twyned

and the reason is, “she hath both kinds in one,”

Both male and female, both under one name:

Many lovers lie about her. She is

Great Venus, Queene of beautie and of grace, (IV, x, 44, 1)

Great God of men and women, queene of th’ayre

Over one arm the lusty courser’s rein

Backward she pushed him as she would be thrust

Like a dive-dapper peering through a wave (86)